Waking Caliban

by Mike Cartlidge

  “I’m as well as can be expected, Sergeant,” I said. “Yourself?”

  “In the pink, sir. Thriving.”

  “You’re not marching today?”

  “I had enough of marching in the old days, sir. I swore I’d never do it again when I finally got out.” He turned and looked around as if he was checking that the Redcaps weren’t coming back our way. “I saw you just as our boys went past. I thought I’d come over and say hello.”

  “That was good of you,” I told him. “Most of my former comrades…”

  “I know, sir,” he said. He stared straight into my eyes, unflinching as ever he’d been. “I’d like to think it’s a bit different between the two of us. I was going for a pint in yonder pub. Care to join me?”

  My eyes went past him. I could see the top of the Cenotaph, ghost-like in the rainy mist.

  “I’d be glad if you would,” he urged.

  I nodded and then followed him as he shouldered his way through the crowd. I guess he was right about the relationship between the two of us. He was, after all, the senior NCO of my first command. I’ve known officers to say that their first sergeant meant more to them than their first lover and be only half-joking.

  The pub consisted of two pokey rooms with a narrow bar to connect them. It smelled of smoke and hops and its seats were all threadbare fabric and cracked varnish. Most people were still outside watching the parades and the place was half empty. We ordered pints of bitter and found a table by a back wall where we could talk without having to raise our voices.

  He sipped his beer and leaned his head towards mine. “So, how are you really, sir?”

  “You don’t have to call me ‘sir’ any more, you know.”

  “I know. And you don’t have to call me ‘sergeant’. ‘Geordie’ will do.”

  “And you can call me-”

  “Mr. Hastings?” There was the faintest twitch of a smile on the trap-line mouth.

  “What are you doing with yourself nowadays, Geordie? You were due to retire from the Army, what? Two years ago?”

  “Two and a half, sir.” He went on to tell me how he’d been approached before he’d even left the Paras, how he’d joined the agency, about some of the assignments he’d done. “Only in-country, though, sir.” He sniffed and almost-smiled again. “It’s the same as I said about the marching. I had enough of gallivanting around the world when I was serving. It’s time to spend my life with the wife, now. And the young ’uns.”

  “They’re…”

  “The girl’s eleven and the boy’s nine. Bonny kids. The lad especially. Oh, I love my daughter just as much but, when I’m home, me and the lad do everything together, fishing, playing football, going to games, the lot. Inseparable, we are.”

  “That’s great,” I said, my voice even.

  “Yeah,” he said. “We had them late in life, me and Julie. I thought they had a right to have an old man who was around when they were growing up.”

  “So no more seeing the world from the bottom of a parachute.”

  “I’m too old for that nonsense now, sir. Anyway, the agency said they were okay with me not traveling abroad. They said they’d enough work in Britain to keep the likes of me busy.” He took a long pull on his beer, his eyes never leaving my face. “So, you’re surviving okay, then?”

  I told him about the job and the bed-sit, making both sound a bit grander than they really were.

  He sat still, considering. “I never believed for a moment all those things they said about you, when they made you leave the Regiment.”

  I returned his stare, suddenly moved. “Thank you, Geordie. I suspect that puts you right in the middle of a crowd of one.”

  “Not really. None of the men believed it of you. It was just the brass.”

  “Not just the brass.”

  “All right. It was those of your own class, wasn’t it? I could never understand...” He seemed embarrassed, for the first time since I’d known him, and I realized he was thinking about my family and my fellow officers, who’d been all too ready to believe the worst of me.

  “Officially,” I said, “nothing happened anyway.”

  “I know, sir. I know.” He sipped at the beer again, bobbing his head towards the glass, the movement strangely delicate for a man I knew to be tough and much stronger than he appeared. “The agency’s always recruiting, you know, sir.”

  I shook my head. “I would imagine that being a bodyguard is quite different from being a soldier. I don’t know anything about it.”

