Kicking Off

by Jan Needle

  It was starting to rain; they were well into North Wales. Andrew flicked on the windscreen wipers, and flicked his eyes onto her small and anxious face.

  ‘Oh, there’ll be a way,’ he said. ‘Don’t worry, little Mouse. What about your old flame? Dublin Desmond? He’ll tuck you into bed, for old times’ sake!’

  The Mondeo, with wet moorland rising to its right and the black and ruffled waters of Llyn Celyn close on the other side, swept round a bend at sixty miles an hour. Rosanna laughed.

  ‘Shut up, oaf!’ she said, and rapped the outside of his thigh with hard, sharp knuckles. He felt her eyes on him and glanced at her once more. It was a moment, half a second.

  When he looked back, he faced a scene of carnage. Two Army lorries, one on its side, lay halfway across the road ahead. Ambulances and police were also there, and the orange hazard lights were almost blinding. The traffic was still moving, with Military Police and traffic coppers vying to harry vehicles onwards. Anyone who tried to stop was shouted at, and a helicopter kept swooping low, its engine unbearably loud.

  ‘Fuck, ‘ said Andrew. ‘Here’s a turn up.’

  The verge had been made into a carriageway so that traffic could move in both directions. Close to the black waters of the lake, a mobile crane was balanced like some enormous praying mantis. It was bellowing black smoke as the engine throbbed and gunned, and as they passed, the roof of a car broke through the surface.

  ‘Poor bastard,’ Andrew said. ‘How could that happen? Army lorries? What the fuck?’

  A policeman was screaming at him, and banging on the roof.

  ‘Move on! Move on! Move on!’

  The old instincts crashed back in. No way to talk to a reporter. Andrew swung the Mondeo hard into a patch of ground just off the carriageway.

  ‘We’re press!’ he shouted. ‘We’re with the BBC!’

  The policeman was inexperienced enough to drop slightly back.

  ‘My orders—’

  And Rosanna screamed. A wild, tearing, awful scream. Her hand clawed Andrew, and the scream went on.

  As the car emerged from the water, the driver’s door had opened. The driver, hanging from his seat belt, lurched forward towards the surface of the lake, then twisted as if looking at them, full in the face. An Army officer, black with fury, reached their hired car.

  ‘Get out of it! Get out of it! You can’t stop here! You’ll be arrested! Constable, what the hell!’

  The constable was lost.

  ‘Official Secrets Act,’ he mumbled. ‘You’ll have to—’

  ‘Move! Move! Move!’

  The car was already moving. Forbes found a gap and hit the accelerator like a man gone mad. The Mondeo leapt onto the carriageway, skidded, almost hit another car. Rosanna was sobbing beside him. And he swore, black bitter words. He swore.

  They slept that night in a bed and breakfast beyond Ullswater. Different lakes, different country. They had fled from Wales like bats from hell. Rosanna cried half the night for Peter, wrapped in Andrew’s arms. Andrew lay and thought a lot, in fear and grief.

  ‘I never promised you red roses, did I, Mouse?’ he whispered in her hair at one point. ‘I’m glad I met you, though, my love. Tomorrow is another day, please God.’

  Please God.

  If you enjoyed Kicking Off you might be interested in Death Order by Jan Needle, also published by Endeavour Press.

  Extract from Death Order by Jan Needle

  BOOK ONE - Invitation to a killing

  One

  August 17, 1987

  The Americans were in charge the day he died. That, at least, was something. It gave the British, on whose territory the prison lay, somebody to blame.

  'What a cock-up,' said the young man in grey slacks and a light cashmere sweater, as he sipped his beer. 'Only the Yanks could do it, couldn't they? They couldn't organize a piss-up in a brewery.'

  His companion, who was also dressed in civvies, nodded. He was examining the Praktica on the bar table in front of him. They were soldiers, anybody with a practised eye could tell. Their hair was short and neat, their shirt collars crisp.

  'Aye,' he agreed. 'Tony got a box of paper hankies from the cell. Souvenir. Daft prat, who does he think'll be impressed by that?'

