(2013) Collateral Damage

by Colin Smith

  'Tell me any society that hasn't got them. If that bunch of crackpots you hang around with ever got into power we'd all be behind barbed wire.'

  He and his wife had promised themselves that there would be no recrimination, but he was finding it a promise increasingly difficult to keep. Ruth's mother, a slim, dark woman with thin gold chains carrying a small Mogen David around her polo neck, watched the scene in anxious silence, pouring tea, passing toast. They did not have any 'help' in the country.

  'That's just not true,' said Ruth, apparently engrossed in the removal of marmalade from a spoon.

  'You know damn well it is,' said her father.

  'No, it isn't. Most of them are so wet that if they tried to build a concentration camp they'd end up wiring themselves in.' Ruth had resigned herself to expulsion from the party. She was surprised to discover that she was really rather glad about it.

  'Well, if that's true,' said the minister buttering his toast, 'then I think I might learn to like them a little better.'

  'Amateur policemen; amateur revolutionaries. There'll always be an England as long as we sit on the fence and muddle through.'

  'You know very well that's not what Daddy meant.' The interruption was ignored by both sides as interruptions between father and daughter in mid-joust tend to be.

  'I suppose that's why you admire your German terrorist friend so much: a real professional.'

  'I've told you. I didn't know he was a terrorist. And what has being German got to do with it?'

  'I know you told me. And I should have thought that it was perfectly obvious, if you ever thought of anyone but yourself for a moment, how his being German affects your mother and me.'

  'Thought you were in favour of the Common Market.'

  'Don't try and be funny with me, my girl. It doesn't suit you.'

  'You don't believe I didn't know he was a terrorist?'

  'I don't know what to believe. I just hope in future you're a bit more choosey about who you take into your bed.'

  Ruth jumped up, tears brimming, and fled the kitchen.

  'Was that really necessary?' asked her mother, getting up to push the open door shut.

  'It probably wasn't, but it made me feel better.' He stood up and took a final sip of his tea while he felt through the still unread pile of morning newspapers on the table for The Times. 'I'm going. I've got some affairs of state to muddle through.'

  'Don't take it personally.'

  'It's a bit hard to take it any other way. Look, when you get to town give me a ring. There might be a chance for a spot of lunch together if you like.'

  She couldn't remember the last time they had had lunch together when the House was in session. Crisis had brought them closer together.

  They left within half an hour of each other. He in his dark green Rover; she in her white MGB with calls to make at a hairdresser and a dressmaker. It was the first day they had left their daughter alone since her court appearance.

  Upstairs, Ruth had started to run the water for a bath in a big old-fashioned tub about the size of a municipal horse-trough. The house was mostly mid-Victorian although parts were supposed to date from the early seventeenth century. There was even a faction within the local historical society who claimed that some of the terrorists who tried to blow up king and parliament had rested there during their abortive flight from failed regicide.

  It was called, after some long dead owner, Growton's Farm and stood, white painted, at the bottom of a meadow where a brook ran not many yards from the front door. The few acres that remained with the property were let out to local farmers and the horses in the paddock at the back no longer belonged to Ruth and her younger sister, who had put aside such childish things some time ago. Four hundred yards of dirt track, just about wide enough for a Land Rover, led from a twisting, tarred lane to the front door with its Regency brass knocker and footscrapers set into large grey blocks of stone. About four minutes after her parents had left Dove drove up the dirt track in his Cortina.

  He had been watching the place for almost three days, spending his nights in a small hotel in a nearby market town. It had taken him a day to locate the minister's country home because the newspapers had not given the full address in their accounts of Ruth's case. Sometimes, when he could see people were getting curious about his own curiosity, he had posed as a reporter. He had told the landlord at the Bull this, but the man had not appeared to be listening.

  Even now, when he had watched the two cars drive away, he could not be certain she was alone. He patted his jacket until he could feel the little revolver where it lay tucked into the waistband of his trousers, a position he was not altogether happy about although he had made sure that the hammer rested on the chamber with the screw. The schoolteacher took a deep breath, pulled back the heavy brass knocker, and let it clatter against the wood. He wondered how he was going to play it. Without any nonsense, he thought. In and out. The longer he was around the more chance of getting caught.

