She pushed herself up from the sofa. As she bent to pick up the mail she felt a breeze touch her cheek. Those smells again. Jasmine and coffee. She left the mail where it lay and turned and walked down the hall to the little kitchen. A broken jar of Java beans lay on the quarry-tiled floor. Behind the sink a window was half open. In the garden outside the white flowers of the jasmine tumbled down a wooden trellis.
Silva looked at the beans and the window. Somebody had forced the catch and knocked the beans onto the floor as they’d climbed in. She tensed and for a moment she thought of Fairchild and the ‘dark forces’ he’d talked of. Wondered about the black BMW with the tinted windows. She turned and looked back down the hall to where the narrow stairs led upwards. Was the intruder still here?
She moved along the hall to the stairs and stood and listened. Nothing. She went up slowly, easing her feet from step to step, trying not to make a sound. On the landing she peeked into her mother’s bedroom. A jewellery box lay upturned on the bed and clothes had been pulled from a chest of drawers. The doors to a full-length cupboard stood open and several dresses lay on the floor. She moved across the landing to her mother’s office. A bed, a Coldplay poster and a shelf full of shooting trophies testified to the fact this had once been Silva’s room, but those were the only concessions to the past. A monitor sat on a table by the window while to one side several shelving units held an array of box files. Next to Chris Martin and his bandmates hung a huge map of the Mediterranean, North Africa and the Middle East. She reached down for the switch on the computer cabinet beneath the desk. After a few seconds a message flashed on the monitor screen.
Disc error. The internal volume is corrupted or missing. Boot from external drive? Y/N
Puzzled, she stepped back, feeling something beneath the sole of her foot. She moved her foot, bent down and picked up a tiny screw. She reached for the computer cabinet and dragged it from beneath the desk. At the back the rear panel was secured with five screws and there was a hole where the sixth should have been.
She looked at the screen again. The machine was an old one and Silva remembered her mother had used a laptop while she was in Tunisia. But where was it? All the personal possessions her mother had with her in Tunis had been sent to Silva’s father; there’d been no laptop. Perhaps the device had gone to the agency her mother worked for.
Silva went back downstairs, uneasy. A local criminal wouldn’t have removed the hard drive from the computer; this was something different dressed up to look like a simple burglary. She cleared up the mess on the kitchen floor and closed the window. She watered the plant in the front room and then went outside and stood by the weir. A torrent of water roared down the concrete apron and hissed into the pool below. She’d stood here many times. There was something about the way the water tumbled and churned in a froth of white. The constant motion and noise cleansed the mind of thoughts, and Silva had often found staring into the flow had the effect of putting the world to rights. This time, though, the noise was angry and more of a growl, as if her mother’s death had conjured a malevolent spirit from the river.
The roar from the weir meant she didn’t hear the near-silent footsteps of the man who crept across the grass behind her. But she felt his hands on her back. A hard shove and she was falling onto the slime-covered, sloping face of the weir. She crashed into the concrete sill and was swept into the churning pool below. She managed to splutter a mouthful of water before the undertow took her down into the turbulent fury of the weir. She tried to fight her way to the surface but found herself being dragged back by the force of the water and the weight of her wet clothes.
If you fall in, swim down and out.
The words had been drummed into her by her mother when Silva had been a young child. A life ring hung on a post to one side of the weir but was useless if you fell in when no one was around. It was useless if you were dragged below the surface.
Swim down and out.
Silva ignored her instinct to head up towards the light. That way was to fight the current and was always doomed to fail. Instead she kicked out and dived deep, feeling a surge of water grab her and carry her downstream away from the weir. Her knees grazed the stones on the riverbed and she pushed the bottom with her feet and shot herself towards the surface. She bobbed up twenty metres from the weir, coughed out a mouthful of water and swam towards the bank. As she pulled herself from the river she heard a squeal of tyres and a car revving, the engine sound fading into the distance as she hunched over on the soft grass and gasped for breath.
Chapter Seven
Silva spent a restless night in the cottage. She lay awake listening to every little sound: a creak on the landing, a fox screeching outside, the wind in the trees.
The previous evening she’d been on autopilot: escape from the water, get dry, find some spare clothes, treat the cuts, get some calories inside, try to rest. She realised her reaction had been a
