CLARE LAYTON

THOSE WHOM THE GODS LOVE

Dedication

For

ROLAND JOHNSON

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Epilogue

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Also by the Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

Chapter 1

The Jeep bounced over a pothole and a broken spring rammed into Ginty’s thigh. They’d blindfolded her at the checkpoint, so she had no idea where they were going. She could feel them, excited and tense, and she could smell them. Stale tobacco and acrid sweat made her gag, but it was the alcohol on their breath that worried her. She knew it wouldn’t take much to tip them over the edge.

Once, all she’d wanted was to be taken seriously. Now that seemed mad. This was serious, and she hated it.

The tyres spun as the Jeep skidded round a tight bend. She was flung sideways into the lap of one of the men. His hand came down on her back, pressing her breasts into his groin. She could feel his prick, thrusting up through the coarse cloth of his trousers. A sharp, unintelligible command sounded from the front seat. The hand moved from her back and she breathed again. Other hands grabbed her shoulders and pushed her upright, like a doll, balancing her against the lumpy seat. Someone knocked against her left breast, then hard fingers grabbed and twisted. One of the men laughed.

This is nothing, she told herself, remembering yesterday’s interviewee.

Only one of a whole string of women who’d been raped by a gang of men like these, Maria had refused to say anything for a long time, but she hadn’t walked away. Ginty had stood in the background, while her interpreter spoke gently, earnestly, sometimes pointing at Ginty, sometimes gesturing around the rest of the refugee camp. At last Maria had begun to talk, her voice steely, punching out the words like a machine. In every pause, Anna gave Ginty a softly delivered translation that made her shiver.

‘She is fifteen. They raped her last year. She did get pregnant. The child was born in a bombed-out cellar. It was a boy. She was alone. She smothered him, then cut the cord. She left him there in the rubble. Her family does not know. I have promised her anonymity. And no photographs.’

Ginty would have promised a lot more than that, but Maria hadn’t asked for anything else. As she felt the hands again, Ginty bit her lip to keep herself quiet. Infuriating tears wetted the scratchy cloth around her eyes. She couldn’t sniff or they’d know they’d got to her. She thought of her bodyguard, forced to wait behind at the roadblock with Anna, and wished she’d never agreed to write this story.

A rock cracked against a hubcap and the Jeep lurched, crunching over it. The muscles in the men’s thighs were taut beside hers, as they braced themselves against the swinging movement. She kept her legs crossed. With every lurch, she was terrified she might wet her knickers. Her head felt hollow and her ears were ringing.

Sharp braking flung her forwards. Someone gripped her shoulder before she could hit her head. Voices called from outside. The hands were back on her body, tugging and pushing her out. Swaying as she put her foot to the ground, she reached out for a handhold. Instead of metal, she felt folds of cloth. Someone laughed. Other hands were pulling at the blindfold. As they wrenched it off, they ripped out some hair that had caught in the knot. More involuntary tears made a blur in front of her eyes.

As the damp fog cleared, she saw blue-grey mountains shining in the sun, trees, grass, and a low, white house with a great hole in the roof. Split and blackened beams showed through the gash in the orange tiles and smoke stains spread up the walls like fungus. Few of the windows still had glass and most of those were cracked.

The splintered door crashed open. Two men, as young and dark-eyed as the ones who’d picked her up that morning, dragged out something heavy. Ginty wiped the back of her hand against her eyes and saw it was a man. They were holding him by the slack of his checked shirt. She couldn’t see his face, which was hanging down a foot above the ground. His bare, bloody feet dragged against the rocks in the path.

Ginty’s escorts yelled something to the two men. One of them put his free hand in the victim’s hair and jerked up his head. Ginty wished she were shortsighted, blind even.

There were bruises and blood all over his face. His eyes were swollen and his lower lip lolled, showing a broken tooth. She couldn’t tell whether he was alive or dead. His guards let his head drop again and dragged him off.

She was propelled forwards by a hand on her back. The doorway into the house looked very dark against the white walls. Everything she’d heard in the camps about Rano and his men pulled at her heels, slowing her down. But she’d come this far, and she had work to do, work that might be the passport to a world where she mattered. If she wimped out now – even if they’d let her go – she’d never get it.

When they reached the doorway she bent down, as though there were whirling helicopter blades that might decapitate her. Straightening up, she found herself in a long, whitewashed room. There were bullet holes in the inner walls, too, and more smoke stains, but someone had given the place an air of makeshift comfort. To the right was a table with food on it, glasses, and a wine bottle; to the left, another table laden with guns and grenades.

In front of her was a tall man, thicker set than the ones who’d brought her up from the roadblock; much older too. As he came towards her he was wiping his hands on a towel.

‘Ms Schell?’ he said in a deep, very British voice.

‘Yes.’ She was proud of the way that came out, neither croaking nor in a squeak.

‘Ronald Lackton,’ he said, throwing the towel to one of his men and holding out his right hand for Ginty to shake. She saw that the small greyish cloth was thick and covered with brown splodges. She looked at the hand she was supposed to shake. There was blood under his nails and clinging to his cuticles. He hadn’t even washed.

She heard her father’s voice in her head: ‘You must look confident even when you are sick with terror. It does not matter what your work is, or how great your talent, if you cannot persuade other people to believe in you, you will fail.’ As I nearly always have, she thought, then tried to brace herself so that it wouldn’t happen again.

Her mother had put the instruction rather differently: ‘Never show fear, Ginty, or the rest of the tribe will destroy you. They have to if they’re to protect themselves against your weakness. Fear of weakness is at the root of all bullying.’

Obedient to the voices in her head, she put her hand into Rano’s. His skin felt warm and dry. He held onto her for much longer than necessary, smiling down into her face as though they were old friends. His smile seemed more sinister than anything his men had threatened. All her life she’d hated being small, but never as much as now.

‘I’m so glad you could come,’ he said. They might have been at a London party. She couldn’t help looking at his hands, at the blood caught under his nails. ‘Would you like something to eat? Drink?’

‘No, thank you.’ She knew she’d choke on anything he gave her, but she had to hide that, too. Always look confident, Ginty, she reminded herself in her father’s voice. And try to make everyone like you, she added in her own.

‘Your men wouldn’t let me bring a notebook or tape recorder, so I’m not sure how effective this interview will be.’ Her voice wobbled on the last few words and she saw Rano smile.

‘I’ve got a tape recorder,’ he said. ‘Double cassette. I’ll give you your tape before you leave.’

‘Great. Then do you think we should start?’ Ginty was pleased with her voice; it had sounded polite but firm, with the kind of English firmness that could seem tentative to anyone who didn’t know the code. She hoped Rano was still English enough to appreciate it.

‘In a minute. First, tell me how the Harbingers are. Has the divorce come through yet?’

Ginty stared at him. What kind of psychopath would you have to be to make gossipy London conversation here?

‘I’ve no idea,’ she said, wishing he’d let her do her job and get out. ‘I hardly know John Harbinger, and I’ve never met his wife.’

‘But he’s your editor.’ Rano forgot to smile, and for a moment looked as dangerous as she knew he was.

Ginty’s skin prickled. She remembered Harbinger’s call yesterday, and her own shaky protests that she didn’t know enough to interview the most notorious of the local warlords.

‘Didn’t he tell you I’m freelance, that I’ve only just started writing for him?’

‘Yes.’ Rano relaxed and the smile oozed back around his lips. ‘But he says your work’s impressive for someone so inexperienced.’

Anywhere else and Ginty would have been flattered enough to ask questions.

‘Are you sure you don’t want anything to eat? You must be starving.’

This is surreal, she thought. There were villages in these mountains where the inhabitants had truly starved before Rano’s men had burned them out of their houses. But she realized she’d have to go along with him or challenge him into doing something even more unpleasant.

‘How do you know the Harbingers so well?’ she asked in much the same, party-going voice he’d used.

‘I was at university with him, which is why I offered him this interview in the first place. We were never close friends, but I occasionally used to run into him and Kate in London. I must say I was surprised when she married him. A man’s man, I’d have thought. Ah, good, they’ve got the tape going.’ He added something in his own language to the young men who were messing about with a large black-plastic tape recorder.

One answered, laughing. Rano laughed back and waved them away. One stayed, leaning against the wall behind the commander, and set about picking his teeth with a grubby fingernail.

Ginty heard the others moving to the far side of the long room. She didn’t let herself look away from Rano, but she could hear metal clattering and cloth tearing. She wondered what they could be doing until the sharp smell of chemicals and oil told her they must be stripping down the guns. Someone began to sing almost under his breath, a peculiar plaintive, wailing song full of nasal sounds. Someone else lit a cigarette. Ginty coughed.

‘Have a seat, Ms Schell, and we’ll get going.’ Rano sat at the food table and poured himself a glass of wine.

His shoulders looked very broad in the bulky camouflage jacket that hung open over a clean khaki T-shirt. The cleanliness bothered her, especially when he idly scratched his chest and she saw the blood under his nails again. He swallowed some wine and swung his legs up to lie on the corner of the table. The camouflage trousers were tucked into the top of gleaming black boots. He pressed the red button on the cassette recorder and nodded to her.

‘So,’ she said, and heard her voice high with nerves. She tried again: ‘So, tell me first how you, an Englishman, became involved in this war.’

‘My mother was born here. Most of her family still live here. She brought me up to speak the language, sing the songs.’ He jerked his smoothly shaven chin towards the singer in the corner. ‘I’ve never felt completely English, whatever my passport says.’

‘Did she come back with you?’

He looked at her as though she was mad. ‘Of course not. She’s in her seventies.’

‘Is she glad you’re here?’

‘She knows it’s necessary. Once this war started, I knew I couldn’t hang around, living in Pimlico and doing deals in London, while my people were dying only a few hours’ flight from the City airport. This is what matters, here and now, not making money.’

He paused, waiting for a comment, sympathy perhaps. Ginty was prepared to wait him out. He must have understood because he picked up the unlabelled wine bottle and held it towards her, raising his eyebrows.

‘Sure you don’t want some?’

‘I’m sure.’

‘OK. So, I left my job and came over here, planning to sort out some aid, or help them organize a proper international appeal for medical equipment, drugs, that sort of thing; but when I saw what was going on I knew I had to get involved. Have you any idea what they – we – have suffered over the centuries?’

Ginty nodded, but that wasn’t enough for him. He started to describe the sacking of villages, the burningsalive, the rapes, the killings, the desecration of holy places, deaths of babies, torture of fighting men, starvation, disease and exile. She listened, feeling battered by his remorseless stream of stories and remembering all the others she’d heard in the last two weeks.

‘You can see why it’s important that everyone in England knows the truth, can’t you?’ Rano was saying. She nodded. ‘International opinion has swung away from us again. Supplies of arms and money and everything else we need have almost dried up. We’ve got to mobilize all our support in the west.’

‘So this interview is part of a PR campaign,’ Ginty suggested, needing to show that she wasn’t a complete doormat. She wondered what his leaders thought about his private enterprise, this murderous miniature army that had topped every excess committed by anyone else.

Rano put down his glass, swung his feet to the floor and leaned across the table. His face was only a foot from hers. She moved back instinctively, remembering that being a doormat was safe as well as humiliating.

‘It’s rather more than that, as you very well know, Ms Schell.’ He waited for some acknowledgement. She despised herself for nodding again. ‘Good. All we’re doing is demanding justice. You have to understand that.’

‘Oh, I understand all right,’ Ginty said. He moved back, but that didn’t make her feel any easier. She forced herself to add: ‘But I’ll have to be fairly even-handed in what I write. If I pretend it’s only your people who’ve suffered, I become … the Sentinel becomes partisan and therefore automatically untrustworthy. I’ll have to include some balance. Do you understand that?’

Rano said something to the man behind him, who straightened up and stopped picking his teeth. Ginty couldn’t withdraw a single word. She just sat, watching them both, hoping she didn’t look too much like a rabbit in the headlights.

‘I know what you’re getting at, yes,’ Rano said at last, his eyes softening a little. Ginty tried to keep her own confident. ‘And it’s a reasonable point, but don’t overdo it. You have to make your readers see that we’ve had no alternative when we’ve hit back. I’ll need your agreement to that before you leave.’

She was very much aware of the other men in the room. Rano was waiting for her response, impatient, his hand clenched around his wineglass.

‘I’ll do my best.’

‘That’s not enough, Ginty.’

She hated the intimacy, and she wondered what Harbinger had said to make Rano feel he had the right to use her name like that. ‘It might help me write convincingly if you could make me understand why what you’re doing to them now – particularly the rapes – is any different from what they have done to you in the past. Aren’t you just fuelling the next bout of revenge?’

Rano frowned and said something over his shoulder to the guard, who stepped forwards. Pictures flashed through Ginty’s mind as her body seized up: the man who had been dragged away as she arrived; the burned villages; the fifteen-year-old who had killed her own child rather than live with the knowledge that he was theirs too.

The soldier walked deliberately round the table to stand just in front of her. Something glinted in his fingers. Her heart thumped, and her throat closed so that she couldn’t breathe. Then she saw he was holding a cigarette packet. He opened it and offered it to her. She shook her head, not trusting her voice. He took it to Rano, who put a cigarette between his lips and leaned forwards for a light. Sucking in the smoke with greedy pleasure, he leaned back in his chair and swung his legs up on to the table again, picking up his wineglass in the hand that already held the cigarette.

Ginty pressed on: ‘Won’t your actions now make them – or their children – try to do the same to you and yours as soon as they get the power back?’