  The cabinet minister's daughter was out of the bath, her feet covered in talcum powder, trying to decide what top to wear with her jeans. When she heard the knocking below she grabbed a blue check shirt, and was buttoning it up as she went barefoot down the stairs, powdering a faint talcum spoor on the carpet.

  'Oh, it's you,' she said when she pulled back the heavy oak door. She had been half-expecting it to be her father come back to apologize for the row. He sometimes did things like that.

  It wasn't exactly the greeting Dove had been expecting.

  'I'd like a few words,' he said. 'It's about Koller. May I come in?'

  'Are you supposed to question people on bail?' She quite liked the idea of having some dozy fuzz about the place to tease and Shoulders seemed no brighter close up than he did at three hundred yards. He was a good-looking hulk though, even if he was a bit overweight in his appalling suit. Strong jaw, white, even teeth; of course she would let him in. She might even make him a cup of coffee if he was nice. She was very bored.

  Dove thought: some reporter must have telephoned her and asked for an interview. Any moment now she's going to slam the door in my face.

  Standing on the doorstep Ruth was almost as tall as him. She stared briefly into his blue eyes - 'guileless', she thought - lowered her gaze slightly and noted the big right fist, blond hair on the back of his hand, playing with his lapel. She stood there like this, half-smiling, waiting for his reply. Then she was having great difficulty getting her breath and at the same time appeared to be falling backwards. She was vaguely aware that these sensations coincided with a sudden movement of the big fist with the blond hairs on it. Now they were in the hall and the front door had slammed shut. He was standing over her as she lay on the rush matting with her knees drawn up, her hands on her belly, trying to hold the pain in almost as if she was in labour. He bent down and pulled her up by the shirt. For a moment she thought perhaps there had been a mistake and he was trying to make amends, but he pulled her up so savagely that most of her shirt buttons flew off. There was a lot of pain. She wanted to scream but she couldn't catch her breath. She was on the floor again and her nose seemed to be swelling across her face and her mouth was full of some warm salty liquid. This process of being picked up and knocked down with heavy blows to the face was twice repeated and for a few seconds she lost consciousness.

  When she came to she was sitting on one of the kitchen chairs, her head between her knees, spitting bits of tooth on to the stone floor. Her shirt was torn and bloodstained, her breasts were mostly exposed. Her nose was bleeding and her upper lip was beginning to swell up. There was a red mark on her left cheekbone that would emerge as a big black bruise; her right eye was half-closed. Dove walked over to the sink and ran some cold water into an orange plastic washing-up bowl which he proceeded to pour over the young woman he had beaten up more efficiently than he had ever beaten a man.

  'That,' he said, 'is just a sample of what you'll get if you don't give me some very quick and honest answers to a couple of q
uestions. Do you understand?'

  She tried to say something, but the words came out in bubbles. He grabbed hold of her wet hair and pulled it back over the chair so that she stared up at him. 'Understand?'

  This time she managed to whisper 'yes' before she started to cough on the blood and he was obliged to let her head drop back to enable her to clear her mouth. He spun the chair round so she was facing him.

  'Where's Koller?'

  'Don't know,' she whimpered. He slapped her, quite gently and held her to prevent her falling out of the chair. When this happened she realised that if she was going to survive, the truth wasn't good enough.

  'Who are you?' She was playing for time while she tried to clear her throbbing head and think of some plausible answers. It appeared that he really did want to know where Hans was. For a moment she had been convinced he was a particularly sadistic rapist with whom there could be no reasoning at all.

  'Never mind who I am. Answer my question.'

  'Beirut.'

  'Where?'

  'Beirut.'

  'Yes, but where in Beirut?'

  Out of her pain Ruth vaguely remembered that Beirut had French connections.

  'Rue....'

