The Adjacent

  He did not feel repelled by her frozen appearance, nor by the fact of her death, nor even by a feeling of loss, because he had realized for some time that what had happened between them was a passing incident. But a sense of tragedy arose in him, the awareness of a life wasted, an intelligent and interesting woman, suddenly killed, pointlessly annihilated.

  ‘Can you please identify her, Mr Tarent?’

  ‘Yes. It’s her.’

  ‘You have to say her name.’

  ‘I knew her only as Flo. Is that this woman’s first name?’

  ‘We need a more certain identification than that.’

  ‘Do you know this woman’s first name?’ Tarent said again. ‘If I say she was called Flo, and you know that, surely it would be enough?’

  ‘Please identify her.’

  Tarent gestured, partly with the frustration of having to deal with this man, but also as some way of physically expressing the despair he had suddenly experienced. ‘I knew her as Flo. She told me she was a senior civil servant in the Ministry of Defence, that she was in the Private Office of the ministry and that she worked closely with the minister, Sheik Ammari. She and I were not close friends. We only met once and she would not tell me her full name. She even suggested that the name Flo was not her real name. But I do recognize her. This is the woman I knew.’

  Lepuits lowered the sheet across her face, and tidied it at each side.

  ‘Is that enough for you?’ Tarent said.

  ‘I can record it as an opinion.’

  ‘But is that enough?’

  ‘An opinion will allow me to release the body.’

  ‘All right, then can we get out of this place? I can’t stand the cold.’

  ‘Would you able to identify the others?’

  ‘I can’t name them,’ Tarent said. ‘But if these were the people I travelled with in the Mebsher, then I would recognize them. The two crewmen’s names were Hamid and Ibrahim, they were serving soldiers in the army, the Black Watch. They weren’t officers, but I don’t know their actual ranks. One of the men who was travelling as a passenger was called Heydar, but I’ve no idea if that was a first name or a surname. He was a colleague of Flo’s. The other man was an American, but I know nothing else about him.’

  ‘If you can recognize them,’ said Lepuits. ‘I will also record what you say as an opinion.’

  Tarent moved awkwardly along the row, having to clamber around the boxes on the floor. He quickly looked at the next four bodies and confirmed that he recognized all of them. None of them showed any signs of physical injuries so far as he could see. They all had the waxy look of death, a horrid blankness, a lack of life-force, of existence: the two Scottish soldiers, Flo’s colleague Heydar, the unnamed American. There was a sixth body, also shrouded, but this was at the far end of the shelf and the materials placed on the floor would have made it impossible to reach it without moving some of the large containers out of the way. Tarent’s hands were shaking with the intense cold.

  ‘There were only five people on the Mebsher with me,’ he said, indicating the extra body.

  ‘We do not need your opinion on the last person. He has already been positively identified. You and I are concerned only with these five people here.’

  ‘You have everything you want from me?’

  ‘Thank you, Mr Tarent. It is of great assistance to us.’

  ‘Can we leave now?’

  ‘But of course.’

  To Tarent’s relief, Lepuits led the way quickly from the cold room and pushed the door back into place.

  ‘Is that all?’ Tarent said, shuddering. His clothes were icy against his skin. He felt as if his eyelids had frozen.

  ‘Thank you, again, monsieur. I have the opinion I need, so these remains can now be placed in coffins and the bodies will be released to the families as soon as possible. If you return to your quarters, I will inform you as soon as I know a suitable Mebsher transit will be available.’

  ‘To London?’

  ‘To the DSG in Hull,’ said Lepuits. ‘You will be able to make further travel arrangements from there.’

  5

  Tarent went straight to Lou’s room.

  ‘I think we can be out of here in the next twenty-four hours,’ he said. ‘I’ve been speaking to Bertrand Lepuits. Do you know who I mean?’

  ‘Director of Operations. The Frenchman. I know him, but I’ve never liked him.’

  ‘Can you be ready to leave at short notice?’ Tarent said.