  'The pictures should be good, though, if they come out. Have you got the hang of that thing yet?'

  'I dunno. It's only Eastern crap. I was in a bloody hurry, too. Yanks or no Yanks, if I'd been caught it would've been the chop.'

  The first soldier finished his beer. He looked at his watch, impatient.

  'What d'you reckon, though? Can we flog it, if it comes out? Let's try and find a place, get it developed. We'd better shift, mate. I'm due in barracks, half an hour.'

  The bar was filling, for the early evening rush. Outside, in Wilhelmstrasse, they saw another Land Rover go past, towards the prison. It was full of military police. It was not the first they'd seen, by any means. They eyed each other, nervously.

  'Bleeding Redcaps everywhere,' said the soldier with the camera. 'Why don't we forget it? Have another beer? The place is swarming.'

  'You're chicken.'

  'OK. What is it, anyway? A picture of a garden hut. If it comes out. Do you know how to flog things to a paper? Without being found out? Let's have another beer.'

  The man in cashmere capitulated.

  'We could take some pictures of the crowds outside, after,' he said. 'There's twats in Nazi tee-shirts there already, Tony said. They're mental, Krauts, there's no doubt in my mind, no doubt at all. They think he was a God, or something. Loony old bastard with dog's breath. Get us a schnapps as well, tight-arse.'

  His friend fished some notes from his back pocket.

  'Yanks are mad as well, though. They'll probably let them in, for souvenirs. They'll probably sell off bits of brick and barbed wire.'

  Both men became aware that people were listening to them, although they spoke in English. In West Berlin, of course, speaking English would hardly keep a conversation private. They decided to forget the drinks, move on. In any case, it was getting late. There was going to be a lot of shit flying about in the next few days, they guessed. They did not want too much of it to stick to them. As they walked along towards the prison gate-house they saw the crowds – not large yet, but growing – and they saw the queue of vehicles. 'Chaos,' said the soldier with the camera . 'Look at all those Redcaps. And the polizei. Look, there's a TV van. We've had it with the pictures, mate. We're miles too late. Hey, look – that prat's got a swastika!'

  Indeed, there was a small knot of youths in jeans and black leather, strutting up and down and shouting 'Heil'. There were several women weeping, older women, and a man in his forties was screaming something at the marchers, grabbing at their flag. In other parts of Germany, slogans had already been daubed on walls and monuments, and former SS men, white-haired and benign of feature, had sought to air their views on local TV stations and to the press. The crumbling red-brick pile, they thought, should be a monument. With its meat-hooks from which the Gestapo chose to hang their victims still intact, its sloping concrete floors to drain the blood away. The Russians, for different reasons, would have agreed.

  But inside Spandau Prison, on this summer evening, there had been little in the way of agreement for many hours. The senior officers from the controlling powers had shouted themselves hoarse, then allowed fresher throats and minds to carry on the infighting and the bitterness. Telephone messages, both scrambled and in­clear, had buzzed to and from their capitals, where high officials had made decisions, then rescinded them, then begged for time to push the buck yet higher.

  'We cannot call it suicide,' bellowed a KGB colonel, his face flushed dangerously with rage. 'If it is suicide, we have failed! Since 1946 we have guarded this animal to prevent that thing, and now at ninety-three he kills himself! No!'

  The French representative, a tall lugubrious man, was calmer.

  As if it were a help, he muttered: 'Ten francs a minute, it has cost. Eight
million a year. What is that in dollars? A ransom for a king.' The senior American present said: 'At least the Germans paid the bill.' He was exhausted, his voice low and scratchy. 'In any case,' he added, 'maybe it wasn't suicide. He ordered—'

  A thin-faced man three feet from him shot a glance that made him bite the sentence off. The prisoner had ordered things that morning: toilet rolls, notepaper, other items. But the thin-faced man was CIA. He had warned him to be circumspect.

  The British representative, who had shortly before been as angry as the Russian, found himself, strangely, on his side.