  'Rue what?' He was standing beside her, pulling her hair again. She put a hand, as weak as a child's, on his forearm to try and stop him.

  'Rue Isa ... Isabelle,' she gasped. Her mind was clearing. A moment ago it had been impossible to think of a single French name.

  'What number?'

  '48.' Year of her birth. That was easy.

  Dove let her head go and she slumped down. He walked round until he stood in front of her and then pulled the Webley out of the waistband of his trousers. 'Look at me,' he said.

  Slowly, she raised her eyes to find herself looking down the hexagon-shaped muzzle of the pistol. On each side of the barrel she could also see the business ends of two copper-jacket .38 bullets waiting in their chambers. Dove held her head in his left hand as gently as a lover and kept the barrel just far enough away from her mouth for her eyes to focus on it.

  'If I find out you're lying I'll come back and kill you ... Are you lying? This is your last chance.'

  'No, no. It's the truth. Really, it's the truth. I swear it. I'm not lying. He's a shit. He ran out on me.' She squeezed her eyes shut. She was a child again, daring God to strike her down dead. She felt the cold metal against her forehead and gave another little gasp. It stayed there for a long moment and then went away. Her jeans went damp at the crutch, but she was too relieved to realise what it was.

  'Have you told the police this?'

  'No.' Her mind was clear now. If she'd told the police and the address was correct Koller might have been caught.

  'Where's the cellar?'

  She told him the entrance was under the stairs.

  'Open your mouth.' He was behind her again, gagging her with a tea-towel. Then he tied her hands behind her back with some nylon plastic washing-line he found on a hook, led her down the cellar steps and seated her on the earth floor with her back to the wall while he tied her ankles with more of the line. Her breasts were now completely exposed because her buttonless shirt had been pulled even further apart when her arms were bound. For the first time since he started hitting her he felt a twinge of something close to compassion. He pulled the shirt together and did up two surviving buttons. In doing so his knuckles skimmed her nipples and he caught the fresh alarm in her eyes, felt her body tense. 'Don't worry,' said Dove. 'Not with a bloody bargepole.'

  For good measure he went back up to the kitchen, found another tea-towel and blindfolded her. He also moved away from her various gardening tools that might have been put to use cutting the washing-line. Before he left the house he used a bread-knife on the telephone lead, and wiped up the bits of tooth, the blood and the pool of urine under the kitchen chair with a dish-cloth. Apart from the sabotaged telephone there was no sign that anything untoward had occurred. If one of her parents came back in the afternoon they might think she had gone out for a walk and that would give him more time.

  Twenty minutes after he had entered Growton farmhouse he was back in his Cortina and driving towards London airport fifty miles to the east. Somewhere along the M4 it occurred to him that if she was expecting a reporter he'd have quite a little scoop. He wondered how long it would take the police to find out who had beaten her up and how much they would care. He didn't regret what he'd done in the least. It was, he said to himself, necessary. He didn't have time for the luxury of prolonged interrogation and at least he had left her alive which is more than her bloody boyfriend had done for Emma. Fancy the bitch thinking he wanted to rape her. Then, to his shame, he began to enjoy the notion. Concentrate on killing Koller, he thought. After a while this did the trick. He noticed he was sweating, and his arms and shoulders ached.

  Dove had been gone almost an hour when Ruth managed to partially remove the blindfold by making downward strokes with her face against the rough brick wall. In doing so she developed another graze on her forehead, but uncovered her left eye. By arching her back she managed to get her fingers to the line around her ankles and pulled at the knots until they were sufficiently loose to allow her to crawl about on her knees.

