Orkney Twilight (31 page)

‘That’s what they all say.’ Sam snorted, suppressed a giggle, pulled herself together again when she noticed the WPC eyeing her cagily in the rear-view mirror and turned to stare out of the window.

Jess nudged her in the ribs again. ‘Are you okay?’

‘Yes.’ She bit her lip. Felt something warm and wet on her cheek. Realized it was a tear.

Later, as a dull dusk was falling, she disinterred the shoebox from its safehouse under the bed, spread its contents out on the thin carpet, sat back on her heels, wiped her forehead and surveyed disconsolately the objects arrayed before her. Jim’s remains. The purple envelope addressed to Anne, the scrap of paper with a London phone number scribbled on it, the A5 manila envelope with its doodled feather. Relics. They seemed to be imbued with a peculiar aura, physical reminders of Jim’s disconcerting presence. She gazed at the biro drawing of the black-barred feather, digging into her mind, trying to unearth the fragment of a memory, and it gave her the strangest feeling, a nagging sense that Jim had set her up somehow, contrived to leave her with his mess to sort out; the information he had let slip, the trip to Orkney, the warnings, the conspiratorial glances, the half-revealed histories. It felt as if he were provoking her in some way. Testing her loyalty.

She picked up the manila envelope and held it warily. It contained, if Jim’s hints and stories were anything to go by, information that Anne had somehow managed to acquire about Intelligence activities, their attempts to fix the miners’ strike. Perhaps it was better not to know the details. But she couldn’t quite resist. She removed its contents piece by piece. First – a photocopy of a British passport in the name of Anthony Baines, showing a grainy shot of a close-cropped, dark-haired man with a big mouth. Scowling. Born 1960 in Carlisle. It had to be a fake ID. She squinted at the image and thought that he looked vaguely familiar – couldn’t quite put her finger on the face. It was hard to tell much anyway from a photocopy of a photobooth snap. Next – a till receipt itemizing electrical wire and a circuit board from a hardware shop in Brixton’s Water Lane. What did that signify? She conjured up a page from Jim’s dilapidated copy of the
Anarchist Cook Book
, a recipe for making an incendiary device in your own kitchen. Ingredients: electrical wire, switches, circuit board, fertilizer. Probably a couple of other things too that she couldn’t remember, but it was sufficient for her to suppose that the till receipt was a pointer to amateur bomb-making efforts. The next scrap confirmed her suspicion. It was a hand-scribbled shopping list of ticked-off items: timers, traps, detonators. Mercury fulminate had a question mark after it. Finally, a piece of lined A4 paper with a hand-drawn map of an unnamed British Rail station and attached car park with a registration number written below: MVF 476X. Well, she certainly recognized the first part of that: MVF. Those were the first three letters on the numberplate of the dark car heading up the hill at Crystal Palace. The Watcher’s Rover. She shivered, disturbed more than surprised to find traces of his repellent presence here.

Was that it? She had half hoped to find a more damning piece of evidence, pointing to the shadows of the secret state. The smoking gun. It wasn’t there. If she made an effort, she could just about string together a story from the information in front of her and the fragments Jim had revealed in Orkney: a conspiracy theory involving Intelligence, the Watcher as middleman, and some other agent using the fake identity of Anthony Baines, explosives and the miners’ strike. But there wasn’t sufficient evidence to convert the theory into fact. And what about Shinkolobwe? Where did that fit in? There was nothing in front of her that made any sense of that.

She upended the envelope and caught a final scrap of flimsy paper as it fluttered out. A ripped-out page, she reckoned, from a book of receipts – the kind that had a removable piece of carbon paper for producing a duplicate copy behind. The uneven pattern of the diagonally torn edge reminded her of an indentured contract, the two halves cut together so they could later be matched up to prove they were related parts of a whole. A company name was printed across its top: Shaba Security Limited. Below this a scribble of handwriting – a sentence without a beginning because of the tear – something about payment for contracted services rendered. At the bottom of the paper, two lines of very small print indicated that Shaba Security Limited was a subsidiary of – and then there was a word missing – Asset Management. Shaba. Sounded African.

