The two men were now standing in stress positions up against a wall. Stevie wondered how far the interrogators were allowed to take the exercise.
Only one of their captors remained to conduct the interrogation; the other men went to play cards in the next room. Stevie soon noticed that the interrogator—an ugly bulldog of a man—had taken a specific interest in Mark. He began asking him questions about his sources, about the rogue soldiers. Mark was foolishly trying to talk back, perhaps buoyed by the confidence that this was just an exercise.
The bulldog was growing angrier, shouting. He wanted to know where Mark had got the information on the soldiers; it had to, he yelled, be an inside job. Stevie hoped Mark would be sensible enough to realise that, even if this were an exercise, he must absolutely hold out. He would be risking the lives of the whistleblowers if their identities were uncovered.
The very real consequences for this mock interrogation brought a second wave of fear and doubt. She didn’t trust the bulldog; something was wrong. Could it all be for real? Why had the bulldog singled out Mark? Did he have a real motive behind his questions?
The interrogation continued. When the bulldog produced pliers and Mark wet himself, Stevie decided that, either way, the exercise had gone much further than ‘let’s pretend’. Mark seemed to be on the verge of telling the mutt what he wanted to know. Something had to be done.
Diversion and escape.
Stevie suddenly started screaming. The men playing cards in the other room came running in; the bulldog stopped his psychological torture.
Stevie screamed higher, louder, hysterical now. ‘I can’t take it! I’m frightened! I want to go home!’
The bulldog laughed. The other men glanced uneasily at each other.
Surely they would be nervous of causing any real damage; this was supposed to be an exercise. And in Stevie’s experience, hysterical women made most men feel terribly nervous . . .
Stevie let out another bloodcurdling scream and began banging her head against the wall. One of the men rushed over to stop her. He untied her hands; Stevie sobbed into them, rocking back and forth.
‘I want to use the bathroom,’ she finally stuttered. Her jailer lifted her and helped her into the corridor, showed her a small door. Stevie locked it quickly behind her.
As she had hoped, there was a window—tiny, but a window. She shoved it open. Could she possibly fit through it? Certainly not in her heavy Shetland Island knit cardigan and massive boots.
She stripped to her thermals and hoped years of school gymnastics would be enough to get her through. She pushed herself off the far wall and dived sideways through the opening.
She crashed head-first onto the sodden ground outside, her legs still half inside, her hip tearing painfully on the sharp window catch. She pulled herself off the ground and limped towards the captor’s jeep. It was the only vehicle in the yard.
Hardly daring to hope she would, she found the keys shoved up behind the sunvisor and started the massive engine. She revved it loudly, hoping it would be heard inside the farmhouse. As she burned out of the yard, the front door of the farmhouse burst open, men spilled out, angry shouts. They did not have guns. Stevie allowed herself a small, gleeful smile. She hoped her escape would be enough to distract the bulldog from his persecution of Mark; she also hoped that the bulldog would feel as humiliated as he’d made Mark feel, that one had got away.
Stevie sped along the road, not caring where she was headed, until her phone showed there was enough reception to make a call.
David Rice said even less than usual as Stevie recounted her concerns.
‘The man wants real information—things that could get people killed if Mark talks. I think it’s dangerous and irresponsible, even if it is just training.’
‘And Stevie, where in God’s name are you?’
‘I have absolutely no idea. Somewhere on the moor—my phone just says “Bodmin” which isn’t very helpful. I took their jeep and now I’m driving around, looking like a mad woman in my thermal underwear . . .’
There was a long pause. Then Rice came on again, ‘Head north, you’ll come to a village. Check in at the local pub and wait for someone to collect you.’ And with that he was gone.
It turned out that the bulldog, having overheard Mark’s tales in the pub, had jumped at the chance to do some old army friends a favour by getting the name of the whistleblower at the source of Mark’s story. A full report of what happened on the hostile environment training course was requested by Hazard. As a result, David Rice began training staff and clients in-house, mock-kidnappings were struck from the training books, and Stevie Duveen found a letter in her college pigeon hole a week later offering her a job at Hazard as a regional security analyst.
