In another Birmingham suburb Peggy Kinsolving parked her car outside a very different kind of house. A black wrought-iron gate opened on to a neat front garden; a York stone path led through low shrubs to a solid oak front door with two stained glass panels.
Arts and Crafts, Peggy said to herself. She and her boyfriend Tim had recently been on an evening course on English domestic architecture, and she was glad some of it had stuck.
A pretty middle-aged woman answered the door. She smiled at Peggy and said, ‘You must be Miss Donovan, come to see my husband. I’m Felicity Luckhurst.’
Mrs Luckhurst led Peggy into a square entrance hall with a colourful tiled floor. Peggy was interested to see the shoulder-high oak panelling on the walls of the hall. It was just as it should be, she thought. She followed Mrs Luckhurst through a modern, spick-and-span kitchen and into a conservatory, from which she could see a freshly mown lawn, neatly edged beds of shrubs, pots of flowers and a little pond with a fountain. At the bottom of the garden there seemed to be a greenhouse under construction.
‘Good afternoon, Miss Donovan,’ said a loud masculine voice, and Peggy turned to see a tall, upright, middle-aged man with friendly eyes. He was dressed casually – fawn trousers, an open-necked shirt and pullover. ‘I’ve just been tidying myself up a bit. I’ve been working on that greenhouse all morning.’
‘Yes,’ said Felicity Luckhurst. ‘I’ve told him he’s got to finish it before he goes back to work.’
‘When will that be?’ asked Peggy.
‘I’m not sure yet. In a month, I hope, but I’ve got to get the medic to sign me off. Lot of nonsense.’
‘Now, now,’ said his wife. ‘Miss Donovan doesn’t want to hear you grousing. Go and sit down and I’ll bring you some tea.’
They sat down in the wicker chairs in the conservatory and talked about the garden and the design of the house until Mrs Luckhurst brought the tea tray and left them to it.
‘So,’ Luckhurst said, ‘tell me what I can do to help the Home Office.’ He raised a sceptical eyebrow.
‘I’ve come to follow up your conversation with DI Fontana. You gave him some information about where you were held in Somalia.’ Peggy was trying not to lead him in any particular direction.
Luckhurst nodded. ‘I take it you know broadly what happened to us?’
‘I think so – your ship was seized, and you and your crew were held captive until a ransom was paid. DI Fontana said you had something to tell us about the camp.’
‘Well, not so much about the camp itself, but rather what one of the people guarding us said to me.’ Luckhurst told Peggy about the young boy, Taban, who had brought them their supper each evening. On the last occasion that he’d seen him, he explained, Taban seemed really nervous. ‘Quite different from his usual self. I’d managed to establish quite a rapport with him – thought it might come in useful somehow. We talked in a kind of pidgin English. That evening he said – well, he didn’t exactly say this but it’s what I think he meant – that an Englishman had come to the camp. Not English like me, but like Taban; I think he was trying to say he was dark-skinned. He wasn’t a hostage, according to Taban; this “Englishman” had come to the camp with a bunch of Arabs.’
‘Arabs?’ asked Peggy. ‘Not Somalis?’
‘No, that’s why it stuck in my mind – that and the fact that he was a dark Englishman, whatever that means.’
Peggy had a very clear sense of what it meant. ‘Did he say what these Arabs were doing there?’
Luckhurst shook his head. ‘No, and I never saw them myself. You see, we never got a look at the whole camp. They brought us there in the dark, and we were kept in a pen. We were let out each day for exercise, in a kind of dusty open courtyard, but all I could see were dunes on one side, and a wall on the other.’
‘You said “dunes” – were you right by the sea?’
‘I assume so. Though to tell you the truth, I don’t know exactly where we were.’
Peggy reached down for the case holding her laptop. ‘Why don’t we try and find out?’
Five minutes later Peggy sat at the dining-room table, with an attentive Captain Luckhurst by her side. Thanks to Mrs Luckhurst’s attachment to online shopping, the household had fast Broadband access, and on the screen of Peggy’s laptop a picture of the United Kingdom suddenly appeared, viewed from hundreds of miles above.
‘Google Earth,’ said Luckhurst knowingly. ‘My son was showing it to me the other day.’
‘Something like that,’ said Peggy cryptically. In fact, they were looking at Ministry of Defence satellite photographs – unlike Google Earth, these pictures were constantly updated, so that instead of patches of cloud obscuring a given location on the day the Google satellite was at work, these were all razor-sharp.
‘You said your ship was boarded almost dead east of Mogadishu.’
‘That’s right. We were about thirty miles offshore.’
‘Did you have a sense of where you went next?’
‘Not really. It was south of Mogadishu – though I couldn’t see the city. Frankly I was too busy following the pirates’ orders to check the final co-ordinates.’
