by Paul Torday
‘How has Sarah taken it all?’ I asked.
‘Oh, she’s been an absolute brick,’ said Henry. ‘She likes a drama. She’s playing the part of the wronged and heroic wife to perfection. No, I’m being unfair: she is the wronged and heroic wife.’
I winced. I could imagine how Sarah would be handling the situation all too well.
‘The children have had to come out of private education, of course, and go to a state school,’ said Henry. ‘Personally, I think they’re happier than they were at boarding school. They have so many more local friends now. Sarah’s been very good about that, but she’s rather worried the children will end up speaking with an accent. And we’re a bed and breakfast now.’
‘A bed and breakfast?’ I asked.
‘We advertise for American visitors who want to get the inside track on life in a mini-stately home in Gloucestershire. I have to sit and have a whisky with them before dinner, and bullshit on about my ancestors while Sarah cooks dinner. We don’t have a cook or a housekeeper any more. Sarah says she doesn’t mind, but I know she gets tired. The trouble is that she has very high standards.’
‘I remember,’ I said.
‘Anyway, keep in touch,’ said Henry. ‘I hear that you’ve cornered the lovely Harriet at last. Well done. Give her my love. I’d ask you to bring her to stay, but this B&B business keeps us both rather busy at the moment, and we don’t often have a spare bedroom.’
‘I’m glad it’s going well, at any rate,’ I said. Henry and Sarah pouring drinks and cooking for passing tourists was hard to imagine. Thousands of other people did it, however; why not them?
‘And Eck,’ said Henry, just before he rang off. ‘No hard feelings. I mean, about all that Mountwilliam Partners stuff. It takes two to do a deal like that and I was greedy. I saw other people, who I didn’t think deserved it, driving around in bigger cars and spending their money like water. It was envy. I couldn’t bear to think that I was poorer than all these people who suddenly appeared from nowhere. I wanted part of the action. I wanted to put my capital to work too. Those times are over now, aren’t they?’
‘For a while, anyway,’ I agreed.
That was typical of Henry - being generous in spirit, always concerned not to hurt the feelings of anyone he met. I knew, however, that things between us could never be the same.
I heard from someone - I think it must have been Doug Williams - that Bilbo is now living in Dubai. He is said to have bought a house and some beach frontage on one of those new islands they have reclaimed from the sea. SOCA is trying to seize his assets in this country but Nick Davies told me the last time we spoke that it is very complicated.
‘The house in Kensington Gate is still worth millions, even after the property crash,’ he said, ‘but the ownership is a bit confusing. It appears to belong to a trust registered in the Cayman Islands. There are all sorts of jurisdictional arguments. And we think Bilbo owes Mountwilliam Partners several millions of pounds in bonuses he paid himself just before the collapse. We’ll catch up with him in the end.’
I doubt that.
*
The investigation into what happened to Charlie Summers dragged on for a while longer. The DI in charge of the case told me that they weren’t sure who Charlie Summers actually was. Based on the information I had given them, they had checked at the Salvation Army Centre in Middlesbrough.
‘The trouble is,’ said the DI, ‘the social security number he used to get accommodation in Middlesbrough belongs to someone called Billy Skeggs. “Charlie Summers” seems to have been an alias.’
To me this information appeared to be irrelevant.
‘Never mind what he is or isn’t called,’ I said. ‘Charlie Summers will do now. Do you know any more about what has happened to him?’
But the DI didn’t know and Charlie’s fate continued to play on my mind.
It was quite by chance, talking to a man from my old regiment at a dinner party at Catterick one night almost a year later, that I heard a story that might shed some light on the matter. We were talking about life in Basra, where he had been stationed until very recently, and he recalled some of the strange things that happened out there, the type of story that was never covered by the press.
My informant said that for a while they had been hearing that a European was being held hostage somewhere on the outskirts of the city. That was nothing special: there were usually two or three contractors being held to ransom at any one time. But in the case of this European there had been no demands for prisoner exchange or money, and no one appeared to be looking for him. So it wasn’t even certain that this particular kidnap victim existed.
‘Then we picked up a group in an unrelated raid,’ my new friend told me. ‘We knew they had dirty hands, and were supposed to have killed a Swiss oilfield engineer. So we took them in and - assisted by the Iraqis - we interrogated them. They told us something rather odd.’
It turned out they’d bought a captive from another group who had sold him on the grounds that he was a British officer, and was worth a fortune in ransom money. The new group - the one that had bought him from the original kidnappers - tried to ransom him, but no one was interested. Eventually, they discovered they’d been had: the man was no more a British officer than they were. The local spooks - our spooks, I mean - couldn’t work out who the man for sale actually was or why anyone would want to ransom him. They had the Foreign Office breathing down their necks about half a dozen more important cases and the British press had never picked up on the story, so no one was under pressure to do anything about the situation.
‘In the end,’ my friend said, ‘his captors just took him out and shot him.’
