Birdkill Read online

‘Who’s this?’ Matt Duprez didn’t look particularly pleased.

  ‘Sorry. Clive Warren, this is Matt Duprez and Brian Kelly.’

  Kelly frowned. ‘We’ve met before. Right, we’re off, darling. See you in the morning. You sure you’ll be okay with Soldier Boy here?’

  ‘Yes, thanks.’

  The two journalists bustled out, Mariam guessed on their way to the pub to toast their new expense accounts.

  ‘Love you too,’ Warren waved at the door.

  ‘So what’s new, Mr Warren?’ Her mobile rang. ‘Hold that thought.’

  It was her landlord, Frank. His urgent voice sounded almost hysterical. ‘Jesus, Marri, where’ve you been? I’ve been trying to call you. The house has been burgled. The place is fucking trashed. It’s a total fucking mess. It looks like Beirut in there.’

  ‘Beirut is a beautiful modern city on the Mediterranean, jerk.’

  ‘You know what I mean. My house is in pieces, man.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Frank. What happened?’

  ‘Fucked if I know. The police are here now. Look, I’m sorry, but they made a particular mess in your room.’

  She glanced at Warren, who raised his eyebrow. ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘The mattress is all cut up. Your clothes are all over the place. They slashed up Mr Bojangles.’

  Mr Bojangles was a stupid stuffed toy monkey in a dinner suit she’d had for years. She’d always taken him with her when she travelled and took a photo of him. Mr Bojangles in New York, Beirut, Kuwait City, London, Paris. He’d got around, had that monkey. He even had his own Instagram. For some reason the news made her terribly sad.

  Warren cocked his head at her as she dropped the line. ‘Doesn’t sound like that was good news.’

  She shook her head. ‘Hardly. My place has been burgled. They slashed my stuff up.’

  ‘Would you like somewhere to stay? No funny stuff. But I think you’re in quite a lot of danger and could use the security.’

  She searched his eyes and found nothing there but genuine concern. ‘No funny business.’ He held out his hand and she shook it. ‘Thanks.

  Mariam cradled a glass of scotch, gazing out over the floodlit pool and smooth green lawn. Clive Warren had followed her to Frank’s place and waited while she packed a bag from the remains of her things. The police wanted her to give a statement, which she did omitting any mention of 3shoof or the story she was working on. Frank was in a daze.

  Leaving the house an hour later, she followed Warren’s Jaguar in her silly Ford, the big house by the Thames surprising her as much from the outside as it did on the inside. The living room was minimalist, masculine but designed with an impeccable eye for light, colour and texture. She admired his taste, walking around and scrutinising his bookshelf, the fine little print of a Degas nude sketch on the wall.

  ‘You like it?’

  ‘Yes. Bet you wish you had the original.’

  He laughed and handed her a tumbler. ‘I do. I just need to fix a few things in the kitchen. Grab a seat, I’ll be out in two minutes.’

  She sat on the sofa wondering about how a soldier would afford all this. A detached house backing onto the Thames, a pool, Degas sketches.

  ‘You okay with lasagne?’

  ‘Super, thanks. Clive, look, it’s very kind of you to put me up.’

  ‘It’s no problem. I had my worries about your place.’

  ‘Why?’

  He smiled, puzzled. ‘Why what?’

  ‘The change of heart. You couldn’t run away from me fast enough to start with. Now you’re opening your house up to me. It’s not that I’m not grateful—’

  ‘But you’re a journalist.’

  ‘…But you clearly have an interest in this.’

  Warren sat on the sofa across from her. ‘I made a few calls around when you first contacted me. Like I told you, I transferred away from Odin. Soon after, I left the army. I was offered work as a contractor in Iraq.’

  ‘When was that?’

  ‘Early 2013. Stop working, journalist, I’m trying to talk to you. So I went to Iraq, but it wasn’t really what you’d call ethical. There was a lot of bully boy stuff going down and I found it distasteful. I started taking on contracts in my own right, bringing old colleagues in as freelancers. The Iraq stuff opened up new avenues and bit by bit I got away from it into more private security jobs for high net worth individuals. Sheikhs, that sort of thing. I had quite a lot of guys on the payroll by then. We were taking on stuff from rock gigs and pop star protection through to private jets and work for big family offices.’

