The Burma Legacy

by Geoffrey Archer

  Sam couldn’t quite understand where his own particular talents and experience fitted in with such a mission. ‘This is a police matter, surely.’

  ‘Absolutely. But the PM wants us in on it too.’

  ‘The key is to find Harrison.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘And it’s the police who have the resources and the international connections. I, on the other hand, still have a highly significant narcotics case on my hands involving a rogue SAS man.’

  Waddell spread his hands dismissively. ‘You’re overlooking something.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Harrison is somewhat unconventional.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So the PM felt an unconventional approach to finding him should also be tried – and he thought of you.’

  ‘He asked for me personally?’ Sam asked incredulously.

  ‘More or less. He remembered we’d moved you to the Far East after you’d cracked open the Lucifer Network. And since it’s highly likely that’s where Harrison’s gone, he thought you were the man for the job.’

  Sam pushed his plate away. The food had been good but he’d suddenly lost his appetite.

  ‘The Far East is a mighty big area, Duncan. Do we have any idea what country Harrison’s in?’

  ‘No. The people at the school aren’t being very helpful.’

  ‘What school?’ The man was talking in code.

  ‘Sorry. I’ve jumped ahead. Let me give you some history.’

  He refilled his glass with mineral water and offered the bottle to Sam, who by now was thinking a real drink would be more appropriate.

  ‘In the period immediately after the war Perry Harrison had a pretty bad time of it. His health was a right mess after a couple of years in the hands of the Japanese. Both physically and mentally. In those days the armed forces didn’t have counselling. Stress disorders weren’t recognised. The men coming back from the prison camps were supposed to put their awful experiences behind them and be thankful they were alive. Well, Harrison had a couple of nervous breakdowns. Even tried to top himself once. All this stuff’s in his book – I’ve got a copy for you in my briefcase. Anyway, eventually he met a woman who helped sort him out. She was a nurse actually – at one of the clinics where they tried to unscramble his brain. He married her and became a schoolmaster – minor prep school, that sort of thing. Some place where you didn’t need teaching qualifications so long as you were a bit barmy and looked the part.’

  ‘What did he teach?’

  ‘Don’t know. Anyway, it didn’t last long. He left his wife, and one child by then, and went back to Burma.’

  ‘Burma? I’d have thought he wouldn’t ever want to see the place again.’

  ‘Oh he loves Burma. Brought up there, you see.’

  ‘You didn’t tell me that.’

  ‘Sorry. Yes. His father managed a rubber plantation or something. Young Peregrine spent the first thirteen years of his life in Burma before being sent to boarding school in England. It was one of the reasons he volunteered to join Wingate’s mob. He knew the country. Loved its people and was ready to do anything to free them from the Japs.’

  Sam scratched his head. ‘I thought the Burmese welcomed the Japs in. As a way of getting rid of us.’

  ‘A lot of them did. But it didn’t take them long to discover their new friends were even more arrogant and self-serving than their old masters.’

  ‘So what did Harrison do when he went back to Burma? Did he plan to live there permanently?’

  ‘I don’t think Harrison’s the sort who ever makes plans that are permanent …’ Waddell pursed his lips, realising the same could be said of Sam. ‘Bit of a rolling stone. Anyway, he got work with a timber exporting company and it wasn’t long before he was shacked up with a Burmese woman. They had a couple of kids. Then a few years later, when Ne Win’s lunatic regime plunged the country into socialism and began nationalising all the businesses, he left her too. Came back to England.’

  ‘Fickle fellow.’

  ‘Yes. But the women seemed to love him for it. His English wife welcomed him back, even after nine years away. Of course, the fact he’d inherited some money might have had something to do with it. Quite a lot of money actually. From an aunt he’d never met. But he only stayed with his wife for a year, just long enough to get to know their son who was about twelve. Then he buggered off again.’

  ‘Burma?’

  ‘No. Cambridgeshire. To found a sort of commune.’

  ‘We’re in the 1960s by now.’

