***
The tears were overwhelming and uncontrollable. Even though she felt rational and collected, they kept on coming sharp and unbidden, like the loan repayment demands through her letterbox.
Alison Palmer could not remember the last time she had shed real tears like this, not even the day all those years ago when she had heard of Robbie's arrest, nor through the court-martial that followed; not even the day she had found herself disastrously pregnant, nor that hot, horrific July night when Michael had been killed in a collision on the M4, just weeks before the date of their wedding, nor even when she had read in the Times about Robbie's death in a helicopter crash in Angola.
She moved to the window, perhaps to see if she could catch a glimpse of Max's back flitting from streetlight to streetlight, back up the rain-swept road. But on a sudden impulse she pulled the curtains sharply together and moved instead to the mantelpiece.
She picked up and fondled the photos of Sophie one by one, as if the very touch of her fingertips on the glass frames could act as a talismanic balm for her daughter.
What was it Max had said about Sophie going out with Easterby's son? She forgot her concern for a second and replaced it with a disgust that made her nostrils flare and her cheeks flush.
And in her disgust, she remembered that night over twenty years ago when she and Max had got horrendously slaughtered at Max's parents' place the week after Robbie's arrest, that fateful night when Max had lent her a drunken shoulder to cry on and she had sobbed over it all the way to his bed. Max had told her back then about what Easterby and that vile sergeant Goss had done to Robbie. Amazing how God could sometimes pop up from the obscurity of non-existence to dispense justice with a supreme sense of irony! How she wished Robbie could have lived to have seen Monday's headlines and revelled in the terrible death Easterby had meted out to his former sergeant. Mind you, Robbie had always been so magnanimous, she felt sure he would have taken no joy even in the demise of one so wicked as Goss.
But thinking back twenty years only worsened the gnawing fear for her daughter. She replayed again and again in her mind what Max had told her about Sophie and a mysterious Ramli millionaire, and her fear suddenly matured into full-blown panic. All the coincidences: Ramliyya, Easterby, Goss and now this Ramli millionaire, all of them merged and coalesced in her mind to form one awful entity.
The shock of her instinctive conclusion sent her scrambling for her phone and four times in a row she dialled Sophie’s number only to hear the voicemail message. There was only one thing to do: she would have to take the first bus to Oxford this very evening.
The split-second decision lent a new purposefulness to Alison’s worry. She went to the bathroom to repair the damage to her makeup and change into warmer clothes. The door buzzer snarled for the first time as she was touching up her eye shadow, then louder for another four angry pushes as whoever it was downstairs grew too impatient to wait for the lipstick to go on.
‘Shit, who the devil can that be now?’ she moaned to Fidelio, her tabby cat, as it brushed its tail against her bare shins.
She slipped into a dressing gown and made for the door, then stopped in the living room. Would it be Max again? She didn't fancy meeting Max semi-naked, so was about to head back for the bathroom again in search of more substantial clothing when the buzzer reached a crescendo of frustration: two short jabs and one sustained burst.
‘All right, all right, I'm coming,’ she muttered, fastening her dressing gown and shooting down the stairs.
‘Who is it?’ she shouted at the bottom of the stairs.
No answer.
‘Is that you again, Max?’
Again, no answer. She undid the lock and pulled back the door till it caught on the chain.
‘Who is it?’ she asked crossly, peering into the dim shadows.
Al-Ajnabi stepped closer, letting the beam of light from the hallway fall across his face. He had waited a long time for this moment, but now he had it in the flesh, it bore no resemblance to twenty years’ of darkly brooded imaginings.
Alison's face quite simply collapsed in front of him, turning and twisting like water down a plughole. The corners of her mouth puckered up her cheeks into one huge, despairing sob and her eyes shrivelled back into a furrowed forehead.
Alison stood motionless, sobbing gently, not hysterically, to herself, as he had seen Ramli mothers doing back in the civil war, collecting the bodies of their dead sons from the backs of Toyota pick-up trucks. Her grief was even more shocking for being self-contained and stationary, and the unexpected strength of her emotion left him no room for vengeful pleasure.
‘This can't be happening to me,’ she sobbed almost inaudibly. ‘You're supposed to be dead. They told me you were dead.’
The sound of Alison’s voice poked Al-Ajnabi from his trance and a photo-click of malice returned to his emotions, corrupting the unexpected impulse towards forgiveness and understanding before it had taken firm root.
‘Yes, dead, Alison. Robert Bailey died with the fake medical records I paid for in Walvis Bay fifteen years ago.'
There was no reply, only a prolonged, muffled sobbing. And knowing he wouldn't get any more than that for now, Al-Ajnabi simply rattled the chain against the door.
