A Conspiracy of Faith (3 page)

She gazed into the empty, orderly rooms and pressed her lips together as the tears welled up in her eyes.

Then she heard the child stir and pulled herself together. Wiped the tip of her nose with her index finger and took two deep breaths.

If her husband was being unfaithful, then he would do well not to count on her.

There had to be more to life than this.

He came into the bedroom so silently only his shadow on the wall gave him away. Broad shoulders, arms wide open. He lay down and drew her in to him without a word. Warm and naked.

She had expected sweetness, but also well-considered apologies. Maybe she’d been afraid of the slight scent of some strange woman and guilt-ridden hesitation in all the wrong places, but instead he grabbed hold of her, turned her roughly onto her back, and began greedily to tear off her nightclothes. The moonlight was in his face. It turned her on. Now the waiting, the frustration, the worry, and the doubt were all gone.

It was six months since he’d last been like this.

Thank God, at last.

“I have to go away for a while, sweetheart,” he said without warning over the breakfast table, stroking the child on the cheek. Distracted, as though his words didn’t mean anything.

She frowned and pursed her lips to keep the inevitable question inside for a moment. Then she put her fork down on the plate and sat with her gaze fixed on the scrambled eggs and bacon. The night had been long. It was still with her, an ache around her pelvis, but also the kisses and cuddles when they had lain there spent, gazing warmly into each other’s eyes. Until now, it had allowed her to forget all thought of time and place. Until now. For at this moment, the pale March sun forced its way into the room like an unwelcome guest to illuminate the facts. Her husband was going away. Again.

“Why can’t you tell me what you do? I’m your wife. I won’t tell anyone,” she said.

He sat with his cutlery half-raised. His eyes grew dark then.

“Seriously,” she went on. “How long am I supposed to wait this time for you to be like you were last night again? Are we back to where we were before? Me not knowing what you’re up to, and you hardly being present, even when you’re here?”

He looked at her with piercing eyes. “Haven’t you known from the start that I can’t talk about my work?”

“Yes, but…”

“Well, then. Let’s leave it at that.”

His knife and fork clattered against the plate, and he turned toward their son with something supposed to resemble a smile.

Her breathing was steady and calm, but despair surged inside her. It was true enough. Long before their wedding, he had explained to her that he was unable to speak about what he did. He might have hinted it was something to do with intelligence, she couldn’t really remember anymore. But as far as she knew, people in the intelligence services still lived reasonably normal lives alongside their jobs. Their own life together was in no way normal. Unless intelligence work also involved being unfaithful, because as far as she could see, that was the only possible explanation for his behavior.

She gathered the plates and thought about giving him an ultimatum there and then. Risking the anger she feared but had yet to experience to its full extent.

“When will I see you again?” she asked.

He looked at her and smiled. “I’ll be home next Wednesday, I imagine. This type of job usually takes a week, ten days at most.”

“You’ll be home just in time for your bowling tournament then,” she said sarcastically.

He stood up and put his arms around her, drawing her in toward the bulk of his body, clasping his hands under her chest. The feeling of his head on her shoulder had always sent a tingle down her spine. But now she pulled away.

“True,” he said. “I should be back in good time for that. So before you know it, it’ll be last night all over again. OK?”

After he had gone and the sound of the car engine had died away, she stood for a long time with her arms folded and her gaze out of focus. It was
one thing to be lonely in life. But it was quite another not to know what you were paying that price for. The chances of ever catching a man like hers cheating on her were minimal, she knew that, even though she had never tried. His territory was a vast expanse, and he was a careful man; everything in their life indicated that. Pensions, insurance, double-checking of windows and doors, suitcases and luggage, desk always tidy, no hastily jotted notes or receipts left behind in pockets or drawers. He was a man who left no trace. Not even the scent of him remained more than a few minutes after he had left the room. How would she ever uncover an affair unless she put a private investigator on him? And where was she supposed to get the means to do that?

She thrust out her lower lip and expelled warm breath slowly into her face. Like she always did prior to an important decision. On the riding ground before clearing the highest obstacle. Before choosing her confirmation dress. Even before saying her vows in the church. And before going outside to see if life might be any different there in that gentle light.

David Bell, a convivial
hulk of a police sergeant, liked to take things easy, to sit and stare out at the waves as they smashed against the rocks. All the way up at John O’Groats, Scotland’s very extremity, where the sun shone only half as long but twice as stunningly. This was David’s birthplace, and it was where he intended to die when his time was up.

David Bell was made for the rugged sea. Why should he idle away his time sixteen miles farther south in the office of Bankhead Road Police Station in Wick, when this slumbering harbor meant so much to him? It was a fact he made no bones about.

It was also the reason why his boss always dispatched him to sort things out whenever there was trouble brewing in the communities up north. David would trundle up in his patrol car and threaten the local hotheads that he’d call in an officer from Inverness. It was generally enough to settle things down again. In these parts, no one wanted strangers from the city nosing about in their back gardens any more than they wanted horse piss in their Skull Splitter ale. It was more than enough having folk come through for the Orkney ferry.

Once things quieted down, only the waves remained, and if there was one thing Sergeant Bell had plenty of time for it was the waves.

Had it not been for Bell’s characteristic sedateness, the man who found the bottle might have hurled it back whence it came. But since the sergeant happened to be sitting there in his neatly pressed uniform with the wind
in his hair and his cap on the rock beside him, handing it to him seemed the obvious thing to do.

The bottle had been caught in a trawl and had glinted slightly, though time and the sea had dulled its sheen, and the youngest man on board the
Brew Dog
had seen right away there was something special about it.

“Chuck it over the side, Seamus,” the skipper had shouted when he discovered the message inside. “Those things are bad luck. Wreckage in a bottle, we call them. The Devil’s in the ink and waiting to be let loose. Don’t you know the stories?” But young Seamus didn’t, and he decided to take it ashore.

When Bell finally got back to the station in Wick, one of the local drunks had trashed two of the offices and the duty staff were rather weary of trying to keep the idiot pinned to the floor. That was how David Bell came to remove his jacket, whereupon Seamus’s bottle fell out of its pocket. And it was how he came to pick the bottle up and put it down again on the windowsill so he could concentrate his attention on planting his full weight on the chest of this drunken oaf in order to squeeze some of the air out of him. But anyone treating a full-blooded Viking descendant in such a fashion is liable to get more than he bargained for. And so it was that the drunk delivered such a blow to David Bell’s testicles that any recollection of the bottle was engulfed by the blaring sirens and flashing blue lights his nervous system frantically emitted as a consequence.

And so the bottle remained undisturbed in the sunny corner of the windowsill for a very long time indeed. No one paid it any heed, and no one worried that the paper it contained might be damaged by the sunlight and the condensation that with time appeared on the inside of the glass.

No one bothered to try to read the collection of semi-obliterated letters that appeared uppermost, and for that same reason no one gave a thought to what the word “HJÆLP” might mean.

The bottle did not come into human hands again until a young man who felt himself unreasonably treated on account of a measly parking fine swamped the intranet of Wick Police Station with a veritable tidal wave of viruses. In such a situation, the routine was to get in touch with a computer expert called Miranda McCulloch. When pedophiles encrypted their filth, when hackers covered up all traces of their online banking transactions, and when asset-strippers wiped their hard disks, it was Miranda McCulloch they kneeled before.

She was given an office. The staff were moved to tears and treated her like royalty, filling up her thermos with scalding coffee, throwing open the windows, and making sure the radio was tuned in to Radio Scotland. Miranda McCulloch was indeed a woman appreciated wherever she went.