‘He told you to.’
‘I told Helen his last words. You know, he was thinking of his family, and spitting bloody murder at those bastards as I left him.’
Tom nodded.
‘He was a brave man.’
‘He was,’ Sannie said.
‘I let him down.’
‘You didn’t, Bernard,’ Tom insisted.
‘I called you, you know?’
Tom was confused. ‘On the phone?’
‘No. When it happened. When they dragged me out of my bed, at the lodge, I called your name. I didn’t know who else to yell for.’
Tom felt the sickness rising from his stomach again, the blood draining from his face. Bernard had said nothing of this before.
‘I called for you, but you didn’t answer, Tom. I suppose you were asleep. Can’t expect you to be on the job twenty-four hours a day, though, can we?’
‘Bernard, toss the gun over here.’ Sannie sounded forceful, and took a step towards him, but Bernard started to raise the weapon and she checked her pace.
‘We let him down. You and me.’
Tom was speechless, his mind still trying to process this new information. He had just about convinced himself that except for sleeping late — and possibly losing five or ten minutes of chase time — there was nothing more he could have done to prevent the abductions. He’d reasoned that there would have been no way he could have known what was going on, as he’d been in a separate suite both to Bernard and Greeves. This new revelation hit him like a blow in the solar plexus and threatened to drop him to his knees in the surf.
‘Sometimes the right thing, being in the right place at the right time, doing the right thing by the book, just isn’t good enough. I should have stayed with him, or taken on the single guard while he was fighting the fire before the others came back.’
‘You would probably have been killed, Bernard,’ Sannie said, filling the void left by Tom’s ominous silence.
‘I cared about him, you know,’ Bernard said, looking back out over the water.
Tom started to move, his fists clenched by his sides.
‘Tom,’ Sannie whispered, but he ignored her.
‘He was a good man, who could have gone on to do great things for his country. Too good a man for politics. I used to tell myself that I would lay down my life for him.’
Tom began to run, his feet raising geysers of water as he closed on Bernard.
The other man turned, so that one side of his face was bathed red-gold by the sun as it breached the waters.
Bernard raised his hand, placed the barrel of the pistol in his mouth, and pulled the trigger.
21
Three weeks later
The phone rang, waking him. He looked at the red LED display of his clock radio and saw that it was nine in the morning. He coughed, and was punished by the smell of stale Scotch.
‘Furey,’ he said into the handset, after retrieving the phone from the floor. His voice was croaky, as he’d started smoking again.
‘Tom, it’s Sannie.’
He raised himself on one elbow, earning himself a giddying head spin. He coughed once more. ‘Sannie, this is a surprise.’
‘Are you okay? You sound like you’re ill.’
‘Got a cold coming on,’ he lied. ‘Bloody London weather. Where are you, at home? I can call you back if you like.’ He remembered the references to her tight family budget, trying to raise her two kids on one income.
‘No, Tom, I’m at work. This is semi-official so they don’t mind me calling overseas.’
‘Oh, right. Of course.’ Not everyone had lost their job over the debacle in Mozambique. He chided himself for his oversight. ‘So this is business?’
There was a pause on the other end of the line and he regretted his last words. Did he sound petulant, as though he had thought she might be calling for personal reasons?
‘Yes, it is business, though I’ve been wanting to call you, to make sure you’re okay. That everything’s all right with you.’
All right? The man he’d been sent to Africa to protect was dead. Another had killed himself in shame, leaving Tom feeling like he should have done the same thing, and he was suspended from his job indefinitely, pending the outcome of an official government inquiry into Greeves’s death. ‘I’m fine. Enjoying the break.’
‘Tom, I know how hard this must be for you, but you’ll pull through.’
‘Right. Um, what is this about, Sannie?’
‘I’m coming to England.’
That made him sit up in bed. ‘When? Why?’
‘I’ve been called to give evidence at the inquiry and my police service — and our government — has agreed to release me. It should be for about a week, they say. I’m arriving tomorrow morning.’
‘Oh,’ he said. He, too, had been called. He figured it would be the last nail in the coffin of his career. It irked him that while details about his late arrival on the morning that Greeves and Joyce had gone missing — and speculation about his drinking on duty the night before — had already been leaked to the media, there was no mention of the nation’s elite counter-terrorist unit storming a house full of primates. It was a good pointer to how and by whom the behind-the-scenes information battle was being waged.
Tom had been inundated with calls from journalists on his return home, and had even had to suffer the ignominy of a few of them being camped on his doorstep until his resolute silence had finally had an effect. He would answer for his sins at the public inquiry, but he wouldn’t lower himself by trying to plead his case or slander anyone through the press. He would take his punishment and do the best he could to find a new way to live out his remaining years. And that was that.
The resolve he’d felt in the immediate wake of the failed rescue mission, to find the perpetrators and bring them to justice, had disappeared with the plume of blood that flowed away in the receding tide of the Indian Ocean on that beach in Mozambique. Bernard’s revelation, that he had tried to raise the alarm and called Tom’s name in the night as the abductors grabbed him, still haunted him. There was no escaping the fact that he had failed in his duty. Even though Greeves had told him to have a nightcap, he shouldn’t have taken the beer Carla poured for him, or let her into his room.
‘Tom? Are you still there?’
‘What? Oh, yeah. Well, it’ll be good to see you again, even if the circumstances are hardly ideal. Where will you be staying?’
Sannie gave him the name of a hotel near Waterloo. He said he knew it and waited for her to make the next move.
‘Perhaps we could get together,’ she said after a brief pause. ‘To talk about things.’
‘Get our stories straight?’ He forced a laugh, but she didn’t reciprocate.
‘That’s not what I meant.’
‘Sightseeing, shopping?’
‘I know it must bother you, Tom — what happened to them, where they went afterwards, why no one’s heard from them since then.’
If there was anything left in the bottle lying on the floor beside the bed he would have taken a deep swig right there and then. He hadn’t yet begun drinking before midday, but there was no time like the present.
