Aggressor (8 page)

I sat next to Silky on the veranda as the sun came up, listening to last night’s events being endlessly dissected on the radio as I cut orange after orange for her to put through the juicer. Getting the Tindalls breakfast seemed the least we could do to repay their hospitality, and I hoped it might help put a spring in their step. The atmosphere had been pretty subdued after Hazel switched off the TV. We’d helped clear up in near silence, then gone to bed. Hazel hadn’t been at all happy about the way the real world had come in uninvited, and Charlie had been tense, preoccupied.

‘Hear that?’ Silky whispered. ‘They now estimate about sixty dead and a hundred and sixty injured.’ She poured another few oranges’ worth of juice into a jug. ‘That’s over half the people who were in the building. It’s terrible.’

‘It’s not so bad, you know, as sieges go.’ In the corner of the paddock, the old bay was treating himself to an early-morning dust bath. ‘You have to work on the basis that they’re all dead from the beginning anyway. Even a single survivor is a bonus in a situation like that.’

She stopped squeezing and straightened up. ‘I keep thinking about that poor child. The one who’d been burned. Did you see the soldier holding him?’

I cut another couple of oranges and passed them across. It seemed to be taking an awful lot of fruit to produce not very much juice. ‘The place was probably rigged with explosives. We saw one lot go off. I’m surprised there aren’t many more dead.’

‘But all those soldiers looked out of control. They didn’t know what they were doing.’

‘You know, if twenty per cent or fewer get dropped it’s a success. What those soldiers were doing was reacting to what was happening, whether it was the correct thing to do or not.’

‘Dropped? What is dropped? Killed? For a panel-beater, you seem to know an awful lot about these things . . .’

‘Don’t you box-heads read
Time
magazine?’

Silky pulled a face before going back to her task. ‘You certainly don’t. The only magazines you read have parachutes on the cover.’

I was still laughing when Hazel appeared in the doorway in her dressing gown. Her hair was a mess and her eyes were red and shiny.

Silky jumped to her feet. ‘Hazel, are you all right?’

Atear rolled down her cheek. ‘He’s gone.’

‘Gone?’ I said. ‘What are you on about?’

‘He’s not here.’

A lot of thoughts raced through my mind in the next split second, and all at a thousand miles an hour. Charlie had withdrawn into his shell after the news broadcasts. ‘That stuff really seemed to get to Hazel,’ I’d said. ‘She’s been like that ever since Steven died,’ he’d replied. ‘She wants to shut out the real world, keep us all from being hurt like that again. That’s what this place is all about.’

He’d been very morose all evening, come to think of it, but I’d put that down to the Toohey’s; it had been looking more and more like he had a drink problem. And all that stuff about shooting horses . . . fuck, he wouldn’t have taken it into his head to drive off into the night and top himself, would he? He wouldn’t have been the first.

Silky wiped her hands on her jeans and wrapped her arms around Hazel. ‘Charlie has gone somewhere? Would you like some coffee, or maybe some tea?’

I glanced across at the parking area at the side of the house. The Land Cruiser was missing. ‘Maybe he’s gone to fetch some croissants.’ I gave her my biggest smile. ‘I noticed a little bakery about a thousand miles back.’

Silky glared at me as she comforted Hazel. ‘It’s not funny, Nick.’ She was right; wrong time, wrong place.

‘I’m sorry. You sure he hasn’t left a note or something?’

She shook her head. ‘He didn’t say anything to you? You two were talking together a long time out here.’

Silky’s head bounced between the pair of us as she tried to get Hazel to sit down. ‘Anyone want to tell me what’s going on?’

I touched her hand. ‘Later.’

She got the hint. Hazel finally sat down and Silky disappeared inside the house to make that tea she’d promised.

‘I’m scared that something’s happened, Nick. He wasn’t himself when he came to bed. You sure he didn’t say anything?’

Silky was back in the doorway. ‘Hazel, the telephone’s ringing. Do you want me to—’

Hazel was already moving. Silky stared at me quizzically but I wanted to listen, not speak.

I started through the door, but Hazel was already on her way back. ‘That was Julie. The Land Cruiser’s at the train station. What’s happening, Nick? Everything’s going to fall apart again, I just know it . . .’ She buried her face in the front of my shirt, and clung to me like a woman drowning.