  ‘Precisely. Buddhism and free love. An odd cocktail. He used his inheritance to buy an old manor house with farm attached at a place called Bordhill. Surrounded himself with flower people. They produced most of their own food. Doing it organically long before the supermarkets picked up on the word. And he started a school for misfit teenagers. A sort of sixth form college with lessons in life instead of A-levels.’

  ‘This is the school you referred to before?’

  ‘Yes. They call it the Bordhill Community.’

  ‘So it’s still functioning?’

  ‘It is. But catering for adults now rather than teenagers. There was some scandal in the early years involving sexual relations between the staff and the pupils. Harrison came close to being charged with corrupting minors. Some of the pupils were barely sixteen. So nowadays it’s people in their late twenties and thirties mostly. Sad types searching for themselves.’

  ‘Aren’t we all …’

  Waddell looked uncomfortable.

  ‘The point is, Bordhill’s something of a cult. Oh, reasonably benign by all accounts. No reports of people held against their will. But people stay because they fall under the spell of Perry Harrison. Women particularly.’

  ‘Even now he’s seventy-seven.’

  ‘Apparently.’

  ‘The people at the school aren’t being co-operative, you said.’

  ‘That’s right. There’s a woman called Ingrid Madsen who runs things. Danish, I think. She’s told the police she doesn’t know where Harrison is. The last time she saw him was the day before that letter arrived at The Times.’

  ‘Convenient. What’s being done to try to find him?’

  ‘Everything you’d expect. Requests for help sent to foreign police and immigration services.’

  ‘You’re being open about it? Telling them we suspect he intends to take out Tetsuo Kamata?’

  ‘No way. This Matsubara deal is extremely sensitive. Nothing’s been signed yet. And if Kamata or his company learn there’s a threat to his life, he might just decide to pull out. The government doesn’t want anything public about this. No. We’ve said we want to question Harrison about his financial affairs.’

  Sam shook his head. ‘I have to say I still find the idea of a seventy-seven year old planning a revenge killing rather hard to believe.’

  Waddell lifted his briefcase onto his lap and opened it. ‘You won’t when you’ve read his book.’ He handed over a volume whose dust-jacket had a torn corner. ‘It’ll give you a flavour of the man. Look, first thing I want you to do is make some excuse to visit the people at Bordhill. See if you can glean anything the police didn’t. Then we’ll ship you back to your usual beat.’

  ‘But where, Duncan?’

  ‘That’s the trouble. We don’t know yet. We can pretty well rule out Japan. Kamata is hard to get at there. And Japan is a country Harrison detests. Never been there so far as we know. Not the likely scene for a killing. But Kamata travels in the area quite a lot. Still very hands-on. Matsubara has business interests in most countries in the region. We’re trying to get a sight of his travel plans for the coming months. Through our commercial attaché in Tokyo,’ Waddell added sheepishly.

  ‘With minimal hope of success.’

  ‘Quite. The Japs are a particularly hard lot to crack. Naturally secretive. Genuinely inscrutable.’ He produced a manila envelope from his case and handed it over. ‘This is some more background on Harrison and the school.
’ Waddell flicked out his arm to look at his watch. ‘Heavens! I’ve a meeting in twenty minutes.’ He summoned the waiter for the bill.

  ‘You don’t … you don’t think you’re imagining this threat?’ Sam suggested tentatively.

  ‘Unfortunately not.’

  ‘But you seem to be basing it on three pieces of purely circumstantial evidence. An emotional letter to a newspaper, a book written twenty-five years ago, and the fact that we don’t know where Harrison is. I mean, he might be visiting a relative in Scunthorpe for all we know.’

  Waddell signed a credit-card slip, adding a precise 10 per cent for a tip. They got up and by the time they reached the stairs, the waiter had retrieved their coats.

  Outside in the street a light rain was falling. Waddell produced a small umbrella from his briefcase, holding it over their heads as they walked back towards Vauxhall Bridge.

