Secrets of the Dead

V

London – Present Day

YOU COULD ALWAYS tell England from the air. Other countries looked messy: fields and houses littered across the landscape without logic, isolated squares of cultivation in ragged, contested lands. In England, all the lines joined up. She watched the tessellated fields and estates drag by under the wing as they descended to Gatwick. Everything was as grey and damp as a dungeon.

They’d flown her back as soon as they dared. She sat on the flight wearing a shapeless smock and a skirt they must have found in a maternity shop. Underneath, she was trussed up like a corpse. At least she could walk, more or less. The airport had a wheelchair waiting for her, but she waved it away. Every step sent bolts of pain through her shoulder; her lungs ached as if she’d run a marathon, but she forced herself to walk to the exit unaided.

Lost in the effort, she didn’t see the sign with her name on it. It was only when she felt a tug on her sleeve that she looked up from the floor. A young man in a suit and an open-necked shirt was waiting for her, a mobile phone in one hand and a printed sign saying CORMAC in the other.

‘Mark,’ he introduced himself with an apologetic grin. ‘The office sent me to pick you up. Said it was the least they could do.’

‘Thanks.’ She didn’t mean it. Everything about him screamed youth: the golden hair, tousled without affectation; the soft fat around his cheeks; the energetic confidence, newly minted from Cambridge or the LSE or wherever the civil service got them these days. She hadn’t felt this old since her divorce.

‘Have you got a suitcase?’

She hefted the black overnight bag she’d somehow managed to carry from the plane. ‘Just this. I didn’t pack for a long trip.’

‘Right.’ And then, as if she’d said something else. ‘Golly.’

Did I step through a time warp? Do people really say ‘golly’ any more?

It was a stupid thought, but it didn’t take much these days. Just the least hint of uncertainty. She began to tremble: the panic swelled inside her. She saw Mark watching, his blue eyes concerned and uncomprehending. He put a hand on her arm.

‘Are you OK?’

‘Dizzy.’ She found a row of plastic seats and sat down. ‘Just the flight.’

‘I’ll fetch the car.’

As soon as his back was turned, she popped the cap on the yellow beaker they’d given her at the hospital and shook out two pills. The airline had confiscated her water bottle: she swallowed them dry and hurt her throat.

Get a grip, she told herself. Don’t let them start to pity you.

Mark reappeared. She hadn’t realised how long he’d been gone. Perhaps the pills were doing something.

‘Where to?’

* * *

Abby owned a flat in Clapham, on the north side of the common. When the divorce proceedings began, the lawyers had said it would have to go, but Abby had doubled down on the mortgage to buy out Hector’s share. It was a silly thing to do – she probably hadn’t spent more than three months there in the last two years. It held some good memories of her marriage, but more bad ones, and anyway she was supposed to forget them all. But her moorings in the world were tenuous enough: the thought of being without a permanent home frightened her too much. She’d rented it out when she left for Kosovo, to a pair of Pakistani doctors working at St Thomas’s. The estate agent had assured her they’d be excellent tenants, and probably they had been, but they’d had visa issues and left in a hurry. Since then, the flat had sat empty.

It was like revisiting somewhere from her childhood. The outlines were there, but the detail wasn’t right. The tenants had moved some furniture around and not put it back; there were things in the kitchen cupboards that weren’t hers, and tacked to the wall was a Magritte poster that she didn’t think had been there before. It made her uneasy, as if someone had tried to piece her life together from photographs and made some clumsy mistakes.

Or are they my mistakes? Most of her memory had come back, but there were still weak spots. Like a warped old record that might stutter or skip without warning.

‘Great view.’

Mark stood by the full-length window looking down on the Queenstown road, the row-houses and chip shops huddled in the valley, Battersea Park and the spires of the Thames bridges beyond. He’d insisted on walking her up. With the pills in her system she found she couldn’t say no.

‘I’ve spoken to work,’ he continued, cheerful as ever. ‘They told me to tell you not to worry about rushing back. You’ve been signed off for as long as you need.’

