The German cemetery was always the second to be visited. First was the American cemetery. It was outside the village of Colleville and closer to Utah than to Omaha. There were two hundred casualties on the first day at Utah, but the mayhem, chaos and suffering at Omaha dwarfed that. The edge of Omaha could be seen from the cemetery grounds. There were always American civilians here. They moved stiffly, ravaged by obesity and arthritis, on sticks and frames, and would have come to see where their young men lay, nine thousand of them. The headstones were in geometrically precise lines, crosses and stars of David in Lasa marble from the South Tyrol, northern Italy. The quiet was infectious: the noise of the sea as it broke on the beaches was deadened by the bluffs of sand that the young soldiers died trying to scale. Many were from the talisman unit – the Big Red One, 1st Infantry Division – which held the motto No mission too difficult, No sacrifice too great. Duty First. There were state-of-the-art museums and a magnitude of organised dignity. The visitors and the guide stepped warily here . . . and returned to the bus.
It was a short ride only to the losers’ resting-place. It was at La Cambe, beside a fast road. There were twenty-six thousand graves and many were marked with the simple words Ein Deutsche Soldat. The crosses marking the graves were different from those of the victors’ dead. The guide did not point it out.
The Germans lay beneath squat, stubby dark stones or under tablets of similar material. There were fine trees that threw shade and broke up the distances. The visitors by now would have been punch drunk with the statistics of the beaches and the strong points that the US Ranger units stormed high on the cliffs. They would have wanted to get away from the gloom of approaching evening and back into a new hotel in Caen. The guide said little but pointed out one grave. He was brief and tantalising about its significance. They were asked to remember the name Michael Wittman, an armoured ace from an SS panzer unit, buried here with the two soldiers who served with him in a Tiger Mark 6. The place had an air of dignity and despair. It lacked the nobility of the field in which the American bodies were interred, and the chance of seeing German families was remote. It was not on the tourist trail that Germans wished to follow.
The attendants wanted the gates closed, wanted to empty the parking area and close down the small building that passed for a museum. Back on the bus, the tourists were addressed by their guide. He congratulated them on their stamina and their attention during a long and upsetting day. They had earned a drink, perhaps two. There might have been a ripple of applause and the bus pulled out onto the main road. The gates closed and the darkness settled. The ghosts emerged, young men all of them, to light their cigarettes, talk about girls and beg paper for letters to distant mothers. Enmity died.
Dusty drove, as he always did, at a steady pace. He had never liked Thursday evening, but reckoned it the lifeblood of Desperate’s week. He thought of him as a friend or elder brother – a troubled man, holding back the pain. Only Dusty, who had known him for ever and had walked behind him with the Heckler & Koch, loaded with a full magazine, thought of him as a rock, but now saw the granite cracked. He feared for his friend.
It had seemed natural for him to follow Desperate out of Gough Barracks. He had not been asked to, but had never questioned his decision to go with him. The day before they had gone was sharp in his memory. He had walked into the outer office to hand in fuel receipts and the mileage list, and had heard voices through the chipboard door that led into Captain Bentinick’s room.
A man had been left bare-arsed and it was inevitable what would happen.
Sorry, Desperate, but out of my remit and taken at a loftier level.
The man would be picked up within twenty-four hours, then be beyond reach. Their security had a line into him already. The man should have been shipped out.
I’m sure you know the factors that are weighed before there is an exfiltration, Desperate. It would have been nice to lift him clear but budgetary restraints forbade it.
Had the man been abandoned because there wasn’t sufficient cash left in a relocation pot?
Let’s not get emotional. Pockets aren’t bottomless. We have to live within our means.
The man would end up with burns, bruises, and a piece of his skull blown out. Was there not a duty of care?
Never thought to hear you, Desperate, muttering that sort of mumbo-jumbo. You know what it costs: safe-house, armed protection, the new-identity stuff. Then they want their women shipped in – and later the women want to go back and do so. Then he does and he’s nutted anyway. Hardly cost efficient. It’s not considered worth the effort.
