Orkney Twilight (25 page)

She hesitated before nodding faintly. He produced a scrap of paper from his pocket, handed it to her. ‘Message for you.’

He turned away to reach for a bottle of Drambuie from a shelf behind the bar. She unfolded the paper. Familiar blue biro. ‘By the woods in five minutes.’ She read the note again. The Watcher was luring her away from the safety of the pub, out of sight, into the shadow of the trees. Stuff it. Forget it. It wasn’t worth it. What if he had the gun with him? But why would he bring a gun? The Watcher wasn’t after her. He was after Jim. She wavered. She was just trying to find out what was going on. Get the Watcher’s information. She had a right to know about her own father.

The midges swarmed round her head in the still air of the valley. She swung her leg over the wooden bar of the stile and stared at the boundary line of the tree trunks, searching for shapes among the shadows, listening for the warning cries of the birds. The rooks were silent. She marched towards the penumbra of the copse, determined not to give away her apprehension. She spotted the red glow of a cigarette tip a second before a hand shot out of the darkness and clasped her arm, held it tight, surprised her with his strength. She gasped and immediately knew she had made a bad mistake. Too late now. He pulled her closer until her face was almost touching his. She could smell his breath. His skin. Stale smoke and Dettol oozing from his pores, as if he had regular antiseptic baths to clean away the dirt. She tried to shrug loose his hand, but her efforts only made him tighten his grip, digging his hard fingers into the tender flesh between her bone and her bicep. She willed herself not to show the pain. He pulled her up against his body. The cigarette in his mouth almost brushing her hair. The smoke choking her. She thought she might puke. She tried to smile.

‘Don’t bother,’ he said, fag clamped between his lips, poking out below his topiary, vowels squashed meanly out of the side of his mouth. ‘I’m not some fucking small-town plod. Now then, let’s see what you’ve got in your pockets.’ He thrust his spare hand into her right-side coat pocket, groped around, pushing his hand against the top of her thigh. She wanted to scream. She swallowed her revulsion. Scrambling to retain a grip on the situation.

‘Nothing? Not even a spray can?’

Bastard. Fucking bastard. So it was him who had reported her to the cop at Crystal Palace. Why hadn’t she worked out that it was the Watcher driving the black Rover? She had been complacent. Failed to make the link and seen that he must have driven up to Scrabster in the Rover to pick up
The
Inquisitor
. It was so obvious. She was so dumb.

‘Quite the little subversive, aren’t you? What with the graffiti and the marches and the arrest for obstruction with all your Greenham friends.’

She willed herself not to react, not to reveal the fact that she was startled that he knew so much about her. Dismayed that the information he had seemed to be all about her, not about Jim. She felt his hand again, searching, and tried to shrink from the press of his fingers through the thin material of her coat. He pulled out a used paper tissue, held it gingerly between finger and thumb, let it drop and land just beyond the tip of his mock croc slip-on. He jammed his hand forcefully into her other pocket, poked and probed; dug out her black raven’s feather.

‘What’s this?’

‘Feather.’

He sneered, jammed the feather back in her pocket with one hand, squeezed her arm again with the other. She squirmed. He smiled, pinched harder. She swung her free arm over, tried to push him away but he caught her hand, crushed and twisted her fingers. She felt a searing pain in her wrist, smelled acrid burning flesh, saw the instant excitement in his enlarged pupils as he watched her writhe. She screeched. Like an owl. The rooks picked up her cry, screamed their alarm, cawing and circling the trees in a seething black cloud of agitated wings and open beaks.

‘Quiet,’ he said with a hint of desperation. ‘Keep quiet. Stop that noise.’

‘You’re hurting my arm.’

He loosened his pincer-grip. The racket abated as the birds settled back on their stick nests.

‘Now we can have a little chat,’ he said.

She cagily assessed his façade, his attempt to pass himself off as a squeaky clean suburban golfer. Every cover tells a story, reveals what a person wants to be, their inner desires, their weaknesses. She glanced down at his mock crocs. He couldn’t quite obtain the acceptability he was chasing, couldn’t quite wipe out the air of seediness.

‘Now my little friend,’ he said ‘I want you to do something for me.’

