INCARNATION (12 page)

On the last day, they’d been driven out into the Kizil Kum Desert, a place of fantastic shapes and unnameable colours, as different from London as the moon. What had struck David more than anything had been the silence. That, above all, had changed him. Stopping in the midst of a vast expanse of dark red dunes, their driver had extinguished the engine, and such a silence had flooded the jeep as David, in all his years of noise and traffic fumes, could never have imagined. On his return to London, he’d found the city brash and desperately loud.

Now, nearly forty years on, the city’s embrace seemed somehow comforting. Deserts, for all their silence, could conceal horrors no city could ever match.

When he reached the house, the lights were still on upstairs. David muttered under his breath. Even in the holidays, Sam was expected to keep civilized hours. He looked up at the house and thought it had suddenly grown ridiculously big. It was a three-storey Victorian town-house, bought for them by Elizabeth’s mother when they married, and now worth massively more than had been paid for it. He’d have a word with Sam, and if the boy was happy with the idea, they could start looking for a smaller place as soon as he’d finished debriefing Tursun. As he climbed out of the car, he thought of Maddie. When she came out of the clinic, wouldn’t she need some sense of stability? It could so easily knock her back again to come home and find a ‘For Sale’ sign in the front garden.

He made to put the key in the front door, but as he did so, the door opened and swung back into the darkened hall. This time he swore aloud. He’d lost count of the number of times he’d had to tell Sam to close the door behind him properly. Surely Nicky hadn’t gone already? She’d always stayed with Sam until David or Elizabeth got back. Had she sensed his passing sexual interest in her and decided to clear off before he got home?

He fastened the lock and snibbed it, then put the hall light on. Right in front of him, Sam’s slippers lay on the floor. He felt a dull prickle of alarm. For the past year, Sam had been wearing his slippers on the way to bed and leaving them on top of a trunk in his room. He’d wear them in bed if allowed to. Ordinarily, when David came back this late, the television would still be playing in the living room, but tonight there was total silence.

No, he thought, not quite total. A muffled sound was coming from the front room, a sound he didn’t like. He hurried to the door, then paused. In the few feet he’d crossed, he had changed from worried father to something none of his friends would have recognized, something he had trained to become in places that did not exist.

He went down to the kitchen and took a knife from the block, a well-made knife with a ten-inch blade. Holding it carefully, he crept back to the living room. He pushed down the handle and gave the door a shove. The room was in darkness, save for the flickering of the television, which showed nothing but a mesh of black and white lines.

He pressed the light switch and blinked as the room came leaping into life. At first, nothing seemed out of place. The furniture was exactly as he’d left it, the paintings on the walls were untouched, the ornaments on the mantelpiece had not been moved.

The smell was the first thing he really noticed. A beautiful smell made up of jasmine, lily, and rose. It filled the room, and he breathed it in deeply, wondering at its delicacy. There was something of the erotic in it. He thought of a bedchamber hung with silk, and a bed strewn with dark red petals. On the mantelpiece, two incense cones smoked silently, sending spirals of blue smoke into the congealing air.

He took a step forward. That was when he caught sight of her, on the sofa. She was naked, and for a horrible moment he thought it was all a clumsy attempt to seduce him. Then he saw the tape over her mouth and heard her groan and sob in an attempt to speak. Her arms had been tied behind her back, and her ankles fastened with more tape.

He went up to her and peeled the tape gently from her mouth.

‘Nicky, what happened? Are you hurt?’

She shook her head. All her terror was in her eyes. Her body had gone rigid with fear.

‘Sam? Is he … ?’

He could not get the words out. She shook her head.

‘He’s upstairs. I don’t know … Two men, they …’

He bent as though to untie her. That was when he noticed what they’d done to her body. He stood back to see more clearly. Her attackers had written on her naked flesh with a pen of some sort. The message was in Chinese characters. On her left breast they’d written:
Meiren
- Beautiful Woman. On her right breast:
Shuai nanhair
- Handsome Boy. Then along her belly:
Bie shi yiban ziwei zai shintou
.