  ‘You’ve really arranged this?’

  ‘Lepuits hasn’t given me a definite departure time, but he said we can be on the next Mebsher out of here. There’s one expected soon. It’s a bit late in the day now, so probably some time tomorrow. We can’t get to London. It will only take us as far as Hull.’

  ‘Anything’s better than having to stay here indefinitely.’

  ‘Once we’re in Hull we can work something out. I want to go to London too, so we can travel together if you want to.’

  ‘I want.’ Lou unexpectedly went to him, and gave him a warm hug. ‘You’ve no idea what this will mean to me, Tibor.’

  ‘You have a lot of stuff in here,’ Tarent said, looking around her room, which in layout was identical to his own.

  ‘It doesn’t matter – I can leave most of it behind. But I know how Lepuits operates. He’ll give us hardly any warning, so to be ready I have to pack now.’

  Tarent still felt himself to be in transit. Since arriving at Warne’s Farm he had barely unpacked. He walked to the canteen for some food. Lepuits was not there. As soon as he had returned to his room he went to bed.

  Then, in the dark, it hit him. Flo was dead. Just as suddenly, just as senselessly, as Melanie. He was deep in grief for Melanie, whom he still loved, but Flo had intrigued and aroused him. Both had been killed by an act of random violence, aimed not at them but in pursuit of some political or religious ambition or grudge. They had been murdered in a similar way.

  The sense of loss was terrible. Not his own loss, which he felt like a dead weight in his gut, but their loss: both were still young enough to have plans and future lives, both were already successful women. He knew for certain that if Melanie had not died he would not have become involved with Flo, even for that one night, that one brief liaison. He had always been faithful to Melanie. Afterwards, as events swept past him, he felt a guilty conviction that he must inadvertently have caused Melanie’s death – the argument that led to her leaving the compound was largely his fault. Now there was Flo too. Should he have tried to persuade her to leave the Mebsher at the same time as him? It had felt at the time as if she were immovable, locked into the demands of her work, and on the contrary she had wanted him to remain in the vehicle with her. She had unbalanced him – he was undecided about her until the moment the Mebsher drove away. He remembered the last seconds while the engine gathered full power, out there on the escarpment, wondering which way he should go. Had he read her correctly? Maybe things could have been different. It was a part of grieving, he knew, for a surviving partner to feel blame for the other’s death, but even though he knew that rationally it did nothing to reduce its impact.

  He was lonely. All he wanted was to return to the old apartment in London as soon as possible, deal with it somehow – sell it, renovate it, clear out of it all their stuff and perhaps start again – but essentially to be there and take his life back for himself.

  It was difficult to sleep but in the end he fell into a fitful, wakeful state, lying still but remaining aware of his surroundings. Whenever he opened his eyes to look at the digital display on the clock next to the bed he found that more time had passed than he thought. It meant he was sleeping only lightly, but better than he knew. As daylight broke, his restlessness turned to a kind of wakeful impatience.

  He showered, dressed and packed his bags. He wondered whether to walk down to Lou’s room to see if she was ready to leave, but he knew she was probably still sleeping. It was a few minutes after 7 am – the
sun had only just risen. Looking down from his window he saw that the workmen had finished clearing the storm debris from the quadrangle. There was no one about, although he could see that the armed guard on the clinic remained. However, the guards themselves were no longer standing or walking by the door. There was a guard point next to the entrance, a hut with a light showing from inside.

  Tarent picked up his Canon Concealable, checked that the battery was fully charged, then walked down through the building and out into the quad.

  He took some shots as he walked, knowing that the stabilizer would cancel any motion blurring. When he was nearly halfway across the quad he stood still, adjusted the camera properly, and looked around for the way in which the low sunlight was striking the buildings and making irregular shadows on the uneven concrete surface of the quad.

