Birdkill Read online

  Robyn lay in the darkness. Her head span if she closed her eyes. They’d drunk too much. They’d done for the bottle of Ksara in the Davington. Robyn had put her hand over the glass after one refill ‘Driving, remember?’ and Mariam finished it off while Robyn guzzled Perrier brought by the stiff-backed little waitress who Mariam had decided was a closet Nazi, all blonde, blue-eyed and Slav-cheeked.

  They’d gone shopping for basics at the big Tesco just out of town. Mariam had been giggly and Robyn stern and matronly. Back at Robyn’s, they opened a bottle of Californian merlot and agreed it wasn’t a patch on the woody, deep marvels of Ksara. Robyn made risotto and Mariam watched her, spooning hot stock from one pan into the rice and onions in the other. The Swedish style open fireplace, charged up with newspaper, kindling and chunks of wood, warmed them as they sat with their legs tucked up and ate from bowls and talked, about new beginnings and, as the level on the bottle dropped, their pasts and fears.

  Robyn closed her eyes and steadied herself as the spinning sensation faded. The rain pattered on the window and she tried to cast her mind back to the yawning lacuna in her past, as she did every night when she found herself with nothing to distract her. Peel away the onion skins, reach into the blackness. As always, it skittered away, elusive just beyond her grasp. Frustrating, shapeless things evaded her; try as she might, they wouldn’t come back.

  Robyn imagined herself sailing on a great lake, as she sometimes did when sleep evaded her. She slid across the mirror surface, the gentle splash of the water and flap of canvas sail relaxed her. The sharp perfume of clean open water and the bobbing of her little vessel cleaving the grey, reflective surface brought delight. Reaching the beach, the boat hove to and the waves expanded in circles dying down to leave peace and tranquillity in their wake. Sleep came.

  She woke with no memory of the night and was thankful, as she always was on a clean awakening.

  THREE

  A New Start

  A six o-clock drive to London with the hangover from hell wasn’t Mariam’s idea of fun. She gulped from the plastic water bottle in her cup-holder, the sweet vestige of her second service station coffee still on her palate. It was a grey, misty morning and the motorway had been quiet for much of the way, Mariam lulled by the buzz of the car’s engine. Closer to London the traffic got heavier. Now she was crawling towards 3shoof’s trendy Richmond offices. She checked her watch, if she was lucky she’d be just in time.

  She had woken on the foldout bed at Robyn’s to the peeping of her mobile alarm and had staggered into the kitchenette and made coffee. Robyn came down, tousle-headed and still pallid and dark-eyed, but she hadn’t had a nightmare, which was worth the six hours’ drive there and back. Sometimes Robyn’s fragility made Mariam want to cry.

  She wondered about 3shoof and Adel Ibrahim, the site’s infamous proprietor. She hadn’t met him, editorial director Alan Kingsthorpe had hired her. Great to turn up for her first day panda-eyed in clothes she’d slept in, sporting boozy dragon breath. Very old school journo.

  Mariam parked up and walked across the road to the townhouse with blue painted windows and the 3shoof logo by its door. She jumped up the steps, her laptop banging against her side and decided that was perhaps a mistake as her head threatened to burst. The receptionist was wearing a headscarf, a blue-eyed pale Circassian whose smile didn’t quite reach those striking irises. Her lipstick was wrong, Mariam decided, beaming at her and asking for Alan Kingsthorpe.

  ‘You have appointment?’

  ‘Sort of. I’m starting a new job here.’

  ‘Ah, yes. Good.’ the woman drawled. ‘Very good.’ She reached for the phone on her desk. She gestured languidly across the grey cloth reception sofas arrayed around a coffee table strewn with dog-eared magazines. ‘Sit.’

  Mariam dumped her laptop and handbag on the sofa and stood looking out of the window at the street beyond and wondering how Robyn’s day was shaping up. The strange incident with the kids in the field had really thrown her friend. Mariam wondered what had really happened out there and how much of it had come from Robyn’s imagining. The bark of a male voice startled her.

  ‘Hi. Mariam. Welcome to 3Shoof.’

