‘OK,’ Henry said, and he ended the call.
‘Nada?’ Rik said, as Henry placed his phone down on the table.
‘Zilch,’ Henry confirmed, wishing he knew a way around the situation. He paced the small office. It was an extreme idea, but the media was a possibility. Go to the papers, slag off MI5? He dismissed that. Apart from the fact it was likely the story would be suppressed from the highest level, he would find himself deep in the mire — shit that would probably follow him into retirement. His anger subsided — a little — and he checked his watch again. ‘I think I’ll go and see if I can collar Mark Carter. I need somebody to shout at. Coming?’
Rik shook his head. Henry handed him his pen back, not having used it, grabbed a set of keys for a CID car and headed down to the police garage. There was no way he was going to drive his Mercedes around the hellhole that was Shoreside estate. He wasn’t bothered if the wheels disappeared from a police car.
They decided on a new location for their next meeting later that evening.
Donaldson made certain he wasn’t followed and insisted Edina did the same. Trouble was, Donaldson knew that the ‘Watchers’, as the surveillance branch of MI5 was called, were the best in the world. They could tail even the most surveillance conscious target without ever revealing themselves. However, basic precautions could be taken, such as stopping abruptly, false window-shopping to look at reflections rather than the display, doubling back and looking at faces, as well as ducking into shops through one door and leaving via another. Edina was unfazed and said she knew what to do.
When she appeared at the Spanish restaurant in a medium-sized shopping arcade just off Victoria Street, Westminster, at eight that evening, she looked beautiful and relaxed. She had strolled the mile or so from her apartment close to the Home Office, overlooking the Thames.
They shared paella, food that Donaldson loved. It was a good one, a mix of seafood and chicken, freshly prepared. The accompanying Spanish beer complemented it perfectly. As Edina scraped a spoon across the paella pan for the tasty burned layer on the bottom, Donaldson asked, ‘Can we talk now?’
She had drunk the best part of the bottle of Rioja. Her eyes glistened as she placed the spoon into her mouth and chewed the burned rice that coated the pan.
‘I can’t actually answer the question you asked about Blackpool, but I can tell you one thing. There were three of them.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Not two, but three.’
Donaldson sat back.
‘Three boys, not two.’ Her words were slightly slurred but clear. ‘The two you caught — Sadiq and Rahman — and another one who had been brainwashed or radicalized or whatever it’s called. As far as I can gather, his whereabouts are unknown, as are the whereabouts of Jamil Akram. But they believe this little escapade isn’t yet over. That’s why they’re keeping a tight reign on Sadiq, but so far he’s told them nothing useful.’ Edina chuckled. ‘A teenage boy is holding out against some of the world’s most experienced interrogators.’
‘I saw you run,’ she said accusingly. ‘You left me to die.’
‘Could you possibly point that thing in another direction?’
Steve Flynn was sitting on the bench seat in Shell ’s cockpit and the woman after whom the boat had been named was perched on the fighting chair, a double-barrelled sawn-off shotgun resting across her lap, but loosely aimed at Flynn’s groin. If it had been discharged, even if he had survived the blast, he would be minus his genitals.
‘You left me behind, ran off,’ she said. ‘I saw you climb back on to the quayside. Then you ran away.’ The aim stayed the same.
Flynn said, ‘I couldn’t have helped, Michelle. I’d been shot
… may I?’ He wasn’t sure why he felt the need to do this, but he eased up his T-shirt and peeled back the dressing to show the ugly red, raised scar across his ribcage. ‘I was unarmed. I thought I might be dying anyway. I could hardly move. I would’ve been no use. As soon as I made a move, I would have been killed. I was too slow. I knew Boone was dead. I just had to hope that they wouldn’t kill you as well, because I knew even then, that if I lived, I’d be coming back.’ He replaced the dressing and pulled his shirt down.
Michelle raised the shotgun and trained it on Flynn’s chest. The double hammers were cocked and her finger was curled across both triggers.
Flynn stopped breathing. ‘Michelle, I’m back. I came back,’ he whispered.
‘You left me,’ she accused him. ‘You left Boone.’
‘He was dead. Don’t forget, I saw him die, too.’
Flynn recalled the first time, not so very long ago, that he’d seen Michelle. It had been on the day he and Boone had returned from a day’s tarpon fishing. He had been stunned by her radiant, free beauty. He also remembered those moments before Boone had hurtled back with the devil on his tail, how Michelle had unashamedly leaned over him at the laptop, naked, her breasts nuzzling his shoulder blades. A vibrant, beautiful woman. Now completely changed by recent events. Her chocolate brown skin had lost its lustre, her face gaunt, bearing the faded marks of a brutal beating. Her eyes seeped terror. Her whole body seemed shrivelled and wasted. Everything had somehow been battered out of her.
‘Do you know what they did to me?’
Flynn shook his head, nostrils flaring, eyes flickering between the double-O barrel ends and Michelle’s face. A tear formed at the edge of her left eye. A perfect, glinting droplet that rolled down her cheek, leaving a track.
‘They beat me and they raped me,’ she whispered.
‘I’m sorry.’ Flynn swallowed. His voice croaked.
‘They beat me and they raped me… again and again.’
Flynn swallowed drily now, his mouth and throat like acid. Michelle’s forefinger jittered on the triggers.
‘But that didn’t matter.’ She removed her finger from the trigger and wiped away the tear with the back of her hand. ‘Rape doesn’t matter to me. I’ve been raped a thousand times. I was a prostitute, you see. A good one. Men have always had their way with me, and as far as I was concerned it was always rape. But I learned to live through it. I’ve been abused since I was seven. By men. Eventually it meant nothing. I have been beaten, too. Many, many times, by angry men.’ Another tear formed, trickled down. She wiped it away. ‘Beating means nothing, either, because no one could ever beat the spirit out of me.’ She lifted her chin challengingly.
‘Shell,’ Flynn started to say, and moved slightly.
She jerked the gun at him. He became rigid again.
‘Those men raped me. They did it on the jetty and in the houseboat. They held my face over the side of the jetty and fucked me from behind so I had to look at Boone’s body floating in the bloody water. His face was looking up at me, what was left of it. The fish had already started to eat him.’
‘Shell,’ Flynn said again.
‘What those men took from me was my hope. Boone was my future. He was my way out. He saved me and I loved him for it. They took him from me… and you — YOU — left me…’
‘Shell,’ Flynn said again for the third time. ‘I’m back. I couldn’t save Boone and I couldn’t have saved you.’
Her head began to shake from side to side, then her chin fell and her whole body sagged as though, this time, the spirit had left her. The gun fell out of her hands on to the deck.
Flynn swooped down and knelt in front of her, encircling his strong arms around her now frail body, which shook and juddered uncontrollably. He held on and her thin arms went around his neck, crushing him ferociously. She started to howl and Flynn kept a tight hold as she broke down completely, her head buried into his chest. He stroked her hair, now coarse and straggled and stale, cooing, ‘It’s OK, it’s OK,’ softly, and other useless words into her ear. Such as, ‘I’m here now.’
As if that was any sort of reassurance to her.
‘I prayed you’d come back,’ she said, her voice muffled and broken. ‘Prayed hard, prayed to God you hadn’t truly deserted me.’