It was late. I had no idea how long I had been talking, but the TV was off. Tanya had listened with absolute attention while I’d told her about the major’s world and my connection to it. I’d kept talking even when I was back with him, interrupting my narrative to let her know what he was doing and thinking, even telling her about his murderous thoughts. I saw her stiffen at this and look at me with something more than vast curiosity: it could have been shock or recognition or perhaps even terror.
Into the silence she said, “Is he there now?”
I shook my head. “No. He’s gone. I’ve lost him.”
She had her arms clasped around her shins, was bunched up protectively.
“What did he do?” she asked at last.
“I don’t know.”
She didn’t immediately say anything further. I expected questions about Owain, about the people and places in his life, the texture and depth and extent of my experiences, and about their relatonship to the world I inhabited with her. I was ready for fascination, scepticism, anxiety or outright incredulity. But there was none of this.
Finally she said, “Did you want to make love? I mean with me?”
I nodded wholeheartedly, though I still felt ashamed.
“It wasn’t you, Owen. You may have started it. But you’d gone before you came.”
If it was a joke, she wasn’t smiling. And of course I knew what she meant. But she was missing the complexities of it.
“It was me, Tan,” I insisted. “It was him, too. In both places. It was both of us.”
THIRTY-SIX
He dreamt that he was stumbling through a blinding light. The instant he woke he knew the light was in his bedroom, shining directly into his face. A gloved hand clamped itself across his neck, thumb and forefinger squeezing.
The torch was high-powered, its radiance a bluish-white. The man leaning over him relaxed his grip slightly, tugging him forward. He sat up slowly, trying to peer beyond the glare.
“Out you get,” said a voice from the foot of the bed. “Nice and steady.”
A northern accent. Yorkshire. Owain slid the heel of his hand back. His pistol was gone from under his pillow. The beam wavered a little as he swung his legs over the edge of the mattress. The CIF man standing beside him had the stubby black barrel of his automatic pointed almost nonchalantly at his chest.
Owain’s brain was thick with sleep and alcohol. He wondered if Marisa had told them he usually slept with the pistol close at hand. But how would she have known? They’d never shared a bed. No, it was just standard procedure. He knew that any acts of bravado would be futile. Stupid to get shot before he even knew why they were here.
“Get your boots on, major.”
A second man at the foot of the bed threw them into his lap. The one standing beside him stepped back, keeping his weapon trained on him as he laced them up. A Sterling TMP.
The torch was clicked off.
As his vision adjusted Owain realised that a murky dawn light was seeping into the room through the open door. The two men both wore full body armour and wraparound helmets with night-vision goggles perched on them. Crack troops, he didn’t doubt that, so best be obliging. They resembled bulky pilots that had just dropped out of the sky.
His jacket was tossed on to the bed. He put it on, asked for a glass of water. They ignored the request. He felt less hung-over than deprived of good quality sleep, as though he’d spent the st few hours merely floating in the shallows of unconsciousness.
“Let’s go,” said the man with the Yorkshire accent.
They marched him outside, the northerner going ahead of them. He wore a section commander’s patches, while the younger man was unit leader. No ordinary rankers for him: special duty operatives.
A tall, lean figure in a long overcoat was standing at the balcony, staring towards a band of light in the east. The blood-orange half-disc of the sun could be seen, squatting in a gap between the horizon and a line of thick cloud.
“Good morning, major,” Carl Legister said without turning around.
He was hatless, his dark hair slicked back on his scalp, delineated by the sharp lines of a recent haircut.
“Where is she?” he asked.
His men took up flanking positions. Both carried Sterlings. They were compact and lightweight, capable of single shots or rapid fire. At close range they could put a hole through you the size of a fist.
It was obvious Legister was asking about Marisa. A muted panic blossomed in him. He’d had vivid nightmarish dreams in the few hours he’d been asleep, dreams of flight, of chases, of corpses and ghosts pursuing him across blasted landscapes. Before that, there had been his conquest of Marisa. The empty aftermath. Her face at the door, hair still damp from the shower. After that? He couldn’t remember. It was all completely blank.
“She’s gone,” was all he could muster.
Legister didn’t move. “That much is evident, major. The question is—where?”
Owain was still trying furiously to recall. Nothing would come.
Legister turned to face him. “You don’t deny she was here?”
Owain knew that before he spoke, he had to think. I sat perfectly motionless within him, wanting to do nothing to disturb the dangerous fragility of his situation.
“You know that already,” he said. “Didn’t you send her?”
Legister’s hands were buried in the pockets of his overcoat. He had the look of someone engaged in a tiresome distraction, who wanted swift answers but knew that the protocols of their respective positions would have to be observed, if only for the sake of his own decorum.
“You say she’s gone,” he remarked. “An interesting choice of phrase. In what sense do you mean exactly?”
“She left. Hours ago.”
“What time?”
“I’m not sure. Around midnight.”
Legister made a motion of his head to the men, who retreated out of earshot. Owain was confident that their weapons were still trained on him. He wondered if Legister was also holding his own gun in his right-hand pocket. The thick navy serge of his overcoat made it difficult to be sure. No, he decided; it wouldn’t have been dignified.
“Was the rendezvous pre-arranged?” Legister asked softly.
“Why are you asking me?”
A slow exhalation that sounded like a sigh of impatience. “Tell me, major.”
It was hard to get his thoughts in order, especially when they contained such a crucial gap.
“She was here when I arrived home,” he admitted. “I wasn’t expecting her.”
“What time was this?”
“I’m not sure. I’d had a few drinks. Ten, eleven o’clock.”
“And then what?”
He had penetrating eyes and the capacity for making his whole being go so abruptly still that he became like a lens concentrating your attention, making you the focal point of his.
“We had coffee. Talked. She left.”
“Is it a sexual relationship?”
Owain managed to turn his surprise into a soulless laugh.
“Aren’t all the details of my recent conquests on file? My endless affairs and frequent visits to the city’s brothels? I imagine you have a good account of such activities.”
Legister didn’t react to this. He merely waited. Owain hadn’t considered until now the impact of negative evidence. It was perversely redemptive: a secret disclosed through the very absence of disclosure.
“Didn’t she tell you?” he said. “About my—difficulties? I thought that was part of the appeal.”
Nothing altered in his face. “She left around midnight?”
“I think so. I wasn’t watching the clock.”
“And you did—what? “
“Went to bed. Slept. Until your wake-up call.”