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Rano put down his glass, swung his feet to the floor and leaned across the table. His face was only a foot from hers. She moved back instinctively, remembering that being a doormat was safe as well as humiliating.
‘It’s rather more than that, as you very well know, Ms Schell.’ He waited for some acknowledgement. She despised herself for nodding again. ‘Good. All we’re doing is demanding justice. You have to understand that.’
‘Oh, I understand all right,’ Ginty said. He moved back, but that didn’t make her feel any easier. She forced herself to add: ‘But I’ll have to be fairly even-handed in what I write. If I pretend it’s only your people who’ve suffered, I become … the Sentinel becomes partisan and therefore automatically untrustworthy. I’ll have to include some balance. Do you understand that?’
Rano said something to the man behind him, who straightened up and stopped picking his teeth. Ginty couldn’t withdraw a single word. She just sat, watching them both, hoping she didn’t look too much like a rabbit in the headlights.
‘I know what you’re getting at, yes,’ Rano said at last, his eyes softening a little. Ginty tried to keep her own confident. ‘And it’s a reasonable point, but don’t overdo it. You have to make your readers see that we’ve had no alternative when we’ve hit back. I’ll need your agreement to that before you leave.’
She was very much aware of the other men in the room. Rano was waiting for her response, impatient, his hand clenched around his wineglass.
‘I’ll do my best.’
‘That’s not enough, Ginty.’
She hated the intimacy, and she wondered what Harbinger had said to make Rano feel he had the right to use her name like that. ‘It might help me write convincingly if you could make me understand why what you’re doing to them now – particularly the rapes – is any different from what they have done to you in the past. Aren’t you just fuelling the next bout of revenge?’
Rano frowned and said something over his shoulder to the guard, who stepped forwards. Pictures flashed through Ginty’s mind as her body seized up: the man who had been dragged away as she arrived; the burned villages; the fifteen-year-old who had killed her own child rather than live with the knowledge that he was theirs too.
The soldier walked deliberately round the table to stand just in front of her. Something glinted in his fingers. Her heart thumped, and her throat closed so that she couldn’t breathe. Then she saw he was holding a cigarette packet. He opened it and offered it to her. She shook her head, not trusting her voice. He took it to Rano, who put a cigarette between his lips and leaned forwards for a light. Sucking in the smoke with greedy pleasure, he leaned back in his chair and swung his legs up on to the table again, picking up his wineglass in the hand that already held the cigarette.
Ginty pressed on: ‘Won’t your actions now make them – or their children – try to do the same to you and yours as soon as they get the power back?’
‘If we do our job properly, they won’t get it.’ Rano paused, looked over her head, then added deliberately: ‘And even if they do, most of the next generation of children will be half ours anyway. This time we will sort it out once and for all.’
He looked directly at her. She knew he must have been told what she’d been doing in the camps, that her main job here was to collect stories from the rape survivors for a quite different magazine. And he must have some idea of what she – or any other woman who had heard them – would feel about him and his men.
She tried to listen to what he was saying, instead of the remembered voices of his victims, as he explained that rape of the enemy’s women is the natural response of men at war, and that people in the west made far too much fuss about rape in general. It had always been part of life, he told her, because of the way men have been genetically programmed to ensure a wide enough spread of their genes and prevent in-breeding within the tribe.
He could have been an academic lecturer, offering evidence from well-known scientists and anthropologists, adding as a clincher the observations of primate-watchers, who had seen males of one group raping and kidnapping females of another.
Work on the guns had almost stopped, and the singing with it. If Rano’s men really didn’t understand English, something outside her five senses was making them remarkably attentive to what he was saying.
Half an hour later, he switched off the tape recorder, ejected the two cassettes, labelled them, dated and signed them, and then passed both across the table towards Ginty. The blood caught in his cuticles had dried to a dull brown, but she was beyond horror. Concentrating on his lecture, while fighting her fear, had been more tiring than anything she’d done before. She hoped she’d lived up to Harbinger’s faith in her. But she couldn’t think of that now.
‘If you would just sign both, then we can be sure we’re dealing with the same interview.’
