Free What Will Survive by Joan Smith

two teenage sons. Arrangements were being made last night to return her body to Britain.
    The Aisha Lincoln I knew,
by Amanda Harrison, page 3
    Obituary, page 32
    Cars and vans belonging to reporters and TV crews were parked in the lane that ran down the side of the house, providing a soundtrack of slamming doors and occasional bursts of laughter. If anything, there seemed to be even more of them today, according to Tim and Aisha’s neighbour, Sue Hickman, who left a rather flustered message on their answering machine. Tim moved restlessly round his first-floor office, avoiding his desk, where he could not bring himself to look at the black-and-white postcard next to the phone. He picked up a series of familiar objects which should have been comforting but merely seemed unreal: a paperback book he had started reading at the weekend; a framed photograph on his bookshelves, showing Aisha and the boys, all much younger, on holiday; an Edwardian hand-held blotter with an inlaid top that Aisha had given him as a birthday present; a magnificent ammonite that one of the boys had found on the beach.
    Abandoning this pointless activity – though what else was there to do until Ricky arrived? – Tim went to the window and threw up the sash, glancing with distaste at the radio car which was just visible beyond the hedge. A movement caught his eye and he turned to stare at the pebble-dashed bungalow which had been built in what was once the back garden of Cranbrook Lawns. It was the reason he and Aisha had been able to afford the house but he had never got on with the elderly couple, now in their seventies, who lived in it. Jack and Beattie Bell complained frequently about the boys and their friends, about noise and even about the position of the Lincolns’ dustbins; Tim could not be sure he had seen someone at the kitchen window, but the Bells must have heard about Aisha by now.
    Sue Hickman had ended her message by saying that the vicar was going to have a word with the journalists and ask them to show some respect — a pretty futile gesture, in Tim’s view. He despised Reverend Roger Crammer, a low-church evangelical who had startled the village when he banned Aisha’s Wednesday evening yoga class from the church hall. Tim had heard Aisha tell the story several times, almost doubled up with laughter at the notion that Sivananda yoga involved pagan rites — he winced, ambushed by the memory — and he didn’t want Reverend Rodgeturning up on his doorstep now, mouthing platitudes. Some jour no had been doing just that when Tim switched on the
Today
programme this morning, babbling about Aisha’s desire to make a difference. It was more than he could take after a night spent drifting in and out of febrile dreams.
    Tim snapped off the radio and he had had the sense not to turn on breakfast TV, guessing that the coverage would be even worse. The rat bag — Max’s mishearing of the phrase ‘rat pack’ was a family joke — had started to turn up in Cranbrook before the British embassy in Beirut even confirmed that Aisha had been seriously injured. How did they get to know such things? The first crew was local and withdrew to film from the main road in front of the house when Tim, looking out the window in Aisha’s bedroom, recognised the logo on their vehicle and decided not to answer the door.
    The people who lived opposite, who were founder members of Neighbourhood Watch, phoned the police around the same time and complained that a TV van was idling on a dangerous bend — a fact Tim discovered from the WPC who turned into the drive shortly after the film crew, parking just inside the gates. She told Tim she had discovered from the producer why they were there, and immediately radioed for reinforcements.
    â€˜They’ll be here in droves,’ she observed, in a way that Tim considered unfeeling. She added that an inspector was on his way from the station in Minehead