She felt his eyes examining her chest. Her mind raced, flesh crawling. He raised an eyebrow, smiled sadistically, leering, enjoying her discomfort. ‘I think you can guess what I’m after.’

She shook her head, scowled in an attempt to disguise her panic, wondering whether she should just try and fight him off now. Make a run for it. He wasn’t about to let her escape. He pushed her back against a tree trunk.

‘You know what your father does for a living,’ he said. ‘You know who he works for.’

She shrugged.

‘The Commander’s a smart man. You can see his rationale, but, really, a bunch of coppers is never going to be competent at this line of work.’

His accent didn’t give much away; he had the vocal smorgasbord of a person who had spent too much time in too many places trying to blend in with the natives, but there was something about his appearance – the cut of his cheekbones, the slight slant of his eyes – that made her think that he came from Slavic stock.

‘Plods. You can’t expect them to know what they are doing,’ he sneered.

He grabbed her chin, trying to force her to stare into his eyes. She wrenched her head away.

‘And so, it’s been decided at the most senior level,’ the Watcher continued, ‘to develop more effective ways of operating, a more… joined-up approach. Leave the deep intelligence work to the agents who have been thoroughly trained in intelligence matters. Put in place some proper operating procedures. The Commander’s men have to be reined in, moved on to more appropriate operations. It’s all been agreed. Unfortunately,’ he added, ‘Jim has been a bit slow coming to terms with the decision. He seems determined to carry on operating as if nothing has changed, picking up information from his old contacts. He always did have odd ideas. Always thought he was a bit superior. Always liked to cultivate his reputation for being a bit of a hero.’

She shrugged. ‘I don’t really think your office politics are any of my business.’

He jabbed the glowing red fag end towards her face. ‘Don’t play dumb with me. You’re going to find yourself in deep shit if you’re not careful. Breaking into people’s houses. That’s serious stuff, you know. You could go down for that. Prison sentence. They know how to deal with girls like you in Holloway.’

He paused, eyed her, checking to see the point of his sentence had sunk in. She fixed her sight away from him, over the field, towards the stile. God, she couldn’t quite believe she had walked straight into this one.

‘So I’m sure you can see it’s in your interest to co-operate with me and bring Jim back into line.’

She hesitated, trying to work out how she could wriggle her way free.

‘I don’t see what I could do anyway.’

‘Let me spell it out for you, then. If you come across any information, any papers, an envelope that Jim might have picked up from one of his contacts, you hand them over to me.’

‘Yes, but it’s beside the point because I haven’t found anything anyway.’

‘No?’

‘No.’

‘Well, if you do – you will hand it over.’

She folded her arms defensively.

‘Now then.’ He removed a death stick from a Marlboro packet, tapped it on the box, poked it in his mouth, lit it with a blue plastic Ronson, dragged, pointed the burning tip at her face. ‘This is about helping yourself. This is about your future. You’re going to university. Oxford. You don’t want to have a bad reputation before you’ve even arrived. You want to start off on the right foot.’

She attempted to appear unconcerned about his vague threats, didn’t believe they were real anyway; what could he do to harm her reputation? He leaned close to her again, almost whispered in her ear.

‘I can think of a couple of papers that would love the story.’

She floundered, tried to pull away, hearing the hardening in his tone, not quite sure whether she entirely understood the new twist in the conversation.

‘Undercover cop’s daughter caught in break-in drama. I doubt whether your college authorities would be very impressed by that headline. They are good enough to give you a place and how do you repay them? By behaving like a common criminal. Bringing their college into disrepute. You do understand what I’m saying, don’t you?’

She nodded almost imperceptibly. She didn’t particularly care what the university authorities thought about her, but the idea that her college peers might find out she was a secret policeman’s daughter was unnerving. She sensed him reading her reaction.

‘You,’ he said, ‘are a little bit careless with your policeman’s daughter line.’ He smirked. ‘According to my contacts in the Ministry of Defence.’

She willed her mouth not to twitch, not to reveal her despair, her numbness at the realization that he had chased every lead. He had followed the trail that she had so carelessly left. Gathered the information so that he could use it as a way of trapping Jim. It hadn’t just been her paranoia.

He gave her a triumphant glare. ‘So you will hand over anything that you find before you go to university in September.’