  In this fashion, and in the half-gloom, she painfully climbed the six cellar steps on her knees. Twice she almost fell backwards and just kept her balance by hunching her shoulders so far forward that she was practically crawling up the flight on her belly. When she got to the top she tried to raise the latch on the cellar door with what was left of her front teeth. It was very tender work for a bruised mouth and she took her time about it. As she was half-blind and could make out only the most definite objects this operation also needed considerable concentration. She bent her head and felt for the latch, first with her tongue, and then with her teeth. Her head was still ringing from Dove's punches. She began to feel dizzy. The latch was stiff. Three times she almost lifted it only to have it fall back into position. Her head ached. She felt sick. Then she was spinning off the edge, dissolving into a nauseous limbo. For a second or two she fought against it, but it was so much easier to let go. She fell backwards and with some violence, her legs bent under her, hands tied behind her back, banging her head hard against the last two steps. When she had finished her fall she lay very still and her breathing was barely audible.

  11. A Loose Net

  'Shloms?' The young Detective-Sergeant who had been so nervous when they raided Ruth's flat often had difficulty in understanding Fitchett. The older man mixed his generation's slang with words of his own device.

  'Yeah. That's what the governor thinks. Shloms.'

  'Who?'

  'Shloms ... Solomons ... Israelis, you know,' said Fitchett, impatiently revealing the word's curious derivation. He'd picked it up years ago from a mate in the old Palestine Police.

  'What do you think?'

  'I'm not so sure. A couple of years back when they had those teams over here and in Europe' - Britain would never be in Europe as far as Fitchett was concerned - 'I'd have been more sure. But then they overstepped the mark and clobbered the wrong bloke in Norway. And the French were getting pissed off with scraping the right blokes off the pavement even before that. One of the Funnies told me they'd promised to stop it, er, which he seemed to think meant, er, be more discreet about it. You could hardly call what happened to the girl discreet, could you?'

  'Looks like she's fallen off a cliff.'

  'Is she conscious yet?'

  'Shouldn't think so. Hargraves is at the clinic and I asked him to call the moment she came round. Last time he was on, he said the doctors were saying that even if she did she might not walk again. Her back's definitely broken as well as the fractured skull.'

  'Marvellous,' said Fitchett gloomily. He lit one of his fat cigarettes with his oily little flame-thrower. 'What about the bloke her dad thought was one of ours?'

  'Nothing yet. The locals are still making enquiries. It would have helped if he'd got his car nu
mber. He said something about him having big shoulders.'

  'Hmm. According to the governor the Funnies say he wasn't one of theirs.'

  'And they've never been known to lie,' said the younger man irreverently.

  Fitchett frowned. 'Don't be bloody silly. They'd have to admit it eventually. Her father's hopping mad.'

  'I don't blame him.'

  'Well it's his own damn fault. If he hadn't thrown his weight around she'd be safely locked up and none of this would have happened.'

  'If it wasn't the Israelis who do you think it could be?'

  'The Palestinians.'

  'But this guy her father saw with the Cortina was white?'

  'So, they've got helpers. Who do you think Koller is? The Sheikh of bloody Araby?'

  The Sergeant began to catch up. 'You think the other Palestinians have hired some heavies as well?'

  'Why not? Fight fire with fire. I think we'd better go and have a chat with that publisher Koller was after.'

  'Both of us?'

  'Yes. I thought you'd like to see exactly how an old pro operates. Part of your education.'

  'Thanks very much.'

  'Don't mention it,' said Fitchett who, like many people who are good at handing out sarcasm, was quite impervious to counter-attack. 'We'll leave in about fifteen minutes unless we hear anything from the girl before. Draw yourself a shooter won't you?'

  'Oh, it's personal protection duty is it?'

  'I'm a valuable man.'

  Just then the telephone on his desk rang. The switchboard operator told Fitchett that he had a caller who claimed that he probably knew the identity of Ruth's attacker. Did he want to speak to him personally?

  'Who is he?'

  The operator gave the publisher's name. 'Put him on.'

  The Palestinian explained who he was and Fitchett said 'Oh yes,' in a manner which indicated that he had some dim recollection of him.

  'I have just been reading about the attack on Koller's girlfriend,' lied the publisher. He rose early and had read it hours ago; he had been wondering what to do about it ever since. 'I think the man who did it was a schoolteacher called Stephen Dove. His wife was killed by the bomb Koller meant for me.'