That had been eight years ago. Hazard was her world now and she was good at her job. The family connection only drew Stevie closer to her boss, who was barely ten years younger than her father would have been, had he lived. Sometimes Stevie thought Rice felt it too, the bond. He was her anchor in a floating world.
‘So, how are you?’ Rice asked, still as stone, waiting for an answer.
He could be quite disconcerting when he wanted to know something that Stevie didn’t want to tell. She could rarely hold out long with him. She excused herself by remembering that he was, after all, a trained interrogator.
‘I’m fine.’
That silence.
‘I’ll be thirty-one next month.’
Nothing.
It would be easier to give in now and get it over with. She took a large gulp of her gin.
‘To be honest, it’s been a little difficult because of the publicity. He’s on every newsstand with Norah Wolfe, all the headlines about how fabulous they are, how extraordinary his talent. It would be easier not to be reminded.’
Stevie couldn’t shut the memory out. She had been deeply in love with Joss Carey. Nothing could change that fact. He had been an unlikely choice for her—although perhaps it was Joss who had chosen Stevie. He was a painter, enormously and romantically good looking—beautiful, in fact—the fifth son of a prominent family, the misunderstood misanthrope with the frayed collar, the paint-flecked hands, the gentle eyes. His was a very different world to Stevie’s—creative and sensuous, with padded edges and bleeding lines.
In Joss’ world, time did not move in a straight line, if it moved at all; life was lived in rumpled bed sheets at noon, on an old velvet sofa in a crumbling studio, surrounded by jam jars of flowers and the overwhelming smell of linseed oil and turpentine. His world was everything Stevie’s wasn’t.
She had met him through her friend Charlie at a party, in a strange old house off Eaton Square. Joss had sat with her on a window ledge full of red geraniums and talked to her about the capriciousness of the muse. Stevie had just returned from a week on an oilrig supply ship in the Caspian Sea and the contrast had charmed her. She’d never met anyone like Joss Carey.
As he leaned in and lit her cigarette, his large eyes had fluttered like brown moths over her face until they came to rest on hers. He gazed at her for a long time before he spoke. ‘You have the most extraordinarily luminous quality about you. I find your face fascinating.’
Stevie blushed and laughed; compliments were not a thing she was particularly used to.
‘I’d like to paint you. Would you do me that honour? I need to see if I can capture your essence on canvas—if it’s possible. Which I don’t know yet. Will you agree to sit for me?’
Stevie nodded, flattered to have been asked, flattered to have been found luminous and fascinating by someone so gorgeous.
The very next week, autumn became winter. Joss arrived at Stevie’s hotel with a huge smile and a primrose cradled in his palm like a tiny bird.
‘It’s wonderful, Joss,’ Stevie said, utterly enchanted by the delicate offering lying in the rough painter’s palm, returning the smile.
Joss put his arm around her shoulders and pulled her in tight, kissing the top of her head as if he had known her forever. ‘Ah, you see, Stevie? I was right about you. You have all the answers already. The true secret of happiness lies in being able to find joy in the details of life. If you can do that, nirvana is yours.’
They walked out of the hotel and into Hyde Park, strolling arm in arm around the circular duck pond, then northwards towards Notting Hill.
Joss lived in a large airy studio, with big windows filled with bare treetops. The walls were covered in colours and postcards and feathers and shards of mirror and graffiti—the whole room was a giant collage. It was like nothing Stevie had ever seen before.
‘I’m a hoarder,’ he laughed. ‘Can’t you tell? Awful vice but I can never let anything beautiful pass me by without grabbing it.’ He turned to Stevie, his brown eyes warm and full of light. ‘Like you, Stevie Duveen.’ He kissed her ever so gently on the lips then laughed again.
‘Why do you really want to paint me?’ Stevie asked.
‘Painting is my way of seeing things,’ Joss smiled. ‘It’s the way I understand the world.’
Joss sat her on his old velvet sofa and set a new canvas on the easel. Stevie sat, her shoulders still, her fingers turning the primrose that had by now become so much more than a primrose, and Joss began to paint her.