Meaning he’d had a gun to his head, thought Peggy, admiring Luckhurst’s understatement.
He pressed a finger to his lips, thinking hard. At last he said, ‘In the old days we’d have had a log – it would probably still be there in the pilot house. But nowadays it’s all electronic. That means HQ have a constant fix on the ship’s whereabouts.’ He looked at Peggy. ‘Let me go and make a call.’
When he returned he held a piece of paper. ‘Hope this means something to you.’
And when Peggy looked at the sequence of numbers it did. Opening a small box in one corner of the screen, she entered the precise latitude and longitude co-ordinates he had given her. Seconds later, the screen cleared and they were staring at a topographical view of ocean, with a superimposed X in the middle of the laptop’s display.
‘What’s that?’ asked Luckhurst.
‘The place where you were last anchored.’ She clicked a sequence of keys and suddenly the focus pulled back, exposing the nearby coastline. ‘Now, you were anchored only a mile or so offshore. Do you think you went straight in?’
Luckhurst replied without hesitation, ‘No. It took maybe twenty minutes before we got to the beach. Admittedly the boats they took us in were pretty small, but they had reasonable outboards on them. We must have gone south, or else I would have seen Mogadishu. It’s quite a large city.’
Peggy zeroed in on the coastline, starting on the southern fringes of the capital city, which was laid out in visible rectangles, then moving slowly south, past the long strip of the international airport and further down the coast. Here the white tops of breakers could be made out, the flat sand of the beach, and dunes pockmarked by the few trees hardy enough to grow there. There seemed to be little or no signs of habitation, and no obvious dwellings; where the city ended, the desert took over.
‘Can’t say anything looks familiar…’
Peggy understood, since even at close range, from a height of less than a mile, it was hard to make sense of a terrain of water, sand, and more sand. ‘Was there any specific feature in the camp you can recall?’
‘I can’t give you an account of the whole camp, as I said. But there was a big block house behind the compound wall which I once got a glimpse of – Khalid lived there. He was the leader of the pirates. And the pen we were held in was very long – fifty, maybe sixty feet, and seven or eight feet wide. It must once have been used to hold animals – chickens, maybe.’
‘Would it be visible to an aerial shot?’
‘Absolutely. If there’d been any shade – even a baobab tree or whatever – we’d have been delighted. But there was nothing – just the sun above.’
Then Peggy clicked for another pop-up box, which listed categories of search items: elevated contours, elevated installations, bodies of water, moving water, vegetation, dwellings, vehicles, humans, animal life. She ticked dwellings and hit return.
‘What’s this?’
‘It ties intelligent search to the satellite photos,’ she said, and left it at that. Not that I could explain much further, she thought, since she was just parroting the explanation of Technical Ted, from A2, who had loaded the special software on to her laptop the day before, and briefed her on how to use it.
The screen view was from a higher vantage point again, but this time a series of highlighted dots, labelled A, B, C, etc., also appeared onscreen, scattered along the shoreline for a range of roughly twenty miles.
They worked their way through the dots carefully. Several were false positives – large boulders detected as buildings, or else abandoned sites, including a tiny village perched right on the shore, now full of deserted crumbling shacks.
Then, just half a mile down from the former village, they examined a number of shapes bunched closely together. They sat under a high rolling dune which half-disguised them from the normal perspective of the MOD aerial cameras. But zoomed in on and looked at carefully, they revealed a suspiciously orderly arrangement, with a central blob that could have been the block house Luckhurst had mentioned, surrounded by a thin line that might have been a wall. A dusty square sat next to it, and at its far end was a long dark rectangle.
‘The pen you were kept in,’ asked Peggy, ‘was it roofed?’
‘Part of it was. With plywood covered by tar paper – to keep us warm,’ Luckhurst said ironically.
Peggy laughed and increased the magnification by a notch. The blob sharpened slightly, and she could see that, yes, it was a structure – nature didn’t like straight lines. ‘What about this? Have we found it?’
Luckhurst peered closely at the scene. Finally he nodded. ‘It must be. There’s the wall, and the compound, and the pen next to the patch of ground where they let us out to exercise and where the food was cooked. There’s something else inside the compound wall…’
‘They look like huts,’ said Peggy.
‘Probably – that’s where Khalid’s men would stay, I suppose. But what are those?’
He pointed to some small triangular shapes that sat at the bottom of the square. ‘Can we look at them from a different angle?’ he asked hopefully.
‘You mean, like Google View?’ Peggy said, referring to the perspective showing scenes at street level. ‘Not very likely,’ she said, and laughed at the thought of a Google representative venturing out to the camp with a video camera. She looked back at the screen and suddenly said, ‘I know – they’re tents. Lots of tents. There must be a dozen of them.’
‘Taban said there had been visitors.’
‘And now we know exactly where they were staying.’ The next step, thought Peggy, was finding out who they were.