Abby stood in the kitchen area and looked down on him. The flat’s top floor was open plan, three rooms squeezed into the space of one, with the kitchen raised above the living area by a couple of steps. She felt as if she was floating above him.

Don’t make me stay here, she thought.

He reached inside his jacket and gave her a card embossed with the Foreign Office crest. Mark Wilson, Office of Balkan Liaison.

‘If you need anything at all, just call me.’

She barely survived the weekend.

On Friday, she forced herself as far as Clapham High Street to buy some clothes. The day was grey and overcast, but not cold, and the effort of walking with her bandages brought on a suffocating sweat. She had thought that getting out of the flat might do her good, but being among the crowds on the high street only made her feel lonely. So many people, nothing in common with her. She tried her phone when she got home but there was no dial tone. BT must have cut it off. At least she still had her television – though judging by the increasingly aggressive letters from the TV licensing authority piled up on her mat, they’d have cut that off, too, if there’d been a way.

On Saturday, she endured the bus to Sloane Square to buy a cheap laptop and a prepay mobile phone. The crowds were thicker than the day before, but she found she could tune them out more. She walked among them like a ghost, unnoticed. That evening, she flipped through the stack of takeaway leaflets that had piled up in the hall until she found one that didn’t look too toxic, and watched a succession of bad films until they bored her to sleep.

On Sunday, she spent three hours fiddling with the phone and the computer, and felt an absurd sense of triumph when the phone finally delivered the primary-colour letters of a search-engine logo on to the laptop’s screen. She tried to log in to her e-mail, and couldn’t remember the password. She read the news and forgot most of it straight away. She searched for stories about the attack at the villa and was surprised how few there were. Of those, only one gave more than the briefest facts, an article from the Montenegrin magazine Monitor. One line in particular stood out.

Police have categorically refuted the hypothesis that a prominent criminal organisation may have been involved.

Hypothesis? Whose hypothesis? Try as she might, it was the only reference she could find to it.

That night, nightmares took her back to the villa. She was running down the colonnade, statues smashing and shattering around her. The gunman stood over her, pistol raised. She stared up into his cruel face – only suddenly it was Michael’s face, mouthing words she couldn’t hear.

The gun went off. She woke in a cold sweat, the skin under her bandages itching so badly she wanted to tear them off, even if it meant she’d bleed to death. She snatched her new phone off the bedside table and stared at the clock, willing the minutes to pass.

First thing Monday morning, she dialled the number on the card.

‘Hi, Mark, it’s Abby. From Kosovo.’

‘Right. How are you?’

‘Fine. Really well.’ Never let them pity you. Then, rushing it out: ‘Can I come and see you? At the office?’

A pause. He doesn’t want to see me, Abby thought. All that concern, it’s just diplomacy. What he’s paid for.

‘Of course.’

‘When?’

He must have heard the desperate edge sharpening her voice. ‘Come by this afternoon.’

The sepulchral walls of the palace of Whitehall loomed large over King Charles Street. Modern buildings might rise many times higher, but they lacked the scale, the knack the Stuart architects had of dwarfing a visitor. Abby walked through the vast triple gate to the Foreign Office, submitted her bag for a search and gave her name at reception. A camera on the wall swivelled round and took her picture. A machine spat out a temporary pass. She locked her phone in a small locker and sat with the other supplicants and plaintiffs, waiting for Mark to come down and rescue her.

‘Sorry.’ He was always apologising, though he never seemed contrite. He led her up to the third floor, and left her in a glassed-in meeting room while he fetched tea. When he closed the door behind him, she heard the click of a latch; a red light came on on the panel next to it.

She peered out between the frosted bars etched on the window. Her department had moved since she was last in London, and the new layout had no desk for her. One more thing taken away. She felt as if her whole life was a jigsaw, that someone was dismantling it piece by piece and throwing it in a box. She looked for her boss, but couldn’t find her.

‘Where’s Francesca?’ she asked Mark, when he returned with two cups of civil service-issue tea.

‘She’s at a conference in Bucharest. She told me to tell you whatever you need to know.’

‘When can I come back to work?’