  “We don’t call ourselves bodyguards. We are protectors. And the agency will provide training. They’ll want payment for it and it doesn’t come cheap…”

  “I don’t have any money, Geordie.”

  “If they think you’re worth the investment, they’ll let you pay off the debt from your first few assignments.”

  “They might have some doubts about whether I was worth the investment if they checked out my history.”

  He chewed the side of his mouth for a moment. “I don’t think so, sir. Half the people in the agency have something in their past they’d rather not talk about. Especially some of them lot overseas.” I could only guess at what he meant, but I’d heard some talk before of the agency and remembered there had been an incident when a bunch of their people had been present during an unexpected change of government in a far eastern country. The agency’s people had been obliged to make a hasty evacuation and the press had been divided over whether the evacuees had been ‘advisors’, as they claimed, or straight-out mercenaries.

  “A bit like the Foreign Legion, some of them lot are.” He drained the remainder of his beer and thumped the glass down on the table. “What they will look for is integrity, a sense of honor. I’d vouch for you, sir, and I reckon that’d be worth something.”

  He went off home to his family, leaving me his card. I slid it into my pocket, not expecting to ever look at it again. A week later, though, the bullying foreman at the timber yard tried to give me a hard time over a misdirected shipment of four by two and, when he grabbed the front of my shirt for the third time, I showed him a little counter-move, slipping my hand under his and wrenching down on his thumb. It was enough to send him sprawling to his knees and keep him grimacing in pain until I got an apology out of him.

  I wasn’t proud of what I’d done – pride was an emotion I’d sacrificed years before – but maybe it wasn’t such a bad thing. He scurried away and returned with the site manager, who was a tiny man but found himself positioned between the foreman and me while the foreman indicated that my services would no longer be required. I laughed at the pair of them and took myself off for a stiff scotch at the nearest pub and then laughed at myself for being such a fool and then headed back to my bed-sit, where I sat, holding Geordie’s card, for a full hour before reaching for the phone.

  ***

  So it was that, two nights after the Stratford incident, Geordie Thorpe was in my thoughts as I lay in the dark of my room, staring at the ceiling, playing movies of my life, my lost family, the children I hadn’t seen in years, my blighted career. I thought of death at times like this, thought of recovering my pistol from its left-luggage hiding place and welcoming the coolness of its muzzle against my temple. Somehow, Geordie’s undying confidence in me was a comfort.

  Then Isbey called me to tell me Thorpe was dead.

  Chapter 4

  The sensation in my stomach was like ice forming in an underground lake. I held the phone hard against my ear as if that would make what I was hearing easier to bear.

  “It wasn’t just Thorpe,” said Isbey.

  “The ex-cop?” I asked. “Brett Young?”

  “They were both shot, Hastings.” Isbey’s voice was as calm as ever but there were fractional pauses between each word that made me think he was making an effort to stay composed.

  I breathed deeply and looked around my small room. The shock hit me hard. I’d lost men in my army days but that had been a long time ago. Geordie Thorpe
had befriended me when I was alone in the world and I suppose I’d always felt that there was a debt there that, one day, I’d repay.

  “What happened?”

  “Their bodies were found outside a deserted cottage on the outskirts of Stratford. Neighbors heard gunfire and called 999. The police went to the scene and discovered our men on the ground. They’d both been shot several times. It was an execution-type shooting, from close range. The police found Young’s agency ID card and called me. They told me both men would have died quickly, if that’s any consolation.”

  I thought about Thorpe’s kids. They’d be around 13 and 15 years old by now. “Has Thorpe’s wife been told of his death?”

  “The police said they’d sent someone to see her. We’ll be sending one of our own welfare people as soon as we can, to offer our assistance. Other than them, you’re the only other person who knows. I knew you’d want to be told straight away. I recall that Thorpe and you were rather close.”

  “There’s no sign of who did it?”

  “It seems not,” Isbey replied. “No doubt the police will have the forensics people there. Maybe they’ll find something.”

