The Turning Tide (18 page)

‘Erykah,’ the woman said. ‘Why?’

‘Oh, you know,’ The Major said. ‘Young face, diversity, all of that fashionable yikyak.’ Not to mention she was now in possession of a recording of him admitting the lottery was a fraud connected to the
SLU
. He thought it best not to mention this part for now.

His goddaughter sighed. ‘She was hardly a credit at the press conference,’ she said. ‘All that
Braveheart
nonsense, and then her shirt pops open. Not to mention the tabloid headlines about that murder.’

‘Sex sells, doesn’t it?’

‘Dear Whitney, you’re so predictable,’ the woman said. ‘You want to fuck her.’

‘Now now, vulgar,’ he said. ‘It simply occurred to me because with the amount of negative attention she has had, she’s still willing to play along.’ And indeed, he observed, the lady was unflappable. ‘Maybe put her on the payroll. Her husband’s a sad sack, but she could be the sort of person we need to stay on side.’

‘Payroll, I see,’ the woman said. He could see her pacing on the other side of the road, impatient. But even without seeing her he would have heard the irritation in her voice. ‘I take it her cooperation comes with strings attached.’

‘She wants money, yes. Not unreasonable given the risks of further involvement.’ Not that he had seen much of the money yet. He was taking it on trust for now. In any case, their lives were too intertwined for her to get away with not paying him.

‘Washed up fortysomething with no career to speak of and a murder scandal in her past?’ she said. ‘You’ll have to excuse me if I don’t see this as a PR win.’

‘That might be one way to look at it. Or, you could say, Teflon woman takes life on the chin and keeps going,’ he said. ‘You must admit she looks great on camera. Not many of those to the pound. What was it you said me once? All publicity is good publicity.’

The more he talked, the better she sounded, in fact. Might want to watch that – in case Erykah had ambitions beyond her station. Wouldn’t want to find himself turfed out in favour of an uppity woman with ideas. ‘With a bit of guidance from myself, naturally,’ he added. ‘She is nowhere near ready to fly on her own as yet.’

‘Mister Moral High Ground telling me how it’s done, now?’ she said. ‘Apologies –
Major
Moral High Ground.’ She paused. ‘Fine. Talk to her, feel out the lay of the land.’

‘We have a morning meeting tomorrow,’ he said.

‘Morning meeting,’ she snorted. ‘Is that what you’re calling it these days?’ She thought a moment. ‘Could work. She does have a certain appeal. If you like that sort of thing. Let me know how it goes.’ She rang off, no pleasantries. Business as usual then.

The Major watched from over the road as she strode away from Cleopatra’s Needle. She didn’t look in his direction for even a moment, and seemed to be already talking to someone else on her mobile.

What must it be like for her? he wondered. At least his public and private personas were roughly in accord with each other. She, on the other hand, had to play a very careful game. Her public face had to be carefully maintained, painstakingly constructed. The puppetmaster had to stay behind the curtain. Given a choice between soft power and hard glory, he would not have chosen the former, himself. But then she was nothing like him and never had been.

He had known her almost her entire life, and she was a fiercely determined woman. One who almost always got what she wanted. And for the first time in a long time it seemed as if things might not go her way.

: 16 :

‘What are you doing the rest of the day?’ the Major asked.

‘Shopping, seeing as I’m in town already.’ Erykah snapped her bra behind her back and eased the straps up over her shoulders. Had she just done this? The sticky sweat of morning sex assured her that, yes, she had.

The diamond rings caught her eye. Her hands seemed to belong to someone else. Was she the same woman, with everything that had happened in the last few days? And after what had happened with Nicole. Doing it for love hadn’t turned out so well. Maybe it was fine to be having sex for all the wrong reasons for once.

So far, though, the thrill of checking in to a hotel first thing in the morning for an illicit rendezvous had turned out to be the best part of the experience. Erykah was disappointed to find the Major’s skills in bed were not at all what his image promised. She had imagined old world romance, a man who knew his way around a woman, a slow hand. Not erection pills and emptying the minibar at nine a.m. Whatever genuine passion might have once ignited the man was long gone.

To be fair, it had been a long time since she’d slept with a man. Grayson had been . . . well, he had been her first, and she supposed it was all right. Things in the beginning had been passionate with Rab, with quickies in restaurants, and one memorable time on a picnic table in a park at night in winter. But after marriage they settled into a routine: oral sex for her orgasm, intercourse for his. Then it happened less and less frequently until it didn’t happen at all. Not with her, anyway. And maybe being with Nicole had altered her expectations considerably.

The Major approached sex like someone ticking a grim but necessary chore off a list. A couple of times she caught his unfocused eyes gazing out of the window. Probably revisiting the mental highlight reel of his earlier conquests.

‘Remarkable,’ he said when the deed was done, and fell back on the sheets. For a frightening fraction of a second she had worried he had keeled over dead.

She looked at her hands again. Same hands. Same woman. If doing this was supposed to mark a kind of passing over from a good woman to a bad one, she certainly didn’t feel any different.