  ‘Nice work.’

  ‘Better than slotting kids at checkpoints on IED-packed highways, believe me. Anyway, it had all got quite big so I shaved off the really fancy stuff high level personal security for myself and sold the company to a bunch in Dubai. I got out, basically. Now I just take on the jobs I want to do. The company got me this,’ he gestured around them. ‘And now I suits meself.’

  ‘And your change of heart about 3shoof and our investigation?’

  ‘I talked to three people I know who’d been involved in Odin. It was a mess. Good men have died needlessly. I’m interested in finding out what the hell has been going on. And I have the luxury of being able to follow my interests.’

  ‘So I’ve become an interest.’

  ‘Don’t go getting ideas. It’s business.’

  ‘You arrogant shit!’ Mariam exploded, but Warren was laughing at her and soon enough she joined in.

  Robyn woke screaming into the pillow she hugged to herself. She was face down on the bed, her knees drawn up, offering herself to be taken from behind. She was quivering with lust but the Void was there, the blackness that masked the dream and just left her with waves of nausea and hate, a violent loathing at odds with her posture and the signals coming from her melted loins. She rolled over and covered herself, the duvet damp from her sweat. She curled up on her side and sent her mind into the blackness, trying to retrieve substance from the lacuna, peeling away layers of nothingness to discover the source of the smell of death and the sense of violation etched into her soul.

  It all came to nothing. She lay staring up at the dark ceiling. Eventually, she peered out at the bedside clock. It was three in the morning. She tried to close her eyes and think of something peaceful, put herself back in her TT on that track, living life in the physical joy of taking a fantastic machine to the edge, honing her ability and revelling in her skill. She drifted.

  The Void was greater than ever before. It curled high over her, a little figure racing round a track in a tilt shift toy car, lit by the orange light of sunset and set against a backdrop of spring green countryside as a dark tsunami poised in the sky, blotting out the sun for a moment before it crashed down onto her and drowned her, consuming her in its stygian cold.

  Mariam got into the office at around eleven, but she didn’t reckon anyone would be watching clocks right now. She and Clive Warren had enjoyed breakfast in his conservatory overlooking the decked patio area leading to his pool. It was a cool, sunny morning and the glass skin amplified the tentative sunlight nicely.

  He’d made croissants and coffee, there was butter and marmalade. She caught Warren’s glance at her as she tore her croissant on the table. ‘Sorry, it’s how we eat at home. Look at it this way, your croissants were good enough for me to think I was at home.’

  ‘You’re Christian?’

  ‘Yup. Mariam’s the giveaway, right?’ She licked her shining fingers and reached for her coffee. ‘So what’s our next move? We’ve lost Buddy. We’ve gained two hard-bitten journos and a soldier. A little band of heroes, aren’t we?’

  ‘Do you mind if I ask you how old you are?’

  ‘Thirty. Where’d that come from?’

  ‘Thirty going on fifty is what you are. Where did you pick up that eight lane wide cynical streak?’

  ‘Lebanon. You’ve been there, why’d you even have to ask?

  ‘Touché. So what’s your next move, journ
alist?’

  ‘Talk to some friends in Beirut.’

  ‘Why Beirut?’

  ‘Because that’s where you and Hamilton and Parker were so buddy. Because that’s where Hamilton used prisoners to experiment on. If we can find someone there who’ll talk, we’ll start to get to the dark heart of project Odin.’

  ‘Dark heart? You’re being melodramatic.’

  ‘Tell me about these men who died needlessly. Where did they die?’

  ‘I’ll get more coffee.’

  And after that it had been small talk. Warren was holding out on her. She liked him and yet trusted him about as much as your average hungry anaconda. Getting into her Ford had actually felt like a release, the relaxed atmosphere quickly becoming stifling as he evaded her questions. Driving to the office she wondered about what the hell his agenda was and eventually concluded whatever he was up to, he was handy to have around right now.

