Strangers (19 page)

Outside, the air was warm. The night was soft velvet and the palms were cartwheels against the sky. She breathed in the clean air. ‘Oh, God,’ she said.

‘Are you sure you’re OK?’

Roisin nodded, her eyes closed. ‘I saw a whole crowd of them getting drunk.’

‘That’s the ex-pat A-list for you. It’s not just the cream that floats.’ He offered her a cigarette.

She accepted it gratefully. ‘Thank you.’ She checked her watch. It was almost twenty minutes since she’d called the taxi. It would be here soon. ‘You don’t need to wait with me. You’ll make sure that girl’s all right?’

‘Don’t worry,’ he said again. ‘I’ll see you into your car, then I’ll go back and get it sorted as soon as you’re on your way.’ She was aware of someone else waiting and looked round. Arshak Nazarian was standing in the doorway, staring down the drive. She remembered that he’d wanted to talk to Joe.

‘I think he’s hoping to see my husband. I told him Joe was meeting me here, but he isn’t now. I don’t want another conversation with him about…’

‘I’ll ride shotgun. You just get in the car and go, OK?’ His phone rang as he was speaking. He took it out and checked the number, frowning as he saw who was calling him. ‘I’ve got to take this,’ he said, turning away.

She was aware of him speaking as she watched the gates begin to swing open, and a car moving between. Her taxi? It was early. ‘It’s…what?’ She was aware of Damien’s exclamation of shock and turned to look at him. ‘From the ward? Someone took him from the ward?’ She could see incredulity and alarm on his face. Then his gaze moved beyond her and his face froze.

She swung round. The car was a black hump in the darkness, showing no lights as though the driver was relying on the street lighting to find his way. It wasn’t moving. Everything seemed to happen in slow motion. Nazarian had stepped back from the doorway, and the girl from the earlier altercation was standing behind him, blocking his return to the house. She had a phone in her hand.

‘That’s—’ Suddenly everything was wrong. The car was wrong. She couldn’t see a driver behind the wheel. ‘I don’t think…’ she said, and she was flying backwards as O’Neill threw himself against her, pushing them down. She was falling and felt his hand behind her head as she hit the ground, then she was rolling as he twisted round so he was above her. She felt him press her face hard against his shirt as the night lit up with a white flash and there was a
crack!
that seemed to go on for ever but was over before she realized she’d heard it, and something heavy punched all the air out of her lungs.

Silence. Blue after-images blinded her as she struggled to breathe. Her ears were ringing and
she was lying on the hard ground. She didn’t know how much time had passed. Her face felt warm and sticky, and she was pinned down by something heavy that lay on top of her. Now she could hear things, far away as though she was listening through thick felt. The clink of hot stone rapidly cooling, a creaking sound that became a rush then stopped abruptly. Something dripping.

And someone was screaming.

The pale light of the dawn washed over the desert, over the sands and dry, stony surfaces baked by the relentless sun, casting hard-edged shadows from the rocks and the strewn rubble across a moonscape wasteland. The road shimmered in the first heat of the day, vanishing across the plains. Nothing moved.

A vehicle had been through not long before. The smell of exhaust fumes still hung in the air. The tracks veered off the road and made furrows across the sand. They ended where the sand was churned up, then they returned to the road and vanished on the metalled surface.

The dawn light crept across the rocks, making the shadows lie long and low. Dew formed briefly and vanished as the sun rose higher. The light glinted off the crystals in the sand, off the rock surfaces polished by centuries of abrasion, off the edge of the knife that had been discarded by the road.

The man lay on his left side. He was very still,
but his hands reached out as though he was frozen in the moment of trying to dig himself into the ground, to hide himself below the surface of the desert. Or maybe he was trying to find some grip so that he could crawl back towards the road. But now he lay still.

The light moved across him, across hair that was matted with something sticky, something that attracted the desert flies in a dark, buzzing cloud, moved across the tanned face where the laughter lines had started to etch into the corners of the eyes.

His mouth, frozen in a grimace, was filled with blood. His eyes, half open, attracting the attention of the flies, were blue. He was dressed in a white shirt and light trousers.

The sand was stained a dark red that was already baking black in the early sun. The blood had spurted far away in thick gouts from where the man was lying, and some was still seeping, thin and watery, from the wounds across his neck. Whoever had cut him had done the job well, opening the larynx, severing the tongue, rendering him speechless before he died, cutting through the major vessels that carry the blood to and from the brain. He had been cut to the bone.

A gold ring on one of the out-flung hands caught the light, the shadows etching the pattern deeper for a moment, two words engraved in a fine script:
Joe∼Roisin
.

The blood soaked into the sand and vanished.

London, January 2005

Snapshots.

A couple stand in the middle of a celebratory group. The woman is small, with fair hair and the man, tall and dark-haired, has his arm round her. They are laughing. Fragments of bright colour are scattered on the ground around them and some have caught in the woman’s hair.

