Beyond Recall

Chapter 1

For Gaz, the island was his new home. He worked on the garden with a bitter and frantic intensity. To a stranger, anyone ignorant of where he had been and why he had been there and what he had experienced, it was the sort of exaggerated effort of an incomer to ease himself towards acceptance. A man arrived and set up home and offered himself for casual labour, and undercut existing rates charged for maintenance work, attempted to be a friend of everybody and offered a familiarity that was almost heathen to the remote community of Westray. If Gaz had been one of them, prodding to be welcomed into the inner tribal heart of the island – and there were enough – he would barely have lasted the first winter. Those were the men and women, who came on a boat in the spring and thought it would be fulfilling, a tapestry of dreams, and talked of a former life until they were shunned. They barely survived the first of the autumn storms that gathered strength out in the Atlantic before breaking on the archipelago of Orkney, howling and endlessly beating on buildings. The first storms brought a level of rainfall unknown to the new settlers. In place of the dull and dreary summer drizzle came the ripping power of near horizontal rain, torrential and frightening. Work would dry up, but a post van still struggled along sodden roads and delivered utility bills, and food was expensive, and… they were usually gone by Christmas. Very few saw out their first winter, returning to the mainland on a tossing ferry, having survived the Pentland Firth’s fierce currents, would land at Scrabster and would say ‘Thank God to be out of there. Pretty enough when the sun’s shining. Miserable people, all wrapped up in themselves and not reaching out with help and a welcome. And the weather, it’s something else; bloody awful wind, and rain. Older and wiser and glad to be out.’ Gaz had been on Westray, a thin and twisted finger of land jutting into the sea and boasting eighteen square miles of gale-scraped land, with idyllic beaches and sheer granite stone cliffs, for two clear winters and he valued each day he survived there, and the place had a particular and especial importance to him.

Gaz was working in the garden of a holiday cottage halfway between the island’s most notable ruin, Noltland Castle, and the sole hotel at Pierowall. The cottage had a decent enough view of the bay and anchorage on the north-facing side. A combination of a mild winter, a strong Gulf Stream, and fair sunshine along with rain-saturated ground, meant that he had a day’s mowing of a rough lawn, hedges to be trimmed and beds to be weeded. The owners, a Glasgow family, would be up in a week and would stay a fortnight, expecting the garden to be manicured. Some occasional residents allowed their grass to be cropped by grazing sheep, others objected to the excreta deposited and demanded that the place be mowed, and were prepared to pay for the privilege. Gaz would mow all morning. His shadow was thrown behind him as he made neat lines on the grass, and he wasted no time because the forecast, as always, was variable and warned of coming squalls, with more expected in the coming days. He was a practical man, good with his hands and willing, happy, to work on his own because that was the style of his old life… It was old, that life, and he hoped it well behind him, but sometimes it seemed to nip at his heels – and lurk in his mind. The island was his refuge. It was a convalescence. He took one day at a time and had done since he’d arrived, a foot passenger on the ferry from the mainland to Stromness, then buses and ferries, and then a jolting journey by air: it had not bothered him because back in his life there had been many turbulent flights.

He had enough gardening contracts to see him through the short summer months, and when the autumn came and the winds gained strength he could move inside; he was a careful decorator, steady and painstaking. Those who owned second homes on the island and visited rarely, seemed to enjoy the smell of fresh paint when they deigned to come. He could also do basic electrics, rewiring and rudimentary plumbing. Gaz had learned to be alone and to solve problems by fast analysis and decision taking. He did not need to pass difficulties up a chain of command, but he could repair a fusing power supply, fix leaking taps and cisterns, and could strip and service a mower. These skills did not mark him out on the island. They were part of the way of life there. To him, the mower was no easier, no harder, to strip and reassemble than any general purpose machine-gun, and the isolation he lived with alone in his rented cottage was no different than that he had experienced in covert observation posts. That was the world he had put behind him, but their demons were in pursuit.

No cruise boat was due that day. There was a murmur of the tide pushing the stones back beyond the island’s cemetery, and oystercatchers came and went and screamed at some imagined danger, and cattle grazed, and seals slept on the rocks and in the seaweed. He was alert to danger, had lived with it pretty much all his adult life. But, in former times, he had been amongst men and women who had shared the risks and could talk about them with gallows humour. That was the world he had fled when he travelled north, carrying his rucksack on to the ferry and never looking back at the diminishing mainland shoreline. Leaving it lost in mist and hoping that memories would become as vague, ultimately be forgotten.