  She’d stopped at a Boots and bought toothbrush, paste, deodorant and other essentials. Feeling slightly stupid, she bought two of everything. Life at the moment seemed to be making a habit of displacing her and it was always good to have some of its niceties to hand.

  She had hardly settled down at her desk, a grunt from Kelly indicating he was busy and she could go to hell with her good mornings, when Alan Kingsthorpe came for her.

  ‘The police are here. They want to talk to you again.’

  ‘Oh fuck. Not Farmer, please not Farmer.’

  ‘That’s the guy. I put him in the boardroom. Will I call Iain?’

  ‘No, that’s fine. I’ll go talk to him. Thanks. Hey, Kelly!’

  The bearded visage blinked and focused on her. ‘What?’

  ‘Name check.’

  She almost skipped up the stairs, buoyed by Kelly’s exasperated ‘Fuck off!’

  Farmer stood at the head of the polished mahogany boardroom table. His gaunt frame was cloaked in a long raincoat, despite the blue sky showing through the windows. It flapped around him as he breasted the table’s end to meet her.

  He gestured for her to sit. She pulled up a chair. ‘What do you want from me now? You have my statement.’

  ‘We do, we do. And fascinating it is, too.’ He dwelled on the word fascinating in a way that made it sound dirty. Come to think of it, Farmer seemed to make everything sound dirty. He had a way of smearing everything he picked out for fastidious examination by implication. Farmer’s world was not a place of pleasant dreams.

  Mariam waited. Farmer sat on the table, looking down at her. She caught the hint of stale cigarette smoke from his jacket and, when he spoke, from his breath. It was the one thing about Robyn she couldn’t abide, that occasional hit of stale fags. But Robyn had cut down to a couple a day or, perhaps, more when the pressure was on. Farmer was a harder case. She noted the yellow patina on his index finger and shuddered.

  ‘Mister Kovak, as I am to understand it, was what they call a whistleblower.’

  ‘He was.’

  ‘Whose whistle was he blowing, Ms Shadid? Who would want to take his breath away?’

  ‘The list would be very long. The archive he released to us covered mostly British and American intelligence and military operations in the Middle East, but there are details of secret and often inflammatory correspondence between a number if intelligence agencies and government bodies across Europe and the Middle East, including Mossad and the Israeli Defence Forces. Are you saying it wasn’t suicide then?’

  ‘I’m saying nothing. Did anyone know of what Mr Kovak had passed to you?’

  ‘He said he was blown. We put him in the hotel for safety.’

  ‘Taken the law into your own hands.’

  ‘Protected a source.’

  ‘Not very effectively, it would appear.’

  ‘So it was murder.’

  ‘I’m saying nothing.’

  ‘I’ll join you.’

  Farmer stabbed his yellowed finger at her. ‘You know what? I’d bleeding love to nick you. See if you’re so cocky sitting in a cell on a charge of obstruction.’

  ‘I’m not obstructing you. You can go to hell with my full blessings.’

  Farmer slid off the table with such ferocity Mariam thought he was going to hit her. He wheeled away from her, his raincoat flapping. He strode to the window and stood, framed against the sunlight outside. Her heartbeat slowed.

  ‘Suxamethonium chloride.’ Farmer turned to her. ‘He had been injected with it. It’s a paralysing agent. He was likely questioned but forensics found no trace of any violence. Some slight bruising to the wrists consistent with being bound, but very carefully. His killers were very considerate.’ There was that dirty inflection again. ‘Then they dumped him in a warm bath and cut his wrist.’

  ‘So why was there so much mess?’

  ‘They think the drug wore off, that he moved about before slipping away. Tried to get out of the bath.’

  Mariam rubbed her eyes to brush away the weariness and the memory of Buddy’s thin, marblesque corpse in its bath of carmine.

  ‘I’m not sure how I can help you.’

  ‘Your offices have been burgled, so has your house. Your pal is dead. Someone’s pretty mad with you, it would appear.’

  ‘I had considered that.’

  ‘But you have no idea who?’

  ‘None whatsoever. If I did, believe me, I’d be at your door in seconds.’

  His voice was gentler. ‘Here. My number. Perhaps you should consider police protection.’

  She glanced up at him. ‘What if it’s our side?’