‘If we do our job properly, they won’t get it.’ Rano paused, looked over her head, then added deliberately: ‘And even if they do, most of the next generation of children will be half ours anyway. This time we will sort it out once and for all.’

He looked directly at her. She knew he must have been told what she’d been doing in the camps, that her main job here was to collect stories from the rape survivors for a quite different magazine. And he must have some idea of what she – or any other woman who had heard them – would feel about him and his men.

She tried to listen to what he was saying, instead of the remembered voices of his victims, as he explained that rape of the enemy’s women is the natural response of men at war, and that people in the west made far too much fuss about rape in general. It had always been part of life, he told her, because of the way men have been genetically programmed to ensure a wide enough spread of their genes and prevent in-breeding within the tribe.

He could have been an academic lecturer, offering evidence from well-known scientists and anthropologists, adding as a clincher the observations of primate-watchers, who had seen males of one group raping and kidnapping females of another.

Work on the guns had almost stopped, and the singing with it. If Rano’s men really didn’t understand English, something outside her five senses was making them remarkably attentive to what he was saying.

Half an hour later, he switched off the tape recorder, ejected the two cassettes, labelled them, dated and signed them, and then passed both across the table towards Ginty. The blood caught in his cuticles had dried to a dull brown, but she was beyond horror. Concentrating on his lecture, while fighting her fear, had been more tiring than anything she’d done before. She hoped she’d lived up to Harbinger’s faith in her. But she couldn’t think of that now.

‘If you would just sign both, then we can be sure we’re dealing with the same interview.’

She did as he’d asked, making sure her fingers didn’t touch his. Her hand looked tiny next to his. She wasn’t sure that her legs would hold her up when he let her go.

He stubbed out his cigarette and signalled to the men behind Ginty. One of them came into her peripheral vision, holding a camera.

‘Harbinger will need an illustration. You and I will look good together. A nice contrast. Come on.’

Unable to fight him, Ginty let Rano usher her outside into the sun. Muscles in her knees were jumping, and she felt sick, but she could walk perfectly well. He carefully positioned her in front of a spray of bullet holes near one of the blackened windows, before standing beside her. The young soldier with the camera shot the whole film. Sometimes Ginty was made to smile up at Rano; at others direct to the camera. She felt his arm heavy on her shoulders and tried to show something of her real feelings.

When it was over at last, the man with the camera rewound the film, took it out, and handed it to Ginty. Her hand was sweating so much she thought she might drop it, but she got the little reel into her pocket. The young man fished in his pocket and handed Rano a bundle of black cloth.

‘We have to use this,’ he said, shaking it out and reaching towards her head. ‘As much for your protection as ours. If you were seen unblindfolded with my men, the other side could make you tell them where you’d been today. D’you understand?’

Making a supreme effort, Ginty said lightly: ‘They might try, but since I’ve never been able to read a map and can hardly tell my left from my right, it wouldn’t do them much good.’

He clearly didn’t like the flippancy. ‘That wouldn’t help you, I’m afraid. You see, Ginty, nothing that we have done – or ever thought of doing – is half of what they’re capable of. You do understand that, don’t you?’

There was no point trying to get courage from making a joke if he was going to take her literally.

‘Good. And don’t forget that we have many friends still in London. Some of our people, too. They will always be able to find you if you have trouble remembering what you’ve heard or seen.’

With the barely disguised threat echoing in the hot still air, she nodded again. Her last sight of him before his men tied the scarf around her head, this time taking more care not to rip out her hair, was of the warmth of understanding in his blue eyes. Blindfold, she felt a hand lie gently on her right shoulder so that the thumb could stroke her neck. She shuddered.

Chapter 2

John Harbinger looked at his latest freelance hopeful across the top of his wineglass and began to feel hopeful himself. He let his eyelids droop sleepily and lifted one side of his mouth in a sexy smile.

‘They say you should leave the table while you’re still hungry,’ he murmured, ‘so I suppose we ought to get going …’

‘Oh, but I’m stuffed,’ Sally Grayling said, gasping a little. She looked at her watch, then up again at his face. Her own turned pink as she realized what he’d meant.

Harbinger hadn’t known that girls still blushed. He began to feel a whole lot better. Without looking away from her big grey eyes, he flipped his Gold Card onto the bill and waved to the waiter. Sally wasn’t likely to go far as a journalist if she didn’t toughen up, but he wasn’t complaining. A bit of gentle adoration would come in handy just now. It would make a nice contrast with Kate’s unbelievable aggression, and it might stop him worrying about Ginty Schell.

He still couldn’t imagine what had possessed him to send her to interview Rano. True, she was already on the ground, but so were lots of real journalists: men, tough and experienced, who knew how to handle themselves and could have stood up to a hundred murderous thugs. He must have been mad.

Catching sight of Sally’s anxious eyes, he realized he was scowling. He did his best to forget what Ronald Lackton might be doing to little Ginty Schell and smiled across the table. Sally relaxed at once, all her muscles flowing into each other. Everything about her yearned towards him. Yes! He could still do it. And if her copy turned out to be crap, he could always rewrite it before it went to the subs. At least for as long as her promise held and he got his just reward he could.

‘I’m going to have to go back in a minute,’ he said, smiling ruefully. ‘I’ve got meetings stacked up this afternoon like high-season Gatwick.’

‘Gatwick?’ Her eyebrows were pressed up towards her neat hairline.

Harbinger wondered if she might be thicker than he could cope with. He put on an efficient briskness. ‘So, you’d better send me an outline of your piece. We don’t commission much these days from people who aren’t on our regular list of freelancers. With a synopsis, I’d be in a better position to give you a contract.’

‘Oh, no,’ she said, scooping her hair behind her ears in a gesture as old fashioned as the blush. He began to wonder if even he, with all his legendary editing skills, would be able to do much with her stuff. Still, he told himself, you can never tell. The oddest people do turn out to be able to write. Ginty Schell for one.

‘Then,’ he went on aloud, quelling his doubts, ‘you will at least get a kill fee. OK?’

‘That’s really, really kind of you. I never thought I’d … Well, you know. Thank you, John.’ Her lips parted, still a little wet from the wine she’d just drunk. She really was rather gorgeous. He felt his prick stiffen and for the first time in years had to drop a hand into his lap to smooth it down with his thumb. He hoped she hadn’t noticed. He wondered whether he might be able to get her to come back to the flat with him now for a quickie. She was infinitely shaggable. Oh, God! he thought, as he added a tip to the credit card slip, and signed it. Why had his subconscious thrown up that particular word? If he didn’t get a grip soon, he’d go completely nuts.

He could still see Sally’s wine-stained lips, but they didn’t do anything for him any more. It wouldn’t have made any difference if she’d taken her clothes off for him there and then.

‘Must get back to work,’ he said, as he flipped his wallet shut over the credit cards.

He kissed her cheek at the door of the restaurant and left her there, walking back along the south side of the Thames to his office. Bursts of reflected light hit his eyes from the river as he fought to keep the memories down, but he couldn’t fight hard enough. He was back in The Goat in Eynsham, in June 1970, waiting for Steve.

The Goat was crowded, as it always was on a summer Sunday with all the girlfriends up from London as well as the Oxford-based ones. But there was no sign of Steve. John had searched the place as soon as they arrived, while Dom and Robert got the drinks.

The Shaggee turned up about half an hour later, in a gaggle of other girls from St Hilda’s escorted by a bunch of braying rugger-buggers. She didn’t look too good, obviously hadn’t slept. In John’s experience (more limited than he’d admit except under torture) they didn’t sleep much after the great deflowering, so that could have been a plus – but she also looked as if she could have been crying. Which wasn’t so good.

Half-way through The Goat’s famous steak-and-kidney pie, the rumour began to filter through to John’s table: Virginia Callader’s been raped. Suddenly the bits of kidney seemed disgustingly smooth and the chunks of steak more fibre than anything else. They stuck in his throat. Memories of the old joke weren’t helping – Meet Virginia: Virgin for short but not for long. But if she had been raped, what on earth was she doing living it up in The Goat?

John took a good swig of beer. ‘I’ve been raped’ was the kind of thing girls said when they weren’t sure they should have given in and let you take their bra off. And they all – even Virginia – laughed like hyenas at the other joke, ‘What did the fieldmouse say to the combine harvester? I’ve been reaped! I’ve been reaped!’

But when John looked surreptitiously at The Shaggee and saw her red, swollen eyes and her pallid skin, with the lovebite flaming just under her left ear, his last bit of advice to Steve did begin to seem a bit off:

‘Give her plenty to drink. Don’t take “no” for an answer. If she protests, it only means she wants you to make the decision for her. Don’t forget that neverpublished poem by one of the Romantics: “There’s a no for a no, and a no for a yes, and a no for an I don’t know”. They never mean no when they say it. It’s their way of getting a good screw without taking responsibility for it. They all fantasize about that, you know.’

John saw his mates beginning to absorb the rumour and get ready to ask questions, so he dredged up a good filthy joke and got them all roaring with laughter. Robert’s latest girlfriend looked a bit po-faced, which didn’t help. And Dom blushed, but then he was always a bit otherworldly, like most Wykehamists. In a way it was a pity that Fergus wasn’t there – he could usually be relied on to cheer everyone up – but, given that the whole situation was his fault in the first place, no one had thought to invite him to the Post-Shagging Party.

A ham-like hand bore down on John’s shoulder. Turning, he saw one of The Shaggee’s rugger-buggers. He looked huge and dangerous. John was surprised to find himself faintly apprehensive.

‘Where’s that shit Steve?’

John shrugged. ‘Haven’t seen him today.’

‘When you do, tell him I’m going to kill him. OK? Got that?’

John nodded and turned away, but not before he’d caught sight of Virginia Callader, leaning against a friend’s shoulder, sobbing into a great white handkerchief. What could Steve have done to her? Steve, of all men, who wouldn’t hurt a fly, couldn’t. Too sensitive, that was his trouble: it was what came of having only older sisters and going to the sort of arty-farty co-ed day school his weird parents had chosen.

After Fergus’s intervention, they’d needed to make a man of Steve – at least show him he was one – and screwing Virginia Callader had seemed the best way of doing that. She was gorgeous, and by all accounts adored him. It wasn’t as though they’d sent Steve off after a complete stranger. She’d told all sorts of people that she was in love with him. What could he have done to her? And why hadn’t he opened his door that morning? And what the hell was she doing in the pub?

John pushed away his plate, smeared still with a good half of the best steak-and-kidney around Oxford. He didn’t go in for the kind of worry that kept Steve busy all day and night wondering what other people were thinking and whether he might have upset them (a man like that: how could he have raped anyone?), but something wasn’t right.

‘You’ll have to get yourselves back under your own steam,’ he said abruptly, pushing back his chair. They looked surprised, particularly Robert’s girlfriend, but John knew that Sasha would get them all back safely. She always looked after everyone, even when they were pissed out of their skulls. ‘I’m going to find out what’s happened to Steve.’

Every single traffic light was red and there were jams at all the bottlenecks. John was all for the Ring Road, whatever they said. A few grotty little Oxford houses knocked down was a small price to pay for better traffic flow.

He parked and ran to Steve’s staircase with what felt like a stone in his gut. Steve’s door was still shut. John banged loudly and for a long time. When one of the Northern Chemists emerged from the next room, his greasy hair adorned with liberal quantities of ink to show what a swot he was, John asked if he’d seen Steve that morning.

He hadn’t, and agreed it was odd since Steve had slopped across the quad in his dressing gown on his way to the bathroom before eleven every morning, rain or shine, hungover or sober. John summoned up all his natural authority and sent the Northern Chemist to the Porter’s Lodge, while he stayed, alternately banging and yelling encouragement to Steve to open the door.

By the time the porter produced the necessary master key, John was pretty sure of the sort of thing they were going to find. Even so, the sight of Steve swinging from a noose made from ripped-up pieces of his own gown was enough to turn anyone up. The porter didn’t appreciate the vomit and thought John should pull himself together and fetch the Dean, but he didn’t think he could move. In the end the Northern Chemist went.

Harbinger wrenched himself back from the past. He could still feel the cold weight of Steve’s body against his hand, as it swung away from him. Wiping his hands on his handkerchief, he wondered why he hadn’t realized then that you could never get away from anything you’d done. You might think it had gone, but it just sat there in disguise, like Kate’s anger, waiting to pop up every time you were feeling a tad pathetic. It was her fault, of course. If she hadn’t banged on about how ghastly he was, he’d have been fine. In the days when she’d still thought of him as an OK bloke, Steve had stayed safely in the past. Unlike now.

He’d had a drink with Fergus only a couple of weeks ago, and had tugged the conversation round to Steve and the so-called rape, but it hadn’t got him anywhere. Fergus had turned chilly – very much the grand QC – and pretended he could barely remember Steve. He clearly wasn’t going to take any responsibility for what had happened, which left it all on Harbinger.

Dom was useless these days, far too tied up in Cabinet Office secrecy to react honestly to anyone else’s problems, and when they’d last had lunch in the Athenaeum, he’d refused all attempts to talk about Oxford. Robert was a busted flush, now that his party was out of office and everyone knew he’d never get back on the front bench. He’d see any call from Harbinger as a PR opportunity, or a chance to moan on about how awful it was to lose everything you’d worked for since university. Harbinger had had more than enough of that the only time he’d been rash enough to agree to meet Robert. He’d drunk far too much and practically wept into his whisky before Harbinger had been able to get away. Creepy.

He wondered where Sasha was working now. She’d always been sensible. And she’d never have forgotten Steve. She’d remember every detail of what had happened, just as Harbinger did. It could be worth looking her up. He might get hold of her number and give her a ring tonight.