  He was skinny, donnish and bespectacled, wispy pale blonde hair and an aquiline nose, angular and terribly English. Mariam took Alan Kingsthorpe’s out-thrust hand. ‘Glad to be here.’

  ‘Come on, I’ll show you the rumpus room. Did you have much of a journey?’

  ‘Sort of, I was staying with a friend in Somerset.’

  He led the way up a narrow staircase. ‘That’s some voyage. Want a coffee?’

  ‘Kill for one.’

  ‘Let’s get you sorted. Then you can install yourself, we’re short-handed right now. Come to think of it, we’ve been shorted handed since we started this whole thing. Coffee machine. Bring your own cup. You can use the guest ones for today. They’re the ones with our logo on them. When you’ve sorted yourself, we’re along there, third door on the right.’

  He slapped her shoulder and Mariam knew this was going to be a good gig.

  It was a good day in all. A lot to take in, a lot of new faces but all young, friendly and pleased to welcome the newcomer. Lunch was ordered in from a local Mediterranean deli and taken in the meeting room, a family affair presided over by the avuncular Kingsthorpe.

  Mariam found her energy levels crashing after lunch. The tiredness washed over her. She fixed herself a strong, sweet coffee and was just back at her desk when Kingsthorpe tracked her down with his hunt master’s cry.

  ‘Hi! Any luck with that sanctions busting story?’

  ‘Just filed it. I got through to the ministry and they confirmed they had just commissioned a brand new American supercomputer. I was speaking to the undersecretary himself. He was very defiant, said that this was yet more proof sanctions wouldn’t work against his country.’

  ‘That’s pretty hot. You obviously have a talent for this.’

  ‘I was just lucky, I—’

  She was interrupted by the entrance of Adel Ibrahim, 3shoof’s owner. She’d seen his picture in news stories and he wasn’t much prettier in real life. Pale-faced and running to fat, he had a wispy beard and was for the most part bald, the remnant of hair in line with his ears making him look tonsured. His retroussé nose gave him a piggish look, accentuated by bulbous eyes and a weak, moist-lipped mouth. He wore an over-sized tweed jacket and a shabby blue jumper. There were livid marks on the pink dome where he had been scratching at spots.

  ‘Who’s this?’

  ‘Mariam, meet Adel. Mariam’s just joined the editorial team.’

  ‘You put the sanctions story up on the CMS just now?’ Mariam nodded. ‘Right. My office, both of you. Something’s come up.’

  Kingsthorpe shrugged at Mariam’s enquiring glance. They followed Ibrahim into the room at the end of the corridor that turned out to be an office. It looked, to Mariam’s wondering eyes, as if it been searched by enthusiastic burglars.

  ‘Grab a chair,’ Ibrahim dumped himself down behind the desk smothered in piles of paper and nameless other detritus. Mariam moved some books from the chair nearest her and added them to a pile on the coffee table.

  Ibrahim’s feral tongue darted out to flick across his lips. ‘Did Alan tell you what the most important thing in your work is?’

  ‘Clicks.’

  He sat back, beaming. ‘Good, good. Absolutely. Everything we do is about driving views. Views means impressions means clicks. And clicks means cash.’

  She nodded, glancing at Kingsthorpe who regarded her benignly; a favourite uncle gracing a precocious child who is proposing a new and innovative system of land reform.

  ‘Here.’ Ibrahim handed her a plastic folder addressed to Kingsthorpe. ‘His name’s Buddy. He’s US military and he wants to whistleblow on a number of American clandestine operations and projects.’

  Kingsthorpe gazed owlishly at Ibrahim, before his brows knotted and he whipped off the thick-rimmed glasses. ‘A whistleb
lower? Are you out of your tiny mind, Adel?’

  ‘This is huge, Alan. It could take us mainstream.’

  ‘It could take us to the bloody Uruguayan embassy, too. You want to bring down the same batshit craziness as Assange or Snowden on us? Or Kim dot bloody Com? Paraiahsville? There’s no way this makes any sense for 3Shoof.’

  ‘It could do for us what the Gulf War did for CNN, Alan. We’re ready to take this on, we’ve got a good, solid platform and a smart team. We can partner with a major to scale up resourcing and reach but this would make our name for all time. We’d be at the top table.’

