I went back to look at the photographs. ‘Lang’s hysterical performance as a chicken in charge of a battery farm for humans at the 1972 Cambridge Footlights Revue earned him plaudits.’ I could imagine us both chasing the same girls, taking a bad show to the Edinburgh Fringe in the back of some beat-up Volkswagen van, sharing digs, getting stoned. And yet somehow, metaphorically speaking, I had stayed a chicken, while he had gone on to become prime minister. This was the point at which my normal powers of empathy deserted me, for there seemed nothing in his first twenty-five years that could explain his second. But there would be time enough, I reasoned, to find his voice.
I double-locked the door before I went to bed that night and dreamed I was following Adam Lang through a maze of rainy red-brick streets. When I got into a minicab and the driver turned round to ask me where I wanted to go, he had McAra’s lugubrious face.
*
Heathrow the next morning looked like one of those bad science-fiction movies set in the near future after the security forces have taken over the state. Two armoured personnel carriers were parked outside the terminal. A dozen men with Rambo machine guns and bad haircuts patrolled inside. Vast lines of passengers queued to be frisked and X-rayed, carrying their shoes in one hand and their pathetic toiletries in a clear plastic bag in the other. Travel is sold as freedom, but we were about as free as lab rats. This is how they’ll manage the next Holocaust, I thought, as I shuffled forward in my stockinged feet: they’ll simply issue us with air tickets and we’ll do whatever we’re told.
Once I was through security I headed across the fragrant halls of duty free towards the American Airlines lounge, intent only on a courtesy cup of coffee and the Sunday morning sports pages. A satellite news channel was burbling away in the corner. No one was watching. I fixed myself a double espresso and was just turning to the football reports in one of the tabloids when I heard the words ‘Adam Lang’. Three days earlier, like everyone else in the lounge, I would have taken no notice, but now it was as if my own name was being called out. I went and stood in front of the screen and tried to make sense of the story.
To begin with, it didn’t seem that important. It sounded like old news. Four British citizens had been picked up in Pakistan a few years back – ‘kidnapped by the CIA’, according to their lawyer – taken to a secret military installation in eastern Europe and tortured. One had died under interrogation, the other three had been imprisoned in Guantanamo. The new twist, apparently, was that a Sunday paper had obtained a leaked Ministry of Defence document which seemed to suggest that Lang had ordered an SAS unit to seize the men and hand them over to the CIA. Various expressions of outrage followed, from a human rights lawyer, and a spokesman for the Pakistan government. File footage showed Lang wearing a garland of flowers round his neck on a visit to Pakistan while he was prime minister. A spokeswoman for Lang was quoted as saying the former prime minister knew nothing of the reports and was refusing to comment. The British government had consistently rejected demands to hold an inquiry. The programme moved on to the weather, and that was it.
I glanced around the lounge. Nobody else had stirred. Yet for some reason I felt as if someone had just run an ice pack down my spine. I pulled out my cell phone and called Rick. I couldn’t remember whether he had gone back to America or not. It turned out he was sitting about a mile away, in the British Airways lounge, waiting to board his flight to New York.
‘Did you just see the news?’ I asked him.
Unlike me, Rick was a news addict.
‘The Lang story? Sure.’
‘D’you think there’s anything in it?’
‘How the hell do I know? Who cares if there is? At least it’s keeping his name on the front pages.’
‘D’you think I should ask him about it?’
‘Who gives a shit?’ Down the line I heard a loudspeaker announcement howling in the background. ‘They’re calling my flight. I got to go.’
‘Just before you do,’ I said quickly, ‘can I just run something past you? When I was mugged on Friday – somehow it didn’t make much sense, the way they left my wallet and only ran off with a manuscript. But looking at this news – well, I was just wondering: you don’t think they thought I was carrying Lang’s memoirs?’
‘But how’d they know that?’ said Rick in a puzzled voice. ‘You’d only just met Maddox and Kroll. I was still negotiating the deal.’
