The Perfect Soldier

by Hurley, Graham

  For the first time, he looked Llewelyn in the eyes, answering his chilly stare.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I think she trusted me.’

  The third time Molly went up to the bedroom, her husband was awake. She stood in the open doorway a moment, a cup of tea in her hand, looking down at his face on the pillow. His eyes were open, gazing sightlessly at the empty glass on the bedside table. Molly had sniffed at the glass the first time she’d checked him. It smelled of brandy.

  Now, she bent quickly to the pillow, leaving the tea beside the empty glass, kissing her husband on the forehead. His flesh was cold to the touch of her lips and she crossed the tiny bedroom to the dormer window, pulling the curtains against the darkness outside. Since the couple from London had gone, she’d been downstairs, curled in front of the Aga, preparing herself for what she knew would be a difficult scene. In twenty-six years of marriage, she’d never once taken the initiative. Not in the important things. Not in a crisis like this.

  She sat on the bed, reaching for her husband’s hand. It felt lifeless, dead, as cold and empty as the rest of him. She explained about the visit from the Terra Sancta people, the trouble they’d taken, how kind they’d been. She explained about James’s accident, what seemed to have happened. For the first time, Giles stirred.

  ‘A mine?’ he said.

  He made the word sound almost foreign, something from outer space, something that couldn’t possibly belong in their lives.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘apparently they’re everywhere.’

  ‘And he trod on one?’

  ‘So they say.’

  Giles closed his eyes and groaned, the reaction of a man who wants to hear no more, and Molly squeezed his hand, remembering the church, how full it had been. ‘To everything there is a season; a time to be born, and a time to die.’ Giles struggled upright in the bed, trying to get out, but Molly restrained him as gently as she could, plumping the pillows behind his back. He looked at her the way a stranger might, uncomprehending.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ he said. ‘I’m not ill.’

  ‘I know. I just want to talk.’

  ‘But …’ he began to move again, trying to get his legs out, then gave up. Molly was still stroking his hand.

  ‘We have to go out there,’ she said quietly. ‘You and me.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Angola.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because …’ she paused, knowing that this question would come, knowing that it had to be answered, ‘because it’s important. James is dead, Giles. He’s gone. But I won’t accept it until I’ve been there.’

  She sat back, turning her head away. For the first time, she understood the real depth of her loss, what had been taken from her, what could never be returned. James had indeed gone. No more surprise phone calls from the station. No more midnight bacon sandwiches. No more tussles over the state of his bedroom. She stood up, reaching blindly for the towel on the radiator, mopping her eyes, blowing her nose. Giles hadn’t moved, his face chalk-white against the pillows.

  ‘We can’t,’ he said. ‘We can’t go out there.’

  ‘Why not?’

  He stared at her, pulling the covers to his chin.

  ‘It’s impossible,’ he said. ‘We just can’t.’

  ‘But why not?’

  He shook his head, refusing to answer, a wild, trapped look in his eyes, and Molly gazed at him, uncomprehending, wondering what had happened to the husband she’d known, the warm, uncomplicated man she’d woken up with. Already, she knew that James’s death had taken him away. What was left was someone else.

  ‘I have to go,’ she said uncertainly, ‘whatever happens.’

  ‘You can’t.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘You just can’t. That’s all. What’s the point? The boy’s dead. Going out there won’t get him back.’

  ‘Yes it will. I’ll bring him back.’

  ‘What?’

  He stared at her, utterly blank, and she hesitated a moment before settling on the bed again. This time, she didn’t take his hand.

  ‘I meant the body,’ she said quietly. ‘I’ll bring the body back. And then we’ll bury him.’

  For a moment she thought he was going to break down again but he managed to stay in control.

  ‘How?’ he said at last. ‘How will you get there?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ She shrugged. ‘There’ll be a way. There are planes and things. I’m sure we’ve got the money. It’s not a problem.’

  At the mention of money, he turned his face to the wall. Outside, in the darkness, Molly could hear the cat scratching at the kitchen door. Giles’s eyes had closed. A tiny muscle fluttered beneath the ridge of his cheekbone.

