Coincidence: A Novel (15 page)

The boy who shot her was no older than August or Tebere. He wore a bandana on his head, like a South American freedom fighter, and a faded T-shirt with Dennis the Menace and Gnasher on the front, with red and black stripes like Dennis might wear. On his feet he wore sandals cut from an old car tyre. He was a thin boy with a lopsided face and one eye that looked the wrong way. We will never know his name or his story. Somehow, somewhere he had found himself enslaved to the cruel despotism of a mad preacher who swore to protect the Ten Commandments, and who did this – who still does this today – by abducting, mutilating and raping young children. Had he, the lopsided boy, like so many children, been kidnapped from his village by raiding militiamen? Had he been snatched from the fields, perhaps, or dragged out of a school? Or had he, like many abandoned children in Uganda and Sudan and Congo, simply drifted towards the LRA camps looking for food? We will never know. This was not a killing that would unravel in front of a jury. No laboratory would examine the bullets. No doctor would dictate a report. Only one journalist would ever come this far, and, crucially, he would get the story wrong.

When Rebecca ran out after the truck, the lopsided boy simply squeezed the trigger on his gun. He looked as much in shock as Rebecca when the shot sounded. Perhaps it was simply a nervous reaction, his finger already on the trigger, his nerves already frayed; we can speculate on this because the boy dropped the gun the second after the bang, put both hands on his head and wailed. Probably the boy knew he would face punishment for this transgression.

Rebecca toppled forward like a tree.

In panic now, in absolute alarm, the remnants of the Lord's Resistance Army fled towards the minibus and tore out of the compound.

When the reporter from the Olsen Press Agency arrived a day and a half later, the crime scene had been cleared by the Moyo District police. The new man in charge of the mission was old Pastor David, who could be found sitting on the red cement floor of the mess hall with his head deep in his hands. The reporter had driven all the way up from Kampala and was anxious to get back to a decent hotel in Gulu before nightfall, before the last ferry made its languid way back across the Nile. He spoke to one of the nurses and a big Acholi man who was the cook. There was very little to photograph; just a poor mission compound in a poor corner of a poor country. The reporter took a self-guided tour of the mission, and on the desk in Luke Folley's office he came upon a family photograph – Luke, Rebecca and Azalea standing outside the mission hall. He slipped the photograph into his satchel. On the way back to Gulu he wrote his report. He would stay a few days at the Acholi Inn in case there were any further developments in the incident. His report would be wired back to his news desk in Nairobi. The reporter was an old hand at this. He would stay by the poolside in his hotel for two or three days until the story subsided. If there were other reporters there, they could share a few beers, play a few hands of poker, swap details of the story.

The story that the reporter sent, while colourful, was not wholly untrue – at least in its conclusions, although it did mislead in its particulars. The reporter built his story around the photograph. Rebecca Folley, he wrote, had died in a hail of gunfire. Luke Folley and the couple's teenage daughter were missing, presumed dead. Five orphans were missing. The story failed to mention the VSOs, and this was because no one in the compound had thought to mention them. No one had seen them being bundled into the truck; the last that anyone had seen of Ritchie and Lauren was their hurried escape from the mission, en route – everyone would have suspected – back to Britain.

When the story and the photograph, now grainy from a fax machine, made it through to Nairobi, the subeditor gave it a headline that read, ‘English Missionary Family in LRA Slaughter'. And this headline, over the touching photograph of the Folleys, led the news editor to make one or two adjustments to the reporter's prose. In particular the ‘presumed dead' of his text was considered too soft for a story of this importance. Better, thought the news editor, to ask for forgiveness later than for permission now. He knew in his gut that the LRA had murdered the whole family, and the photograph seemed to confirm this assessment. So that is what he said. The story appeared in the Kenya
Daily Nation
as ‘Mission Family Murdered', and it told in graphic detail how all three Folleys had perished in the raid. The bodies of two, the story said, had been taken by the LRA and were now missing.

The news item reached the London papers on 24 June, and the
New York Times
covered the story the following day in the context of a wider piece exploring terrorism in the developing world. The photograph, re-faxed, was by now too poor to publish, and this robbed the story of much of its impact. Some of the quality papers in Europe carried the item, and this was where, one year later, an investigator called Susan Calendar working for a blind man called Peter Loak sourced the conclusions for her report.

