Free A Loyal Spy by Simon Conway Page B

northern March and early purple orchids, as well as sea bindweed, yellow rattle and red clover among the carpet flowers. She had even spotted Irish ladies’ tresses, a native orchid of Greenland, its seed probably deposited by migrating Greenland white-fronted geese in their droppings. Then there were the birds: corncrake, twite, dunlin, redshank and ringed plover. After Jonah had left she simply continued with her daily routine of hiking, note-taking and observations. If nothing else, it had provided a ready excuse for her restless meandering.
    Beyond that, it was a struggle to remember how she had spent the time. There were piles of books, fragments of diary notes and observations, clues here and there, but nothing concrete, and certainly nothing to distinguish one day from another. They’d run together like goulash.
    She was almost forty.
    She didn’t even own a car.
    She left the kitchen and walked down the hallway, her fingertips sliding along the wall. There was a black Karrimor rucksack hanging on a peg on the wall, its straps fastidiously folded and taped. Her crash-bag, Jonah had called it. The night before he had left, he’d packed it and insisted that she keep it ready for instant departure.
    ‘You need to be ready at a moment’s notice,’ he’d told her.
    ‘Why?’ she’d asked, amused by the gravity of his expression. She’d put such things behind her. That was why they had come to Barnhill, to put their wildness behind them. She’d imagined it was simply force of habit in him.
    ‘Trust me,’ Jonah had said. It was only much later, days after he’d gone, that it occurred to her that these were the very the same words that she’d used to him in Baghdad in March 2003 in the last days before the war, when falling for him felt like utter madness, when everything that she did, every word she said, every man she fucked or betrayed, everything she revealed and the many things that she kept concealed, all of it was about getting back her stolen child.
    She drifted from room to room in a sleepy daze with the dog following. There was a thin layer of peat dust from the fires in the kitchen and the drawing room that covered everything. It needed dusting. She needed to find a morning routine again.
    She opened the door to Jonah’s study and stared at the empty desk and the wall beside it, which had a profusion of jottings, press cuttings, photographs and maps pinned to it. The collage, he called it – the research matter for his memoir. She sat in the swivel chair and leant back to study the wall. She had taken to randomly reading the press cuttings, the items of interest to Jonah that were highlighted in fluorescent yellow marker. This time, she read a cutting from the
Daily Mail
– ‘
Aviation International Ser­vices do not now and have never conducted so-called rendition flights
’.
Beneath it there was an article from the
Washington Post
with the headline:
‘
Al Qaeda Cash Tied to Diamond Trade
’
.
Beside that, with an arrow linking the two, there was a 2004 print-out from Wikinews: ‘
The bodies of eleven disembowelled people have been found in a mass grave in the Sulaymaniyah region of Kurdistan, according to the United States military in Iraq. The bodies have not yet been identified. Reports quote an estimate that the bodies may be more than a year old.
’
    Then there were the faces. She recognised some of them – the obvious ones, including Bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, US vice-president Dick Cheney and the Abu Ghraib guard Lynndie England. There was a Polaroid photograph of Monteith, head of the shadowy unit of the Ministry of Defence known only as the Department, and until 2003 Jonah’s boss. Then there were other faces, faces remembered from her own past, the evidence of an unexpected and at times troubling intersection between her life and Jonah’s. There was a Pakistani brigadier, whose face she remembered glimpsing in a tunnel in the Tora Bora mountain range of