He realised, and it would bring a sardonic smile to his face, that he had been from the start a mystery figure in the Westray community. As intended. In the shop, to his neighbours on the nearest farm, and the more distant ones, and on the rare occasions he went to the hotel bar, and to his customers, he volunteered nothing about his background. His reticence permitted rumour to go free range. Some sidled questions to him, others were more direct and sought information: he was not rude, never offhand or dismissive, but always deflected the enquiry. He was good at it; his previous life had taught him the discipline of secrecy. In the first winter there had been a persistent beat up the path from his iron gate with invitations to join any one of the myriad of clubs that succoured the island people through the darkness of the long winter. The second year few, other than the most insistent, had come to his door. Now, he was left to himself, tolerated, accepted and greeted with a certain warmth and an understanding that he must be a man ‘with a past’, who had perhaps escaped from an old episode in his life. He was talked about, he was quizzed, and he smiled and changed the subject, and worked hard which was a requisite talent for being accepted on Westray, population a few shy of 600. The postman, of course, knew a little more than most. Brown envelopes still pursued him, and on them was his name: Gary Baldwin.

No one on the island called him ‘Gary’, nor was he, in this society, ‘Mr Baldwin’. He introduced himself as Gaz, which was what he had been called from far back. He was not paid by card or by cheque but asked for cash, using it for buying food and small items of equipment for his work. He was of average height, and had average features and his hair was of average colour, and his eyes seemed unremarkable and there were no features on his appearance which stood out. Not being noticed had been a hallmark of his craft. He spoke with a quiet voice and in two long winters and one full summer none on the island had heard his voice raised either in laughter or anger: there was a Birmingham accent, supposedly the West Midlands whine, but not pronounced. He’d had, as a child in an anonymous tower block in the Aston district, no knowledge of his father, and not much more of an idea of who his mother was. There had been a succession of ‘uncles’ who visited or took up temporary residence, and a legion of social workers who called by. He had been five years old when his life had altered… an ‘aunt’ had come, a relation of his mother. His few possessions had been packed in a small case of imitation leather. A spattered Land Rover had parked at the entrance to the block. An overweight couple, cords and tweeds, had panted their way to the door. They were friends of the aunt, he was told, and he left with them and his mother had shrugged and looked away. He remembered everything of the two-bed flat, but a keen memory for detail was a skill that he was to practise in his work… what he did before the experience, the illness, then the flight to find a refuge.

The wind buffeted him as he steered the mower, and the storm edged closer. Too many memories and each time he was less able to run from them.

“Morning, Knacker.”

“And morning to you too, Boot. Keeping well?”

“Not too bad, thank you.”

“Glad to hear it.”

Knacker gave his coat to the long-retired company sergeant major of the Coldstreams who did duty at the door of this upper-floor dining-room where intelligence officers, past and present, gathered to swap tales. He handed over his phone and accepted the receipt for it, and registered the respect in which the NCO held him, and then had turned to face old Boot, a long-time colleague and now said to be in poor health. He gazed inside the room, started to nod greetings and let go of Boot’s limp hand. Gerard Coe – rather good in the Gulf, once – was at the bar and had lost too much weight and too quickly – and saw others that he’d want to talk to. Just in time, not late because that would have been an act of disrespect, and he was rewarded with eye contact from Arthur Jennings, low down and bowed in his wheelchair but who maintained an unimpaired mind. It was the first Tuesday of the month, a locked-down date, when the Round Table met.

Knacker eased away from Boot but gave him a soft smile as a parting gift. He thought, Boot was on borrowed time and might not be long with them, but his reputation was well burnished, as bright as Coe’s, as were the credentials of all of them, veterans of espionage, who came – by invitation only and access jealously guarded – to the upstairs room in the Victorian building on the Kennington Road. They were part of the Secret Intelligence Service, with good links but still regarded with well-founded suspicion, kept at arm’s length, funded by proxy, rarely seen in the building at the top of the road and overlooking the Thames. He reached Arthur Jennings whose parchment-textured skin seemed to crack in pleasure, his eyes rheumy in delight. Knacker crouched beside the wheelchair and allowed the talons of Jennings’ hand to grip his shoulder.

They were there, at least a dozen of them that day, because of Jennings. He was their founding father: had made his name (to the select few who knew anything of him) while working out of Beirut. He had become a legend of manipulation and success and extraordinary bravado melded with a ruthlessness that would have seemed brutal to anyone of a squeamish nature – and was a deity in the life of Knacker. There would have been no Round Table but for an evening of binge drinking led by Jennings – an endless supply of brandy sours. The refrain was that their Service had lost its edge, was no longer a risk taker, had ditched the role of playing the desperado. The Service, they said, was ‘withering on the vine’, and something must be done to rectify the weakness. An association of like-minded men, and a few women, was built around an image of a table, round, and on that table – sketched by an old China hand – was a ‘bloody great sword, sharp blade, unsheathed’. Arthur Jennings, in good voice in those days and with no audible alcohol impediment, had quoted from Alfred, Lord Tennyson. For many a petty king ere Arthur came Ruled in this aisle, and ever waging war Each upon other, wasted all the land: And still from time to time the heathen host Swarmed overseas, and harried what was left.

