The Blasphemer: A Novel (36 page)

The major’s eyes are burning and wet. ‘Our business here is finished,’ he repeats.

The brigadier-general blows his nose. ‘Yes, well. Are there any more points to be made? Prisoner’s friend?’

‘No, sir.’

‘Prosecution?’

‘No, sir.’

‘Is the court martial officer satisfied with procedure?’

The chaplain tilts his head. He has a degree in jurisprudence from Cambridge but little of what he learned there applies to the vacillations of this court. ‘I should point out that, in order to convict, the court must be certain that the defendant was not only absent without leave but had formed the intention of never returning to his unit.’

‘Very well,’ Blakemore says with a nod. ‘We know the answer to that. Thank you, padre. We shall adjourn to consider our verdict. Take the prisoner away.’

Andrew has been waiting for four minutes when a hoarse yell summons him back inside. A crackle of excitement passes through the court. With an excess of tight-lipped military smartness the clerk stands to attention and reads from a piece of paper. ‘Private Andrew Kennedy, you have been found guilty of shameful desertion in the face of the enemy and it is the sentence of this Field General Court Martial upon you that you suffer death by shooting at dawn on the fifteenth of September. May the Lord have mercy on your soul.’

The chaplain says: ‘Amen.’

Andrew salutes and remains standing to attention.

Blakemore isn’t sure what to do next. He looks at the prisoner expectantly. ‘Have you anything to say?’

‘The fifteenth, sir. When is that?’

‘Tomorrow.’

The prisoner makes as if to speak again but instead clicks his heels together. From start to finish his trial has lasted twenty-three minutes.

London. Present day. Five months after the crash

WITH HER HAIR STILL WET FROM THE SHOWER, NANCY WENT
through an underwear drawer, holding up several items before choosing black silk hipster briefs with a lace trim. As she stepped into them, she had to hop twice and steady herself on the ottoman. Half standing, half sitting against this, she opened a new packet of black hold-up stockings and rolled them on. She chose a bra next, a black demi-cup that flattened her breasts slightly so that the Theo Fennell cross she intended putting on would hang better. Next she sprayed a mist of scent from a bottle, walked through it and stood in front of her full-length mirror to look over her shoulder at the curve of her hips and the taut roundness of her buttocks. She patted her left cheek to test the elasticity of her skin; rubbed her forehead. Why had she said yes when Tom had asked her and Martha over for Sunday lunch? She had bumped into him near her house. She rubbed again. What had he been doing near her house? And why had she mentioned that Daniel was away in Boston? ‘Why are you making an effort?’ she said out loud to her reflection. She knew why and it brought a flutter of nerves to her belly. Infidelity begins in the imagination and it had begun for Nancy that afternoon when Tom had walked her to her car. She had, in moments of reverie, been imagining herself having sex with him ever since, vengeful sex, dirty sex, and this mental adultery had
been making her furtive and jumpy. The deed itself was a mere technicality.

She took her BlackBerry from her handbag and sent Daniel an email to appease her guilt. ‘Why not look Susie up while you’re in Boston?’ it began. ‘She and I have been emailing each other and I’m sure she would appreciate the chance to talk to a fellow survivor, someone other than me, I mean. You might get something out of it, too. I know she’s still struggling to come to terms with what happened to Greg. Poor thing. It broke her heart. In the last email I got from her she said she had gone back to college. I think she has also found religion, but don’t hold that against her. She said she starts each day with a visit to the cathedral x.’

A few seconds after sending the message, she sent another: ‘We miss you … The bins need emptying x.’

Long after the message had been sent, she continued staring at the screen. As if of its own accord, her hand returned to the bag and felt for a packet of anti-depressants. The flat metallic wrapping held eight pills, each separated by an expanse of empty foil. They were like prisoners in solitary confinement. Lonely and enclosed, hermetically sealed and claustrophobic. Their solitude cruelly reflected hers.
They must feel as I feel. Why aren’t they all in the same bottle?
She popped each one of them out and pushed them together like gamblers’ chips. The staring again. Taking one without water, she clicked her handbag shut. The sound was reassuring, decisive, thrilling.