She didn’t answer.

‘Well?’

She would just have to agree to get him off her back, escape. ‘But how can I contact you if I find something anyway?’

‘I will contact you when you have something to give me. I will be keeping an eye on you.’

Her flesh puckered. He pushed his face against hers. ‘I’m glad we understand each other, my little friend.’

She tried to pull away. ‘I have to go,’ she said. ‘I’m meeting someone at the pub in a minute.’

He puffed a plume of smoke in her face. ‘What does he do anyway, your mate?’

‘He’s taking a year out before he goes to university.’

‘Well, if I were you, I wouldn’t tell him about any of this. I wouldn’t mention our conversation to anyone. This is our little secret. Right?’

She glared at him resentfully, eyes smarting from the smoke, managed a smile. Nodded.

‘Good,’ he said.

He gripped her arm tighter yanked her closer to him again, made a grab for her jeans, tried to stick his hand down her waistband. She didn’t resist; powerless, passive, sensing that a bit of groping might be an accepted part of the deal. A tax the secret services had a right to claim on any dodgy transaction. The price she had to pay for her stupidity. A rook rasped above her head and brought her to her senses.

‘Fuck you.’ Her sudden shout sent the rooks into a cloud of frenzied squawking above the canopy again. She elbowed him in the balls sharply, levered herself away and ran into the field, out of the shadows. Fear driving her on.

There was a shout from behind. ‘You know what I think?’

She could hear agitation in his voice. She didn’t break her stride.

‘Jim. He’s not a hero. He’s just a playground bully.’

She reached the stile, clambered over, pelted down the shaded lane, the screech of the rooks fading, her heart thumping now with the release of tension. Playground bully. She turned the phrase over in her mind. Playground bully.

Midsummer Day: the sky clear blue, the sun scattering the sea with crystals. Jim had already departed, to do what she didn’t know. Anxiety gnawed at her stomach; the events of the previous day eating away, the shadow of the Watcher hanging over her, the nagging, painful mistrust of Tom, the ever-present ticking of the clock audible through the doorway, marking off the seconds, minutes, hours. The crow cawed from its rooftop perch, shook its executioner’s hood with mock pity. Tom emerged, groggy as ever at that time in the morning.

‘It’s midsummer’s day,’ she said. ‘It’s all downhill from here.’

‘Oh God. Are you going to be like this all day?’

‘Let’s go and look at some ancient monuments.’

She needed a distraction.

They drove restlessly, going nowhere. She spotted a sign for a cairn she had visited years ago with Jim and persuaded Tom to stop. They followed the directions, collected the key and torch from a farmhouse, trekked along the stony track winding over a hill spur with the sea behind them, taste of rotting seaweed in the air, and there was the tumulus above, its swelling roundness pressing against the sky.

‘It was built nearly five thousand years ago,’ she read from the noticeboard at the perimeter. ‘Time runs differently here,’ she mused. ‘It piles up in layers. Sediment. It doesn’t flow like a river.’ Tom wasn’t listening. She continued reading anyway. ‘When they excavated it in 1901 they found eight human skeletons. And the skeletons of twenty-four dogs.’

Hounds. An ancient hunting pack.

‘How do we get in?’ Tom asked.

‘Through that hole.’ She pointed at the dark gash in the green. ‘There’s a fourteen-foot tunnel. We have to crawl. It’s a passage grave.’

She shuddered slightly as she said it. She had blanked out the fact that entering the cairn was like being an oversized rabbit burrowing into its warren.

‘And what’s in the middle?’

‘A chamber. You can stand up in the middle.’

‘That’s funny. It makes me think of…’ He trailed off.

‘Of what?’

‘Well, it’s a bit womb-like isn’t it?’

She sized up the entrance. ‘You’re right. Fancy you making that connection
. Death and the Regeneration of Life
. Funerals and fertility rites are closely associated in many cultures.’

‘
What?’

‘Something I read on the back of a book in Mark Greenaway’s study.’

He sniffed dismissively. ‘Are you worried you will feel claustrophobic?’ he asked.

‘I’ll be fine. As long as I know there is an exit.’

‘So what do you think it’s all about, then? The claustrophobia?’