At last she raised her head. ‘Please help me find him, Nick. Please . . .’

5

Even with the door closed, the racket Julie’s kids were making carried into her father’s office. Then the TV came on, and cartoon voices took over from their shrieks and the clatter of small feet across wooden floors.

I looked up from Charlie’s desk. ‘He won’t have done anything stupid, Hazel. You know that’s not his style.’

She nodded as if she wanted to believe me, but couldn’t quite bring herself to. ‘I pray you’re right, Nick. I want him home.’

She’d already told me Charlie had been suffering from depression over the last few weeks, and the episodes had been getting worse and more frequent. She wanted so much to convince herself he wasn’t off in the bush having a final dark night of the soul.

‘Promise you’ll try to find him for me?’ She sounded lost, bewildered. She had changed out of her dressing gown but her hair was still a mess, and she’d given in to little bouts of weeping over the last hour. I’d never seen her look so vulnerable, and I wanted to do whatever I could to make her smile again.

She leaned down and switched on the worn, stained-plastic PC for me. I listened to the modem shaking hands with the server on the line. I certainly wasn’t going to admit to what Charlie and I had talked about. Maybe without realizing it I’d said the wrong thing and got him all sparked up. ‘You go back to Julie, Hazel. I’ll give you a shout if I find anything.’

As she left the room, the PC played the Windows music and went into msn. It was a very uncluttered office; the desk, the swivel chair I was sitting in, a filing cabinet, and that was about it. A venetian blind over the window cast big wedges of light and shadow. There was a strong smell of wood.

The monitor sat in front of me, covered with kids’ stickers. Shrek had a starring role on the mouse mat. A glass tankard full of sharpened pencils and pens, engraved with a winged dagger, doubled as a paperweight.

Family pictures were Blu-tacked to the walls. It didn’t surprise me to see that there were none of Charlie’s SAS days. There’d always been two types of guy in the Regiment: the ones who displayed nothing to do with their past, no certificates or commendations, no bayonets or decommissioned AK47s dangling off the wall. Work was work, and home was home. Then there were the others, who wanted it all to hang out for the whole world to see.

I picked up the tankard. Everyone got presented with one when they left. I couldn’t remember where mine was. The squadron sergeant major had handed it to me almost as an afterthought when I gave him my clearance chit. ‘Hold on,’ he’d said. ‘Here, I think this one’s yours.’ He’d fished around under his desk and given me a box, and that was that. ‘See you around.’

Fair one. I was the one who’d chosen to leave. When you’re out, you’re out. There isn’t a Good Lads Club or annual reunion or any of that malarkey.

I read the engraving and had to laugh.
To Charlie. Good luck. B Squadron
. By Hereford standards, that was emotion running amok.

I went through the paperwork it had been keeping in place; unpaid bills for fencing posts and animal feed, and two or three utility bills that had reached the red stage.

I started to mooch around on the PC. The only documents on the desktop were one about poultices for horses’ feet, and something about the exchange rate between the Australian dollar and Turkish lira. I knew they’d honeymooned in Cyprus. Maybe Charlie was planning a surprise return trip. Maybe he’d just gone into the city to pick up the tickets.

The email folder didn’t yield much either. The bulk of it was Hazel’s daily exchanges with Julie and the kids, even though they lived within spitting distance. I wondered what it must be like to be part of such a strong family unit. Maybe it was a bit too claustrophobic at times. Maybe Charlie had just gone off to find himself some space. Enough of that; I was starting to sound like Silky.

I spent the next hour searching all his document folders, but found nothing. I went online. The browser’s history had been cleared. What did that mean – that Charlie was hiding something, or just that he was a good housekeeper? Whatever, if he’d been planning something he didn’t want Hazel to know about, he would hardly have left a sign saying THIS WAY on his PC.

The filing cabinet had four drawers. I opened the bottom one, P–Z, and pulled out the folder marked T. Charlie had done himself proud. The last couple of years’ phone bills were not only in date order, they were itemized. I pulled out the last couple of quarters and ran my eye down the lists.

It didn’t take long to spot a pattern.

Over the last month or so, and with increasing frequency, there had been several long calls to an 01432 number in the UK.

I looked at my watch. It was just after 9 a.m., so still well before bedtime back home.

I picked up the phone and dialled.

PART THREE

1

‘Hereford.’ A finger prodded me in the shoulder. ‘You wanted to know when we got to Hereford.’

