‘Mr Raker,’ she said, and kissed me.
‘Elizabeth.’
She gave me a gentle slap – she hated being called Elizabeth – and I brought her into me and kissed her on the top of the head. ‘How was your day?’ I asked.
‘Full of meetings.’
We stayed like that for a moment. This was new for both of us. It had been two and a half years since my wife Derryn had died of breast cancer, and almost sixteen since we’d first met. Liz was married at twenty-one, pregnant six months later and divorced shortly after that. She spent two years bringing up her daughter Katie, before returning to the law degree she’d started and completing her training as a solicitor. She hadn’t dated seriously since before she’d married her husband.
‘Where are we eating?’ she asked.
‘There’s an Italian place I know.’ I shifted us – still together – around to face the closed restaurant just down from where we were standing.
She squeezed me. ‘You’re a funny man, Raker.’
‘I booked us a table at a South African place just off Covent Garden. We can get drunk on Castle Lager.’
‘South African?’
‘Ever had babotie?’
‘Can’t say I have.’
We started walking slowly. ‘Well, tonight’s your lucky night.’
The restaurant was in a narrow cellar in a side street between Covent Garden market and the Strand. The stone walls had holes carved in them, framed photographs of South Africa sitting inside. In the one closest to us, the Ferris wheel at Gold Reef City was caught in black and white, frozen for a moment against a markless sky. I’d spent a lot of time in and around Johannesburg in my previous life as a journalist, and been stationed there for a year in the run-up to the elections in 1994. It had been a different place back then, more like a war zone than a city, its people massaged by hatred and fear.
Liz let me choose, so I ordered two bottles of Castle, peri-peri chicken to start and babotie – spiced mincemeat, baked with egg – for the main course. While we waited for the food to arrive, she talked about her day and I told her a little of mine. I’d just put a case to bed a couple of days before: a seventeen-year-old runaway who’d been hiding out close to Blackfriars Bridge. His parents, a couple from a sprawling council estate in Hackney, had told me that they only had enough money to cover my search for three days. It took me five to find him, the job complicated by the fact that he had no friends, talked to pretty much no one, and, when he’d left, had literally taken only the clothes on his back. No phone. No cards. No money. Nothing even remotely traceable. I’d been to see his mum and dad and told them to pay me for the three days, and then return when they felt they could afford to square up the extra two. They were good people, but I wouldn’t see them again. I wasn’t normally in the business of charity, but I found it even more difficult to leave things unfinished.
After the babotie arrived, conversation moved on from work to Liz’s daughter and the university course she was doing. She was finishing the final year of an economics degree. I hadn’t had the chance to meet her yet, but from the way Liz had described her, and the photos I’d seen, she appeared to be almost a mirror image of her mother.
I ordered two more bottles of Castle and, as Liz continued talking, caught sight of a woman watching me from across the restaurant. As soon as we made eye contact she looked down at her food. I watched for a moment, waiting for her eyes to drift up to me a second time, but she just continued staring at her plate, picking apart a steak. I turned back to Liz. Ten seconds later, the woman was looking at me again.
She was in her late twenties, red hair curling as it hit her shoulders, freckles scattered across her cheeks and nose. She had a kind of understated beauty, as if she didn’t realize it, or she did but wasn’t bothered enough to do anything about it. The thin fingers of her right hand grasped a fork; those on her left were wrapped around the neck of a wine glass. She was wearing a wedding ring.
‘You okay?’
The woman was looking away again now, and Liz had noticed me staring at her. ‘The woman in the corner there – do you know her?’
Liz looked back over her shoulder. ‘I don’t think so.’
‘She keeps looking this way.’
‘Can’t say I blame her,’ Liz said, smiling. ‘You’re a good-looking man, Raker. Not that I want to inflate your ego or anything.’
We carried on eating. A couple of times I glanced in the woman’s direction, but didn’t catch her eye again. Then, about thirty minutes later, she suddenly wasn’t there any more. Where she’d been sitting was empty; just a half-finished steak and a full glass of wine. Money sat on a white tray on the edge of the table, the bill underneath it.
She was gone.
2
Just before we left, Liz got a call from a client. She rolled her eyes at me and found a quiet spot in an alcove. I gestured to her that I’d meet her upstairs when she was done.
The rain that had been in the air earlier had now arrived. I pulled my jacket on and found shelter a couple of doors down from the restaurant. Across the street people emerged from Covent Garden Tube station, a few armed with umbrellas and coats, but most dressed in short sleeves or T-shirts, blouses or summer skirts. After about five minutes I spotted a figure approaching me from my left, moving in the shadows on the opposite side of the street. When she got close, the light from a nearby pub illuminated her, freeze-framing her face, and I realized who it was.
The woman from the restaurant.
She crossed the street and stopped about six feet away.
‘Mr Raker?’
I immediately recognized the look in her eyes. I’d seen it before, constantly, repeated over and over in the faces of the families I helped: she’d either lost someone, or felt she was about to. Her face was young, but her eyes were old, wearing every ounce of her pain. It gave her a strange look, as if she was caught somewhere in between, neither young nor old, not beautiful or ugly. Just a woman who had lost.
‘I’m really sorry I had to come up to you like this,’ she said, and pushed her hair behind her ears. She seemed nervous, her voice soft but taut. ‘My name’s Julia. Julia Wren.’
‘What is it you want, Julia?’
‘I, uh …’ She paused. A bag strap passed diagonally across her chest. She reached behind her and pulled it around, opening up the front flap. She took out her purse and removed a piece of paper from it. As she unfolded it, I could immediately see what it was: a printout. ‘I read about you,’ she said. ‘On the internet.’
It was a BBC story, a photograph showing me being led out of a police station, flanked by a detective, two uniforms and my legal counsel, Liz. Three days before the picture had been taken, I’d gone right into a nest of killers and almost lost my life. Eighteen months had passed since then, but my body was still marked by the scars.
There had been other stories on the same case. Many other stories. I’d given no interviews, even to the people I’d once worked with, who’d called begging for comment. But it had gone big. For a week it had played out in the nationals until, like all news stories, it eventually burned itself out. For everyone else, it was consigned to history.
But not for this woman.