‘They shot him?’ I said in disbelief. I don’t know why I was so surprised, though. If this unknown captive had been Charlie, as I was beginning to think it was, it would have been much of a piece with the rest of his luck.
‘Why did they shoot him?’ I asked.
‘It was cheaper and safer than releasing him, I suppose. They said they actually liked the guy. He made them laugh. But what does a bullet cost? And if they’d simply handed him back, the guy might have given away something about the identity of his captors, or their location. Plus they’d have looked silly releasing someone they paid good money for in the first place. Shooting him was the simplest way out.’
There was a silence. I could not speak. The grief I felt was sudden, and overwhelming. I told myself this was only a story, long on suppositions and very short on facts. Even if the story were true, how could anyone be sure that the prisoner was Charlie?
‘They’d kept him for six months in some tenement on the outskirts of As Zubayr,’ continued my friend. ‘Half the time he would have been bound and hooded. It can’t have been fun, but the people we interrogated said that the guy was as good as gold: never complained. They gave him a radio to listen to and he sang along to some of the music. They liked hearing him sing.’
‘That’s good, then,’ I managed to say.
‘Here’s the thing that made the story stick in my mind,’ said my friend. ‘It’s probably just one of those urban legends, but apparently when they took this guy out to shoot him, he began to sing. They said that they all thought it was very beautiful, and that he had a very good voice. They waited until he had finished before they shot him.’
I knew, then.
I knew for sure who it had been. And I knew for sure what he had sung. They had walked Charlie out from his miserable cell, perhaps down into the dry bed of a nearby wadi for greater discretion. Charlie would have known what was coming; he must have expected it, and probably longed for it. The last few months can’t have been comfortable for him. I can’t imagine what it must have been like to have your head bagged inside a hood with two air holes for most of the time, while the temperature outside soared past forty degrees: not knowing where you were, or who your captors were, listening to their voices when they raised them, wondering whether they were arguing among themselves about what
to do with you. He must, by then, have been sick at heart, and probably was physically ill too.
Still, he had the heart to sing:
‘Panis angelicas
Fit panis hominum
Dat panis coelicus
Fuguris terminum
O res mirabilis!
Manducat Dominum
Pauper, servus et humilis.’
I remembered the words. I could hear them in my mind as clearly as if Charlie were in front of me at that very moment. I could picture him singing them in a green Provencal dusk, the swifts and bats swooping in the airy gulf behind him. 1 could recall the feeling of enchantment the song had produced in me.
Charlie Summers had found peace.
Epilogue
Harriet stayed. She made a few trips back to France that autumn and winter to wind up her affairs and arrange for her small stock of worldly goods to be packed up and shipped over to England. By the following spring, Harriet and I had both found jobs not too far from Pikes Garth Hall. Harriet worked part time as a consultant to a firm of land agents in Ripon. I ended up as secretary of a charitable trust. Neither of us earned much money, but between us it was enough. I remembered the contempt with which Bilbo had forecast such an outcome for me, and was glad things had turned out as they had. At least there was no moral hazard in this job.
Life had to be conducted on fairly frugal lines. The money we made from the sale of Aunt Dorothy’s house in Cirencester was saved up for our future life together, although Harriet for a long time remained reluctant to discuss the future.
I sold my flat in London just before the property market really crashed, and was able to pay off my mortgage and my loans I had used to invest in Mountwilliam Partners. There wasn’t any change. I sold the Audi, and since then have had little call for any of the dozen or more suits I used to own. I wear the tweed one for Sunday lunch parties, if I wear a suit at all, and the pinstriped one for funerals and regimental reunions. The rest are hanging in a spare bedroom, and the moths are welcome to them.
*
One evening Harriet was watching the latest series about celebrities dancing or ice skating or some such; the kind of programme she watches with a great deal more enthusiasm than I do. It was a warm spring evening, so I went outside and lit a rare cigarette, and thought about how the music that the rest of us had been dancing to for the last few decades really had stopped, at least for the time being. For a long while its compelling, seductive rhythms, its jazzy tones, captivated all of us and we went out and spent. We spent, and we worked harder and harder to earn what we had spent, and when that wasn’t enough, we went out and borrowed some more.
Now, at least for the moment, the players had mislaid their scores.
In the silence, it was just possible to imagine that there might be other music being played somewhere else. If I listened hard enough, I thought I might hear it.
Harriet’s television show came to an end and she joined me on the terrace. She began to talk about our plans for redecorating the house. We couldn’t afford to get someone in: we would have to do it ourselves, and in a very modest way. Money was always going to be tight with us, but it didn’t matter any more. We had what we needed.
Out in the dark, an owl screeched. Harriet gripped my hand for a moment and said, ‘I love it here.’
‘So you’re going to stay for a while longer?’ I asked her.
‘I don’t know,’ she replied, but she was smiling.
THE END
