by Andy Maslen
“And you’re sure the Russians will cut off his support?”
“Listen, Kasha,” she said, her voice softening as she used her pet name for him, “our intelligence is solid. Makhmad spoke to Artur in Moscow less than a week ago. Abramov has been boasting all over the place how his under-the-table deal with Dreyer is going to bring air superiority back to Mother Russia. It’s in the papers and on State TV, for God’s sake. He’s staked his reputation – and all his holdings – on this bet. When it explodes over the British countryside in front of the world’s defence industries in a couple of weeks’ time, Abramov won’t be able to take a piss within ten kilometres of the Kremlin without someone trying to shoot his balls off.”
She laid her hand on his thigh and patted him. At her touch, he relaxed. She was right, of course. All they had to do was deflect the MOD inquiry. Piece of cake. Well, not cake. Not exactly. He felt for his knife through the leather of his jacket and ran his finger along the handle.
Out of Tallinn, the road wound through beautiful countryside, its vibrant green clothing emerging into full summer colour. Kasym stared out of the windscreen, lulled by the monotony, half asleep. He was thinking of a school he’d once visited with friends in a place called Beslan. As they’d arrived, the sound of children’s laughter had filled the air. The young women who’d taught them were fair-haired and so pretty. Then he started. Elsbeta was braking.
“What is it?” he said.
“Nothing. I need coffee, and it’s your turn to drive for a while. We should check in the back, too.”
She pulled off the main road down a wooded lane that led to a picnic area, though there were no other vehicles parked. The rain that was wetting Tallinn’s commuters had abated and out here, it was a fine summer’s day. Sun streamed down through the branches of the massive oak trees that shaded the rough grassy circle, split into narrow shafts of pale-green light. The truck bumped across some tractor ruts leading to a field gate then, with a greasy cough, the engine fell silent.
They got out and stretched, joints popping and cracking. While Kasym unscrewed the flasks of coffee and unwrapped the sandwiches – garlic sausage in thick slices of rye bread – Elsbeta rounded the truck to check on their hostages. She stepped back as she threw the doors wide, but there was no need, Kasym noticed. No screaming harpy emerged, fingers clawing at Elsbeta’s eyes. Instead, he saw her extend her hand into the truck and then, courteously, help Sarah Bryant to descend. Sarah stretched too, then approached him.
“Is that coffee?” she said, nodding at the flasks he’d set down on a rough wooden bench.
“It is. I can’t vouch for the quality, but would you like some all the same?”
“Yes please. I don't know if Chloe will,” she said, looking back to the truck. “You know, she’s a little . . .”
“Fierce? As I said to you before, it is an admirable quality in a woman. I regret that we have been forced to take these steps Mrs Bryant, but in a year or so, this will be merely a story you tell your dinner guests. For us, it is part of a long, long struggle. If Chloe wishes to hate me, that is her prerogative. I will not hold it against her.”
Elsbeta returned from the truck.
“She says she’s staying there. Fine, she can listen to music and piss in the bucket for all I care. Coffee, please.”
The three of them stood around in a tight little group, sipping coffee and munching the big peasant sandwiches, for all the world as if they were travelling to a country market with a load of fruit and vegetables to sell and had decided to take a break on the way.
As they were finishing their food and draining their enamelled mugs of the coffee, a pheasant scraped out a cry of alarm in the neighbouring field and its wings clapped the air as the ungainly bird sought safety in a tree at the field edge. Kasym looked round sharply, then ran to the back of the truck.
“Fuck! She’s bolted.”
Without waiting for any further instructions, Elsbeta sprinted for the gate and vaulted it like an Olympic steeplechaser, barely touching the top rail with her hand. She landed in long grass on the far side of the gate, stumbled, then regained her balance and was running through the waving barley, away from the truck and after Chloe Bryant.
Kasym ran back to Sarah Bryant, who was looking at him coldly.