  ‘There is no money,’ he said at last.

  Molly stared at him.

  ‘What?’

  Giles opened his eyes, looking at her for a long moment, all emotion spent.

  ‘There is no money,’ he said again. ‘One of our syndicate’s come unstuck. It owes millions. Hundreds of millions. They want our money …’ he paused, ‘everything we’ve got.’

  CHAPTER TWO

  The first shells fell after midnight. McFaul had been asleep for more than three hours, sprawled on the camp-bed in a corner of the classroom they’d converted into a makeshift dormitory. He was awake at once fumbling for the MagLite torch he kept on the floor beneath the bed, peering through the filmy gauze of the mosquito net. The beam of the torch settled briefly on the camp-bed across the room.

  ‘Bennie,’ McFaul hissed, ‘for fuck’s sake.’

  Bennie grunted and then began to protest, still half-asleep. In three years together, McFaul had never known him master the art of waking up sweet-tempered. McFaul was strapping on his false leg now, then he levered himself upright and limped across the bare wooden floor. Far away he heard a dull crump and he found himself counting the seconds until the explosion. When it came, the blast was uncomfortably close, shaking the old schoolhouse, stirring the blanket they’d hung over one of the windows. Mortars, McFaul thought. Probably 120 mm.

  Bennie was on his feet, cursing in the hot darkness. He and McFaul had discussed this situation only three days ago, when the commander of the local government troops had released the latest intelligence. According to captured prisoners, a big UNITA offensive was imminent. As usual, infantry assault would be preceded by some form of bombardment, either mortars or artillery or perhaps both. Courtesy of their friends in South Africa, the rebels had stockpiled a great deal of ammunition. The shelling could go on for days.

  There was another explosion nearby and then the plaintive wail of a child. McFaul quickly checked the room, sweeping the torch from left to right. He had a standing arrangement with the Red Cross people. They had a secure bunker half a mile away. In the event of emergencies, he and Bennie had allocated places. Bennie was getting his kit together, bundling what he’d need into a holdall and a rucksack. Most of the heavy equipment they’d agreed to leave behind, locked in the closet they’d turned into a strongroom. If the schoolhouse suffered a direct hit, the stuff would probably be destroyed but much of it was too bulky to take with them. The beam of the torch pooled on the survey maps pinned to what had once been the blackboard. The maps were large scale, big blow-ups of the locations where they’d been working, a painstakingly accurate record of exactly what they’d achieved. They held all the vital information, which paths were safe, which fields were still mined, which areas had yet to be surveyed. Without them, they’d have to start all over again.

  McFaul held the torch steady, telling Bennie they’d take the maps with them. Bennie was crouched in the darkness, rolling up his sleeping-bag.

  ‘You want me to bring them?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  McFaul left the room. Out in the corridor, he peered through the window at the new rubber dinghy, lashed to its trailer. They’d only had it a month, airlifted in from the coast, and already it had proved invaluable on the river. Should he try
and wrestle it indoors? Protect it somehow? He heard the crump of another mortar and ducked beneath the window, waiting for the blast. With luck, the dinghy would survive the bombardment. Tomorrow he’d try and sort something out.

  Back in the classroom, McFaul found Bennie unpinning the maps. He had a torch in his mouth and muttered something incomprehensible when McFaul told him they’d be moving out in five minutes. Next to the classroom, through another door, was the storeroom where they kept the generator and the big freezer they’d inherited from an outgoing UN crew. The freezer was powered from the gennie and they normally ran it in bursts, three or four times a day. That was plenty enough to keep the stuff inside decently chilled but now was different. They might be gone for days, quite long enough to lose their precious supply of meat and fish and chilled Sagres beer. McFaul bent to the generator, checking the level of the fuel. On a full tank, it would run for forty-eight hours. Satisfied, he primed the tiny carburettor and pulled the starter cord. The gennie fired first time, settling into a steady thump, and McFaul locked the storeroom door behind him, adjusting the ‘DANGER – MINES’ sign they used as an extra deterrent against looters.