Tom lived in a Victorian redbrick in Dulwich. It was semidetached and three storeys tall. ‘I inherited it from an uncle,’ he explained apologetically as Nancy looked down at the black and white marble tiles on the floor and up at the high ceiling in the hall. He led the way through an airy kitchen and, holding open a fridge door covered in brightly coloured magnets, offered Martha a can of Coke.

‘Diet?’ Martha questioned.

‘Diet,’ Tom confirmed.

‘Sorry. She has to be careful about her sugar intake,’ Nancy explained.

There was a hiss as Tom pulled the ring on the can and put it to his lips to stop it foaming over. ‘I’ll get you another one,’ he said.

‘That one’s fine,’ Martha said sharply.

Tom shrugged and led the way out to the garden where there was a bottle of champagne cold-sweating in an ice bucket. Next to it, on a mahogany table, were two long-stemmed crystal flutes. As he expertly unwrapped the wire, he asked Nancy if she would join him in a glass. Nancy’s affirmative answer was lost behind the sound of the cork being popped.

‘You seem happier,’Tom said as he tilted both the bottle and the glass.

‘Feel happier. Thanks to you.’

‘I don’t think I’ve done anything. You needed someone to listen, that was all.’

‘You ever seen a counsellor?’

‘Why do you think I became one? My counsellor saved my life.’

‘Really?’

Tom rolled up his sleeves and showed the thin white scars on his wrists.

Nancy put her hand to her mouth. ‘Why?’

‘It was after my wife died. The only way I could think to make the blackness go away.’

‘I didn’t know …You never mentioned a wife.’

‘Bit of a conversation killer … “Hello, my name’s Tom. By the way, I’m a widower.”’

‘How long ago?’

‘Eight years, nearly nine. But she had been dying for a year before that. A horribly slow journey.’

‘You poor man.’ Nancy touched his arm. ‘I’m so sorry.’

‘Let’s change the subject … To happier days.’

They clinked glasses.

‘Happier days.’

They ate outside under a large canvas umbrella. Tom had cooked lamb with new potatoes and fresh mint, and when they finished the champagne they opened a bottle of red. Feeling light-headed, Nancy had to support herself when she rose from the table. She was
still smiling at her own clumsiness when, a minute later, in the bathroom, she looked in Tom’s medicine cupboard and found several bottles of anti-depressants. She recognized them. The same ones she used.

Afterwards, while Tom filled the dishwasher, she leaned over a kitchen counter with her chin resting on her fists and watched Martha playing with Kevin the Dog in the garden. She was feeling drunk, as if she needed to sit down. When she felt Tom’s fingers kneading her shoulders, she rolled her neck slightly, giving him permission to continue. He bunched her golden brown hair and savoured its weight, smell and texture before laying it gently over her shoulder and kissing the nape of her neck. She closed her eyes as his hands reached around and cupped her breasts, a shockingly intimate gesture. How rude. How deliciously rude. The unfamiliar hands were a thousand times more erotic than if they had been Daniel’s familiar ones. When she still did not protest, he hitched her skirt up to her hips; it was tight and she had to help him by wriggling slightly. She felt him press his lips against the exposed curve of skin at the top of her briefs. Feathery kisses now. Goose bumps. Oh my God. He was kissing the backs of her knees. She closed her eyes, breathed through her nose, stopped herself. She then stopped Tom. This was wrong. She wriggled again as she tugged at the hem of the ruched skirt, smoothing it down.

‘What are you doing, Mum?’

Nancy opened her eyes. Martha was standing in the doorway directly in front of her. If she moved her head a fraction to either side she would see Tom. ‘I was just thinking, darling.’ As Nancy said this she lifted a distracted hand to her loosening hair. ‘And call me Mummy.’

‘What were you thinking?’

‘I was thinking that we should be getting going. Can you go and call Kevin in.’

*

The following morning, a raw-boned Monday,Wetherby closed the provost’s door behind him, hovered across the corridor to his own office, sat down, tilted back his chair and smiled sparingly to himself. The meeting had gone well. Exceptionally well. It could not have gone any better. The provost was normally like a water spider skitting across the surface of conversation. It was to do with his wandering focus: the way he nodded and smiled constantly, but rarely concentrated on what Wetherby was saying, still less on what he himself was saying. But this time … Wetherby’s brain reversed current as he retraced his steps back across the hall and replayed the conversation, savouring its nuances, enjoying its dramatic structure. The water spider had also played his part well, given the performance of a lifetime. Sensing Wetherby’s reluctance to share what was clearly preying on his mind, he had stopped writing and laid down his pen, affecting his usual air of irritation at being a busy man interrupted.