The upstairs room with its nicotine-stained prints and panelling, and tackily painted woodwork at the windows was not Camelot, but did the job for them and would have been well swept for recording devices by the Coldstreamer and his people. At face, their coming together was of little more significance than a Rotary or Probus group in a small market town, but such a view would have sold short the expertise of those who would take their place at the table where the sword – bought on the cheap from a theatrical costumier in Greek Street – dominated the centre. They believed in the Service’s ‘loss of clout’, believed that the fresh-faced graduates now dominating the headquarters building were unwilling to travel the ‘extra mile’, were wedded to the strictures of analysis. ‘The slide has to be halted in its tracks,’ Arthur Jennings had said. Tennyson had written And so there grew great tracts of wilderness, Wherein the beast was ever more and more, But man was less and less, till Arthur came. Arthur Jennings – now frail but not feeble – had summoned an image of a glorious and triumphant new world of espionage, compromise, deceit, and above all of success. They cost little, they were discreet, useful. They worked, as Arthur Jennings had said, ‘ahead of the sharp end’ – some of the claims were at the edge of justification but much was truthful. All of their membership, with their cover names of Tennyson’s knights, would have seemed to an outsider to behave like schoolboys, but a point would have been missed. Or several points.

And were deniable. They brought in defectors from across cultural and military frontiers. Agents were run on tight leashes, were seldom allowed to walk away from treachery. A glass was raised to his memory when an asset was captured, tortured, eventually executed or died under the rigours of interrogation, and when the glass was emptied the file was forgotten and the casualty became a fast-fading memory. It was as it had been before.

Over a buffet lunch, Knacker would hear the gossip of colleagues – not indiscreet, but valuable, and nuggets of recently learned tradecraft would be exchanged, and enemies’ weaknesses and strengths evaluated. In the centre of their round table was a narrow slot and when they were called upon to eat, the theatrical sword would be lowered into it. Grace would be said – not of a religious nature, but an Orwell quote: People sleep peacefully in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to visit violence on those that would harm us. It was the anthem of the group along with the historic poetry, and seemed to provide ample justification for the bending, fracturing, of official Rules of Engagement. Then, Arthur Jennings would be helped to lean across the table, and he’d puff and pant, and draw the sword clear of the slot – an Excalibur re-enactment, and then the business would begin and the swapping of confidences.

Arthur Jennings, mouth close to Knacker’s ear, voice a guttering growl, asked, “Busy? What do you have? Up to speed?”

“Not as of this moment, Arthur. Sort of parked up in a lay-by.”

“It’ll come…”

“What I always say, Arthur… Get up in the morning and don’t know what a new day will bring – out of a clear blue sky, that sort of stuff.”

“Good boy.”

They were called to order by Hilary, decent-looking woman whose last agent had been a Chinese air force pilot in an interceptor wing, dead now but valuable while he had lasted. Would have been roughed around before his trial, then taken out into a gaol yard, kicked into a kneeling position and then shot in the back of the head with a .38 calibre. He had done a good job for her, and earned her plaudits. Clapping broke out in the room and Knacker stood and carefully removed Arthur Jennings’ hand from his shoulder… It was the way things happened, least expected and out of that ‘clear blue sky’, and then a dawdle would become a sprint.

Knacker’s special talent was to squeeze the usefulness of an asset till the poor bugger was dried out, finished and condemned, and done without clemency.

In a first-floor office in the Lubyanka, Lavrenti was briefed on his new job. He was wearing the fatigue uniform, combat medal ribbons on his chest, and had flown down from the north the previous day.

To his mother, Lavrenti was a hero and she would hiss with sympathy each time he raised his hand to the grooved line in his cheek which he had told her was the result of crawling under fire through barbed-wire entanglements. Now a major, he was to his immediate superiors a coming figure to be humoured and treated with respect. He was regarded by his peers in those sections of FSB where he was known, as an officer of influence and prospect, not one to be crossed, and no offence should be given him. To his father, nominally retired and with the rank of brigadier general, he was the meal ticket to a dynasty of financial advantage and an opportunity to advance good links with the present apex of the regime.

Lavrenti was thirty-two years old. His father had been thirty-eight when he was born, far away in the death throes of the failed Afghan campaign, and his mother was thirty-six. His had been a difficult birth and the experience was not repeated. An only son, an only child, alone on the fast track, all their efforts deployed to propel him through èlite schools and an élite college.