  ‘You’d be on the way to the slammer and I for one won’t stand you bail, you crazy Arab bastard.’

  ‘Fuck.’ Mariam hadn’t intended to say anything and, having let that one slip, realised she had become the centre of attention in the messy room. She tore herself away from the inflammatory sheaves of printed emails and correspondence and peered at the two irate men. Kingsthorpe was furious and steely, Ibrahim wobbly and puce. ‘This guy handled information on a whole range of experimental projects in the Middle East. They used us as lab rats for new weapons, drugs, the lot. Like it’ll just blow up a few dirty Arabs if it works as we planned and if it doesn’t the drones can go in and finish them off anyway.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter, Mariam.’ Kingsthorpe’s voice was kindly. ‘It’ll just make a couple of headlines and then we’ll be their target. They’ll destroy us.’ He rounded on Ibrahim. ‘And it won’t matter how many times the world clicks on the stuff we publish, because you’ll be tied up sucking down doses of water through a flannel and screaming for your mother’s tit, not munching foie gras and quaffing Krug.’

  Ibrahim wet his lips. ‘It’s worth the risk. This is the big time, Alan. Global. It’s global.’

  ‘No. I won’t support this lunacy.’

  Mariam heard herself speak, a small voice belonging to someone else. Not hers, no way. She had enough trouble with a traumatised best friend and a new job to hold down. Let alone putting her own experiences as a hostage in a cellar outside Damascus behind her. The memories she didn’t allow hold her back or keep her down. There’s no way Mariam would seek anything other than a nice, quiet life in exile in London. Maybe find a nice English boy. Someone boring and dependable who liked his slippers warmed by the fire and perhaps impassioned chats about pointless British politics over a merlot under a gas burner outside an Edgware Road bar. Her voice tore it all apart, her treacherous mouth working as her mind screamed no at the very idea.

  ‘We need to do this.’

  Dr Lawrence Hamilton. A brass plaque on a panelled door. Robyn knocked, rewarded with muffled ‘Come’ from inside. She pushed against the heavy wood, a naughty schoolgirl once again. He strode from behind the desk, a sparse gantry robed in a three -piece suit. Precarious half-frame glasses breasted the great beak of his nose. She jumped as the door slammed shut behind her. Robyn grasped the extended hand, all liver spots, wrinkles and tendons. Hamilton’s grip was paper dry and warm. His cornflower eyes pierced in the frameless spectacles. Trimmed eyebrows and manicured nails. Robyn almost curtseyed.

  He swept her into a chair.

  ‘Come along in. I’m so sorry to keep you waiting, but sometimes I get so terribly behind. Here, do take a seat.’

  She smiled, nerves jangling as she lowered herself into the wooden-armed chair set aside the richly striated dark wood desk with its green leather and gold foil surface. The study was men’s club opulent; bookcases of bound volumes and a glowing fireplace with a brass fender and fire irons. There was a dark green leather couch flanked by armchairs with deep-studded buttons. The coffee table sported a book about horses.

  ‘Coffee? Something stronger?’

  She shook her head, hands clasped in her lap. Christ, but she was desperate to be anything but Miss Jean Brodie and yet playing the part so well she could be hamming it if not for her own confusion making her simper like a tweed-skirted idiot. Was the question a trap? Was she a raging alky after her ‘episode’? Whatever that episode had been because she didn’t remember any of it and her knees looked pale clasped together beyond her hands and she wished to God she’d worn jeans rather than this stupid M&S checked skirt; too short and tight.

  ‘No. No thanks.’

  Hamilton steepled his hands. ‘Welcome to the Hamilton Institute. We’re pleased you could join us and I’m personally delighted you’ll be adding your expertise to our little teaching staff. Your interview was rather brilliant, and backed up by your references—’

  ‘But my problem, the war. Lebanon—’

  His pianist’s hand batted down her objection. ‘Lebanon doesn’t matter. We’re about the future here, not the past. We actively encourage healing through positive, forward thinking. Leave the past to its ghosts. We’re interested in a prospect we can share.’

  ‘You’re being very kind, but I—’

  ‘Please. We know about the bombing at the school, but you’re not to blame yourself. God knows, you are least of all to blame. Dr Hass assures me you have made a remarkable recovery from a traumatic incident, so let us look ahead.’