  Bennie was in the corridor now, peering out into the darkness. He’d found a rubber band for the maps and had wedged them under one arm, tightly rolled. McFaul paused by the open door. The place already reeked of exhaust fumes.

  ‘OK?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  Bennie slipped out of the building, following McFaul. The agreed route took them down Muengo’s pot-holed main street, hugging the shadows, moving from house to house. Many of these buildings were already derelict, carrying the scars of earlier fighting: shattered roofs, fire-blackened walls, whole rooms laid open by weeks of bombardment. What wood they contained – floorboards, doors, the odd cupboard – had long gone, stripped out by the refugees, desperate for cooking fuel. By the big, ghost-like Roman Catholic cathedral, McFaul paused, signalling Bennie to take cover. The UNITA mortars were busy again, five or six of them, firing at what McFaul judged to be maximum range. There seemed to be no pattern to the fall of shell, just the random dispatch of high explosive, the usual bid to bludgeon the city into submission. Already, he knew, the hospital would be under siege, relatives arriving with their dying and their wounded, long queues in the candle-lit darkness, kids sitting cross-legged, their faces upturned, uncomprehending. The surgeons at the hospital were Norwegian. There were just two of them but they only stayed a month at a time and they seemed to have limitless reserves of energy. With the recent drugs resupply, and a great deal of luck, they might just cope.

  The mortars fell silent at last and McFaul and Bennie crossed the dusty square outside the cathedral. During daylight hours, this was the heart of the city, the place where the locals spread their mats and traded what few goods they possessed: green bananas, pulped roots, scraps of charity clothing, the odd jam jar half-full of cooking oil, torn paper bags spilling powdered milk, spare ends of the thick, heavy-duty blue polythene scavanged from the aid dumps. The praça, the market, supplied the city’s life-blood and without it Muengo would have died long ago. The praça kept the city going. The praça was what you were left with once everything else had fallen apart.

  The mortars opened up again and McFaul stumbled into an awkward run, covering the last hundred metres to the Red Cross bunker, oblivious to the pain in his leg where the stump chafed against the shaped plastic socket. Access to the bunker lay through a gaping hole in the wall which surrounded the Red Cross compound. After the last siege of the city, the Swiss had brought in their own engineers to do the construction work, adapting the basement of the existing house, strengthening the beams at ground level and adding a rough concrete scree to the earth floor. The result was a blast-proof underground living space, approximately twenty-feet square, offering reasonable protection against anything but a direct hit from a heavy-calibre shell. The bunker had its own electricity and water supplies and a big dipole aerial on the roof supplied a radio link to Luanda and even – atmospherics permitting – to Europe. The head of the Red Cross mission in Muengo had celebrated the bunker’s completion with a party for the local aid community and shortly afterwards drills had been organised in the event of further fighting. The bunker, at a pinch, could hold fifteen.

  McFaul found the steps to the bunker’s entrance, heavily sandbagged on both sides. Halfway down the steps, a face appeared in the darkness. The tempo of the bombardment had increased again and McFaul was in no mood for conversation.

  ‘Por favor … vamos!’

  He tried to push by but couldn’t. The other man muttered an apology in English and it took a second or two for McFaul to recognise the voice. Then he had it. Peterson. The new arrival from Luanda.

  ‘Off somewhere?’ McFaul enquired drily. ‘Out for a stroll?’ Peterson pulled a face in the gloom.

  ‘I’ve got a billet with the UN people,’ he said. ‘They’ve promised to do something about the body.’

  ‘Whose body?’

  ‘Jordan’s.’

  ‘Like what?’

  Peterson shrugged. His eyes were wide.

  ‘Organise a flight, I hope. Unless there’s some other way out.’

  McFaul looked at him a moment, then ducked as an incoming mortar shell plunged into the cathedral square, sending shrapnel and fragments of paving stone whining into the surrounding darkness. Back upright, seconds later, he tried to resume the conversation but Peterson had vanished. Bennie was at the head of the steps now, the sweat beading on his shaven head, pushing McFaul down towards the reinforced steel doors at the bottom.