She did as he’d asked, making sure her fingers didn’t touch his. Her hand looked tiny next to his. She wasn’t sure that her legs would hold her up when he let her go.
He stubbed out his cigarette and signalled to the men behind Ginty. One of them came into her peripheral vision, holding a camera.
‘Harbinger will need an illustration. You and I will look good together. A nice contrast. Come on.’
Unable to fight him, Ginty let Rano usher her outside into the sun. Muscles in her knees were jumping, and she felt sick, but she could walk perfectly well. He carefully positioned her in front of a spray of bullet holes near one of the blackened windows, before standing beside her. The young soldier with the camera shot the whole film. Sometimes Ginty was made to smile up at Rano; at others direct to the camera. She felt his arm heavy on her shoulders and tried to show something of her real feelings.
When it was over at last, the man with the camera rewound the film, took it out, and handed it to Ginty. Her hand was sweating so much she thought she might drop it, but she got the little reel into her pocket. The young man fished in his pocket and handed Rano a bundle of black cloth.
‘We have to use this,’ he said, shaking it out and reaching towards her head. ‘As much for your protection as ours. If you were seen unblindfolded with my men, the other side could make you tell them where you’d been today. D’you understand?’
Making a supreme effort, Ginty said lightly: ‘They might try, but since I’ve never been able to read a map and can hardly tell my left from my right, it wouldn’t do them much good.’
He clearly didn’t like the flippancy. ‘That wouldn’t help you, I’m afraid. You see, Ginty, nothing that we have done – or ever thought of doing – is half of what they’re capable of. You do understand that, don’t you?’
There was no point trying to get courage from making a joke if he was going to take her literally.
‘Good. And don’t forget that we have many friends still in London. Some of our people, too. They will always be able to find you if you have trouble remembering what you’ve heard or seen.’
With the barely disguised threat echoing in the hot still air, she nodded again. Her last sight of him before his men tied the scarf around her head, this time taking more care not to rip out her hair, was of the warmth of understanding in his blue eyes. Blindfold, she felt a hand lie gently on her right shoulder so that the thumb could stroke her neck. She shuddered.
Chapter 2 (#ulink_c6349ca9-9220-5803-b261-adcfd31d3b5a)
John Harbinger looked at his latest freelance hopeful across the top of his wineglass and began to feel hopeful himself. He let his eyelids droop sleepily and lifted one side of his mouth in a sexy smile.
‘They say you should leave the table while you’re still hungry,’ he murmured, ‘so I suppose we ought to get going …’
‘Oh, but I’m stuffed,’ Sally Grayling said, gasping a little. She looked at her watch, then up again at his face. Her own turned pink as she realized what he’d meant.
Harbinger hadn’t known that girls still blushed. He began to feel a whole lot better. Without looking away from her big grey eyes, he flipped his Gold Card onto the bill and waved to the waiter. Sally wasn’t likely to go far as a journalist if she didn’t toughen up, but he wasn’t complaining. A bit of gentle adoration would come in handy just now. It would make a nice contrast with Kate’s unbelievable aggression, and it might stop him worrying about Ginty Schell.
He still couldn’t imagine what had possessed him to send her to interview Rano. True, she was already on the ground, but so were lots of real journalists: men, tough and experienced, who knew how to handle themselves and could have stood up to a hundred murderous thugs. He must have been mad.
Catching sight of Sally’s anxious eyes, he realized he was scowling. He did his best to forget what Ronald Lackton might be doing to little Ginty Schell and smiled across the table. Sally relaxed at once, all her muscles flowing into each other. Everything about her yearned towards him. Yes! He could still do it. And if her copy turned out to be crap, he could always rewrite it before it went to the subs. At least for as long as her promise held and he got his just reward he could.
‘I’m going to have to go back in a minute,’ he said, smiling ruefully. ‘I’ve got meetings stacked up this afternoon like high-season Gatwick.’
‘Gatwick?’ Her eyebrows were pressed up towards her neat hairline.