But while news of the shooting made very few ripples in London, things were different in Moyo District. Here the story of the incident at the Langadi Mission took hold like a bush fire. Police and army units were dispatched all the way from Kampala. Pastor David held a special service in the mission hall and a thousand people came. And sometime later, a helicopter flew in with Vice-President Samson Kisekka and a representative from the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office, and they walked solemnly around the mission and shook hands with Pastor David and with Odokonyero. Photographs were taken, and some footage was shown on the Uganda television news. The Vice-President promised that those responsible for this outrage would be hunted down like rats, and he cautioned his people not to show the LRA any quarter.

In the city of Gulu, two hours' drive south of Langadi, an unwashed and battered Land Rover might have been seen in the car park of the Acholi Inn just hours after the shooting in Langadi. And if you had been in the pool garden, where waiters in white uniforms served iced drinks to the mainly Western clientele, you might have seen an urgent conversation taking place in the shade of a huge bougainvillea. A man of peace, who once might have given you the two-handed peace sign, who once sang protest songs in a subway in London with ‘Peace' painted on his guitar, was sliding an envelope filled with American dollars across a table to a man of war, a man who had fought in jungles for the SAS, a man who was promising violent and bloody retribution, a man with the slogan ‘Who Dares Wins' tattooed down the biceps of one arm.

17

March 2011

T
he journey home from the cliffs at Millook felt like an anticlimax. They had driven for five hours to stand for ten minutes in a gale, so that Azalea could rant against the cruelties of fate. Now they were headed back on the same road, aimed squarely towards the M5 motorway, and Thomas could feel the moment of opportunity that this day might have represented somehow slipping through his fingers. Azalea's feet were strapped back into her unsuitable shoes. She was gazing wistfully out of her window, and Thomas felt unable to interrupt her reverie.

Eventually, however, she turned towards him. ‘Thank you,' she said. ‘Thank you for taking me all that way.'

‘You're welcome,' he said, and now it was all worthwhile.

‘Do you believe in my coincidences? My midsummer coincidence?'

‘Of course I do,' said Thomas.

‘But what do you think it means?' said Azalea.

‘What do I think it
means
? I could tell you. But I don't know if you'd want to hear it.' Thomas looked at her, wondering perhaps if she might want to remove her shoes again. And then he felt cross with himself for such a selfish thought. Then he told himself that this was why Azalea had made this journey – not because she relished the opportunity to spend a day in his company, but because she wanted to understand the strange existential events of her life. So he started again.

‘Do you believe in luck?' he asked her.

‘What kind of luck? Good luck? Bad luck?'

‘Any sort of luck.'

Azalea shrugged. ‘Of course.'

He smiled at this. It amused him that Azalea's view of the world could fall so far from his own. ‘Are some people naturally lucky? Do some people get all the luck?'

She smiled her half-smile. ‘It seems like that.'

‘OK.' He appeared happy with this answer. ‘This isn't a test.'

‘Good.'

‘There's really only one question that matters when you talk about luck and coincidence. Do you believe that it's all down to the mathematics of chance? Or do you prefer to believe that there are other forces at work, influencing our lives?'

‘Well y
ou're
the coincidence man,' she said. ‘What's the answer? You tell me.'

‘I'd like to know what
you
believe. Does anything happen purely by coincidence? Or do you believe that everything . . .' he took his hand from the steering wheel and gestured expansively, ‘everything unfolds according to a great master plan?'

‘Definitely the latter,' she said, and then she laughed. ‘Don't give me that disapproving look.'

‘I'm not.'

‘Oh, yes you are.' She mimicked his stern expression, and this made him laugh too. ‘But of course I believe in random chance,' she said. ‘So many things take place over the course of history, there are bound to be coincidences happening all the time.'

‘I'm glad to hear it.'

‘But are you giving me a dichotomy? Do I have to choose between random coincidence and . . . I don't know . . .' she was hunting for a word, ‘destiny?' She screwed up her face. It didn't feel like the right word.

He nodded at that. ‘How about
providence
?' he suggested.

‘Providence?'

‘Yes.
Pro-videre
. An incident that was foreseen. That was provided for.'

‘Something that was supposed to happen?'

‘If you like.' He offered a weak smile. ‘If I toss a coin five times and every time it comes up heads – is that a coincidence?'

Azalea considered this carefully. ‘If my maths is correct,' she said, ‘then the chances of four coin tosses all being the same as the first coin are . . . one in sixteen. So yes, it's a coincidence, but not an amazing one.'

