Scorpion Trail

by Geoffrey Archer

  As the hours passed, her anger had subsided, but she’d not let Alex touch her. Their marriage was over, she’d said. It had died with Jodie.

  She’d left the house that same afternoon and gone to stay with her brother.

  ‘She doesn’t want to see you again,’ he’d reported two days later. ‘I suppose you know that.’ He was visibly distressed. They’d got on well, he and Alex.

  ‘She’s talking about moving to a retreat . . .’ He’d shaken his head. ‘Almost twenty years since Dermot passed away, and she’s never come to terms with it. Should have had treatment long ago . . . I’m really sorry. None of us is blaming you, you know that.’

  Alex had thanked him.

  In the small, grey, stone church, Alex sat across the aisle from Kirsty, her eyes fixed on the coffin below the chancel steps. Most of the mourners knew she’d left the house at Longniddry. Most wished it weren’t so, but feared nothing could change the way she thought. The doctor had called it a ‘kind of breakdown’, but she was refusing further medical help.

  She looked to be in a trance. Paper-white face, lifeless eyes. Behind her sat her parents, ramrod-straight Presbyterians, faces as impassive as they had always been, emotions locked away. Kirsty was so much their child. All her pain, all her scars hidden from view.

  Outside in the hillside churchyard, they lowered the simple pine box into a newly-dug hole beside the grave of the father Jodie had never known.

  Alex bit his lip and swallowed back tears.

  Such a waste, he thought. A person, a character that he had helped mould, wiped out just as he’d begun to grab what life could give him.

  ‘He’s yours at last, Dermot,’ Alex reflected. ‘But if it was you who took him, don’t expect the boy to be grateful.’

  By the churchyard gate, the family stood in line to receive the condolences of the mourners. There was a set of faces Alex didn’t recognize until Claire took his hands and squeezed them. Several others from the parachute club had come with her.

  A camera flashed; the tragedy had interested the local press. Alex flinched; he was shy of photographers. Made it a rule to keep his face out of the papers.

  He turned away.

  The ghastly process over, Alex heard the parachute group talk of heading for a bar. He might have joined them, if only their youthfulness weren’t too painful a reminder of what he’d lost.

  Kirsty was driven off in the Daimler. Suddenly Alex realized he might never see her again.

  ‘Mr Crawford?’ The chauffeur of the second car held the door for him. Kirsty’s parents were already inside. A reception was to be held at the brother’s house, but he couldn’t face it.

  ‘No,’ he answered after a moment. ‘No. I want to walk.’

  He leaned in, made his excuses, then waved the vehicle away.

  The car park emptied. With Jodie in the earth and Kirsty gone from him, seeing the last vehicle rumble down the hill was like watching twenty years of his life drain away.

  Earlier that morning, there’d been another blow. As if to twist the knife, a letter had arrived from the radar factory saying he’d been made redundant.

  He set off towards the sea, raising the collar of his dark grey overcoat. Four miles of coastal path lay between him and home.

  The cemetery was on a hillside. Beyond was a golf-course where many of his neighbours spent their leisure time. Small, bright figures strolled between the greens.

  He had never taken up the sport. Golf clubs spelled danger. Too much chat. Too many people asking about his past. Jogging was his exercise. Lonelier but safer.

  He seldom met anybody when he ran on the beach. Just one regular, a stocky man walking a Red Setter. They’d exchanged names once. Somebody McFee. An executive with Edinburgh Life. Hadn’t seen him recently.

  As he cut down through slopes of dead bracken towards the coast, it felt as if the corner stones of his life had been stolen away and he’d been presented with a blank sheet of paper in exchange.

  He realized there was little to keep him in Scotland now, other than the place itself. The gentle Lothian hills, the clean coastline and views of the Forth speckled with white sails in the summer had been a kindly hole to hide in, but having isolated himself for his own safety, he had few friends here.

  His life had been different before the disaster in Belfast, first as an engineer with Marconi’s, and later when he’d worked with the television news. He’d had plenty of friends to drink with then, to chat to and to make love with.