There had been a moment in the café when she wasn’t sure. When it could have gone either way. Walk out, not tell him about the recording, see the job through as things stood. Divorce. Go back to square one, if there was such a thing. What she was really looking at looked more like a black hole.

The sleet against the window there had been so thick that, looking out from the café to the street, it was like a dull mirror. She had turned away from the Major for a second, afraid she might cry.

In the glass, though, it hadn’t been her own reflection she saw. It was Grayson’s. The last seconds in the courtroom after the sentence and before they took him away. His eyes locked on hers, his lips moving. What was he saying? What had he been trying to tell her then?

‘Good. I have a job for you,’ the Major said. He flipped a business card in her direction. ‘Check out this man. He won’t be in his office today. Get in and see what you can find, and bring it back to me.’

Erykah leaned over from getting dressed and picked up the card from the floor. The print was small and raised, the card stock stamped with university insignia. Her alma mater. She knew the building. ‘Are they expecting me?’

‘The opposite,’ the Major said. He leaned and checked his reflection in a mirror. The skin of his back was mottled with freckles and moles, hanging like a wet bed sheet over what had once been a broad pair of shoulders. ‘Use those,’ he gestured at her in the reflection, ‘feminine wiles to get in.’

She watched his face for some kind of sign of what he was thinking. Who was he protecting, really? And as much as he was an old blowhard hustling for a last scrap at fame, he also had discretion etched deep in his psyche. Whoever had this much control over him must be very important indeed.

‘You haven’t told me much about yourself,’ Erykah said. She looked up in what she hoped was a seductive manner. ‘Why did you decide to switch from the service to politics?’

He caught her eyes in the mirror. ‘I thought you said you had read my book.’

‘Oh right, yes, of course I did.’ She giggled, and tried not to cringe at how false it sounded. The paperback was Rab’s, and she wouldn’t have known they had a copy of it at all, had she not been looking at their bookshelves only days earlier. ‘But that’s not the same thing as getting it from the horse’s mouth, is it?’

‘Mmmph,’ the Major grunted. ‘Another time. Right now you have a job to do,’ he said, and cinched the kilt straps around his waist. ‘I clearly can’t go in there without someone noticing me. As for the two gentlemen I would normally call on, they wouldn’t get past the door of a flophouse without raising suspicion. I need someone who can pass in public crowds. Someone who blends in.’

‘How will I know when I find what I’m looking for?’ she said.

‘You won’t,’ the Major sighed as he rushed her out the door. ‘None of us do. If it were that easy we would have done it already.’

She walked down the street, Googling the name on the card. So it was that missing geologist. She slightly recalled the story from over a month ago. Something to do with a disputed suicide note, or similar. Though as far as she knew he hadn’t been found.

Erykah stood in the end of a Tube carriage and turned the whole situation over again and again in her mind. It didn’t make sense: The Major and a couple of guys straight out of prison? The scheme had all the subtlety and complexity of a middle-school shoplifting ring. No way was that all that was going on, no way were they the only people involved. And where was the money coming from?

In spite of being missing, the university website still listed Damian Schofield’s office location and open hours as if nothing was amiss. Not the sort of glamorous assignment she thought she was signing up for. She had envisioned herself rubbing elbows with the media elite, not trying to break in to an academic office.

Erykah got off a stop early and decided to walk over the river. Without really thinking about it she found herself on a towpath on the north side of the Thames. Across the water, the Tideway rowing clubs clustered on the bank. Once upon a time this was her patch: the Barn Elms boathouse, where an afternoon taster session organised for underprivileged teens first caught her imagination. A couple of years later she was rowing from the university boathouse only a few hundred metres away, one of the best student clubs in the country. Better even, to those in the know, than Oxford or Cambridge.

On the shore was a group of boats all trying to launch at the same time. Belligerent geese snapped at the ankles of the rowers, while a coach on a rib shouted at them through a loudhailer. It was a scene as familiar to her as the back of her own hand; one she had been part of for years.

The Tideway section of the river was miles downstream from Molesey and it was, as its name indicated, the tidal part of the Thames. The difference between low water and high water was huge – not to mention the stream of the tide when it was running at its fastest. Nearly all new rowers here found themselves in trouble at some point, either from trying to turn a boat too close to the pylons of the bridges, or running into the infamous Black Buoy.

It had been decades since Erykah trained on the Tideway. It had a reputation, and not a good one. The first outing was nothing like she had ever experienced. Thrown into a wooden boat with seven other shivering and frightened novice girls, wondering how long it would be before the tiny narrow craft dumped them in the river. And yet, miraculously, it didn’t. The cox steered them downstream, then patiently explained to them how to turn the boat around, then they came back on the eddy.

Erykah was instantly hooked. It was amazing to realise the power of the water, how it could take you where it wanted you to go. Even the strongest crews, at best, were only working with what the water was already doing.

