Safe from Harm Read online

  ‘Have you read it?’ she shouted.

  ‘Are you drinking and weeing?’

  ‘Not at the same time. What do you make of it?’

  I scanned it again. ‘Unpleasant, to say the least. But probably harmless.’

  ‘Probably?’

  Yes, probably. But how did the guy – a guess, but the odds were I was right – know which door to push it under? A hotel employee was the most obvious answer. I decided I’d tell the head of the RST my suspicion, just in case. But there was no need to worry the shadow minister unduly, not while I was there. ‘You can never say for sure, not from one letter.’

  ‘If you were my PPI what would you do?’

  ‘PPO. I’d take us to Orange status while you were in the city. Make a strict plan of what you are doing, where you are doing it, with whom you are doing it and stick to it. I’d make sure you had a PPO at all times and I’d change whatever method you are planning to go back to London by – preferably switching to a car, rather than train or plane. Public transport is never good.’

  My more colourful colleagues on The Circuit call going out in public ‘wading through cunt soup’. I’m not that misanthropic. Not yet.

  ‘And I’d also show this to the police. And I’d take the advice and avoid any tours of dark alleys. And I’d switch hotels if you’re staying over.’

  ‘God, I feel better. What a relief. You’re a genius.’ I’d heard that tone a million times, nearly always when I have used nothing but common sense.

  ‘Good.’ I pulled out my phone. ‘I’d better tell my supervisor where I am.’ I walked to the window and looked out. It was one of those that only opens about four inches. There was no balcony, no fire escape, no way of entry into the room. The letter-writer wouldn’t be coming in there. ‘I’ll be in the corridor outside if you need me.’

  ‘I was just wondering . . .’

  ‘Yes, ma’am?’

  ‘Would you like a job?’

  FIVE

  Colour: Yellow. The cabins of the plane had slipped into the soporific routine of a long-haul flight. A meal had been served, champagne, G&Ts and wine consumed, the in-flight entertainment service had begun and the young men to the rear of me were suffering the effects of the early-morning booze. They’d be dehydrated by now, exacerbated by the altitude, and doubtless their mouths were feeling like they’d been sucking up sand and some cracking headaches were beginning their preliminary drumrolls. By the time we landed, they would feel like shit. I can’t say that upset me too much.

  I was re-reading the arrival protocols – Gemma and the rest of us would be met by limo airside, which was reassuring – when I heard a slight commotion from behind me. A call signal bonged and the purser walked back from First Class. I undid my seatbelt and stepped to the curtain that separated the pampered from the merely privileged and checked on Gemma in her pod. She still had the mask in place and was asleep. Only then did I look down the aisle to see what was happening.

  Most of it was taking place at the second curtained intersection, between Business and Economy, and on the far side of it at that, so all I could see were ripples in the blue drape. But I could hear the voices, some strained.

  I looked down at Martyn, who mouthed: ‘What’s going on?’

  I pointed over my shoulder, back towards First. ‘Tell the attendant to ask the captain to put on the fasten seatbelt signs.’

  That would have the effect of winnowing out those who instinctively obeyed rules.

  ‘Tell him there might be a disturbance.’

  ‘What kind of disturbance?’

  If I knew that, I’d have had a better idea of what to take out of my RTG bag. As it was, I went for the MLA fast-strap restraints. ‘Now, please.’

  Emily the P.A. had headphones on – her own, expensive, noise-cancelling ones, I noted – and was blissfully immersed in some movie. She didn’t so much as glance up as I passed.

  There was a band member standing in the aisle and I gently moved him aside. There was another electronic bong. At that moment the stewardess came over the address system. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, as you can see the captain has switched on . . .’

  I took a deep breath, pulled the curtain aside and stepped through into Economy.

  There were two of them and I wasn’t going to wonder how the staff had allowed them to get so drunk. My guess would be they smuggled their own alcohol – in bottles of 100ml or less – on board to supplement what the airline was serving. I gave myself a bird’s-eye view of the area in my brain, as if plotting all this out on paper, which we PPOs do a lot. Scribble on paper, I mean. Those who know such things claim it is like football coaches writing out potential match-plays – except instead of players, it’s car here, Principal there, bad guy here, PPO there. It keeps you sharp.