‘So, Larry, what is this matter to which you feel my attention should be drawn?’

When Wetherby told him, with a plastic sigh, that a senior member of staff had been in contact with a terrorist suspect – had, indeed, brought on to campus a man MI5 suspected of being a jihadist trying to recruit Muslim students – the provost, selfimportant dolt that he was, had looked stunned. Literally stunned, as if zapped by a Taser. There had been utter confusion in his eyes. Wetherby had enjoyed that.

‘I do not think it right to say who the member of staff is, at this stage,’ Wetherby said, magnanimity personified. ‘I would not wish to accuse a man, and potentially ruin his career, without
ablativus absolutus
.’

The provost insisted. Because the provost always insisted. Because the provost was an insistent creep. ‘A name. I must have a name. I insist.’

When Wetherby divested himself of the name, the provost shook his head in disbelief. ‘Daniel Kennedy? That can’t be right.’

Wetherby unfolded the copy of the Trinity College newspaper he was holding and pushed it across the table. The provost stared at
the photograph of Daniel in the refectory with a young Muslim man who had a few weeks’ beard growth and a chequered scarf wrapped around his neck. After this, the questions came in a torrent. How did Wetherby know? What should they do? Did he think it an isolated incident?

Wetherby mentioned his phone conversation with Geoff Turner, the MI5 officer specializing in counter-terrorism. (He neglected to add that he had been the one to ring Turner, rather than the other way round. There was no need for that information. It would have distracted the provost, a man of limited concentration.) ‘Turner does not think we are dealing with a typical cellular formation here. There is no stable command hierarchy. No army council. That is not how AQ – Turner refers to Al-Qaeda only by its initials – operates. They are more organic. More spontaneous. A loose-knit unit. In all probability the jihadist cell on campus—’

‘
There’s a jihadist cell on campus? Jesus!
’

Wetherby ignored the provost’s lazy-minded blasphemy. ‘The jihadist cell on campus,’ he repeated, ‘will have started as an informal conversation between a small group of like-minded young male students. They are always male, though not necessarily fundamentalist. Not to begin with anyway. This will mutate as the conversational stakes get raised at the next meeting. Then one member will broach the subject of a terror attack. They will discover that they have particular talents or resources, access to materials, skills in chemistry and so on. Their behaviour then resembles that of a playground gang and their bond becomes something close to the psychology of a group dare. None wants to be the first to abandon the project – and thus it develops its own momentum. They tend to be ill-disciplined. They fantasize. GCHQ has picked up chatter from a group thought to be connected to the campus group – chatter about kidnapping British and American children and filming them being tortured. The problem for MI5 is when to send in the police. Too soon and there will be no evidence to prosecute. Too late and …’Wetherby made an exploding gesture with his hands.

The blood had drained from the provost’s face. ‘Unbelievable,’ he
said. ‘This is unbelievable. How many Muslim students do we have?’

‘About thirty, I believe.’

‘It makes no sense. We go out of our way to address their needs.’

‘Turner thinks that might be the problem. The better educated, the more privileged, the greater the likelihood they will become radicalized.’

‘But why Daniel? The man’s an atheist.’

‘Good cover.’

‘You mean he’s not an atheist?’

‘No, I mean, that is why they are using him. They know he is a liberal, a political soft touch. That he is a high-profile atheist as well is a bonus. Puts him above suspicion.’

‘Is he aware he is being used?’

‘Who knows?’

Wetherby closed his eyes as he respooled the next part of their conversation, allowing it to linger in his memory like the smell of incense after Solemn Mass. Predictably, the provost had been concerned that ‘all this’ should be kept out of the press – that his, the provost’s, name should be kept out of the papers. Wetherby agreed there was a risk the story would leak out. If that happened, the press would want to know why the provost had not acted as soon as he had known – why he had not suspended Dr Kennedy, pending an inquiry.