There was soft music in the air, the music of gypsies, and Stevie felt full of magic. Joss’ world was so different to hers, so unplanned, so romantic, so free. Suddenly she wanted a piece of it; she couldn’t remember what it felt like not to always be responsible and organised and utterly dependable, forever locked in a tight cage of control. She couldn’t remember what it felt like to be young . . .
She looked at Joss, a paintbrush behind his perfect, paint-flecked ear. He glanced at her, then back at the canvas, then up to her face again.
The way he stared at her, his intensity, made her feel like she was being seen for the first time in her life.
Could Joss set her free?
Her heart gave an almighty thump and she knew she had no choice but to try to find out.
‘I should have known, David,’ she said, shelving the postcards from the past. ‘For all my training in risk assessments, I didn’t see it coming. There were no signs. No indicators. It was . . .’ she swallowed hard, ‘completely unforseen.’
Stevie had arrived unexpectedly from Zurich one weekend. It was three weeks since she’d last seen Joss—too long—but her work had taken her to Jakarta and it had been impossible to come home sooner. She had walked into Joss’ studio and smiled to herself as she took in the familiar disarray, the sofa, the rumpled sheets of the bed in the corner.
There was a new canvas on the easel, the beginnings of a bare breast that was not hers. She didn’t think anything of it, until she noticed a primrose amongst the bed sheets.
Stevie’s legs began to shake. She sat on the velvet sofa that had seen so much happiness and wept.
Joss returned right then, his arm around a stunning, laughing girl.
It was Norah Wolfe, the super-cool supermodel with the shaggy blonde hair and the rock star father.
Stevie remembered being with Joss at Annabel’s when he had first spotted Norah across the room, him sneering, ‘Famous for nothing.’ Stevie had heard the contempt in his voice, but she also remembered that the contempt had been mixed with fascination.
Stevie turned back to Rice and gave a little laugh. ‘He actually smiled at me when he saw me there.’ But she remembered too well how it had felt to see her future happiness catch flame and burn to fine ash.
‘Now they’re London’s hottest couple and his paintings are selling.
He always told me he despised celebrity.’
‘Insignificant people crave celebrity because it reassures them of their relevance. Joss is no different. He’s a small man.’ Rice’s tone was withering, his voice now full of heat. Stevie was surprised and touched. It was very rare for the man to let his composure slip even the slightest degree.
She would have liked to say something, to reach out and touch the grizzled soldier sitting opposite her, but the moment passed and when Rice spoke again, the chill in his voice had returned. ‘You dodged a bullet, Stevie.’
But Stevie had not escaped unharmed. Somehow she couldn’t shake the feeling, in her heart, in her stomach, that she had been found to be unlovable, that she had in some way failed as a woman. And she hated the fact that David knew.
‘Joss was so different. I thought artists were different—passionate and true—’ she stopped herself, realising how naive she sounded.
Rice said nothing. With a small gesture, he ordered Stevie another gin and tonic.
‘He made me believe he saw qualities in me that no one else did.
That’s very attractive. It makes you feel special. Unique. I loved him.’
Her voice trembled a fraction, the tiniest warble of pain.
‘Oh you poor darling.’ Rice’s words barely rising above a growl.
Stevie blushed. He had never called her that before. She took the clean napkin he was holding out to her; he had seen the secret tears in her eyes.
‘Your parents were both mad on artists, especially painters, had lots of them as friends,’ he said, trying to offer some consolation. ‘But painters are still people, you know, and share insecurities and desires and weaknesses with the rest of us humans.’ Rice took a long sip of his drink and fixed Stevie with his gaze. ‘You have to stop seeing yourself through that fool’s eyes. You
are
special, in my eyes—’ Stevie looked up, startled, her face suddenly hot.
‘—in the eyes of your colleagues at Hazard.’
The mad flutter in her heart died like a day-old moth. Professionally respected. Yes, she supposed she was now. But that was hardly enough to ensure her human credentials.
‘I just feel like a fool,’ she confessed. ‘I had no idea and I still don’t really understand why.’
‘And you’re still heartbroken.’ It was not a question. It was an outcome.
‘It’s hard to just turn love off. You despise them, but they can still make your heart jump.’ Stevie reached for a cigarette and held it in her long fingers, fiddling with the gold band. ‘I did ask him why, you know,