White Crocodile

by Medina, KT

  ‘You know it’s clear,’ she whispered. ‘Just walk.’ But it didn’t feel right, walking into a lane – this lane, in this minefield – without checking every square centimetre of it first. She didn’t have the time.

  Trying not to think too much about anything, she stepped forward, slotting her boot softly into one of the footprints. Nothing. Well, what did you expect? She took another step and another. The ground slurped as it caught and released her boots. Every few steps she stopped and looked around her, compelled by an urge to keep checking she was alone.

  By the edge of the crater under the tree, she stopped. Cloudy water was pooled at the bottom. The sides glistened red in the dipping sun. Hesitantly, she reached out and started tracing her detector in circles around the crater’s rim. The circles became smaller and smaller. Sliding the detector into the puddle at the bottom of the crater, she pressed until she felt it snag on mud. The detector screeched, and her heart almost jumped out of her chest. Dropping it, she fell back on to her knees, staring down into the pool of water. This was the epicentre of the anti-personnel mine’s explosion. There couldn’t be anything else down there. But if she really believed that, what had brought her back here in the first place?

  Pulling the detector from the crater and laying it aside, she slumped to her knees in the mud, rolled up her sleeves and leaned into the puddle, splashing handfuls of water over the edge on to the ground behind her. Grabbing the detector once more, she passed it over the base of the crater. The same screech. There was definitely something there, and not just a mine fragment. This was something big, heavy with metal.

  Lying on her front, the thin shaft of her mine prodder in hand, Tess slithered to the edge of the crater, just far enough that she could reach to its base without putting any pressure there. She slipped the prodder into the muddy soil. It snagged on a solid object immediately. She pulled it out and moved it a couple of centimetres to the left. Something solid, again. Dropping the prodder, she started scooping at the earth with her fingers. Her hand sliced on something sharp. She snatched it away, saw a cut pop red against the damp white of her skin; licked it, tasting blood and dirt. Ignoring it, she reached back into the crater and began digging again, her heart slamming in her chest.

  It took her a few more minutes to uncover the whole thing. Olive-green metal, black stencilled writing. She wiped her fingers across the letters and stared in disbelief.

  An anti-tank mine, Jesus. She pushed herself on to her knees, wiped a muddy hand across her eyes and looked again.

  Its fuse had been removed. Someone had laid this thing under the anti-personnel mine that blew Johnny’s foot off, with the idea that it would sympathetically detonate when the anti-personnel mine triggered. Johnny would have been vaporised if the anti-tank mine had blown. But something had gone wrong, the sympathetic detonation hadn’t worked – which was why he was still alive. And there was no way Huan could have missed this. It would have sent his detector haywire.

  Tess unearthed the rest of the device, lifted it gingerly from its muddy bed and started back towards the Land Cruiser, the weapon cradled under her arm. Though she knew it wouldn’t explode – it had no detonator – her muscles were still stiff with fear. Stowing the mine carefully in the Land Cruiser’s boot, she took off her flak jacket and tucked it gently underneath, so it wouldn’t thump against the floor of the boot on the long drive home.

  The orange of the sky had faded now and the sun had dipped behind the trees, a claret glow in the distance. A couple of water buffalo were watching her from an adjacent paddy field, their coats russet in the waning light. She waved a hand at them. They ignored her, big brown eyes impervious. On an impulse, she jogged towards them, waving both arms. They lowered their heads and backed away until the ropes around their necks snagged taut. She stood and watched them for a moment, regretting having frightened them, then turned and walked slowly back to the Land Cruiser.

  12

  Manchester, England

  The Brookses’ house, with its bay window, new plastic double glazing, neat square of lawn and gravel drive, in a leafy Altrincham street, was textbook middle-class. Andy Wessex stood outside for a few moments, shuffling his feet in the slushy sleet on the pavement, clutching Carly Brooks’s passport – the only identification they’d found on the girl’s body – and getting his thoughts ordered before he pushed open the wrought-iron gate.

  The Brookses must feel happy here, he thought, among their own kind. Hard to imagine tragedy lurching down these suburban streets.