  Both guards emerged quickly from the hut and without any hesitation raised their rifles and pointed them at him. Alarmed, Tarent stepped back, waved the camera high to show that he had understood the message and would not take any more pictures. The men were standing stock-still, aiming at him. They then lowered their weapons a little. One of them went back into the hut, and Tarent saw him pick up a telephone handset. After a moment, the other guard also walked to the hut.

  There had been something unusual about the way the men moved towards him: there was a stiffness of movement as they emerged from the guard post, the raising of their rifles had been too quick, too speedily responsive. For a few seconds he had felt genuinely apprehensive of what they might do next, and he cursed himself for not letting them know immediately that he wanted to take photographs – normally a safe rule for his work, where local officials could be paranoid about people using cameras. He assumed the rifles were loaded. But then he thought again. The men had not shouted a warning at him, nor run across to him, nor challenged him in any way. They looked as if they were drilling, performing a ritual response.

  He waited for a moment, holding the camera with his arm hanging loosely. Then he turned towards the building he had been intending to photograph, and raised his camera again.

  The guards reacted exactly as before: they rushed out of the guard post, their legs almost comically stiff, they raised their rifles – but as soon as Tarent again lifted his camera to show that he would not take any pictures, both men lowered their weapons. One of them returned to the guard post and spoke into a telephone handset. Moments later the other one joined him.

  Tarent moved back from them, to the side of the quad where the residential block was situated. He raised the camera but the men did not rush out of the guard post.

  He took several frames in quick succession from that position, then turned around and took many more. The guards did not react – only when Tarent moved towards them, reaching approximately the centre of the open space, did they once again rush from the guard post and mutely threaten him with their rifles.

  Tarent backed away again, but then by trial and error established how closely he could approach the clinic building before provoking the guards’ reaction.

  The presence of one building particularly interested him. It was on the southern side of the quad, next to the gated entrance to the compound. It was unusual because of its shape, size and physical condition, obviously much older than any of the others. It was a tall, brick-built tower, square and stout, but rising to at least thirty or forty metres. It was more or less derelict: several parts of the walls revealed that the mortar between the bricks had eroded away. There were high, narrow window frames, but no windows, or at least no glass in the frames. Towards the top, the outer walls had been rendered with concrete facing, but this had nearly all fallen away, revealing that the brickwork beneath was in even worse condition than the rest.

  The building looked dangerous and unstable, as if it might collapse at any time, but it had apparently withstood at least the recent temperate storm and presumably several of the others that Lou had told him about. Temperate storms often recorded wind velocity in excess of a hundred miles an hour, or more than a hundred and fifty kilometres. TS Federico Fellini was clearly one of the more violent of the recent storms, to judge by the visible damage Tarent himself had seen in the quadrangle, yet this ancient tower had mysteriously survived in spite of the weather.

  Staying within the zone he had worked out as uncontroversial Tarent took several shots of the building, fascinated by its appearance, the way it loomed darkly over the more modern buildings around it. He used the telephoto setting to capture close-up shots of the building’s decrepit fabric.

  The guards showed no interest in what he was doing.

  By this time the sun had risen higher and the unique and subtle light that often accompanied a dawn was changing to a more usual kind of bland sunlight. The sky was clear, with no threat of storm clouds.

  Tarent put away his camera and returned to the residential building.

  6

  There was a note from Lepuits’ office on the terminal in his room. It said, Transportation as requested to Hull DSG will be available at 1100 hours. Space restrictions apply. Limit: one suitcase, plus hand baggage. Office of B. L. – Dir. Ops.

  When he saw this, Tarent took his one bag and his cameras, and walked down to Lou’s room. She had been sent the same information. She had completed her packing, getting everything into a single large wheeled suitcase. There were still some clothes in the closet, and she was leaving behind most of her cooking utensils. There was a long shelf of books, also to be left.

  ‘I just want to get back to London,’ she said. ‘Most of this stuff was borrowed, or inherited from other people who moved on. I can leave it behind. None of it means anything to me.’

