by M. R. Hall
‘No, don’t say that. It’ll get better. Everyone says so. You’ll be starting physio soon . . .’
Lee sank back into the pillows and stared at the ceiling. ‘If you don’t want to come back here, you don’t have to.’
Anna tried hard not to cry. ‘You’ve lost a friend. You’re bound to be feeling down.’ She gripped his hand tighter, but got nothing back. ‘Look, there’s something else I want to tell you.’ She dropped her voice to a whisper, ‘I had a visit from some lawyers – the ones who are looking after Sarah – Kenny’s fiancée. They said if the army have been negligent, you’ll be in line for some money. A lot of money. Enough that we won’t have to worry.’
She waited for his reaction, but none came. He didn’t even turn his eyes to her.
‘Lee, did you hear me? . . . Lee? If they’re hiding something you need to tell me. It’s important – for all of us.’
He sank further into the pillow with a soft groan. His lack of hair and eyebrows made him look like a corpse.
‘We’ll talk again, hey? I’ll come again soon. I’ll manage it somehow.’ He didn’t react. Anna felt herself start to panic. She could hardly bear to see him like this. She leant over and kissed his cheek. ‘Sleep tight, babe. Be strong. We’re going to get through this.’
He didn’t answer.
It had been a mistake coming this late in the day: they gave him more drugs at night to help him sleep through. No one could be themselves on that much medication. She would probably behave the same way in his position. Give it another week and he’d be smiling again and turning his mind to the future like the other men in the ward.
These were the thoughts with which Anna consoled herself as the nurse ushered her out and she began her long journey home.
Kathleen was fetching her coat from the staff rest room when Phil Peters, the deputy manager, popped out of his office and asked for a quick word. It was past eight o’clock. She’d been working the till since midday and her back was as stiff as a board, but she obeyed without complaint. She left the whining to the young staff.
‘Have a seat, you look a bit tired,’ Phil said as she stepped into his office. He was around thirty, but his hair was already thinning at the temples and he was showing the beginnings of a paunch.
‘I’m fine,’ Kathleen said. She sat on the chair in front of the cheap desk. The air in the windowless room was stale and smelt vaguely of souring milk.
‘I keep meaning to ask – any news of your grandson?’
‘Not yet.’ She hadn’t mentioned Pete at work and preferred to keep it that way.
Phil seemed to take the hint and glanced at his computer monitor. ‘I was just checking to see the last time you took any leave. You’ve had none since Christmas. You’ve even worked two bank holidays.’
‘Really? Time goes by so quickly,’ Kathleen said, and for a moment allowed herself to believe that she’d been called in to be congratulated, or perhaps even rewarded.
‘I know you’ve had a lot of worries, but it’s not a good idea to push yourself so hard. We all need balance.’
‘Of course,’ Kathleen said, while at the same time asking herself what right this boy had to lecture her.
Phil laced his fingers together on the desk, wearing a serious expression. ‘At least having seen this I’ve got an idea of what might have caused the recent problems.’
‘Problems?’ Kathleen said, feeling her face flush with alarm.
‘Your last few shifts – the till hasn’t reconciled. Twenty-three pounds off on Friday, thirty-four pounds adrift on Saturday.’
Kathleen shook her head. She’d been known to be a pound or two out occasionally, but never by this much. ‘They were busy days. You were here – you saw it.’ She heard the defensive note in her voice and wished she could start again. ‘It shouldn’t have happened. I don’t know how it did,’ – with every word she seemed to dig herself in deeper – ‘I’ll make it up in extra hours if you like.’
Phil gave a sympathetic smile. ‘Maybe you should take a few days off, Kathleen? Recharge the batteries.’
‘No, I don’t need to do that. Really. I prefer to keep working.’
It wasn’t true. She was exhausted, but at the same time she knew that if she were to stop, even for a day, she’d come down with something and be off her feet for a week. She longed to ask for a guarantee that she wouldn’t be one of the names considered for the redundancies they all knew were coming, but was too afraid. At the very least she knew that once she raised the issue he would turn it around and invite her to think of it as a positive step. She could hear him saying it: ‘a breathing space while you consider new opportunities’.