  He was from a different world – he’d grown up in a council flat on Lancashire Hill, just outside the centre of Stockport. The middle of three boys in an all-male household. It hadn’t predisposed him to be relaxed socially with women, or to understand them, and he was very comfortable in the knowledge that, at his age, marriage and children, a house in a quiet street like this one, had eluded him. He could never help thinking about quantity at a time like this, though he knew it was coming at the problem from the wrong angle. Did the Brookses have more than one child? He hoped for their sake that they had. But did it mean anything? Could you balance the life of one against the death of another, and come out even? Or didn’t it work like that? He genuinely didn’t know.

  Wessex hadn’t had time to form an impression of what the parents might be like. But the man who answered the door was exactly what he would have expected if he had: mid-forties, running to fat around the middle but otherwise in decent shape, a blue-and-white striped shirt, the cuffs rolled up a couple of times, tucked into navy-blue suit trousers, greying hair neatly clipped. Questioning hazel eyes met Andy’s.

  He held up his warrant card. ‘DI Wessex, South Manchester CID. May I come in?’

  They had a brief dance on the doorstep, Wessex trying to step in, Mr Brooks still grappling with his confusion at what a policeman might want with them.

  ‘Who is it, Bill?’

  A tiny Asian woman with a round face and huge, gentle brown eyes appeared in the hall behind Mr Brooks. She was wearing a hot-pink T-shirt and an ankle-length skirt that could have been stitched from Joseph’s Technicolor dreamcoat. The contrast between her and her husband was startling, as if he had plucked her from a flock of exotic rainforest birds.

  ‘The police. My wife, Jintana.’

  ‘Detective Inspector Andy Wessex.’ He addressed himself to her, reaching past her husband to shake her outstretched hand. ‘May I come in?’

  ‘You already have. But – yes, of course. That’s fine.’

  Wessex followed them down the hall, past a row of A4 photographs in black frames: the Brookses on their wedding day, framed in the arched doorway of a church; an older couple, his parents by the look of them; the daughter sitting cross-legged on a sofa, unmistakably Asian-looking, the British half of her genes coming through, in appearance terms at least, only in her soft hazel eyes. Indisputably the girl whose passport he had in his suit jacket pocket.

  He couldn’t see signs of any other children.

  Entering the sitting room was like stepping into a page of Living magazine, all muted beiges and creams. Two beige linen-covered sofas set at right angles to each other on the cream carpet, the three-seater facing a credit-card-thin plasma TV, a glass coffee table bearing a big colour edition of Flora Britannica. Every door he stepped through to do this – to break this news – opened on to a complete world, like a stage set. He’d done the same only last week in Longsight, the mother of a junkie. Different decor. Hadn’t been any easier.

  Mrs Brooks perched on the edge of one of the sofas and gestured for Wessex to sit down.

  ‘I’m fine standing, thank you. But you sit down please, Mr Brooks.’

  The couple exchanged glances.

  ‘I’d rather not. Can’t you just tell us what this is about?’

  Wessex shuffled his feet. The first time he had told someone that their child was dead, he had skirted around the issue, believing that it was easier to let the bereaved acclimatise degree by degree. By the th
ird time, he’d realised that getting straight to the point was kinder.

  ‘We’ve found the body of a girl in woods in south Manchester. I’m very sorry, but we think it’s your daughter, Carly.’

  Mrs Brooks stared resolutely back at him. ‘It can’t be her.’

  Wessex suddenly felt immensely sad. ‘I’m sorry. There hasn’t been a mistake—’

  She lifted her hands to halt his flow, let them fall back to her lap. ‘No, really it can’t be.’

  ‘Mrs Brooks—’

  ‘We spoke to her this morning. On Skype. She called from Sri Lanka. She’s staying with my brother and his family. They run a wildlife project, protecting turtles. She’s taking a year off travelling before starting university next September.’

  ‘But I have her passport.’ He pulled the passport from his pocket. ‘The photographs in your hall . . . it’s definitely your daughter’s.’

  ‘May I look?’ Reaching out, she took the passport from him; looked at the cover briefly before flipping through the pages. ‘Yes.’ A tiny smile tipped the corners of her mouth as she studied the photo. ‘Yes, that’s her. The name, date of birth, everything – it’s definitely her passport. Or identical to hers if it isn’t.’ She passed it back to him.

