The Corporal's Wife (2013) (32 page)

On the nights when he was at home early enough to eat with them, he didn’t bring his work to the dinner table. He hadn’t told her that his driver had gone, that an armed gang had snatched the traitor’s wife from under the noses of security. He had not told her that his own position was threatened. He checked his watch. It was time to walk from the villas at Shahrak Shahid Mahallati, go past the security guards, who would be smoking in their cars and would recognise him. He had given enough time to the Armenian, whose family had been hairdressers, in great demand, expensive. They had looked after the women from prominent families when the Shah had ruled. They had served the women well, but since the Air France plane had landed from Paris, and the Imam, scowling, had come down the steps, headscarves had been required and the women could not show off their new hairstyles. Would his own wife have enjoyed the attention of an Armenian hairdresser? He didn’t know. Did she talk about it with her friends in the villas around theirs? He didn’t know.

Without hair to tend, the Armenians had made their mark as suppliers of alcohol, brought in from Turkey. He slipped on a coat. He checked the money. His choice was Scotch whisky rather than American bourbon. He wouldn’t have touched the bootleg vodka, kept in plastic containers once filled with anti-freeze; it was drunk by those who were not of the élite.

He needed to drink to forget.

It was all the sounds, meshed together, that woke Dunc Whitcombe in the small hours. He heard voices calling, horses neighing and the clip of hoofs. He was cold and the bed was cold. He didn’t know how long he had been asleep and groped for his glasses. At the window he saw torches near the field where the horses were. He slid from under the sheets and blankets, and slipped on his suit jacket. He went to the door, opened it.

A side light had been left on down the corridor and in a corner of the living area. He and Mandy hadn’t been disciplined enough to clear the table. The plates were gone. The glasses had been taken to the kitchen, and everything they had used during the meal had been washed and stood on the draining-board. The maps were scattered across it, and they’d done one of those useless recap conversations – ‘So, where are we as things stand?’ – which they loved in London and added another fifteen minutes to the length of a meeting.

Simple enough. They were at the extreme edge of
Dogubeyazit
, a ten-minute drive from the road junction that was a designated pick-up point – they were within daylight sight of it, if there was no fog and no low rainclouds over the upper ridges of the hills along which the frontier ran. They had been told all of that by the young man who had met them off the feeder flight. It was a diabolical failure of tradecraft to leave the maps on the table.

She was by the plate-glass windows. Of course, a woman would have packed a dressing-gown. He had not. It was thin material, a functional blue, and dropped to the knees of her pyjama trousers. She held the poker from the fire irons on the hearth set.

He murmured, ‘Is there a problem?’

It was unusual for Dunc Whitcombe to ask such questions. She gestured with a hand at her hip for quiet, then pointed beyond the patio. He stood beside her.

The horses were on the move. He thought they were roped together and the boy was there, close to the front. The animals skipped willingly to keep up with him.

Another torchbeam, solitary, away from the path of the horses, was aimed towards the house. It bounced on the rough ground between them and the churned field where the horses were kept. At some moments the torch showed the frosted path ahead, and at others the grip must have wobbled and they could see boots and muddy trousers advancing. He wondered if she had been on one of the courses recently. They ran them down at the Fort, a Napoleonic-wars artillery position on the Hampshire coast. They did small arms, unarmed-combat basic training and refreshers; the instructors liked to liven their lectures with talk of high physical threat and the dangers posed by hostile intelligence services. But the worlds of HPT and HIT seemed far removed from the bleak corridor in Ceauçescu Towers – as Dunc always referred to Vauxhall Cross and its eccentric architectural lines – and he had had his name removed from the list of staff taking the train to Portsmouth. Would Mandy offer up her life in his defence? He thought she would make a fair job of wielding the poker.

A man came onto the patio.

She stood her ground.

The torchbeam came full into her face.

The man waved. A confident gesture.

Self-defence, as a hobby, was an art-form Dunc Whitcombe despised, and he had never been required to consider its virtues for self-preservation. The man pointed to himself, then to Mandy, then to the door latch. It was past three in the morning. The horses had gone, with the boy, who should have been in bed, and a man now invited himself inside.