‘Well, maybe someone was watching the publishers’ offices, and then followed me when I left. It was a bright yellow plastic bag, Rick. I might as well have been carrying a flare.’ And then another thought came to me, so alarming I didn’t know where to begin. ‘While you’re on – what do you know about Sidney Kroll?’
‘Young Sid?’ Rick gave a chuckle of admiration. ‘My, but he’s a piece of work, isn’t he? He’s going to put honest crooks like me out of business. He cuts his deals for a flat fee rather than commission, and you won’t find an ex-president or a cabinet member who doesn’t want him on their team. Why?’
‘It’s not possible, is it,’ I said hesitantly, voicing the thought more or less as it developed, ‘that he gave me that manuscript because he thought – if anyone was watching – he thought it would look as though I was leaving the building carrying Adam Lang’s book?’
‘Why the hell would he do that?’
‘I don’t know. For the fun of it? To see what would happen?’
‘To see if you’d get mugged?’
‘Okay, all right, it sounds mad, but just think it through for a minute. Why are the publishers so paranoid about this manuscript? Even Quigley hasn’t been allowed to see it. Why won’t they let it out of America? Maybe it’s because they think someone over here is desperate to get hold of it.’
‘So?’
‘So perhaps Kroll was using me as bait – sort of a tethered goat – to test who was after it, find out how far they’d be willing to go.’
Even as the words were leaving my mouth I knew I was sounding ridiculous.
‘But Lang’s book is a boring crock of shit!’ said Rick. ‘The only people they want to keep it away from at this point are their shareholders! That’s why it’s under wraps.’
I was starting to feel a fool. I would have let the subject go, but Rick was enjoying himself too much.
‘A tethered goat!’ I could have heard his shout of laughter from the other terminal even without the phone. ‘Let me get this straight. According to your theory, someone must have known Kroll was in town, known where he was Friday morning, known what he’d come to discuss …’
‘All right,’ I said. ‘Let’s leave it.’
‘… known he might just give Lang’s manuscript to a new ghost, known who you were when you came out of the meeting, known where you lived. Because you said they were waiting for you, didn’t you? Wow. This must’ve been some operation. Too big for a newspaper. This must’ve been a government—’
‘Forget it,’ I said, finally managing to cut him off. ‘You’d better catch your flight.’
‘Yeah, you’re right. Well, you have a safe trip. Get some sleep on the plane. You’re sounding weird. Let’s talk next week. And don’t worry about it.’
He rang off.
I stood there holding my silent phone. It was true. I was sounding weird. I went into the men’s room. The bruise where I’d been punched on Friday had ripened, turned black and purple, and was fringed with yellow, like some exploding supernova in an astronomy textbook.
A short time later they announced the Boston flight was boarding, and once we were in the air my nerves steadied. I love that moment when a drab grey landscape flickers out of sight beneath you, and the plane tunnels up through the cloud to burst into the sunshine. Who can be depressed at ten thousand feet when the sun is shining and the other poor saps are still stuck on the ground? I had a drink. I watched a movie. I dozed for a while. But I must admit I also scoured that business-class cabin for every Sunday newspaper I could find, ignored the sports pages for once, and read al
l that had been written about Adam Lang and those four suspected terrorists.
*
We made our final approach to Logan Airport at one in the afternoon, local time.
As we came in low over Boston Harbor the sun we had been chasing all day seemed to travel over the water alongside us, striking the downtown skyscrapers one after the other: erupting columns of white and blue, gold and silver, a firework display in glass and steel. O my America! I thought, my new-found-land – my land where the book market is five times the size of the United Kingdom’s – shine thy light on me! As I queued for immigration I was practically humming ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’. Even the guy from the Department of Homeland Security – embodying the rule that the folksier an institution’s name, the more Stalinist its function – couldn’t dent my optimism. He sat frowning behind his glass screen at the very notion of anyone flying three thousand miles to spend a month on Martha’s Vineyard in mid-winter. When he discovered I was a writer, he couldn’t have treated me with greater suspicion if I had been wearing an orange jumpsuit.
‘What kind of books you write?’
‘Autobiographies.’