The man was liked. He was good company, and—
Hadn’t expected you’d need to be told this, Desperate, but get a grip. Nothing is ever as bad as it seems. You’re starting to feel sorry for yourself. You should take some leave and find a woman. Look, someone has to protect those wankers on the commuter trains and you’re the best at it. Another day, another dollar. On your way, please, Desperate.
A bit late. They’d learn, through back-door channels, that the man was already in the hands of their security unit. Dusty had scarpered. He’d left his paperwork and was gone by the time Danny had come out. Dusty had only ever been into Bentinick’s office to deliver a mug of tea because the girl was busy with a malfunctioning computer. There had been no family photograph on display, but rumour had it he’d been heard speaking to a daughter on the phone and had sounded almost human.
If Dusty Miller had been there when Matthew Bentinick had called him back he’d have fought it. But he hadn’t. And already, before the call, his friend had been in a state of decay. It was sad to watch a good man weaken.
It was Gaby Davies’s room. No trail of clothing across the floor, but two neat piles.
Bizarre. They had met in the corridor. Neither had picked up the phone and offered an invitation. She had come out, and so had Ralph. Both had closed their doors. He had brushed a hand across his hair, straightened his back and pulled in his belly. She had tugged at her blouse and done a wriggle with her hips. As if choreographed, they had moved forward and nearly bumped into each other. Her room was a couple of yards nearer.
The coverlet pulled back, sheets and a blanket rucked under them.
She had led, and both had understood where they were going. Neither held the initiative. So, an officer of the Security Service, with a future, was in the arms of a near-itinerant chancer. Ralph Exton had not crossed the Rubicon to be with her, and she had not seen him on the far side and waded out. It was as if they had held hands and stepped into the shallows together, had skidded and slid but held each other up. Well, something similar. They understood that time was with them, and a future might have beckoned.
He lay on his back, Gaby Davies half across him. Her head was on his shoulder and her fingernails worked in the hairs of his chest.
She said, ‘I don’t see it as two lonely people, needing to do this to feel better about themselves.’
‘I see it as going forward.’
‘Going where I want to be.’
‘He said I could be found wherever I went.’
‘What else?’
‘They’d trace me. The mafiya would be told and the people off the mountain. He said I’d be looking over my shoulder day and night. He terrified me. Confession time, Gaby.’
‘Tell me.’
A pause. ‘I told you half of it, maybe a third. The Russian end – my friend Timofey, who’s a devious and wicked little bastard – was where I filtered the truth.’
‘I think I realised that.’
‘It was threatened out of me. He did that.’
‘I’d have had the same result. Slower but the same.’
‘It makes me the great betrayer. A traitor to my friend, a traitor to the men with drills and burning cigarettes. Not to you, Gaby.’
She looked down into his face. Their eyes and mouths were close. His teeth were poor and hers imperfect. She would have bought insurance from him if he had cold-called at her door.
If she had spun a hard-luck story about needing a taxi because her mum was at death’s door, he’d have cleaned out his wallet for her. ‘We’ll find somewhere. A bottle of fizz every Friday night, and you’ll put on a pretty frock, and I’ll try to look my best. It’ll be our place. Somewhere they don’t reach.’
‘We deserve each other.’
‘Right word, “deserve”. We’ll be good for each other. They’ll say in the corridor that I was a frigid bitch but developed an itch. God, the shock waves . . .’
‘Can they reach us? I think he could, that he would fulfil a threat. He’s hard.’
‘Wrong, Ralph. Bad habit of mine. I call it like I see it. There was a woman at our place, Winnie somebody. She was involved in a big one and afterwards she bugged out. Up in the Hebrides, living at a backpackers’ bunkhouse. She’s surviving, and we can . . . You’re wrong.’
‘He’s hard, as I said.’