“You planned this, did you?” he said. “Wait for a stop then she runs because she’s young and fit?”
“What, did you think we’d just be your docile prisoners, you bastard?” She spat at him. “You’re kidnappers, murderers, and I don't care what you’re fighting for. You ripped her earring out to scare James. Chloe ran for her county till she went to university. She’ll be long gone by now.”
Her eyes were flashing as she delivered this impassioned speech and at one level Kasym was impressed.
Then he hit her, hard, across the face.
Chapter 13
Gabriel left Audley Grange after an interminable round of observation and tests. The red-haired Irish nurse had clearly been assigned to look after him personally. Her name was Niamh.
“You pronounce it ‘Neeve’,” she’d said, when he’d looked inquiringly at her after reading her name badge.
Niamh asked him to accompany her on walks and to play cards with her. He suspected she had been briefed by one of the head-shrinkers to get him to open up, and he didn’t blame her for doing her job. The morning after his conversation with Don Webster, he was sitting at a shaded picnic bench by a lake with Niamh, playing gin rummy.
“What was on at the gallery?” she asked him, as she picked up a three of spades from the discard pile.
“What? Oh. It was photographs. You know, portraits. Well, it would be, wouldn’t it, at the National Portrait Gallery. Hardly likely to be landscapes.”
He picked a card from the deck and discarded it straight away.
“I had a quick look,” Niamh said. “On their website. Hells Angels. Not a very pretty bunch for portraits, were they?” She selected a card from the deck. Kept it and threw out an ace of hearts.
“I don’t know. Can’t really say I took much notice. I only went because it was Annie’s little brother who shot them.” He picked up the ace of hearts.
“So, it wouldn’t have been something you saw that set you off, then?”
“No! Look, can we just play, please? I can’t concentrate with you interrogating me like this.” He knew he’d overreacted, but the memory of that ugly scarred face was overlaid with another, more distant tableau. One in which the face’s owner and four of his friends hadn’t been standing around getting their pictures taken by Lazarus Frears. There’d been another kind of shooting altogether on that particular day. He wiped his hand across his forehead. It came away wet.
“Sorry,” she said. “I shouldn’t have pushed you. Oh, but one more thing.”
“What is it?”
She flipped the card she was holding face-up on the discards pile and fanned the remaining seven cards out on the table between them.
“Gin.”
Their shared laughter broke the tension that threatened to cloud the temporary friendship that had sprung up between them. Gabriel knew enough about the so-called Florence Nightingale effect not to fall in love with his nurse, but she was good looking and had a lovely smile, and he didn’t want anything to spoil their easiness with each other.
The following day, the doctor in charge of his case signed him off. Her name badge said ‘Norton’, but at their first meeting she’d asked him to call her Gail.
“I’d be more comfortable with Doctor Norton,” he’d said at the time, with a grin. “Doesn’t pay to get too friendly with the MO. They might want to start sticking needles into you.” They’d compromised on ‘Doc’.
Now it was she who was speaking as she handed a prescription to him.
“This is a just a little bit stronger than paracetamol”, she said, “if you need it.” Then she leaned across the desk and placed her hand across his wrist. “I know you don’t want to talk about what tr
iggered your little episode in London. And that’s fine. It’s your decision. But I want you to promise me one thing. If you change your mind, or if life starts getting a little hard to handle, come and see me. Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder is nothing to be ashamed of, you know.”
Gabriel lips tightened then relaxed.
“That’s not what’s wrong with me, Doc, but OK, I promise. On one condition.”
She smiled. “And that would be what, exactly?”
“If you ever find yourself in Wiltshire you’ll look me up and come for tea.”
“I think I could manage that. So, we have a deal?”
“We do. And thanks. For everything. You are amazing. All of you, I mean.” Gabriel half-rose from his chair then frowned and sat back down again. “Actually there is one last question I want to ask you.”
“Ask away.”
