‘What did you see?’ she whispered. ‘In Pakistan, I mean.’
Joe shook his head. ‘I don’t know. Only that they removed two bodies from bin Laden’s compound.’
‘Two? But… I saw it on the news. They all said—’
‘I know what they
Another silence.
‘Joe,’ Eva said timidly. ‘Are you sure about all this? It sounds like…’
Joe snorted. ‘Like I’m cracking up? That’s what they all think. My OC. Even Caitlin thought I was imagining things.’ He turned towards Eva. ‘And they’re right.’ It was the first time he had admitted it, even to himself. Somehow it made him feel lighter. ‘I have flashbacks. Blackouts. But they
‘Wait,’ Eva breathed.
On a reflex, Joe looked over his shoulder to check nobody was approaching. But the rain was falling heavily again. Apart from the sleeping tramp, they were alone.
‘The men who attacked you in prison. They were Middle Eastern?’
Joe nodded.
‘Were they in the visiting room the day I came?’
Joe thought back. He could see two of them in his mind, sitting ten metres to his left. ‘Yeah.’
‘There was a man,’ said Eva. ‘He looked, I don’t know, Arab or Asian. I know that doesn’t
Joe tried to sharpen his memory. There
‘Would you recognize him?’ he asked Eva.
She nodded. ‘I think so…’
They fell silent again, then Joe said quietly: ‘You don’t have to help me. If anyone suspects you know where I am, they’ll—’
‘—break into my house at night? I think it’s safe to say somebody already suspects.’
Joe nodded. ‘I’m sorry.’
Eva stood up, walked to the other side of the bandstand and stared out into the rain. ‘Remember last time we were here?’ she asked. Joe nodded. He also remembered the photograph he’d found in her sitting room.
‘Every male visitor to Barfield has their photograph taken and biometric information recorded,’ Eva continued, suddenly brisk.
‘Barfield will be crawling with—’
‘I don’t need to go to Barfield. It’ll be on the system, somewhere. I’ll just have to locate it.’ She looked out at the rain again. ‘I could go to the office first thing.’
‘I don’t like it,’ Joe said.
‘Better than sitting and shivering in the bandstand. I’ll drop into my place first, see what state it’s in, get a few things—’
‘Absolutely not,’ Joe cut in. ‘They’ll have eyes out for you.’ He still didn’t know who ‘they’ were.
‘I can look after myself, Joe.’
‘You can’t go home.’
There was an edgy silence. ‘Fine,’ Eva said. She looked at her watch. ‘It’s just gone midnight. I’ll wait till six before I go to the office – any earlier and it’ll look suspicious.’
Joe closed his eyes. People close to him were suffering. Dying. He didn’t want Eva to be next in line. But he didn’t have any better ideas.
It was almost as if she knew what he was thinking. ‘I’ll be careful,’ she said. ‘How will I contact you?’
Eva gave him some paper and a ballpoint pen from her bag, and he wrote down two random strings of eight letters, numbers and symbols, following them both with the suffix ‘@hotmail.com’, and by each one he wrote an equally unguessable password. Then he copied them exactly onto a second piece of paper, and handed it to Eva. ‘I’ll create these accounts,’ he said. ‘The first one’s yours, the second’s mine. Check it regularly, every hour if you can, but not from your phone and never from the same location. If you don’t hear from me, meet back here at 1800 hours.’
Eva neatly folded the piece of paper and placed it in her bag.
A sudden wave of exhaustion crashed over Joe. He sat down again, his head against the edge of the bandstand. ‘I need to sleep,’ he murmured. He’d had no shuteye since his first night in prison – forty-eight hours ago – and even that had been more a trance than a sleep. He looked down at his prison clothes. ‘And I need to clean up, find something else to wear before it gets light. And then…’
He paused.
‘Then what?’
‘They told me Conor was staying with Caitlin’s dad in Epsom,’ he said quietly. ‘I need to know he’s safe.’
Eva nodded. It looked like she understood.
Silence. Joe tried to fight his drowsiness.
‘These attacks… are they… revenge?’ Eva asked quietly. ‘For bin Laden, I mean?’
‘Don’t know,’ Joe replied. He was slurring from exhaustion. ‘I just don’t know… Doesn’t make sense.’
Maybe something showed in his face, because Eva suddenly crouched down beside him. She put her arms round his shoulders and rested her head against his chest, much like she had been doing in the picture he’d seen in her house. ‘I’m sorry about your friend. And I’m so, so sorry about Caitlin.’
From anyone else, the words would have been inadequate. From Eva, they were everything.
‘Go to sleep,’ she said. ‘I’ll wake you if anybody comes.’
Joe nodded. His fatigue was overpowering everything else. He sensed Eva removing the overcoat and spreading it over him.
His eyelids became heavy.
In seconds he was asleep.
It was midnight.
A dark-haired man with stooped shoulders stood in a quiet suburban street. The rain was still falling, but that made no difference to him as he wore a heavy waxed raincoat. Its pockets were equally weighted on either side: in the left one, a small, leather-bound copy of the Koran. In the right, a Browning semi-automatic pistol and two cable ties.
The house opposite which he stood had, as a focal point of the front garden, a magnificent magnolia tree in the early stages of budding. It also had, the man noticed, a flashing burglar alarm and one window open on the first floor. People only opened windows at night to give themselves ventilation as they slept. It meant someone was home.
He crossed the road, opened the front gate, passed under the magnolia branches, and rang the front door bell. He heard no chime, but a red light by the button indicated that it was working. Twenty seconds later, through the glass of the front door, he saw a landing light come on and the silhouette of a figure descending the stairs rather slowly, apparently tying a dressing-gown cord as he went. The figure stopped on the other side of the front door. ‘Who’s that?’ The male voice sounded elderly and tired.
‘Police,’ the man replied. ‘I need to speak to you about Conor. I know it’s late but this is urgent. We think you might be in some danger.’
A short pause. Then a click as the door opened to reveal a man in his late sixties, a pair of half-moon spectacles propped on his hook-like nose, the remnants of his hair in two dishevelled tufts on either side of his head, and wearing a navy blue kimono-style dressing gown. ‘You’d better come—’
The man stopped short, perhaps realizing that his guest was not uniformed, nor did he have the demeanour