‘Any ideas?’ she asked him.

He had not been to Monkton Fort for the refresher course, but it was possible she had. Silly, but at that moment, Dunc Whitcombe thought Mandy Ross seemed unfazed. In recent years the only two women he had been close to were his mother – ‘I never want to be a burden to you, darling’ – and his former wife, who had said on the steps of the court, ‘Good riddance, and goodbye. The big thrill in my life is that we will never meet again.’ Mandy sat across a table from him at meetings. She didn’t use scent, and wore minimal jewellery but she was defiant, magnificent. She opened the door.

He came in. He had a rolling gait. His trousers were old and torn, and sagged from a wide belt at a big belly. His woollen jersey had runs on the chest. His leather gilet was scratch and smeared with dung. The front fastenings were undone and it bulged at the left armpit. He had a rounded face, a week’s beard, and a mole sprouted darkly on his nose. His eyes were close-set and bright. The light danced in them.

No hesitation, good English. ‘Welcome to my home. The holiday home.’

‘Your home?’

‘Rented out for visitors, their “holidays”.’ He laughed loudly. Poor teeth.

‘For holidays?’

She said briskly, ‘Don’t repeat everything he says, Dunc.’

‘I am Khebat. In the Kurdish Turk tongue that is “Struggle”. You have seen my son, Egid, which is Hero. I hope you have settled, that you find what you need in the house . . . that at night you are not cold.’ He leered.

Only on London’s Green Lanes, between Seven Sisters and Stoke Newington where the Turkish Mafia had their bunkers and businesses, had Dunc Whitcombe come across such a man. In the days before the al-Qaeda call to arms, parts of the Service had been hived off as policemen and were supposed to be the dog’s bollocks in the hunt for organised-crime barons; the Green Lanes clans were big on heroin importation. He had been there to liaise with ‘assets’ supposedly capable of infiltrating the groups in Turkey: money had been spent, but little had returned in recompense. There had been men like this one in cafés.

‘Fine, thank you. Everything’s fine,’ he said. Tiredness swept over him, as it always did when he woke too fast.

Khebat peered at her and asked the question, ‘The people you wait for, when do they come?’

Dunc choked. Mandy chuckled – the first time Dunc had seen her amused. Abject failure.

‘You come to meet people. Am I not permitted to ask when they come?’

‘I’ll put the kettle on,’ Mandy said.

Dunc tried. A cover story should always, it was said, be given opportunity to breathe. ‘We wanted to visit the mountain, see Ararat, hear at close hand the legend of Noah, and I’m an archaeologist. It was a chance so we took it and —’

‘Those you are meeting, when do they come?’

‘We’ll have some tea,’ Mandy said. ‘Or, maybe, a drink.’

The dishes consumed more from the Signals bunkers, sorted and brought it to the screens. Boredom died among the analysts fielding a torrent of radio and telephone communications among agencies in Tehran, between the capital city and out-stations in Tabriz, in the north-west and the principal city close to the Turkish frontier. It was rare for the young men and women, with computer skills and knowledge of Farsi, to feel themselves caught up in a slipstream of events. There was fury in the messages and reprimands flew. Men on the ground, and in the close-pursuit units, gave assurance that a trap had closed and escape for the killers of two young policemen, martyrs, was impossible.

Several technicians, surfing the airwaves, sensed the panic of flight. They shivered at the thought of the fugitives, what was arrayed against them, and . . . It was another night on shift, but a welcome escape from the usual tedium.

The reports would be read, and men would drum their fingers in frustration because they had no power to help those who were running for their lives.

The dawn came up above the lake and the mountains, but hadn’t yet spread under the trees. They had reached the clump of pines by a rough farm track, more recently used by scientists investigating the water’s salinity, four thousand feet above sea level and fed by streams, with no outlet, making a hostile place to all but the flocks of migrating birds that paused there, pelicans and flamingos. The scientists had left for the winter and would return only if further government funding was made available. The farmers had gone, because every year the grazing was poorer as the deposits spread wider. Among the trees, at a lop-sided angle, there was a builders’ van. Its occupants slept, exhausted by the longest day and night any had previously experienced.