“The guy I was sharing a room with, Tom Ainsley. Can you tell me what caused his hallucinations? He said he thought his cockpit was full of giant spiders.” He suppressed a shudder as he said this. He’d never had a problem with jungle warfare, except for the bloody spiders.
She pressed her lips together. “You know I can’t discuss another patient with you, Gabriel. Even if I wanted to. There are medical ethics, and military rules, not to mention my Hippocratic Oath.”
“But if I asked you something, and you said nothing, and I decided that meant I was on the right track, that wouldn’t be in breach of your code of practice, would it?”
Now she was frowning. “Look, I appreciate you want to help Tom. Poor boy’s been through a lot. But this is really too much.”
“Please. I promised him. Just one question.”
She paused for a long time before she answered. Time enough to notice the small muscle firing involuntarily under her right eye.
“One question. That’s it.”
Gabriel looked her squarely in the eye. OK. Time to deliver the line you’ve been practising and refining for the last day or so.
“If I were to contact a certain pharmaceutical company and make some inoffensive enquiries about their work with the RAF, would I be wasting my time?”
She looked down at her prescription pad.
Then back up at Gabriel.
She said nothing.
“Thanks, Doc” he said. He rose and offered her his hand. They shook, briefly, and then he left.
He sat in the common room – a warm space full of leather armchairs, with a table tennis table, and a big plasma TV on one wall – and called Annie. The distant burr made him realise how easily you could get used to life in an institution. Especially one as comforting and compassionate as Audley Grange. He looked around him. The men sharing the space with him were all damaged in one way or another. They were young, fit-looking guys for the most part; only one appeared to be older than forty. But each man had a distinctive feature that would draw stares “out there”, as one Royal Marine had called it in conversation over breakfast, nodding his head at the windows, and the world beyond the landscaped parkland.
The physical injuries were the easiest to spot. Gabriel had seen plenty of guys airlifted back to field hospitals with horrific injuries. Limbs missing, torsos split open by IEDs or bullets. Faces obliterated by blast trauma or shrapnel. Here they were again, sitting around playing cards, watching TV or just shooting the breeze about life and its ups and downs. The blood had stopped jetting, the guts had been neatly packed back into bellies, the faces repaired as best as the plastic surgeons were able, the limbs mended, pinned or removed altogether. But the memories of the firefights, the roadside explosions, the hand-to-hand fighting when the ammunition ran out – they weren’t so easy to shift. And for another group of casualties, it was the memories themselves that had brought their possessors to Audley Grange. Maybe voluntarily, after one too many fights in a pub, arrests for domestic violence or a kind word from a sponsor at an AA meeting. Maybe compulsorily, as part of a court order or sentencing from a sympathetic magistrate or Crown Court judge.
They were the ones with whom Gabriel could identify. He’d served his time, first in the Parachute Regiment, then in the SAS, without sustaining any serious injuries in combat. But when he’d left a member of his patrol dead on the squelching floor of a jungle in Mozambique, it had undone something inside him. He didn’t use the four initials that doctors – and even the general public – now bandied around with such abandon: PTSD. They scared him. Whenever the flashbacks or the nightmares got too much, he could take off the rough edge of his terror with a glass of something cold.
But now he was surrounded by men who looked physically undamaged, yet whose behaviour betrayed the mental turmoil that threatened to destroy them from the inside. Saddest of all was a young kid, only nineteen. His name was Mark and he looked like he should be working as a primary school teacher. He had soft blond curls, china-blue eyes and such a light beard he could probably get away with shaving one day in three. Gabriel had talked to him in the grounds for half an hour or so the previous day.
Mark had been an infantryman with the Irish Guards, a private. On an operation in Afghanistan, he’d been part of a platoon that fought its way into a village against heavy fire from insurgents. There had been solid intelligence from an interpreter that there were women and children held captive by the Taliban. The last enemy fighter down, they’d begun to search the low, whitewashed houses looking for the hostages. It had been Mark’s misfortune to find them. He’d kicked in the door to a low, single-storey building – a village hall of some kind – to be confronted by a scene that made even the battle-hardened, thirty-five-year-old sergeant who followed him in retch and stagger back into the sunlight.
