Approaching the house, she skirted the deepest mud in the yard, noted the Land Rover hard against the steading wall and stepped up to the door. She knocked and waited. Knocked again.
A window was heaved open on the upper storey and Miranda stepped back from the door to get a better view. A woman stuck her head out of the window, her long auburn hair blown across her face.
‘It’s Miranda,’ she called up, ‘I need to speak to you.’
The woman swept her hair away from her face.
‘Miranda,’ she repeated. ‘I’ve come from Barnhill.’
‘Barnhill?’
‘On Jura. I’m Jonah’s friend.’
‘Wait,’ replied the woman from the window.
Miranda waited. What else was she going to do? Where else was there to go? This was the only lead she had.
A minute or two later the door opened. The woman’s eyes were strikingly blue but she’d been crying and there were dark smudges under them. A small boy with large and reproachful eyes clung to her right leg. Small boys were the worst – they gave Miranda a plummeting feeling. She struggled to maintain her composure.
‘You’re Flora Beech?’ Miranda asked. Jonah had told her that Andy Beech was married to Monteith’s estranged daughter Flora.
‘I am.’
‘I need to speak to you.’
Flora Beech chewed on her fraying lower lip and stared suspiciously from the hallway.
‘Please,’ Miranda urged.
After a pause, Flora stepped back and the child shuffled after her, clinging to her leg.
‘Come in.’
Miranda followed Flora and her son down a narrow and darkened corridor that was lined with a montage of framed photographs and into the kitchen. Flora stood for a few moments in a sleepy daze and then tucked a lock of hair behind her ear and wiped her nose. ‘Tea?’
Miranda nodded. ‘Please.’
Flora filled the kettle from the tap and set it on the Rayburn.
Miranda squatted down and smiled at the boy. ‘What’s your name?’
The boy shrank behind his mother’s leg.
‘His name’s Calum,’ Flora told her. ‘What are you doing here?’
‘I’m looking for Jonah.’
Her face twisted. She turned on Miranda angrily. ‘He’s not here any more.’
‘Do you know where he is?’
‘No.’
‘Could I speak to your husband?’
‘He’s gone,’ she said bitterly, and pressed a fist against her forehead.
‘Do you know where he is?’
‘No.’
Miranda considered this information gloomily. ‘How long has he been missing?’
‘He’s not missing, he’s just gone. He walked out.’
Miranda struggled to understand. ‘Did he leave a note?’
Flora looked furious. ‘No.’
Miranda tried to keep her voice as calm as possible. ‘Have you told the police?’
‘He is the police, and like I said, he’s not missing. He left.’
The kettle began to whistle and Flora turned back to the Rayburn. She flung two tea bags into a teapot.
‘Can I use your bathroom?’ Miranda asked.
‘Down the hall on the left,’ Flora said without turning.
It took a moment for the dizziness to subside. Miranda sat with her head in her hands. Jonah was missing. His friend and colleague Beech appeared to have walked out on his wife and son. The policemen Mulvey and Coyle – if they were police – had suggested that there was a threat against the UK from a former colleague of Jonah’s, Nor ed-Din. Persons unseen, possibly also the police, had broken into her house and planted evidence – if it was evidence – that seemed to give a date and rough location to the threat.
She had no idea what to do next – who to tell or what to tell them. That was the trouble: she didn’t know what anything was about. Flora, who she knew little about beyond the fact that she was Monteith’s daughter and Beech’s wife, wasn’t exactly being friendly.
On her way out of the bathroom she felt for the switch and lit up the hallway. A collage of framed family photos ran the length of the wall. There were generations of Beech ministers and their wives and children in colour and black and white: Calum clutching a collection of outsize shopping bags; Flora with flowers in her hair ducking through an arch of raised swords on their wedding day; and at the end of the hall a lurching revelation that caused Miranda to put her hand on her chest and feel her heart thumping.
She remembered Jonah’s words, spoken to her the evening before he left: ‘Beech and I worked together in Afghanistan.’
It was a group photo of five lean and bearded men on the knife-edge of a mountain ridge with an apparently endless succession of crumpled, dun-coloured ridges marching into the distance behind them. They were in mufti: patched and threadbare shalwar kameez and chest webbing, with black turban cloth wrapped around their necks, and they were so caked in dust that they seemed camouflaged. Each one carried a rifle, a Kalashnikov, and they stared into the camera with defiant expressions.