‘Wrong. We get taught profile recognition. He’s lonely, nervous, twisted with emotion. I loathed him at the start and now I’m a sympathiser. He’s a wall-builder. If anyone comes close to him, he’s mixing mortar and slapping on the bricks. He’s one of the men or women we have a use for but are kept outside the gates. They’re increments, employed like street-sweepers. He’s a creature of Matthew Bentinick and . . . What’s the matter?’
His hands eased her sideways. ‘Gaby, can we do it again?’
‘No . . . I’m going back to the battlefield. Get some sleep – you won’t tomorrow. It’s always difficult when the betrayal gets called in.’
She kissed him and swung her legs off the bed. He wasn’t much of a catch but he was what she had. Would anyone care? She went to her pile of clothes and started to dress. Probably not. Not even the agent handler if she delivered. Not even Matthew Bentinick.
The pattern was well established. There was a chair in the corridor for Matthew Bentinick. The door was left open and his shoes rested on the line where the carpets changed. Rosie was inside. Truth was, and he freely acknowledged it, he didn’t have the strength to be inside the room for the weekly one-hour visit.
Nothing much changed. The days of head X-rays and magnetic resonance imaging scans were long past. Their daughter was in ‘trauma’. In fair physical health but psychiatrically wrecked. She sat in an easy chair. She could swallow solids and drink. She could use a toilet with help. Most afternoons she was brought downstairs into a common recreational area. On dry summer days, once a week, she might be allowed to sit in the sunshine by a large lime tree under observation. But Mary Bentinick never spoke. Her mother and father had not heard her voice since they had met the air ambulance and hurried beside the gurney as she was wheeled through the airport passageways. She had the TV on: she did not watch it but stared at it. She seemed to recognise neither her parents nor members of the nursing staff. Matthew no longer bothered to quiz consultants. He had been told years before that his daughter had the acute symptoms of catatonic schizophrenia: Catatonia is a state of neurogenic motor immobility and behavioural abnormality manifested by stupor. That was enough. How long would it last? ‘Sorry, Mr Bentinick, we have no idea.’ The fee at the clinic was around a thousand a week and the insurers of the charity that had sent her to Africa paid a lump of it. The previous director general had done some creative accounting so the Security Service chipped in. A little more came from the Bentinick funds.
If she had spoken it would have been better. If they had been given an approximation of an end date it would have been easier. It was the blank stare that destroyed him. Much of the time he was there he focused on the carpet. Rosie had a cheerful voice and talked for both of them. She was describing now how well the tomatoes were doing in the greenhouse in spite of the aphids. Mary’s condition did not change. When he imagined what had been done to her, the torture was almost beyond what he could bear. There could not be closure, but he hoped for redress. Maybe tomorrow evening.
‘Of course, I wasn’t actually there.’
‘I think you’ve a good idea of events as they played out.’
‘I suppose I have. It’s like a nightmare, but not a dream. It happened.’
Jocelyn sat opposite him. He was the stereotype of an aid worker. She had travelled to his office that afternoon: too complicated to have him inside Thames House, and unsuitable for their business to be talked through in a public place. There was a small conference room at the back of the first floor of the building. She had a mug of coffee, and the charity’s logo was flaking off – a child in its mother’s arms against a backdrop of Africa. He had close-cut blond hair, sun-bleached, a wind-tanned face, and wore a safari shirt with frayed jeans. Her estimation: a grandparent’s trust fund supported him. He seemed irritable, and she assumed that was because her questioning reminded him of where he’d been – useful, involved – and where he was now.
‘She didn’t make the radio link. She was supposed to do it whether she had malaria, was at death’s door, in the middle of a clinic, taking classes or delivering babies. Two days without contact – we pressed the panic button. Mary Bentinick was important to us. She was conscientious, stubborn and played by the rules. She should have left, but had refused. The area director was scheduled to go up and drag her out by the hair if he had to. It was not something we’d have done lightly – two hundred klicks there and another two hundred back. We’d decided to bring her back after the first shipment had gone in. We left it too long. It happened, we think, a couple of days afterwards.’
