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.