  I had moved to Red, even though there was no direct threat to my Principal. But, given that you shouldn’t be wielding a selfie stick like a rapier, there was a more general concern about safety on board. This came under Hostile Environment Assessment.

  Cramped into the space next to the galley was the pair causing the disturbance, both well into their thirties, their faces flushed from the booze. The one with the selfie stick was the taller: thickset, face folded into a hateful scowl.

  Her partner in insobriety had no weapon, but I clocked her nails. They explained the stripes down the face of the male steward, who was to my right, his eyes wide with shock. Blood was seeping into his collar.

  Another attendant was in the aisle, gripping the seat backs, holding in check a couple of passengers who had either come to assist or gawp. She was doing the right thing. This confined space did not need any more bodies in it. Or blood.

  The purser was slightly to the left of me, and she swayed back as the stick arced in front of her face. Finally, I had the band’s PPO standing directly in front of me. His contribution was to tell the two women to fuck off. Repeatedly.

  There are lots of good guys on The Circuit, exmilitary, police, the various security services, but I suspected this wasn’t one of them. He had the feel of a lad who had been doing doors six months ago and got lucky.

  I grasped his shoulders and swivelled him to encourage a return to Business. He struggled a bit so I kneed him in the back of the thigh. Hard. He crumpled to one side and then he was gone. I turned back to the fracas.

  ‘We only wanted a fuckin’ photograph with the lads,’ said Ms Selfie Stick. ‘Just a photo.’

  She held up a Samsung in her left hand to make the point. ‘And that twat –’ I assumed she meant the numb-legged PPO ‘– he assaulted us. I’m going to sue his fuckin’ arse. I’ll get one of those lawyers off the telly. No free, no win.’

  Close, I thought, but no cigar.

  ‘We just want a quick selfie,’ echoed the smaller of the two, as if this were still on the cards. She had a rodent-like face with nicotine-stained teeth and was wearing a pink velour tracksuit. But I could ignore her as long as I stayed away from the nails. She was a tailgater. Her chum was the more dangerous of the pair.

  I returned to watching the end of the stick pendulum back and forth in front of the purser. ‘If you will just return to your seats, we’ll see what we can do,’ she said.

  The duo simply gave a torrent of highly imaginative abuse back. I moved to take a position behind the purser.

  ‘Just fuckin’ let us take the pictures and then we’ll go back to our seats.’

  ‘When I say the word,’ I said softly in the purser’s ear, ‘I want you to duck. Go straight down, as if crouching. OK?’

  A nod.

  I could feel bodies pressing against my back through the curtain. Either the PPO or his charges. Neither would improve the situation.

  ‘Now.’

  The purser dropped and I used my height to lean over her. I grabbed the selfie stick and pulled. The woman lost her balance. I yanked her to one side and down and, as subtly as I could manage, with the purser’s body blocking most people’s view, I hit her with a short, sharp jab to
the temple. Not hard, but accurately. Enough to traumatise one of the arteries to the brain. It can be dangerous, and it can lead to all sorts of lawsuits from the no-win, no-fee bottom-feeders she was so keen on, but sometimes you take that chance. Sometimes, you enjoy taking that chance. I let her go and she crumpled to the floor.

  Her friend screamed loud enough to bruise eardrums and, as if there really were an option to flee off a plane at 38,000 feet, began scrambling down the aisle, lashing out with her nails and spittle whenever anyone blocked her path.

  I barged past the attendant and the passengers. I managed to grab the woman’s right arm, get it up her back, then snagged the left – the screaming was really hurting my ears now – and wrapped the fast-straps around her wrists. They were thick and a lot less damaging than the thin plastic ties some use. When you are a civilian PPO, bruises and abrasions from restraints are never a good idea. Lawyers love them, mind.