In their exchange of looks Phil seemed to read all of this and more. He may have been young, but there was a reason why they had made him assistant manager: he handled staff in the same way a shrewd farmer did cattle. Outward fondness was matched with a ruthless acceptance of the facts of life. He could measure the health of his stock with a glance. And he knew to get a tiring beast out of the yard before it became a liability.
‘I’ll tell you what we’ll have to do then, Kathleen,’ he said, spreading the responsibility amongst invisible associates. ‘Seeing as you’re quite sure tiredness isn’t to blame, we’ll have to give you a warning and continue to keep a close eye. I’m sorry, but you know how it is. It’s the same for everybody.’
Kathleen nodded. ‘I’ll be certain to take extra care.’
‘But don’t feel you have to slow down,’ Phil added. ‘Remember that in this war we’re in with the discounters, till speed is everything. If we can make it even two per cent more convenient here, this is where the punters will spend their cash.’
Two per cent. He’d let it slip – perhaps on purpose, perhaps not. All the staff knew that their performance could be measured to within a fraction of a second. Somewhere on his computer there would be charts that would tell him how many items she had scanned in any given minute during the last ten years. Other charts would show her performance day to day, week to week, month to month. The worsening arthritis in her fingers would show up as the slightest downward movement in the line on the graph, and on the days when her back had played up there would be V-shaped dips that would drag her average lower. Meanwhile, the young girls, for all their gossiping and complaining, were moving gradually in the opposite direction. Two per cent: every extra half-second it took to turn a tin of soup in aching fingers in search of its bar code was another step closer to the end.
‘Well, have a nice evening,’ Phil said. He opened the door for her and sent her on her way with a smile.
Kathleen walked home along pavements speckled with drizzle and tried not to brood on her encounter with Phil. She didn’t have much of a faith, but what she did have, aside from some snatches of hymns and a handful of Bible verses, was a belief that everything happens for a reason. Life had always seemed to her to be a series of tests and trials. Why some had to suffer more than others was the only mystery, but the older she got, the more she accepted that there could never be an answer to that in this world. You could only do your best with what you were given. Compared with many others, she was lucky.
It was only as she approached the gateway to her block that she lifted her gaze from the ground in front of her. She saw the shiny boots and dress trousers first, and knew before she arrived at the soldier’s face that it was Sergeant Price. He was standing with his hands clasped in front of him like an undertaker. The silent young Corporal Benson stood at his side. Although Kathleen had been expecting this moment, she felt her legs wobble beneath her. She steadied herself on the gatepost.
‘It’s not good news, I’m afraid, Mrs Lyons. Would you like us to come inside?’
She shook her head.
‘Would you like me to—’
‘Yes. Please be quick.’
‘A soldier’s body was found at a crossroads near the village of Shalan-Gar this morning. The identity tag is that of your grandson. According to the limited information we have so
far received,’ Sergeant Price faltered briefly, ‘Private Lyons was murdered by his captors. I’m afraid that’s all we can tell you at the moment. Please call at any time.’
He offered her a card. She took it from his hand, but immediately dropped it. His colleague picked it up from the ground and placed it in her hand, unable to meet her gaze.
‘I’d like you to know that all his comrades consider him a hero, Mrs Lyons. I’ll be in touch.’
Kathleen walked slowly through the silent flat and stopped in the centre of her living room. It was quiet. The only sound, that of the breeze gently rattling the window. She looked at the row of framed photographs arranged along the mantel over the gas fire. Her life in pictures: her long-dead parents, a cheating husband, the daughter he drove away, the grandson conceived by accident, now dead at eighteen. She had wanted to care for him, to set him along a straight road, but it had taken all she had merely to keep him clothed and fed. His inexhaustible, restless energy would have sapped a strong man, let alone a woman of her age.
She wished she could weep, but all she felt was a cold, hard rage at the waste of the beautiful boy she had let slip through her fingers.
