Secrets of the Dead

good memories of her marriage, but more bad ones, and anyway she was supposed to forget them all. But her moorings in the world were tenuous enough: the thought of being without a permanent home frightened her too much. She’d rented it out when she left for Kosovo, to a pair of Pakistani doctors working at St Thomas’s. The estate agent had assured her they’d be excellent tenants, and probably they had been, but they’d had visa issues and left in a hurry. Since then, the flat had sat empty.

It was like revisiting somewhere from her childhood. The outlines were there, but the detail wasn’t right. The tenants had moved some furniture around and not put it back; there were things in the kitchen cupboards that weren’t hers, and tacked to the wall was a Magritte poster that she didn’t think had been there before. It made her uneasy, as if someone had tried to piece her life together from photographs and made some clumsy mistakes.

Or are they my mistakes? Most of her memory had come back, but there were still weak spots. Like a warped old record that might stutter or skip without warning.

‘Great view.’

Mark stood by the full-length window looking down on the Queenstown road, the row-houses and chip shops huddled in the valley, Battersea Park and the spires of the Thames bridges beyond. He’d insisted on walking her up. With the pills in her system she found she couldn’t say no.

‘I’ve spoken to work,’ he continued, cheerful as ever. ‘They told me to tell you not to worry about rushing back. You’ve been signed off for as long as you need.’

Abby stood in the kitchen area and looked down on him. The flat’s top floor was open plan, three rooms squeezed into the space of one, with the kitchen raised above the living area by a couple of steps. She felt as if she was floating above him.

Don’t make me stay here, she thought.

He reached inside his jacket and gave her a card embossed with the Foreign Office crest. Mark Wilson, Office of Balkan Liaison.

‘If you need anything at all, just call me.’

She barely survived the weekend.

On Friday, she forced herself as far as Clapham High Street to buy some clothes. The day was grey and overcast, but not cold, and the effort of walking with her bandages brought on a suffocating sweat. She had thought that getting out of the flat might do her good, but being among the crowds on the high street only made her feel lonely. So many people, nothing in common with her. She tried her phone when she got home but there was no dial tone. BT must have cut it off. At least she still had her television – though judging by the increasingly aggressive letters from the TV licensing authority piled up on her mat, they’d have cut that off, too, if there’d been a way.

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.