As she reached the door, a cab pulled up opposite, and a man carrying a leather holdall bag stepped out on to the pavement. Her suitcase slipped from her hand. The scar on his cheek was a livid slash in the suntanned face. He was leaner than she remembered at the funeral. He seemed older, greyer. He paid the cabbie and hurried into the mews, pulling his collar up against the icy February blast.
A fat, middle-aged man tried to squeeze past her where she blocked the doorway. ‘Excuse me, miss, are you coming or going?’
Elliot shut the door behind him and scuffed through a pile of mail lying on the carpet, mostly bills and circulars. He opened the cupboard at the foot of the stairs, turned on the heating and set the thermostat, then climbed the stairs and shivered as he switched on the light in the sitting room. The air was chill and the flat smelled damp and unlived in. He threw his bag into an armchair and tossed his coat over it. At the drinks cabinet he poured himself a large whisky. He retrieved the newspapers he had bought at the airport from his coat pocket, and sank into the settee to catch up on the world. He did not immediately notice the light winking on the telephone answering machine, indicating that a message awaited him.
On the foreign pages of The Times there was a story about a call from the United Nations for an international conference in Geneva to discuss the ‘increasing problem’ of the Boat People. He remembered Bidong, the crowds of bleak, malnourished faces that gathered around the noticeboard at the centre of the camp, more out of habit than with any real hope. Vietnam, the story said, would be asked to put a halt to the exodus. But it was as much, Elliot thought, a denial of the rights of these people to make them stay, as it was to force them to leave. The real problem was that no one wanted them.
Another story outlined the UN’s refusal to recognize the Heng Samrin regime installed in Phnom Penh by the Vietnamese. The international community, it seemed, preferred to recognize the murderers of the Khmer Rouge as the legitimate government of Cambodia.
Elliot threw the paper aside in disgust and took a stiff pull at his whisky. He wondered why he should feel such anger and realized, with a sense of shock, that it was because he cared. He stood up and dropped the other newspapers on the coffee table. He didn’t need to catch up on the world. Nothing had changed — except in him.
The flashing green light on the answering machine caught his eye. He walked round the settee, rewound the tape and pressed the PLAY button, then slipped back over the settee and lay along its length to listen to the message. His head was pounding still after the long flight. Above the background hiss, he recognized Sam Blair’s voice. ‘If she hasn’t found you before you get this message, Jack, your daughter knows you’re alive and she’s looking for you.’
Lisa was passing under the arch when the blast ripped through the windows of Elliot’s apartment, sending debris and lethal splinters of glass hurtling out across the mews. The shockwave hit her in the face like a slap. For several long moments she stood stunned. Her suitcase slipped from her hand and tipped over on the cobbles. Shouts sounded from the street and footsteps ran past her. The mews seemed suddenly full of people. Tiny flames licked around the edges of the shattered windows, dancing in the wind. She saw the dark blue uniform of a policeman. Someone was asking, ‘What happened? Another voice said, ‘There’s someone in there, I saw a light.’
Lisa picked her way slowly through the debris, as if in a dream, glass crunching beneath her feet. There was a crowd at Elliot’s door. The policeman and two other men, one in shirtsleeves, hammered shoulders against wood to break it down. A cloud of dust billowed out into the mews. Lisa’s panic redoubled. She pushed through the gathering crowd to follow the men inside.
‘I wouldn’t go in there, love.’ A hand caught her arm, but she wrenched free. It was almost pitch black beyond the door, the air thick with dust. She choked and covered her face with her hand and ran up the stairs. The room was wrecked, debris and dust strewn everywhere, walls scorched black. Flames flickered around the window frame, sizzling now as sleet drove in on the wind. Shadows stirred in the gloom.
‘Here, under the settee,’ one of the men said.
She took a step into the room and saw a hand protruding from beneath the wreck of an upturned settee. The three men pulled it aside and crouched over the figure lying beneath it. Blood had trickled across the face from the left ear, where the force of the explosion had burst an eardrum.
‘Someone call an ambulance!’ It was the policeman who spoke. One of the men broke away from the others to brush past Lisa and clatter down the stairs.
‘Is he dead?’ She heard her own voice reach her from somewhere far away.
The policeman looked up. ‘The settee must have taken the full force of the blast. Do you know him?’
Elliot’s eyes flickered open as Lisa knelt beside him. He felt the warmth of her hand clasping his. As the dust settled he saw her face clearly for the first time.
‘He’s my father,’ she said.