  ‘Who was that?’

  ‘Peterson. The Terra Sancta bloke.’

  ‘What’s he after?’

  ‘A flight out.’

  At the foot of the steps, both men rapped urgently on the door. Bennie was laughing.

  ‘Dream on,’ he said. ‘Dumb fucker.’

  Molly Jordan was late for her appointment with the family solicitor. On the phone they’d arranged to meet in his office at eleven but she’d spent most of the morning dealing with callers from the village. News of James’s death had been headlined on the local news bulletins and since nine o’clock the kitchen had never been empty. By ten, she’d run out of vases for the flowers callers had brought and when she finally locked the door and fled, the sink was overflowing with iris and gladioli.

  Now she hurried across the road, hoping that Patrick would forgive her. Ever since she could remember, he’d occupied the same suite of offices in a solid thirties building in Frinton’s main shopping street. At one end of the street lay the greensward and the sea; at the other, the white level-crossing gates which guarded the town from the outside world. Frinton, she’d always thought, lived in a time warp: old-fashioned, genteel, determined to resist the uglier encroachments of twentieth-century life. No pubs. No buses. Barely even a fish and chip shop. In this strange, walled-off community, Patrick – with his quiet, good manners and passion for golf – was the perfect fit.

  He was waiting for her in the little reception area. Unlike most men she knew, he seemed completely at ease with emotional situations. Now, he stepped forward and put his arms around her, hugging her tightly. She could smell the pipe tobacco he smoked in the folds of his battered tweed jacket. Nice man, she thought. Nice, nice man.

  They went upstairs to his office. Bright sunshine patterned the carpet. He paused by the drinks cabinet in the corner, waving away her apologies for being late. He offered her a sherry but she settled for tea.

  ‘Alice sends her best,’ he said. ‘She’s there if you need her. You only have to ring.’

  Molly nodded. Patrick’s wife, Alice, had no children of her own and she’d always taken a lively interest in James. For the first time, it occurred to Molly that the loss to her would be profound.

  Patrick talked for several minutes, gentle reminiscences about James, the various scrapes he’d got himself into, his unerring nose for trouble. He used the past tense without any trace of em
barrassment or awkwardness and Molly found herself smiling at some of the more outrageous stories, oddly comforted. James had been real. Real blood. Real tears. Real laughter. When the temptation was to sentimentalise, to make the boy out to be some kind of saint, she needed to hang on to that.

  After a while, a tray of tea arrived. Molly was nibbling a biscuit, her first food of the day, when Patrick asked about Giles.

  ‘How’s he taking it?’

  ‘Badly, he’s …’ Molly tried to find the right word, ‘in shock, I suppose. It’s hard to recognise him just now. He doesn’t seem to want me around. Or anyone else for that matter … It’s …’ She shook her head, still nursing the biscuit. Giles hadn’t come to bed until two in the morning and even then she knew he hadn’t slept. She’d gone running at seven as usual, determined to hang on to this one precious hour of her day, but by the time she got back he’d gone. No note. No explanation. Just another empty tumbler on the draining board, smelling faintly of Scotch.

  Patrick sipped his tea.

  ‘He phoned first thing,’ he said. ‘About half-seven.’

  ‘Giles?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What a coincidence.’ She frowned, trying to remember whether she’d told him about her plans to drive over to Frinton. ‘Did he know I was coming?’

  ‘No, but he asked me to talk to you anyway. So …’ he smiled, ‘it’s all worked out rather well.’

  ‘What about? What did he want you to say?’

  Patrick got up and closed the door. When he sat down again the smile had gone.

  ‘You’ll know he’s in trouble. I gather he told you.’

  ‘He told me we’re broke. Is that what you mean?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Patrick reached for the teapot, offering a refill, but Molly shook her head. It was a shock to realise that this man probably knew more about their financial affairs than she did. She felt herself colouring slightly, more irritation than embarrassment.

  ‘Patrick …’ she began, ‘it’s been a difficult twenty-four hours. What exactly do you want to tell me?’