She stuffed all the bits of paper back in the envelope, glanced at the doodled feather, looked over her shoulder involuntarily and tasted stale vomit in her mouth. For the love of God, why had she swiped the envelope from Jim’s haversack? She might as well have picked up a live hand-grenade. She might not think its contents were particularly revealing, but someone had been prepared to kill for it. Wet-worker. Hitman. She should have just left it where it was. Maybe Jim would still be alive if she hadn’t taken it. She certainly wouldn’t be in this mess. She’d really dropped herself in it, one way or another. She had to dispose of the information, pass the package on before some pistol-toting secret agent came creeping into her room in the darkness. Before Odin and his wild hunt chased her down. Jim had been right; she wasn’t professionally trained to deal with the consequences of her smart-arsery. She shoved the manila envelope, the purple envelope and the scrap of paper back inside the shoebox. Wiped her clammy hands on her jeans. Tried to formulate a plan. She had to hand the package over to the Commander. That was obvious. It was what Jim had been intending to do. If she passed the package to the Commander, then he could deal with the Watcher. The problem was she had no idea how to contact him. She didn’t even know his name. She would have to locate him, make discreet enquiries, without drawing attention to herself and giving herself away to the Watcher. Easier said than done. She needed a clear head to think about it and at the moment her brain was numbed with grief. Exhaustion. Fear. She would have to deal with it after the funeral. Once she had buried the dead.

Time dragged. Sleep eluded her. Kept awake by noises, bangings in the house, footsteps in the garden. Dark and light, day and night, merging. Turned upside down. She hung around the house. Listless. Uneasy. Fearful of going out. Unable to settle indoors. Incapable of making decisions. Jumping every time the doorbell or the phone rang. Haunted by images of the morgue. Jim’s face staring up from the slab, hands reaching out to clutch at her, pull her down, underground, ghosts whispering in her ear. Bury the dead. Bury the dead. The mortuary assistant’s words playing on her mind. Wouldn’t want my name on their list. That’s for sure.

Monday. Two days after the crash, the solicitor phoned and informed Liz that he had recently received a letter from Jim containing a sealed envelope with instructions to open it in the event of his death. The envelope turned out to contain notes for his funeral. Sam recalled, with a start, Jim telling her that he had already made his own funeral arrangements. So he hadn’t been joking then. It was, the solicitor observed, quite a coincidence that the letter had arrived shortly before his unexpected and untimely death. Jim; always three moves ahead. Liz had gripped the receiver tightly and calmly asked the solicitor to relay Jim’s wishes. Jim had, his notes revealed, already reserved a burial plot in an out-of-the-way graveyard on the edge of the periphery. According to the solicitor, Jim’s letter indicated that he wanted a small and informal ceremony. Family and friends only. He definitely did not want any coppers, current or ex, to attend. Liz shook her head despairingly as she repeated Jim’s strange instructions. He had always had such odd ideas about death, she said. Odd ideas about everything, in fact. Still, she wasn’t going to question his last wishes.

Tuesday. The day after the solicitor phoned, a welfare officer from the Force pitched up to return Jim’s belongings, recovered from the scene of the accident, and to deliver the official explanation for Jim’s death. According to the officer, the fast-tracked coroner’s report indicated that Jim had been driving south over Vauxhall Bridge in the early hours of the morning. Too late for the straggle of all-night revellers wending their way home from the Royal Vauxhall Tavern. Too early for the thin stream of commuters spewed up daily by the tube on the hard embankment slabs. No witnesses then, apart from the cormorants plying the river for fish. Nonetheless, the crash investigators were able to surmise the events leading up to Jim’s demise. There had been a momentary lapse of attention, apparently, as he drove across Vauxhall Bridge, during which he jumped a red light and swerved into a brick wall on the far side of the junction underneath the railway arches carrying the trains to Waterloo. By the mouth of the Effra, Sam noted. Right next to the last remnant of the old Vauxhall pleasure gardens, a desolate void on the edge of north Lambeth. A place where no one would be around to hear the shot of a pistol. Or linger too long even if they had. The welfare officer droned on: the Cortina had been completely trashed. How? Sam thought. By whom? Somebody, somewhere had been doing a lot of fixing, she heard the mortuary assistant saying.

