The Black Art of Killing

by Matthew Hall

  The unavoidable fact was that Black had only one realistic shot at being accepted. His twenty-two years of experience in the Special Air Service had earned him an invitation to present a paper at an international symposium at West Point Military Academy in late August. If he could make a favourable impression on the audience of generals, diplomats and strategists with his controversial thesis, he stood a chance. He merely had to convince them that nearly every conflict he had been involved with had been a disaster and that all military interventions that couldn’t be avoided should be carried out only with a minimum of arrogance and a maximum cultural understanding. ‘Just discard your entire approach over the last twenty years, ladies and gentlemen; admit you were wrong and start again.’

  No one could accuse him of making life easy for himself. They would expect him to be a man of war eager to promote the idea that problem nations could be brought to heel by their billion-dollar hardware and their populations forced to submission and compliance by highly trained soldiers of just the kind he had been. Peace through superior firepower. Instead they would get a man who had come to believe that surrendering to the instinct to violence was the route to perpetual and unresolved conflict. If that’s what they wanted, so be it, but he was determined to show them there was another way. A way that meant trying to stand in your enemy’s shoes before you even fired a shot. A way that treated violence as the very last resort. If he could change his way of thinking so profoundly, so, he would argue, could they. Each time Black imagined himself at the West Point lectern, all he could picture was row upon row of startled and indignant faces. Sometimes the daydream would end with him being shut down and humiliated in mid flow by some convenient technical fault, but in more optimistic moments he fantasized that his persuasive analysis would bring the assembled company to its feet in rapturous applause, his triumph culminating in a slew of offers to become a trusted advisor to governments and NGOs around the world.

  Then he would come back to earth. If he was well received, the most he could realistically hope for was a fellowship. It would mean a modest but steady wage, lend him the credibility to have his articles published in the respected journals and, crucially, the chance to have his doctorate published as a book. If he was going to change the world, it would be a long, tough slog, and he would have to earn every ounce of respect.

  And if West Point proved a failure and the fellows rejected him, it wouldn’t mark the end of the world. He had a small, slightly dilapidated cottage on the slopes of the Black Mountains in the Welsh borders to retreat to, and sufficient tools in his shed and strength in his arms to scrape a living as a jobbing builder while he worked out what to do next. It was a strange crossroads at which to find himself at this late stage of his career, but after the life he had lived, he was grateful to have reached it at all.

  Black emerged from Gloucester Green on to Worcester Street, dodged between passing bicycles and headed for the unassuming doorway set in the plain eighteenth-century façade of Worcester College. The inauspicious exterior hid one of the best-kept secrets in Oxford. He crossed the threshold and entered the cool shade of the cloister, its stone flags polished and foot-worn by a centuries-long procession of scholars. Framed between its supporting columns was a view over the sunken quadrangle, its rectangular lawn mown in diagonal chequerboard stripes. Beyond the elegantly crumbling sandstone wall at the quad’s far end was the Provost’s garden, whose borders were informal riots of lavender, hollyhocks and peonies, and further on still were the gently stirring trees bordering the college lake. The soft and fleeting beauty of the English summer was the thing he had missed most while on operations in the baking desert or the steamy gloom beneath the jungle canopy. He paused to impress it on his mind.

  ‘Idling, Leo? That’s not like you.’

  Black turned to see Karen Peters emerge from the porters’ lodge clutching a pile of mail. Karen was a gifted plant biologist, a junior fellow and one of the few members of the Senior Common Room he could count as a friend. Dressed in jeans, pumps and baggy T-shirt with sunglasses balanced on her forehead, at first glance she could have been mistaken for a student. Only the faint lines at the corners of her dark green eyes gave any clue to the trauma of her previous three months. Days before she and her husband were about to conclude the purchase of their first home, he had left her for a twenty-three-year-old PhD student, taking all their savings with him. Aged thirty-four and after five years of marriage, Karen had found herself penniless, homeless and broken-hearted. Her lawyer had advised that even if she were to recover the £40,000 he had stolen from her, the legal costs would leave them both bankrupt. As a tutor in contract and family law, her husband had no doubt been aware of this fact.

  Despite these disasters and being reduced to living in two poky rooms in a graduate accommodation block, Karen somehow managed to keep smiling. Fortunately, her cheating husband had been only one of two loves in her life. The other was her work: she was trying to save the dying forests of Canada and Siberia from the ravages of climate change.

  ‘You caught me,’ Black said. ‘I’m always a sucker for this view.’

  ‘How’s the paper coming along?’

  ‘I’ve planned it, more or less. Starting to rough it out.’

  ‘So what you really mean is that you haven’t actually written anything yet?’

  ‘I’m aiming to get a first draft down over the weekend. Hunker down till it’s done.’

  ‘Well, if you need another pair of eyes – not that I’m any sort of expert in your field.’

  ‘Thanks, as long as you’re not too hard on me – my confidence is easily knocked.’ He smiled. Karen smiled back, but Black sensed more than a desire to make harmless small talk beneath the cheerful front. ‘How are things?’ he asked.

