by Tom Bradby
He was wearing a pair of khaki trousers and a white turtle-neck sweater and she couldn’t ignore how handsome he still looked. Clean-cut and good-looking. The things that had not immediately appealed before the summer in which they’d made love – his thinness and the narrowness of his face – now seemed like virtues. She turned back and chose a Louis Armstrong selection.
After putting it on, she looked across at the shelves to her left. One section seemed to be history, another contemporary fiction, all organized and neat. ‘Okay,’ she said, ‘wall-to-wall history and then, next shelf, Bridget Jones’s Diary. What does that say about a man?’
‘Pretentious. Slave to literary fashion.’
It was impossible to imagine him reading, let alone enjoying, Bridget Jones.
‘I forgot the wine,’ he said, and went to get it. For a man who had served in the SAS and then British Intelligence – MI6 – he seemed curiously vague sometimes.
Julia put on the tracksuit and glanced around the room again. There were few photographs and pictures – none on the mantelpiece or above his desk. On the wall ahead, there was a beautiful watercolour of a young girl, a bucket and spade in her hand, and an expanse of empty beach and sea beyond. He had obviously been to London because there was an Evening Standard on the ottoman and when she turned it over, she saw that it was today’s. The front page carried a picture of a group of office workers in Ohio running from their building, the accompanying story detailing another shooting rampage. Inside, there was a photograph of the man responsible, pictured with his wife and two young children. He had killed his wife first, then the children – the latter to spare them, he had written in a note, ‘a lifetime of pain’. The girl could not have been more than five and both she and her elder brother looked happy sitting on their father’s knee. All four were smiling.
Julia looked closely at the faces of the children who had not deserved to pay the price for an adult’s inadequacies and who had lost their one chance of life to the man they had had most reason to trust.
The second story on the front page had an ‘exclusive’ tag and was speculation about another new search for a body on Welham Common. She wondered how they had got hold of that and imagined, for a moment, the media circus that would accompany an announcement.
Michael placed a glass of wine in front of her.
‘How come you’re suddenly so rich?’ she asked.
‘Theft.’
‘No, come on. Seriously.’
He leant forward, spreading his legs and resting his elbows on them. ‘I told you. I’m in business now.’
‘What sort of business?’
Michael tossed a log on to the fire, sending sparks flying up the chimney, then picked up a packet of cigarettes from the table beside him and leant forward. She took one and he lit it for her.
‘Since we last saw each other,’ he said, staring into the fire, ‘which must have been at least three years ago, if not longer, I decided that the Service and I were never going to get along in a permanent sense and so, with one or two former colleagues, I set up a business called Assured Security. Should you ever be wishing to set up an office in Moscow or Azerbaijan, or anywhere like it, you can come to me and I will make sure that your premises don’t get raided and you don’t get kidnapped by the Chechen Mafia, or whomever it happens to be. In fact, if you’re looking for a job …’
‘And it’s profitable?’ she asked, looking at her surroundings.
He nodded. ‘It’s very profitable, but … an aunt died as well.’
Michael took a long drag of his cigarette, letting the smoke drift out of his mouth, not concentrating on its expulsion. He had his sleeves rolled up and she could see the contours of the muscles on his forearms. His hands were broad. Julia wondered, again, if he had fucked Sarah, but this wasn’t the first time she had asked herself the question.
‘How was Northern Ireland?’ he asked.
She looked down at her glass. ‘Fine. I left there eight months ago.’ She looked at him. ‘I think you enjoy taunting me in front of everyone. You know they’re all still looking at us, wondering …’
‘Don’t be paranoid. Our relationship was pleasant, if brief, but it’s long over and everyone knows it.’
‘And you’re still punishing me.’
‘Why would I be punishing you?’
‘Because I cut you dead.’
‘I’m a big boy.’
Julia shrugged. ‘Well, I’m sorry, I suppose.’
Michael smiled at her. ‘That is the most insincere apology I’ve ever heard, but I wouldn’t worry about it.’
He leant back, resting the ankle of his right leg on the knee of his left and running his hand through his hair. ‘What’s your friend doing back here?’
Julia didn’t think this question was as casual as it sounded. ‘I think Professor Malcolm, if that is who you mean, is here because he believes he made a mistake in his diagnosis of the crime and—’
‘Academics don’t diagnose crimes. Doctors diagnose illnesses.’
‘Well, these days, that’s not strictly—’
‘Anyway …’ He waved his hand irritably, then threw the cigarette into the fire. Julia had not yet taken a drag of her own. ‘I still don’t understand what you’re doing.’
‘I’m helping.’
‘Helping. How come a high-flying army officer has time to do that?’
‘I’m on leave.’
‘Voluntary or forced?’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘Voluntary or forced leave?’
Julia hesitated. Word had probably got round already. ‘Forced.’
‘What did you do?’
‘I don’t – that’s – I’d rather not talk about it.’ She looked at him. ‘Why did you say the other day that you had some sympathy for me and for what I was doing?’
He looked confused.