  'You are right,' he told him. 'Gentlemen, we must take account of what the colonel says. It is bad enough that he should have died so suddenly, although I fear it's typical of the bloody-mindedness he's always shown. But we can't let him be seen to have got one over on us. Martyrdom is possibly inevitable among certain sections of the German population, but they must not be allowed to couple it with preternatural cunning. It was not suicide. Not yet awhile.'

  'Cunning indeed,' said the Frenchman, drily. 'To hang oneself with an electric flex and yet not be a suicide.'

  'We'd better burn it,' said the grey-haired Englishman, ignoring the sarcasm. 'We'd better burn the hut, as well. We can't afford the souvenir-hunters to get their hands on anything.' He looked at the senior American, meaningfully. 'The flying boots and goggles disappeared some months ago. Unfortunate.'

  'And British soldiers were in the grounds this afternoon,' came the tart reply. 'Taking happy-snaps.'

  The Briton paled. The younger officer next to him reddened. 'True I'm afraid, sir. There was a gap before the military police got here from HQ, it took them half an hour. There'll be a search, though. Locker by locker, bed by bed if need be. We'll find anything that's been taken. Including photographs.'

  'Another thing,' said the Russian, still intensely irritated. 'The pathologist. I insist we have a joint autopsy. Physicians of all four nations.'

  'Why? What do you expect to find? Poison? You begin to sound like the prisoner himself. He complained for forty-six years that people were trying to poison him, and lived to ninety-three. The procedure is agreed. We're on British territory, for the purpose of post mortem. Stop splitting hairs.'

  The anger was surfacing once more. They had been through this several times, first in the hospital library, later in the prison, where the Soviets did not feel so threatened by the Western listening techniques. There had been too many of them, a shifting population of officers and officials, scuttling in and out of drably painted rooms. The underlying mood had slowly changed. Through excitement, to vague disquiet, to fury and frustration, to exhaustion. The British contingent, noticeably, had been bombarded with governmental signals. When the Special Investigation Branch had become involved, their role had become quickly decisive. Some things were unarguable. Procedure.

  The Russian said: 'Your pathologist is not even here. Where is he? How long must we wait?'

  'He has been located in Strasbourg. He will be flying shortly. Our top man.'

  A gleam entered the Frenchman's eyes. The boredom lifted momentarily.

  'A specialist.' He paused. 'In strange judgements, might one say?'

  The senior British officer looked at him as if he had crawled from underneath a stone.

  'You have the edge of me,' he lied. 'I don't know what you're talking about.'

  But everybody else did. The younger Briton's colour heightened further. Dr Cameron, Professor of Forensic Medicine at London University and the Army's chief pathologist, had been involved in some bizarre cases, and had not always escaped with praise. A small smile lit the hangdog French face.

  'The Dingo Baby, was it not? That pauvre femme convicted by a bloodstained scrap of cloth. And Mr Cameron.'

  And the rest, thought the red-faced major. Michael Calvey, Maxwell Confait, he had looked them up. One had to wonder sometimes, at the decisions of the Great and Good. But the American flapped his hand, impatiently.

  'What the hell? This time there's no mystery, is there? The old sonovabitch hanged himself, whichever way we cut it. It's not our job to get the details out, we just need consensus for a day or two. So far we've done not badly. The initial statement's issued. It can be worked over later - let the top brass make the top decisions, that's what they're paid to do. If a few thousand crazy Germans want to worship him, so be it. Who cares who signs the death certificate so long it's signed? Let's get out of here!'

  'In a week, ten days, it will be rubble,' said the grey-haired English officer. 'We're going to build a Naafi supermarket, the plans are writ in concrete. Some sort of shrine that will be! No,' he said, raising a hand to the Russian colonel. 'No arguments. We can argue afterwards. Statements can change if need be. In a case like this, there will be confusion. There always is. First we'll act, then we'll sort it out. It is our ultimate responsibility, gentlemen, and that is the British way.'

  'Confusion?' asked the laconic Frenchman.

  'Decision,' snapped the English officer.

  The Russian colonel muttered, in heavily accented French: 'Oui. L'Albion perfide. '

  'I'm pooped,' said the American.