‘No more of this, Alison,’ he continued in a level but bitter voice. ‘No more of the past. There are other things we need to talk about. Undo the chain and let me in.’
Still no answer, nor even any gesture of compliance. Her dark eyes were staring straight back at him with twenty years' worth of remorse and regret.
Al-Ajnabi came closer, pushing a hand through the doorway to tackle the chain.
‘Let me in, Alison,’ he grunted. ‘We need to talk about Sophie.’
The mention of her daughter's name snapped Alison Palmer out of her abject despondency and she yanked at the chain vigorously, catching his hand in the jam of the door as she pushed it back.
‘Sophie? What's Sophie got to do with any of this, Robbie? It's me you want to punish. So here I am. Do what you want with me but leave Sophie alone.’
Suddenly all the pent-up bile of twenty years returned with the new-found hostility in Alison’s voice. He swallowed hard and spoke through clenched teeth.
‘I told you, Alison, Robbie's dead. So don't start appealing to him. This is Omar you're talking to, Prince Omar Al-Ajnabi of Ramliyya. Now take me inside please.’
With that he slipped the chain and pushed the door fully open. Brushing past Alison, he took the stairs and soon found the open door of her first-floor flat. His anger had quickly smothered Alison’s resistance before it could develop into open rebellion. She shut the main door and followed him up the stairs; Al-Ajnabi sensed the onset of hysterics.
‘But why have you got Sophie caught up in this?’ she shrieked from the hallway. Her shouts roused the neighbours, prompting a door to open and a head to poke out from the across the landing.
Al-Ajnabi retreated inside the flat, stepping towards the windows and peering through the curtains. Alison followed him inside, slamming the door behind.
He turned to confront her as she joined him by the windows and their eyes met. Alison looked deeply into her former lover’s eyes, and as she did so she remembered what Max had just told her. This second shock of understanding coming so soon after the first was simply too much to bear. She sank to the floor, clasping his knees in her outstretched hands, begging for mercy as apologetically as any suppliant had ever implored an executioner.
‘Oh no, no, no. Not that. Tell me it's not true. Not with Sophie. Tell me not with Sophie, Robbie.’
Al-Ajnabi swallowed hard again and had to look away from those distraught eyes he still remembered so well. The more he looked the more it could be either of them, Alison or Sophie, mother or daughter, the difference between them fudged in their identical chocolate hues.
His grim silence gave Alison the answer she needed. Al-Ajnabi thought she might leap from the floor to sink her nails into his check, but, on
the contrary, she had slumped even further to the ground with her cheek propped against his shin, sobbing in very low-pitched convulsions to herself. The downwards slide against his leg had pushed her dressing gown down, revealing a bare shoulder and the top of her left breast. Al-Ajnabi leaned down and pulled her up by the wrists, helping her onto the sofa.
But lifted off the floor, Alison’s eyes turned defiant again.
‘You bastard!’ she hissed. ‘You had no right to do that. I could have accepted any other punishment, but not Sophie.’
‘Sophie is an adult, Alison,’ he answered. ‘She can make her own choices. And she did. In fact it was Sophie who changed it all, changed all my plans. That's why I'm here. I don't want Sophie to get hurt any more than you do. You see, I'm letting her go. I'm letting her get out of it.’
‘Out of what?’ The tears had stopped, but Alison’s voice was hoarse and resentful.
‘What's about to happen,’ he answered curtly, moving away towards the windows again. ‘What you have seen so far is only the prelude to the beginning. I'm going to take them all down, Alison: Max, Easterby, McPherson and all the rest of their rotten kind. They're nothing but parasites, Alison, parasites on a diseased body.’
‘Wait,’ she interrupted, suddenly more in control of her emotions. ‘Let me go to bathroom.’
She was gone for a long, long time. In her absence, Al-Ajnabi paced up and down the room, taking regular checks through the curtains to keep an eye on Hasan in the hire car across the street. As he moved around the room he paused to look at the gallery of photos of Sophie that dominated every corner of the flat, providing welcome visual relief from the over-faded Laura Ashley wallpaper.
There were only a few photos of Alison herself, as if she were ashamed to be seen on display, and only one faded portrait photo of Michael Paxson, probably just before the car crash that preceded Sophie’s birth. Al-Ajnabi knew why this photo, in particular, was kept in a very prominent location.
Eventually Alison re-emerged from the bathroom, dressed properly, her smudged make-up rearranged. She seemed much calmer now after the initial shocks, but still nervous and forlorn.
‘Why did you never answer any of the letters I sent to you while you were in prison? I tried so many times to explain; you knew I never stopped loving you, Robbie. It was only an accident with Max.’