  ‘OK.’ She shrugged as if to say she was managing fine, but her eyes told a different story.

  Black took his cue. ‘Fancy a quick stroll?’

  She nodded gratefully.

  He led off down the flight of stone steps that connected the cloister to the sunken quad below. At its foot they turned right and wandered side by side along the gravel path that bordered the grass.

  ‘What’s happened now?’ Black asked.

  ‘Just another letter from Joel’s lawyers. I really shouldn’t be bothering you with it.’

  ‘It’s no trouble. What do they say?’

  She glanced away as if she were too embarrassed to share it, but the pressure had built to the point where she couldn’t help herself. ‘They’re claiming the money was all his, that I was emotionally abusive, impossible to live with, that I was determined to frustrate his career … it just goes on and on. And there was me believing we were happily married. I know rationally that it’s all just lies designed to wear me down, but when you read something like that from someone you loved, you really do start to doubt your own sanity. You can’t help it. You start to wonder whether you really were that person … Does that sound nuts?’

  ‘It sounds perfectly natural. If it’s any comfort, in my limited experience of other people’s divorces, his behaviour has been pretty much typical. And the guiltier the deserter, the dirtier they fight. He won’t keep it up, though – six-month rule.’

  ‘Tell me.’

  ‘The time it takes for sanity to return. Relative sanity, anyway. Anger fades like the first flush of passion – so I’m told.’

  ‘Maybe I should just let it go and forget about the money. I can’t even afford to pay the lawyers’ bills I’ve already got.’

  ‘Anyone would be upset, but you’ve got to try not to react. If he’s being this aggressive, it probably means he’s frightened, which gives you the advantage. He’ll have told the new girl all sorts of lies about what a bad person you were, but the chances are his conscience will get to him in the end and he’ll come back with an offer.’

  Karen nodded. She seemed to want to believe him, but something was nagging at her.

  ‘You say conscience, but … it only happened a couple
of times … when we argued, he scared me. It was like there was a dark side to him that I tried to pretend wasn’t there.’

  ‘Did he ever hit you?’

  She shook her head.

  ‘Threaten you?’

  ‘No … not explicitly.’

  ‘Then I shouldn’t worry. It’ll work out. It nearly always does.’

  They arrived at the far corner of the quad and stopped at the foot of another set of stone steps where they would go their separate ways. Black gave her a reassuring pat on the shoulder. ‘This time next year it’ll all be a memory. I promise you.’

  She nodded, her eyes brightening a little. ‘You are coming to the Provost’s drinks tonight?’

  ‘I’ll try.’ Black kept the fact he had entirely forgotten about the occasion to himself.

  ‘You’ve got to do better than that, Leo. If you want that fellowship, you have to be seen. You’ve got to make yourself part of the furniture, show them your human side. Tell them a few jokes. Soften them up a bit.’

  ‘I’ve never been much good at cocktail parties.’

  ‘That makes two of us.’ The warm breeze scattered her thick brown hair across her cheek. She pushed it away. ‘You are very popular, you know – I keep hearing students saying how great your seminars and lectures are. I’m going to make sure the Provost knows it, too. It counts for a lot.’

  Black was touched. ‘Thanks. I appreciate it.’

  ‘Yes, well – it’s not pure altruism. For one thing I need someone I can talk to around here who isn’t on the spectrum.’ She smiled. ‘No excuses. See you later.’

  Playfully waving an admonishing finger, she set off up the steps.

  Black stared after her for a moment, then continued on his way. Karen was right about the need to ingratiate himself more with the masters of his fate. Her concern for him was touching. He wondered what he had done to deserve it.

  He made his way to a far corner of the quad to the last in the row of a terrace of medieval cottages. From the outside his college accommodation looked charming: a centuries-old oak door set back in a weathered stone porch with roses growing around the lead-lattice window. But the reason it was assigned to a junior tutor became apparent the moment you stepped inside. The interior had remained largely unchanged from its last overhaul in the early 1960s. Apart from the laptop on the heavy Victorian desk, the study room, which took up most of the downstairs floor, looked and smelled exactly as it had done when Black had first ventured across the threshold nearly thirty years before. Then it had been occupied by his former tutor, a small, curt man who wore the same tweed jacket every day of the year and chain-smoked unfiltered Woodbines or, when he had been lucky on the horses, slim Panatela cigars. Though he had been dead for nearly fifteen years, Godfrey Lane’s presence still lingered in the pair of sagging Chesterfield sofas, the oil painting of the heavy cavalry at Waterloo above the gas fire, and the now threadbare rug his father had hauled back on a troop ship from Alexandria at the end of the Desert War. For an historian the rooms were perfect: the ancient plumbing and frigid temperatures from November through to March a constant reminder of the deprivations of the past.

  Black went through to the kitchen at the back, made himself a cup of strong tea and returned to his desk. He had three clear hours before he was expected to be on parade on the Provost’s lawn. More than enough time to crack the critical opening paragraphs of his paper.