This obviously baffled him. He suspected mockery, but wasn’t quite sure. ‘Autobiographies, huh? Don’t you have to be famous to do that?’
‘Not any more.’
He stared hard at me, then slowly shook his head, like a weary St Peter at the Pearly Gates, confronted by yet another sinner trying to wheedle his way into Paradise. ‘Not any more,’ he repeated, with an expression of infinite distaste. He picked up his metal stamp and punched it twice. He let me in for thirty days.
When I was through immigration I turned on my phone. It showed a welcoming message from Lang’s personal assistant, someone named Amelia Bly, apologising for not providing a driver to collect me from the airport. Instead she suggested I take a bus to the ferry terminal at Woods Hole, and promised a car would meet me when I landed at Martha’s Vineyard. I bought a New York Times and a Boston Globe and checked them while I waited for the bus to leave to see if they had the Lang story, but either it had broken too late for them or they weren’t interested.
The bus was almost empty and I sat up front near the driver as we pushed south through the tangle of freeways, out of the city and into open country. It was a few degrees below freezing and the sky was clear, but there had been snow not long before. It was piled in banks next to the road and clung to the higher branches in the forests which stretched away on either side in great rolling waves of white and green. New England is basically Old England on steroids – wider roads, bigger woods, larger spaces; even the sky seemed huge and glossy. I had a pleasing sense of gaining time, imagining a gloomy, wet Sunday night in London, in contrast to this sparkling afternoon winterland. But gradually it began to darken here as well. I guess it must have been almost six when we reached Woods Hole and pulled up at the ferry terminal, and by then there was a moon and stars.
Oddly enough, it wasn’t until I saw the sign for the ferry that I remembered to spare a thought for McAra. Not surprisingly, the dead-man’s-shoes aspect of the assignment wasn’t one I cared to dwell on, especially after my mugging. But as I wheeled my suitcase into the ticket office to pay my fare, and then stepped back out again into the bitter wind, it was only too easy to imagine my predecessor going through similar motions a mere three weeks earlier. He had been drunk, of course, which I wasn’t. I looked around. There were several bars just across the car park. Perhaps he had gone into one of those? I wouldn’t have minded a drink myself. But then I might sit on exactly the same bar stool as he had, and that would be ghoulish, I thought, like taking one of those tours of murder scenes in Hollywood. Instead I joined the passenger queue and tried to read the Times Sunday magazine, turning to the wall for protection from the wind. There was a wooden board with painted lettering: ‘CURRENT NATIONWIDE THREAT LEVEL IS ELEVATED’. I could smell the sea but it was too dark to see it.
The trouble is, once you start thinking about a thing, you can’t always make yourself stop. Most of the cars waiting to board the ferry had their engines running so the drivers could use their heaters in the cold, and I found myself checking for a tan-coloured Ford Escape SUV. Then, when I actually got on the boat, and climbed the clanging metal stairwell to the passenger deck, I wondered whether this was the way McAra had come. I told myself to leave it, that I was working myself up for nothing. But I suppose that ghosts and ghostwriters go naturally together. I sat in the fuggy passenger cabin and studied the plain, honest faces of my fellow travellers, and then, as the boat shuddered and cast off from the terminal, I folded my paper and went out on to the open top deck.
It’s amazing how cold and darkness conspire to alter everything. The Martha’s Vineyard ferry on a summer’s evening I imagine must be delightful. There’s a big stripy funnel straight out of a storybook, and rows of blue plastic seats facing outwards, running the length of the deck, where families no doubt sit in their shorts and T-shirts, the teenagers looking bored, the dads jumping about with excitement. But on this January night the deck was deserted, and the north wind blowing down from Cape Cod sliced through my jacket and shirt and chilled my skin to gooseflesh. The lights of Woods Hole slipped away. We passed a marker buoy at the entrance to the channel swinging frantically this way and that as if it was trying to free itself from some underwater monster. Its bell tolled in time with the waves like a funeral chime and the spray flew as vile as witch’s spit.