He had served two years in the north, far beyond the Arctic Circle, because his father had demanded the opportunity for him. It was a hideous place, awful people, and almost as grim as the sand and the shit and the company of his previous posting… The future looked better.

He would return to Moscow. Would head up a new section, reporting directly to the senior officer of a directorate who had once served as his father’s chief of staff. Would have good ‘opportunities’. He understood that there would be considerable financial benefit in this new work: monitoring private enterprise in the capital. With power, as he was well aware, came the ability to create fear. He would see that truth every day and witnessed it now as he sat in a barely furnished room, a colonel fawning over him.

He was tall, blond, carrying no surplus weight, working out in the gym had become the necessary therapy of those two years in the north. Pale blue eyes, usually hidden by lowered lids, a square and strong jaw, a facial tan flawed by the fucking scar on his cheek. Had a past that very few knew of, had a hidden shadow that burdened him… They talked of how it would be and he sensed the friendship he was offered.

He did not easily accept friendship. Lavrenti was curt, to the point, businesslike. His work was praised, what he had achieved in the north and – of course – his record in a combat zone. His previous work on the staff members of foreign embassies in Moscow and their locally employed personnel was lauded, also his ‘investigations’ of foreign journalists who went home with the precursors of breakdowns speeding them to Sheremetyevo and the flight out. He accepted coffee and water. No alcohol, no cigarettes. There would have been a packet in a drawer of the colonel’s desk, and a bottle and glasses. He would accept no favours from this man, wanted not the slightest baggage. Matters were concluded; he would return north, pack up, then transfer south. Would he, please, pass on to his father – Brigadier General Volkov (the name meant ‘wolf’ and was appropriate) – good wishes and best regards?

Lavrenti would not commit himself, shrugged, a finger worrying at his scar, stood and walked out.

Her name, Faizah, meant she was ‘victorious’, a winner. The customer jabbed a finger at the ‘special of the kitchen’ on the lunch menu she had offered him. Little in her life that day, or any day in the previous two years, told Faizah that she was not anchored at the bottom end of existence, was a scarred failure. Hers was a familiar name in the distant central deserts of what little remained of Syria, her former homeland, after the devastation of war.

The four men at the table had come to the bar for three consecutive days and each time she had served them drinks, then food. They must have liked her, had tipped her well. They were Norwegian, in Hamburg to see a demonstration of an engine suitable for powering a twenty-metre fishing trawler, were going home that evening, had come for their final lunch. Not that they needed to see the menu because they always chose the same – schnitzel, with Flensburger beer. They were looking at an iPad open on the table. There was a chorus for more beer to be brought… Perhaps they liked her out of sympathy. She was a migrant far from home and – obvious to them – damaged.

She scribbled their order on her pad but suddenly her expression froze, as her eyes locked on their iPad. It showed a photograph of two men in uniform. Behind them was a rotund figure, a smile on his face and wearing a military beret. It was the nearest figure that riveted her. He wore officer’s insignia on his shoulder, a camouflage tunic, open at the throat. His hair was hidden under a high cap, gold braid and a badge on a blue background and a top of deep grass-green. He stared at the lens, at her, and his eyes gouged into her mind. There was no smile at the mouth and the lips were dried out and his expression held contempt, perhaps arrogance, and there was a narrow line where the knitting of the flesh had been clumsy, running from near to the lobe of his left ear and down his left cheek, disappearing into the folds of his tunic collar…

Blood draining from her face, a hand catching at her mouth and a chill on her neck, and feeling that place on her chin where the wound had been opened and the dirt and dust had been absorbed before it had been treated. The Norwegians had sympathy for her, acknowledged that she would never be classified as ‘pretty’, carried a wound on the chin that would go with her to her grave… as the scar on the officer’s face, in the photograph, would last for the remainder of his life.

“You all right, kid?”

“You seen a ghost? What is it?”

“Heh, what is the problem?”

She collected herself, a migrant waitress in a bar on a side street off the main drag to the Hauptbahnhof, managed a brittle smile. She asked them in her halting German where the picture was taken. She tried to sound offhand, but failed, tears distorting the image on the iPad. They all peered at it, bemused by her reaction. What was the website? She was told. What was the picture? Told that also. Who was the man nearest the camera? Given his rank, but not a name… And then, politely, one of them gestured towards the glasses on the table and tapped his watch to indicate that time was limited if they were to eat and drink before catching a flight that would lift them, via Copenhagen, beyond the Arctic Circle and home.

