Sometime in the predawn a car passed in the lane, the noise waking Silva from a fitful sleep. She jumped out of bed and went to the window. Headlights painted the hedgerows as the car drove away. The car was the final straw and she gave up trying to sleep and went downstairs.
She opened the back door and slipped outside into the pale light that preceded sunrise. The weir rumbled, the water churning in the pool below. She walked across to the sluice gate at the top of the weir and gripped the railings with both hands. The cold metal sent a sharp pain into the cuts on her palms. She flinched but continued to hold on, as if she needed to cling to some form of reality. She breathed in the sharp morning air, felt a mist on her face as spray rose from the frothing water, heard the sounds of birds starting their dawn chorus. All that was real. The other stuff, like Karen Hope, Fairchild’s dark forces, the break-in and the mysterious assailant who’d pushed her into the water, was just the opposite. The realm of fiction. Things she didn’t want to believe. Things she was frightened of.
Except it wasn’t fiction. Somebody had attacked her.
She relaxed her grip on the railings and turned, almost expecting to see someone lunging for her, hands outstretched, intent on violence. She shivered, aware of how vulnerable she was, and hurried back into the cottage and locked the door.
Inside, she fished out a tin of rice pudding from a cupboard for breakfast and changed back into her own clothes. She spent another hour clearing up the mess the burglar had left behind and then fired up her bike and headed for north London and Third Eye News, the agency her mother had worked for.
She raced along the M4 but heavy traffic on the North Circular meant the eighty-mile journey took well over two hours, and by the time she got to Highgate it was mid-morning. The agency was located in a maisonette above a wholefood shop and consisted of half a dozen rooms filled with desks and screens and chatter. As Silva entered several journalists came over to greet her, and it wasn’t until she’d spoken to them all that she was able to climb the stairs to the top floor where Neil Milligan, the editor, had his office. The room was a nook tucked in under the eaves and was crammed with piles of old newspapers and magazines. A desk sat beneath a skylight and a large TV hung on one wall showing rolling news. There’d been another terrorist atrocity, this one in Hamburg. A man had run amok with a knife and three people were dead. Not religious extremists this time: the attacker had been a white neo-Nazi, the victims young Turkish immigrants. Seeing Silva, Milligan rose from behind his desk and came over and hugged her. He was a thin man, his narrow face covered with a grey beard, his features sharp, his eyes keen.
‘Where’s it going to end?’ he said. ‘I’m getting tired of writing the same story over and over.’
Silva shrugged. Quite why Milligan expected she, of all people, would have an answer, she didn’t know.
‘Thanks for coming to the funeral, Neil,’ she said. ‘Thanks for setting up the fund too.’
Milligan had signalled his desire to create a scholarship in Silva’s mother’s name. The scholarship was intended to sponsor a journalism student through university. It was a nice touch and something her mother would have approved of.
‘Not much good can come of this.’ Milligan gestured at the screen. ‘But it’s important we try to cling onto some sort of hope.’
The final word of the sentence cut right through Silva. Hope. Karen Hope. ‘Yes.’
The response was flat and Milligan picked up on it.
‘You OK, Rebecca?’ He tutted to himself. ‘I mean, fuck, of course you’re not OK. What I meant was—’
‘Forget it, I know what you meant.’ Silva dismissed Milligan’s apology. ‘My mother was working on a trafficking story when she was killed, right?’
Milligan recoiled, almost as if Silva was being disrespectful by getting straight to the point. ‘Yes. She was trying to follow the migrant flows across the Mediterranean, talk to the victims, the perpetrators, the NGOs, the authorities. It was sheer bad luck she was interviewing the head of the charity when the attack happened.’ Milligan moved round and sat behind his desk. Shuffled a sheaf of papers. He appeared distracted. ‘I want you to know we’re not dropping the story, and I fully intend to publish something with your mother’s name on the byline.’
‘What happened to her laptop?’
‘It’s probably downstairs somewhere. I know we had some equipment sent to us from Tunis.’
‘Can I see it?’
‘Why? There’s nothing on the machine. The disk has been wiped, ready for a fresh install.’
‘So how are you going to publish the people-trafficking story?’
‘Your mother’s files were backed up to cloud storage.’ Milligan nodded at his own laptop. ‘I can access them from here.’
‘I was wondering if there was anything else she was working on. Something much bigger than people trafficking.’
‘Bigger than trafficking? Not that I know of.’ Milligan glanced up from the laptop. ‘Look, I know what you’re trying to do. You want to make sense of this and understand why your mother died.’ He gestured at the screen on the wall. The chaos in the aftermath of a terrorist attack. ‘But there is no sense to it. She was just doing her job and happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong
