Old Enemies (6 page)

‘Mr Jones, I don’t believe we’ve met,’ Breslin said.

That was for sure. Harry had spent many years assiduously avoiding him.

‘But I believe you know my wife.’

And there she was, standing by the ornate marble fireplace, smiling ruefully from behind her glass of wine.

Harry’s head was spinning. It wasn’t often he lost control of his feelings, but now he was very close. The steward was at his side with the tray of drinks; he grabbed a whisky, leaving the orange juice undisturbed. It gave him the chance to look at her. The hair was a little shorter, a more distinct shade of chestnut than he remembered, her high cheeks perhaps a little fuller, the clothes certainly better cut but she was now – what? Thirty-eight? Or was it nine? It had been so long ago, he’d tried so hard to forget.

‘Hello, Harry.’ Still the same breathless, husky voice, the same pouting, expressive lips. ‘It’s been a long time.’

‘That’s for sure.’

‘Paris, wasn’t it?’

‘The Left Bank.’

‘You remember.’

‘Every detail.’

Lapérouse, a corner table. A Friday evening, shortly after eight, with light, mist-like rain that had required no more than a turned-up collar and springing step to make sure he wasn’t late – at least, that’s the way he remembered it. Waiting for her, alone at the table, too long, beginning to feel awkward, exposed, before she’d arrived, flustered, fumbling with her coat and her words, telling him it was over, that there would be no more secret trips, no more stolen moments. That she was sending him back to his wife.

‘How have you been . . . Terri?’ he heard himself saying. Her name emerged almost as an afterthought, on an unwilling tongue.

‘Fine. Really fine.’

Her husband was a tall man who might once have been good-looking but who now sported a receding hairline and a developing stomach hemmed in by a double-breasted suit – always a mistake on a stomach, Harry thought. He was looking at them with a glint of curiosity through thick-framed designer glasses. ‘I’ll leave you two to catch up,’ he said, turning abruptly and leaving them alone on their island in a sea of noise.

‘You’ll have to forgive J.J.,’ she said. ‘He has a jealous streak. He’ll be checking up on us.’

‘He knows?’

‘Perhaps. I’ve never told him. He senses more than knows. Heard whispers, maybe.’

‘You weren’t the guilty party. I was the one who was married.’

She smiled, an expression which on her lips always contained an element of provocation. ‘J.J.’s Irish. He never forgets the past.’

‘And I’m . . .’

She nodded. ‘The past.’ Then she laughed, that soft, lilting sound like a trickling brook that he remembered and which had for a few terrifying months of his life so bewitched him. Yes, it had been witchcraft, for otherwise none of what had happened made sense. He’d been married to Julia, the most extraordinary of women, the great love of his life, and yet . . . Terri had come along and his life had been trashed. His fault, not hers, she hadn’t particularly encouraged him, had always held back, but he had pursued her in that relentless Jones style until all he could think about was her. Yet somehow Julia had managed to forgive him. They had rebuilt the marriage, crawled their way back through the pain, little by little, until the day Julia had been killed in a skiing accident, following Harry down the side of yet another mountain, and after that he had never found a way of living with the guilt. It had burned like acid through so many other relationships. He’d hated Terri for all that, because she’d finished it, and he’d never understood why, and because it was so much easier hating her than hating himself. And now she was here, standing in front of him, beneath a portrait of the virgin Queen Bess.

‘You know I’ve spent all these years avoiding you,’ he said. ‘Checking guest lists, walking out of receptions just like this, turning down invitations to dinner parties because I knew you and your husband would be there.’

‘I know. Me, too.’ No more laughter, only memories. ‘But you’re a very difficult man to avoid, Harry Jones.’

‘Someone mentioned . . .’ He found himself reaching for another drink. ‘You have a family.’

She nodded, sipped, lowered her eyes. She was still elegant, the years had been kind, and if she had put on a few pounds since her early twenties they were spread in superb places. As he looked, and remembered, he found there was too much to say, and so he said nothing. A silence of guilt.

‘I never remember you being tongue-tied,’ she teased, softly, trying to break the impasse.

‘I’m just not in the mood to stand here and swap small talk.’

‘This is Downing Street, what else are we supposed to do?’ A gentle laugh, which died. ‘Or is it me?’

Harry wasn’t one of those braggarts who claimed never to have crawled away from a place of danger. He could smell the stuff, knew how it lurked like a ruffian on the stairs, waiting to trip you, cast you down, kick the crap out of you and take advantage of any vulnerability. Crawl away? Hell, he knew there were times when the only wise thing to do was to run, to put as much distance between yourself and it as possible. That’s why he’d survived. He swallowed the last of his drink and, without offering a word of apology, turned on his heel and left.

In the taxi on the way back from Downing Street, Harry’s mood proved to be as sour as the milk that would be waiting for him back home. Terri could do that for him, curdle the finest day. He told the cabbie to stop and clambered out, intending to walk the last stretch and restock his fridge at his local Asian minimarket, maybe get himself a fresh attitude, too. He felt mean.

He still had his suitcase but it had wheels and was clattering unsteadily along the pavement when up ahead in the lamplight he saw a group of youths loitering near the shop, blocking the path, deliberately making others walk round them and into the gutter. Five of them, wearing hoodies, smoking, spitting, cursing, scratching spots. A woman with a child’s buggy, the wife of the minimarket owner, was asking them to move to one side. Harry wasn’t close enough to make out her precise words but from the woman’s body language he could see that she was nervous and hesitant, trying to be studiously polite. They looked at her, at the colour of her skin, and too long for comfort at the child, before turning their backs and ignoring her. She lowered her head in submission and began to make the trek into the gutter.

That was when Harry got involved. He had no trouble in finding justification for barging in, of course, and on another day he would have said he was being chivalrous, but the truth was he was pissed off, stirred up by his encounter with Terri, and wanted to take his dark humour out on somebody. The mop-heads made a convenient target. These kids were feral, the type of wild, unassimilated creatures that nowadays were found in every town and on too many corners. Broken families, of course, that was always the excuse, but so what? His family hadn’t been exactly a festival of fun, either, yet Harry had got over it, hadn’t he?

Or maybe not. Family was something he’d never done well and sometimes, when night pushed aside the clutter of the day, Harry wondered why he’d never been able to find the right place for a woman in his life. Was that because he had no role model, because his own father had so often been absent, erratic and untrustworthy, an emotional waterhole that had dried up and left those around him gasping? It would all have been so different for Harry, of course, if Julia had lived. She’d been pregnant when she died, carrying their son – Harry always thought it was a boy, didn’t know why, perhaps that was nothing more than male attitude, and Harry possessed more than his fair share of that. Dammit, maybe he was more like his father than he cared to admit. And suddenly Harry realized his own son would have been about the same age as these punks on the pavement.

The frustration boiled over. Not just with these teenagers but with his father, with Julia for going and getting herself killed, with Terri, but most of all with himself. He was normally a man renowned for his self-control but today wasn’t normal, and suddenly a gear inside him slipped and he was shouting, threatening, making a stupid scene. In response the kids began laughing, mocking, gave him the finger before melting away, moving past him like a current around a stone, kicking over his suitcase as they disappeared.

He’d spent years listening to any number of psychologists and sociologists, let alone fellow politicians, offering explanations for kids like these who turned into a rat pack, but right now he wasn’t big on mitigation. He was burning, he hated them. For making a fool of him, and for enabling him to make a fool of himself.

The owner of the minimarket was out on the pavement now, rescuing his wife, comforting his bewildered child, looking at Harry with suspicion as though he was to blame. And at that moment Harry came to the conclusion that he was, after all, a lucky man not to have a family, not to be a father, not to be forced to put up with this sort of shit.

To hell with the sodding milk, he’d pour beer over his cornflakes. Harry kicked the pavement in fury as he picked up his suitcase, shouldered his anger and continued trudging home.

It was called the Karst, or Kras or Carso, depending on which of the locals you spoke to, a vast, thinly populated plateau that stretched back from the Italian port of Trieste and marked the boundary between Old Europe and the Balkans, the place where Latin met Slav, a spot where many passed through but few stopped. It was a place easy to overlook. That’s why the kidnappers had chosen it. The dense oak trees that had given this area its character had long ago been ripped out by medieval foresters to provide wood for the trading fleets of Venice, just seventy miles along the coast, leaving scrub pine in their place. This was high limestone country, a landscape that seemed to be at war with itself, riddled with caverns and sinkholes gouged out by the underground streams that made the ground disappear beneath the feet, a place of neglected paintwork and crumbling stone walls where scattered rural communities struggled to eke out a living on thin soils. Such hard conditions bred independence and self-reliance, and a distrust of the many monarchs who had tried to bend it to their ways. It was a region of meagre rewards and hardy souls, and of the Bora, a savage northerly wind that generated extraordinary ferocity as it descended upon the Adriatic, like a hooligan who molested you before running off, only to return just when you thought it safe to come out again. The Carso was a place with its own laws, its own way of doing things. Policemen and officials sent up here had sometimes simply disappeared, as though they had been dropped down a hole in the ground, which in all probability they had. And that was another reason why the kidnappers had come.

It was dark when they arrived at the isolated two-storey farmhouse, darker than any place Ruari could remember. A dim glow from behind drawn curtains was the only light he could see in any direction. They heaved him from the car, dragged him inside, his legs still numb from the drug, his mind like treacle, and someone was trying to drive a chisel into his skull. A room, flagstones on the floor, with old wooden beams and rough plasterwork, and sparsely furnished – a table, a dresser, a mixture of ageing wooden chairs, little more. A wood fire was spitting in the corner. On the table Ruari could see dirty plates and empty beer bottles, along with a laptop computer. There were also several weapons, including an assault rifle. A smell of wood smoke and stale cooking fat hung in the air.

He counted seven men in total, the three who had brought him here and four others. As he struggled to regain his senses he quickly became aware of the order of things; five of them were dark-eyed with olive skins and a rough, wild look. They mostly spoke poor English and a language that Ruari didn’t understand. He thought it sounded a little like the Latin spoken by some Catholic priests; he later discovered it was Romanian. The two others were different, lighter in hair with fairer skin beneath the tans and accents that carried the unmistakable clip of South Africa. This pair – the red-haired de Vries, and Grobelaar, the pilot – were the men in control, the remainder the hired hands. Oil and vinegar.

Almost as soon as Ruari was dumped upon his chair one of the Romanians lifted up his chin and took a couple of photographs.

‘I am not happy,’ de Vries declared as the photographer finished his work and Ruari’s chin sank back onto his chest. ‘Damaged goods. You bought back damaged goods.’

‘It’s only a busted nose,’ said the gunman from the helicopter. His name was Cosmin. ‘You should see what I did to the others.’

He laughed, crudely, baring his teeth; the rest of the Romanians joined in, a great joke, but not de Vries.

‘So why did you break his nose?’

‘The little shit was trouble,’ the gunman replied, scratching at his dark stubble. ‘He threw away his phone.’

‘He had a phone? That would have been useful.’ The South African began prowling, walking behind Ruari’s chair. The boy became apprehensive; there was a sense of menace in this man, of anger seething just below the surface, and Ruari wondered if he was about to be on the end of it.