She handed in their order: four plates of schnitzel and four more glasses of Flensburger. She told the manager that she needed to get out of the bar. She worked hard, she slept in a garret of the building. She did long hours that she knew to be in contravention of European legislation. She was paid below the minimum rate. A fuss was made but then her employer noted a steeliness in her eyes and gave his permission – but not for long, to be back by late afternoon. Another girl carried the beers to the table and the Norwegians broke off from conversation and stared as she walked out of the bar and into the rain, no coat, no umbrella, but a mission… the wound on her chin would never be forgotten, nor the line on the military man’s left cheek.

She walked briskly, the pavement puddles splashing under her feet, drenching her ankles. She knew where she would go, and what she would say, would be ashamed of herself if she did not take the chance.

Delta Alpha Sierra, May 2019, the first hour

First light was a dirty opaque wash. A storm blew. The sound of explosions was distant.

Rain would come later, not the sort that fell at home, pattering down from dull cloud, but torrential, slashing through clothing and kit, and running into his hide. Gaz, with a corporal’s rank in an obscure and understated unit, had been, with two others, dropped off in the small hours by helicopter – and had walked the last four miles.

Ahead of him and hard to follow were the outlines of the few buildings that comprised the village. Because its name, Deir al-Siyarqi, was usually written only in what the military categorised as ‘worm scribble’, it was listed in the letters of the NATO alphabet. Where he was, a call sign. If threatened, Gaz, or any of the others, could press the panic tit and broadcast an emergency call from Delta Alpha Sierra and know that a big bird would be tasked for immediate response and would likely come with a pair of Apache flying close fire support. He felt a wariness, the caution that went with the loneliness of deployment as a recce guy. Should have been a piece of cake, they had said at the briefing at the Forward Operating Base.

Gaz lived with jargon, the script of the Special Reconnaissance Regiment unit which he served with, and was regarded – he acknowledged it, but humbly – as one of the best at Close Target Reconnaissance. It was about a camera battery. Too much of his work was determined by the miniaturisation of batteries, how long they would last, and how often the bloody things needed replacing. To get good quality pictures beamed back to the FOB required a battery capacity that could not be sustained if the camera and its lens were housed in minimum space: this one was in a hollowed-out breeze-block. Not ideal, the best was not often the easiest. He rated the combat as seven, perhaps eight, miles down the road, and thought there might be mortars in use or small calibre artillery, but vicious in intensity, was unsettled by it.

He had walked in through darkness, the wind stinging dirt against his body. The others would by now have been on the far side of the village, south of it and to the west. The camera was built into a low wall, once the base of a superstructure beside the main highway where someone had probably tried to set up a soft drinks stop. Perhaps they had also sold fruit or vegetables or bottled water, or fags; the war would have killed off the chance of a budding entrepreneur making it rich. The road bypassed two indistinct front lines – a combat no-man’s land. Seemed months since he had been here to extract a single breeze-block and return it to the Base, since the technicians had worked on the colour and the texture of the concrete dust, since the camera had been mounted to keep watch on the road. They – staff and intelligence back at the Base – wanted warning of any probing advance by the Iranians up the road because this was their sector. Gaz came every two or three weeks. He had modified and deepened his hide and made it, admitted with a suspicion of pride, a work of art: his art was that of the Special Reconnaissance Regiment. Sometimes the hit men, the Hereford gun club, drove them in but more usually the helicopters did the lift and left them to walk the final leg. Always in darkness and weather not negotiable. He would arrive during the night, lie up for the day, then go forward when the sun had sunk beyond the village, do the work and then get the hell out, taking everything that had been in the hide; including his waste and his food wrapping. Four pick-ups, lights off, swept off the main highway and careered down the sloping track towards the village. The dogs barked and charged at the wheels.

The mission to the village, the change of batteries and the collection of the camera images, had become almost routine…

Also routine would be the presence of the girl, and her goats and her dogs. Not that they spoke, or touched, and barely made eye contact. Everything he knew about the girl was listed in the debrief sessions back at the FOB. Twice he had moved the hide but she had come looking for him and the goats had always gathered close and grunted and he had caught the merriment in her grin. It had seemed easier to move back to his first hide, the best, and allow the goats to forage near him, and hear her plaintive songs and know that the dogs would guard her with their lives. At that distance, less than a quarter of a mile and with the spreading light helping him, he saw the village youths as they cut the pick-ups’ engines, jump out and scurry into doorways. Easy enough for Gaz to believe that they’d been down the road to the Iranian camp and had shot it up and had a fun deal out of the experience, then had made it back, and the follow-up firing that came after them would have been random and not aimed and frustrated. It was bad news, like tugging at an elderly lion’s tail and believing the beast too moth-eaten and toothless to respond. Bad news and likely to be a bad mistake. The gunfire was closer, he was sure of it. He had the new and fully charged battery in his Bergen bag and enough water and dried food to see him through the day, and had the panic tit… But the dogs had gone quiet and the firing of the mortars and artillery still seemed far back. It was unusual for Gaz to feel apprehension and he hoped to shrug out of it. The wind steadily rose and blew eddies of sand and grit.