  ‘No, Sam. I don’t think we’re imagining it. You see, one other piece of information emerged this morning. Two weeks ago Harrison set up a trust and put all his assets into it. The premises for the Bordhill Community, his remaining capital, the lot.’

  ‘So?’

  Waddell stopped and fixed Sam with a look that said for Christ’s sake start taking this seriously, chum.

  ‘The lawyer who prepared the deeds told us he gained the impression his client wasn’t expecting to be around for much longer.’

  Sam stared back obstinately. If he was to be forced into this mission, he would make them spell out the reasons for it line by line. ‘And from that you deduced …’

  ‘That for Peregrine Harrison, killing Kamata is so goddam important he’s ready to die in the process.’

  Four

  As he made his way back to Ealing on the tube, Sam flicked cynically through the pages of Harrison’s book, unable to convince himself the threat was real. The way he saw it, the PM had told SIS to jump and the buck had been passed to Waddell, who’d put his name in the frame. Simple as that. Days, weeks of effort were about to be wasted. Then Peregrine Harrison would reappear, asking why all the fuss.

  The cold weather was beginning to get to him. The thought of prowling around the windswept flatlands of Cambridgeshire looking for Harrison’s Bordhill community did not appeal. Spending the next couple of days in bed with Julie did.

  When he arrived at the flat he browsed through the file Waddell had given him, finding most of the contents merely duplicated what he’d learned at lunch. Then he opened Harrison’s book again, A Jungle Path to Hell, and began reading it more seriously.

  The opening chapter was written in the clipped style of a previous age, telling of a school leaver’s excitement about joining the army in the late summer of 1940. Despite the recent and salutary lesson of Dunkirk, the war had still been an adventure to him.

  My upbringing in Burma made me a natural for service in the Pacific and after basic training I was shipped out to Rangoon, considering myself a lucky blighter not to have been dispatched to the deserts of north Africa. A year later however, our belief that the Japs would never dare take on the British in Burma and Malaya received a nasty shock. They invaded with great strength, remarkable speed and with the tactics to outwit our own rather incompetent commanders. There began a retreat for us which involved trekking through a thousand miles of jungle before reaching the safety of India.

  Harrison wrote movingly of the loss of hundreds of his comrades to disease and Japanese bullets during that withdrawal, and expressed a deep concern for his parents who’d been living at a hill station near Mandalay. He’d feared his father’s determination not to yield his property to the invaders had put them into the hands of the Japanese.

  Unfortunately my fears proved justified. When I eventually reached India I managed to trace some friends of theirs who confirmed my father’s insane intent to defend his property to the end. Where they died, I do not know. Sadly their bodies have never been found.

  Sam skim-read the next section in which Harrison stepped back a decade to dwell on his Burmese childhood. An idyllic upbringing by all accounts, with a mother who spoiled him, partly out of her own obsessive love, and partly to compensate for the aloofness of his father. Harrison wrote fondly of his early interest in Buddhism. He told of friends he’d made with Burmese of his own age – not common amongst the colonials – and about the attractively gentle customs of the country.

  It was a place where children seldom seemed to misbehave. They had an extraordinary tolerance of one another, which even at that young age I found admirable. It proved a rude shock for me therefore, when, at the age of thirteen, I was transported from there and thrust into the mêlée of an English boarding school, where very different standards of behaviour applied.

  Then the narrative jumped forward again to 1942. Harrison had been selected for the Chindits. He described forced marches through mosquito-infested jungles in north-east India, part of a gruelling seven-month training to prepare for survival in the Burmese bush. Their eventual insertion had been by glider, crash-landing onto clearings hacked out of the forests by advance parties of American paratroop engineers.

  That first Chindit operation was certainly not short on daring, both in its conception and its execution. The Japs were rattled to discover that we British could fight a guerrilla war as well as them, but teaching them that lesson was done at great cost to us in resources and in lives. The sad truth is that the first Chindit deployment of which I was a part achieved little.

  Sam heard the front door opening. He looked up from the book and glanced at his watch. Nearly six and Julie was back. He stood up and walked into the small hall. Hanging up her coat, she gave a little laugh of pleasure at seeing him.