Chapter 11

Zach’s left arm fell away from him and he rolled on to his back. He shouldn’t have done that, he thought, because of where she was. He might have hit her. He hadn’t. The back of his hand lay against a crumpled rug.

Some guys were good at dawn and others weren’t. Some of the lads at work were efficient with bricks, electrics or saws at first light, and others needed a sandwich and half a flask of tea before they could get to it. He was usually good.

He sat up. She wasn’t there. Zach heard the guys.

The van was tilted, as it had been when they had parked it under the trees. Memories came: the shooting, the grenades, two dead, the spikes across the road. Another was of his fear when he had joshed and lied with the men at the block – he’d been brilliant but no one had acknowledged it. Yesterday’s complaint – a useful lesson his father had taught him: ‘Yesterday’s complaint should be left there. Move on, Zach.’ He rubbed his eyes.

The guys were murmuring. Zach assumed that fighting people switched away from the immediate in favour of talking nonsense – apparently it was the same for ambulance crews, fire teams and police clearing up after fatal road accidents.

Wally: ‘Boys, second time “Where I would rather be”. Take it, Ralph.’

Ralph: ‘Same as the first. Where would I rather be? At home, about this time, the little red van comes down the drive, bumping over all the bloody holes, and the postman delivers an armload of brown envelopes, all with red over-stamping, which means final demand. If I’m at home I can run down to the post office and pay them off with a cheque that’ll bounce. Mikey.’

Mikey: ‘In a surgery. Been there half an hour but they’re running late. Same seat as last week when I was there and handed in the piss bottle because they’d asked for a sample. Reading the magazines about women with false boobs, and waiting to be called in because they’ve got the test results. I’d give plenty to be there.’

Wally: ‘My turn. At home, so I can field the phone and row with my ex, and we’ll argue over who’s having the kids next weekend – she’ll want to dump them so’s she can shag her new bloke. We have great rows.’

There were chuckles. What might have been Zach’s answer? He couldn’t have matched the guys’ ability to face away from catastrophe: the road block and the spikes that had done for the tyres. He hadn’t been asked – because he was separate from them, and his work, in Farsi, was done. He crawled out of the back.

There was a portable jack out. The tilt seemed worse when he stepped back two paces and looked at the van’s angle. They had their weapons beside them.

He walked now in a different world from anything he knew. Where would he rather be? A piece of bread was pulled off the loaf and thrown to him. He hadn’t been ready for it and it landed in the mud beside the wheel tracks. He picked it up. They didn’t jeer at his failure to catch it, and didn’t apologise for not having passed it to him carefully. He thought they were playing a game, protecting themselves with banter. He wasn’t asked to join in.

He said, ‘Sorry I slept in. I’d crashed out. Where is she?’

Wally grimaced. ‘The lovely Foxtrot? With you, in the back.’

‘Catching up on her beauty sleep.’ Ralph grinned, then frowned. ‘Isn’t she?’

‘She’s not inside.’

Silence fell.

Swearing broke it, then recriminations: who’d done stag in the night and at first light? And the inquest, but no one was blamed so there were no excuses.

Mikey took charge. ‘I did five till seven, Wally was after me and was fine. Ralph did two till five, sharp as a pin when I relieved him. That woman did not go off for a piss, blunder into the darkness and bust her head open on a rock. Two of us at all times in the front cab. Him in there with her. She went quietly and did her damnedest not to be heard or seen. She was fully dressed, which doesn’t indicate a comfort break. I did movement when I was on stag, so did Ralph and Wally. Anyone going for a nature call would have had a word on the way out and another on the way in. That adds up to a runner. My mind tells me it would be hard for us to ditch the van and start out on a trek without her. Why she’s quit on us, I don’t know.’