The more Michael learnt, the more the injustices continued to deepen. Caroline and her team had been in Pakistan, a country with whom America was not at war. This was why their vehicle had been unmarked, why Sightline or their fixer hadn’t contacted the U.S. military. Why warzone protocol had not been followed. Although the strike had been a covert operation, under pressure the Pentagon had issued a statement acknowledging the incident. It was, the statement read, a tragic accident. There would be an internal investigation. As well as Caroline, her British director, a Swedish cameraman, and their Pakistani interpreter and driver had also been killed. Among the dead was a fourteen-year-old boy. The British, Australian, and Swedish governments demanded answers. There would be a review of operating procedures, they were told, of lines of command. There would be answers. But the Pentagon statement also made mention of the journalists “working undercover,” of “entering a high-risk area.” They had known, it was implied, the dangers of their actions. And, the same statement reminded the world, an influential terrorist had been successfully targeted. The weight of blame, Michael knew, from the moment it happened, was being dissipated, thinned.
At night, when he couldn’t sleep, he thought of the interviews he’d give when he was able to face a camera or a microphone. How he would broadcast his anger. How he would make sure the story was never allowed to slip from the public conversation. How he’d demand those responsible should face justice, a glaring light, not an obscuring darkness, and how in its illumination Caroline’s death might yet prevent the future deaths of others. He would find a way, somehow, to visit pain upon those who had killed her.
Then, just as quickly as it had first washed through him, so the swell of Michael’s vengeance ebbed. It left him overnight. On waking in the small hours one morning, he’d simply known he wanted none of it. That rather than broadcast anything, he wanted to curl up from the world, to hibernate with his loss. This was, he realised later, perhaps the true moment of Caroline’s death for him. A quieter, more complete acknowledgement of what Peter had told him as he’d knelt on the gravel beside him and laid his hands on his shoulders. A lonely and terrible reckoning with the facts.
In the following months Michael refused all interview requests. He made no statements, he pursued no more enquiries. Caroline’s remains were repatriated in a Royal Air Force transport plane. A week later he and her family buried them in the chapel he’d first seen with Caroline through Coed y Bryn’s kitchen window. The coffin, Michael had known, was mostly empty. He watched it lowered into the ground, threw a handful of soil across its wood, then turned his back on it. He would let the world clamour over her death. He would let others discover the details, the reasons. Because for Michael there was only the one truth to learn, and he’d already discovered it that night when he’d sat on the floor of their bedroom pressing Caroline’s clothes to his face: in her scent, fading by the hour, and in the sheets of their bed, still creased by her body, which was no longer whole, and no longer here.
―
A tall window rose above the armchair in Samantha and Josh’s bedroom, its frame filled with the leaves of the sycamore outside their house. Opposite was a king-size bed, above which hung an abstract landscape: the suggestion of hills, sky, perhaps a river. On either side the bedside tables marked out the room’s territory. On the right a pile of novels, women’s magazines, a ceramic bowl filled with earrings. On the left a book on the American Civil War, a glasses case, the lead of a phone charger. On the wooden floor, copies of the Financial Times and Herald Tribune. The bed itself was unmade, the duvet a cumulus at its centre. At the other end two pillows were stacked against its head, their shape still holding the depression of a back.
Michael looked over the bed, the clothes on the armchair. So often, over the last seven months, being in the Nelsons’ house had been like reliving echoes of a past life. As he’d helped Lucy build a LEGO car, when he’d watched Samantha and Josh fill the dishwasher or, once, each carry a sleeping daughter up the stairs to bed.
But such moments were visions, not echoes, glimpses of a future life that had been taken from him along with Caroline. A life of children, family. Even this bed before him was such a vision. The bed he and Caroline had shared had always been new. A bed of promise, not years. And it was the years Michael wanted, the accumulation of sharing. A lifetime, not just a marriage.
He turned from the bed. Whatever trace of Caroline had led him up the stairs wasn’t to be found in here. And this wasn’t for him to see, anyway. He felt as if he’d strayed from the corridors of a cruise liner to find himself, unexpectedly, in its engine room, the mechanisms unprepared for public eyes, the working parts worn with keeping an even keel, whatever the seas. He glanced out the window at the quiet street, the sycamore leaves filtering the afternoon sunlight. As he did, he seemed to surface back into the day, into the facts of its ordinariness, the city subdued under the heat. What if Josh were to come home now to find him in their bedroom? How would he explain? What had he been thinking, in coming up the stairs at all? He hadn’t heard a sound since he’d entered the house. Would an intruder really have remained so quiet for so long? The open door was just a mistake, that was all. He should leave now, while he still could. Write a note for Samantha and Josh, close the back door and leave.
CHAPTER TEN
ALTHOUGH IN THE months after her death Michael had lost his desire for full knowledge of what had happened to Caroline, there was one question that continued to linger in his mind. Who? That was all he’d still wanted to know. Not why, but who? Who had pressed the button? Who was the person behind the pilot, the operator, the contractor?
Who was the man or woman who’d killed his wife?
What did they look like?
How did they dream?
Who did they love?
What was their name?
―
On a March morning, four months after he’d moved into South Hill Drive, Michael learnt the answer to that final question, when Major Daniel McCullen wrote to him.
The letter had been addressed to his publishers in New York. An intern or mailroom worker had inserted it into a new envelope and written Michael’s address on it in a rounded, flowing hand: Flat 6, 34 South Hill Drive, London, NW3 6JP, United Kingdom. The letter was handwritten, too. A controlled script with little variance, even around the fifth line, where Michael felt surely it should have betrayed something — a break in a descender, a deeper impression on the page — as the mind guiding the pen had written the words I regret to say I was the pilot that day.
Michael first read that line while sitting on the bottom steps of his communal stairwell. He’d been lacing his trainers when the letter, along with the rest of the day’s mail, had slipped through the front door and fallen to the mat beneath. Charity brochures, bank statements, a travel magazine for a long-moved-out tenant, and, bearing a New York postmark, a letter addressed to Mr. Michael Turner.