It was because of the storm. It was better for Gaz since he had come to the island than it had been before. The place he had fled to was a refuge, almost.

The force of the changed weather would not reach Westray for three or four days but the advance warnings were already over the bared hillsides, where sheep and cattle fed, and the long stone walls that would have broken the backs of the builders more than a century before. Where washing was hung out, shirts and underclothes, sheets and towels, flying horizontally, and the singing had started in the overhead cables.

A psychiatrist, hired for him by the unit, had said that the black dog days were pretty much inevitable. Powerful medication might block their access to his mind, but would send him to a state of vegetative collapse. Did he want that? Or would he prefer to live with the demons? He’d refused the medication and the next best thing that the psychiatrist had offered was long-distance flight; to head away to a place that was remote, where his history was not known, somewhere he could bury the hours of the day in agricultural and handyman work. He had hit a girl. The girl, Debbie, had thought they were an item, a relationship developing faster in her mind while he was on deployment than he had reckoned for. A nice enough girl and thinking him a catch; pressure building on him but unable to talk about the ‘what’ and the ‘where’ of his work, and memories spiking in his mind, and her not understanding. Had hit her in the face, sobbing as he did so, and it was a piece of luck that he had not broken the bridge of her nose and left her disfigured: if he had, it would likely have been a prison sentence… would have been shoved into a closed van, put in the wire cage and off through the gates and behind the high wall, and would have joined the scores of former servicemen for whom black dog days were classified as post-traumatic stress disorder. The unit, his former home and his only surviving family, had pushed for a psychiatrist to speak for him, an attractive woman with a winning smile and skilled at shifting the magistrate’s prejudices. He should go away. He should grab the chance. He should find a place where stress did not eat at him day and night. On her advice he had made a quite sincere apology to the girl from the dock, and had travelled to the far north and had immersed himself in gardening work and minor property repairs and dog walking… but it came on bad when the storm winds blew.

He was slumped on his spade, vulnerable and weak, a shadow of what he had been. The storm made chimes of memory ring in his head, hard enough to split his skull apart. Stress was to be avoided, the psychiatrist had said and smacked a fist into the palm of her other hand, avoided like the plague. He should run from stress, she’d said, not permit it to confront him. If he were free of it for a long time, years not months, then there was a chance he could put the experience behind him, just a chance.

In her cell block, she was ticking off the days. Natacha had only those left to serve that could be counted on the fingers of one hand. She wore a soiled tunic, and a drab prison skirt. She was filthy from dirt and sweat and she kept her hair hidden in a light wool cap.

She had been given a four-month sentence, all of it to be served in the bleak red brick prison in old Murmansk. Probably one of the first buildings put up in the city on the inlet to the west of the Kola peninsula, the extreme north-west of the Russian land mass. The cell stank of the urine and faeces and period blood of the five women she shared it with. There was a murderess and a brothel owner who had refused to pay a cop-bribe, a seller of heroin powder, and a thief who had burgled her way into foreigners’ Radisson hotel rooms in the centre of the city, and there was a girl similar in appearance to herself who had painted slogans denouncing the President as a thief. Natacha had been told often in the last week that she would be missed… She was slight, bony, with a flat chest and a flat stomach, and she might have a dose of HIV or might not but had not bothered to be checked. She would be missed because she possessed a smile that few models on the cover pages of fashion magazines could match, and with the smile she made them laugh. She had a mimic’s eye for detail and screeches of laughter came from their cell when she did her impersonation of key members of the prison staff, and she was, in a quiet way, anarchic in her sense of defiance: not political but merely to point up the pompous stupidity of the rule book.

She had been caught selling ’phets and weed down by the Murmansk railway station. Her boy had been with her but had run faster and there was snow on the ground and the trooper had slipped, then regained his feet and she had tripped him, and her guy had legged it away. She had not named Timofey. Not a love-match, but a relationship of convenience and comfort, and they would have had to beat her one step short of unconscious for her to give his name. The days were ticked, and now Natacha talked about the dilemma of her hair, and they laughed fit to burst. Should her hair, a scrubber’s blonde, go purple or larch-green at the end of the week when she went free. It would be a big decision, green or purple – but might depend only on which was easier to lift off the shelf in the Magnets store on Poliarnye Zori, and Timofey would be waiting outside and they would be gone – and she would not be back, not to the gaol. They challenged her. She was adamant, would colour her hair and would sell wraps and skunk and smack, and might hitch up her skirt in a police car for cash, but nothing serious.