  I had her pinned to the carpet when I became aware of the applause around me and, worse than that, the flash of phone cameras. I had a feeling that was going to be all over Instagram, Vine, Tumblr, Twitter and Snapchat. Which is not where any PPO wants to be.

  I stood and indicated that one of the stewardesses should take over. My job was done. And for about thirty seconds it was. Then the woman on the floor, the one with my straps around her wrists, went into cardiac arrest.

  I listened at the intercom while the captain called MediLink, the outfit that advises on airborne crises. As instructed, he asked if there was a doctor on board. There wasn’t. The MediLink specialist, somewhere in Toronto, recommended an immediate divert. I could almost hear the pilot’s brain computing his options. It isn’t something you do lightly; diverting a 777 can cost up to half a million dollars. The airlines are never best pleased. But then the captain declared a medical emergency to air traffic control and requested an alternate destination airport with an ambulance on the tarmac. I felt the pressure change almost immediately. We were going down.

  For the most part, you only end up at Gander International Airport if something has gone wrong. Badly wrong. Once, most transatlantic flights stopped at this Canadian boondocks to refuel, and it was a base for hunting U-boats in the Second World War, but these days the little town of 10,000 people doesn’t see much action. Apart from the aftermath of 9/11, of course, when thirty-eight flights landed in a matter of hours as the skies over North America were cleared. It was the biggest day in Gander for forty years.

  There was no such fuss when we arrived. The captain’s medical emergency was one of the two main reasons planes land at Gander, the other being something going ‘tech’ on board. Like an engine catching fire. The Canadians took off the cardiac-arrested passenger – a Mrs Tanya Carlton – and her friend, Miss Sharon Allerton, for hospital treatment. Between us we had made both of them comfortable on board and Sharon, shocked into sobriety and remorse, had confessed they had been doing cocaine in the lavatories. Hence, probably, the little pink rodent’s heart attack.

  I gave a statement to the local police, as did the purser and cabin crew, and all backed up my story. As did the phone footage. No excessive force (not on the second one anyway) and a release of the restraints once I realised she was in trouble. Prompt, correct and smooth medical treatment for the cardiac episode had been available from both crew and myself.

  Nobody mentioned – or had caught on film – my surreptitious punch to Sharon’s temple, which was just as well. It’s not like in the movies. Incapacitating someone isn’t easy and it always has risks. I knew of one PPO who ruptured the aorta of one hostile with a punch to the solar plexus. No matter that the man had a congenital condition, it was manslaughter. All my girl got was a bad headache, which, I was fairly certain, she would have trouble telling apart from the damage caused by her cocktail of drink and drugs.

  I asked Gemma if she wanted me to get a VistaJet for the rest of the journey, but as we would probably be on our way before that could be expedited, she deemed it not worth the expense.

  The purser told me there were local journalists out on the tarmac, but that the captain had denied them permission to board. The official line was: medical emergency caused diversion. The rest, he said, could wait until we were all back home.

  I was beginning to tell myself that I had been very lucky and the captain had just announced we were ready to take off once more, when my phone rang. I took the call. As I listened I felt a numbness course through my veins, as if I had been injected with anaesthetic. The words didn’t make any kind of sense. And then, three of them did, with a shocking clarity. The shields didn’t just come down, they shattered like glass under a tack hammer.

  Paul was dead. My husband was dead.

  SIX

  Imagine a scream that goes on and on, building and building, until you think your brain might explode. Except nobody else can hear it. The sound is in your head and your head alone. And you only get a respite, and then just for a few seconds, a minute at most, when you wake up and you’ve forgotten all that went before, or imagine it wasn’t real. And then it kicks in, your constant companion until – maybe helped along by a bottle of wine and a glass of scotch – you silence it with sleep.

  I don’t really remember the immediate aftermath of Paul’s death. Bits of it come to me, the memories like fragments of a shipwreck thrown onto a beach, forlorn and bleached by the sun. At Gander there was a strange – to me, at least – role reversal, where I became the Principal and Gemma and Emily and Martyn looked after me. There was a VistaJet booked all right, but it was to take me home, back across the Atlantic. Gemma and Grant picked up the tab.

