Other Countries

by Jo Bannister

  Still Ash had the attentive, blank expression of a sniffer dog with a head cold – willing but unable to help.

  ‘Okay,’ said Hazel resignedly, ‘let’s take it a step at a time. You know how a television works?’

  ‘By picking up a signal transmitted …?’

  ‘No, no,’ said Hazel. ‘I mean, you turn it on at the wall and then you press the button. And a lot of the time a little man comes out and talks to you about stuff. Well, quite often, if the stuff has anything to do with history, the little man is going to be Oliver Ford.’

  Ash was nodding slowly. Her teasing didn’t offend him. He’d been out of circulation for a while. It was only thanks to Hazel’s efforts that he was slowly gaining on the twenty-first century. ‘What’s he doing in Norbold? A series on the treasures of the Black Country?’

  ‘Hardly,’ chuckled Hazel. ‘There’s a new museum opening at Wittering. Britain’s role in the Crusades or something. That’s his period.’

  ‘I thought the Crusaders were rather frowned on these days,’ Ash commented mildly. ‘All that riding over other people’s countries, and poking the residents with sharp sticks to make them believe in the goodness of the Christian God.’

  Hazel shrugged. Her interest in history had come to an end when she left school. ‘Maybe it’s not that helpful to judge people who lived almost a thousand years ago by the standards of today. Plus, even today common sense goes out the window when religion marches in by the door. Christian Europe thought it was important to keep the infidels away from the Holy Places around Jerusalem. Funnily enough, the Saracens thought pretty much the same thing. At least while they were fighting one another they weren’t persecuting anyone else.’

  It wasn’t exactly an in-depth analysis of three hundred years of political, military and economic upheaval spread across half the then-known world. But it served.

  ‘All the same,’ said Ash doubtfully, ‘I can’t see people forming a queue outside a museum set up to glorify the Crusaders.’

  ‘They will if Oliver Ford’s involved. This is what he does – takes a subject nobody’s interested in and makes it required viewing. He’s a bit of a charmer. He’s the eye-candy that makes people – well, all right, women – who’ve never given any thought to the Crusades before want to know more about Richard and Saladin and whose turn it was to hold Jerusalem. It’s not a bad way to drip-feed the general populace a bit of extra learning – give them someone pretty and witty to look at.’

  ‘And that’s what makes Oliver Ford a celebrity instead of just an historian.’ Ash considered. ‘I mean, David Sperrin is an historian – at least, he’s an archaeologist – but no one ever suggested he needed police protection.’

  Hazel couldn’t decide which was more unlikely: that their bad-tempered friend might be deemed in need of protection as he knelt in his muddy holes groping for bits of broken pot, or that he might accept it if offered. She shook the image from her head. ‘David isn’t famous.’

  ‘Oliver Ford can’t be that famous either. I’d never heard of him.’

  Hazel let that pass without comment. ‘Everyone on the TV is famous. If only for being famous, which is pretty much what being a celebrity is.’

  ‘And celebrities need police protection?’

  ‘Apparently. There’s a big film crew in tow, a lot of vehicles, so a police presence is required. To control the hordes of salivating middle-aged women who might want to throw their corsets at Mr Ford. To make sure that, in order to film him in the most flattering light, the crew don’t close all six lanes of the motorway. That kind of thing. Someone has to liaise, and this time it’s me.’

  ‘Well, it should be interesting.’

  Hazel rocked a non-committal hand. ‘I thought they’d want me to hang out with Melvin the computer geek for a fortnight. Tidying up the networks, backing up the files, playing Warriors of Wolfworld when no one’s around. I was looking forward to getting all the gossip I’ve missed over the last four months. It never occurred to me they’d actually have a job for me to do.’

  ‘It doesn’t sound like a very demanding job,’ ventured Ash.

  ‘Keeping a television hot-shot and his retinue from turning the district upside down? Of course not,’ she said sourly. ‘I’m so lucky that none of the people heading up the queue for plum jobs was available, so the task was delegated down the line until it reached the station trouble-maker just back from a psychiatric break!’