I jammed my hands in my pockets, hunched my shoulders up around my neck and crossed unsteadily to the starboard side. The handrail was only waist-high and for the first time I appreciated how easily McAra might have gone over. I actually had to brace to keep from slipping myself. Rick was right. The line between accident and suicide isn’t always clearly defined. You could kill yourself without ever really making up your mind. The mere act of leaning out too far and imagining what it might be like could tip you over. You’d hit that heaving icy black water with a smack that would take you ten feet under, and by the time you came up the ship might be a hundred yards away. I hoped McAra had absorbed enough booze to blunt the horror, but I doubted if there was a drunk in the world who wouldn’t be sobered by total immersion in a sea only half a degree above freezing.
And nobody would have heard him fall! That was the other thing. The weather wasn’t nearly as bad as it had been three weeks earlier, and yet, as I glanced around, I could see not a soul on deck. I really started shivering then; my teeth were chattering like some fairground clockwork novelty.
I went down to the bar for a drink.
*
We rounded the West Chop lighthouse and came into the ferry terminal at Vineyard Haven just before seven, docking with a rattle of chains and a thump which almost sent me flying down the stairs. I hadn’t been expecting a welcoming committee, which was fine, because I didn’t get one, just an elderly local taxi driver holding a torn-out page from a notebook on which my name was misspelled. As he heaved my suitcase into the back, the wind lifted a big sheet of clear plastic and sent it twisting and flapping over the ice in the car park. The sky was packed white with stars.
I’d bought a guidebook to the island, so I had a vague idea of what I was in for. In summer the population is a hundred thousand, but when the vacationers have closed up their holiday homes and migrated west for the winter, it drops to fifteen. These are the hardy, insular natives: the folks who call the mainland ‘America’. There are a couple of highways, one set of traffic lights, and dozens of long sandy tracks leading to places with names like Squibnocket Pond and Job’s Neck Cove. My driver didn’t utter a word the whole journey, just scrutinised me in the mirror. As my eyes met his rheumy glance for the twentieth time I wondered if there was a reason why he resented picking me up. Perhaps I was keeping him from something. It was hard to imagine what. The streets around the ferry terminal were mostly deserted, and once we were out of Vineyard Haven and on to the main highway there was nothing to see but darkness.
/> By then I’d been travelling for seventeen hours. I didn’t know where I was, or what landscape I was passing through, or even where I was going. All attempts at conversation had failed. I could see nothing except my reflection in the cold darkness of the window. I felt as though I’d come to the edge of the earth, like some seventeenth-century English explorer who was about to have his first encounter with the native Wampanoags. I gave a noisy yawn and quickly clamped the back of my hand to my mouth.
‘Sorry,’ I explained to the disembodied eyes in the rear-view mirror. ‘Where I come from it’s after midnight.’
He shook his head. At first I couldn’t make out whether he was sympathetic or disapproving; then I realised he was trying to tell me it was no use talking to him: he was deaf. I went back to staring out of the window.
After a while we came to a crossroads and turned left into what I guessed must be Edgartown, a settlement of white clapboard houses with white picket fences, small gardens and verandas, lit by ornate Victorian streetlamps. Nine out of ten were dark but in the few windows which shone with yellow light I glimpsed oil paintings of sailing ships and whiskered ancestors. At the bottom of the hill, past the Old Whaling Church, a big, misty moon cast a silvery light over shingled roofs and silhouetted the masts in the harbour. Curls of wood smoke rose from a couple of chimneys. I felt as though I was driving on to a film set for Moby Dick. The headlights picked out a sign to the Chappaquiddick ferry, and not long after that we pulled up outside the Lighthouse View Hotel.
Again, I can picture the scene in summer: buckets and spades and fishing nets piled up on the veranda, rope sandals left by the door, a dusting of white sand trailed up from the beach – that kind of thing. But out of season the big old wooden hotel creaked and banged in the wind like a sailing boat stuck on a reef. I suppose the management must have been waiting till spring to strip the blistered paintwork and wash the crust of salt off the windows. The sea was pounding away nearby in the darkness. I stood with my suitcase on the wooden deck and watched the lights of the taxi disappear around the corner with something close to nostalgia.