  Surely it would be safe to return to some of that life, he thought, despite what the minders said. Not to have to hide any more, that would be something . . .

  The tide was ebbing and the Gullane sands stretched far out, their dull flatness broken by strips of sky reflected in pools left by the receding sea.

  He saw Jodie everywhere he looked, the beaches so much part of his childhood. Emptiness gnawed at his stomach. There was no way he could remain here. Not when every whiff of seaweed, every caw of the Arctic terns was a reminder of the boy.

  Not easy to start again, approaching fifty. Unless he could salvage something from the past.

  He thought suddenly of Lorna. Always did when things weren’t right in his life. She was his ‘if only’ girl, the one he would have married if events hadn’t got in the way.

  They’d met in the sixties. Pop and protest, Ban the Bomb.

  Lorna was a believer in fate. A sacred thread linked their karmas, she’d told him. That’s why they’d fallen in love. When they met again ten years later, it had confirmed her belief.

  ‘There’s someone up there making the breaks for us,’ – that was the way she always put it.

  The trouble was he’d not seen or heard of her for the twenty years since then. And when they’d parted, she’d hated him enough to want him dead.

  Where then was he to begin his new life? Have to talk to the men at MI5, if he wanted their continued protection. He could go back to London where he had his roots. Parents were both dead, but he had a sister in Wimbledon. They’d been close once, until she married some detestable stockbroker.

  The stones of the coastal path jabbed through the thin leather soles of his black shoes. By the time he reached Longniddry his feet were pinched and sore.

  He stood in the porch fumbling with his keys. There was no light inside. As he opened the door the emptiness engulfed him.

  A newspaper lay on the mat. He picked it up. It was the local one. The headline caught his eye. They’d found the body of that girl – the thirteen-year-old he’d read about on Sunday.

  Poor kid. Poor mother.

  He tossed the paper onto the hall table and fumbled in his pocket for a cigarette. He flicked the lighter, then stopped. Not in this house. In his mind the place was still Kirsty’s.

  The message light winked on the answerphone. He left it. There were people still ringing for Jodie, not knowing he was dead. Or else it would be for Kirsty, and he’d have to explain she was no longer there.

  He wandered into the kitchen. It had been his wife’s domain. Kirsty’s wish as well as his; she’d been old-fashioned that way. He filled the kettle and plugged it in.

  The message machine niggled him. It might be for him. He brewed his tea then returned to the living-room and pressed the replay button.

  ‘Ah, hello . . .’ A man’s voice, but not one he recognized. ‘It’s Moray McFee here. Just ringing you Alex to offer my condolences. Er . . . terrible business. I was very sorry to hear about it. Er . . . I haven’t been around much in recent weeks, which is why you haven’t seen me up at Yellow Craig in a while.’

  It clicked at last. The man on the beach. The man with the Red Setter.

  ‘I’m down in London, as it happens. Something new I’m involved in. Errm . . .’

  There was a pause of a few seconds. Alex could hear the muffled rumble of traffic in the background.

  ‘I . . . I wonder if you would give me a ring here. I’d like to talk to you. There’s something I think you m
ight be interested in knowing about. I’m staying in a wee bed and breakfast place. Just ask for me, Moray McFee, and if I’m not here, then leave a message and I’ll call you back. The number . . . oh, hang on. Ah yes. Here it is . . .’

  Alex wrote it down.

  Odd. Why should a man he hardly knew take the trouble to find his number and call him?

  He hesitated. It was twenty-past five. Perhaps he’d ring him this evening. Or now. Get it over with.

  He picked up the phone and dialled. It rang for a while, then a woman answered, her voice heavy with some foreign accent.

  She laid the receiver down, and he heard footsteps in a corridor. Then a few moments later, a heavier footfall returning.

  ‘Hello? McFee here.’

  ‘Ah. It’s Alex Crawford here. You left a message on my machine.’

  ‘Alex! That’s good! I wasn’t so sure you would ring. Very presumptuous of me I’m sure, but er . . . I heard about the terrible accident and then . . . then your wife taking it bad. Sorry to be so direct and so on, but em . . . I understand it was in the local papers about Jodie, and then em . . . I was talking to someone else who . . . who knew the family . . .’