Chapter 3

The friendly smell of the flat greeted Ginty as soon as she unlocked the door, and she leaned against the jamb, breathing it in. The air was stuffy after her two-week absence, but the mixture of vanilla-scented soap, books, pot-pourri, washing powder, and something indefinably her, was so familiar that it made her feel hugged. She’d never be able to forget Rano and his men, but already they were twenty-four hours and a thousand miles away.

The six lemons she’d left on the sea-blue ceramic plate had survived the heat and still looked glossily yellow as they marked the boundary between the working and eating ends of the huge scrubbed oak table under the windows. She was home.

A messy heap of mail spread out in front of her. Even before she bent down to collect it, she could see cards from all the courier firms and postmen who’d tried to deliver parcels that wouldn’t go through the door. Books, probably, for review. She’d have to phone to make arrangements for another delivery, but that could wait until she’d had a bath.

There had been no hot water when she’d got back to the hotel yesterday, after Rano’s men had dropped her at the checkpoint. Some of the other journalists had been drinking in the lobby bar when she’d arrived and had tried to make her join them. She’d muttered something graceless about having to phone her editor and escaped. Upstairs, with the door locked on the lot of them, she’d wrenched off her clothes and blundered across her untidy room to the shower, longing to wash off the sweat and the sick, humiliating fear she’d felt at Rano’s hands. But the water had hardly even been tepid. Swearing, shivering, trying to hold back the absurd, unnecessary tears, she’d rolled herself first in the inadequate towel, then in the quilt, and tried to get warm.

She shivered again, in spite of the stuffiness and the knowledge that no one had actually done anything to her and she was perfectly safe now. More than that, she’d come home with tapes and photographs that might at last get her the kind of work she wanted.

It couldn’t come soon enough. She was so bored with writing frivolous articles about the loneliness of the longdistance singleton and the perils of falling in love that she could hardly make herself do it, and yet that was usually all she was offered. There was still a pile of stuff on her desk that she hadn’t been able to force herself to finish before she’d left for the refugee camps.

The relentlessness of the freelance life was beginning to get to her as badly as the repetitive silliness of so much of what she was asked to write. Every minute that wasn’t spent trying to finish work that had already been commissioned had to go into hustling for more, and she still had to take everything she was offered, however excruciating. As a teenager she’d fantasized about the perfect man; now all she wanted was the kind of important weekly column that would earn enough to pay her bills and leave her free to pick and choose among the rest.

No wonder I’m losing my touch with diets and dreams of Mr D’Arcy, she thought, hitting the ‘play’ button on her answering machine before opening the windows over her desk.

At the other end of the big room was a pair of french windows, leading to the narrow balcony that provided all the garden she had. Unlocking them, too, she was glad to see that all the herbs and lilies were flourishing in their big glazed pots. Her expensive new automatic watering system must have worked. She picked some basil and rubbed it between her fingers, breathing in the clean, aniseedy scent.

As she listened to the voices of her friends and clients, she looked out over the rooftops and the tiny cat-ridden plots below, glad she’d traded a real garden for this extra height. A police helicopter chugged low across the sky in front of her, then passed again and again, circling noisily overhead. She peered down, wondering whether its officers were monitoring some fugitive hiding in the gardens.

They were a well-known escape route for the area’s school-age burglars, who nearly always overestimated their own strength. When they found they couldn’t hump their stolen televisions and videos over the high fence at the far end of the row, they dumped them there. Ginty’s flat had been turned over twice in the three years she’d had it, and both times her not-very-valuable possessions had been found under the fence and returned to her, grubby and slightly battered.

Few of the phone messages needed answering straight away, which was lucky. She didn’t feel like talking to anyone yet. The boiler thundered in the background. It shouldn’t be too long before the water was hot.

A couple of journalists she didn’t know had called, telling her the names of the mutual friends who’d handed over her phone number and asking if she could help them with background on her father.

‘You’ll be lucky,’ she muttered, assuming that the magazines must be gearing up for a big splash to coincide with his September South Bank concerts. Well, they could get their facts from the press releases or from his agent. She never commented publicly on either of her parents.

The crushed basil leaves were still in her hand when she went back inside, not quite sticky yet but already disintegrating. The smell made her think of holidays and tomatoes and Tuscan sunlight. And Julius. They’d been happy for a long time, until she’d screwed that up, too. A bleep signalled the end of one message, then a familiar voice said:

‘Ginty, it’s your mother. I got your card. Thank you, but I don’t think there is anything I need from you this weekend.’

So, what’s new? Ginty thought.

‘The caterers have everything under control. But if you had time to get hold of some Fru-Grains for your father, he would be grateful. The only shop round here that used to do them has just gone bust. He flew in yesterday and is well. The tour’s a success so far, and he’s pleased with the orchestra now. The strings have come together at last, he says. He can tell you all about it before the party. We are looking forward to seeing you.’

Ginty sighed, wishing her mother could occasionally sound as though she cared. She required her daughter’s presence at all the major family anniversaries, but that was all. From behind a mask of cool detachment, she made it quite clear that Ginty’s opinions were worthless, her friends inadequate, and her yearning for warmth as embarrassing as her lack of height and brains.

The machine bleeped again. Ginty rolled the remains of the basil leaves into a ball and dropped it in the bin, before stopping the messages and pressing the key for her parents’ phone number.

Waiting for the automatic dialling process to click through, she wondered how her mother would explain Rano. His justification of what he was doing still made Ginty feel sick. As an evolutionary psychologist, Doctor Louise Schell could take the heat out of the fieriest emotion and rationalize almost any human behaviour in terms of its survival value. Ginty hoped that organized rape would be too much even for her.

Her new housekeeper, Mrs Blain, answered the phone with the familiar announcement that both Ginty’s parents were at work and could not be disturbed. Trying to feel as cool and untouchable as they, Ginty left a message to say that she’d do her best to track down some Fru-Grains and that she expected to arrive at about eleven-thirty on Saturday.

The only other call she had to answer straight away was from Maisie Antony, the editor of Femina, who had sent her out to the refugee camps in the first place.

‘Ginty, it’s Maisie here,’ said her message. ‘Let me know as soon as you get in. The stories on the news have been ghastly, and I need to know you’re all right. Then we have to work out how you’re going to write the piece. OK? Ring me.’

Ginty rang, touched that Maisie cared enough to be so worried about her, and glad of the welcome, too. But she was in a meeting, so all Ginty got was her secretary and an appointment for Monday afternoon.

The last message came in a highly civilized voice, announcing that its owner was a friend of Ronald Lackton, who’d asked him to ring and offer his services in case she needed anything. He gave his name as Jeremy Hangdale, left a phone number, and said he’d be only too happy to help Ms Schell with any information she might want.

‘We have many friends still in London,’ Rano had told her, but she hadn’t expected them to get to her so fast. Funny how that one call could make her feel so exposed. Fresh air suddenly seemed less important than security, so she locked the french windows again.

Unzipping her bags where they were, she carried piles of dirty clothes straight across to the kitchen to load into the washing machine. When she slid a hand inside the insulation around the water cylinder, she was relieved to feel warmth against her palm. But it wasn’t hot enough for a bath yet, so she made a mug of strong tea, turned on her laptop, plugged in the modem and started to read her e-mails. The snail mail could wait till later.

An hour later, she was standing under the shower, letting the water drum down on her head and sluice over her body. Only when she felt properly clean again did she run a bath. She added lavender oil for serenity and rosemary for strength, without believing in either, lit a couple of orange-scented candles and put some Mozart on the CD player.

‘Always play Mozart, Ginty,’ her father had told her years earlier, ‘when you are feeling low or anxious. Your mood will lift.’

Much later, sitting clenched in front of her laptop, she read through the stiffly formal first draft of her interview with Rano and wrinkled her nose in self-disgust. The three thousand words seemed nearly as constipated as the first book review she’d written. That had taken days and been quite unpublishable. She should have known better by now, but she couldn’t see how to bring this piece to life.

Listening to the interview tape again might help. She rewound it and played it once more. The firmness of her own voice amazed her. No stranger hearing it would have guessed she was a scared amateur, who had to stretch to reach five-foot-three on any measuring stick. But when the tape spooled on to the moment when Rano had insisted that she admit his actions had been justified, she stopped it and decided she needed coffee.

Caffeine couldn’t give her courage, but boiling the kettle provided an excuse to leave her work for a few minutes. When she’d drunk half a mugful, she laid her fingers on the keyboard again, forced herself to remember what it had been like in the farmhouse, and had another crack at recreating Rano and his aura for the comfortable, highbrow, mainly middle-aged readers of the Sentinel.

She wished she could describe the blood under his nails, and the tortured man who’d been dragged away as she arrived, but those must have been exactly the kind of things he’d been warning her about. Maisie had once told her that until she risked getting off the fence and writing what she really believed, her work would always be bland and she’d never get anywhere, but this was different.

She’d just about got to the stage where she could face her mother’s distaste for what she wrote, but the possibility that Rano might send someone round to ‘remind’ her of what he wanted her to write was something else.

‘But would he?’ she asked aloud, hearing her father’s voice in her head as he warned her of the dangers of melodramatic fantasy. She told herself that she’d watched too many James Bond films. No one was going to come crashing through her french windows to beat her up, or fling her into a pool of piranhas. This was London at the end of the twentieth century, and she was – or wanted to be – a serious journalist. She had to take risks.

The first paragraph was too sycophantic even for her. She rewrote it, then deleted the angry new version without even re-reading it. When the phone began to ring she ignored it. The machine could deal with whoever wanted her. This piece had to go to Harbinger in twenty-four hours, whatever state it was in, so she couldn’t slack off now.

Harbinger put Sally Grayling’s faxed outline in his pending tray. It was dire. Nothing about it suggested that she had any talent whatsoever. There wasn’t even a hint of rhythm in her clunky sentences, and she had no idea of basic grammar; even the proper use of the apostrophe was a mystery to her. Worse than that, her banal ideas bored the pants off him. He pushed back his chair until the back of his head nearly touched the late 18th-century bureau bookcase behind him. He still took pleasure in this converted Soho house, with its perfect proportions and panelling, and the glorious furniture the Sentinel’s original owners had provided for their editor. He might be paid only a fraction of what he’d have got as editor of The Times, but at least he didn’t have to work in poxy Wapping and he was surrounded by pieces that would have graced most museums.

Were the likely benefits of pulling Sally Grayling worth a crash course in basic journalism? Basic English even? Bellowing for a cup of tea, he decided to think about it later and do some real work before the end of the day. The week’s copy deadline was still two days away, so all the pros were hanging on to their stuff. But Ginty Schell had sent hers through.

His assistant brought in the tea, strong and dark orange as he liked it.

‘You OK, John?’

‘Why?’

‘You look as if you’ve seen a ghost.’

‘Worse than usual?’ He held back his usual lecture on the deadening effect of cliché.

‘Much.’

He grunted. ‘Nothing tea won’t cure. Bugger off now, will you? I’ve got work to do.’

‘OK.’

He waited, finger on the mouse, until she had gone, then he let Ginty Schell’s formally arranged e-mail reveal itself on the screen again.

Dear John,

Here, cut and pasted into the e-mail as you asked, is my piece on Rano. He was quite firm about what he wanted me to include, but it seems important to offer something of the opposite point of view, too. Anyway, I hope I haven’t made it too even-handed, too bland. Let me know what you think,

Ginty Schell.

Harbinger sighed for her lack of self-protection. He really was going to have to take her in hand. Didn’t she know yet that you shouldn’t express doubts about your own work when you submitted it? Or that you should wait until the deadline to make sure what you’d written didn’t seem stale when the final decision on the week’s contents was made?

But as he read he began to smile. Beginner though she was, she hadn’t done badly. The piece could do with tightening here and there, hardening up once or twice too, and it needed the few telling personal touches that would lift it out of the good-exercise category and into something the Sentinel could publish. But he was reasonably pleased. And he was dead pleased to know she was safely back. That might let him sleep tonight. He reached for the phone.

‘Ginty? John Harbinger here. How are you?’

‘Fine. Did you get my e-mail?’

‘Yes. You’ve done a good job so far. It needs work, but for a first draft, it’s not too bad. I thought we might go through it over dinner.’

‘This evening?’ She sounded suspicious. Almost like bloody Kate. He wondered who’d been talking to her.

‘Yes. I need the finished version by Monday evening, as you know, so that would give you the weekend to knock it into shape.’

She was knackered, she told him, and needed an early night. After a second, she added in a rush that she wasn’t trying to avoid him, only making sure she got enough sleep.

‘Enough for what?’ he said with a suggestion of a laugh.

‘I’ve just been phoned to ask if I’ll go on Annie Kent’s Saturday radio show tomorrow morning – to discuss rape. Radio always makes me nervous and if I’m too tired, I’ll make a fool of myself and my voice will be all croaky.’

‘Good for you,’ said Harbinger, seeing the opportunity for a little publicity. ‘You will say something about the Sentinel, won’t you? After all, it’s not the BBC, so there are no rules against advertising.’

‘If I’m allowed to,’ Ginty said, adding more briskly: ‘And if you e-mail me with the changes you want to the interview, I’ll get you a revised version by the end of Monday. And by then I should have prints of the photographs Rano’s men took – and some of my own – in case you want illustrations.’

‘Good. That’ll help. Now, are you sure about dinner? Editing is always more satisfactory face to face than via e-mail. You sound like a woman who needs food.’