“Better believe it.… You don’t see me again, none of you, not ever. Nothing serious, nothing that rocks them, so I do not come back.” She flashed her smile. “Counting the hours till I am free and able to enjoy again the wonder and beauty of the streets of Murmansk.”

Murmansk’s winter has six weeks of no sun, just a mix of total darkness and charcoal-grey gloom. Murmansk’s summer has six weeks when the sun never sets and the city is bathed in perpetual light. Far to the north of the Arctic Circle, Murmansk can also experience rain in January and snow in July: a contrary city.

Murmansk has a population, sinking, of almost 300,000, and is big on sexually transmitted disease, ferocious seasonal mosquitoes, drug abuse, and the architecture of Stalin, Kruschev and Brezhnev. The Putin legacy is a couple of modern hotels, low rates of occupancy and high rates.

Murmansk, one day but not tomorrow, could have a glittering financial future as the hub of oil and gas exploration, except that the Fatherland, as represented by the ruling class in Moscow’s Kremlin, cannot filch the necessary infrastructure technology – even with its army of expert hackers – from the West’s engineers. Not for want of trying. While that is on hold, the purpose of the city is to be home to the navy’s Northern Fleet.

Murmansk was founded as a naval base in 1916, in the final throes of the Czar’s rule, because the deep inlet on which the city was built never froze, even in the depths of winter. Government resources are rich when it comes to the fleets of hunter-killer and long-range missile-firing submarines. In strategic terms, Murmansk is a big player in international military games, and nuclear missiles are stacked in bunkers dug out of the perma-frost ground. When the Soviet Union seemed destined for defeat in World War II, and the German war machine pressed closer to the valued nickel and iron ore mines of the region, British, American and Canadian convoys fought their way through bomb and torpedo attacks to bring military supplies to Murmansk and to stabilise a front line to the south during the 900-day siege of Leningrad. The life and atmosphere of the city is supposedly dominated by the experience, and on a bluff above the drab living blocks the Alyosha monument was built in memory of those killed in defence of the port and its resources.

Murmansk’s main street of Lenin Prospekt, designed on the grand scale of public buildings when Josef Stalin ruled, is where the new palace of the FSB is located with 15,000 square metres of offices and holding cells built over eight floors. The vast size of the building is justified, the FSB spokesman has said, because of security dangers in the region. A reported toxic dump for nuclear waste and bristling with modern warfare, it is natural that the security police would send their best and their brightest to Murmansk.

“Murmansk?” Knacker murmured into the phone.

In a building halfway between the pub where he had attended that day’s Round Table lunch and the headquarters of SIS, a member of his staff had taken a call from the British Consulate in Hamburg, the northern port city of Germany. It would have been filtered fast through several of the agency’s arms: the triggers would have been the war in Syria; the village of Deir al-Siyarqi, with its call sign of Delta Alpha Sierra; the massacre; the date; the accusation; the photograph from a Norwegian-based amateur commentary in both Russian and English, sent from a harbour town near the border shared with Russia – a photograph, and a denunciation. Knacker had been in deep and fruitful conversation at lunch with the man who had run a penetration into the political élite of DPRK and with a woman who had compromised a senior official on the treasury side of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the Quds crowd, and basked in justifiable pride at the achievement. Both assets faced, in Knacker’s opinion, an ‘uncertain future’ and both should be kept in their place. The Coldstreamer had discreetly summoned him from the table. A phone had rung with a sharp request to extract him. Knacker had taken the call, had slipped the phone into secure mode, and was relayed the guts of what a Syrian-born waitress had come to the consulate and said. He remembered her, would have been hard not to.

“She is definite in the identification?”

He was told that the girl was adamant.

“Forget the photograph of this Russian officer. Have we been sent an image of her?”

They had. The photo of the girl, as supplied by the consular officer, was on the screen in front of Alice, and Fee had good sight of it.

“Does she carry a scar on her chin? Size of a fifty pence piece?”

She had. It had healed but not well.

Knacker slipped back inside. He whispered apologies to Arthur Jennings and was gently quizzed. Something of interest? He said that it might be. Was it those bastards, the usual ones, he was asked. It was, always them, always the same bastards, always the Lubyanka boys. Arthur Jennings was holding a cheese knife and stabbed it into the table, tearing the plastic covering, watched it quiver.

He was gone and left a slack grin at the mouth of the Round Table’s founder… He was Knacker because of his reputation to recruit damaged personnel, get one last mission from the wretch. Like a man who went round farms or gypsy camps and took away lame horses and would get them one last time between the shafts of a carriage, tighten the harness, crack the whip. Cat food if it failed, or, if it went well perhaps another season grazing in a paddock. And who would his new bedfellows be? The usual point of concern when a mission was at the embryonic stage: who would help it along and who would stand in its way, who was an ally and who was the enemy? Strangers would lurch out of any imagined mist. Might help, might hinder. Always the way with his work. He turned the word over in his mind as he stamped off down the pavement: Murmansk. He had just the man for it.