The same couple against an anonymous, scrubby background. The man’s face is obscured as the woman, clowning, holds her scarf up against it. Her face, and her head, are uncovered.

Water sprays against the sun in rainbow arcs as children play in a lush green garden oblivious to the man in a light-coloured garment hunkered down on the grass, working the soil with a machete as the sun beats down on him.

The desert. The sun is a brilliant sphere, bright enough to burn through closed eyelids. The sand
curves and crests in high dunes and the shadows lie in black pools. The bones of a desert creature protrude from the sand which is stained with black, heavy smears.

A garden at night, lit by flames in an eerie silence.

She walks down a path towards a flower bed, where a creeper, heavy with flowers, grows up the wall.

The light flickers as the flames climb up, a sickly orange against the shadows. There is no sound. She can see the girl’s face, a pale glimmer in the darkness of the foliage. The face is serene, the eyes closed, the mouth curved in a faint smile.

Only her face is visible. The jumping shadows must conceal her body completely. The orange light reflects off the leaves, and now she can hear the sound of the flames, muffled and far away. She reaches out to touch the face…

…and it falls forward as her touch frees it from the vines, then the girl’s head drops, disembodied, into her hands.

Roisin jerked upright, wiping her hands frantically against the sheets. Her heart was hammering and she was breathing fast. Gradually the sound of the flames became the noise of rain beating against her window, the light became the glow of the floor lamp she had left burning all night. The relief of being out of the nightmare was replaced by the leaden awareness of the day.

She lay back down, her hand reaching out to the empty space on the other side of the bed. Her dreams were always about the dead girl, the girl she had last seen in the doorway with Nazarian, the girl whose body had been ripped apart by the explosion.

She had been back in the UK for a week, a week of sleepless nights interrupted by vivid, violent dreams and long, grey days when she lay on the settee, too weary to get up, just watching the time drag past.

She had been in hospital for a week after the bomb, shocked and concussed, aware that she had lived and Joe was dead. She could remember police officers by her bed, asking her about Joe, about the time he’d left her, the time he’d phoned, about what he had been doing, what they had both been doing in the day leading up to the party. Where had they been? What time? How well did she know Yasmin? When had she last seen her? Her confused mind had struggled to understand. ‘Yasmin wasn’t there,’ she said, watching as their faces remained impassive.

The Embassy had arranged for her to be flown out of the Kingdom as soon as the doctors said she was well enough to travel. A representative had turned up by her bedside one confusing morning and rushed her to the airport with an urgency she had been too dazed to understand. He’d answered the few questions she had been able to formulate: Joe hadn’t died in the explosion, he’d been the
victim of a random attack, possibly a robbery; Damien O’Neill was in hospital, where surgeons were fighting to save his hand. She’d scrabbled in her bag and found a photograph she’d taken in Riyadh weeks ago. She scribbled on the back:
Thank you. Roisin
. He promised he would deliver it.

And then she was being rushed through passport control, the man from the Embassy still by her side, still there as her flight was called. Then she was stepping on to the plane, a BA flight direct to London. He didn’t leave her until the last minute, until the plane was about to leave the stand. And then they were in the air and she could see the lights of Riyadh below her.

Somewhere down there, Joe was lying dead and alone in a foreign morgue.

The flight was a blank, and then she could remember walking through the cold air of the winter night at Heathrow, could remember seeing her mother’s face in the arrivals hall with the relief that she wasn’t to endure this homecoming alone.

‘We’ll go back to your flat tonight, pet.’ Her mother’s hand touched hers, fluttered away, touched her again. ‘Then we can go home tomorrow. I’ve got your room ready. In the new house. I said, remember, that that was your room, yours and…’ She fell silent.

‘Joe. Joe’s dead.’

‘I know, pet. I know.’

The taxi driver had dumped them with her cases
at the block of flats behind King’s Cross, and driven off. The street lights wavered yellow through a wintry mist. The concrete stairwell was dank and uninviting. ‘Such a place…’ her mother muttered as Roisin fumbled for her keys. But Roisin hadn’t heard her. She was watching the door of the flat swing open, and she waited for the sudden flood of light, for the waft of coffee and for music drifting from the box room where Joe was working at the desk.

‘I’m back!’ she whispered into the dusty silence.

‘Hey, babes,’ and the sound of his chair being pushed back echoed in her memory.

But memories were all she had.

Joe was dead.

She climbed wearily out of bed and released the blind to look out at the London day. The sky was heavy with clouds that the pale winter light had barely penetrated. At this time of year, the daylight arrived late and began to fade by four. She stood for a moment watching the rooftops and the pavements shining with the wet.