I struggled to open my eyes. I hadn’t realized the train had stopped. Lucky I’d asked the old lady opposite to give me a shout, or I’d have woken up in Worcester.

I thanked her and headed for the door, feeling like a zombie. After a two-and-a-bit-hour journey from Paddington, I’d changed at Newport for the local commuter to ‘H’, as it was known to guys in the Regiment. Before we’d even left London, my lids had been drooping and my chin was on my chest. Too many time zones and twelve thousand miles in cattle class were against me.

My conscience was weighing pretty heavily, too. I felt bad about lying to Silky. ‘Going to the station to see if he’s left anything in the wagon’ was hardly the same as ‘I’ve spoken to the broker and it sounds like he’s accepted a job offer somewhere, so I’m flying halfway across the world to find out more. You know that bit about being back here tonight? I’ll actually be thirty thousand feet over Singapore by then, but apart from that, everything I said was true and we can trust each other always, honest.’ But what else was I supposed to do? The only way to find out where Charlie had gone was to put in a personal appearance. The broker wouldn’t help me. His job was to match guys and work, not tell them to go home. The only way I was going to be able to fetch him back to his family was to physically grab hold of the silly old fucker and find out exactly what the problem was, and then see if I could help.

Maybe it was being separated from her for the first time in three months that did it, but I had a terrible feeling I was missing Silky already. She had a stupid accent and an irritating habit of understanding people much better than I did most of the time, but I’d got used to her being around, and it wasn’t at all a bad feeling. The lying thing wouldn’t go down well, of course, but Hazel would explain and I’d make it up to her somehow when I got back. Whenever that was. And if she was still there.

As I stepped onto the platform, carry-on in hand, I had a go at wiping off the dribble soaking into the front of my leather bomber jacket. The old lady must have thought I was pissed.

I wandered out to the taxi rank. Not much seemed to have changed. There was a new superstore opposite the station, but that was about it.

I climbed into a cab and asked for Bobblestock. The driver, a guy in his mid-fifties, eyed me knowingly in the rear-view of his old Peugeot 405. ‘Been far, have you?’ The locals loved the Regiment being based in their town, and not just because of the amount of money they spent. This guy was drawing all the wrong conclusions from a bloke with a tan who looked like he’d slept in a hedge.

‘Yeah.’ I tried to rub my face back to life. ‘I can’t remember the name of the road but I’ll show you where it is when we get there.’

I spotted a new pub and a couple of shops that hadn’t been there long, but otherwise Hereford was exactly as I remembered it. I’d left the Regiment in 1993, and I’d never been back since. The only thing I’d left behind was my account at the Halifax. I wondered how much interest I’d made on £1.52.

Bobblestock had been one of the first of the new breed of estates that sprang up on the outskirts of towns in the Thatcher era. The houses were all made from machined bricks and looked as if they were huddled together for warmth. With 2.4 children inside, a Mondeo on the drive, the minimum of back garden and front lawns small enough to cut with scissors, these places had about as much character as a room in a Holiday Inn. The developers had probably made a killing, then bought themselves nice period mansions in the outlying villages.

Crazy Dave lived on the high ground of Bobblestock, which he proudly told me had been Phase Three of the build. That was the only landmark I had in my head, but it was good enough.

‘Just here, mate.’

We stopped outside a brick rectangle with a garage extension that looked as if it had been assembled from a flat-pack. The house to its right was called Byeways, the one to its left, the Nook. Crazy Dave’s just had a number. Typical. Crazy Dave had been in Boat Troop, A Squadron. I knew him more from the café downtown than from work. We both used to spend our Sunday mornings there, drinking coffee, eating toast and reading the supplements. Him because he was trying to avoid his wife; me because I didn’t have one.

Crazy Dave had earned his name because he wasn’t; he was about as zany as a teacup. He was the kind of guy who analysed a joke before saying, ‘Oh yeah, I get it. That’s funny.’ In all the time I knew him, he never understood why shitting in someone’s Bergen was funny. But for all his faults, being as straight as a die made him perfect for his new job. Discretion was everything. When I’d asked him about Charlie over the phone, he’d admitted the old fucker was on the books, but wouldn’t give me any wheres or whens. He did invite me round for a brew, though, any time I wanted to chat; so, well, here I was.