Thomas looked over from the driving seat. ‘Interesting,' he said. ‘So if I threw fifty heads in a row – what then?'

She smiled. ‘Then I would say the coin was fixed.'

‘So at some point you would cease to believe in coincidence and start to believe in some kind of intelligent intervention?'

She nodded cautiously, unsure where this was leading. ‘I guess so.'

‘Fifty heads means someone is messing with the coin?'

‘Probably.'

They drove for a while. The gear changes were becoming so second nature now that Thomas didn't even have to say ‘gear'. He would drop the clutch and Azalea would slip the gears and it didn't interrupt the rhythm of the conversation. They drove through Crediton and picked up the road to Stockleigh Pomeroy. The light was starting to fade.

‘We never had much twilight in Africa,' said Azalea. ‘One moment it was daylight, and the next – pfft – it was dark.'

‘Just like that?' said Thomas, ‘Pfft?'

‘Pfft,' said Azalea.

‘In 1912 a lady called Violet Jessop survived the sinking of the
Titanic
,' Thomas said, picking up the earlier conversation. ‘And then, four years later, she survived the sinking of the
Titanic
's sister ship, the
Britannic
. Was that a coincidence?'

‘It was certainly unlucky,' Azalea said.

‘Was it a coincidence, then?'

‘If I had to choose . . . I'd say she must have had a helping hand.'

‘At the time a lot of people claimed that Violet Jessop's survival was more than a simple coincidence. Some said it was proof of divine intervention.'

‘Perhaps it was. Maybe she wasn't meant to die at sea.'

‘Or maybe it was just chance. When we come to look at it, we find that Violet Jessop wasn't actually a
passenger
on the
Titanic
. She was a stewardess, employed by White Star Lines. A lot of liners used to sink in those days, so a stewardess like Violet might reasonably expect someday to experience a sinking. Then after the first disaster she retrained as a nurse, and she went to serve in the Great War. The
Britannic
had been commandeered as a hospital ship. It was because of her experience of ocean liners that she secured the job – so no great coincidence there. The ship hit a mine. No great coincidence there, either. The mines had been placed with the intention of sinking ships, after all.'

‘So it wasn't a coincidence?'

‘Oh yes. It
was
a coincidence. But more along the lines of tossing five consecutive heads than tossing fifty. It was an
acceptable
coincidence.'

‘So what,' Azalea asked, ‘does all this have to do with my coincidences?'

Thomas narrowed his eyes. ‘Here's another one,' he said, ignoring her question. ‘Shakespeare and Cervantes – the greatest writers in the English and Spanish languages – respectively both died on the same date – 23 April 1616. Was that a coincidence?'

She mused. ‘I would say it's a pretty borderline one; say, twenty-five heads.'

‘Divine intervention or no divine intervention?'

She shrugged. ‘Why would it matter to God if they died on the same day?'

‘And in fact they didn't,' said Thomas, ‘because Spain and En-gland operated different calendars in 1616. The Gregorian calendar in Spain was ten days ahead of the Julian calendar in England. So it looks like a big fat coincidence, but it's more of a coincidence based on wonky calendars than any kind of cosmic synchronicity.'

‘Cosmic synchronicity? Is that the official term?'

‘Maybe not, but it's quite a useful expression, don't you think? Coincidence relies on some synchronicity. Look at John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, the second and third presidents of the USA. Guess what? They both died on the same day, and that day was 4 July 1826, which was exactly fifty years to the day since the Declaration of Independence – to which they were both signatories. John Quincy Adams was president when they died. He wrote in his journal that it could
not
have been a coincidence – it had to have been a manifestation of divine favour. A lot of people shared his view at the time.'

‘Well, maybe it was. Divine favour.'

‘Do you really think so?'

‘I don't know what to think,' Azalea replied. ‘That's why I came to see you.'

‘And I'm not proving particularly helpful, am I?'

She didn't reply to this.

‘Shall we stop for something to eat in Tiverton?'

They parked in the town and found a pub close to the canal. The menu was not especially enticing, but through the window they could see the welcoming glow of an open fire. It was enough. They bought beers from the bar and settled opposite each other at a small table, their knees almost touching.

‘Looks like fish and chips for me,' Thomas said.

‘That'll be two then,' she said.