  THREE

  Oliver Ford was not quite as tall as he looked on television. He was also a little older and a little heavier, and right now a lot more harassed. His trailer had taken a wrong turn outside Nuneaton and he hadn’t seen it since. The producer kept assuring him she was in contact with the driver, Ford’s home-from-home would be at the shoot by the time he needed it, but he couldn’t help worrying. Everything that made filming bearable was packed into that trailer. Fresh clothes, his favourite tipple, reading matter – scholarly tomes for when the cameras might stray his way, a paperback thriller for when he was alone – and the cosmetics that made him look human under the powerful lighting. He laughed and called it ‘My slap’, and aloud bemoaned the fact that television makes normal people look like startled zombies. Privately, though, he’d noticed that life was starting to have the same effect.

  Now this blonde girl was trying to attract his attention. He didn’t even recognise her. Surely they weren’t letting the groupies in yet! He inclined his head – where was that damned hairdresser? – slightly in her direction. ‘Listen, sweetie, I’m a little busy right now. Why don’t you have a word with the PR guy? – Justin, that’s him over there. I’ll try and catch you later.’

  ‘Mr Ford’ – and that surprised him, right there, because mostly they called him Oliver and occasionally Ollie – ‘my instructions are to stay with you. To protect you from over-enthusiastic fans. You can call me Hazel or Constable Best, but not Sweetie unless you’re sure your insurance is up to date.’

  That got his full attention. He swivelled and stared at her, the only fixed point in a river of bustling bodies. She smiled back amiably, as if she hadn’t just threatened him. As if he must have misheard, or misunderstood. ‘Hazel?’

  ‘Or Constable Best. I’m your police liaison officer while you’re in Norbold.’

  ‘Norbold.’ Ford looked around vaguely. ‘Is that where we are?’

  ‘More or less. This is Wittering: Norbold’s about four miles that way.’ She pointed. ‘This is the new Museum of the Crusades.’ The historian continued to look blank. Hazel went on, pointedly, ‘Today is Wednesday, the opening ceremony is in a couple of hours, and you’re doing the honours. Afterwards you’re doing some filming here. For your new series?’

  Finally that seemed to ring a bell. ‘Oh – yes. Quite. Sorry, I’m a bit jet-lagged – I only got into Heathrow last night. Interesting period, the Crusades,’ he said, warming to his subject. ‘Nearly as interesting as the way twenty-first-century political correctness has tried to airbrush it out of history. That whole era between 1096 and 1453, that involved pretty well everyone of consequence in much of Europe and the Middle East, that laid the foundations of alliances and rivalries whose ripples spread up to the present day – we’re supposed to pretend it never happened.’

  Ford shook his head bemusedly; the thick conker-coloured hair, cut just a shade too carefully, danced in his eyes. ‘You know what they say about history: that those who don’t remember it are condemned to repeat it. It’s my job to present people with the facts: what they make of those facts is up to them. Love them or hate them, the Crusaders were important in their own time and have been consistently misunderstood ever since. I hope this new series will set the record straight.’

  Hazel was pretty sure he’d already forgotten who she was. He was giving her the sound-bite he’d prepared for the reporters covering the opening ceremony. ‘Jolly good,’ she said encouragingly.

  Ford blinked velvety chocolate-brown eyes. Apparently that wasn’t the response he was
expecting. ‘And you’re from – where, again?’

  ‘Meadowvale Police Station, Norbold.’

  The historian frowned then as another thought struck him. ‘You’re not in uniform. Are you a detective?’

  Hazel shook her head. Her hair was down, gathered in the nape of her neck by an elastic band. ‘Just trying to blend in, Mr Ford. No need to make people nervous. The Crusaders aren’t the only ones who’re consistently misunderstood.’

  A tall, angular woman with a clipboard bustled by. ‘Oh good, you two have met. Heather’s going to keep you out of trouble, Oliver.’ She snorted a laugh. ‘Rather her than me! Anything you need, Heather, just give me a shout.’ She bustled away without waiting for a reply.

  ‘Hazel,’ Hazel murmured to her departing back.