  They went down to the canteen for breakfast, lingered over coffee, then returned to her room. There was still at least an hour and a half before the time they had been told the Mebsher would be ready. They sat together in her room, chatting to pass the time.

  Tarent mentioned the old tower to her, wondering if she knew what it had been, what it might once have been used for, what it was used for now, but she did not seem to know what he was talking about. Now he was in her room he discovered that the tower could not be seen from her window.

  ‘I’ll show you,’ he said. He took out the Canon, logged on to the remote laboratory and sent a coded request to view all of the frames he had taken that morning. Moments later the green light blinked. Tarent switched on the LCD monitor and held it so they could both see. He said, ‘I was up early this morning, so I took these.’

  He scrolled quickly through the shots he had taken: the quad as he first walked across it, the low shadows on the ground, the early sunlight, mist dispersing from above the roofs, then the sequence of trial-and-error pictures of the clinic building while he tried to establish how close to it he could go. After that: the residential block, the canteen, two other large buildings whose function he did not know, then finally the tower.

  But the shots of the tower were not there. The sequence ended.

  Tarent quickly checked the camera settings he had been using, then logged back on to the lab. He re-ordered the same shots, but when they arrived on the camera a second time the pictures he had taken of the tower were still not there.

  ‘I took about a dozen shots of it,’ he said to Lou.

  ‘Which building do you mean?’

  ‘The old tower, down on the south side. Close to the gate.’

  She shook her head. ‘I still don’t know what you mean.’

  Tarent felt frustrated with the camera – it was the first time it had ever let him down. So long as he kept the battery charged, or carried spares, the little Canon was a reliable workhorse. There were so few moving parts in modern cameras there was almost nothing that could go wrong, once the instrument had been passed by the manufacturers’ quality control. The only possible cause of the problem might be that he had inadvertently pressed a key that suppressed picture-taking. He had been using the camera for months, though, and handling it was second nature to him. H
e could think of nothing he might have done to the controls that would have that effect.

  Lou sat tolerantly beside him while he fiddled with the camera settings, trying to find the lost pictures.

  She said, ‘Could the tower have been part of the prison?’

  ‘It didn’t look like that. Would a prison have a tower, like something on a church? Anyway, I didn’t know this was a prison.’

  ‘It was for a while. An open prison. I researched its background once. Time hangs heavy when you’re stuck here for months, so I started looking things up.’

  Still examining and checking his camera, curious about how those shots had been lost, Tarent said, ‘Tell me.’

  ‘Well, it was farmland for years, probably centuries.’

  ‘Is that where the name comes from?’

  ‘No, that came later. The first real change came during the Second World War, when they built a bomber base here. It was called RAF Tealby, or maybe RAF Tealby Moor, I’m not sure which. Two operational squadrons were based here for most of the war. It remained as an airfield for a few years afterwards and still belonged to the Air Ministry, but no one flew from it. After about 1949 it was allowed to revert to farmland – the runways were broken up and removed, and within a few years there was no trace of them. At that time the farmer kept several of the old RAF buildings, including the control tower, one of the hangars and a water tower. They were used for storage, keeping animals, and so on, but they soon became dilapidated. I found photos of them on the internet, taken shortly before they were demolished.

  ‘That was when it was renamed Warne’s Farm. Probably the farmer’s own name, but anyway it seems to have stuck. It was a mixed farm for many years, but in 2018 the area was bought back by the government and some of the buildings that are here now were put up. They used it then as a training camp for army recruits. By 2025 it had been converted again. That’s when it became a prison. It wasn’t a secure unit, but housed non-violent or long-term prisoners. There were more new buildings added and some of the older ones were modified. In 2036 the prison was closed and the Ministry of Defence moved in. They’re still running it. It’s partly an admin area for the north of England, but there are also closed buildings about a mile away, where some sort of experimental or development work goes on. I’ve never been down there. I think the building we’re in now was one they put up for the army training camp, but the interior has been completely remodelled.’