Listen

Clare Taylor

Description

The death of a childhood friend leads a woman journalist to a US military surveillance base on a bleak Yorkshire moor, in this taut political thriller... Set in 1996, when US mass intercept surveillance in the UK was already fast expanding, Listen pits the macho and paranoid world of secret military intelligence against the women activists intent on protesting against the US presence. The personal journey of the chief protagonist, unusually an older woman, draws together a web of relationships between four very different women and the male National Security Officers responsible for controlling protesters. Based on a factual background, Listen anticipates the contemporary issue of mass state intercept surveillance exposed by Edward Snowden, and underlines how this activity has been expanding covertly in the UK for decades. Sarah Braithwaite's BBC radio documentaries once won prizes, but she's long since been sidelined. Only one day after Sarah's fiftieth birthday, and her new young female boss threatens to bin her safe but uninspiring job editing short stories. It's all change at the BBC. When an elderly woman submits an Orwellian story about an expanding US military base which, the woman claims, is illegally intercepting UK telecommunications traffic, Sarah rejects her as paranoid. The woman, undeterred, continues to harass her, pleading for help for "a girl in danger" but Sarah - her own London life in free-fall - refuses to listen. Unexpected news of the death of her childhood friend, Lucy Jepson, prompts Sarah to escape back to her northern roots where she learns that Lucy, flamboyant heiress to an industrial fortune, has died, poor and alone, on a derelict smallholding. Shocked by the circumstances surrounding Lucy's death, and driven as much by instinct as logic, Sarah determines to find out how she came to die. Her turbulent journey takes her through suburban and rural North Yorkshire, the evidence leading her ever closer to the sinister American base, RAF Menwin Moor; the same base that Erin, the woman she had so carelessly dismissed, had repeatedly tried to bring to her attention. Who is the "girl in danger"? If Sarah is to resolve her own life she must find out how her friend died and try to save the girl. And to do that she must penetrate the male bastion of the base at its most vulnerable point

Sujets

• Thriller

Informations

• Publié par: eBook Versions
• Date de parution: 01 octobre 2013
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781843962854
• Langue: English

Extrait

Published by Chiari Books

Copyright © 2013 Clare Taylor

Clare Taylor has asserted her
right under the Copyright, Designs and
Patents Act 1988 to be identified
as the author of this work.

ISBN-13 978-1-84396-285-4

A CIP catalogue record for
this ebook edition is available
from the British Library.

ePub edition production
www.ebookversions.com

All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be
reproduced, stored in or
introduced into a retrieval system
or transmitted in any form
or by any means electronic,
photomechanical, photocopying,
recording or otherwise without
the prior written permission
of the publisher. Any person who
does any unauthorised act in
relation to this publication may be
liable to criminal prosecution
LISTEN



Clare Taylor





CHIARI BOOKS
Contents


Copyright Credits
Title Page

PROLOGUE

WEEK ONE, NOVEMBER 1996
First Sunday
First Monday
First Tuesday
First Wednesday
First Thursday
First Friday
First Saturday

WEEK TWO
Second Monday
Second Tuesday
Second Wednesday
Second Thursday
Second Friday
Second Saturday

WEEK THREE
Third Monday
Third Tuesday
Third Wednesday
Third Thursday
Third Friday
Third Saturday

EPILOGUE
Prologue

February 1996


Dead winter. Filthy fog. A dawn so dark it might still pass for night were it not for the sun s refusal to give in, give up; heaving just high enough to spew crude ginger onto the crusty snow before being shoved back out of sight. Then night returns, ghoulish and dank. Doomed to daily resume its vigil on this desolate place, as if sun could help, what point self-delusion? Get real. Just do the job as best you can then back to bed. And the earth stays clenched; frost clawing down into the dense dark clay.
This is the hump-backed spine of England where no one ever lived, till now. And why would they? Why try when the land itself would buck you off; the cold, the wind, rocky outcrops smugly hugging ancient grudges? A clutch of hill farms crouch down in the hollows; scarfed by steep fields, a few arthritic birch. But up beyond the bracken-line on open moor nothing grows that isn t rank and low and leeched, even in high summer; clumps of defeated grass, lop-sided thorn, balloons of twissly thatch pushed sideways by the wind as if they might blow off and leave shocked trunks. Land good for nothing more than sheep, you might have thought. But you would be wrong. For here in this place that seems to repel chlorophyl itself, rare orchids grow. And so too do other strange growths which reproduce themselves without explanation; luminous and white and round, defying biology and seeming on this dark satanic day as if they liked it here. As if they fitted in.