Mark had not vomited, or run. Instead, he walked into the midst of the carnage and sat down among the newly dead, letting the blood soak into his uniform. To remove him, the two men who arrived next had to first prise a dead toddler from his arms and then carry him bodily out to the truck. His limbs had locked so that he appeared to be floating cross-legged between them. Wherever his eyes were focusing, it wasn’t on the buildings of the village, nor on the faces of his comrades. Somewhere beyond the far distant mountains, possibly, where men who could do those things to women and children burned eternally.
Now he lived at Audley Grange, walking endless circuits of the gardens or talking in a low, affectless voice to a psychiatrist whose job it was to bring this teenaged boy-man some peace.
Gabriel shook his head violently, then winced at the burst of pain that flared behind his eyes. Time to go home.
Annie picked up.
*
Annie was practical as well as beautiful. She brought Gabriel a soft leather weekend bag packed with clothes.
“I didn’t know what you’d feel like, so I brought you a selection,” she said.
Back in his room, empty now that Tom had been transferred to a newly free single, he unzipped the soft, navy leather bag. He rummaged through the garments, noticing how she’d folded or rolled everything, right down to his underwear.
“This is really kind of you,” he said. “I mean it.”
“Oh, for Goodness sake, did you really think I’d not come?”
“No. But that doesn’t mean it’s any less kind of you. And I know you talked to the doctors and brought me some stuff when I was admitted.”
She took his hands out of the bag and clutched them to her chest.
“Look at me, for a minute, will you?” she said. “We may not be boyfriend and girlfriend, but I love you. Properly. The way friends do. No angle, no passive aggression. Just the good old-fashioned kind. And that means here I am and I’m happy to be here. So stop being such a dick and choose some clothes out so I can get you home.”
He did look at her. Into her green eyes, flecked with brown. Noticed the web of tiny lines radiating out from their corners. At her lips, wide and full. He pulled her close and kissed her. She softened in his arms and kissed him back, opening her mouth and letting their tongue tips touch in a gentle dance.
<
br /> He was still wearing pyjamas and a dressing gown, so she pulled the free end of the braided cord around his waist and opened the front of his gown, slid her hand inside the trousers and gripped him firmly.
“Someone’s feeling better,” she breathed in his ear. “Want to do something about . . . this?” giving him a squeeze.
He looked over his shoulder. The door was closed. He nodded.
In bed, Annie lay on her side and backed into him, lifting her leg and reaching down to bring him inside her. Their lovemaking was fast, urgent, the risk of discovery an additional thrill. When they came, seconds apart, they stifled their cries before bursting out laughing.
“Oh, my good Christ,” Annie said. “Have we just broken the rules?”
“Probably all of them. Fraternising with a civilian in a military facility. Engaging in PT while improperly attired. Misuse of Army property. We’ll be lucky if we’re not up on a fizzer before the CO.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about, but it doesn’t sound good. Come on, let’s get dressed and let’s get out of here. I want a drink and some chips.”
On the drive down to Salisbury, Annie was in a more serious mood.
“Do you want to tell me what happened in the National Portrait Gallery?”
“Nothing. I said. It was hot, I needed some air. Maybe I got a bit overheated but that’s it.”
“But you were staring at that security guard like, I don’t know, he was a ghost or a devil or something. And you completely blanked me when I asked you what was wrong. Just before you yelled out,” she cleared her throat, “and ran outside and under the wheels of a lorry.”
“I didn’t run under the wheels. I hit the side, and he was on the wrong side of the road, anyway. Maybe he’s the one you should be interrogating. Anyway, look. Something happened at Audley Grange. I might need your help.”
Annie pursed her lips and stared straight ahead.
