Holm pushed the phone away. ‘I’m done with this, Farakh. Taher is strictly off-limits, remember? If you’re worried home-grown extremism might have spread to football fans then you should have a word with Huxtable. She’ll find somebody to look into it for you.’
‘The Spider? No, I don’t think you understand and she certainly wouldn’t.’ Javed shoved the phone back towards Holm. He was agitated, upset almost. ‘Take a look at the username.’
Holm peered at the screen again, more to placate Javed than with any real interest. ‘It’s a bunch of letters and numbers. Makes no sense.’
‘TCXGP1505. The digits. Do they mean anything to you?’
‘1505?’ Holm laughed. ‘The fifteenth of May. Coincidentally, it’s my birthday.’
‘Now take the letters. It’s a simple rotation cipher. Shifted by two. Child’s play.’
‘TCXGP.’ Holm did the decoding in his head and as he did so a chill spread across the back of his hands. ‘RAVEN.’
‘Which is?’
‘MI5’s code name for Taher.’ Despite the warm sun Holm shivered. A smidgeon of nausea began to rise from his stomach. ‘Christ.’
‘Your birthday and a code name supposedly known only to the security services sent in a social media message to me.’ Javed took the phone back. ‘Doesn’t that strike you as just a little bit odd?’
Chapter Eight
Silva went to the Costa on the high street opposite the agency. She bought a cup of coffee and a muffin and sat at a window seat. Milligan was inside because she’d seen him come to a window and peer out nervously. This wasn’t the Neil Milligan her mother had told her stories about. In his time as a front-line journalist he’d covered wars, famines and natural disasters. He’d been shot in the leg in the Balkans, captured by Angolan rebels in Africa and faced trial in Singapore for refusing to reveal a source. He’d won awards for his work. Silva concluded he’d either lost it or had a genuine reason to be frightened. Considering what had happened to her at the weir, she was inclined to think the latter and that wasn’t comforting. She turned her head and scanned the cafe. Milligan’s paranoia was infectious.
When she’d eaten the muffin and finished the coffee, she drummed her fingers on the table for a couple of minutes. She’d planned to wait for Milligan to emerge so she could try to talk to him again, but now, having seen him at the window, she came to the conclusion he wasn’t going to open up to her.
She decided instead to return to her mother’s place and take a good look through all the documents in the upstairs room. She dodged through the traffic and headed west, arriving at the cottage mid-afternoon. She sat astride the bike and removed her helmet. Listened. Nothing but the water tumbling through the weir. She kicked down the stand and dismounted. The attack had spooked her and she was angry it had changed her feelings about being here. After a minute’s contemplation she went inside.
She spent several hours going through all the box files. There were documents relating to research her mother had done years ago as well as more recent material, but there was nothing that mentioned Karen Hope.
The sun had sunk by the time she’d finished. Down in the kitchen she found a tin of curry in a cupboard. There was dried rice in a jar on the side. Two saucepans went on the stove. In another cupboard a rack held several bottles of red wine. Silva smiled to herself; her mother enjoyed a drink and it wasn’t hard to imagine her pouring a large glass and taking it outside to sit by the weir on a summer’s evening such as this one. Silva opened a bottle and checked the rice and curry. While she was waiting for the rice to cook, she drifted through to the living room. Above the fireplace there was a corkboard with photographs and postcards. There were several pictures of Silva as a child, some of her with her shooting medals, one of her standing beside a Foxhound armoured vehicle in Afghanistan. Silva pulled off some of the postcards. These were from friends, and she recognised the names of various people who’d come to the funeral. Like her mother, the friends were well travelled. Peru. Japan. New Zealand. South Africa. Chichester Harbour. Chichester Harbour? Silva turned the picture over, interested to know which of her mother’s friends would send a card from a little over fifty miles away. Presumably it was an attempt at ironic humour.
18 August
Dear Rebecca, remember the beach we used to go to here? West something or other, wasn’t it? Those were happy times, good memories, a place with buried treasure and hidden secrets to be passed on from one generation to the next. I so enjoyed the many times we visited. I definitely Hope you did too. Love always and forever, Mum.
Silva stepped back from the mantelpiece and sat down heavily in an armchair. She’d never received this postcard. It was correctly addressed to Silva’s boat at the boatyard, but there was no stamp. The card had never been posted. Had her mother meant to send the card and forgotten? All of a sudden Silva felt a wave of regret. If the card had been posted, if Silva had received it, things might have been different. She might have phoned her mother and perhaps the call could have changed events in some small way. A tiny ripple moving forward in time, disrupting the flow of atoms and altering history. The butterfly effect, but in this case not causing a storm but preventing it. Silva dropped the card into her lap. The cold shock at seeing the message had gone and now she found herself crying again, unable to reconcile the present with the past, reality with what might have been.
After a while she stood and went back to the kitchen. The rice was done and she drained it