The girl was running - no not running, not yet - jogging, jogging easily; headphones under her bobble hat and anorak hood, her stride in rhythm with the Spice Girl s song; the new Walkman snugly in her pocket. As if this vast hall of a half-finished building - where the swirling fog, the moaning wind and the Spice Girls (I'll tell you what I want, what I really, really want. So tell me what you want, what you really, really want) all keeping step together as she bounced through the empty rooms - was a usual and suitable spot for early morning exercise. No windows. She glanced up at the new plaster-board ceiling, a ceiling which seen from outside did not exist; flat roof concealed by heather, like moor. And it was moor, out there, under the snow. In here thick bunker walls half submerged; battle-hardened; meaning, so the women in the caravans said, it could sustain nuclear attack.
Her breath puffed into the ghostly air. Frost clamped around each tiny hair in her pretty pointed nose and beads of damp froze to nip her lips. She stopped and glanced at her watch, yanked the headphones from her ears and listened. The moaning wind had found a pile of semi-rigid plastic sheeting to clatter against in ghostly syncopation. She hugged herself through many layers, bones chill, and checked her watch once more, edgy now, the Spice Girls silent, the place eerie and wrong; long low grey concrete walls, the sweeping alley of grey concrete floor, the half-built grey breeze-block internal walls, their edges shrouded and smudged as fog shifted and glided. Eight thousand, three hundred square metres so they d read. But not all was grey. At measured intervals huge bunches of fibre-optic cable erupted from the floor in flowering celebratory founts; scarlet, orange, blue and green. Yellow neon jackets and orange hard hats, some marked with B.T s logo, hung on piles of plaster-board. She picked a scrap of paper off the floor - a discarded chit - indicating the delivery of components: Dockheed - stuffed it in her anorak pocket. But no contractors would come and find her here today, at this hour, running where she wanted and not minding her own business. Today wet concrete would freeze. The men themselves would freeze. She herself would freeze - if she stayed.
The scream was diffuse; dampened and drowned in the thick wet air.
Not jogging now, but bending deep and powering into full sprint she dodged out of the door into shifting fog and shrouded moor, leaping forward over frozen tussocks, snow compacting with creaks and groans under her step. Three scanky ancient ewes hung about with their own foggage of greasy grey wool lifted their heads, hustled and bolted a few paces, then froze in a blob to view her again, disapproving old ladies with poor false teeth and rheumy eyes, almost dead in the cold. Folds of air swung and merged, baffling, obfuscating place. She stopped, lost.
This time the howl of pain arced straight to her feet; describing line and distance. Arms flailing she skittered forward crushing frosted thistles underfoot till she saw the man s faint outline; rectangular, angular, regular, feet apart, head high, grey as the air and at his feet a movement, a wriggle, an urge; the splash of a scarlet woolen hat turned to a soft roseate streak by the fog; warmth, the outline of a woman at his feet. And from beyond, over the dank sour snow bounced an armoured 4 X 4 decorated with the jolly blue, yellow and white stripes of the Ministry of Defence Police; to decant three men in black uniforms wielding stubby guns.
The girl froze, fist in her mouth, watched as two men snapped hand-cuffs on the prone woman s wrists, heard her whimper, watched as they dragged her to the van; her scream of pain igniting the girl s own cry.
Mother!
And the men swung round to scan the thick air, saw the girl s faint outline, turned towards the big stiff man still standing foursquare sentinel where the woman had fallen. But he didn t move.
Mother!
And still they didn t come for the girl. They threw the woman into the van and drove away. And she was left running alone in all that space under the big sky choked with fog and other information.

Week One, November 1996.

First Sunday


The other end of the country. The other end of the year. The other end of the day. North London, late October, 1996. Another mother was about to fall. The sun was not reluctant here; rather the opposite, as if compelled to demonstrate its fullest show it flooded the first-floor room with operatic farewell light. Unnecessarily tragic, thought Sarah, as she leant, waiting, one hand against the marble mantlepiece the other fingering the stumpy limbs of a tiny terracotta figurine standing beside the clock. That night the clock would go back. That night she would have to start to find a way to go forward. She could do without this collision of sunset and farewell; she could do without cheap meaning.
She glanced at the window as if to catch sight of his plane but the harrowing dark core scorched her eyes and she blinked, wincing and turned back to gaze, dazed, into the massive mantle mirror. Not at herself, oh no not that, but just as bad, all that reminded her of who she was: the row of starched birthday cards doubling themselves and standing as crenelated foreground to the reflected room behind; the shining square table with its litter of lunch-time debris; champagne glasses, wine glasses, cutlery askance, abandoned crusts. A spoon stuck out of the remains of the plum crumble beside bowls stained with jammy smears. The mauled birthday cake with its awful toppled candles straddled the centre. Carrot - Ruth had said it had to be carrot. Childhood food, significant food; signs and meanings and feelings. Agh... they should have had a takeaway instead.
The sun slipped further and came to rest on top of the Edwardian chimney pot opposite - gradually pressing down in its own skin like a squashed egg yolk. Beams of bright light roved the room, agitated and interrupted by scraps of dragged cloud. Then, pop, the yolk split and dribbled messily along the roof-line; and as it did the room was momentarily beatified in a crimson rush. This was it. She glanced at the clock. Yes. Now. And she imagined his plane arrowing up; her own yolk, trajected. Already the room was darkening; the sky ominous, too fast. Slowly, she picked each card off the mantlepiece and dropped it into the waste-basket beside the febrile flames of the faux log fire till only one remained. She put that flat against her heart. Then in it went as well.
A sudden movement of her hand to her face and she swiped the figurine onto the floor, heard it crack, looked down. But it remained intact, lying on its back, looking up at her. Its little belly swollen. She dipped to retrieve it, a deep curtsey. Cradled it in the palm of her hand. A sort of voodoo, a sort of comfort.

The treads on the stairs had always been wonky. The tray was laden with gleaming crystal. Her heart was laden with loss. It followed that what followed would follow. Even as both feet slipped and shot up in the air and her bottom went down to bounce from step to step, she recognised the balletic inevitability, that s