  Paul Hass was her trauma counsellor. She’d given him as a reference and Hamilton had clearly been fast enough to take it up. She held the cornflower-blue regard steadily and nodded. ‘Okay.’

  He smiled, relaxed. ‘No more about the past. We’ve got brighter times ahead of us and you have the chance to make a real difference here at the Institute. We need your skills. As I explained when we met in London, our work involves a number of troubled and yet highly talented young individuals. Our goal is to harness their extraordinary potential and unleash their true aptitudes. We have two teams here, the teaching staff and the research staff. We encourage a division of tasks, allowing you to focus on your pedagogical goals while the research teams try to understand what remarkable accidents of genetics and science it is that sets these young people apart. Most of them would have been cast off on the junk heap of disturbed youth, sent to borstals or even worse if we hadn’t been able to intervene. The one thing they have in common is they are all possessed of extraordinarily degrees of intelligence.’

  ‘But surely we should be combining learning with feedback from the research.’

  He cut her off with an imperious wave. ‘No. Absolutely not. We have twenty years of experience in this work and although we still feel we are barely scratching the surface, we have learned valuable lessons in the course of our research here. And it is critical there be no interaction between the teaching and research staffs. In fact, it is an undertaking you make in agreeing to work here.’

  ‘You didn’t mention this in London.’

  ‘It was not relevant then. It is now.’

  Robyn gripped the arms of her chair. ‘Well, hang on a second. How not relevant? It’s a major condition of my employment. You chose not to mention it until I was actually here and committed to taking up the position. You’re asking that I submit to a research programme being undertaken with children I am to teach without knowing the faintest thing about that programme? It hardly makes my position in the classroom workable.’

  ‘It has no impact on your work in the classroom. As I have stated, we have considerable experience and the arrangement has presented no issues for other members of the teaching staff here.’

  Robyn forced herself to relax, ease her grip and sit back. Breathe, take it easy. The pay was handsome, the opportunity once in a lifetime as Mariam had reminded her more than once when she was going to interviews and reporting back on how it was all going. First with Hamilton’s deputy, Simon Archer and then with the great man himself; both had taken place in the Knightsbridge Room at the Berkeley Hotel. Uncompromisingly posh, that place. Staff who smiled at you with that brand of service that lets you know you were actually the inferior party around here.

  Hamilton laid his hands on the desk, no doubt sensing her grudging compliance. ‘I can promise you will be most comfortable in your time with us, which I sincerely wish will
be a long and mutually profitable engagement. And the arrangement between two teams of professional and caring people performing totally separate roles with the children will, I promise, present no obstacle to your work. Will we take a look at the school?’

  Robyn conjured up a smile and crossed her legs in that stupid dress so she was displaying open body language for him, catching his glance at the gesture. Maybe too open. She tugged down on the hem above her knee. ‘That would be delightful.’

  Lawrence Hamilton led the way through the gates separating the reception area and teacher’s accommodation from the school buildings and the research institute. The security guard saluted him and smiled a greeting at Robyn. ‘Good morning Ma’am.’

  She grinned back and tipped her forelock.

  Hamilton stopped and flung out a hand at the buildings around them. ‘This is the research institute proper, where we conduct the majority of our work. The classrooms are over here; a couple are still in temporary buildings but we expect to move them to the new wing within the next few weeks. Over there is Levington House, the original manor house of the estate. That’s where the dormitories, refectory and recreation rooms are based. And that building is the research institute’s accommodation. Not as fancy as the teachers’, I’m afraid, but an upgrade is part of the next phase of building works. We seem to have been something of a building site for the past two years and it doesn’t look as if it’s going to change any time soon.’

  ‘Why do you keep this all behind locked gates?’

  ‘Two reasons. Firstly, because we have a responsibility to the children to ensure their safety at all times. And secondly because the work we carry out here is pioneering and highly confidential. So we take security very seriously. Talking of which, you had a visitor yesterday. A lady, I believe. She stayed with you last night?’

  Robyn fought to mask her irritation at the intrusion. ‘Yes. A friend of mine came down from London. Is that an issue?’