  “Were Thorpe and Young armed?” I asked him.

  “No.”

  I sat quietly as Isbey held on the line. My grief at Thorpe’s death was matched by a mounting anger that someone would kill him and orphan his children in such a cowardly manner.

  “And Bakst?” I asked at last. “Are you going to call him?”

  “I will, soon.”

  “What happens next?”

  “I’m heading to Stratford,” he said, “as soon as I’ve finished talking to you. Someone will have to be on the scene to deal with the police and to arrange for Thorpe and Young’s bodies to be brought home.”

  “I’ll come with you.”

  I could hear him clearing his throat. “Yes, that might be as well. Once the police find out that you were there last week, they’re bound to want to talk to you.”

  “I don’t know what I’ll be able to tell them,” I said.

  “I know. But, excepting the need for confidentiality, the agency’s policy at times like this is to co-operate fully with the authorities. Tell me where I can pick you up.”

  I gave him my address and he said he’d be outside in fifteen minutes.

  I shaved, showered and dressed, throwing a change of clothes and the history book I’d been reading into an overnight bag, moving too quickly to give my mind time to dwell on Thorpe’s death. When I hurried down to the street, dawn was creeping through the city’s buildings from under blood red clouds. I looked to the east and thought of seamen standing watch on tankers and warship bridges, reading the signs in the sky and predicting turbulent seas. Here, though, it was the stillest of Sunday mornings and the sounds of lonely birds and a far-off river boat emphasized the silence that surrounded me. I sat on the front steps and watched a trickle of water from some leaky pipe in an adjacent building as it ran softly along the gutter on the other side of the road. Such melancholic moments might have deepened my depression but I’d always found that, rather, they acted like an inoculation against a virus, a small dose of fever that restrained the onset of worse contagion.

  After a few minutes, Isbey pulled up and I climbed into the passenger seat of his Jaguar. I didn’t feel much like conversation but I guessed that Isbey needed to talk. Several times, he shook his head and muttered that he couldn’t believe what had happened.

  “We lose people sometimes, of course we do.” His voice remained calm but his hands fidgeted on the steering wheel. His usually immaculate standards of personal grooming had slipped: he’d missed some stubble while shaving and there was a tell-tale dot of blood on the collar of his white shirt. “It’s an occupational hazard when we deploy our people in some parts of the world. It doesn’t happen in this country, though. Not like this. That’s why our people go unarmed…”

  “Did you call Bakst?” I asked.

  “His mobile was turned off,” Isbey said. “I left a voicemail message.”

  I looked from the car window as we left London behind and sped along the motorway. We passed pasture fields and I saw a bull standing astride a hill on square-set legs, staring at the passing cars in challenge. “There are a few questions I’d like to ask him. Like, whether he had any idea what he was sending us into.”

  Isbey glanced at me then turned his attention back to the road. “What would he have to gain from putting our men in danger? Nothing, surely.”

  “Maybe,” I murmured.

  We drove on in silence, Isbey keeping to the speed limit. Just as we passed the border into Warwickshire, his mobile rang. He answered, using the car’s hands-free, and I recognized Bakst’s smooth Sydney Greenstreet tones. I listened quietly as Isbey explained that I was with him in the car and told him what he knew.

  “May I say to both you gentlemen,” Bakst said, “how shocked I am and how desolate for the loss of your comrades. Regrettably, though, I must insist that my involvement in this unfortunate matter be held in confidence as far as the authorities are concerned.”

  I leaned over towards the phone’s microphone. “Bakst, we have two men down-”

  “And, as I said, I am truly regretful. But my involvement in this business must be kept between the three of us. Colonel Isbey…”

  Isbey shot a warning glare at me. “The agency’s policy is always to preserve the confidentiality of its clients, Mr. Bakst.”

  “Mr. Bakst?” I forced myself to be calm. “What is it you’re not telling us?”