Harbinger wondered if she might be thicker than he could cope with. He put on an efficient briskness. ‘So, you’d better send me an outline of your piece. We don’t commission much these days from people who aren’t on our regular list of freelancers. With a synopsis, I’d be in a better position to give you a contract.’
‘Oh, no,’ she said, scooping her hair behind her ears in a gesture as old fashioned as the blush. He began to wonder if even he, with all his legendary editing skills, would be able to do much with her stuff. Still, he told himself, you can never tell. The oddest people do turn out to be able to write. Ginty Schell for one.
‘Then,’ he went on aloud, quelling his doubts, ‘you will at least get a kill fee. OK?’
‘That’s really, really kind of you. I never thought I’d … Well, you know. Thank you, John.’ Her lips parted, still a little wet from the wine she’d just drunk. She really was rather gorgeous. He felt his prick stiffen and for the first time in years had to drop a hand into his lap to smooth it down with his thumb. He hoped she hadn’t noticed. He wondered whether he might be able to get her to come back to the flat with him now for a quickie. She was infinitely shaggable. Oh, God! he thought, as he added a tip to the credit card slip, and signed it. Why had his subconscious thrown up that particular word? If he didn’t get a grip soon, he’d go completely nuts.
He could still see Sally’s wine-stained lips, but they didn’t do anything for him any more. It wouldn’t have made any difference if she’d taken her clothes off for him there and then.
‘Must get back to work,’ he said, as he flipped his wallet shut over the credit cards.
He kissed her cheek at the door of the restaurant and left her there, walking back along the south side of the Thames to his office. Bursts of reflected light hit his eyes from the river as he fought to keep the memories down, but he couldn’t fight hard enough. He was back in The Goat in Eynsham, in June 1970, waiting for Steve.
The Goat was crowded, as it always was on a summer Sunday with all the girlfriends up from London as well as the Oxford-based ones. But there was no sign of Steve. John had searched the place as soon as they arrived, while Dom and Robert got the drinks.
The Shaggee turned up about half an hour later, in a gaggle of other girls from St Hilda’s escorted by a bunch of braying rugger-buggers. She didn’t look too good, obviously hadn’t slept. In John’s experience (more limited than he’d admit except under torture) they didn’t sleep much after the great deflowering, so that could have been a plus – but she also looked as if she could have been crying. Which wasn’t so good.
Half-way through The Goat’s famous steak-and-kidney pie, the rumour began to filter through to John’s table: Virginia Callader’s been raped. Suddenly the bits of kidney seemed disgustingly smooth and the chunks of steak more fibre than anything else. They stuck in his throat. Memories of the old joke weren’t helping – Meet Virginia: Virgin for short but not for long. But if she had been raped, what on earth was she doing living it up in The Goat?
John took a good swig of beer. ‘I’ve been raped’ was the kind of thing girls said when they weren’t sure they should have given in and let you take their bra off. And they all – even Virginia – laughed like hyenas at the other joke, ‘What did the fieldmouse say to the combine harvester? I’ve been reaped! I’ve been reaped!’
But when John looked surreptitiously at The Shaggee and saw her red, swollen eyes and her pallid skin, with the lovebite flaming just under her left ear, his last bit of advice to Steve did begin to seem a bit off:
‘Give her plenty to drink. Don’t take “no” for an answer. If she protests, it only means she wants you to make the decision for her. Don’t forget that neverpublished poem by one of the Romantics: “There’s a no for a no, and a no for a yes, and a no for an I don’t know”. They never mean no when they say it. It’s their way of getting a good screw without taking responsibility for it. They all fantasize about that, you know.’
John saw his mates beginning to absorb the rumour and get ready to ask questions, so he dredged up a good filthy joke and got them all roaring with laughter. Robert’s latest girlfriend looked a bit po-faced, which didn’t help. And Dom blushed, but then he was always a bit otherworldly, like most Wykehamists. In a way it was a pity that Fergus wasn’t there – he could usually be relied on to cheer everyone up – but, given that the whole situation was his fault in the first place, no one had thought to invite him to the Post-Shagging Party.
A ham-like hand bore down on John’s shoulder. Turning, he saw one of The Shaggee’s rugger-buggers. He looked huge and dangerous. John was surprised to find himself faintly apprehensive.