Her mother was moving around in the small kitchen. When Roisin had refused to go back to Newcastle, she had stayed, cleaning, tidying, doing the shopping, cooking meals that Roisin could barely eat.

She pulled on a pair of jeans and a sweater and went through to the living room. It was impeccable, unrecognizable from the casual disorder that she and Joe had maintained. The bed-settee where
her mother had been sleeping was put away, the bedding neatly folded. The bookshelves had been tidied so that the books stood in disciplined rows instead of leaning against each other in untidy piles. The furniture was carefully placed, the settee was lined up with the wall, and the chair positioned at a suitable angle, the plumped cushions neatly aligned. A vase that Roisin didn’t recognize–her mother must have gone out and bought it–was dead-centre on the coffee table. Early daffodils stood to attention.

Her mother, building her familiar ramparts to keep her daughter safe. Roisin’s throat ached.

‘Rosie? Is that you? I was going to bring you tea in bed. You should be resting.’ Her mother came bustling through.

‘I’m fine. I’m rested.’ Roisin kissed the soft cheek and took the proffered cup of tea. In the short time she’d been away, her mother had aged. When she was younger, Maggie Gardner’s eyes had been the same clear green as Roisin’s, and her hair had been a rich gold. Sometimes, to her secret delight, people had commented on the resemblance between mother and daughter. Now, the gold hair had faded to white and the creamy skin was dull and shadowed. ‘Are you keeping an eye on the time? You mustn’t miss your train.’

Her mother was going back to Newcastle where she had a long-awaited hospital appointment and Roisin wasn’t going to let her miss it.

‘I don’t like leaving you, pet.’ Her mother frowned with worry. ‘I really don’t need to…’

‘Yes, you do. It’s important. I’ll be all right. I’m not far away. Not any more.’

‘I wish you’d come home with me.’

Why wouldn’t she? It would make her mother happy. What was there for her in London? She just knew she couldn’t leave, not yet. ‘I can’t. I was going to bring Joe to Newcastle in February. We were planning to come home…’ She couldn’t talk about it.

‘That place. Animals. They’re animals.’ Her mother’s grief for her expressed itself in a virulent hatred of the Saudis.

‘They aren’t,’ Roisin said wearily. Najia, Fozia, Haifa–even Souad–they were people she thought of with warmth, some with affection. And Yasmin. She wondered what the news was about Yasmin’s baby.

‘But still…’

‘Still, nothing. I will come home for a visit. Soon. I promise.’ Focusing on her mother kept her mind away from the things she didn’t want to think about. She finished her tea. ‘Have you packed?’

‘I’ve got everything. I didn’t bring much. I could come back…’

‘Have a break. Come back in a couple of weeks.’ She was physically better now, and she needed to be alone for a while. A wave of tiredness washed over her, and for a moment, all she wanted to do
was lie down and sleep. She turned away so her mother wouldn’t see her face. ‘I’ll get myself some breakfast,’ she said.

‘Sit down. I’ll get it.’ Her mother was delighted at the sudden evidence of appetite.

An hour later, Roisin walked with her mother to King’s Cross. She made sure she had magazines for the journey, and saw her on to the train. Just before she climbed into the carriage, Maggie Gardner hugged her hard. ‘Rosie, pet, if you need anything, anything at all, call me.’

‘I will. I promise.’

She walked slowly back. Even though it wasn’t noon yet, the day had a heavy dreariness to it as though the sun had barely risen and would shortly sink defeated into the long evening and night. She let herself back into her flat, and stood for a while with her back to the door. Then she pushed open the door to the small bedroom, the one Joe had used as a study, where she had dumped the remaining cases that had come back from Riyadh. The table light came on when she pressed the switch, casting a warm glow over the desk. The chair was pushed slightly away, as though the person sitting there had just that moment left the room.

Joe?

Hey, babes.

She knelt down by the cases that had been dumped against the far wall. She opened the first one and pulled the clothes out–skirts, trousers,
scarves, all in light colours. Something jangled among the fabric, and a cluster of silver bangles fell to the floor. She picked them up and held them.

Something for you
…

They’re beautiful. Thank you
.

One of Joe’s shirts was tangled up among the clothes. It was crumpled and slightly stained. Slowly, she unfolded it.

And she was breathing in his smell, and he was there, all around her. She knew he was just in the next room, he was going to come through the door.
Hey, sweetheart, where did you put
…

Joe.

She’d made them tell her what had happened to him. ‘He’s dead,’ the consul had said. ‘They killed him.’

‘How?’ she’d insisted. ‘How did they kill him? Tell me what they did.’

He hadn’t wanted to, but in the end, he told her. They’d cut Joe’s throat and left him to bleed to death by the side of the road. Alone. Afraid and alone. He’d died afraid and alone.

She crouched by the case with Joe’s shirt crushed against her face. The pain was so intense she could hardly breathe. She had no idea how she was going to survive.