“Giving them something to think about, Mags.”
“More likely thinking about whether they wet themselves, love.”
“Can’t keep the customer waiting, right?”
Tristram and Izzy were ushered in.
They were sitting around a formica-topped table littered with plastic coffee cups and cardboard plates. They had all – men, women and children – been kitted out in bland grey tracksuits and flip-flops.
The walls were bare but for an old portrait of the Queen, a framed document listing the rights of migrants taken into custody following illegal entry to the United Kingdom, and a No Smoking sign. The room had one window, but any view it might have given of the Port of Dover and harbour area, where intercepted migrants were always brought as a first call, was blocked by a lowered blind. All eyes were turned to the door and the new arrivals.
Maybe they would have expected a warm welcome to the UK, the keys to accommodation and a list of useful phone numbers for schools and employment opportunities . . . Maybe they would have expected after half an hour in this place, with escorted trips to a shabby toilet, that they would be confronted with boots and batons and scowling uniformed officers . . . Maybe they would not have anticipated the arrival of a young man and a young woman, no uniforms, wearing neutral expressions. Tristram breathed fiercely, not the emotion of the moment but the legacy of Izzy’s drive to the coast: there would be a book of speeding tickets awaiting her when she was back in Thames House. They were stared at, warily. Tristram might have revelled in the authority given him by the card he had flashed at the duty officer, and asked, demanded, that their escort peel off. There was a hesitation.
“Meaning now, not tomorrow,” from Izzy.
A stubborn response: “There are regulations and procedures, and . . .”
“Not with us, there aren’t. And, please, close the door after you.”
It started well. Names were given, and ages, and the children had started to smile, and they heard the nightmare stories about the crossing, and the force of the storm with interruptions to describe the frantic baling, and the height of the bow wave from a giant cargo ship, and where they had come from, and the reason they had fled Iran . . . All going well, and all irrelevant to Tristram and Izzy. Neither had bothered to take a note. Time to kick on.
“And what did he call himself, your saviour?”
“The chap who brought you across, what name did he give you?”
“He must have had a name . . .”
“If you try and tell us that you let a perfect stranger drive you from Bordeaux to the Channel coast, then confront people traffickers on your behalf, then you put your lives in his hands – and he had no name?”
“Saved the kid, but still had no name?”
No answers given. Heads hanging . . . Tristram and Izzy, trusted with work that was beyond their grade, bottom rung of the ladder were looking down the barrel of having to call Jonas Merrick and tell him that they had failed. First proper test run for each of them and they faced silence.
His voice rising, “I will ask you again . . . What name did he give you?”
And hers, quieter and colder, “Refuse to identify him and it will go badly.”
No reply. One of the children had started to cry, little soft sobs.
From Tristram, “Who was he? What did he say about himself?”
From Izzy, “So that we all understand what is at stake – you can be handcuffed, you can be led to a ferry, put on board, held under guard for the crossing and then returned to France. That can all happen . . . Who is he?”
“You set out to come to the UK. You are here. You want to stay a lifetime, or a couple of hours? Which?”
“What name did he give?”
It had dawned on Tristram that their debt to this nameless individual, their saviour, was greater than any momentary loyalty towards the country in whose care they now rested. Was clear to Izzy that they felt a love of him and a regard for him – because of where he had led them and what he had brought them through – that outweighed their future advantage. It was a wall of silence, the stuff that the daily rags used to write about, but this was not East London, not Sicily or Naples or the toe of Calabria . . . They were “decent Christian worshippers” and they did not look down at the table or at the wall, but stared back into the faces of Tristram and Izzy. Seemed not to relish their stubborn response, seemed to have no pleasure in their refusal to cooperate.
He murmured in her ear, “Would some rough stuff work with them?”
She answered, “No idea. Never been taught it.”
“Quite rough stuff – slap them around a bit?”
“Don’t know. He’ll think we fucked up, but we have to call him, tell it like it is.”
Tristram, grim, told them: “Your choice. It was all for nothing. What you did, surviving that journey, was just time wasted. You’ll go back to France today. Perhaps you can find another trafficker and do a deal with him. Perhaps you can stay there a month or a year, however long you want – and congratulate yourselves that you made the choice not to say anything about the guy who brought you over. Fair exchange?”
They went out into the corridor.
Izzy said she’d do it, report the failure.
And Jonas remembered.
Thought back to how it had been in the days when he was young, “wet behind the ears”. They were the Irish days.
Men sporting tight tweed jackets, regimental ties and twill trousers had walked the corridors of the building then occupied by the Service. They had done the “Irish scene” while Jonas Merrick was a junior, little more than a clerk, and they would have chuckled at the thought of getting any Irish boy into the darkened corner of a cell and administering a beating. The boy would be from the wastelands of Fermanagh or the hillsides of Tyrone, or the farming fields of Antrim, or might have been lifted out of West Belfast: there had been the men in the Service who could pull on leather gloves and “do the necessary”. And Jonas remembered that photographs marked “for restricted circulation” used to drop by from time to time, pictures of faces with split lips and missing teeth and closed, bruised eyes, and with them there was often a note that no worthwhile information had been extracted. The story was that, in the majority of cases, the men who inflicted shock and awe on prisoners would step out into the corridor of the cell block, sweating from exertion, and frustrated at wasted effort, and would straighten their ties and walk away and have learned very little. They were gone, had used up their life span in the Service. Where might they be now? Maybe running a pub in Devon or a guest-house in the Lakes, maybe a garden centre in the Black Country, or on a short-term security contract in Bahrain or anywhere else down the Gulf where “robust methods” were still practised. They did not exist in the current Service. Thumping men and boys seldom delivered the goods.