‘Where’s that shit Steve?’
John shrugged. ‘Haven’t seen him today.’
‘When you do, tell him I’m going to kill him. OK? Got that?’
John nodded and turned away, but not before he’d caught sight of Virginia Callader, leaning against a friend’s shoulder, sobbing into a great white handkerchief. What could Steve have done to her? Steve, of all men, who wouldn’t hurt a fly, couldn’t. Too sensitive, that was his trouble: it was what came of having only older sisters and going to the sort of arty-farty co-ed day school his weird parents had chosen.
After Fergus’s intervention, they’d needed to make a man of Steve – at least show him he was one – and screwing Virginia Callader had seemed the best way of doing that. She was gorgeous, and by all accounts adored him. It wasn’t as though they’d sent Steve off after a complete stranger. She’d told all sorts of people that she was in love with him. What could he have done to her? And why hadn’t he opened his door that morning? And what the hell was she doing in the pub?
John pushed away his plate, smeared still with a good half of the best steak-and-kidney around Oxford. He didn’t go in for the kind of worry that kept Steve busy all day and night wondering what other people were thinking and whether he might have upset them (a man like that: how could he have raped anyone?), but something wasn’t right.
‘You’ll have to get yourselves back under your own steam,’ he said abruptly, pushing back his chair. They looked surprised, particularly Robert’s girlfriend, but John knew that Sasha would get them all back safely. She always looked after everyone, even when they were pissed out of their skulls. ‘I’m going to find out what’s happened to Steve.’
Every single traffic light was red and there were jams at all the bottlenecks. John was all for the Ring Road, whatever they said. A few grotty little Oxford houses knocked down was a small price to pay for better traffic flow.
He parked and ran to Steve’s staircase with what felt like a stone in his gut. Steve’s door was still shut. John banged loudly and for a long time. When one of the Northern Chemists emerged from the next room, his greasy hair adorned with liberal quantities of ink to show what a swot he was, John asked if he’d seen Steve that morning.
He hadn’t, and agreed it was odd since Steve had slopped across the quad in his dressing gown on his way to the bathroom before eleven every morning, rain or shine, hungover or sober. John summoned up all his natural authority and sent the Northern Chemist to the Porter’s Lodge, while he stayed, alternately banging and yelling encouragement to Steve to open the door.
By the time the porter produced the necessary master key, John was pretty sure of the sort of thing they were going to find. Even so, the sight of Steve swinging from a noose made from ripped-up pieces of his own gown was enough to turn anyone up. The porter didn’t appreciate the vomit and thought John should pull himself together and fetch the Dean, but he didn’t think he could move. In the end the Northern Chemist went.
Harbinger wrenched himself back from the past. He could still feel the cold weight of Steve’s body against his hand, as it swung away from him. Wiping his hands on his handkerchief, he wondered why he hadn’t realized then that you could never get away from anything you’d done. You might think it had gone, but it just sat there in disguise, like Kate’s anger, waiting to pop up every time you were feeling a tad pathetic. It was her fault, of course. If she hadn’t banged on about how ghastly he was, he’d have been fine. In the days when she’d still thought of him as an OK bloke, Steve had stayed safely in the past. Unlike now.
He’d had a drink with Fergus only a couple of weeks ago, and had tugged the conversation round to Steve and the so-called rape, but it hadn’t got him anywhere. Fergus had turned chilly – very much the grand QC – and pretended he could barely remember Steve. He clearly wasn’t going to take any responsibility for what had happened, which left it all on Harbinger.
Dom was useless these days, far too tied up in Cabinet Office secrecy to react honestly to anyone else’s problems, and when they’d last had lunch in the Athenaeum, he’d refused all attempts to talk about Oxford. Robert was a busted flush, now that his party was out of office and everyone knew he’d never get back on the front bench. He’d see any call from Harbinger as a PR opportunity, or a chance to moan on about how awful it was to lose everything you’d worked for since university. Harbinger had had more than enough of that the only time he’d been rash enough to agree to meet Robert. He’d drunk far too much and practically wept into his whisky before Harbinger had been able to get away. Creepy.