  There’d been no shortage of gossip in the area, Alex was well aware of that.

  ‘I wanted to offer my condolences . . .’

  ‘That’s good of you. It’s been a bad time, as you can imagine. Pretty bloody really. I’m just back from the funeral.’

  ‘Oh, I’m sorry. My timing was not of the best, perhaps . . .’

  ‘That’s all right. You said there was something you wanted to tell me.’

  ‘That’s right. Look, um . . . I won’t go into all the details on the phone, but for various reasons, I’ve resigned my job in Edinburgh, and . . . well the fact is my wife and I are having a break from one another as well. So, my life is going through a bit of an upheaval, shall we say.’

  ‘I’m sorry to hear that.’ Alex began to regret he’d made the call. Had enough troubles of his own.

  ‘But that’s not the point. That’s just for background. The reason . . . the reason I rang you was to tell you what I’ve got involved in down here, because . . . well I happen to think you might be in a similar position and might be interested in hearing about it.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘You’ll have seen on the TV all the dreadful things that are happening in Bosnia?’

  ‘Of course.’ Alex frowned.

  ‘Well, I’ve just been out there as a volunteer to help get emergency food and clothing to children. There’s thousands and thousands of them who’ve been burned out of their homes, and they’ve got nothing. Nothing at all. And the winter’s still biting.

  ‘There’s a small charity called Bosnia Emergency that’s been set up by an ex-major in the army. They collect stuff here and take it direct to the villages where it’s needed. I’m going out with another van-load in a week’s time, and they’re looking for one more volunteer. I told them I knew someone who might be interested, but I need to give them an answer tomorrow.’

  Alex did a double-take. It wasn’t something that had remotely crossed his mind. Bosnia had always been ‘someone else’s problem.’

  ‘You mean me?’

  ‘Aye . . .’

  ‘But why? Why did you think of me?’

  ‘Look, I’ve been away from Scotland for a good few weeks now, but I keep in touch with what’s going on up there. Em . . . I won’t mince words Alex, I know your company’s in trouble and they’re making half the staff redundant . . .’

  ‘Is it half the staff? God, I didn’t even know that.’

  ‘And I guessed, just a guess mind, that you might have been sent a letter through the post. The money’s good, I’m told. And that’s important. Because you wouldna get paid for this Bosnia business. Just living expenses.’

  ‘I see.’ Alex felt distinctly uncomfortable that a stranger should know so much about him. ‘You seem remarkably well informed . . .’

  ‘Years of listening at keyholes, that’s all! Well. Are you interested or not?’

  ‘I don’t know . . .’ He was thinking hard. It was bound to be interesting. Worthwhile too. Might be the break he was looking for. ‘I’ll need to think about it . . .’

  ‘Aye, well, as I said, there’s not a lot of time. I have to tell them tomorrow one way or the other. But from my point of view it’d be grand. I’d much rather work with someone I know than a complete stranger.’

  ‘Well, yes I can see that . . .’

  Alex glanced round the living-room. A stack of Kirsty’s Good Housekeeping magazines on the coffee table. A pile of Jodie’s CDs on the audio system. The silence that echoed.

  Someone up there making the breaks for him . . .?

  ‘Well, thanks Moray. Yes, I’ll do it.’

  Three

  Thursday 17th March

  The Hague

  THREE MEN AND a woman sat at the light oak conference table flicking through the thin file which had been presented to them by the Data and Records Section. The words it contained were clinical, but they described a calibre of human savagery most Europeans believed had died out with the end of the Third Reich.

  The Yugoslav War Crimes Tribunal was open for business but it was early days. No prosecutions were yet in prospect, and many of those who paid lip-service to the need for a tribunal suspected there would never be any. Politics, they thought, would get in the way.

  The office smelled of new paint. There was a hammering in the background. Carpenters putting up shelves.

  All four round the table were from different countries: a Dutch police inspector, a lawyer from Senegal, a French investigating magistrate, and Caroline Zander, a legal officer from the British Home Office.