NINETEEN
Jenny awoke from the semi-doze in which she had passed the ninety-minute train journey to the faintly bitter ammonia smell that invariably seeped into the carriage as soon as the fields of Berkshire gave way to the outer sprawl of the city. It was the signature of the London railways and existed nowhere else. The air grew staler and more humid the closer they drew to Paddington. There, she stepped on to the platform into the sultry heat of the late evening and all the unwelcome odours of a busy station in the dog days of summer. Her fellow passengers jostled impatiently in their race for the ticket barriers and most sped on across the concourse to the Tube station as if fleeing from some threatening catastrophe.
Recoiling from the prospect of travelling underground, Jenny swallowed the expense of a taxi. The journey across the West End to Portland Place was short, but took in enough of the capital’s wealthy heart for her to wonder at the extravagance on display, while at the same time giving thanks that her life wasn’t confined to its skyless streets. London, she felt, had a high conceit of itself that bordered on the ridiculous. Cars that cost as much as houses sat in traffic with no audience to admire them; bars and restaurants that strained to outdo each other in fashionable chic merged into an indistinguishable blur. It was somewhere and nowhere; a city that in its bewildering collision of cultures and styles defined itself by offering something of the exotic essence of everywhere else. You can have anything you desire all at once, it seemed to say. A place for restive, rootless spirits and dream chasers.
But even as she had these uncharitable thoughts Jenny was aware of their source. She had had to go to ground in the country to find her equilibrium. The moment she was cut off from the steady pulse of nature she began to lose her bearings and become, by slowly ratcheting degrees, ever more anxious. The streets that held so much excitement and promise for some were, in the depths of her subconscious imagination, a labyrinth, the walls of which were steadily closing in. She supposed this made her something of a ‘city-phobe’, if such a word existed. To maintain her balance, Jenny needed anchors, a sense of place, of permanence, a viewpoint from which to establish her bearings. Some years before, the psychiatrist who had helped her regroup after her ‘episode’ had explained to her how much of the brain’s efforts go into editing out what the senses relay. It had struck a chord and she had learned to lower her input, to focus her attention on the elemental things her work required: life and death; truth and lies. She needed to exist apart from the chaotic rush in order to see clearly. She couldn’t afford to be dazzled.
Avoiding the lift in the Langham (another of her many inconvenient phobias), Jenny climbed the six flights of stairs to her room where she performed a quick change into a pair of tight, uncomfortable heels and the one black dress she possessed. In her haste, she had forgotten to bring any jewellery or make-up. She had to make do with the lip gloss and a stub of eyeliner pencil that lived permanently in the pocket of her handbag. She went downstairs feeling respectable rather than glamorous, but nevertheless distinctly underdressed as she stepped into the Langham’s famous cocktail bar, the Artesian. It was a busy evening and the patrons were conspicuously wealthy and international: the kind who travelled in limousines and first-class cabins and seemed only to acknowledge those who were members of their caste. Jenny anxiously scanned the room and finally spotted Simon lolling comfortably on one of the scallop-backed purple leather sofas at the far end of the bar. He looked very content to be among the moneyed elite, passing himself off as one of their number.
As she crossed the floor, Jenny felt the subtle evaluating glances of women glad to see that their diamonds hadn’t been outshone or their slender waists upstaged. It was a strange place to be talking about death in the Afghan desert, but she had grown used to such incongruities in her dealings with Simon. The more thorny the subject, the more refined the location he would choose in which to discuss it. He relied on her being too embarrassed to make a public scene.
Simon rose to greet her with a warm, soft handshake and a presumptuous kiss on the cheek. ‘Jenny – so sorry to call you in at such short notice.’ He smelt faintly of gin. ‘Will you join me in a Martini? They mix the best in the world, apparently.’
‘Why not?’ She couldn’t recall the last time she had drunk cocktails. She couldn’t even be sure what a Martini consisted of.
Simon nodded to the barman and made a circling gesture with his index finger. Apparently this sufficed to order two more of what he was already drinking.