He wondered where Sasha was working now. She’d always been sensible. And she’d never have forgotten Steve. She’d remember every detail of what had happened, just as Harbinger did. It could be worth looking her up. He might get hold of her number and give her a ring tonight.
Chapter 3 (#ulink_ccf008b5-d0f2-5591-942c-34efd5da3a65)
The friendly smell of the flat greeted Ginty as soon as she unlocked the door, and she leaned against the jamb, breathing it in. The air was stuffy after her two-week absence, but the mixture of vanilla-scented soap, books, pot-pourri, washing powder, and something indefinably her, was so familiar that it made her feel hugged. She’d never be able to forget Rano and his men, but already they were twenty-four hours and a thousand miles away.
The six lemons she’d left on the sea-blue ceramic plate had survived the heat and still looked glossily yellow as they marked the boundary between the working and eating ends of the huge scrubbed oak table under the windows. She was home.
A messy heap of mail spread out in front of her. Even before she bent down to collect it, she could see cards from all the courier firms and postmen who’d tried to deliver parcels that wouldn’t go through the door. Books, probably, for review. She’d have to phone to make arrangements for another delivery, but that could wait until she’d had a bath.
There had been no hot water when she’d got back to the hotel yesterday, after Rano’s men had dropped her at the checkpoint. Some of the other journalists had been drinking in the lobby bar when she’d arrived and had tried to make her join them. She’d muttered something graceless about having to phone her editor and escaped. Upstairs, with the door locked on the lot of them, she’d wrenched off her clothes and blundered across her untidy room to the shower, longing to wash off the sweat and the sick, humiliating fear she’d felt at Rano’s hands. But the water had hardly even been tepid. Swearing, shivering, trying to hold back the absurd, unnecessary tears, she’d rolled herself first in the inadequate towel, then in the quilt, and tried to get warm.
She shivered again, in spite of the stuffiness and the knowledge that no one had actually done anything to her and she was perfectly safe now. More than that, she’d come home with tapes and photographs that might at last get her the kind of work she wanted.
It couldn’t come soon enough. She was so bored with writing frivolous articles about the loneliness of the longdistance singleton and the perils of falling in love that she could hardly make herself do it, and yet that was usually all she was offered. There was still a pile of stuff on her desk that she hadn’t been able to force herself to finish before she’d left for the refugee camps.
The relentlessness of the freelance life was beginning to get to her as badly as the repetitive silliness of so much of what she was asked to write. Every minute that wasn’t spent trying to finish work that had already been commissioned had to go into hustling for more, and she still had to take everything she was offered, however excruciating. As a teenager she’d fantasized about the perfect man; now all she wanted was the kind of important weekly column that would earn enough to pay her bills and leave her free to pick and choose among the rest.
No wonder I’m losing my touch with diets and dreams of Mr D’Arcy, she thought, hitting the ‘play’ button on her answering machine before opening the windows over her desk.
At the other end of the big room was a pair of french windows, leading to the narrow balcony that provided all the garden she had. Unlocking them, too, she was glad to see that all the herbs and lilies were flourishing in their big glazed pots. Her expensive new automatic watering system must have worked. She picked some basil and rubbed it between her fingers, breathing in the clean, aniseedy scent.
As she listened to the voices of her friends and clients, she looked out over the rooftops and the tiny cat-ridden plots below, glad she’d traded a real garden for this extra height. A police helicopter chugged low across the sky in front of her, then passed again and again, circling noisily overhead. She peered down, wondering whether its officers were monitoring some fugitive hiding in the gardens.
They were a well-known escape route for the area’s school-age burglars, who nearly always overestimated their own strength. When they found they couldn’t hump their stolen televisions and videos over the high fence at the far end of the row, they dumped them there. Ginty’s flat had been turned over twice in the three years she’d had it, and both times her not-very-valuable possessions had been found under the fence and returned to her, grubby and slightly battered.
Few of the phone messages needed answering straight away, which was lucky. She didn’t feel like talking to anyone yet. The boiler thundered in the background. It shouldn’t be too long before the water was hot.