He might get around to telling Tristram and Izzy that a thrashing in a dark corner rarely produced worthwhile intelligence. Was once thought to be beneficial to the public good. Was the old way . . . Torture did not work.
Not long after the move into Thames House, a gentle-voiced Russian had addressed them. A subdued man, not seeking celebrity status although he had been a colonel in the old KGB and had done two tours in Chechnya . . . He had talked of torture. Described an assignment in Moscow where he worked against the powerful forces of organised crime. A clan leader was in the cells, refusing to communicate: he had been roughed up, robustly questioned. The colonel had gone into the cell and had sat on the filthy floor, had stayed there for four days, eaten there and slept there, and had won the clan leader’s confidence. All they wished to know had become known. They had all thought the colonel interesting and had regarded him as brave, principled: to his own people he was a traitor and they had successfully poisoned him nineteen months after his address to the Service audience . . . One man’s hero was another man’s scum. Still, a useful insight into torture and other alternatives.
Not a matter of him losing his job, exiting
in disgrace: nor of the two youngsters ditching their careers. Simply that fists and boots and falls down the cell block steps did not produce information.
He rummaged in his files. It could have been that his eyes were tired, or might have been that the light through his window was dulled by the low cloud and the fine rain. It was hard for him to see the details of the pictures: a white American, a German with snow-blond hair, a Russian national who had been in their military before switching sides and heading to Syria. And the face of a British boy who had been a student, supposedly studying an aspect of computers, and another who had an encyclopaedic knowledge of long-playing records – then found the one of a fresh-faced lad, pleasant looking, with an open and mischievous face, and he marked that picture “CJ” with an indelible pen, then marked all the others. It was not necessary for him to pinch himself for allowing the thought of it to play in his mind. There was no burden of conscience involved. He did not approve of torture in any form – noise, sleep deprivation, pain, abuse – because he did not think it worked well enough or fast enough.
Jonas was not skilled at loading and sending photographs by electronic mail, but he managed it . . . was quite pleased with himself when they had been sent, and more so to learn they had been delivered . . . There would be a delay. The images would have to be printed and then one of his probationers would have to pop out and find an ice-cream booth. It would take a few minutes . . . He had eaten his sandwich and drunk a mug of coffee from the flask, now flicked crumbs from his work surface, closed his eyes, and hoped to doze. Believed that soon the opportunities for rest would be scarce.
He walked on a sward of rough cut grass that stretched away from the prison wall where the cranes had swung and the lorries manoeuvred and towards the immediate outskirts of the city. Cammy had rested, not slept because of the pains in his stomach and the dryness in his throat, but he could cope with that, and his mum would feed him.
Parkland and ruins marked the site of St Augustine’s Abbey, now with only a fraction of its walls still standing. It was a familiar place for him. Every school kid, from the posh end up on the hill or the college beside the cathedral park down to the overflowing state schools, was carted around the county’s monuments: they did Roman ruins and Saxon ruins and Norse ruins and Norman ruins. They all did ruins like it was a staple for breakfast, necessary for keeping the bowels moving – he had hated ruins. Ahead of him were three parties of tourists, their guides carrying multi-coloured umbrellas though the rain had stopped, and gathered among the sunken stones of an excavated chapel were schoolchildren in neat blazers and short trousers or gingham frocks. He kept moving, his chin tucked against his chest. The kids would have been regimented, same as the wannabe “martyrs” that had come to Syria and were then tucked away in special camps, separated from the living, breathing, laughing, smoking fighters. Cammy, as Kami al-Britani, had been a free spirit, and his brothers had been too, and they had all found friendship, and what they had believed to be “liberty” when they carried the assault rifles and big mortar tube and a sniper’s rifle, when he had balanced on his shoulder the weight of the heavy machine-gun. The kids had sheets of paper on clipboards and would be tested later on what they remembered of the dirge they had been told about these buildings, and the tour guides breathed enthusiasm and the tourists snapped photographs. He could go forward as covertly as a fox at dusk, all of his brothers could. And later that day, when the light fell, his abilities to move unnoticed would be used. For now he was an independent man, alone and isolated, and knew it.