‘You said you could see what I was doing and “most people” would have some sympathy.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘It’s a simple question.’ She had moved to the edge of the sofa. She put the cigarette to her lips and inhaled for the first time. It had already burnt almost to the filter and she noticed her hands were shaking again. ‘Come on,’ she said. ‘I’m helping the Professor review a criminal investigation. Of course it makes people uncomfortable, and it’s worse because I’m not an outsider like everyone else. They don’t like it, they shouldn’t like it, so why do I get the impression that everyone is trying to … protect me? Even if they have their own secrets, when they are confronted with them, it’s like … I mean, they look at me and it’s like, you know, there’s only so much we can say, don’t want to hurt Julia.’
‘What secrets?’
She threw her cigarette into the fire. ‘Never mind.’
‘Perhaps,’ he said, ‘they are wise to protect you.’
He got up, walked to the sideboard then returned. He took her empty glass and gave her a huge tumbler, with plenty of ice and an enormous dose of malt whisky. Julia helped herself to another of his cigarettes and lit it. This time, she inhaled deeply.
‘You know,’ he said. ‘Is this really doing you, or anyone else, any good? Why don’t you call it quits?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘It’s common gossip that your father was close to Sarah. Nobody knows what really did and didn’t go on, it’s a long time ago, so just leave it at that. Adult relationships are difficult to fathom, especially when you’re a child, so give your father the benefit of the doubt, if you want, and then just forget it. Move on.’
Julia could feel the heat of the fire on her face. She took another large gulp of the whisky, inhaled deeply on the cigarette, then closed her eyes as she blew out the smoke. ‘So that’s what people are protecting me from?’
‘No.’
Julia felt her stomach turning over.
‘No,’ he went on. ‘That was common gossip. I don’t think they’re protecting you from that.’
Julia stared into the fire. The new log was resting on the red embers of two old ones, but it was catching now, the flame climbing higher up the blackened wall of the chimney behind. Louis was still singing in the background, but his sonorous tones did nothing to calm her nerves.
‘I thought you liked my father.’
‘I did.’
‘Why did you like him?’
‘I told you that, Julia, that’s why you were interested in me.’
‘That is not …’
‘Don’t be defensive.’ Haydoch sighed. ‘I liked him because he was a character, because I thought he was the original no-bullshit officer; straightforward, honest, reliable, with a lot of integrity. If he said something, you thought you could rely on it. In the war, he made sure that we had the best kit, and if he thought somebody was withholding something he’d go down and get it himself. If he didn’t like the orders, he’d more or less refuse to carry them out. He hated arse-lickers and career crawlers and was never afraid to say what he thought. If he was briefing you and you thought he was wrong, you could say so and he would listen. That’s why I thought I liked him.’
‘That’s the most loaded eulogy I’ve ever heard.’
‘Suspicion can erode almost anything. You have read Othello?’
Julia did not reply.
‘Is Mitchell Havilland Desdemona or Iago?’
Julia stared at the floor.
‘If he was the man I have just described, then why was he so often seen with Sarah, even though she never talked about him? We were friends, but she never said a word about him and yet I saw them walking together … The wife of one of his junior officers.’
Michael was staring at her. ‘How could he have been just helping her? Does that seem likely to you? And yet does it fit with everything I’ve just said? Does it? The question for you is: are you certain truth is better than suspicion?’
She looked at him. ‘How can the truth be a bad thing?’
‘It could be in a relationship you cannot escape from.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘You can escape from a wife or a husband. The wife who thinks her husband is cheating can perhaps afford to have her life destroyed by knowledge of his infidelity, so that she can begin again, but a parent and child … You can never escape from that relationship, can you, even if you want to? You can’t choose another set of parents.’
His eyes rested intently on her. ‘What do you … suspect your father of, exactly, Julia?’
She looked at him, sharply, before glancing at the fire. ‘Don’t get inappropriately intimate.’
‘Intimacy,’ he responded, ‘is what you’re afraid of.’
‘I was intimate with you.’
‘Physical, but not intimate.’
She exhaled heavily.
‘You can’t trust anyone, that’s what it boils down to. You feel betrayed by your father’s memory, because you trusted him and—’
‘What happened here was evil,’ she said. ‘Beyond evil. How can anyone forget? Don’t you see it here? Don’t you look for it every day?’
‘There was a culprit.’
‘No, there wasn’t.’
‘What do you want me to do? Look under the bed at night? Sure it was evil, but evil doesn’t advertise itself in The Times. It can be mundane. It is selfishness, insecurity, insensitivity, self-justification. It’s about what you can get away with. It’s about not understanding the consequences of cruelty – or not caring or even acknowledging a moral framework. Acts of evil can be committed easily. Not being aware of the world in which you live – or at least caring about it only in so far as it relates directly to you.’
She did not understand what he was saying. His sudden exposition had a relevance she could not discern.
He stood up. ‘I’ll get you another drink.’
She watched as he poured the whisky into the glass. She felt light-headed.
Julia was drunk. She was sitting on the sofa, her head spinning violently. The room was warm, so warm she wanted to take off her jumper and perhaps her shirt too. Her inhibitions had gone. ‘He loved me,’ she said.
‘Of course. But you were jealous of the little girl. You believe he betrayed you, but you don’t know how.’
Julia had closed her eyes. She could hear the sound of her own breathing.