  Julie Jackman had grey-green eyes, shiny brown hair and wide cheekbones. She was wearing dark trousers and a red pullover. He hooked his arms around her waist and kissed her small, soft mouth. She yielded for a moment then pulled away from him.

  ‘I stink of the lab,’ she whispered. ‘Want to take a shower.’

  ‘We’ll take one together …’

  They kissed again, more slowly this time, savouring each other’s half-forgotten taste.

  ‘God I’ve missed you,’ she breathed. ‘Like … like absolutely bloody crazy.’

  ‘Missed you too.’

  Julie pulled her head back, her eyes full of questions. But they weren’t the ones she asked.

  ‘How was it – the flight back? You must be zonked.’

  Trivial matters. To buy time. She’d been a little shy of him when they’d had their last reunion after months apart and she was so again. Made worse this time because of the ultimatum she’d given him by email a few days ago.

  ‘What time of day is it for you?’

  ‘Bed time.’ He nuzzled her neck, smelling faint echoes of the perfume she’d put on that morning.

  ‘You need a shave …’ she giggled.

  ‘Later.’ He guided her to the bedroom. Just inside the door he lifted her pullover, her arms floating up in willing connivance. Then, as he was about to unclip her bra, she shied away, turning for the bathroom. He pulled her back, nudging her towards the bed.

  ‘No …’ With a shake of the head she extracted herself from his grip. ‘It’ll only take a moment.’

  He peeled off his own clothes and followed her into the bathroom. Julie was reaching for the tap in the shower. He ran his fingertips down the ridge of her spine, then slid his hands round to cup her small, soft breasts.

  She squirmed away and stepped into the cubicle, pulling him in with her. As their mouths found each other under the warm deluge, he reached down to her hips and lifted her up. She locked her arms round his neck and encircled him with her legs.

  He guided himself into her and came within seconds, losing his balance and banging his shoulder against the tiles. Giggling hysterically, Julie clung on with octopus limbs, then with a whoop of alarm released her grip, splashing down into the shower tray.

  ‘You’ll have us both in A and E, you daft bugger. Broken ar
ms, wet hair and you with a bent willy.’

  They soaped each other down then hugged under the jets.

  ‘Welcome back, my darling,’ she murmured. ‘And you still need a shave.’

  When they were dry they poured glasses of wine and Sam ran an electric shaver over his chin. Then they lay on the bed making love again, slowly and lingeringly. Eventually, they fell back against the pillows. Sam’s eyelids closed. By his body clock it was after midnight.

  ‘Hey!’ Julie nudged him in the ribs. ‘Hey, you can’t nod off on me! We’re going out to dinner!’

  ‘We are?’ He opened one eye. The look of bitter disappointment on her face told him he was in trouble.

  ‘We discussed it, remember? On the phone a couple of days ago.’

  ‘Oh Christ …’

  Today was Julie’s thirtieth birthday. He’d failed to buy her a present, forgotten to book a restaurant, even, in his eagerness for sex, omitted to congratulate her on this landmark day in her life.

  ‘You forgot,’ she said limply.

  ‘I’m terribly sorry. The jet lag …’

  She turned away.

  ‘Happy birthday, Julie.’ He put a lame hand on her shoulder but she shrugged it off. ‘Shit, look I’m sorry. Before I left Singapore I had it firmly in my head. But what with the journey back and my meeting …’

  ‘Oh sure …’ She gave him a look of petulant disdain. ‘You haven’t even got me a present, have you?’

  He knew why she was so upset. This was what her absent father had done throughout her childhood – turning up to visit when the mood took him, forgetting birthdays, oblivious to what was important in her life.

  ‘Wasn’t sure what you wanted,’ he mumbled, knowing it was a lousy excuse.

  ‘Only what you wanted …’ she muttered, getting off the bed.

  ‘Look. I’ll fix something.’

  He sat up, but his head was a mess. If they went for a meal he’d nod off at the table.

  ‘Julie …’