It was also where she first saw the city in a new way. Not from the streets, buses, and parks where she grew up. From the water, as Londoners must have navigated it for thousands of years, it whispered an ancient history, the meandering river carving out the fate of a city before the proliferation of bridges and tunnels that crossed it now.

One of her first times in a pair had been here, too. It wasn’t a good outing. The tide had turned during the outing, but Erykah, not realising it, steered the boat in the wrong direction when they stopped to turn and go back to the club. Other crews had been shouting at them from downstream, but it wasn’t until the stream grabbed the bow of the boat and tries to push them under a moored catamaran that she realised her mistake. The girl in the stroke seat screamed and lost control of her oar. The boat wobbled dangerously, and the gate of Erykah’s rigger was crushed against the catamaran’s hull. The angle of the turn meant that while crews already on the water had been able to see their disaster before it happened, the larger boat blocked the sight line to shore.

The water rushing under their boat was speeding up, tugging them further under the moored cat. Erykah reached out with one arm and tried to push them off, but it was like pushing against a brick wall. Underneath, the rush of water going through the catamaran’s two hulls was like a giant, sucking drain.

Her crew mate started undoing her feet from the blocks. She was going to swim for it. ‘What are you doing?’ Erykah said. ‘If you jump the stream will carry you under the boat. You’ll die!’

‘I have a stage nine swimming certificate!’ she said. ‘It’s only a few metres away!’

Nothing at that moment seemed less relevant to Erykah than a swimming certificate, but the look in the girl’s wide blue eyes brooked no argument. It was obvious she would be pulled between the hulls and not calmly swimming to shore. Erykah was stunned at the confidence, even though it was clearly foolish and dangerous to leave the boat, even though they had been told never to abandon a boat if you went in, unless it was sinking.

Luckily for them it never came to that. The shouting crews on the water must have attracted attention, and two coaching launches sped out from the bank of the Thames to rescue them. Erykah and the other girl were hurried back to shore in one rib while a second one dragged the empty pair behind it. The river going from slack to a turn was subtle and easy to get wrong. Making that choice could have killed her and her partner, and it tore a hole in their boat the size of her hand.

But everyone in the Tideway had a near-miss story just like that one. The Tideway produced a different breed of rower to anywhere else. The rougher the water, the more satisfying the outing. Were the waves high? Tap your oar down harder and get on with it. Was the wind hard? Lean against it and push your weight in. Big wash coming off a motor boat? Row across it, hard. If you almost drown? Laugh it off.

Rowing clubs from Putney to Chiswick trained every day on the same stretch of the river that the Boat Race crews of Oxford and Cambridge only dared touch once a year. Molesey rowers complained about the unpredictable streams and vicious steering down here. ‘More bumper cars that real rowing,’ some sneered. ‘Bring a sick bag.’ But the fact was that, compared to the Tideway, the upper Thames was a broken beast, a glorified millpond.

The water was glinting and furious and ready to swallow all comers. In the twenty years since she last trained there Erykah had forgotten how much she loved it. She had thought rowing at Molesey & Hampton Anglian would make her into a more refined rower, a better competitor. Maybe a champion. But for all the cups and points won over the years, she was no closer now than she had been then.

The walk from the boathouses to the university was exactly as she remembered it. Students crowded the lobby of the university’s main building, rushing to get to morning lectures on time. A security guard stood by the door and checked ID cards. She didn’t have one and shrugged apologetically. The guard’s eyes caught hers then slipped down to her chest as he stepped back to let her pass anyway. Erykah smiled and swished past the checkpoint.

The Internet hadn’t revealed much about the target that she didn’t already know. Apart from some news coverage right after his disappearance there wasn’t a lot else to go on. He had a number of papers in scientific journals, most on oil survey techniques. The departmental website had a brief sketch of his career to date. Nothing unusual she could see there. Some work in Argentina, Ecuador, and the North Atlantic for industry, before moving into academia. One site had scans of an old magazine profile, complete with a photo showing Schofield leaning on the desk in his office, its top piled high with papers and notebooks. He was wearing a shirt open at the neck and a pair of corduroy trousers, and had the lean and rangy look of a man who spent a lot of time outdoors. There was not much else, at least not online. She would have to wing it.

It seemed the breast inspector in security at the main entrance might be her only human obstacle. The fourth floor of the environmental sciences building was restricted to card entry only. No guards to charm, but a swipe pad that needed a staff card to unlock the door. No security camera that she could see. Erykah hovered by the doors, walking up and down a few steps, trying to look as though she had just arrived. After a few minutes a group of students exiting the department held the door open for her. ‘Cheers,’ she said, and slipped inside.

No secretarial staff in sight. Her luck was holding. The room she wanted was around the corner on the right. Damian Schofield’s office had a brass nameplate on it, the little black plastic In/Out slider below set permanently to Out.

She jiggled the door handle. Locked.

There was that book her mother had bought her. Lock picking was in it, although not in any great detail. What did it say? That picking a lock wasn’t done at all the way they do it in films and television. That you needed two tools, not one. One to keep the tension and start turning it round, another to feel for locations of the tumblers.