‘He was affectionate to the little girl, too, wasn’t he? Very close.’
Julia did not respond.
‘What did you really fear, Julia? What do you fear? Did you fear that love was being taken away from you?’
The room was silent, but for the crackle of the fire.
‘Did you fear that the love that should have been yours was being taken away and given to someone else, to the little girl next door? And to her mother?’
Julia wanted to speak, but couldn’t.
‘Given to Sarah? Given to Alice? But the truth is, that wasn’t your real fear, was it? You actually feared the type of love he may have had for the little girl next door.’
Julia bent her head, gritted her teeth. ‘Shit,’ she whispered, under her breath.
‘Your man, your professor, thinks it’s about the woman, about Sarah. Nobody believes that. Nobody. Adults kill each other all the time, no one cares. Adult passions, adult folly, adult retribution, adult consequences … but here, the filth and the suspicion and the hatred, that’s about what a man wanted to do to a little girl, isn’t it?
‘It’s about the way little Alice was coveted by a man she had reason to trust. That’s what people here are protecting you from. It’s not just about screwing Sarah, is it? Why did he have to muscle in as a surrogate father to Alice? She had a father, didn’t she?’
He was staring at her and she was trying to avoid meeting his eye.
‘To paraphrase a great fictional criminal: what do we covet, Julia? We covet what we see every day.’
The machine-gun fell silent, leaving just the whistle of the wind as it whipped across the ridge and around the rocks, slicing through to their skin. The man started crying again, the sorrowful, agonized whimper of the dying.
Julia watched Mitch’s blackened face, almost invisible in the darkness.
‘Fuck,’ she heard him say.
He was sitting behind the ridge, leaning against a rock, without a helmet, wearing the dark brown woollen hat she’d given him, his face blacked up. There was fear in the faces around him – of failure, of cowardice, of death – but she could see the strength in him and knew it was what sustained them.
The man cried out again.
Julia watched him make the decision, the certainty and determination in the set of his chin. A grunt and then he was up, another shell bursting overhead, crawling through the mud and the wet, feeling the rocks tearing at him, hearing the clatter of guns, the bullets passing him by, seeking contact, but disappearing miraculously into the blackness beyond.
Despite the noise all around him, she could hear his ragged breathing and see the concentration in his face.
Progress was so slow. Another shell exploded, death tickling the air around him.
Time had stopped.
She felt a rush of fear at the blast of a closer shell. She heard the angry panic of the machine-gun ahead.
He was still on his feet, taking the last steps, with the world slowing and fate quickly closing the odds.
He tripped, almost falling, fighting for balance, sliding in the mud and the wet, boots slipping back. The boy was whimpering, his strength gone.
And now he was running downhill, the boy in his arms, clutching his stomach.
He slipped, wobbled and ran on. She felt the tears in her eyes as he came so close to them, saw the passion in his muddy face and finally felt the bullet squarely in the middle of her own back.
Like a great tree, he tumbled.
Julia saw that the body he had carried was Alice. It was her face and now, resting beside him, her eyes shut, she looked peaceful.
For a moment, there was only the sound of the
wind and the shock in his face and the silent sound of a life disintegrating halfway across the world.
Then, panic.
Sudden shouting, activity, anger. They were on their feet, over the ledge, the spur to end this battle and take the last section of the ridge. Julia heard the furious screams of the men and the rattle of their gunfire as they tried to expunge their cowardice.
She saw someone kneeling in the mud beside him.
Someone else was screaming into the radio. ‘CO hit, repeat CO hit, request urgent evacuation!’
Someone was tearing at his uniform, ripping the buttons open, pumping his chest, stemming the blood.
‘Jesus fucking Christ!’
‘Come on, Mitch, come on.’
‘It’s all right,’ he’d have said, teeth gritted, knowing it wasn’t.
Issuing last orders.
‘Tell the buggers …’
A moment of peace, staring up at the sky, thinking of them so far away, crying inside perhaps, but too tired to let it show. Gripping the hand of the man beside him, still strong, even now. The thud, thud, thud of the rotor-blades in the distance.
And then, for him, the silence beyond human endeavour.
She looked up from his body, and a group of men stood there. They had guns in their hands and they were smiling. Michael was smiling. Alan was smiling. Adrian Rouse was smiling.
And then Mitch was sitting in front of a birthday cake in full camouflage kit, his face still blackened, Alice on his knee, the pink dress falling from her shoulders.
‘This is the way the lady rides …’
He was bouncing her.
‘This is the way the soldier rides …’
Alice was not laughing, or enjoying this.
‘This is the way that Alice rides … Wheeeeeee!’
Julia woke up. She stood up, immediately. She had been lying face down on the bed. Her throat was raw, her head pounding. She flailed her hand, as if trying to beat the air that surrounded her.
‘Christ,’ she muttered. ‘Christ.’
The room was quiet, light spilling through the gap in the curtains. She went across to pull back the one on the right. The gravel drive was flooded in arc-light, the trees and lawn beyond still hidden by the darkness of the night. Her head was spinning. She turned back to the room. The bed had been comfortable, but she was almost naked. Had she undressed herself?