He recognized the last words. They were the last line of a well-known poem by the Emperor Li Yu. Like an owl screeching, they ran through his mind even as he got to his feet and hurried to the door: ‘Parting lies in the heart like a bitter taste.’

He ran up the stairs two at a time.
Bie shi yiban
. The words of the poem rang at every step like a bell in his head. Sam’s room was at the end of the corridor on the first floor.
Ziwei zai shintou
. The door was wide open, and light spilled into the passage. David knew he was taking an enormous risk going into the room without a gun, but his gun was in his bedroom on the next floor, and he wasn’t prepared to waste another second getting to Sam.

He dashed through the door and pulled up hard.

Bie shi yibari ziwei zai shintou
.

They hadn’t stripped him naked, they hadn’t beaten they hadn’t so much as disturbed a hair on his head. David moved into the room carefully, inching his way forward, feeling the hair start to move on his neck, straining to understand what they had done.

The boy was sitting on a large wooden stool, to which he was fastened by thick leather straps.

‘Sam, what’s wrong? What have they done?’

Sam turned a distressed face to him.

‘I have to keep tight hold, Dad. They said …’

‘Yes, I see, son. Don’t move. Just stay as you are. Can you do that? Can you hold on a little longer?’

Sam nodded. He was holding a rope and pulling back on it very hard with both hands. The other end of the rope was attached to a spring mechanism that fed into the trigger of a large crossbow whose bolt was directed exactly at Sam’s heart. By holding the rope he ensured that the spring remained taut. If he slackened his hold by a mere fraction, the spring would catapult the bolt straight into his chest.

David had had little experience with them, but he knew that crossbows were not toys but serious weapons that could inflict frightening injuries. At this short range, the bolt would not only pierce Sam’s slim body but would tear through it and embed itself in the wall behind.

In his long experience with weapons, the one thing he’d learnt was to do nothing hastily. The crossbow had been set up as a booby trap of sorts, and well-made booby traps often had more than one way of being sprung. The obvious thing to do was check the bolt. If nothing stood in his way, he could simply lift it from the groove and disarm the weapon. The moment he looked at it, he knew that wasn’t an option. Someone had designed a long cage to fit over the bolt. It held it firmly in place, and would only release it when the trigger fired. His next thought was to move the whole crossbow. It was screwed down firmly to a metal stand, and the stand was bolted to the floor. Someone had gone to a lot of trouble.

‘Dad, my arms are sore. I can’t hold it much longer.’

‘Don’t worry, Sam. If I can’t find a way of disarming this thing quickly, I’ll take over.’

‘You’ve got to hurry, Dad. I’m really tired. I’ve been holding this thing for hours.’

‘OK, Sam, I’m coming now. I’ll get hold of it, then I want you to make a phone call. I’ll give you the number.’

He turned and smiled at the boy. Sam was trembling, straining to keep the tension in the rope. He smiled back at him bravely, but David could see he was terrified.

Suddenly, he saw Sam’s head turn, drawn by something at the door. It was Gromit. David remembered noticing her in the living room when he’d gone in to find Nicky. The cat ran in and headed straight for Sam.

David let out a cry and lunged for the cat, but it was too late. She jumped up at Sam, expecting him to catch her, clawing his face as her attempt failed, throwing his delicate balance off. The boy threw up his hands, and the spring thudded back, releasing the trigger and sending eight inches of steel bolt into the centre of Sam’s chest, hurling him backwards and smashing him against the bedroom wall. A smear of blood washed the wallpaper. It was an image David could never expunge from his mind: Sam’s blood, red on a poster of the Arsenal football team, his passion and his ambition.

He did not cry out. There was no time. By the time David reached him, he was already dead.

T
he sun shone as brightly as a winter fire all through the day of the funeral. Trees caught the light in the furrows of their branches, and juggled it between their leaves, dappling and undappling the grass at their feet. Row upon row of white headstones lay bedazzled in the brightness, and here and there a golden name would shout aloud, or a sequence of dates, carved deep in the stone, would tug at the attention of passers-by.