  ‘How did she get to Sri Lanka without a passport?’

  ‘She has dual nationality. She travelled on her Sri Lankan passport.’

  ‘Did she tell you she’d lost her British passport?’

  ‘Yes. She was planning to take both with her, but we couldn’t find her British one, so she just took the Sri Lankan.’

  ‘And you didn’t think to report it stolen?’

  ‘We were pretty sure it would turn up somewhere in the house,’ Mr Brooks cut in, joining his wife on the sofa. ‘She’s not the most organised, I’m afraid. We had a great hoo-hah the day before we went skiing last New Year. She couldn’t find her passport anywhere. The French won’t let Sri Lankans in without a visa and we just didn’t have time to get one, so we thought we’d have to cancel the holiday. We turned the house upside down and finally found it behind the sofa.’ He smiled. ‘Heaven knows how it got there.’

  ‘Have you had a break-in recently?’

  ‘No.’

  Wessex held up the passport. ‘So where?’

  ‘She’s been filling out applications for university at school,’ Mrs Brooks said. ‘They ask for all sorts of identification these days, so she’s had to take in her passport a few times to get it photocopied.’

  Mr Brooks gave an apologetic smile. ‘It’s her Achilles’ heel – the organisation thing.’

  Wessex nodded. ‘Could you call her and tell her that we have it. Ask her if she has any idea where it might have been stolen.’

  Mrs Brooks glanced at her watch. ‘It’s the middle of the night over there.’

  ‘First thing in the morning – their morning.’ He pulled a card from his pocket and passed it to her. ‘Call me on my mobile, as soon as you’ve spoken with her, please. It’s important. Very important. And I’m going to have to ask you to keep quiet about this. If you talk to anybody about what I’ve just told you, it may compromise our investigation.’

  ‘Of course,’ they murmured in unison.

  Mrs Brooks dropped her gaze to the card in her hand. ‘So the girl you found?’

  Wessex shrugged. ‘Now? I don’t know. I don’t know who she is.’ He looked at the photo of their daughter again. Then he held out his hand. ‘Thank you for your time. I’m very sorry for the mistake.’

  13

  Jacqueline Rong’s life in the last few months had been defined by a series of choices. Confess her condition to the people who knew her, or hide it for as long as she could. Beg for help, or withdraw into solitude and keep her own counsel. She was self-reliant by instinct. But she had made one mistake. And it was a mistake she had come to love very much.

  Now she had a new choice to make. She knew she was bleeding, that a shard of wood from the old broken fence that ran like a spine through the jungle had sunk deep into her thigh. There was pain, but something worse too, an electric zing in the muscles around the wound. Gritting her teeth, she scrambled on to her knees – the shocked response of her wounded leg made her shout, once – and felt frantically through the sludge of mud and rotten leaves for her baby son. His blanket was gone – the blanket with the embroidered teddy bear that the woman from Médecins Sans Frontières had given her – and his little body was cold and slippery from leaf mulch. The fall had winded him, and for a moment he was silent. But she heard that familiar in-suck of breath, and she knew what was coming.

  His scream echoed through the dark jungle. It sounded different out here, raw, the noise of an animal in pain. She hugged him to her chest, jiggling and shushing him as quietly as she could. He gasped again, but another sound came before his next cry – so soft she wasn’t even sure she’d heard it – a twig breaking in the undergrowth at the edge of the little clearing? And then it was lost in Chhaya’s next shriek, though she pressed her hand over his mouth to muffle him. Mercifully, he seemed to sense her desperation for him to be quiet because after a few whimpers he fell silent, breathing quickly.

  Jacqueline scrambled to her feet, clutching Chhaya with one arm, clawing the air with the other, as if she could swim forward through the murk, but her injured leg gave way again, and she just had time to wrap both arms around Chhaya before she fell hard on to her knees. She wanted to scream with frustration. She wanted to scream for help too: both impulses were there. But it was too late to give in to that other voice. She was a mother now, not a little girl. She was the protector. And if she did scream, no one would come.