‘Honestly, I think I’d fall over if I tried to go out tonight. Like I said, I need to get my head down. I’ve got a hell of a lot of work on, and it’s my mother’s fiftieth birthday tomorrow. I’ve got to drive straight down to Hampshire after Annie Kent’s show, which means I’ll lose most of the rest of the weekend. But I’ll do your rewrite on Monday. I promise.’

‘What about having dinner with me then, as a celebration?’

‘All right. Fine. Yes, thank you. I’ll look forward to it. Bye.’

‘Me too. Before you go, Ginty: how was it? I mean, face to face with Rano? It sounds as though it might have been pretty rough.’

There was a high-pitched gasp down the phone as though she was about to giggle. Damn! It would be a bugger if she turned into another silly girl after all the trouble he was taking for her. But it turned out that she wasn’t laughing.

‘It was vile, while it lasted, but they didn’t actually do anything to me. And I got back in one piece, so I’m filing it under “useful experience”. That should deal with the nightmares.’

‘Great,’ he said as casually as he could with the word ‘nightmares’ sticking in his mind. ‘I’ll see you Monday. Have a good weekend.’

Putting down the receiver, he wondered what she was really like. The first time they’d met, she’d reminded him of those East European gymnasts, with her childish body and the big hurt eyes. She was pretty enough, and rather sweet, but not his type, so he’d been surprised Janey Fergusson had thought he might fancy her. Then, glancing around the room, he’d seen a long-legged blonde with big tits and a taut torso stretching her skimpy black dress and realized Ginty had been invited for someone else.

But the blonde had turned out to be a self-obsessed vacuous pain, in spite of her amazing body, so he’d started to pay more attention to Ginty and been reluctantly impressed. She’d laughed when he said he’d seen some of her work. Most wannabes were left gasping – or grasping – by the mildest of compliments from anyone in his position. And once she’d got over her evident surprise that he wanted to listen to her, she’d talked well. But there’d been nothing in what she’d said, or how she’d looked, to justify the conviction that had been growing in him ever since, that she had something he needed.

If so, he was clearly going to have to work hard to get it. There weren’t many young, female, freelance journalists who turned him down when he offered them dinner, even when they were doing some radio the next day. It hadn’t occurred to him that she might refuse, so he hadn’t set up anything else. Still, there’d be plenty of parties; there always were.

He riffled through the clutch of invitations on his desk. They were all from PR girls, desperate to drum up some publicity for yet another ghastly new book or an artist no one had ever heard of. One, which he’d been avoiding ever since it arrived, made him wince as it reached the top of the pile again. A nephew of Steve’s had become a painter and was having a private view next week. Harbinger put that on one side, then dumped the rest in the bin. He was too tired to go on the pull anyway.

The first three mates he phoned were busy, so he rang the local takeaway for a curry instead. It ought to reach the flat pretty much at the same time as he did.

The moment he unlocked his front door, he was hit by a peculiar smell, sickly and rotten, like decomposing bodies.

Oh, Christ! he thought. I am going off my trolley.

A second later he realized something must have gone wrong with the drains and felt better, even though he had no idea what to do about getting hold of a plumber. That sort of thing had never been his job. Bloody Kate had always done that.

As far as he could see, he hadn’t got anything out of their twelve-year marriage in return for working his arse off to pay the mortgage. He’d had to put up with Kate’s ghastly family, her PMT, the sleepless nights, the babysick and nappies, and all he’d got back had been constant carping about the time he spent at work and his inadequate sexual technique. Bloody women.

He was sniffing round the bathroom, leaning down towards the basin’s plughole, which smelled only of the toothpaste he’d spat into it that morning. The bog was OK, too, and the bath, so maybe it wasn’t the plumbing. He sniffed his way all round the flat like a customs’ dog. The sheets could do with changing, but it wasn’t them; they were just a bit grubby. And there were no sweaty games clothes either. He hadn’t played squash for weeks. Perhaps that was why he’d been sleeping so badly.

He followed the stink round the flat, ending up in the kitchen, staring at a virtually clean saucepan. All it had in it was half an inch of vaguely green water, but it stank. He’d boiled some frozen peas in it a few days ago, just after the cleaner’s weekly visit. He hadn’t known water could turn rancid like this.

Pouring it down the sink, he thought he might throw up. A gush of cold water from the tap washed away the slime, but he couldn’t get the smell out of his mouth and nose. It really was like decomposing bodies. Oh, God! Somehow he had to stop thinking about dead bodies or he really would go bonkers.

A good slug of whisky would take away the memory of that smell, he thought, as the bell rang. It was his curry. Damn good, too. He ate it, watching his video of Cape Fear. That and the whisky got him through the evening until it was time to go to bed.

Hours later, he reared up off the pillow, sweat pouring from his skin. Choking, he flung back the duvet. This time the dream had had an added extra torture. As he’d advanced on the body and felt it swing against the flat of his hand, he’d looked up and seen that it had Ginty Schell’s face. This was ridiculous. He hadn’t done her any harm. Not yet anyway.

Harbinger got out of bed and staggered to the bathroom to get a glass of water. The taste of curry in his mouth made him feel gross, and the sight of his pouchy eyes and clammy grey-pink face in the mirror turned him up. He looked about a hundred-and-fifty. He’d be ill soon if he didn’t find a way to stop all this.

It must have been Kate’s loony accusations that had set off these dreams. He was a decent bloke, whatever she’d said. Look at Ginty Schell. He’d given her a leg up without any nefarious intentions. Her Rano interview was going to give her a much higher profile than she’d ever have got writing for Maisie Antony or any of the other women’s mag harpies.

He tried going back to sleep, but it didn’t work, so he poured some more whisky and put on another video. Sometimes now, he slept in front of them, waking with his back wrenched and his tongue bitten. But usually he watched until dawn, then went back to bed and managed to get another hour or two. He was so tired, he sometimes wondered how much longer he could go on. It was even worse than when the kids had been babies.

Perhaps all he needed was another girlfriend. He still wasn’t sure about Sally Grayling, but he could always give her a go. See how it went. She wasn’t the sort of hardfaced bitch Kate had turned into, and she might know a plumber.

Chapter 4

Ginty had been afraid that her voice would be squeaky with nerves when she was eventually taken to the studio to be introduced to the presenter and her fellow-speaker. But the atmosphere was so relaxed and so cheerful that she felt her throat ease a little, and when she said good morning to them her voice sounded almost normal.

A thin plastic beaker of cold water from the filter just outside the studio door reassured her that she wouldn’t have to croak. She waited, trying to feel confident as she watched the clock over the presenter’s head for the programme to begin. The seconds jerked by, the clock’s hand bouncing a little at each green dot. As the hand reached the top, a red bulb glowed beside it, and the presenter nodded towards a dark glass wall between her and the engineers.

‘You’re listening to My Radio, and I’m Annie Kent,’ she said in her familiar, seductive voice, as though she were talking to someone she knew and trusted.

Ginty reminded herself to copy it. On the few previous occasions when she’d been interviewed on the radio, she’d sounded as though she’d been talking to a vast lecture hall full of hostile strangers.

‘We’re here this morning to talk about rape. I have with me Doctor George Murphy, who has been working with sex offenders for the past twenty years, and Ginty Schell, who is just back from the refugee camps, where she has been interviewing rape survivors about their experiences.’

The doctor produced an affectionate-sounding ‘hello’ for listeners, but Ginty wasn’t quick enough to say anything.

‘Now, Doctor Murphy,’ said Annie, obviously speedreading a sheet of paper on a clipboard in front of her, ‘you have written in support of the new theory that rape is not, after all, a crime of violence. It’s an evolutionary adaptation to ensure the survival of certain genes. What exactly did you mean by that?’

Ginty bit her tongue. She should have done some research before agreeing to come on this programme, but there hadn’t been time. If she were going to have to argue with a man whose beliefs sounded like a cross between Rano’s and her mother’s, she might lose it.

‘And what do you think, Ginty?’

She pulled herself together, not having listened to the doctor’s answer, and licked her lower lip. ‘Well, I don’t agree. I do think rape is about violence, but, even more, it’s about control.’

That was a bit lecture-y, she thought. Relax.

Annie Kent was smiling, but she gestured with her right hand to make Ginty speed up. She tried to obey: ‘I’m sure, too, that some men use it as a way of terrorizing people who might otherwise be a threat.’

‘Is that what you think’s happening in the war?’

‘Yes. I can’t believe that the rapes have really been organized to make sure that the next generation of children belongs to both sides, whatever Doctor Murphy assumes.’

‘But …’ he began, but Ginty was launched now. She couldn’t hold in the words.

‘I think the whole campaign has been organized to destabilize the enemy. It’s an appalling example of men using women’s suffering in their own fight with other men. Unforgivable, but unfortunately typical.’

‘Doctor Murphy?’

‘Did you know, Ms Schell, that rape is more likely to result in conception than unforced lovemaking?’ he asked in a voice so reasonable that it sounded patronizing.

Ginty swallowed, thinking about Maria and the child she’d murdered.

‘No, I didn’t,’ she said, ‘but I don’t see that that makes any difference.’

‘Why not?’

‘I don’t see how it’s relevant to whether rape is or is not a violent crime.’ Clumsy, she told herself. Make it personal, specific: ‘Do you ever talk to rape victims, Doctor Murphy?’

‘Not many. My business is with offenders, who are sent to me for treatment.’

‘Well, I don’t see how you can bring them to understand what they’ve done, unless you yourself know what it’s like for a woman. Any victim of real rape could tell you that it’s definitely a crime of violence and power; nothing to do with procreation.’

‘The two are not mutually exclusive, and …’ Doctor Murphy began, just as Annie Kent started to talk, overriding him with ease, even though she didn’t sound remotely bossy:

‘What do you mean by “real rape”, Ginty?’

‘Forcible rape by a stranger,’ she said quickly, the anger she’d felt as she listened to Maria coming back to loosen the words in her mind. ‘The stories I heard out there have made me intensely impatient with women in countries like this – and the States – who may have had a bad time in bed, or drunk more than they meant and regretted making love, then gone on to claim they’ve been raped. However unpleasant, uncomfortable or humiliating what’s happened to them, it’s not the same.’

What a speech, she thought, as she heard the pontifical note in her voice and forced herself to stop.

‘And what about Rohypnol?’ said Annie with deceptive gentleness. Ginty wished she’d kept her mouth shut.

‘That’s different,’ she said, hearing the power in her voice diminish. She felt as she always did when arguing with her mother, outmanoeuvred and under-informed. ‘Giving someone a drug covertly is forcing them. It’s not like one drink too many, taken knowingly – of your own free will.’

‘A lot of people have fought hard – are still fighting – to establish the fact that “No” means “No”,’ Annie Kent said, making it clear whose side she was on, so Ginty had to answer.

‘I’m not suggesting for one moment that a woman can’t go out with a man and still decline to have sex with him. Of course she can. Women must be allowed to dress attractively, flirt, kiss or behave in some other way that leads men to think they’re going to get lucky, and still refuse. Of course they must. But if a man then persuades a woman against her better judgement, or encourages her to drink so much that she loses her inhibitions and does sleep with him, calling what’s happened “rape” diminishes the real thing and short changes the real victims – like the women in those camps. The word “rape” implies violence – or at least the threat of it.’

As she spoke, she saw surprise on Annie Kent’s face, but she didn’t comment then, turning instead to Doctor Murphy to ask whether he thought his theories meant that men who rape were less culpable than those who committed other kinds of violence – against women or men. Ginty listened crossly, wondering if he was being deliberately provocative. She kept a tight hold on her reactions, and answered the last few questions as calmly as she could without backing down.

Annie Kent wound up the programme, inviting her listeners to call in with their views. The red light went out, and she pulled off her heavy-looking headphones, saying cheerfully:

‘We’ll get a lot of calls about that. You were very brave, Ginty, denying the existence of date rape. You’ll have the PC brigade all over you now, not to speak of date rape victims. It’s a subject that always gets people going.’ She looked pleased.

‘Oh, God,’ Ginty said. ‘That’s not what I meant. I wasn’t thinking. I was just so shocked by what some of those women out there – children really – have been through that I … Damn! When will I learn to think before I speak?’

‘Don’t worry about it,’ said Doctor Murphy casually. ‘It made a good programme. Listeners like a bit of controversy.’

‘Do they?’

‘Of course. I used to shade what I said, put both sides of every case, and ended up boring everyone. There’s nothing most people like more than an excuse for outrage. You’ll have done a public service this morning, letting them get rid of some of their spleen. You don’t have to look as though you’ve just murdered your grandmother.’

Ginty managed to laugh.

‘That’s better. Can I buy you a cup of coffee?’

‘I’d like that. Thank you,’ Ginty said before checking her watch. ‘Oh, no! I can’t. I’m really sorry. But I have to be in Hampshire by eleven-thirty, so I’ll have to go now.’

Harbinger hit the button on the top of his kitchen radio with a triumphant pop of his fist. No wonder he’d sent little Ginty out to interview Rano! No wonder he’d had this idea that he’d met her for a purpose, that she had something he needed! He could have kissed her.

‘Calling that rape diminishes the real thing and shortchanges the real victims,’ he recited, practically dancing over to the espresso machine.

Good for Little Ginty Schell. His heroine. He’d buy her a bloody good dinner on Monday. And he’d see what he could do to get her the career she wanted so much.

Freshet House was a small Queen Anne box, built on a gentle incline above untouched, old-fashioned water meadows. Its red brick façade had been pitted and faded to a rosy softness, but the pristine paint on the cornice and windows gleamed in the sunlight as Ginty turned into the drive two hours later.