Sam’s dates, when they came to be carved, would plead for notice. Nine years, seven months, five days. Until then, a wooden cross served to mark his head. The grave was heaped with flowers, more flowers than David had ever seen in his life. He walked about among them for a while, reading cards, struggling to remember the host of names, until it was too much, and he stood to one side, fighting back the darkest tears of his life.

Elizabeth was there, as she had every right to be. David could not have turned her away. He gave her what little comfort he could; she made herself a sort of hostess to the occasion, and said nothing to comfort or quieten him. It was not that she did not grieve, merely that she coped with her grief by turning it into something else: resentment or self-pity, and frequently anger. Every so often she would remove a little bottle from her handbag and take a not-too-surreptitious sip from its neck. He pitied her then, and might almost have loved her had she not looked at him, all love extinguished, and shaken someone else’s hand.

She held him responsible, of course; he’d expected that. She said nothing directly, but it came out again and again in little meaningful phrases against which he could not defend himself. 'If he hadn’t been …’ ‘Surely, if there’d been the slightest risk …’ ‘Did you really have to leave him on his own … ?’ She stopped short of blaming the service, knowing that any accusation there would come too close to home.

Anthony Farrar stayed away, knowing his presence would have caused an unwelcome stir. As David’s boss, of course, he was morally bound to be present, not least because there was every reason to believe Sam had been killed in error for the boy being kept down in the Cotswolds. David couldn’t decide whether Farrar’s absence was out of delicacy on account of his relationship with the dead child’s mother, or because he wanted to avoid drawing attention to the link between Sam’s death and his father’s occupation.

There were others there from the China Desk and elsewhere in the service, close friends and acquaintances of David’s who’d made a point of turning up. They hadn’t all known Sam, but those who hadn’t knew of him. Privately, they’d sworn that whoever was responsible would pay a high price for the boy’s murder. They’d already stepped up surveillance of the Chinese embassy to the point where they knew if a toothpick went missing from the refectory.

Elizabeth’s older brother, Laurence Royle, was there, of course, looking rich and healthy and completely detached. A bevy of lesser Royles had come with him, curiosity-seekers from a world that knew little of grief or any raw emotion. Laurence shook hands on all sides, picking his careful way through his fellow guests like a surgeon among prospective patients. The 1997 election had lost him his previously comfortable seat in the shires, but he had not thrown off the patronizing manner of a member of the political elite.

David’s parents were there, still devastated by the news. His mother seemed to have shrunk, like a fruit that has dried from within, shrivelling the flesh. His father held himself stiff and still throughout the interment, gazing out over the trees into a distance whose ends were invisible to anyone but himself. Later, when they went back to the house for food, he kept to himself while David’s mother helped Elizabeth. David found him sitting on a high stool in the kitchen, an undrunk cup of tea in hand.

‘Why don’t we go out to the garden?’ David suggested.

His father said nothing, but followed him out. It was a large garden, full of Canterbury bells and hollyhocks and tall trees covered in moss and thick clumps of ivy. Up above, the branches were patrolled by convoys of dipping and turning birds. The old man looked up at them for a minute or more, then turned to David.

‘"The oriole cries, as though it were its own tears 

Which damp even the topmost blossoms on the tree".'

David knew the poem, a brief, four-line piece by Li Shang-Yin.

‘No orioles here, Father.’ He sneezed once, assailed by the garden’s thick pollens.

The old man sighed, and they walked on. Guests watched them go, but no one intruded on their grief.

David looked at his father, as though seeing him for the first time in years. Age had settled on him like a deposit of white ash, transforming his skin to parchment and his hair to thin strands of gossamer. His shoulders were stooped, but he refused to use a stick. Mentally, he seemed as sharp as ever.

‘Why isn’t Maddie here?’ he asked.

David had expected the question, dreaded it.

‘She doesn’t know, Father. She isn’t well again.’

‘Is she in hospital?’

‘Yes. Dr Rose’s clinic’

‘I hope that bitch is paying.’

‘Not today, Dad, please.’

‘When will you tell her?’

‘I don’t know. Rose says it could do irreparable damage to tell her now. Her breakdown was a reaction to Elizabeth’s leaving.'