A couple of journalists she didn’t know had called, telling her the names of the mutual friends who’d handed over her phone number and asking if she could help them with background on her father.
‘You’ll be lucky,’ she muttered, assuming that the magazines must be gearing up for a big splash to coincide with his September South Bank concerts. Well, they could get their facts from the press releases or from his agent. She never commented publicly on either of her parents.
The crushed basil leaves were still in her hand when she went back inside, not quite sticky yet but already disintegrating. The smell made her think of holidays and tomatoes and Tuscan sunlight. And Julius. They’d been happy for a long time, until she’d screwed that up, too. A bleep signalled the end of one message, then a familiar voice said:
‘Ginty, it’s your mother. I got your card. Thank you, but I don’t think there is anything I need from you this weekend.’
So, what’s new? Ginty thought.
‘The caterers have everything under control. But if you had time to get hold of some Fru-Grains for your father, he would be grateful. The only shop round here that used to do them has just gone bust. He flew in yesterday and is well. The tour’s a success so far, and he’s pleased with the orchestra now. The strings have come together at last, he says. He can tell you all about it before the party. We are looking forward to seeing you.’
Ginty sighed, wishing her mother could occasionally sound as though she cared. She required her daughter’s presence at all the major family anniversaries, but that was all. From behind a mask of cool detachment, she made it quite clear that Ginty’s opinions were worthless, her friends inadequate, and her yearning for warmth as embarrassing as her lack of height and brains.
The machine bleeped again. Ginty rolled the remains of the basil leaves into a ball and dropped it in the bin, before stopping the messages and pressing the key for her parents’ phone number.
Waiting for the automatic dialling process to click through, she wondered how her mother would explain Rano. His justification of what he was doing still made Ginty feel sick. As an evolutionary psychologist, Doctor Louise Schell could take the heat out of the fieriest emotion and rationalize almost any human behaviour in terms of its survival value. Ginty hoped that organized rape would be too much even for her.
Her new housekeeper, Mrs Blain, answered the phone with the familiar announcement that both Ginty’s parents were at work and could not be disturbed. Trying to feel as cool and untouchable as they, Ginty left a message to say that she’d do her best to track down some Fru-Grains and that she expected to arrive at about eleven-thirty on Saturday.
The only other call she had to answer straight away was from Maisie Antony, the editor of Femina, who had sent her out to the refugee camps in the first place.
‘Ginty, it’s Maisie here,’ said her message. ‘Let me know as soon as you get in. The stories on the news have been ghastly, and I need to know you’re all right. Then we have to work out how you’re going to write the piece. OK? Ring me.’
Ginty rang, touched that Maisie cared enough to be so worried about her, and glad of the welcome, too. But she was in a meeting, so all Ginty got was her secretary and an appointment for Monday afternoon.
The last message came in a highly civilized voice, announcing that its owner was a friend of Ronald Lackton, who’d asked him to ring and offer his services in case she needed anything. He gave his name as Jeremy Hangdale, left a phone number, and said he’d be only too happy to help Ms Schell with any information she might want.
‘We have many friends still in London,’ Rano had told her, but she hadn’t expected them to get to her so fast. Funny how that one call could make her feel so exposed. Fresh air suddenly seemed less important than security, so she locked the french windows again.
Unzipping her bags where they were, she carried piles of dirty clothes straight across to the kitchen to load into the washing machine. When she slid a hand inside the insulation around the water cylinder, she was relieved to feel warmth against her palm. But it wasn’t hot enough for a bath yet, so she made a mug of strong tea, turned on her laptop, plugged in the modem and started to read her e-mails. The snail mail could wait till later.
An hour later, she was standing under the shower, letting the water drum down on her head and sluice over her body. Only when she felt properly clean again did she run a bath. She added lavender oil for serenity and rosemary for strength, without believing in either, lit a couple of orange-scented candles and put some Mozart on the CD player.
‘Always play Mozart, Ginty,’ her father had told her years earlier, ‘when you are feeling low or anxious. Your mood will lift.’
