He doesn’t acknowledge me.
‘Ellen, can you do me a favour?’ He reaches out to me and his fingertips come to rest lightly on my forearm. ‘If Nathan—’ He stops himself, his voice suddenly thick with emotion. ‘If DS Holt contacts you, follows you, turns up at your door, you need to let me know straight away. Promise me you will?’
‘OK,’ I say quietly. I feel safe for the first time in days. ‘I will.’
Gilbourne still looks shell-shocked, all the colour drained from his face.
‘You know what?’ he says, eyeing the half-empty wine bottle. ‘Maybe I will have that drink. Just one glass.’
‘Afraid I haven’t got glasses, just plastic beakers.’ I fetch another clear plastic cup from the bathroom and fill it with the Grenache.
He shrugs. ‘I don’t suppose it makes much difference, really.’ He taps his beaker gently against mine. ‘Cheers, Ellen Devlin.’
We both take a drink.
‘I’m not going to get you in trouble with your boss, am I?’
‘To be honest,’ he says, blowing out a breath, ‘I’m past caring what my boss thinks.’
60
We sit in silence for a moment, me on the bed and him by the window in the armchair. The TV is on mute and it suddenly feels very quiet in this little hotel room, the two of us together with an open bottle of wine on the bedside table. Gilbourne shifts in his seat, putting his beaker on the floor.
‘So tell me about you, Ellen,’ he says, his head cocked slightly. ‘You’re a bit of an enigma.’
‘Not much to tell, really.’
‘Why do you care about Mia so much? You could have walked away, but you didn’t. That’s a rare thing.’
‘Is it?’
‘Believe me, I’ve been around the block enough times to know more than I ever wanted to about human nature. Most people would have handed that baby over at the first opportunity and never looked back, been glad to get away. Or they wouldn’t even have volunteered to help in the first place. But not you.’
‘Just trying to do the right thing, that’s all.’
He studies me, eyes locked on mine as if he can see right into my soul, until a frown creases his forehead.
‘There’s more to it than that though, isn’t there? Don’t tell me there isn’t.’
I take a breath. I realise I’m about to open myself up in a way I haven’t done for years, tell him a story that only my ex-husband and my best friend have ever heard.
‘There is, yes,’ I say finally. I take a swig of heavy red wine, feel the warm buzz as the alcohol hits my bloodstream. ‘There’s more to it. The truth is, it’s not exactly the first time I’ve been in that situation.’
Gilbourne frowns. ‘Really?’
‘Not on a train. Somewhere else, a while back.’
‘When you were in the navy?’
I nod silently.
After a moment, he says gently, ‘What happened, Ellen?’
I sit back against the headboard so I can face him properly, begin telling him about one day a decade ago when I had still been in uniform, all the memories, the images, still as fresh in my mind as if it happened last week. Operation Ellamy, 2011 – as Libya tore itself apart in a bloody civil war, civilians were caught in the crossfire and the Royal Navy was dispatched as part of the UN-backed intervention to protect them. I had been leading part of the humanitarian relief effort that went alongside, flying in food and medical supplies to refugees using helicopters from HMSOcean.
‘On the second day we found a makeshift refugee camp on the outskirts of Benghazi.’ Now I’ve started telling him, I find I can’t stop, the story picking up its own momentum. ‘A couple of hundred civilians displaced by the fighting, terrified they would be singled out as rebels by government forces. I wanted to take them out on the helicopters, take them back with us onto the ship for a few days until the situation had stabilised. Until it was safer. We’d had reports of mass shootings.’
‘But you couldn’t take them?’