  ‘Or Constable Best,’ added Oliver Ford; and they traded a grin.

  Rachid Iqbal had learned English at school in Istanbul. He had thought himself fairly proficient – had once won a prize for it. At Rachid’s school, prizes were always books, and you were allowed to choose your own. Rachid had chosen a book in English – Pride and Prejudice by Miss Jane Austen – immediately earning himself points towards the next year’s prize.

  Now he was here, though, he seemed to be rather less proficient in English than he’d thought. Either that, or the inhabitants of that broad area around Birmingham known variously as The Midlands or The Black Country spoke a local patois only loosely related to the language he’d studied. In the general store, spending some of the English pounds his friends had gathered up for him, they tried to sell him hair gel and cigarettes rather than what he was – quite clearly, he thought – asking for.

  Finally, with a sigh of relief and his modest purchases in a plastic bag, he left the store and began looking for the bus station. Again, the unfamiliarity of the local inhabitants with their own language proved an obstacle. They directed him variously to the train station and the police station, before somebody eventually understood that he wanted to take a bus.

  At the bus station, at last he got lucky. There was a picture of where he was heading pinned to the booking office wall. Abandoning all attempts to communicate in English, he pointed and proffered his money. The clerk took almost all of it. But that didn’t matter. Rachid had only to get there. He wouldn’t need money after that.

  Museums weren’t really Hazel’s cup of tea. She was the wrong age: neither an enthusiastic pre-teen nor a serious grown-up. Given a wet enough weekend, she had been known to wander into the Birmingham Museums & Art Gallery to marvel at their Pre-Raphaelite collection, but she doubted if it could ever be wet enough to drive her into a military museum. Because that’s what this was, even if the wars it commemorated were long enough ago to have acquired a kind of glamour. Although she was a soldier’s daughter, she didn’t thrill to the colours and the bands. In fact she harboured an instinctive suspicion that the more panoply an army required, the less confident it was in the rightness of its cause.

  She’d been the only girl in her class to side with Cromwell and the Roundheads when they’d studied the English Civil War. There was no denying that the Cavaliers had all the best hats; but the principle at issue – the Divine Right of Kings versus the primacy of Parliament – seemed unarguable to her. If the king and his champions hadn’t been allowed to wear lace and plumes but had had to debate their case instead, she reckoned the whole thing would have been over in a fortnight.

  On the subject of panoply, Oliver Ford was being prepared for his close-ups: primped and painted to even out the flaws the television cameras would otherwise home in on ruthlessly. It was a little like getting a house ready to sell, thought Hazel – repointing the mortar and painting the down-spouts.

  The official opening of the Museum of the Crusades was still an hour away, but there was work to be done before Ford would cut the ribbon with a twinkle of the eye and some charmingly provocative banter. The producer, whose name was Emerald, was setting up the to-camera pieces she wanted to shoot inside the museum for the forthcoming series, on the grounds that the place would never be tidier, the glass never better polished, than today, before the public were admitted. So two sets of activities were converging in both time and space, and the scene was one of mounting chaos as people in museum blazers laid out rows of chairs in the little stone-walled courtyard outside the foyer, and other people in jeans and T-shirts moved them because they were in the way of the cameras.

  Amidst all this busyness, Hazel felt surplus to requirements. If any liaising needed doing, it wasn’t here and now, and there was nothing to protect the celebrity from except the excesses of his own make-up artist. She wandered round the museum, being careful not to leave fingerprints on the glass cases, but there’s only so much pleasure to be had from seeing model soldiers fighting in a sandpit, however splendid their tiny flags.

  At least she wasn’t the only one watching from the sidelines, isolated from the mounting activity. When she first saw the boy wandering along the edge of the scrum, plainly looking for someone, she thought he was Ford’s hairdresser. But he wasn’t just too young, he was too ordinary, entirely lacking the flamboyance of person, dress and gesture which are part of the stock-in-trade. He was a gopher, the can of hairspray in his hand the missing necessity he’d been sent in search of. Now he’d found the hairspray, he’d lost the person who wanted it, and he was verging on panic.

