Silva reached for her jeans and motorbike leathers and began to pull them on. ‘Never when I’m driving, thanks.’
‘Rebecca? What’s going on?’
‘I’m leaving. I have to get back.’
‘For what?’
Silva put on her jacket and reached for her helmet. She was cross at Sean for misleading her about the evening and angry with herself for allowing her guard to drop. ‘For the rest of my life, Sean, that’s what.’
‘I don’t…’ Sean paused before raising a hand and making a dismissive gesture. ‘Aw fuck it. Do what you want. I’m beyond caring any more.’
Silva nodded and headed towards the door. She clicked it open and stood for a moment. ‘That’s what I thought.’
She arrived home in the early hours and spent a good chunk of Tuesday asleep in her bunk. She tried not to think about Karen Hope and Matthew Fairchild and Neil Milligan and Sean. Tried not to think about her mother. On Wednesday she returned to work and walked the streets. Pushed letters through flaps. Nodded to colleagues in the sorting office at the end of her round. Hung up her bag and went home and fed herself and lay on her bunk and read until she fell asleep.
The next day she woke thinking this was it. Stuck on an endless wash cycle: soak, rinse, spin, repeat. Soak, rinse, spin, repeat. She remembered her mother’s exhortation in Tunisia: At some point you have to move on. There was sense in what she’d said, but it was almost as if her death prevented the very thing she’d told Silva to do. She doubted anybody else could understand, not even Itchy. He seemed to have escaped the worst of the psychological trauma of what happened in Afghanistan. Was that because his life was moving on? He had a girlfriend, a baby on the way, something to look forward to. What did Silva have? Perhaps it went deeper than that though. Itchy was happy-go-lucky, fatalistic. Things always worked out all right in the end; for Silva, raised by two headstrong parents who believed in their own ability to make a difference in the world, the powerlessness she’d experienced after Afghanistan had been debilitating. And now, with her mother dead, the feeling was almost overwhelming.
She went off to work, collected the mail for the round and filled her postbag. She was keen to get moving, keen to stop thinking. Halfway through her shift she was shoving a bunch of mail into the letterbox of a little terraced house when she noticed the front door wasn’t quite closed. Whatever, she thought. Not her problem. But as she turned to go she remembered the old woman who lived there. She walked with a frame and always had a smile for Silva. Once, a cup of tea and a chocolate biscuit had appeared. ‘Because, you know, you look like you could do with something sweet in your life,’ the woman had said.
Now there was no tea, no smile, just the door ajar. Silva pushed and shouted ‘Hello.’ There was no reply. She walked into the hallway and peered into the living room. The old woman lay stretched out on the floor, her head crocked towards Silva, her eyes blinking.
The ambulance came within ten minutes and Silva held the woman’s hand as they waited.
‘She’s fractured her hip, the old dear,’ the paramedic said as he closed the doors of the ambulance. ‘Nothing to worry about, but if you hadn’t found her…’ The paramedic pinched his nose and shook his head. ‘In this weather the smell doesn’t bear thinking about.’
The ambulance drove away and Silva sat on the low wall outside the house. She pulled out her phone and called her father. Within ten seconds of him answering she was chiding herself for being concerned with his welfare.
‘You disappoint me, Rebecca,’ he said. ‘That woman murdered your mother to further her political ambitions, and yet you walked out on Matthew Fairchild. Ignorant and downright rude.’
‘Rude?’ Silva clenched the phone in her hand. ‘Dad, he wanted me to kill Karen Hope.’
‘Of course. What else are we supposed to do?’
‘Well, duh, phone the police like most normal people would?’
‘There’s no need to be flippant.’
‘I’m being sensible. This is something for the authorities. If the police aren’t good enough then look up a mate from your old boys’ network and speak to someone in the intelligence services.’
‘I’m not sure you understand the complexity of this. If it was that simple we’d have already called the spooks. You need to reconsider your decision, Rebecca. Matthew knows what he’s doing. He showed me the details of the operation and the plan is foolproof.’
‘Please tell me you haven’t bought into this mad scheme, Dad.’
‘Your mother trusted me with those files, Rebecca. I’m doing it for her. She was a decent woman and she deserved more. I let her down, I owe her, and this is my way of paying her back.’
There it was, Silva thought. The sentence was as close to an admission as she was ever likely to hear that her father had never stopped loving her mother. In all the years they’d been separated he hadn’t once admitted the responsibility for the failure of their relationship might lie with him. Now he was saying he’d let her down. It was as if her death had softened him in some way, as if it had cracked open his hard exterior shell and revealed that he was, after all, human.
‘She wasn’t a pacifist, you know.’ He was talking again. ‘She abhorred war, but understood there was sometimes a need for action. This is one of those times. The Hopes killed your mother because of a lust for power and money. She would have understood the need to eliminate them.’
Silva sighed. ‘Dad, I know you’re trying to do the right thing, but surely this isn’t the way. Please tell me you’re not getting involved. Please tell me