Square, safe, and very English, the house sat in ravishing gardens that had just reached their annual moment of perfection. She looked and admired and wished she felt part of it all. Now that she’d probably alienated half the world by what she’d just said on air, it would have been nice to find a refuge here.

Luckily neither of her parents listened to the radio, unless of course there happened to be some incredibly important music on Radio 3. She parked her Ka neatly between their Volvos, checking that she’d left enough space for them to open their doors, and that she hadn’t allowed her front wheels to slip over the edge of the gravel on to the grass, both sins for which she’d been castigated in the past.

To one side of the house were the old stables, where Louise Schell had her working library and offices; to the other was the startling, modernist music room Gunnar had had built when he bought the place thirty years ago, in the days when planning officers let that kind of thing through. Ginty sometimes thought that the arrangement was typical of their lives: screened, separated, and selfcontained.

As always in good weather, the back door to the house itself stood open. Ginty walked past the laundry and the store rooms, down the long black-and-white-floored passage towards the kitchen. In the pantry a strange young man in white trousers and T-shirt was counting piles of plates. Crates of glasses were stacked up on the floor beside him, with cases and cases of wine. Dozens of champagne bottles lay on their sides in the wine bins. In the dim light, the rows of dark-green glass looked like Rano’s guns.

The kitchen smelled of yeast and raspberries. Mrs Blain was very much in charge, standing in a white overall with a clipboard in her hand. Three other women were working for her, dressed in similar overalls and mesh hats. One was making what looked like brioches, another picking over trays of soft fruit, and the third was standing at a separate worktop trimming whole fillets of beef. Her hands were bloody, but all the kitchen surfaces were of gleaming stainless steel and there were no ungainly gaps or chips to collect grime and microbes.

Ginty had a moment’s guilty pleasure as she dropped her purchases on one of the draining boards. The plastic bags had almost certainly collected germs from her car.

‘I’ll take care of those,’ said Mrs Blain, looking up from her clipboard. ‘Thank you. Your parents are in the garden. And …’

And you are in the way, Ginty supplied, understanding the polite tones with ease. She nodded, moved on to the garden room to collect a floppy straw hat from the pile by the door, and set out to find them.

There was no wind to stir the hot air. Nothing moved. Even the birds had ceased to flop in and out of the dovecote. A pair of rooks squatted on the shaven lawn, beaks open and wings hanging out from their bodies like stiff black screens. The mower had left a faint petrol smell to spike the richness of cut grass and lavender.

Over the top of the yew hedges, Ginty could see the pinnacles of what looked like an elaborate marquee. She was amused to see that the peacocks were not in evidence. After the last concert they’d ruined with their screams, her father must have insisted on their removal.

She followed the distant hum of voices, between the borders, through the walled garden, and down the yew walk towards the river. The sounds became inaudible words, then distinct syllables, then real language:

‘… think so. It’s too much responsibility. If one of them should drink too much, take a canoe and capsize, it would be … tricky. Let’s have both put into the boathouse and then there will be no temptation and so no trouble.’

‘Hello?’ Ginty called.

‘Ginty!’ Her father’s voice answered. ‘You have made good time. We are down here by the bridge.’

She walked on, to see her mother sitting on the stone parapet, with her back to the river. She was wearing another of the big soft straw hats. The unravelling edge made a ragged fringe over her face, but when Ginty bent forwards to kiss her, she saw the unmistakable marks of exhaustion. She knew better than to say anything.

When she straightened up, Gunnar kissed her forehead as he always did. ‘You look well. Doesn’t she, Louise?’

‘Yes.’ Louise smiled at Ginty but managed, in patting her arm, to push her further away. ‘It’s a relief. If I’d known where you were while I watched the news each evening, I …’ Louise stopped, then took a fine lawn handkerchief from her pocket and wiped her upper lip. ‘Well, as you can imagine, I’m glad to see you safely back. Shall we go up?’

Couldn’t you sound a bit more passionate about it? Ginty asked in silence. I could have been in real danger out there.

Humiliated by the longing she should have grown out of years ago, she wondered suddenly if she’d accepted Maisie Antony’s commission as a way of scaring her mother into showing some emotion. If so, it had clearly been a waste of time. Nothing was going to shock Louise Schell into pretending affection she didn’t feel.

She staggered a little as she slid to the ground, murmuring something about the dazzle. Gunnar took her arm and they strolled together towards the house, both tall and elegant in their matching loose white linen trousers and shirts. Ginty followed, bending to pick up the sunglasses that had dropped out of her mother’s pocket with the handkerchief.

That night, as she moved among the guests in the garden, Ginty discovered that her encounter with Rano had bought her something, even if not what she’d most wanted. Instead of spending the evening hovering on the edge of conversations between her parents’ friends, she found herself talking about the war, as though she’d become some kind of expert. A few of the guests had heard the Annie Kent programme, but luckily most of them agreed with Ginty, and even the ones who didn’t were polite about her views on rape.

Boosted by the interest and compliments, she voluntarily went to talk to a music publisher and her husband, who had always terrified her in the past. Tonight they greeted her with apparent pleasure and even congratulated her on the courage she must have needed to face a thug like Rano.

‘Thank you.’ Ginty smiled up at the woman. Like most of the guests tonight, she was intimidatingly tall, as well as beautifully dressed and jewelled. Ginty tried not to let that make her feel small and grubby – or stupid. ‘But honestly I didn’t have much choice. His men picked me up and forced my interpreter and bodyguard to stay behind. So I just had to go along with it.’

‘I think you’re amazing. I’d have been scared out of my wits.’

As Ginty thanked her, she caught sight of a lone woman, standing on the edge of the terrace and apparently unable to break into any of the groups of chatting friends. Instead, she was peering into the waxy paleyellow petals of the magnolia grandiflora that grew beside the garden room door, as though an air of intense concentration might protect her from the humiliation of being alone. Someone would have to gather her up and ease her into the party. Ginty knew from experience that no one else would bother, so she made an excuse and moved to the rescue. Before she was half-way to the magnolia, she overheard the publisher say:

‘She has done well, hasn’t she? What a relief for Gunnar! With that cloth ear of hers and all the problems over her education and career, he must have been worried she’d never amount to anything.’

Her husband’s voice was kinder: ‘Don’t be too hard on her. Think what it’d be like to be an only child growing up in a house like this, always in their shadow. And with Louise being so beautiful and Gunnar looking like a Norse god …’

Ginty walked on in the scented dusk, glad she had her back to him. He was right, of course: it had been hard. For years she’d assumed she must have been adopted because that was the only way she could account for her lack of looks and talent. Just after her sixteenth birthday she had pretended she needed her birth certificate for some bit of school administration. That should have settled it because she was described in a neat italic hand as the daughter of Gunnar and Louise Schell, née Callader. But it had only set her thinking up stories of hospital carelessness and changelings and unlabelled babies given to the wrong couples.

‘I’ve always thought they smell of lemon soufflé,’ she said to the solitary guest, ready to take the conversation into botany, art, the sensual effects of flowers, or anything else that might suit. ‘By the way, I’m Ginty Schell.’

‘I know. I think I’d have recognized your smile anywhere.’

Ginty looked up at the softly creased face of the older woman and tried to find the right name in her memory.

‘Don’t worry about it,’ the woman said comfortably. ‘I moved to the States soon after your third birthday. You couldn’t possibly remember me. I used to look after you while Louise was working for her degree.’

‘I …’

The woman smiled, which made her face even more creased. Something did begin to move in Ginty’s mind and before she’d thought, she said: ‘Are you Nell?’

‘My God! Amazing!’

Warm memories were gushing up, as though a switch had been thrown in Ginty’s brain. There had been picnics, and stories, nightlights in the dark, sweets and all the warmth anyone could have wanted. How could she have forgotten it?

‘Of course I do. I can’t think why I didn’t recognize you at once. I missed you so much when you went.’

‘Me, too. It took me months to get over it. But I had to leave if Louise was to have any chance … You know, Ginty, I’ve been hearing about you from all sides and trying to tie up these stories of the fearless war reporter with the touching little creature you were, who had such awful nightmares. How did you do it?’

Ginty laughed. The party suddenly seemed more alive. Then she saw that the guests were moving towards the music room. There was to be an hour’s concert before dinner. She felt as though she was shrivelling inside her skin.

‘What’s up?’ asked Nell.

Ginty explained, adding: ‘It’s not that I don’t like music; I just hate the way it always has to be more important than anything else.’ She looked quickly over her shoulder to make sure they couldn’t be overheard.

‘Then why don’t we take advantage of the weather and the garden and just chat?’ said Nell. ‘There’s no reason why we have to go and listen to Gunnar and his band, is there?’

Band, thought Ginty in shocked delight. The irreverence!

They walked slowly down through the yew walk towards the river. Seeing the moon reflected in the blackish-green water and the way the pink and yellow flowers trailed off the opposite bank, she regretted the locking up of the two canoes. A fish nosed upwards, sending ripples through the surface, breaking the light into thin strips that spread and shivered and slowly reformed.

Nell kicked off her evening shoes to reveal bare legs and scarlet toenails and sat on the bank, wriggling her toes in the dark green water. Ginty looked at the bare legs in envy, then thought: why not? Hitching up her long cream-silk dress, she stripped off her tights and sat down on the bank. This was an unexpected bonus of freedom in a weekend she’d been dreading. She stretched out her feet until the cool water met her hot constricted toes.

‘So,’ Nell said, patting her hand, ‘tell me what’s happened to make you so tough.’

Ginty grimaced, thinking of the huge mass of people and possibilities that made her feel so vulnerable. ‘It’s only cosmetic – like fake tan. But I’m glad if it’s convincing.’

Nell looked her up and down in the moonlight. ‘Dead convincing. Very well applied, if I may say so; no tell-tale streaks at all.’

Chapter 5

Next day Ginty couldn’t remember exactly what they had talked about, but she felt as though Nell’s affection had stacked cushions of reassurance around her. They’d swapped e-mail addresses and promised not to lose touch again. But now she’d gone, along with all the other guests, the musicians and Gunnar himself, leaving Ginty alone with her mother.

They were sitting under the cedar at the edge of the lawn, having lunch. Sunday was Mrs Blain’s weekly day off, so Ginty had made sandwiches from some of the leftover beef, layered with asparagus and dollops of cold Béarnaise sauce sharpened with extra lemon juice. Trying to think of everything her mother might want, she had brought out an ice bucket with a bottle of fizzy water and a half-drunk bottle of claret from the pantry.

‘Tell me what happened to you out there,’ Louise said, tilting her head back against the padded head-rest of her chair to look up through the dark layers of the tree. Her left hand trailed against the grass, occasionally rising to stroke the icy glass of water.

‘Why do you think anything happened?’ Ginty heard herself sounding defensive and wished she had more self-control. Her mother’s question wasn’t that different from Nell’s, however critical it had sounded. Ginty tried to see kindness rather than judgement in her mother’s face, and failed.

‘Because you’ve changed, even since Easter. I was watching you at the party last night. I don’t think I’ve ever seen you so confident. Happy, even. Are you in love again?’

Ginty thought about the days when she’d still brought boyfriends to Freshet and watched them elegantly demolished by one parent or the other. Sometimes, looking back, she thought she might have been able to make it work with one or two, if she hadn’t been made to feel an undiscriminating fool for even liking them.

‘No. I still see a bit of Julius, but we’re only friends these days.’

‘Just as well. He’s not reliable, I’m sure, and all that exaggerated charm! Rather cheap, really.’ Louise shuddered delicately. ‘So it must have been something that happened to you out there in the refugee camps. Tell me about it.’

Ginty described a little of what she’d seen and heard, always watching for signs of boredom. Louise listened carefully, but made no comment, so Ginty ploughed on.

‘And he sat there in the room where he’d clearly been torturing the man I saw as I arrived, explaining to me that the things his men did to women were perfectly normal.’

Louise sipped her water and watched Ginty over the rim of the glass. Ginty had no idea what she was thinking.

‘So I suppose if I do seem tougher, it may be partly because I finished the interview, in spite of being such a hopeless coward.’ She paused, not sure whether she wanted denial or compliment. She didn’t get either. ‘And partly because he made me so angry.’

‘Angry about the beating you nearly witnessed, or about what they’re doing to those women?’ Louise’s voice was different now, almost breathless. Of course it was very hot, even under the tree. Ginty picked up the bottle of Vichy to refill her glass, but there was still plenty there.

‘All of it,’ she said. ‘But particularly the rapes. In fact I was on the radio yesterday, talking …’

‘About date rape. I know. Mrs Blain came running upstairs to tell me you were on. I heard most of it.’ Louise’s voice was hard. ‘You think that talking about “date rape” diminishes victims of “the real thing”.’

‘Don’t you?’

There was silence as they both stared out at the faintly blue distance. A heat haze was making the air shimmer. The cedar above them smelled heavily spicy. Ginty brushed a passing fly off her damp forehead and bent to pick up her glass, resting the cold wet surface against her forehead. It soothed the ache.

‘Ginty?’

‘Yes?’

‘You ought to know that date rape isn’t so trivial.’

Surprised at the thinness of her mother’s voice, Ginty turned. A muscle was fluttering under the slack skin beneath her mother’s left eye. She swallowed, then coughed as though there was no saliva in her mouth. Her lips parted, but she said nothing. She licked her lower lip, then coughed again.

‘Ginty …’ There seemed to be a plea in the sound. Unprecedented.

Oh God, Ginty thought, far too late: it happened to her. But how could I have known?

‘I’m sure it’s horrible,’ she said carefully, wanting to make peace without giving in yet again. ‘But it can’t ever be as bad as what’s happening to the women out there.’