Monteith, the short, barrel-shaped man with ginger hair who had interviewed her in London on her return from Iraq – Flora’s father – was standing at the centre of the picture with the others flanking him. Jonah was standing on his left beside Beech and had his arm around the shoulders of a fourth man she did not recognise. And finally, lounging insouciantly on a slab of rock with his feet dangling, was the man who had picked her up in his sports car on the road north of Gallanach, and driven her as far as Spean Bridge.
‘It was taken in Afghanistan. Jonah and Beech and my father were part of a Special Forces unit called the Afghan Guides,’ Flora told her from the kitchen doorway. She held out a mug of tea, which Miranda gratefully accepted. Flora seemed to have calmed down a little. ‘Beech said that if anything ever happened to him I should destroy the photo.’
‘Why?’ Miranda asked.
‘Officially the Guides didn’t exist.’
Miranda pointed at the man who had given her a lift. ‘Who’s he?’
Flora considered the photo. ‘Alex Ross.’
‘Is he still with the Department?’
‘No. Well. Not overtly. It’s complicated. Alex works for a private security firm that undertakes the kind of work that governments need done but don’t like to be associated with.’
‘He gave me a lift yesterday.’
Flora pursed her lips and said, ‘He was probably the one that I liked the least.’
‘I’m sorry if I’ve brought them here.’
Flora shrugged. ‘Beech said you were trouble.’
Miranda smarted at the comment but let it go. After all, it was mostly true. She was trouble. It followed her everywhere she went. She felt chastened.
While Flora was bathing Calum and putting him to bed, Miranda drifted from room to room. Eventually, she found herself in the study, standing behind the broad expanse of a desk with a desktop computer on it, staring at the books – mostly well-thumbed paperbacks with cracked spines – crammed upright and on their sides on shelves that reached to the ceiling. The fireplace stacked with peat. A fistful of pens jammed in a mug. A litter of paper clips. A small wooden icon with flecks of gold leaf. She found herself reflecting on this need so evident in both Jonah and Beech to have somewhere away from the turmoil of the world. Jonah had spoken wistfully to her of his envy for Beech, who had chosen to walk away from a life of espionage in favour of the relative quiet of a policeman’s life on a small Hebridean island. Looking around, she saw it as the mirror of the island hideaway that Jonah had chosen for himself twice now, first in his marriage and more recently with her at Barnhill, and which on both occasions he seemed to have been unable to sustain.
She looked up to find Flora standing in the doorway in a pair of jeans and a T-shirt. She was holding a plate with two pieces of buttered toast. ‘Dinner?’
Miranda took a piece and Flora had the other. Flora paused between mouthfuls and said, ‘I’m sorry about what I said earlier. About you being trouble. I had no right.’
‘It’s OK,’ Miranda replied.
‘Why did you come here?’ Flora asked, after a pause.
‘I’m looking for Jonah.’
‘He did come here, right after he …’ Flora tailed off awkwardly.
‘… left me?’ Miranda finished for her.
‘It wasn’t about you.’
‘Then what was it about?’ Miranda asked.
There was a pause.
‘It wasn’t about you,’ Flora repeated, softly.
‘The police came to Barnhill, looking for Jonah,’ Miranda told her.
‘Did they say why they were looking for him?’ Flora asked.
‘No.’
Flora nodded as if this was not unexpected. ‘Anything else?’
‘They showed me a photo of a British-born Jordanian called Nor ed-Din.’
‘I’m sure they did,’ Flora told her.
‘What do you know?’ Miranda demanded.
Flora stared at her for a second. Then she sighed. ‘You might as well hear it from him.’
She went over to the computer and Miranda followed.
‘Sit down,’ Flora said, indicating the chair before the monitor. ‘It’s connected. The video link is on the first bookmarked site.’
Miranda sat and gripped the mouse. The monitor lit up. She clicked on the web browser and pulled down Bookmarks. The first was a page and download link grabbed from YouTube. Someone, presumably Beech or Flora, had originally typed
Nor ed-Din
into the search facility. Top of the list was a freeze-frame of Nor’s face staring out of the tube and beside it the title:
A spy’s confession
The Koran commands you to speak the truth, even if it be against your own selves (
more
)
Miranda glanced up at Flora, who was standing at her shoulder.