  ‘We’d still protect you.’

  She took the card. ‘I think I’m covered for now, but I’ll bear it in mind.’

  ELEVEN

  Security and insecurity

  Lawrence Hamilton sat behind his desk, his chin resting on steepled hands. He didn’t move as Heather ushered Bill Foster in and closed the door behind him. Foster wore a tweed jacket, a beige V-neck and a burgundy tie. All very country, Hamilton thought, mildly surprising himself with the bitterness of the sentiment.

  ‘Bill. Nice of you to drop in. If unusual.’

  Foster dropped into one of the green studded club chairs. ‘It’s not social, I can assure you. That’s a hell of a drive from London.’

  ‘I try not to do it too often, myself. To what, then, do we attribute this rare pleasure?’

  ‘Project Odin has been compromised. Details of the entire process from the first day we applied for funding to scope out the research project until the end of the trials in Lebanon have been leaked. A Middle East gossip website has obtained them and is working with the Guardian and the Telegraph on investigating the story.’

  Hamilton let the news sink in. He laid his hands down on the desk. ‘What does Raynesford say?’

  ‘Keep our heads down. The Select Committee has approved our funding; the Americans are making their contribution. Operationally, everything is smooth. His people are endeavouring to deal with the issue. The Americans are on board. On no account are you to speak to anyone from the media.’

  ‘And precisely how is he going to ‘deal with the issue’?’ Hamilton snapped. ‘Besides, when did we stop calling a problem a problem?’

  Foster pushed himself to his feet and wandered over to the bookshelves, his amused glance making Hamilton regret his asperity. ‘You’re getting more like Victor Meldrew by the day, Lawrence. Old age isn’t sitting well with you.’ He picked out a book and riffled through its pages. ‘As for what Raynesford intends, I didn’t ask him. There are things you don’t really want to know. Jolyon’s people don’t always play nicely. But they’re effective.’

  ‘There’s no link in any case between the Institute and Odin. There’s no case to answer.’

  Foster grimaced and replaced the book. ‘Apart from the Shaw girl.’

  ‘You mentioned an Arab website. What’s it called?’

  ‘3shoof.com. It’s all scandal and tittle-tattle.’

  There was something nagging at him and he couldn’t pu
t his finger on it, an infuriating sensation akin to forgetting a common word in the middle of a sentence.

  ‘Do we know the names of the journalists who are involved?’

  Foster darted a glance at him. ‘No. What a strange question. Why do you ask?’

  ‘No reason. Curiosity.’ Hamilton was remembering the young Lebanese firebrand Robyn Shaw had inveigled into his study. Looking away from Foster, he had a distinct and unpleasant sensation in his stomach.

  The cat was clearly very much out of the bag.

  Robyn sat at her desk. The last of the class had just left and she scanned the empty classroom. She was tired, but it had been another engaging session and she felt she was making tangible progress. The kids had started to open up and she was beginning to get a feeling for quite how screwed up having a kid’s emotional age and an adult’s intelligence and learning could be. She felt for them and they had responded to that by letting her in.

  She put her pen down just as Martin Oakley walked back. Panic rose in her. She fought to stay in control and at least outwardly calm. ‘Hello, Martin.’

  He really was an urchin. Snub-nosed, freckled and thin, he stood in his shabby coat and baggy jumper, his stained jeans marked with biro. Even his sneakers were shabby, the white laces grubby and trailing. His usual scowl puckered his brow. ‘It’s alright. I know. Your head’s all fucked up. There’s nothing there, a big emptiness. You’re like Pandora. It’s in a box you’re keeping shut. I can open it.’

  She fought the urge to scream, her body electric with adrenaline. The urge to flee made her quiver.

  ‘Please don’t.’

  ‘I can. I can let it free. Your memories.’

  ‘You’re cruel, Martin. What made such a young person so cruel?’

  He grabbed his sleeve, pulled it up to expose his chalk-white forearm. It was criss-crossed with scars and straight scarlet lines. Razor cuts. ‘We’re cruel. That’s what we do. We’re fucked up. Us lot more than most. We’re all guinea-pigs.’

  ‘Why do you let them experiment on you?’