I held my hand out and shook his. If the girl’s grip was feather light, this guy had a grip like an anaconda. Del Rio nodded. He didn’t say anything either but I don’t think it was from a lack of self-confidence. I don’t think you could dent his self-confidence with anything short of an oak pickaxe handle.
‘Dan will take care of you now, but if you ever need to speak to me you’ve got my number, right?’ said Jack Morgan to the girl, who still seemed more interested in her feet than in anything else.
‘Yeah, Jack,’ she said. ‘Thanks.’ Then she looked up and smiled. She had a nice smile.
‘Anytime, night or day.’ Jack slapped me on the back. ‘Take good care of her, Dan. I’m counting on you.’
‘You got it,’ I said, falling into the native lingo. I turned to the young woman. ‘We good to go?’
See.
‘Sure,’ she replied. I didn’t get a smile but figured it was just a matter of time. A six-hour flight is plenty of time to get to know people. I’d break her in under four, I reckoned. The old Dan Carter charm. They should put it in a bottle.
Chapter 6
A couple of hours later I sighed an inward breath of relief and undid my seat belt.
It took a couple of tugs. I turned to look at the young woman next to me who was effortlessly undoing hers, her attention never wavering from the e-book she was reading.
I had let Hannah Shapiro have the window seat and she had pulled the blind down, which had suited me just fine. A little bit of turbulence had been predicted and the fasten-seat-belt sign had lit up. I had got mine on a lot quicker than it took to get it off. Luckily the threatened turbulence hadn’t arrived!
I craned my head to look at the book that Hannah was engrossed in. ‘What are you reading?’ I asked her.
She didn’t look up. ‘The Beautiful and the Damned,’ she said.
‘Tender is the Night is my favourite novel,’ I said.
She looked up then, surprised. ‘Really?’
‘Really. And I know what you’re thinking.’
‘And what’s that?’
‘That a big man has no time really to do anything but just sit and be big.’
There was a slight crack in the corner of her mouth. It might even have been a smile.
‘F. Scott Fitzgerald?’
‘The same.’
‘Tender is the Night – my mother’s favourite book.’
‘Are you going to miss her?’
‘I already do. She died, Mister Carter.’
‘I’m sorry to hear that.’
‘It was a long time ago. I was a child.’
‘What happened?’
‘I grew up.’
I decided not to press the point – Hannah clearly didn’t want to talk about it. Looking at her it seemed to me that whatever had happened it hadn’t been so long ago. She might have been nineteen but she still looked like a child to me.
‘Losing a parent is never easy,’ I said gently. ‘No matter how old you are.’
‘Are your parents alive, Mister Carter?’
‘My father died a few years back. My mother is still with us, thank God.’
She looked at me unblinking for a moment, as if searching for something in my eyes.
‘You should thank God indeed. You must cherish her, Mister Carter,’ she said finally. ‘There is nothing in life more precious than your mother.’
‘I do,’ I said, feeling a little guilty. I hadn’t spoken to my mother in over a week.
Hannah nodded as if my answer satisfied her.
‘It was cancer,’ she said quietly. ‘There was nothing they could do.’
‘I’m sorry,’ I said again.
She shook her head. ‘It wasn’t anybody’s fault, was it?’
I didn’t reply.
‘My father is a scientist, did you know? Extremely rich. Extremely clever. He couldn’t do anything, either.’
I nodded. She was right. Death just came at you sometimes. Sideways, from behind, head-on like a high speed train. And whichever way it came at you there was nothing you could do about it. I knew that better than most.
‘My father gave Mom a first-edition copy of Tender is the Night on their twentieth wedding anniversary. She treasured it like it was the most valuable thing in the world to her.’
‘Maybe it was…’ I paused for a moment. ‘After you, I should imagine.’
And got a smile this time. A sad one, though.
‘When she went it was like the light had gone out of the world, Mister Carter. All the warmth.’
‘Call me Dan, please.’
Hannah didn’t seem to be listening, lost in her own memories. ‘I feel sometimes that I’m still walking in the shadows, waiting for dawn,’ she said.
I thought of my mother and my dear departed dad and I knew how she felt. ‘The dawn does come,’ I said. ‘Eventually it always does come.’
‘Hope is the feathered thing.’
‘Emily Dickinson.’
‘You are a man full of surprises, Mister Carter.’
I let the mister ride and held my hand out. ‘It’s Dan, remember?’ I said.
‘I certainly do,’ she replied, shaking my hand and meeting my eyes this time and holding the grin. I smiled back at her myself. I was ahead of schedule.
‘I shouldn’t have told you my dad was a scientist,’ she said.
‘That’s okay. I know how to keep a secret. Kind of goes with the job.’
‘I guess so. I didn’t know they had private detectives in England. I thought it was all bobbies and police boxes.’
‘And some of us.’
‘Are you ex-police?’
‘Royal Military Police. Redcaps, we call them.’
‘You served overseas, then?’
‘I did.’
‘Like Jack Morgan?’
‘Jack was in Afghanistan. I was in Iraq.’
‘So what made you leave the military?’
I looked at Hannah for a moment or two before replying.
‘It’s too long a story for this flight,’ I said. She seemed to accept that and returned to her novel.
I closed my eyes and leaned back, the memory of that day flashing into my mind as clearly as though it had been yesterday.
The pain every bit as fresh. Remembering.
I didn’t know it at the time but it turned out that Hannah and I had a lot more in common than I thought.
Chapter 7
9 April 2003. Baghdad City, Iraq.
There were four of us in the jeep that afternoon.
Three men, one woman. One mission accomplished. Operation Telic. Signed, sealed, delivered. The end of the war.
At least, it felt like that. We were on our way to check into some reported post-conflict celebrations that were maybe getting a little rowdy. We couldn’t blame the boys – and had no intention of any strong-arm stuff. Enough people had been hurt as it was. Enough bodies sent home to be buried way before their time.
You couldn’t blame the lads for having a drink or two. Letting off a little steam. If you couldn’t celebrate today – then when could you?
The sun was shining as it had been every day since I’d started this tour of duty. But even that seemed different somehow. A brighter, cleaner, excoriating light. I knew that was nonsense but it felt that way.
The excitement in the air was certainly palpable. I hadn’t felt anything like it since I’d been a very small child and my whole street had turned out for a party to celebrate the Queen’s silver jubilee. That had been a hot, glorious day too.
The Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins once wrote some lines: ‘The world is charged with the wonder of God. It will flame out, like shining from shook foil.’
Well, God’s grandeur wasn’t evident around us then, truth to tell. We were in a particularly devastated area on the western outskirts of the city. Blown-up buildings left, right and centre, their roofs and top floors shattered and cracked like a scattering of ruined teeth. The scars of incendiary bombs and smoke and ash and wreckage strewn all around.
The city had been literally smashed apart. But what was in the air that day was hope. Hope – maybe that was what God’s grandeur really was all along. Because without hope what do you have? The three other people in the jeep with me all had fixed grins on their faces.