Al-Ajnabi picked up a photo of Sophie somewhere on a beach holiday aged maybe twelve or thirteen, replaced it on the mantelpiece and sighed.
‘That wasn't the story Max wrote to me. They way he put it, it sounded more like an accident that kept on repeating itself. In his last letter to me in Catterick, he said it would go all the way to the altar.’
Alison swished at her hair a couple of times in discomfort and curled it into a bob, combing the ends with her fingers in her fidgety embarrassment.
‘Well, yes, no, … I wasn't sure. It was so confusing; I seemed to be stumbling from one disaster to another back then. But I always wanted you, Robbie. Believe me. I looked everywhere for you when you were released. Everywhere I could think of. Until I found out you had left the country and were fighting as a mercenary in Africa. And then the helicopter crash. Suddenly you were dead and I had never had the chance to explain.’
Alison’s eyes met his again and she gazed at him softly as if to make sure he really was alive, stretching out a hand to touch his shoulder. Al-Ajnabi edged away towards the mantelpiece, but not without a certain hesitation.
‘Why did you fake your death back then?’ she asked, ever more gently.
‘Max was on to me.’
‘Max? What did he want?’
‘God knows.’ Irritation and bitterness had crept into his voice. ‘To kill me? To bring me back to the fold? I wasn't interested in any of it. Something changed inside me out in Africa.’
‘What was that, Robbie? Did you become a Heart of Darkness?’
His eyes bored into hers, then from nowhere a brief smile.
‘No, not at all. It's hard to explain. Just an understanding that they way I had been fucked over by the greedy, the ambitious and the powerful was just par for course; nothing special out there in the Third World. Thousands were dying daily for the sake of diamonds, prospecting rights or cash crops. Their deaths and the devastation of the land all around were just irrelevancies, didn't even figure on the balance sheets of the rich and powerful, the paymasters of our political leaders. That's when it suddenly hit: Robert Bailey had to die. He was just some arsehole, moping around the African bush feeling sorry for himself. The cocoon opened and out stepped… this man.’
Alison was captivated. Since Robbie had started talking all the bitterness seemed to have evaporated between them. It was as if the intervening years simply hadn't happened, all the deceit, sorrow and suffering, and they were simply picking up where they had left off, from where she had hugged him close as he left her at the end of his first leave back in March, well over twenty years ago. For the moment, she just wanted to keep him talking.
‘And who is the new man?’ she asked, closing the gap between them again. ‘Tell me about him.’
‘His lucky break came almost ten years to the day after Rob Bailey's fall from grace.’
‘And how did that come about?’
‘It’s a long story.’
‘But I want to hear it.’
And without knowing why, suddenly he wanted to tell it.
‘I had been hired by Sultan Al-Janoubi as part of a mobile helicopter mercenary unit to help eliminate insurgents operating out of North Yemen. The Ramli regulars we were fighting alongside were untrustworthy and split along tribal allegiances. We lost four of our six helicopter gunships to SAM missiles in the first five months I was there. The guerrillas couldn't have had better terrain to hide in than the hot, volcanic mountains of the Ramli-Yemeni border. One man hiding in the hills with a surface-to-air missile could do a lot of damage. When we lost the fourth chopper, I was the only mercenary officer left, so I took command.
But rather than carry on getting picked off by SAM’s decided to switch tactics. I had grown friendly with the king's young son, Khalid. Khalid was in command of a supposedly elite 600-strong battalion, the Royal Guard, but he was only nineteen and way out of his depth. At least he had the sense to realize that. We pooled forces and I assumed overall command. After a month's constant training in the hills, I had a force to be reckoned with.
Just in time. Two weeks later, General Madani, the Ramli Chief of Staff and the Sultan's second cousin, launched a coup attempt.
We were on manoeuvre in the hills outside the main base at Jebel Bahri when we heard about the coup. The fighting was already intense and there was no way of knowing who was loyal or who had gone over to Madani.
I think that that was the first time, amid the shouting, the gunshots, the heat, the sand and the confusion that I realized I had a chance at something really big, the sort of opportunity that sometimes occurs in a coup for a nobody to become a president. All it needed was a level head and ruthless determination.’
‘And you had become ruthless because of me?’
He shrugged indifferently.
‘No, don’t give yourself all the credit, Alison. There was a lot more to it than that.’
‘Anyway?’
"Anyway, while the Ramli commanders of the other units at Jebel Bahri were still arguing over who was on what side, I marched straight back to the camp, opening fire on everything in our way, friend or foe, till we had captured the entire base.