‘Go on,’ Flora said.
Miranda clicked on the screen and the clip played. Nor spoke slowly and carefully in English, as if he was reading from a prepared statement. He addressed the camera and began with a phrase that Miranda recognised as originating from the Egyptian Islamist movement, the Muslim Brotherhood, ‘
al-Islam huwa al-hull
’
– Islam is the solution. He stated that given the continuing occupation of Islamic lands by the Crusader forces of America and Britain, he had no alternative but to go public with the details of the assassination of the CIA agent James Kiernan at the hands of rogue elements within the British intelligence services, and his hand in it. He briefly described his career as a British undercover agent embedded in the Pakistani Intelligence Service, the ISI, and that organisation’s extensive links to Islamist elements – including al-Qaeda – operating within Afghanistan and the tribal areas of Pakistan. He described how he was cruelly abandoned by the British for more than two years following the capture of Kabul by the Taliban and how in that time he found God’s true path and nurtured within himself a murderous desire to seek vengeance upon the
kuffar
, the unbelievers, who had led him so far from the path of righteousness. He described the ease with which he tricked the British into killing Kiernan. He described the subsequent cover-up. He named the rogue intelligence unit known as the Department, and its controller, the war criminal Monteith. He committed himself to further acts of violence upon the agents of the Crusader nations, specifically revenge against the hateful British. He ended by saying, ‘Soon I will come to your country and I will launch an attack that will amaze the whole world. A tide of destruction. I swear to God, the greatest tide that ever was remembered in England …’
The link froze.
‘It was posted about a week before Jonah came here,’ Flora told her.
Miranda ran her hands through her hair. ‘Shit.’
‘Beech said it was taken down off YouTube a couple of days after being uploaded, but not before it had been grabbed and circulated on a bunch of jihadi websites.’
‘Will people believe it?’ Miranda asked.
Flora shrugged. ‘It’s true.’
‘They really killed a CIA agent?’
‘According to Beech, yes, they did.’
‘That’s the secret,’ Miranda said. ‘That’s the secret that he said must never be told.’
‘It’s no longer a secret,’ Flora told her. ‘I don’t know about you but I could do with a drink.’
They returned to the kitchen. Flora retrieved a full bottle of Talisker from the back of a cupboard and two large glass tumblers from a shelf and set them on the table. ‘Sit,’ she said. She uncorked the bottle and poured two large measures. She slid one across the tabletop to Miranda and picked up the other. ‘Drink that,’ she said.
The whisky performed a slow burn down Miranda’s throat. They sat in silence for a while. Miranda watched as Flora’s nails worried the chipped surface of the table.
‘Nor was one of my father’s waifs and strays. A double agent, I suppose. Just as he said in the video, he was planted by my father inside Pakistani intelligence, the ISI, to keep an eye on what the Pakistanis were up to in Afghanistan during the civil war in the mid-nineties. Jonah was the one that recruited him. They were at school together, but different years. Jonah was a couple of years older, I think, but they were two Arab kids in a mostly white boarding school. It created a bond between them. Nor looked up to Jonah, hero-worshipped him. He followed him into the army. He didn’t last long. They kicked him out on a drugs charge, I think. I wouldn’t be surprised if it was a trumped-up charge to provide him with cover. My father sent him off to Afghanistan. For a while he fed them information, and then at some stage they dumped him. I don’t think anyone felt good about it but that’s what happened. Understandably, Nor felt betrayed. I don’t know how bad things were for him on his own in Afghanistan without anyone to turn to, but I’m guessing pretty awful.’
‘And now he’s making threats?’
‘Beech said that if it ever came out that elements in British intelligence had been complicit in the death of a senior CIA agent and covered it up, then the Department would be finished and everybody who had ever served in it would be thrown to the wolves.’
‘You think that’s what’s happening?’ Miranda asked.
‘Isn’t that what it looks like to you?’
‘I guess it does,’ Miranda conceded.
‘We came here for a quiet life,’ Flora said bitterly, ‘to get away from the past.’
‘Have you spoken to your father since Beech disappeared?’
‘I phoned the Department’s emergency number. And I phoned the cottage in Norfolk. Both lines are out of service. As far as I know the Department has been closed down and my father has disappeared.’