  “My dear sir, there is absolutely nothing,” he said. He sounded almost exasperated and I ground my teeth at the man’s obvious indifference to the suffering that would ripple out from those night-time acts of violence to shatter the lives of families and loved ones.

  “Roden disappears,” I said, “I get attacked and then two men are killed. On your advice, this is a grade 5 engagement. What’s wrong with this picture?”

  There was a moment’s silence and I could picture his stony stare as he held the phone. “I can assure you,” he said at last, “that I had no idea that this affair would have such unfortunate consequences. The nature of the assignment was just as I described it when we met in London. I do not know where Professor Roden has got to or who might have intervened to divert him from the assignment he was undertaking on my behalf. As for your men… I can only assume that they stumbled into something that none of us expected.”

  I was ready to argue the toss but Isbey waved his hand to silence me. He spoke placatingly to Bakst until the other man rang off.

  I looked out of the car window at the passing fields and trees while I got my feelings under control. “He knows more than he’s saying,” I said, at last.

  “We don’t know that. But, whether he does or not is a question we must leave until later.”

  As he drove on, I found my feelings coalescing into anger and a barely-reasoned need to make those responsible for Thorpe’s murder account for their crimes. I had an obligation to my old comrade. Irrespective of what Isbey might want, I was going to stay involved until, somehow, I’d seen the guilty brought to account.

  By the time we reached Warwickshire, the first of the tourist coaches were taking to the roads, carrying their charges on to the wonders of Warwick Castle or Stonehenge or whatever was on the schedule for the day. Stratford, though, was unchanged, despite the violence that had shaken its suburbs. Isbey pulled the Jaguar into the curb and asked an elderly man the way to the central police station before driving on and parking the car across the road from the somber dark-brick building.

  ***

  The local plod took Isbey away to talk to him and I was left to cool my heels in an interview room which contained nothing but a small table, its wood as scratched as an old school desk, and a couple of chairs. For an hour or so, I tried to ignore the aroma of pine disinfectant and bodily fluids and stared at walls that might have been painted cream, around the time of the Crimean War. I wished I�
��d brought my book from the car. I couldn’t help thinking about Geordie Thorpe and his family, imagining them as they should have been, laughing together and contemplating a future in which the father of the family had nothing more urgent on his mind than taking his son to soccer games and attending parents’ nights at his daughter’s school.

  Eventually, the door opened and I was joined by a middle-aged man whose mouth and cheeks were etched with such deep lines that he probably looked as though he was frowning even when he wasn’t. Which I suspected wasn’t very often. He told me he was a detective sergeant and that his name was Tench. When he asked me what my involvement had been in the events leading up to the deaths of Thorpe and Young, I told him the bare facts of the case, that I’d been looking after a man called Roden, that Roden had disappeared, and that the dead men had been given the job of finding him. Tench made desultory notes in a small black book but gave me no indication of what he was thinking. After a while, he seemed to tire of the whole thing and, picking up his little book, began to move towards the door.

  “Can I go now?” I asked him.

  He turned back to me wearily. “My boss will want a word, sir. If you wouldn’t mind holding on a while longer.”

  I spent another ten minutes gazing at the walls until the door opened again and Tench led in a man whom he introduced as Detective Inspector Rainbow. When I offered him my hand, the new guy ignored it and sat down opposite me to read what I took to be Tench’s notebook. He was, I noticed, pretty-much gray from the thinning hair on his head to his twill trousers and, for all I knew, his socks. I wondered idly if the drabness of his appearance was some sort of protest against a lifetime of comments about his name. Add in the stale smell of cigarettes that wafted across the table and he was the human equivalent of an extinguished bonfire. I sat and stared at the wall until he lifted his head and looked at me.

  “I’ve read through the statement you gave Sergeant Tench,” he said.

  He seemed to want some sort of response from me but I kept quiet and waited for him to speak again. Eventually, he pursed his lips and sighed. “You don’t seem to have told him any more than your colleague, Colonel Isbey, told me.”