1.4
The news about Parson comes directly from the police.
Gibson doesn’t understand why it’s taken so long to inform them. He asks: when did this become clear? When was this certain? Sutler’s death has caused a frenzy of calls, work, and bother, and in one short statement the news is refigured into an uncomprehendable shape. It was Parson.
He asks the question again. Are they certain?
The answer is simple. The material they found on the train, the papers found in a bag, mentioned Sutler. These were Parson’s notes.
It doesn’t make sense. Parson running along a train track? He can’t imagine the man running. A man like Parson doesn’t run. He tells this to the police. He asks if they are absolutely certain.
They need to know more about Parson. Was he working for Gibson & Baker or HOSCO?
‘He was working for us. We assess claims for HOSCO — we used to. Parson was in Iraq when Stephen Sutler disappeared. HOSCO wanted someone immediately on the job and Parson was available.’ Gibson closes his eyes when he speaks. Partly to think, but also because he doesn’t want to look at either of the policemen. He explains: Stephen Lawrence Sutler stole a great deal of money. He was managing a project for HOSCO in Iraq, and he disappeared. The investigation has exposed a good amount of, let’s not call it illegal, exactly, but non-standard activity in HOSCO’s dealings with the military and with US funding sources. As a result the company has collapsed, or rather, it has been dissolved, and there’s a great deal of interest in finding the man responsible.
The men know this. They want to see Parson’s reports. He did make reports?
Gibson asks for his secretary, Margaret. He apologizes first and asks that she join him. Poised in the door, arm extended, he waits for her to set aside her work. In the outer office the staff stop working, the room quietens, and attention focuses on Gibson’s door as Margaret approaches.
Margaret is asked to sit. The door is closed, and the information is repeated. She struggles to understand. This must be, she says, a terrible mistake. Surely? He was here before Christmas. After his wife came out of hospital. We were talking last week.
She turns to Gibson and asks, almost in a whisper, if someone has contacted Laura. His wife, she says. Wasn’t she also with him? She’s only recently out of hospital.
* * *
Gibson waits until the afternoon to call Geezler, and still does not understand the news as he repeats it.
Geezler, who has been aggravated by Parson’s comings and goings, is respectful, perhaps contrite. Like everyone else he is confused by the circumstances.
‘He was on the tracks?’
Gibson says he doesn’t understand it either.
‘Tracks?’
He has no further information.
Geezler wants to extend condolences to Parson’s wife, but he doesn’t want to intrude. If there’s anything he can do Gibson should let him know. Any expense. Any way in which he might be able to help. Perhaps he doesn’t need to mention his involvement, in which case Gibson could act as mediator. Gibson agrees. This isn’t the time to be talking about HOSCO. Geezler’s offer is sensitive to the situation.
‘Do they have any idea why he was on the tracks?’
Gibson is at a loss. There is only one idea. Parson was in Europe to find a man called Sutler. It isn’t unreasonable to imagine that Sutler is involved, perhaps responsible.
‘But they have no information?’
‘There’s nothing.’
Geezler asks Parson to keep him informed. If anything happens, any news, or development. For the newspapers this is a sensational turnaround. Sutler dead. Sutler alive. Neither Gibson nor Geezler are prepared for the complications this causes.
Geezler closes repeating his offer of assistance.
* * *
Gibson thinks of his office as a lung. It faces the river, and he recognizes the traffic, the barges, tugs, tour boats, riverboats and ferries. At night, as the South Bank lights up, the room, he thinks, seems poised in expectation, as if holding its breath. He has thought this for many years, and in the evenings he seldom fails to appreciate the view: the shift in colour as the day falls, and how the quality of this light changes through the year. He’s sure he would have mentioned this to Parson. Was it Parson who’d said you can’t look at the river without thinking of fires and spitfires, pageants, floods, but what you actually see, dressed in industrial greys, are the mounting blocks in which hundreds and thousands of people labour, eat, sleep, live. When you look at the river you think of events, he’d said. Not people.
There was a whale once which swam right outside his office.
Margaret, inconsolable, had hidden in the office, blind with tears, hands to her face as if ashamed of her distress.
1.5
The job will last for seven weeks. Rike can teach English because there isn’t any call for German or Italian. The pay is good enough for her to accept without thinking it over, but she wants to pass the idea by her sister and give the matter a little discussion anyway. You don’t want to appear too grateful. Teaching English isn’t much fun, she finds the language practical, bare, obvious. English is the language of bureaucrats and pedants. Rike had expected a negotiation, something more like an interview, but the woman faces her with the decision made and an expression that won’t broker refusal. They talk through the noise of jets taking off, thundering over them — the British base is less than a kilometre away, and these jets come howling over the salt lake with a splintering sound, low enough to vibrate the paper on the table, to shake glasses. Rike smiles through the noise. The woman smiles back. The jets are heading to the Lebanon, to Syria. There is talk of bombing government compounds, ports, barracks, signal stations, power stations, installations, of going to town on the place just like they did with Libya, but there’s no real commitment yet. Rike keeps the smile but feels the weight of these fighters over her, and wonders if this time they have the right permissions. Locally, everybody understands the threat: if the British take action in Syria and on the Russian ports, the Russians will take action in Cyprus and on the British bases. Tit-for-tat. They haven’t said as much, no one is that explicit, but the security level is high, and there are soldiers in bunkers with green smudged on their faces, and these bunkers line the orchards and the roads from Akrotiri to Limassol (east), from Akrotiri to Episkopi (west), from Episkopi to the signals base in the foothills of the Troodos mountains (north). She tells herself that she shouldn’t be here, that none of this should be happening, and having grown up in the wake of the cold war this feels, anyway, like a punch on an old bruise. Instead she smiles, promises to bring in her passport, guarantees that the recommendations from the German consulate will come through by the end of the day, and that she’ll be happy to teach Intermediate English to Cypriot nationals who have been cleared to work at a British military base. Perfect, isn’t it? She’s still smiling when she leaves.
* * *
Rike returns through the old city, follows a wall which curves alongside the road, no pavement here, a dangerous corner crowned with jasmine in full flower. The scent — one of her favourites — dry and sweet, isn’t so much a scent as a sensation of space opening in the back of her head. This corner isn’t a place to pause. The jasmine is a bad distraction. Supposing a car came round that curve — you wouldn’t see it. You wouldn’t stand a chance. There wouldn’t be anything you could do. You couldn’t step aside because there isn’t a pavement. She thinks like this all of the time. Things that might go wrong. Like Henning, she worries about her sister’s pregnancy, and conjures up scenarios for a miscarriage in order to dispel the possibility. Falls, faints, dizzy spells, bumpy car rides, blood disorders, food poisoning, organ failure, a stroke, some kind of a prolapse, sepsis, various or multiple and synchronous allergic reactions, cat-scratch lock-jaw, some kind of massive muscle spasm, heat exhaustion; and lately more extreme situations which might once have seemed impossible: a bullet, a bomb, an assassin — one of those British or Russian missiles, a shot in the head when she’s feeding the cats. In addition she imagines scenarios in which her sister might be crushed: stampeding crowds, falling masonry, some kind of large rogue animal, a tsunami, a blast, an avalanche, the ground opening up to a sink hole or a lava flow — because you never know.