  Communication between them alternated between French and English.

  ‘It’s thin,’ Ms Zander complained, tapping at the paper.

  She was in her mid-thirties, a career woman with short, brown hair and a look in the eye that warned others not to waste her time.

  ‘Plenty on the crime, but not much on the criminals.’

  The War Crimes Tribunal had been set up the previous summer by the UN Security Council. Seen politically as ‘the right thing to do’, the UN had found its member nations reluctant to finance it, however. The Tribunal’s rented space in a former insurance office in the Hague was short of equipment and staff.

  The woman from the Home Office turned back to the cover page of the file.

  ‘The Tulici Killings – March 11th,’ she read again.

  ‘Victim Total: 44.

  ‘Women: 18

  ‘Children under sixteen: 21

  ‘Men (elderly): 5.’

  The first inside page gave the background:

  ‘The village of Tulici consisted of twelve habitable dwellings and a small mosque. A further two houses had been rendered uninhabitable recently; their occupants, Catholic Bosnians, referred to as ‘Croats’, were expelled from the village during the widespread “ethnic cleansing” perpetrated by all sides in recent months.

  ‘Tulici is on the northern slopes of the La?va Valley in central Bosnia, where the community has been of mixed religions for many years. The battle lines between the BiH (Bosnian) army (mostly Muslim) and the Bosnian-Croat Hrvatsko Vije?e Obrane – HVO (Catholic) are constantly changing, according to UN observers. At the time of these murders Tulici was at the edge of the area under BiH (mostly Muslim) control, but was not believed to be of strategic importance to the other side. It had been left undefended, apart from the presence of a few elderly men armed with hunting rifles and shotguns. All the younger men of the village had been enlisted in the Bosnian army and were manning defences elsewhere.’

  Caroline Zander picked up a pen and gently chewed its end.

  ‘At approximately 14.15 hrs, an unknown number of assailants (the UN Protection Force UNPROFOR estimates twelve) approached the village from the south. An unmade road passes east-west through Tulici. Sniper positions appear to have been establis
hed at each end of the hamlet. Six of the women and nine of the children killed were shot at the eastern end as they tried to flee.

  ‘At 14.55 hrs, an armoured patrol from the UNPROFOR base at Vitez saw smoke from the village and went to investigate. Before reaching Tulici, they came under attack from a mortar and withdrew. One hour later they returned and succeeded in entering the village.

  ‘In an orchard at the western end they found the bodies of five men, described as elderly. All had been shot several times. UNPROFOR believes the men had been rounded up in the village and brought to the orchard to be murdered.

  ‘Along the road through the hamlet the bodies of seven women and six children were found. All had multiple gunshot wounds. Two of the children also had their throats slit.

  ‘Every house in the village had been set on fire, apparently to ensure that anyone hiding in them would also die. Some had been attacked with grenades. The charred bodies of four women and six children were recovered from cellars by UNPROFOR soldiers and the men from the village who had arrived back at the same time.

  ‘The last victim was discovered in a cow shed behind one of the houses, a young woman, said by her father to be nineteen. She had been shot in the head and chest, and stabbed several times. The clothing had been stripped from her lower body. An UNPROFOR medical officer was present; he reported that blood smears in the area of her vagina and anus suggested she had been subjected to multiple rape.’

  Caroline Zander smacked the pen down onto the table and chewed her lip. She’d seen many reports like this in the past three months, but it didn’t make them any easier to read. She pressed on.

  ‘The bodies of the victims were buried the next day in a field next to the mosque. No autopsies were carried out. There are no known survivors of the attack, and no one witnessed it at close enough quarters to provide any description of the assailants. It is assumed however that they were affiliated in some way to the HVO.

  ‘The UNPROFOR Colonel in Vitez lodged a strong protest with the HVO commander and demanded that he carry out an investigation. The latter reported back that after interviewing all his subordinate officers, he could find no one who had any knowledge of the incident. The UNPROFOR Colonel has described the HVO chief as a “pathological liar”.