  Hazel tapped him on the shoulder. ‘Mr Ford’s trailer is over there. They’re doing his make-up right now.’

  The boy cast her a grateful look, and a quick nod, and hurried away.

  Emerald stalked by, tapping her clipboard with her pen in an irritable, staccato rhythm. ‘What do you mean, we can’t get the swords out of the case? I want to film Oliver handling them – wielding them! Otherwise there’s no sense of scale. They’re steel, for pity’s sake, what harm’s it going to do? He’ll put his gloves on. I never have this problem at the V&A …’ The tide of activity carried her, and the small but incredibly dogged-looking museum director she was arguing with, out of earshot.

  Hazel was left in an improbable hiatus, like the eye of a storm, all the bustle circling around her, with nothing to do but perch on a low stone wall and watch the activity, and wonder if the few minutes of coverage that the museum’s opening would get on the television news tonight could possibly be worth all this effort.

  And think.

  There’s a lot to learn as a new police officer. More than anyone applying for the job ever expects. There’s the law, and the role of the police in upholding the law, and the procedures hammered out to protect both the officer and the public. There are the respective roles of all the other statutory authorities, and how they should dovetail, and how to manage the fall-out when they inevitably fail to. There’s even what is often called the feel for the job, which is an amalgam of all the things that can’t be written down, tested for and marked, but without which no police officer will be successful: an instinct for when the public good will be best served by coming down hard on transgressors, and when more will be achieved by offering advice and support. In short, when to help little old ladies cross the road, and when to book them for jay-walking.

  Hazel had been well taught, but she also had good instincts. She had never wanted to judge her performance by the number of arrests she made. Arrests meant crimes, the commission of which transformed some citizens into criminals and some into victims. It had to be better, she reasoned, if good attentive policing could prevent the commission of crime in the first place. Also, she was a kindly young woman. She would rather keep people out of trouble than make them pay.

  Closely allied to this feel for tactful versus muscular policing was the sixth sense for when a situation was inherently dangerous and when it was merely boisterous. The invisible line between a rowdy party and an incipient riot. You can’t teach that, either. Mostly, people learn it by experience or they don’t learn it at all. Hazel was beginning to learn it.

  Now she found, sitting on her wall out
of the surge of activity, that she was experiencing that sense of heightened alertness – the pricking of the hairs on her arms, the sharpening of her eyes and ears – that signalled something wrong. She might have looked around, seen nothing amiss, been unable to think what might go amiss at a museum – unless the exasperated director finally stabbed Emerald with one of his precious swords – and dismissed her edginess as an aberration. She didn’t do that. She scanned the scene carefully, and interrogated her memory, and though she still couldn’t pinpoint the reason for her unease, she was never tempted to dismiss it. Something had provoked it, even if she didn’t know what. She kept looking, kept thinking.

  The door of the trailer opposite opened and Oliver Ford emerged, as carefully groomed as a finalist at Crufts, thick hair swept back theatrically over his left temple, talking over his shoulder to the make-up artist as he came down the steps.

  His hair. His thick dark chestnut hair was perfect. It needed another can of hairspray like a lily needs gilding. So what was that boy with the lost expression actually doing?

  Hazel was on her feet now, scanning the sea of heads for the out-of-place one. If he hadn’t been sent for hairspray, what was he doing wandering round with it? Hiding in plain sight, that’s what.

  He might have been nothing more than an enterprising autograph-hunter. But Hazel didn’t think so. She knew that something was wrong, had known even before she focused in on the boy. She moved purposefully towards him, shouldering indignant camera crew out of her way. At the same time the boy was moving towards Ford, and Ford was moving towards the little podium in front of the entrance, still symbolically sealed with blue ribbon.

  They were all going to come together in the thickest part of the crowd.

  Hazel knew what to do as if she’d been dealing with such situations all her life. She didn’t even have to think about it: she knew. She went from purposeful march to Usain Bolt in a split second, driven through the crowd by strong muscles and the certain knowledge that she had only moments to prevent a disaster. A yell of warning preceded her.