The strong-arm tactics worked. A few units fled into the hills, but the majority simply gave up. I had them all disarmed and sat them hands-on-heads out in the blistering sun till Khalid's men returned to sort them out.
The reports from Madinat Al-Aasima were bad. We heard that Madani controlled the port, the airport and the military airbase outside the city. Something swift and daring was called for.
At three in the morning I set off with the sixteen other remaining South African mercenaries and fo
ur Ramli officers, including Mohammed Al-Hajri, a captain in the Royal Guard. We left in the two remaining helicopter gunships for the airbase at Madinat Al-Aasima, flying out low, very low over the Red Sea, keeping our altitude down to a hundred feet to escape radar detection. There was a quarter moon setting to the west in the sea, giving off just enough silver glow to illuminate the shore and the edge of the reef, where the Red Sea shallows suddenly plunge hundreds of feet into the Rift Valley floor.
I've never felt such exhilaration. Lungs full of balmy, fetid air, rotor blades pulsating as fast as the adrenalin in our veins. We shot across the shoreline just to the north of Madinat Al-Aasima, so low that we almost collided with the minaret of the big mosque standing on the edge of the lagoon.
We knew where the officers' quarters where and we hit those first, firing two missiles into each, then one into the control tower and the anti-aircraft batteries.
The surprise was total. Within half an hour we had taken control of the entire airbase. The problem was pilots. Several had been killed by our missile raids, and of those we had, only five were deemed trustworthy by Mohammed Al-Hajri.
At dawn we sent out five Phantoms and the two helicopter gunships against Madani. There were no other aircraft in Ramliyya and I knew that if those Phantoms did the job properly, Madani was finished. They did. Two days later, Khalid arrived from Jebel Bahri with the rest of the Royal Guard. By that time, most of Madani's men had defected, deserted or been killed in air strikes. I pushed him towards the sea to the north of the city at Ras Shammali where his last units surrendered.’
Al-Ajnabi’s voice tailed off and his eyes were distant. He and Alison were standing closer together now. Very close.
‘And after that?’ Alison probed, forcing his gaze onto hers.
‘After that I rescued the Sultan and his family. They were being held at gunpoint in a palace just outside Madinat Al-Aasima. In gratitude, the Sultan adopted me into his family, made me his Chief of Staff, gave me several million dollars and the opportunity to earn many million more…’
‘And he gave you his beautiful daughter to marry, I suppose?’
Their eyes were close enough for him to taste Alison’s breath. It was still salty after the tears, but moist and enticing.
‘No, no king's daughter,’ he whispered.
‘But there were surely other women?’
‘Several. A little harem, you could say, dotted here and there around Africa and the Middle East.’
He watched her eyes lower with almost imperceptible disappointment.
‘So you did fall in love again? I'm glad for you, Robbie.’
He smiled acerbically.
‘No. That was never in my plans. At least, I certainly never expected to, not again…’
‘Yes?’ Her voice was expectant, her face flushed and palpitating.
Al-Ajnabi broke off from her gaze and took a step away towards the windows. The rebuff struck Alison like acid in the eyes; she could suddenly read his thoughts.
‘Oh no, not Sophie again! You can't mean…?’
‘I don't.’
His voice was firm but it sounded too riled to be true.
‘I just mean that I have changed the nature of Sophie’s role in my business, as I already told you. She was to have been my insurance policy, you see, the ace up my sleeve against Max.’
Alison was crying again now.
‘Max? What on earth has Sophie got to do between you and Max?’
‘Oh do let's stop playing games with each other, Alison!’ he shouted her down, his voice grown bitter and overbearing again. ‘Do you not think that with the money, power and resources at my availability I don't know everything about you, Alison? Absolutely everything.’
He could not tell how long they stayed silent like that: Finally Alison broke away from his gaze and stumbled towards the sofa, where she sat whimpering softly and steadily to herself in the awesome magnitude of this third and final shock.
Al-Ajnabi left her on the sofa and checked out of the window again for Hasan’s hire car. Yes, he knew she knew he knew. There was no doubt left, no need for further explanation. And by letting her know that he knew her secret, Al-Ajnabi was sure he would have Alison’s loyalty in the fight ahead.
After she had cried long enough, finally he walked over to the sofa and bent down towards her. Alison didn't pull away. Her head was buried in her knees; he touched her hair, almost affectionately, and produced a letter from inside his black leather coat.
‘Alison, I want you to hand this letter to Sophie yourself, but not before tomorrow evening. On no account is Sophie to read this before 6:00 p.m. tomorrow evening. That's for her own safety. As for us,’ he sighed, there's nothing more left to say, Alison. It's settled.’