  The media frenzy was intense but short-lived. ‘Heartbreak of Have-A-Go Air Hero’ sums up most of the headlines. They were there till the funeral – which, thanks to my old boss Ben and Paul’s colleagues, had security to rival a G-20 summit – but after that the interest tailed off. Gemma kept in touch, sporadically, but politics doesn’t favour those left behind.

  Gemma had said, during our last conversation, that she had never figured me for one of those who would crack. She thought I’d shrug it off and come back to work. It was, she said, the best tonic. I couldn’t explain about the shattered shields, about how I couldn’t operate when my personal life mixed into my professional one. They should be like acid and oil, two separate layers. Not one swirl of intermingled colours, like petrol spilled on water.

  Which left Jess and me. After a while we settled into a routine of lots of hugs and long nights watching TV in pyjamas while she drank hot chocolate and I demolished a bottle of red. After Jess went to bed I would play some David Sylvian from Paul’s collection, and wallow in his seductive melancholia. And some more wine.

  I only really argued with Jess when I decided we had to move house. I had lived in Chiswick with Paul for almost a decade and everything was marked with his name. His favourite restaurant, La Trompette, our pub, The Hole in The Wall, High Road House, where we’d had his fortieth . . . the butcher, the baker, and the bloody candlestick maker. They all shouted one thing: Paul was here, and he’s not any longer. He’d gone into that Long Dark where, let’s face it, there is no light at the end of the tunnel.

  After the rows, I promised Jess I’d give it a little longer, to see if the ghosts faded, but I knew we’d have to go eventually. Every trip out of the house was like being pricked with a thousand pins. I was slowly falling to pieces and I knew moving would be a step in the right direction to preventing a total collapse.

  Meanwhile, after several months, some of Paul’s friends came calling. Most, really, the vast majority, were genuinely concerned. They brought flowers and memories. Duncan, his immediate boss, brought a detailed account of what happened that day, why the last few minutes of a routine SIG – the Strategic Intelligence Group – operation had killed my husband.

  But a few clearly brought other intentions. I had heard it said that young widows give off some sort of pheromone that triggers the protective instinct in males. I think it triggered some
thing else, because I found myself turning down dinner, holidays, the opera, Wimbledon centre court. I bought myself a vibrator instead. Jimmyjane. Bronze. Almost a hundred quid. But worth it for me to stay away from concerned old chums with hard-ons. I’ll take my orgasms alone for the time being, thanks.

  And we did move house. To not far from where Paul and I had lived before Jess, although the streets were unrecognisable now. I bought a flat in a converted industrial building on the canal near Islington, close to the Angel, which meant Jess had an easy commute to school – easier than from Chiswick – which partly helped mitigate the trauma she felt at leaving familiar ground. Also, she loved ballet and dance and I showed her Sadler’s Wells and promised we’d become members.

  And me? I had no real job to resign from; I had some money from Paul’s investments and a surprisingly small pension from his employer but I’d cleared the mortgage and had some cash in the bank left over from the move, which I placed with my dead husband’s financial advisor to give me an income. On paper, I was sitting pretty. Except I wasn’t. I was sitting feeling fat and ugly and drinking too much and thinking about dominoes. And somehow, I managed to do that for close to two years, letting my thoughts unspool over the ruins of the shields that had once held me in check.

  The whining of the lift has stopped. I hear a distant, disembodied woman say that the doors are opening. But it isn’t on our floor. There is an intermediate one, a full-size car wash. More voices echo down the shaft, male. A laugh. Not a very nice laugh, either, more one of disbelief at how easy this was going to be for them. And how hard it would go with me.

  I check my wound again. The blade cut through the outer fabric and has almost severed my bra. I think that was the idea. Tits out for the boys. I give it a tug. The remaining nylon and Kevlar webbing seems to be holding. It should do, it’s a ProTex, standard issue for female Secret Service agents in the US who also don’t want their tits falling out at inconvenient times. They cost a small fortune. Right now, it feels like money well spent.