‘The Chief sends his apologies,’ Simon said, as they settled into seats opposite one another. ‘He would like to have been here this evening but he’s a lot on his plate – that ghastly business in Lincolnshire last week.’
He was referring to a warehouse fire that had incinerated nearly a dozen illegal migrant workers. Allegations were flying that the employers had failed to inform fire crews that they were inside. It was a nasty situation that had sparked a minor riot in a nearby market town and embarrassed the junior government minister who served as the local MP. Jenny could understand that the incident was a high priority for Peter Etherton, the Chief Coroner, but she doubted whether it came close in importance to her inquest at Highcliffe.
‘Yes, he had to go up there for a couple of days,’ Simon continued, ‘so I’m afraid you’ll just have to put up with me.’
The Chief’s motives became clearer still: there would be no face-to-face meeting between them. No possibility of her blaming whatever might transpire on a steer from above.
Jenny felt justifiably annoyed and couldn’t contain the fact. ‘I thought the whole point of my coming was to meet with him. Has he had second thoughts?’
‘Not at all. Why ever would you say that?’ Simon appeared genuinely bemused. ‘He knows we have an understanding. I assured him I would be able to convey his sentiments.’
‘Informally, away from the office – without the inconvenience of someone keeping a note?’
‘Oh, Jenny . . .’ Simon gave a look of faux exasperation. ‘You’re not in one of those moods, are you? We are all trying to do the same job, you know.’
A waiter arrived with their drinks. Jenny noticed Simon steal a glance at her neckline as she was momentarily distracted by the task of lifting the delicate, top-heavy glass to her lips. He never changed.
‘Delicious, isn’t it?’ he said, with a glowing smile. ‘Makes one nostalgic for the days of curling smoke and tinkling pianos.’
He was right: it was an exquisite drink. Gin and vermouth mixed with a wisp of lemon peel. Since she’d missed dinner, the first sip went straight to her head.
It was lazy of her, but she allowed Simon to drift off into his usual routine of mildly flirtatious small talk while she drank. The alcohol relieved her tension along with the niggling worry she had carried with her all evening about Michae
l’s medical. By the end of her first Martini she was in the moment, her earlier self-consciousness forgotten.
Another round of drinks had arrived by the time Simon steered the conversation back to the purpose of their meeting. ‘We heard about the shaven heads this afternoon. The press haven’t got hold of it yet, but I’m sure it’ll only be a matter of time.’
‘Who told you?’ Jenny asked.
‘I called your officer for an update. I had a suspicion Hastings wasn’t going to let you get your way.’
‘You’re not in communication with him?’
‘Of course not. He’ll be under strict instructions not to speak to anyone outside the army, in any event. He’s just a colonel, after all. The real tussle here’s going on right up at Chief of Staff level.’
‘Tussle for what, precisely?’
‘Power. Leverage. Influence.’
‘I suppose I should be grateful for your honesty. At least I know where I stand – in the middle of a battle zone, from the sound of it.’
‘The army’s feeling got at. Of course, it is – its reward for thirteen years of attritional war is having its budget and personnel cut to the bone. The last thing it wants is criticism for incompetency on top of all that.’
‘And you expect me to do what, precisely?’
‘Your usual, very thorough job, of course.’
‘And you’ve brought me all the way here for that?’
Moreton smiled and touched his hand lightly to the bare flesh of her arm. ‘I wanted you to hear from me in person – we’ll back you to the hilt – just try not to fall into any more bear traps.’
‘That sounds like qualified support . . .’
‘Not at all, Jenny. Trust me.’ He squeezed her wrist. ‘Now – Private Lyons. Are you happy to hear the case together with that of Green?’
‘A cynic might say that lands me with a lot of responsibility others might be eager to avoid.’
‘Can you think of anyone who would do it better?’
Jenny took a large sip of Martini. ‘It’s a peculiar feeling, Simon – on every other occasion I’ve found myself with a contentious case, you’ve been the one trying to put the brakes on me.’