The explanation whispered by the welfare officer, as he looked over Liz’s shoulder and eyed Sam warily, was that Jim had been drunk at the wheel. The pathologist had recorded a high level of alcohol in his blood. Jim was a car crash waiting to happen, the welfare officer said. Drink driving, the mortuary assistant’s voice interjected in Sam’s head; that’s what they always say when it’s a hit job. The welfare officer added, in sympathetic tones, that they would of course do everything possible to ensure that Inspector Jim Coyle was buried in a manner appropriate to his rank and standing, albeit a bit quicker and a bit quieter, just to have it all done and dusted without any embarrassment or undue attention from the local press. Liz told him, politely, to get stuffed. There was no reason, she said firmly, to sweep anything under the carpet. She intended to proceed with the funeral arrangements herself, exactly in accordance with Jim’s final wishes.

After the welfare officer had been shown the door, Liz and Sam had emptied the contents of Jim’s haversack onto the kitchen table: his beloved Swiss Army Knife, clean and ready for use, binoculars, a smutty cotton snot rag that reeked of musky fungus, and a short piece of white chalk. Sam didn’t bother to tell Liz that his rag-wrapped Walther and his dog-eared copy of
The Orkneyinga Saga
were missing. She did suggest that they should place Jim’s Swiss Army Knife in the coffin alongside his body. Just in case. Liz agreed it was appropriate. Always good to be prepared.

Wednesday, and there was an unexpected kerfuffle. The phone had rung. Yet again. Liz had picked it up and had a heated conversation with the unidentified person on the other end.

‘The Commander,’ she had announced after she had replaced the receiver.

Sam’s heart had raced – she saw her lifeboat passing. Was the Commander trying to contact her? Had he surmised that she might know something about the information Jim had been sent to collect from Orkney? Was this her opportunity to hand over the envelope? Dump her burden. Liz relayed the details of the exchange peevishly. The Commander had asked if he could attend the funeral in an unofficial capacity, as a friend, not a fellow police officer. He had been quite insistent. But Liz had been equally unwilling to budge. Jim’s last orders were clear: nobody from the Force to attend. Frankly, Liz said, she thought he had a cheek. In all those years of absence and anxiety he hadn’t bothered to call. Not even once. There had been absolutely no reassurance, no concern for their welfare, no offers of help, no support whatsoever. Nothing. So she wasn’t about to do him any favours now.

Sam’s heart sank as she saw her chance drifting away, just out of reach.

‘But the Commander was a good friend of Jim’s,’ Sam asserted. ‘Perhaps he should be at the funeral.’

Liz, though, wasn’t having it.

‘Did he leave his number?’ Sam enquired.

‘No.’

‘A name?’

‘I didn’t ask. I’m surprised that you, of all people, are so keen to have a policeman breathing down your neck at your father’s funeral.’

Her, of all people. What was that supposed to mean? Liz didn’t give Sam a chance to contest. She left Sam feeling dismal as she went out and closed the door behind her.

Thursday. The day before the funeral. Sam was in the kitchen killing time with Jess. The phone rang. Jess picked up the receiver. Asked who it was, pulled a face when she heard the reply. Jess put her hand over the mouthpiece. ‘Tom,’ she mouthed silently.

Sam shook her head furiously, made chopping signs in the air with her hands.

‘She’s out,’ Jess said into the phone. ‘All day.’

Jess nodded as Tom said something on the other end. ‘I’ll tell her. Yes. I promise.’ She replaced the receiver. ‘He was a bit insistent.’ Jess eyed her little sister quizzically. ‘He said he had something to tell you. Maybe you should phone him. Find out what he wants.’

Sam tutted.

‘Sounded intense,’ said Jess. ‘He said it was really important and you should call him back.’

‘I’m sure it can’t be that important.’

‘What did you do to him,’ Jess said, ‘to make him so desperate?’

‘Nothing,’ said Sam. She walked away.

Friday at last, and the relentless sun was giving everything a hard edge and a dark shadow. They had followed Jim’s instructions and had located his burial plot in a yew-bordered graveyard attached to a squat Norman flint church in the furthermost reaches of the suburbs. The dirty tidemark of the metropolis. No weeping statues here. No service either. The coffin, lid tightly nailed, had been carried from hearse to churchyard and lowered straight into the freshly dug grave on two beige webbing straps. Without ceremony. There were, however, selected ritual trimmings: a Tupperware pot of dust held by a shifty-looking vicar. Lord only knew, Jess had whispered loudly when she saw him, how Jim had persuaded a Church of England Reverend to comply with his unconventional funeral arrangements.