He pulled out his teabag and tossed it in the bin. ‘Sorry. Above my paygrade.’

And what is your paygrade? His card said Office of Balkan Liaison, but she’d never heard of that.

‘I want to come back,’ she insisted. ‘The doctors said it’ll help my recovery.’

He looked as if he believed her – or at least as if he wanted her to think so. ‘You’ve been on secondment for eighteen months. And before that, you didn’t have a London job for five years. They’ll find you something to do soon enough.’

He gave a reassuring smile, which, eight years her junior, couldn’t help but patronise her. Abby gave a glassy smile of her own.

‘Is there any news from Montenegro? The police – any progress?’

‘They’re keeping us informed.’

‘Do they know who attacked me?’

‘They haven’t arrested anyone.’

‘Any leads?’

‘Probably.’ Mark stretched his legs, pointing out the toes of his shoes, as if to admire them. ‘Look, you know how it is. There are a lot of sensibilities here. The Montenegrins have only been independent five minutes and they’re pretty touchy about it. We’re putting pressure on them, discreetly of course, and they’ll tell us when they’ve got something.’

‘I read something online – that there’s a rumour organised crime might have been involved.’

‘You know as well as I do that the Balkans is one big rumour mill. Put it together with the Internet and you’ll probably hear that Father Christmas was involved.’ He blushed as he saw her face. ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to be flip. I know this is pretty dire for you.’

Pretty dire. Abby closed her eyes. She could feel a headache coming on, and the throb in her shoulder that said she needed another pill.

She opened her eyes again. Mark looked up from checking his watch and rearranged his face in concern.

‘Is there anything else?’

‘Do you know what happened to Michael?’

He looked surprised. ‘I thought you knew. They say he fell –’

‘I know. I mean …’ She could hardly say it. ‘The body.’

‘There’s a sister who lives in York. Apparently, she flew out to Montenegro and brought it – him – home for burial.’

‘Do you have an address for her? I’d like to write.’

‘Human Resources are the ones who’d know. They must have had something on file to track her down.’

Mark stood and gave her a lukewarm smile. He looked as if he might try to pat her on the shoulder, but thought better of it.

‘I know how hard it must be for you, coming to terms with this. The best thing for you is to stay at home and get some rest.’

Please, she wanted to say. Don’t make me go back there. But she let him open the door, and steer her out of the office. She thought he’d leave her at the lift, but once again he insisted on accompanying her all the way to the street.

‘Good luck,’ he said. ‘If there’s any news, we’ll call straight away.’

‘My phone’s been disconnected.’ She dug the new mobile out of her bag and gave him the number. ‘This is how to find me.’

But she knew he wouldn’t use it.

* * *

She picked up a curry on the way home and ate it curled up on the sofa. She was already putting on weight, though she’d lost so much in the hospital she thought it didn’t matter. She stared out of the windows at the suburbs below. She imagined a glass canopy covering the whole city, cocooning its inhabitants in their daily lives, and herself above it hammering to be let in.

An hour on the web turned up no one called Lascaris in York. She tried to look up some friends, panning through online profiles to dredge up their contacts. But the numbers she could find were out of date or not answering; most of her friends, she supposed, weren’t even in the country. It occurred to her she hadn’t really had that many friends, not for a long time. She even thought about calling Hector – was seriously tempted – but drew the line at that.

And how long’s that going to hold?

Somehow, she survived three more days. She forced herself to take walks on Clapham Common, morning and afternoon, setting herself little goals each time: the bandstand, the fishing lake, the Tube station. She binned the takeaway leaflets and bought a stack of supermarket ready meals, which she told herself was progress. She searched the Internet for news of her case, though there was nothing. She took her pills.

And then the letter came.

She almost threw it out. The address and the postage were both printed on the envelope: it looked like another reminder from TV Licensing. But it had her name on it, and she was grateful for anything that proved she still existed to the outside world.

How pathetic am I? she wondered as she tore it open.

It wasn’t a demand from TV Licensing. It was a single sheet of paper, with three lines of text typed in the centre.

Jenny Roche

36 Bartle Garth

York