‘Maybe not.’ Louise pulled a clean handkerchief out of her trouser pocket and wiped her dry lips. ‘But it can have repercussions. Serious, damaging repercussions that last for ever.’

‘I …’ They had never discussed anything messily emotional, and Ginty had no idea how to deal with this. But she had to say something. ‘I’m getting the feeling that this conversation is turning rather personal.’

Louise said nothing. Ginty drank for courage. ‘I had no idea you might ever have … If I’d realized, I’d …’ What would I have done? she wondered. Not raised the subject here, anyway.

Louise swung her feet to the ground so that they were face to face. ‘I know,’ she said quickly. ‘You’ve never been prurient or gratuitously unkind.’

There was a sudden sharp pain in Ginty’s calf. She brushed her trousers, felt something move under the cloth and pulled it up. A huge horsefly flew off her skin, leaving a swelling red patch and a spreading ache beneath.

‘Ugh,’ Ginty said. ‘A cleg. Sorry, but I think I’m going to have to put something on this.’

‘Yes, you’d better. Stay there; I know where the Sting Relief is. I’ll get it. Don’t put your leg up; that makes it worse. Leave it there. I’ll be back in a minute.’

Louise ran towards the house so fast that her hat dropped behind her. In spite of the pain in her leg, Ginty was grateful to the horsefly for ending the impossible conversation. By the time her mother came back the sharpness had gone from the bite, but the ache it had left was throbbing still. The swelling was now nearly three inches across, raised like a boil.

Louise subsided gracefully on to her knees in front of Ginty and began to anoint the bite. It was strange to feel those long fingers caressing her skin through the salve.

‘There!’ Louise sat back on her heels as she screwed the top back on the neatly rolled blue tube. ‘I hope that’ll help. I’m sorry it took me so long to find. Someone must have moved it.’

‘That’s fine. It’s much better.’ Ginty smiled to show that she wasn’t going to ask any more questions about the date rape, but her mother had already turned away.

‘I’d never intended to tell you anything about it,’ she said as she lay back in her chair. This time her eyes were closed. ‘But now I’m not sure. Ever since I heard you on the radio, sounding so authoritative, so condemnatory, I’ve been thinking perhaps … Perhaps you do need to know.’

‘Don’t say anything if you’d rather not. I’m not …’

‘No. I think it’s time.’ Louise opened her eyes and let them slide sideways so that she could look at her daughter. Ginty couldn’t see any hint of affection or even tolerance in them.

‘Pour me some wine, will you? I don’t think water will be enough to get me through this.’ Louise sipped the richly tannic claret. She looked utterly in control, but she said: ‘I don’t know where to start.’

‘Perhaps with what happened, and how,’ Ginty suggested, noticing that her voice was as calm and polite as usual. Odd that, with the feelings battering at her. ‘If you really do want to tell me.’

‘It was when I was in my first year at Oxford, and …’

‘But you were at Cambridge.’

‘That came later.’ Louise moved so that she was sitting on the edge of her long chair. Her knees were slightly apart and her hands hung down between them. She picked up her glass, only to put it back on the ground without drinking. She gripped her hands together, then wound them in and out of each other as though she was washing. The rings moved so that the big stones ended up inside one hand, where they must have scratched the other. But her voice was formal and nearly as clipped as a wartime radio announcer’s:

‘I went up to Oxford – St Hilda’s – when I was nineteen. There was a boy in one of the other colleges. He used to take me out sometimes. We weren’t sleeping together.’

Ginty blinked. Her mother had never talked about her emotions, let alone her sex life.

‘I hadn’t been to bed with anyone. But one night, when we’d been out to dinner and had gone back to his room for coffee as usual, he raped me. After I’d gone, he hanged himself.’

‘Because of you?’

Louise’s face could have been made from plaster of Paris. Her lips were so stiff they hardly moved. ‘It was not my fault he died.’

‘Of course not,’ Ginty said, slipping to her knees in front of her mother, longing to help. Louise moved back. Defeated all over again, Ginty returned to her chair, saying: ‘That’s not what I meant, either now or in what I said on the radio. I was only talking about terminology. You were a victim, whatever the offence is called.’

The stiffness eased very slightly. ‘No one thought that at the time.’

Ginty grabbed the wine bottle and slopped more into both glasses.

Louise shook her head, feeling for her handkerchief. There was no sweat to wipe off, but she passed the thin white square backwards and forwards across her lips.

‘Who was he?’ Ginty asked when the silence had become unbearable.

Back went the handkerchief, back and forth. Ginty’s mind began to crank slowly into gear. She did the sums.

‘And when exactly did it happen?’ She wished the question hadn’t sounded so harsh, but it was hard to speak ordinarily with what felt like a bird’s nest stuck in her throat.

Louise looked at her. ‘Nine months before you were born, Ginty. I’m sorry.’

A high, thin, buzzing sound filled Ginty’s head. Heat rushed through her body. A second later she was freezing, with sweat lying clammy in the crevices of her knees and elbows. She couldn’t see. She couldn’t think. She asked the first question that came into her head:

‘He was my father? This rapist? Not Gunnar?’

‘Yes.’

‘No wonder you’ve always hated me.’

‘Ginty, don’t be absurd.’ Even now, Louise sounded no more than mildly impatient.

Ginty drained her glass and refilled it, splashing wine over the side on to her hand. Seeing it drip on to the grass, she brought it up to her mouth and sucked loudly. The pain in her leg was dulling, but the swelling was as wide and pink as ever, with a dark red dot in the centre.

‘Who was he? I think I ought to be told that, at least, don’t you, since I owe half of everything I am to him?’

‘He was called Steven Flyford. Steve.’ Louise’s voice was as bleak as an empty room. ‘And he was the best friend of your new employer.’

Ginty felt as though there was a huge black cliff looming only metres in front of her. She wasn’t sure whether it was her own fury or the passion that must exist behind her mother’s perfect mask.

‘John Harbinger, the editor of the Sentinel,’ Louise added in case she hadn’t understood.

‘Yes, I’d got that much.’ The cliff loomed even bigger, decorated now with flags of humiliation. ‘Does he know who I am?’

‘I’ve no idea, but I doubt it. No one knew I was pregnant. My family sent me to France. Gunnar rescued me, decided to call me by my middle name, married me in Vienna, and so brought me back to England as Louise Schell. Who’s to know I was ever Virginia Callader, the girl who …?’ She choked, as though trying to bring up words that were buried somewhere deep in her guts.

Ginty’s head felt so tight it seemed about to crack open. All she could bear to think about were practicalities. ‘But there must be all sorts of official records. Your birth certificate for one.’

‘And my marriage certificate.’ That didn’t seem hard to say. ‘But why would anyone bother to look them up?’

Ginty thought of her own birth certificate. ‘So, how come I’m registered as your and Gunnar Schell’s daughter?’

‘Gunnar decided that would be best. He wanted you.’

And you didn’t? Ginty didn’t voice the question. There didn’t seem any point when the answer had always been so obvious. At least now she knew why. It was a small, cold satisfaction, but it was better than nothing.

‘And no one’s ever recognized you since?’ she said aloud. ‘I find that very hard to believe.’

‘Not as far as I know.’ Louise looked as though Ginty’s questions were almost unbearable, but she struggled to answer them. ‘We took a certain amount of trouble to make sure that didn’t happen. And in any case, people see what they expect; if they’re expecting Louise Schell then that’s who they recognize. But I’ve never felt particularly safe, which is why I don’t go about much or have my photograph on my book jackets.’

‘Don’t you think you – and everyone else – might have been happier if you’d told the truth?’ Ginty tried not to feel bitter and failed. ‘I certainly would have.’

Louise swung her legs up on the chair again. She stared up at the tree.

‘After the inquest, I overheard a man say that I was “a nasty little cock-tease who drove a man to death.” I don’t think either you or I would have been particularly content if I’d had that embroidered on my bosom for the rest of my life.’

Ginty felt as though her blood had been poisoned and was clotting in her veins, slowing her down, making her legs ache unbearably, threatening to stop her heart beating.

‘Even my father told me I’d as good as killed Steve by the fuss I made. I’d asked for it, after all, and should’ve kept my mouth shut. Men can’t stop, you know. If a girl goes back to a chap’s room and lets him kiss her, she can’t start crying “rape” when he does what comes naturally.’ Louise’s voice had taken on a bluff male severity; now it sharpened with her own bitterness. ‘Just the sort of thing you said on the radio, Ginty.’

Ginty couldn’t take any more. As she stood up, her right trouser leg unrolled, tickling her skin. She ignored it as she walked away.

The river seemed to be in spate, which was odd in this heat. Water rushed down it, bubbling in the shallows and pouring over the few rocks Gunnar had had put in it to make it more interesting. Ginty leaned on the edge of the bridge.

Through the roaring of the river, or perhaps the roaring in her own head, she heard Louise’s voice calling her. She took a step back, then stopped, remembering the powerlessness, the terror, she’d felt in the Jeep. Nothing had happened to her at the hands of Rano’s men, and she’d been terrified. Louise had been raped. Or believed she had.

Ginty turned back, to see her coming down through the yew walk, a slim swaying figure, immaculately dressed in white against the darkness of the trees, fragile but determined. Trying to see her as a victim who needed sympathy, Ginty could only remember the years she’d spent struggling to be good enough to be loved. Now she knew that she’d been running up an escalator that was going down. Every time she might have got near the top, the downward pull had been increased. All that effort, she thought, all that misery, and I was clobbered before I started.

Louise stopped. Her hands were in her pockets, but she didn’t bring out the handkerchief this time.

‘Try to understand, Ginty. He terrified me,’ she said in her most matter-of-fact voice. ‘He seemed so gentle that I’d always trusted him. But that night he used his strength to hold me down and force my legs apart. He raped me.’

And I came from that, Ginty thought. She should have told me. She should.

She looked at her mother and saw that she was about to say something else.

‘No,’ Ginty said. ‘Not now. I can’t take any more.’

Chapter 6

The huge red-bound volumes of back copies of The Times were too heavy for Ginty to carry comfortably. After the weekend’s revelations, she felt like a sock plastered to the drum of a washing machine at the end of its cycle: beaten, limp, slightly ragged, and good for nothing. But even in normal times she’d have had trouble with these. They were nearly half her height.

It hadn’t helped to get back last night to read outpourings of hate in her e-mail from people who’d heard her on the radio. There had been thirty separate messages, accusing her of betrayal, cruelty, stupidity, and every kind of sexual perversion. Now, it seemed, she was a frigid cunt and a sado-masochistic bitch, as well as the incubus who’d ruined her mother’s life.

When she’d identified the right volume, she put her shoulder to the others on the same shelf to heave them upright so that she could tug out the one she wanted. She broke a nail on the four-inch strap across its spine, but managed to haul the vast leather-bound book up on to the metal table. Who needs a gym, she thought, still fighting to keep the tattered remains of her sense of humour, when they can have this?

Fluorescent lights made the library’s basement uncomfortably bright, but at least it was peaceful. No one could get at her here. The only sounds were the occasional wheeze and ping of the lift and her own breathing. Outside in the hot bustle of Piccadilly there had been revving engines and a cacophony of mobile phones and burglar alarms that had sharpened her headache so much that she’d been tempted to abort her mission and go home.

Abort. The word sent her mind lurching round the questions she’d been asking herself all night: Why didn’t she have an abortion? It was legal by then. Why did she let me go on existing if she was going to hate me so?

‘It wasn’t my fault you were raped,’ she said in her head, keeping up the imaginary conversation that had hardly stopped since she’d left Freshet. She had to provide both sides of it, but at least now she knew what she was talking about. That was a first. ‘Or that you were accused of driving your boyfriend to death.’

‘Someone has to be punished for it,’ came the answer. ‘There isn’t anyone else.’

‘There must be,’ Ginty said aloud, in her own voice.

All the way back from Freshet yesterday, and every time she’d woken in the night, she had thought of more things her mother’s story explained. But every answer led her only to more questions. And more anger.

She’d tried to tell herself that it didn’t matter that she wasn’t Gunnar Schell’s daughter. Or that her real father had been a rapist. But of course it did.

‘Don’t be melodramatic, Ginty,’ Gunnar’s voice boomed in her mind as loud and foggy as it used to sound when she was about to be car sick as a child and already miles apart from reality.

He’d have said that the only sensible way of dealing with her mother’s revelation was to ignore it and get on with her life. But Ginty had discovered that she was not as sensible as either of them had thought. Maybe it was her real father who had endowed her with the drama queen tendencies Gunnar had been so concerned to stamp out. And maybe there was more, too, that she hadn’t yet uncovered. Maybe all Gunnar’s lectures about proper behaviour and self-control had had less to do with making sure she didn’t embarrass him in public, as she’d always assumed, and more to do with ensuring that whatever her nature might drive her to commit could be counteracted by learned behaviour. Maybe the iron suit he and her mother had been forging around her true character for as long as she could remember had been to keep in something horrifying.

Oh, stop it, she told herself. You know you’re neither evil nor dangerous. Grow up.

She opened the great red-leather volume, determined to find out the truth about herself and her father – and why he’d died and whose fault it had all been. She didn’t want to do anything to the guilty, but she wanted to know who they were. Only that, she thought, could completely free her from the iron suit.

The old newspapers smelled of biscuits. As she turned the fragile pages, trying not to tear them, she let herself be distracted by the price of houses for sale in the summer of 1970. One advertisement seemed particularly astonishing, asking eleven thousand pounds for a five-bedroomed listed house with a big garden in Berkshire. Her eyes moved and caught sight of a headline on the opposite page, announcing ‘Women’s Appointments’ at the top of advertisements for secretarial posts.