Jocelyn took the note. The story was substantially the same as that told by the Revenue & Customs team, but the slant was different so it was useful.
‘It isn’t a pretty story.’
‘I wasn’t expecting it to be.’
‘Her father’s been told.’
‘In the raw?’
He grimaced. ‘With edits for sensitivity.’
‘I’ll take the unexpurgated version, thank you.’
‘It was an Antonov plane and had been given an arrival time on an old strip – mineral explorers had built it. The Russians had a contract to provide the M23 people with more modern firepower, better weapons than the UN people down the road – where I was with the area director. The local commander was Brother Hastings – that was what he called himself – and he paid with illicitly mined rough diamonds. Twenty-five tons of hardware were ferried in. A Russian handled the transaction, a former intelligence officer named Simonov. There were people in the theatre who had big radios and could download stuff – spooks did it. Simonov brought the weapons in – threw in a crate or two of Scotch – and flew out. It was illegal. It violated a UN resolution and an embargo. There was a nun who nursed in the clinic and she’s the main source. Don’t ask for her email address. She kept a diary, wrote it down and fled. She was caught and butchered. The document was stuffed down her front – they weren’t interested in removing clothing from above the waist so they didn’t find it. Her body was located by troops of the UN force, Indonesians. They recovered the document. How are you doing?’
‘Thank God my parents sent me to shorthand classes. I’m doing fine but I’ll want a photocopy of the document she carried out.’ Her coffee had cooled.
‘The first night was tense. The M23 people were mostly blind drunk. Mary Bentinick stayed in the clinic and made it into something of a refuge. There were two nuns and a priest there, and patients who were recovering after minor surgery from the doctor’s last visit. In the morning, apparently, they came looking for food and assumed the building was a good start point.’
She wrote.
‘They took what food was there, went away for a couple of hours, then came back. Mary Bentinick could have done a runner, but she didn’t. It’s a familiar enough story for foreign aid workers in bad places at bad times. They’re surrounded by the kids they’ve taught and nursed, and the friends they’ve made – they find it impossible just to leave them. So she didn’t go. The priest was bayoneted, the nuns were raped. Any of the men who tried to stand in the militia’s
way were shot or clubbed. Then they got to her. What they did is in the document. I can’t bring myself to spell it out.’
He lit a cigarette.
‘In brief. She’d already have seen the brutality of the killings. At some stage she was clubbed across the skull or thrown down and hit her head on concrete. She was raped. It would have been a frenzy. Unprotected sexual penetration with more than a platoon of them. They were high on alcohol and higher on the power given them by the cargo brought by Timofey Simonov. I don’t know whether she was HIV-infected – it’d be a miracle if she wasn’t. There would have been a bit more of it the next day. The graves had been dug and the dead buried. The woman who had written up the document went that night, and other villagers left singly or in family groups. The militia still had the dregs of the whisky. Someone took her out but she was already wounded – had a bullet in the stomach. She was found by the Indonesians about five klicks up the road. She was sitting by a tree with her legs apart and her knees up, as if she were just waiting for the next in line and being ready meant it hurt less. The wounded man had bled to death. Do you want a full résumé on the UN mandate?’
‘I think I know where you’re going.’
‘The Indonesians didn’t think they had the firepower to win a decisive victory over the M23 people. They believed it would be inconclusive and they would take casualties. They never went as far as the air strip, but took her back with them, along with any survivors lucky enough to be close to the track. Those who were in the bush had to take their chance. You know the rest. Air-ambulance evacuation. I’m afraid I’ve lost touch with it. I do southern Sudan now. How is . . . ?’
‘Not much changed. I’m grateful for your time.’ Jocelyn gathered together her clutter, dumped her pad and pencil in her bag, and had her scarf out. She stood up.
He gazed at her. ‘It was all because of those bloody weapons being sent in, some bastards making a fortune out of the trade. Are you actually going to do something about it?’
Vagabond Page 34