  Resisting the urge to prevaricate, he hurriedly typed out the words that had been forming in the back of his mind throughout the day:

  In the early years of this century I met with Afghan men in a village we had just liberated from the Taliban. They were illiterate, had never heard of President Bush or Osama Bin Laden, were unaware of the destruction of New York’s twin towers and considered us hostile invaders. The British, I soon learned, had not been forgiven for their last occupation of their country in the 1870s. The consciousness of these men stretched little further than the walls of their valley. Their minds had been formed by a mixture of tradition, folklore and the local version of Islam. The Koran teaches that the world is 4,000 years old and that is what they believed. Ignorant of science or even of the very idea of intellectual discourse, there was virtually no mechanism by which I could communicate with them except in the most basic terms.

  The British and other occupying armies were, however, expected to win hearts and minds and to convert these tribal peoples into enthusiastic democrats who would discard 1,500-year-old habits, liberate their women and embrace the rule of law.

  Who set those impossible tasks? Our politicians. Politicians needing votes and results. Politicians who could no sooner enter the mind of an Afghan tribesman than those of our prehistoric ancestors.

  This is the truth on the ground. And only when we acknowledge the truth can we address it and find answers. Ladies and gentlemen, I am a soldier who as a result of long and regretful experience has largely ceased to believe in the ability of war to deliver peace.

  Black paused to assess his progress. As an opening salvo it was certainly bold; but, on reflection, its tone was closer to that of a magazine article than learned argument. Arresting as it was, it wouldn’t do. There was too much of him in it. He couldn’t afford to be dismissed as a mere peddler of anecdotes before he had even begun. He tried again with a more impersonal, academic approach:

  Conventional paradigms governing military interventions intended to oust elements hostile to native civilian populations have operated according to a number of a priori assumptions. These principally concern the willingness of newly liberated citizens to engage constructively with their liberators in the implementation of social and political policies deemed by those same liberators to be universally desirable.

  He paused, imagining eyelids in the audience beginning to droop. There had to be a middle way.

  The telephone rang, interrupting his train of thought. He reached for a receiver old enough to be connected by a knotted spiral of cable.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘Is that Major Black?’

  It was a woman’s voice, shaky and tearful.

  ‘Yes.’ He had an idea that it was one he should recognize but he couldn’t immediately put a name to it.

  ‘Sorry to call you out of the blue like this.’ He sensed she was about to deliver bad news. ‘It’s Kathleen. Kathleen Finn. Ryan’s wife.’

  Kathleen. Of course. Black felt his chest tighten.

  She seemed unable to speak.

  ‘What’s happened?’

  ‘He’s working in Paris, as a bodyguard. He was meant to come home today … I just had a call from the British Embassy … They want me to go over and identify …’ She trailed off into sobs, unable to finish her sentence.

  Black heard the sound of excited children in the background. The Finns had three, still all quite young as he recalled.

  ‘There’s a body and they’ve asked you to identify it, is that it?’ He heard himself speak as a soldier, clipped and emotionless.

  ‘Yes –’

  ‘Then I’ll go. You stay with the kids,’ Black said without a moment’s pause. ‘Give me the number of the person who called you and your email address. I’ll make contact and instruct him to route all communication through me. I’ll send you information as I receive it. I’m going to give you my mobile number, too – you can call me any time. Have you got a pen, Kathleen?’

  She fought back tears and whispered a ‘yes’.

  Black dictated his number and made her read it back to him, then took down the number of an Embassy official named Simon Johnson and all of Kathleen’s contact details, both of them finding reassurance in the practicality of the task.

  ‘Have you anyone to keep you company while you’re waiting?’ Black asked. ‘I shan’t be there until tomorrow morning.’

  ‘I can call my sister.’

  ‘Do that. It’s best not to be alone. I’ll be in touch the moment I’ve anything to report.’

  There was a brief, awkward pause
in which Black might have brought the conversation to a close, except that it felt somehow incomplete. He and Finn had worked side by side for twenty years. They had been closer than brothers and saved each other’s skins more times than he could recall. This was never meant to have happened. Finn was the one with family, Black the man whom scarcely anyone outside the Regiment would have come to mourn.

  ‘I’m sorry, Kathleen,’ Black said. ‘We haven’t been in touch for a long time. We should have been. It’s my fault.’

  ‘It was as much his as yours,’ she said. ‘He was always so busy, you know. He did mean to get in touch.’

  ‘Me, too,’ Black said.

  They lapsed into another painful silence. Black put them out of their misery. ‘Goodbye, Kathleen.’

  ‘Goodbye. Thank you.’

  He set down the phone and immediately picked it up again. He dialled the Paris number and got through to Simon Johnson, who sounded no older than a schoolboy. Black explained that he had been Finn’s commanding officer and arranged to come in Kathleen’s place. Johnson wasn’t certain the French police would accept the identification of a non-family member, but Black explained that in all likelihood he had spent more time in Finn’s close company and knew more about his habits than his wife. That seemed to satisfy the young official. They arranged to meet at the mortuary the following lunchtime.