  She had spent many hours in the jungle collecting firewood to barter for food to keep herself and Chhaya alive, and had always felt secure in the privacy it afforded, something that hadn’t been hers since her pregnancy had begun to show. But the place seemed different at night, through the prism of her fear, and she realised that she was hopelessly lost. She had no idea which way led back to her village, or which direction to take to reach one of the other settlements. She started to crawl forward, hauling Chhaya as best she could, dragging her leg behind her, adrenalin diluting the pain.

  Then something slid across her back and she suddenly knew exactly where she was. Mine tape. It was the edge of the Koh Kroneg field. Mined land. Her heart lurched again, but nothing could be worse than what was behind her.

  Every few scrambled paces, she looked over her shoulder, and the mine tape receded, five metres, ten. A curl of moon showed in the canopy of branches beyond. And then, in its light, something else. A pale figure standing in the roots of the banyan, on the very edge of the jungle. She stopped and sat still, next to the hollowed-out stump of a tree, clutching Chhaya’s tiny, shivering body, muffling his whimpers against her ragged T-shirt, feeling the cool mud oozing between her thighs. The shape in the banyan hadn’t moved. But it was there. It was real.

  She was being hunted.

  Hot tears spilled. Koh Kroneg. Her beauty had brought her to the edge of this abyss. It had captivated Arun, ten years older than her and still without a wife. Jacqueline’s father had disappeared, eaten by the minefield, when she was four years old; the dominant memory of her childhood was her mother’s incessant fear of not being able to keep them both alive. Hunger had followed them every day. To be flattered and appreciated by Arun was an escape, and she had allowed herself to dream.

  Now, through her own stupidity, she had written herself the same history. But where her mother had had a husband and honour, she had none. It was her fault, of course, not Arun’s, that she had fallen pregnant, and the consequences were hers to bear. Hers, and Chhaya’s. Her son would have to shoulder them too: the stigma and isolation, the constant hunger. By bearing him, she had cursed him. Now that he was here it felt an impossible betrayal to wish him gone, but before he had been born, she had prayed constantly for his growing life to vanish from inside her.

  She blinked. How long had it been? Minutes
? Time passed differently out here at night. She had been sitting in her hut preparing for bed. The best time of day, Chhaya asleep, safe, tucked inside the wooden crate she had found a couple of months before his birth and saved. Her thoughts losing their definition, she had been about to remove her dress when she heard the bottom step creak. No one ever came to their door, and she hadn’t heard approaching footsteps. Lifting Chhaya out of his crate, she backed away, drawing the curtain she used to fence off their sleeping area from the rest of the room quietly behind her. Holding her breath, she peered around the edge of the fabric. Nothing there, she thought for a moment, and then she realised there was something on the doorframe after all. A hand, bloated and pale.

  She shot backwards, felt in the gloom for the loose planks in the back wall. She had been meaning to repair them for weeks, but had neither the tools nor the skills, and no one would help her. They turned away when she tried to explain that on monsoon nights, Chhaya would wake, pale and shivering, his chest thick with mucus. Forcing the planks apart, she slithered through the gap, reached back for her baby and ran fast and silent into the trees.

  Burying her face into Chhaya’s heaving tummy, she jammed her eyes shut. Who would miss her and Chhaya? No one. Both her parents were dead. When their bodies were carried out of the minefield, the villagers would nod and turn away. The White Crocodile had decided.

  Anger surged suddenly. Chhaya would die, before his life had even begun. A sudden memory from a few days ago rose. She had been walking back from the jungle with a bundle of firewood, Chhaya in a sling on her back, when she had encountered Arun’s new wife on the path, cradling the swell of her stomach. Jacqueline’s first inclination had been to duck into the jungle, melt into the faceless trees until she had passed. But something stopped her. Perhaps it was the noise Chhaya made as her head dipped. It was probably just because her spine had arched and made him uncomfortable. But for that fleeting moment, she felt he was admonishing her. Suddenly ashamed, she kept her ground, looked Arun’s wife in the eye and smiled, held her gaze until she had lowered hers, stepping to one side of the path to let Jacqueline past. She had swung Chhaya into the crook of her arm as she walked away, holding him like a prize.