So easy then, those long-ago days, to act outside the loop, and stake big survival cash on the unexpected. The time outside Deir Ezzor. He and the brothers moving in a defile towards a village believed to be deserted. The “empty” village was occupied by at least 100 of the Hezbollah force – hard, squint-eyed bastards from south Lebanon. The laconic Stanislau had been point man. A guy of few words because of his cleft palate; probably the only time in his life that he had prospered was when he’d caught up with Cammy. Came from Belarus, and grunted that when the war was over and no more fighting to be done he would be a poet. Something of a miracle but the shots fired at him had all missed, and their surprise factor was lost. They had been pinned down, multiple fire positions on them. Ulrike, flat on her stomach and surrounded by the mortar bombs she was supposed to be hauling, had started the chorus for them to back off, reverse down the defile, and Cammy had thought it the worst of options. His word counted. Up front, in an alley he had seen a waving radio aerial. An aerial was where the boss was, the top man. Not argued with. No dissension. He led, the brothers followed. Ulrike up close to him and sweating, grunting, under the weight of the bombs. They had charged together and had woven a path between doorways and rubble, any cover available, but had kept going. Dwayne had killed the top man, had done it with a knife: his handset had dropped and he had shrieked, and that was what his people would have heard: their leader in pain, in terror, his scream. And those around the top man had gone down . . . an attack where it was not expected and the pace had been frantic. The Hezbollah boys had done a runner . . . Pieter had said that if they had tried to extricate themselves, gone back and deeper into the defile, then they would have been cut to pieces. There had been a cursory celebration, nothing like “triumphalism”, and others had utilised the hole they had made in the line and come through it. Ruhan had told them that the execution of the attack was “brilliant”, but Ruhan was dead, and Tomas, and . . . He was alone and strode across the grass and looked neither right or left but kept the tower of the cathedral – the Bell Harry Tower, 250 feet high – in his gaze. Would not let it from his sight, and the afternoon wore on and the guides would soon be finishing their talk, and the kids were already late for the bus to get them back to school.
Here, Cammy thought himself to be near his home, the place where his life had been shaped, more so than in the semi-detached house on the estate above Sturry. He was drawn towards the cathedral. He did not think of caution, went forward and tried to believe he was not alone, was again where – briefly – he could gather comfort.
Ice-creams had been brought in from the town, proper ones with cones and chocolate sticks, and the adults had been separated from the children.
Tristram and Izzy nowhere to be seen, and friendly smiles from the staff at the holding place.
The children alone with a minder, and then the door opening, the attending uniform gone. The boy and the girl were left with Tristram and Izzy. He had a broad smile and she had a grin that said conspiracy and mystery.
The ice-creams were handed over.
The photographs were placed on the table.
They had come through onto Tristram’s mobile phone. A room had been found where he could hook up to a printer. They were A4 images. Perhaps the kids when they saw the photographs would have accepted the truth of that old adage, however it was expressed in their culture: no such thing as a free lunch. Good ice-creams but cheap when set against the photo gallery on display. The girl, older, understood. She turned away and looked at the Annigoni portrait of the Queen painted more than 60 years before. The night before the boy had been in the water, his breath seeping away between his lips, darkness and noise all around him, and a hand had grabbed him. His life had been saved, and for a moment he would not have known, confused and open-hearted, that he was about to betray the best man he had ever known.
One by one, the pictures were pushed in front of him by Izzy.
The student from Westminster University, and the shop worker who specialised in vinyl. A shake of the head and another mouth-ful, the chocolate dribbling from the sides of his mouth. The last picture was marked with the initials “CJ”, and the child had rocked and his eyes had bulged and there was a gasp of recognition.
The child bent over the table. Held the ice-cream cone away from his mouth. Kissed the image of the monochrome face. An uninhibited kiss – out of innocence, as they had hoped for and as Jonas Merrick back in London had indicated might h
appen.
The girl, older, wiser, better able to read the moment, saw what her brother did. She kicked him hard. Her toe, in the flip-flops, careered into his shin. His head came up and he would have seen his sister’s contempt . . . Tristram wondered if, in their Christian teaching and whatever equivalent to a Sunday School they had, either of them knew of a Judas kiss . . . The girl dropped her ice-cream on the floor and reached out to grab the picture. Not fast enough. Tristram had it, and palmed it behind him, and Izzy took it.
They left the room.
In the yard, Izzy said, “Sort of leaves me with a bad taste. And you?”
Tristram said, “No sort of taste at all. Wobby had it right. Not known as a Wise Old Bird for nothing. You going to call him? Sorry, we could have beaten three shades of shit out of them and they’d not have done the identification. I don’t feel good and I don’t feel bad. It’s not a fun world, Izzy, but you know that. But didn’t know it when you joined.”
“Pompous fucker,” she said and punched him, grinning. He was looking at the picture, good-looking young man, clean and neat, with the stain of the ice-cream around his lips.
“Heh, old cocker. Fancy . . . bloody hell.”
Cammy’s way was blocked. He had left the grounds of the ruined abbey, was heading for the Burgate opening in the city walls, sitting close to the cathedral.
“That is you? Cameron? Yes?”
The guy stood in front of him. Joey Pickford, a year ahead of him at the comprehensive, no friend. Had been the kind of guy who could recognise a kid coming down in the world, literally down from the college on the hill overlooking the city and whose scholarship had been binned. Could recognise and milk an opportunity.
“It is you . . .? That’s a turn-up. Old Cameron – Shit, thought you had been blown into small pieces. You all right? Look like you’re not. And dressed like a bloody pensioner.”
The Crocodile Hunter Page 15