  The chaos had started at about 3.30 that afternoon, and it was chaos unconfined. There were more than a hundred soldiers involved in the running of the crumbling structure that was Spandau Prison – British, French, American and Russian plus a staff of nationals from the 'interested nations'. There were Italians, Egyptians, two Poles, two Indians, a Ghanaian, a Greek, Tunisians – and all to minister to the needs of one solitary, frail, half-blind old man.

  It was a Tunisian, Abdallah Melaouhi, who had been closest to him for some months, and who had been looking after him that morning. Afterwards he was to claim that the prison log had been altered for that day, and that Prisoner Number Seven had been found dead or dying at 2.30 p.m., not an hour later. He would further claim that when he fought his way to the small garden hut having been held back by a British guard for forty minutes, there were two men in US Army coveralls already there, two men he did not recognize, as well as the American guard whose job it was to attend the old man constantly for fear of suicide attempts. The prisoner was on the floor, apparently lifeless, and the electric-light extension cable later said to have been used in the self-murder was plugged, as normal, into the wall. There were signs of a struggle, everything had been 'turned over', and he later discovered that the prison's emergency resuscitation unit had been destroyed. Shortly, the cable itself had disappeared, burnt by the British, and next day the garden hut was gone as well. So too was the US guard who had left the prisoner alone for a minute or two 'to take a telephone call' - flown back, on whose orders it was never disclosed, to the United States. Melaouhi, failing to evoke a serious response from the British, took his story to the West Berlin police, who immediately announced that they intended to investigate it as a possible murder case. The British response this time was prompt: the incident had taken place on their territory, and the West Berliners had no jurisdiction. The case was closed.

  Whatever time it started, the chaos soon became overwhelming.

  The American director, once informed, immediately ordered that the man be taken to the British military hospital, with no time for a police escort to be mustered. Although his face was blue, no one was prepared to name him dead, and as the stretcher-bearers rattled clumsily up the spiral staircase into the main cell block, as they raced along the echoing, empty building towards the gate, they pummelled inexpertly at his chest, breaking several ribs. In the ambulance, which had two miles to go and took seven minutes, a rubber tube was inserted down the patient's throat, missing the windpipe, and oxygen was pumped into his stomach, which was later found to be inflated hard, grotesque. Whether it was ninety minutes after Melaouhi saw him on the ground or thirty, the prisoner reached the hospital at precisely four o'clock, where a team of doctors had been alerted. The rubber tube was re-inserted correctly, drips were attached to wrist and ankle, heart massage continued, even life-saving
methods of last resort perfected in Vietnam were used. At 4.10 Major Carabot, the duty doctor, gave the thumbs-down. They were dealing with a corpse.

  The chaos worsened. Even by the time the medics had given up, officials and soldiers of all four powers were cramming the hospital.

  The British military governor, Lieutenant Colonel Anthony Le Tissier, bore the brunt, as his government was most intimately concerned. The furious rows erupted almost instantaneously, as the way to tell the world the news became the crucial issue. After two hours of wrangling the first release said the death had been in hospital, which enraged the Russians, who pointed out the man had been sent to jail to die, and had therefore to have done so. Further, they said, the slapdash methods of the Americans were to blame for the whole pathetic farce, and that fact should be noted. A second communiqué said the prisoner had died in the summer house, in the normal course of his captivity, and a third release, twenty-four hours later, said tersely that it was suicide with an electric cord. After another twenty-four hours - fortuitously - a suicide note was found in the dead man's jacket pocket, where it had been 'overlooked'. His family were not allowed to see it.

  On procedure, the British were insistent. Whatever anybody else might want, the matter was to be investigated solely by the British Army. An SIB investigation unit under Major J.P. Gallagher was under orders within an hour, with operatives on their way from Rheindalen and Dusseldorf. The autopsy was to be conducted by Dr J.M. Cameron and no one else, although doctors from the other powers could be present as observers. To prevent the possibility of souvenirs, there were to be no still photographs of any sort during the examination. For the same reason, all the prisoner's effects were to be destroyed immediately, save a few which would go to his family. A few not of their choosing.