‘Prehistoric,’ she muttered, surprised that even in 1970 women looking for work had been assumed to be secretaries.

Apart from the price of property and attitudes to women, there was plenty in the paper that seemed positively familiar. Mr Jonathan Aitken had offered to resign his parliamentary seat because of his involvement in a case concerning the Official Secrets Act. An international ring had been smuggling in immigrants. Brian MacArthur was writing on ‘Firms Feeling the Pinch’; Philip Howard, on London. Mr David Irving had apologized in the High Court. No evidence had been found to suggest that television caused juvenile delinquency. There was new hope for the Northern Line. Deaths on two tube lines had brought big delays. A foetus bank providing material for scientific experiment had been discovered in an NHS hospital. Fears were expressed that new big district hospitals would turn out to be white elephants.

At last she found it, in a small headline on the far right of page 3, which read ‘Undergraduate suicide at Oxford.’ The paragraph beneath, only five short lines, told her that Steven Flyford had been found hanging in his room in Christ Church. The police were not looking for anyone in connection with the death.

She lifted the pages gently, holding them by the top right-hand corner and sliding her other hand along the bottom to make sure they didn’t rip, as she searched for the report of the inquest. Occasionally there was the sharp cracking sound when the edge of one sheet did split a millimetre or two, in spite of all her care. Each time she looked round guiltily, but there was no one watching, waiting to point out her failings and the damage they might cause.

There was a photograph at the top of a column reporting on the inquest. All her instincts pushed her to reject it. Her imagination had been full of violence and men like Rano, but here was just a boy, happy and slight and quite unthreatening. Ginty remembered Doctor Murphy’s views on rape, and wished she could believe them.

‘He held me down and forced my legs apart and raped me,’ her mother had said.

This boy did that? Ginty thought, pressing down on the paper with her index finger until the blood was forced away from the nail, leaving the whole top of her finger pale yellow and dead-looking. I don’t believe it.

The photograph must have been taken on a beach somewhere. There were cliffs in the background, and the boy was only half-dressed. His hair looked wet and thick with salt. His eyes, dark like hers, looked straight at her, trusting, affectionate and easy. But, apart from the eyes, there was nothing in his face to remind her of the one she saw in the mirror every day. So where did hers come from? And her character? What was it she might turn into, if Gunnar’s training ever failed completely? She forced herself to read on.

Steven Flyford, 19, was so distressed by his relationship with his girlfriend, Virginia Callader, also 19, that he killed himself last week. Mr John Milk, whose room was beside the deceased’s, gave evidence of seeing the couple walking upstairs on the night Steven Flyford died. They had their arms around each other and at one moment stopped to kiss.

Later Mr Milk heard the unmistakable sound of lovemaking, followed by a woman’s weeping, then doors banging and the sound of footsteps running down the stone stairs. He did not look out of his room. Steven Flyford was found the next morning hanging from a noose made from his own gown.

His sister, Mrs Grove of London SW, gave evidence that he had always been a well-adjusted, happy boy, but said he had not had a steady girlfriend before Miss Callader. He was quite inexperienced sexually. She could only suppose that he was distressed by Miss Callader’s reaction to intercourse.

Miss Callader said that he had seemed quite untroubled when she left his room, but agreed that she had been crying. His tutor, Dr Oliver Bainton, said: ‘He had been depressed over his work for much of the term; perhaps the added stress of a new and difficult relationship was too much for him.’ His friends, Miss Sasha Munsley, Mr John Harbinger, Mr Dominic Mercot, Mr Fergus Swinmere and Mr Robert Kemmerton, also gave evidence of his low spirits all term, but said that they were unaware of any details of his relationship with Miss Callader.

After the inquest, John Harbinger said: ‘Steve was very kind, and he greatly admired Virginia. I can only suppose that seeing her in distress worried him so much that he took his own life.’ The dead boy’s mother, Mrs Flyford of London SW, commented that young women who lead men on and then change their minds at the last minute are a menace to themselves and their boyfriends. Miss Callader had no comment to make.

The coroner said: ‘As a result of many anxieties concerned with his work and his social life, Steven Flyford’s normal equilibrium was disturbed and he took his own life.’

So, Ginty thought, pushing down all thought of her unknown family until she felt safer, Harbinger practically oversaw my conception. Does he know that? Is that why he’s been giving me work? Is it why he sent me to meet a man involved in the mass rape of women?

She tried to remember what Janey Fergusson had said when she’d rung up with the invitation to dinner. She’d certainly mentioned Harbinger, but only because she’d thought he might help Ginty’s career. And he himself hadn’t shown any signs of knowing anything about her when they’d started to talk.

Her forehead rucked up as she tried to remember what they’d said. Harbinger had been funny about freelance journalists, and reasonably encouraging about her chances of changing direction. That was clear enough, and she was sure he’d been excited by the discovery that she was Gunnar’s daughter. It hadn’t surprised her; most people who knew anything about music were excited by any contact with him, even at one remove, and they all asked exactly the same kind of questions.

No. She was sure there had been nothing to suggest that Harbinger knew her real identity. That ought to make it possible to ask him all the questions she would never be able to put to her mother. A detached journalist, researching the rape story, might hear the real facts from the rapist’s friends. His child would almost certainly not.

Ginty made a note of everyone else who’d given evidence at the inquest. If Harbinger wouldn’t give her what she needed, she’d try them. Moving between the smaller volumes that held the index and the heavy piles of bound copies of the newspaper itself, she looked them up. The more she knew about them, the more likely she was to get them to talk.

Sasha Munsley, who had married a man called Henderson and had four daughters, had become an orthopaedic surgeon. There was an article about the rarity of female consultant surgeons when she was first appointed to a London teaching hospital in the 1980s. Only six months later came a brief comment about her resignation in a commentary opposite the leader page by a senior member of the Royal College of Surgeons on the unsuitability of women – and in particular mothers of young children – for high-pressured surgical positions.

Robert Kemmerton was now an MP, whose political career was easy to track from his first adoption for a hopeless seat through to his appearance on the front bench as a very junior minister in the Department of Social Security. He seemed to have bypassed all the sexual scandals of the era and had hung onto his seat in the landslide that had booted out the Tories.

Dominic Mercot appeared only once in the index, when he was appointed Companion of the Bath in the New Year’s Honours List. That gave the information that he was now an Under Secretary in the Cabinet Office. Fergus Swinmere had more entries than all the others put together. Having been called to the Bar in the early seventies, he’d taken silk in 1989 and was now mentioned in the Law Reports practically every other week. Ginty ignored them, but she did follow up a reference to an article about barristers’ earnings and read that he was thought to be one of the few Queen’s Counsel pulling in more than a million pounds a year.

That definitely made him the star of the group. It also made Ginty curious enough to stop thinking about her own story for a moment. You had to be brilliantly clever, of course, to achieve that kind of success, but you also had to be driven. Might this man’s obsessive hard work have come from watching a friend destroy himself before he’d achieved anything?

Looking back towards the beginning of Fergus’s career for answers, she found the obituary of another Swinmere, a General Arthur George, who had died four months after Fergus’s first marriage, leaving a widow, two daughters and a son. It didn’t take Ginty long to nip upstairs to check Who’s Who and confirm that Fergus had been the son.

Back in the basement, she read the rest of the obituary. General Swinmere had served with distinction in North Africa and Italy during the Second World War, going on to become a regular soldier after VE Day, and eventually taking up a post at the Ministry of Defence in London. At the end of his list of achievements, Ginty found an even better reason for his only son’s drive to succeed:

It was a tragedy for this gallant and respected officer that his house was burgled one night when he had classified documents in his possession. They were taken with the rest of the contents of his safe. The thieves were never caught. Honourable to the last, he resigned at once, even though there was never any suggestion of fault on his part. He was greatly missed by colleagues, all of whom had tried to persuade him to stay on. He died four years later.

That seemed to explain pretty much everything. Watching your father’s heroic career spoiled by a stray burglar, you’d probably be prepared to do just about anything to make the kind of money and reputation that would let you say ‘sod off’ to anyone in the world. A top-earning Queen’s Counsel was one of the few who could.

The pile of huge volumes on the table was unmanageable now, and so she moved seats to give herself room to search the index for clues about her Flyford relations. As she moved, she caught sight of the clock on the far wall and swore. She was supposed to have been at the Femina offices ten minutes ago.

There was a phone box on the ground floor of the library, near the lift. Knowing how slow that was, she took the stairs, feeling in her purse for change as she ran.

Twenty minutes later, she was standing breathless by the lift in a tall glass building north of Marble Arch, having run all the way from Bond Street tube station. There hadn’t been any taxis either in Piccadilly or Oxford Street.

‘I’m sorry, Maisie,’ she said when she was admitted to the editor’s office.

‘I told you on the phone there was no rush. Coffee?’

‘Great. Thanks.’

It came in another bendy plastic cup from a machine, but it tasted better than it looked. After a few minutes, Ginty’s heart stopped banging, and her breathing returned to normal, but her mind was still skittering about her own concerns. For a time she was afraid she wasn’t making much sense. But Maisie liked talking, so that didn’t matter too much.

Ginty calmed down eventually as they discussed the ways she might frame the rape victims’ stories and settled most of the editorial questions. When Maisie was satisfied with what she said she was going to write, Ginty added:

‘There is one other thing. I want to use a pseudonym.’

‘Why?’

Ginty told her about the threats Rano had made as he tied the blindfold round her head and sent her back down to the valley with his men. Maisie wasn’t impressed. She lit another cigarette and sucked in a lavish mouthful of smoke.

‘I sent you out there,’ she said as she exhaled and tapped some ash into the overflowing saucer on her desk. ‘I paid your expenses. And I want the Ginty Schell article I’ve commissioned, with a photograph of you at the top; not some virtually anonymous piece that won’t carry any weight with anyone. Why not do Harbinger’s piece as Jane Bloggs? He’s had a free ride on me so far.’

‘Because Rano knows it was me he sent.’ Ginty assumed Maisie was being deliberately obtuse. ‘Come on. I’m not nearly famous enough for you to mind whether it’s my name at the top of the column or not.’

‘Don’t sell yourself short. You’re not exactly unknown. After all, you were on the radio, talking about rape, only the other day.’

‘So, you heard that, too, did you?’

‘Of course. I always listen to Annie Kent. Her guests give me a lot of ideas. You don’t have to look sick, Ginty: you were great. I don’t happen to agree with you, but that doesn’t matter.’

‘A lot of people think it does.’

‘Ah,’ said Maisie, grinning as she stubbed out her cigarette with the force of someone squashing a cockroach. ‘Now I understand. You’ve been getting hate mail already, have you?’

Ginty nodded. ‘Well, hate e-mail anyway. I left this morning before the post arrived.’

‘That’s the price of being successful. As a journalist, you will always piss someone off. I’ve told you before that you have to learn to take it. So, no: you can’t use a pseudonym.’

‘This isn’t about taking flak from readers, Maisie. I loathe that, but I’m learning to cope with it. What scares me is what Rano might do to me if I write too sympathetically about his victims.’

‘Oh, don’t be absurd. He might conceivably read your Sentinel interview, but he’s not going to open a women’s mag like Femina. Even if he did, he’s not going to worry about it. Ginty, for Christ’s sake! He’s fighting a war out there. Risking his life. That’s rather more important, you know.’

‘Of course I do. But you’re underestimating him. He went out of his way to tell me he had plenty of friends and supporters in London.’ Ginty shivered. ‘One of them’s even rung me up. Already.’

‘You’re making far too much of this.’ Maisie sounded brisk. She lit another cigarette. ‘Look here, I want the piquancy of a cosy makeup-and-boyfriend writer tackling a subject that really matters to women. It’ll show the world what Femina is about.’ Maisie blew out another thin stream of smoke, watching Ginty through it. ‘Besides, Gunnar Schell is famous, and so is your mother.’

‘That’s not fair.’

Maisie laughed, tapping off the ash. ‘Come on, Ginty, get real. You want a career in serious journalism. You may get it. You’re beginning to show signs of writing well enough and, through your parents, you’ve got access to some good contacts. But at the moment it’s their celebrity getting you read. Don’t get so cocky you forget that.’

Cocky! Ginty thought. If only.

For years she’d been trying to teach herself to operate without approval, but she hadn’t got very far. She still couldn’t stop herself believing that all criticism was real and justified, even though compliments were never more than kind lies.

‘Listen, Ginty, I know you had a tough time out there, and I was worried about you every time I saw the news. But you’re home now, and safe. That bastard Harbinger should never have involved you with a man like Rano, but the experience will help you. Use what you felt – all that fear – and write me a blinder about his real victims. You’ve got two weeks. OK?’

Why did I ever start this? Ginty asked herself. ‘I don’t know that I can, Maisie. Not if you insist on having my name on it.’

‘That’s your choice.’ Maisie got to her feet. ‘Go away, and think about whether you want real work. If you do, write up the article as we’ve agreed. If you don’t, send me a cheque to repay your expenses and go on your way. But don’t come back wanting me to publish anything else in the future because I won’t. OK?’

‘You’re all heart, aren’t you, Maisie?’ The friendly message on the answering machine might never have existed.

‘It’s a tough business. I’m prepared to help you. But I won’t be messed about. You’ve already chucked photography. Think very carefully before you chuck journalism, too. Now, I must get on. Can you find your own way out?’