‘You can't beat a traditional English pub, can you?'

Azalea nodded in agreement. ‘No TV,' she said, ‘no jukebox.'

‘No fruit machine, no pool table.'

A waitress came to take their order. Afterwards they sat and sipped at their drinks.

‘Are you familiar with the concept of determinism?' Thomas asked.

Azalea raised an eyebrow. ‘I've heard of it. Why?'

‘Because determinism is what I study. That's my true field, not coincidences. My work is really about trying look experimentally at a very deep conundrum in philosophy. There is a theory of the universe that is sometimes called the “billiard ball” theory. Do you know it?'

Azalea said she didn't.

‘It's a bit of a depressing theory, really. What it suggests is that from the moment the universe came into being, you know, a zillionth of a second after the Big Bang – well, everything that happened from that moment onwards was essentially predictable, like the movement of balls on a snooker table. When you take a shot in snooker, if you could know exactly the position of every ball and the mass and the speed and direction of the cue ball, and the air pressure and all the other things that might affect the impact, well then, you could predict exactly how the balls would cascade and bounce around the table. The balls don't have free will. They all follow the basic rules of physics – and so does every particle in the universe, including every atom in your body and every atom in your brain. So the billiard-ball theory suggests that every particle in the universe has simply been obeying a basic set of rules since the beginning of time. And the key thing is this: everything was effectively preordained right from the very first instant. So if you could have known the precise location and velocity and relevant property of every particle in that Big Bang, you could ultimately have predicted that you and I would be sitting here at this table and having this conversation, because all we are is clusters of fundamental particles and none of us has the power to alter the laws of science.'

‘I think I need another drink already,' Azalea said.

‘I told you it was a depressing theory.'

‘And that's the theory of determinism?'

‘Actually it's the theory of
pre
determinism, if we want to be picky. But everyone confuses the two, so we needn't worry too much. In any case, it's an idea that's been around for a long time. Democritus and Leucippus put forward the idea around four hundred years before Christ. Laplace thought up the billiard-ball idea in 1814. We call it “Laplace's Demon” in his honour. Hobbes, Leibniz, Hume – they all bought into it.'

‘So free will is just an illusion?'

‘Or a delusion,' said Thomas.

‘So even though I feel perfectly free to chuck this beer over you and kick the table, you would say that I don't have that freedom at all, that I'm just responding to the colliding atoms in my brain?'

‘I'm just explaining that this is one way of understanding the universe. Look at it another way: if we accept that you really do have the freedom to choose your own actions, then every time you exercise that freedom you must be breaking the laws of physics at some subatomic level.' Thomas took a long draught of beer.

‘Hasn't quantum mechanics swept this theory away?' Azalea asked. ‘You know, the Uncertainty Principle, Schrödinger's cat and all that?'

Thomas inhaled slowly. ‘That misunderstands what quantum physics really tells us. What Schrödinger and Heisenberg showed was that we can never know the position of an elementary particle like an electron because the very act of observing it changes it. Their propositions don't really alter the arguments of determinism. After all, just because we can't know the position of an electron doesn't mean that it doesn't have one.'

‘This is very deep stuff.'

‘And even if we choose to interpret the science as telling us that nothing is really knowable, and that random events really can happen at the quantum level, we still don't have any mechanism that might describe how a bowl of chemicals – which is essentially all our brains are – can select or modify the way that matter will behave.' Thomas looked at her with the air of a man who had presented these arguments many times before. ‘So imagine you wanted to prove the existence of free will in the universe. How would you do that?'

‘I have no idea,' Azalea said. 'But I have a feeling you're about to tell me.'

‘Well, it isn't easy. If we're thinking about whether the universe is predetermined or subject to free will, then I prefer to ask myself whether we can find out, empirically, if the universe is random or non-random.'

‘Was it created, or did it just emerge from a big bang?'

‘No. We
know
that it emerged from a big bang. That isn't at issue. What is at issue is whether the universe
behaves
in a way that might suggest some controlling mechanism.'

‘I didn't know we'd be going back as far as the Big Bang.'

‘That's where everything starts. So let's try a thought experiment. Imagine there are two universes. We're allowed to explore both. We are told that in one universe free will exists. In the other, everything obeys Laplace's Demon and we're all just billiard balls bouncing around according to the laws of motion. Can we distinguish which of the two universes is which? What will
differ
between these two universes?'