Osama

of encouragement to help her push through the barrier of pain and exhaustion. He could feel her body convulsing. She badly needed medical attention. So did Conor.

The hallway stank of the rotting corpse of the old woman. Eva showed no sign that she even knew what she was stepping over – her glazed eyes were as desensitized as Conor’s. With difficulty, Joe manoeuvred the two of them up the stairs. It was with an overwhelming sense of relief that he turned left at the top, into the room where he had found Ashkani’s passport. He didn’t know why he wanted them to stay in this room – it was just a vague sense that Ashkani, whoever he was, had been a pro, and that there was a chance of finding medical supplies in here. Plus, of course, he wanted to strip the place down for information.

He helped Eva and Conor over to the bed on the far side of the room. Eva collapsed heavily onto its edge. Her lips had a bluish tinge. Her shaking hands clutched the wound on the side of her abdomen. Joe gently lowered Conor from his shoulder and sat his son next to her.

‘You OK, champ?’

Conor’s blank face looked around the room. For a few seconds he appeared not to know where he was, but then his eyes widened. He slipped off the bed, his head in his hands, and curled up into a little ball on the floor. No words escaped his throat, just a pathetic mixture of frightened sounds.

Joe knelt down and put his hands awkwardly on his son’s shoulders. ‘Hey champ,’ he whispered. ‘It’s all right… he’s gone… I’m here now…’ His words had no effect. The boy remained huddled on the thin carpet.

Joe turned his attention to Eva. Her face was racked with pain and she winced as he removed the hooded top to look at the wound. It was a mess, no doubt about it. The skin where the bullet had clipped her was torn and the tissue beneath it was a bloody pulp. The heavy bleeding seemed to have stopped, but Eva was very weak and in great pain. He couldn’t risk moving her any further.

‘Ashkani?’ she breathed. Her voice was fragile and cracked.

Joe looked around the room. ‘You needn’t worry about him.’

A pause. Speech was clearly a huge effort for Eva. ‘Is he dead?’

‘I shot him in the back of the head. That normally does the trick.’

Joe strode into the hallway and started checking out the other rooms on the first floor. The old lady’s bedroom – a riot of floral wallpaper, floral bedding and a violet carpet – revealed nothing but clothes, photographs and a handful of old jewellery. The spare bedroom, with its two single beds, was similarly empty. His search of the bathroom, which didn’t give the impression of having been used very often, despite the limescale stains around the edge of the roll-top bath and inside the sink, was more productive. In the mirrored cabinet above the sink he found a pile of large swabs, still in their sterile packaging, and a roll of bandage. He rushed back to Eva, ripped open the swabs and pressed them against her wound, before tying them into position with the bandage. Eva winced, but didn’t cry out. Joe was grateful for that. ‘You’ll be OK,’ he told her, and she nodded as though she believed him.

The cupboard in the corner was filled with grey suits – nothing in the pockets – as well as a couple of old coats that he assumed belonged to the dead woman at the bottom of the stairs. He pulled out the coats and took them over to Conor and Eva. Eva accepted the coat over the shoulders of her trembling frame. Conor was still on the floor. Joe lifted him up again and laid him on the bed where once more he curled foetus-like. He lay the coat over him to keep him warm.

‘I’ll be back in a minute,’ he said, and hurried downstairs, stopping only to pull the old lady’s body out of the hallway and into the front room. Conor was traumatized, that much was clear. The last thing he needed to see was dead bodies on the floor.

In the kitchen he looked for provisions. He found a cupboard full of cat food, a bottle of Ribena, the remains of a loaf of Hovis that was covered in a dusting of mould and, in the fridge, an unopened carton of milk. He filled two glasses with water, as both Eva and Conor needed rehydration, even if there was no food to give them. Back in the bedroom he managed to get some fluid into Eva, but Conor would not, or could not, move. Joe stood over him, and for the briefest moment he was back in JJ’s house, lying next to Caitlin, shortly before their life had been ripped apart.

I’ll be a dad, he was telling himself. I’ve had enough of being a soldier…

He snapped back to the present and looked around. This had been Ashkani’s room. His safe house. It had all the hallmarks – remote, unexpected, easy to leave. He had no doubt that the bastard had been paying the old lady a fair whack to keep this room available for him whenever he needed it. Who did she think he was? A travelling salesman, maybe? Someone who just wanted a place to get away to? And why had she ended up dead at the bottom of the stairs? Had she started to suspect something?

His thoughts turned to Ashkani himself. He remembered the man’s American passport. What did that mean? Whatever it meant, Joe needed to search this room. Find out everything he could about Mahmood Ashkani, if that really was his name. Find out who he was working for. And try to locate anything that might prove Joe’s own innocence.

Underneath the wardrobe he found four shoe boxes. They contained nothing but shoes. On top of the wardrobe was an old leather suitcase. Empty. He swiped the pile of books off the table – all in Arabic, they were meaningless to him, but he held each one upside down anyway, in case anything had been secreted between the pages. Nothing. And so he turned his attention to the cardboard boxes.

The room was littered with them – Joe counted fifteen in all. Three stood against the wall opposite the bed and window. He ripped them open. In the first he found nothing of interest – just old clothes, musty-smelling and crumpled. The second was more revealing. It contained a handgun – on examination he recognized it as a Glock 22 – along with a box of .40 S&W rounds. There was also money – not sterling, but a thick wad of Eritrean nakfa, bound together with a rubber band. Why did Ashkani have this currency? What were his links with Eritrea, that lawless land in East Africa that Joe knew was a sanctuary for AQ?

The third box contained the treasure.

The box itself was the smallest in the room – a 50cm cube. Its flaps were well sealed with packing tape, which meant that Joe had to rip through the cardboard to get inside. The first thing he pulled out was a newspaper: The Times. It took only a glance at the front page for Joe to see that it was the one that had his name, photo and crime plastered over the interior. He had no desire, or need, to read it again. In any case, he had already pulled out two DVDs in clear plastic cases. Each disc had been written on in black marker pen: the lettering was Arabic and Joe couldn’t understand it. And at the bottom of the box was a single sheet of A4 paper, on which was written, in a neat hand, a column of ten alphanumeric strings, followed by a three-letter code, followed by four digits. Joe only had to cast his eyes down the column once before realizing what they were.

Flight numbers. Airport codes. Take-off times.

‘Joe?’

Eva’s voice was weaker than ever.

‘Joe, I think we need to get to a hospital… Conor too…’

Joe nodded. She was right. He looked across the room at her, then back to the contents of the box. ‘Give me two minutes,’ he said.

Clutching the two DVDs, he hurried downstairs again, barely glancing at the old lady as he ran into her front room. The red standby light of her television was on. He opened the white-painted cabinet beneath it to find an ancient VHS machine and a DVD player, both covered in dust and clearly seldom used. He switched on the DVD player and inserted the first of the two discs. Moments later he was staring at a black and white image on the screen with a sick, knotted feeling in his stomach.

He recognized Lancing Way at once, and the black Discovery that had pulled up in front of his own house. And, of course, he recognized himself stepping out of the car on the day he had returned from Bagram, his scruffy black beard still intact, his North Face bag slung over his shoulder. He stared in shock at the screen, trying to work out where the image had been shot from. From the angle he deduced that a camera must have been hidden on the first floor of the house directly opposite his, where old Mr Thompson lived by himself. He watched himself knock on his own front door before disappearing inside.

The screen went black.

His hands were trembling as he ejected the disc, proof positive that he’d been under surveillance and that Ashkani had at least had access to it, even if he hadn’t organized it. What would the second DVD show? He barely