Chapter Fourteen

DYER COULD TELL – YOU ONLY had to look at him – that Marvar had exhausted himself swatting away the images. There were nights in Belém when the bats zinged back and forth in front of your face, as if someone was shooting them. That was how Marvar held up his hands. It was going round and round in his head, what might have happened, what he could do.

‘Have you spoken to anyone?’ Dyer said finally. Here, on Port Meadow, beside the Thames, the whole thing seemed melodramatic, extreme. So implausible.

‘No … I can’t tell Samir.’ He had had to keep his excitement and then his dread from his son.

‘A doctor, perhaps,’ although Dyer did not mean this in the way that it sounded to Marvar, who looked bewildered and exposed.

‘You don’t believe me …’

‘I didn’t say that –’

‘I’m not delusional,’ his face haggard.

Dyer replied in the controlled, neutral tone of the seasoned reporter. Behind him, the years of patient questioning. Telephone calls, long bus journeys, the sun on his unshaven face. The words of his first editor in his ear. Doubt and you’ll not be deceived.

‘Please. I’m trying to get this straight. You’re worried that your wife might have been tortured and raped because you sent her a joyful text?’

‘You don’t understand these people, John Dyer,’ he said from within his invisible hole. ‘I thought that you at least … with your experience of the Shining Path … would know what human beings are capable of … would see that I’m saying the truth.’

He had to pause to catch his breath. But he had not finished. ‘I always hoped, because she had a marvellous thing for life, that she would escape … She had always managed to … She had an animal’s instinct for survival. When I heard her as a petrified animal, it went quickly through my head, “God, she’s lost.” Now I’ve stopped hoping.’

The helplessness in his voice was enough to tell Dyer it was true.

‘Is there no way to secure Shula’s release?’

Oh, nothing could be simpler, said Marvar with an unconvincingly pleasant smile. One call from his mobile would do it – to General Damghani, revealing what Marvar had achieved nine days earlier in a room on the second floor of the Clarendon, and how to repeat the experiment.