Julianne is speechless. Stunned. She stares at the grapefruit in her hand, trying to decide if she was putting it in the fridge or taking it out. She doesn’t want to hear any more. Details matter to me but not to her. She closes the fridge and steps around me, taking her silent verdict upstairs.
I wish I could make her understand that I didn’t choose to get involved in this. I didn’t choose to watch Christine Wheeler jump to her death or have her daughter turn up on my doorstep. Julianne used to love my sense of fairness and compassion and my hatred of hypocrisy. Now she treats me like I have no other role to play except to raise my children, perform a handful of lectures and wait for Mr Parkinson to steal what he hasn’t already taken.
Even when Ruiz came to dinner last night she took a long while to relax.
‘I’m surprised at you, Vincent,’ she told him. ‘I thought you would have talked Joe out of this.’
‘Out of what?’
‘This nonsense.’ She looked at him over her wine glass. ‘I thought you retired. Why aren’t you playing golf?’
‘I have actually hired a hitman to bump me off if I ever leave the house wearing tartan trousers.’
‘Not a golfer.’
‘No.’
‘What about bowling or driving a caravan around the country?’
Ruiz laughed nervously and looked at me as though he no longer envied my life.
‘I hope you never retire, Professor.’
From upstairs there are raised voices. Julianne is shouting at Darcy.
‘What are you doing? Get away from my things.’
‘Ow! You’re hurting me.’
I take the stairs two at a time and find them in our bedroom.
Julianne is gripping Darcy’s forearm, squeezing it hard to stop her getting away. The teenager is bent over, cupping something against her stomach as if hiding it.
‘What’s wrong?’
‘I caught her going through my things,’ says Julianne. I look at the dresser. The drawers are open.
‘No, I wasn’t,’ says Darcy.
‘What were you doing?’
‘Nothing.’
‘It doesn’t look like nothing,’ I say. ‘What were you looking for?’
She blushes. I haven’t seen her blush before.
She straightens and moves her arms. A small dark crimson stain is visible in the crotch of her track pants.
‘My period started. I looked in the bathroom, but I couldn’t find any pads.’
Julianne looks mortified. She lets go of Darcy and tries to apologise.
‘I am so sorry. You should have said something. You could have asked me.’
Ignoring my inertia, she takes Darcy by the hand and leads her to the en-suite. As the door closes, Julianne’s eyes connect with mine. Normally so poised and unflappable, she has become a different person around Darcy and she blames me.
26
I was thirty-one years old when I understood what it was like to watch someone die. A Pashtun taxi driver, with psoriasis on his joints, expired as I watched. We had made him stand for five days until his feet swelled to the size of footballs and the shackles cut into his ankles. He didn’t sleep. He didn’t eat.
This is an approved ‘stress and duress position’. It’s in the manual. Look it up. SK 46/34.
His name was Hamad Mowhoush and he’d been arrested at a checkpoint in southern Afghanistan after a roadside bomb killed two Royal Marines and wounded three others, including a mate of mine.
We put a sleeping bag over Hamad’s head and bound it with wire. Then we rolled him back and forth and sat on his chest. That’s when his heart gave out.
Some folks claim torture isn’t an effective way to get reliable information because the strong defy pain and the weak will say anything to make it stop. They’re right. Most of the time, it’s pointless, but if you act quickly and combine the shock of capture with the fear of torture, it’s amazing how often the mind unlocks and all sorts of secrets tumble out.
We weren’t allowed to call the detainees POWs. They were PUCs (persons under control). The military loves acronyms. Another one is HCI (Highly Coercive Interrogation). That’s what I was trained to do.
When I first saw Hamad someone had sandbagged and zip-tied him. Felini gave him to me. ‘Fuck a PUC,’ he said, grinning. ‘We can smoke him later.’
To ‘fuck a PUC’ meant to beat him up. To ‘smoke’ them meant using a stress position. Felini used to make them stand in the sun in hundred degree heat with their arms outstretched, holding up five-gallon jerry cans.
We added some of our own touches. Sometimes we doused them in water, rolled them in dirt and beat them with chem lights until they glowed in the dark.
We buried Hamad’s body in lime. I couldn’t sleep for days afterwards. I kept imagining his body slowly bloating and the gas escaping from his chest, making it seem like he was still breathing. I still think about him sometimes. I wake at night, with a weight on my chest and imagine lying in the ground with the lime burning my skin.
I’m not scared of dying. I know there’s something worse than lying underground, worse than being smoked, or fucked over with chem lights. It happened to me on Thursday May 17, just after midnight. That’s when I last saw Chloe. She was sitting in the passenger seat of a car, still in her pyjamas, being stolen from me.
That was twenty-nine Sundays ago.
Ten things I remember about my daughter:
1. The paleness of her skin.
2. Yellow shorts.
3. A homemade Father’s Day card with two stick figures, one large and one small, holding hands.
4. Telling her about Jack and the Beanstalk, but leaving out the bit about the giant wanting to grind Jack’s bones to make his bread.
5. The time she tripped over and opened up a cut above her eye that needed two and a half stitches. (Is there such a thing as a half-stitch? Perhaps I made this up to impress her.)
6. Watching her play an Indian squaw in a primary school production of Peter Pan.
7. Taking her to see a European cup tie in Munich, even though I missed the only goal while retrieving the Maltesers she dropped beneath her seat.
8. Walking along the seafront at St Mawes on our last holiday together.
9. Teaching her to ride a bicycle without training wheels.
10. Putting down her pet duck when a fox broke into the pen and ripped off its wing
The phone is ringing. I open my eyes. Heavy curtains and blackout blinds make the room almost totally dark. I reach for the telephone.
‘Yeah.’
‘Is that Gideon Tyler?’ The accent is pure Belfast.
‘Who wants to know?’
‘Royal Mail.’
‘How did you get this number?’
‘It was inside a package.’
‘What package?’
‘You posted a package to a Chloe Tyler seven weeks ago. We were unable to deliver it. The address you provided appears to be out-of-date or incorrect.’
‘Who are you?’