Ginty opened the heavy glass door that led out into the maelstrom of the editorial floor. Against the clatter of talk, phones, printers and photocopiers, Maisie’s voice was very quiet, but Ginty heard every word.

‘And don’t forget those women you interviewed. If you don’t write this piece, their voices won’t be heard. I’m not sending anyone else out there. Don’t you think you owe them anything, all those rape victims you persuaded to talk?’ Maisie’s voice was like a rasp. ‘And the children – the survivors anyway – who are going to grow up hated by their mothers. Don’t you owe those children anything?’

Chapter 7

Ginty was changing for dinner with Harbinger. She’d had a shower and was standing in front of the long mirror at the back of the wardrobe door, surprised to find that she looked exactly the same as usual. Her eyes were a little bigger and her mouth a little tighter, but that was all. It was peculiar. Here she was, fighting her way out of the iron suit, expanding with every moment of freedom, and looking like the same gentle midget she’d always been.

She pulled the clingy black dress over her head and rearranged her short brown hair with her fingers so that it lay in feathery points around her face. She outlined her brown eyes with smoky shadow and lengthened the lashes with mascara, but she left the rest as it was. It was too small to take much paint.

The dress seemed a bit too gloomy, so she dug out a beautifully made, very plain, silver torc Gunnar had given her years ago to replace a glittering diamanté choker he’d disliked. The choker had been a seventeenth birthday present from her first boyfriend, and she’d loved it until Gunnar explained why it wouldn’t do.

‘Flashy jewellery is vulgar, Ginty; it rarely shows a woman to good advantage. Particularly not one with freckles.’

She couldn’t remember what she’d done with the choker, but now she wished she’d kept it. Tonight would have been a good time to wear it. Catching herself wondering whether the laughing boy in the newspaper photograph would have liked it, she told herself to stop being so sentimental. Whatever he looked like, he was a rapist, and he’d killed himself rather than face the consequences of what he’d done and make it right.

‘Never give up, Ginty,’ Gunnar used to say at every opportunity. ‘Once you’ve taken something on, it’s cowardly to abandon it half-way through. Cowardly and irresponsible.’ Now, of course, she understood why he’d wanted to drum that lesson into her.

Time to go, she told herself, wondering whether to check her e-mails before she left the flat. No, she’d ignore them; the phone messages that had been waiting when she got back from Maisie’s office had been offensive enough. She bent down to check that she’d pulled out the iron’s plug from the wall socket.

Often in the past, usually when she’d got to the far side of the Hammersmith roundabout, she’d become convinced that she’d left the iron switched on and hot. She’d always rushed straight back to deal with smouldering cloth or gouts of flame, only to find the plug well away from the socket and the iron itself cold. These days she didn’t let herself come back, but it seemed mad not to make sure everything was safely off before she left the house.

‘Fear is a weakness, Ginty, and the weak are a burden to themselves and everyone around them.’

But perhaps, she said to Gunnar in her mind, answering back for the first time in her life, it’s the fearless who are really dangerous because they never think about what they’re risking – for themselves and everyone else – until too late. Perhaps Steve was like that.

She reached the restaurant without faltering once. Harbinger was already there, half-way through his first glass of wine. He hauled himself to his feet when he saw her.

‘You’ve done a terrific job on the rewrite, Ginty.’ He kissed her cheek. ‘So you deserve a celebration. And you look gorgeous. Come and sit down. Red all right for you? It’s proper French stuff; not this New World fruit juice.’

‘Great,’ she said, even though she liked the despised fruitiness. ‘Did you get the photographs?’

‘I did. And I must say they surprised me.’ He raised his glass in a corny toast. ‘You are a bundle of contradictions, aren’t you?’

‘What d’you mean?’

‘A size-eight, bird-boned, terrified, war photographer.’

‘I’m not a war photographer.’ She’d never have admitted to terror, but denying it wasn’t likely to be convincing, so she didn’t even try.

‘Could’ve fooled me. I’ve been looking at some of your other pix today, which I found in the files, and I’m dead impressed.’

Ginty thought of the disheartening years when she had been trying to sell her work, sending off examples of it to people like Harbinger, who’d all ignored her. Spending a fortune on prints she never got back, forcing herself to write letters falsely confident enough to satisfy even Gunnar, had eventually worn out her patience. She’d hawked her portfolio around in person, too, only to be sent away with criticism of the sentimentality of her work and advice to think again about her career choices. Now it sounded as though yet more anguished effort had been unnecessary. She tried to ignore it and concentrate on Harbinger, who was looking at her with all the approval she could have wanted.

‘So, how would you describe yourself – in your photographic guise?’

‘A failure,’ she said with a laugh that was supposed to be cheerfully cynical but in fact sounded hard-edged and defensive.

‘Oh, come on. You know you’re not that. Now, what are you going to eat?’

‘I’ll have the roast veg, then the lamb.’ Ginty put down the menu, amazed to see that her hands weren’t even trembling. She felt as though her whole body should be shaking with the power of what she felt.

‘Good, a carnivore. We can go on drinking red.’

‘Fine. Whatever. You know, I’ve been wanting to ask you something.’

‘Yes?’ He didn’t sound interested, probably too busy signalling to the waiter. Ginty kept quiet until they’d ordered and been left alone again. She wanted Harbinger to concentrate before she launched her quest.

‘I’m thinking of writing a piece about this new crisis of masculinity,’ she began when she had his attention again. He laughed.

‘You know,’ she went on, ‘all these young men who are killing themselves either because they can’t cope with competition from strong women, or because they feel undervalued in a world in which female skills are needed much more than traditionally macho strength.’

‘It’s a load of cock.’ Harbinger’s shoulders had tightened under the loose, cream linen jacket. ‘Nothing more than a product of all those noisy feminists seeing their sons growing up. Now that they have to watch their cosseted darlings being made to suffer by girlfriends, they’re at last realizing what they’ve put their husbands and lovers through all these years. They’re manufacturing this idea of a new crisis to get themselves off the hook of their own guilt.’ He shook his head, as though he’d got water in his ears.

‘You could be right,’ Ginty said, drooping over her plate. She picked at some wax from the leaky candle that had settled on the rough wooden table in a warm, yielding mass. ‘After all, young men killing themselves isn’t anything new, is it?’

Harbinger said nothing. When she looked up, he was staring at her.

‘I mean, you did have rather a traumatic time yourself at Oxford, when that friend of yours hanged himself, didn’t you?’

‘How did you get on to that?’

She’d been prepared for him to be angry or contemptuous, but he wasn’t. If she hadn’t known better, she’d have thought he was grateful. But that was absurd.

‘I’ve been reading the account of the inquest in The Times and talking to one or two people. What happened, John?’ Her voice was gentle and she knew her eyes were soft. It wasn’t completely fake. He’d known her father and she wanted to find her father loveable.

‘Oh, God!’

‘Tell me.’

‘I’m not sure that I can. But … Hell!’

The waiter was back, bringing their food. Ginty waited, but the moment had passed. Harbinger picked up his fork and started eating, gulping down his twice-cooked goat’s cheese souffleé like a pelican choking down an enormous fish. She ate some of the slippery roasted peppers on her plate. The oil coating them had been spiked with balsamic vinegar, and the caramelized edges of the skin added bitterness. The sweet sliding flesh turned to pulp between her tongue and her palate. She swallowed easily.

‘You’re right. I did have a friend who topped himself,’ Harbinger said abruptly. He picked up two lettuce leaves from the garnish on his plate, rolled them into a sausage and stuffed them in his mouth, wiping his chin with the back of his hand. Before he’d swallowed, he muttered something.

‘Sorry?’ Ginty leaned forwards to hear better. He didn’t repeat himself. She poured more wine into his glass. ‘Tell me about him, John. I know his name and I’ve seen his photograph. But what was he like? Steven Flyford.’

Harbinger flinched. Staring at the table, he said: ‘He was my best friend: vulnerable, anxious, eager to please. Good company, too, and clever and kind.’

Something in Ginty’s neck let go and her teeth unclamped.

‘What made him so unhappy, then, that he had to kill himself? The inquest report wasn’t clear.’

Harbinger shook his head. ‘There were all sorts of theories. None of them seemed quite right.’

‘Didn’t he leave any kind of note?’

Harbinger couldn’t think why she was asking all these questions. She’d let him off the hook with her resounding statement on the radio about date rape. That should have been the end of it. Not this inquisition that seemed to go nagging on and on. Somehow he had to stop her asking questions.

He took a great swig of wine, trying not to remember the inquest, trying to concentrate on the face in front of him, with its freckles and its crossed teeth and the wide, hurt, brown eyes. But it didn’t work. He even tried to think about pulling her to distract himself from his memories. But that didn’t work either. That bloody, wet day in Oxford came rolling back like the waves up a beach where he and Steve had once nearly drowned.

They hadn’t known how sharply the ground would shelve away or how strong the undertow that would suck them down. It had been Sasha who’d rescued them then, standing on the beach yelling instructions, wading into the surf to pull them out of the grip of the water with a strong arm.

Coming out of the inquest had been a bit like that, too, with Sasha sniffing back tears as she pulled off her big black felt Biba hat and announced that they’d all better go for a drink now to take the taste away.

‘We could have stopped him,’ she said as she twisted the big, black felt hat between her hands. ‘He never talked about suicide, even when he was most depressed. If it was getting that bad, he should’ve told us. We could have helped, got him into the Warnford even.’

Dom pushed up his spectacles with one lanky finger, hovered on the edge of the first word, then got it out without too much stammering: ‘He w-wouldn’t have wanted to worry us. He never did. That’s why he wrote that letter: ‘Don’t let this make you sad. It’s the best way. And afterwards n-nothing will matter any more.’

The coroner had asked each of them in turn if they had any idea who the ‘you’ in the letter might be, just as he’d asked Steve’s parents and his two elder sisters. None of them had had any suggestion to make. Sasha had said she thought it must be a member of his family because he hadn’t been close enough to anyone else to care that much about them. John had been sure it was a plural ‘you’, addressed to everyone who’d liked Steve. Robert thought it might be Steve’s girlfriend, Virginia Callader. But she hadn’t thought so.

They’d half expected her or one of her rugger-bugger friends to start telling the court all about the supposed rape, but no one had actually said the word. Even she seemed to have thought better of the whole idiotic story.

‘But why didn’t he tell us why he did it?’ Robert burst out. ‘Didn’t he realize how we’d worry? Bloody selfish.’

They were at the door of The King’s Arms by then, so they went in and Harbinger got four pints. Sasha took her usual healthy swallow and saw that they were all looking at her.

‘Just because I’m a medical student, it doesn’t mean I …’

‘Not because of that,’ John said impatiently, ‘but because you’re a girl. What d’you think Virginia did to make him kill himself?’

Sasha shrugged. In her black coat, her shoulders looked almost as broad as Robert’s. Dom’s were puny by comparison.

‘At the beginning she said he raped her,’ she started uncertainly, then couldn’t think of anything else.

‘Bollocks to that,’ John said. ‘Steve couldn’t have raped anyone. You know that. And he couldn’t have heard the story either. Didn’t you hear the pathologist say he must have died some time in the night? The one good thing is that he can’t ever have heard what she said about him. Where’s Fergus?’

‘Couldn’t face talking. He went back to Merton as soon as he’d given his evidence.’

‘Poor bugger!’

John’s cheek muscles began to tighten as he tried not to laugh. Sasha glared at him. He knew why: Steve was dead, Fergus was pretty nearly desperate, but John still couldn’t stop himself seeing the joke. He caught her eye and grinned at her, making her smile back. Suddenly she let go and roared with laughter. Robert and John joined in, but Dom pushed up his specs again, looking like an adult disgusted at children’s antics, and that made it worse.

Suddenly John coughed, and the black joke stopped being at all funny. He tried to get some more bitter down his throat.

‘D’you think maybe Virginia laughed that night?’ he said. ‘At him, I mean. Steve.’

Sasha’s face reminded him of a hare that’s heard something in the undergrowth. After a moment she nodded.

‘You mean that if he couldn’t get it up she might have teased him?’

‘Yeah. It was his first time, after all; he wasn’t sure he could do it. I know he was worried. Don’t you think it could’ve been that?’

‘But Virginia looked awful in The Goat that day. She wouldn’t have if she’d …’

‘I’m not so sure,’ John said soberly. ‘You know what Steve could be like when he was in a state about something. What if he realized he couldn’t screw her, hated her laughing at him, and went silent on her? You know how he got sometimes, Sash.’

‘White, silent and shaking,’ she said nodding.

After a second, she brushed the back of her hand over her eyes. It came away wet and black. She was crying again. Sasha of all people, who never minded anything. The smell of beer and fag ends sickened him.

‘With that suggestion of tears making his eyes go pink?’

‘Yes,’ John said, staring at the festoons of foam that hung on the inside of his empty tankard. ‘That could be grim.’

‘And the more you tried to help, to get him to talk, the whiter he’d get and the bigger his eyes.’

John wondered why it hadn’t ever occurred to any of them to suggest that Steve shagged Sasha. That would have been infinitely more sensible. Sasha wouldn’t have gone in for all this rape nonsense. And Steve would still be alive. Of course, he hadn’t fancied her. Who could, with that great arse of hers? But she’d have been kind to him, and it would have been a lot better for all of them.

Robert and Dom were turning from Sasha to John, as though they were at a tennis match. Both looked astonished. Obviously neither of them had ever known the real Steve. Dom got up and fished in his pocket for a handkerchief. When he’d polished his spectacles, he blew his nose. John and Sasha both started to speak at the same time. He deferred to her.

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