He held the phone. What he had looked forward to, like a talisman, through the despair of the late afternoon and early evening as the storm curdled over the horizon to the west, was the arrival the next morning of Aggie. She would have come on the plane from the small sister island of Papa Westray, or hitched a ride on an open boat, both rough and turbulent but both usually running whatever the weather.

“Sorry and all that, Gaz, but you know how it is… Just a foul summer dose of ’flu. Best to see it out and get it behind me. Give it a few days, and I’ll have shaken clear of it. Look after yourself, my big boy. Bye-bye.”

The phone purred in his ear. She did not say, not ever, that she loved him. Did not say that it hurt her to cry off from travelling to see him… She made pottery for sale in the hotel on Gaz’s island, and was a dab hand at simple watercolour paintings and designed her own cards with illustrations of her island views. She would have been four or five years older than Gaz and he had met her when a gale had damaged her roof and it had needed a partial rebuild, and the weather had been foul and it had needed strength, ingenuity and luck to keep the tarpaulin in place while he had done the work, and she had paid him in cash and he had been captivated. She had been on her island three years longer than he had been on Westray so was a veteran and took the bad times with the good; unflappable, unfazed whatever the elements chucked at her, and seemed not to share any of the black dog days he entertained. It had been weeks before they had kissed and months before they had gone to his bed – probably too much drink taken that evening in the Pierowall hotel bar, but not regretted. Most weeks she came on the twenty-five minute ferry link or the two-minute fixed-wing flight, and greeted him as he met her as if it were the one thing – a kiss and a hug – that she had most missed since last seeing him, but she would call and stand him down and sound relaxed about it, no huge deal. Gaz had told her that she was the most important woman he had known in his adult life, had tried to tell her about previous relationships – all in the disaster folder – and been shushed. She knew he had been a serving soldier, not what he had done and not where he had been, and she did not know any of the detail of the psychiatrist’s assessment… and of her he knew next to nothing. Easier. What he did know was a verdict on him that she had given a friend in the bar who had told him on one of the rare times he was there by himself, and this woman had passed on Aggie’s description of him. ‘Nice enough, and bloody useful round the place, but I don’t really know him because he wouldn’t let that happen. A guy you hardly remember, see him and think he’s all right but the memory is sort of vague. Something happened but I don’t know what, and he’ll not tell me, and I don’t ask.’ What he had learned about black dog days from the few therapy sessions he had gone to before the uprooting and the journey north, was that no one outside the experience gave a toss what he and other sufferers went through and in military terms it was still ‘Get a grip’, and the days of a diagnosis of ‘lack of moral fibre’ still lurked. He needed her, and with a storm coming he had counted on her presence to help him through. Sometimes, when the weather was bad and his bungalow seemed to shake with the wind’s buffeting he would sit on the floor in the hall and let the draughts whistle round him and put a blanket over his head and just shake and tremble. Sometimes – if the tremors were slaughtering him and his legs were weakened and his head in torment, he would go out – likely having the back door open – and trudge up the hill and past the Noltland ruin and maybe start to run, pounding ahead in the darkness as they had done in the fitness sessions before being accepted into the unit, and he would run until the lighthouse beam caught him and then keep going until he was at the edge of Noup Head. He would hear the waves crashing on the rocks some 400 feet below and sway on his heels and let the wind shake his balance. When the lighthouse beam came round again it would fasten momentarily on the narrow ledges to the left of where he stood and show him the white bodies of the gannets. They were never blown off their roosting points and it might be the only place where he could fight his way through the black dog sessions. With the gannets, up on Noup Head, were guillemots and kittiwakes and fulmars, and farther to the right where the ground dropped towards a bay there were old rabbit holes refurbished as homes for puffins. Once – only once – he had seemed to stumble and a gust of wind might have come at him at a different angle, and he had lurched towards the edge and had regained his balance. Had Gaz saved himself by regaining his foothold? Had the wind shifted and veered off him? Had he struggled to prevent himself being pitched over the cliff? Was he resigned to ending the agonies? Not sure… And it had passed and he had turned and gone back towards the ruined castle with the wind hammering at his back. It was about controlling levels of stress and minimising them. Hard to do, but it was why he had fled to the island.

He sat in his chair with the lights off and the bungalow creaking and it would have been good if he had a dog, by his feet or on his lap, and he hoped to sleep – not dream and not remember.