by Medina, KT
Dropping her hands back to the desktop, she fixed her gaze back on the screen, took the mouse in her hand, guided it firmly back to the first of the two icons. And in this document was everything they had discussed in the meeting yesterday morning. That Johnny had gone in the minefield to check out a skull, that the field had been muddy but not waterlogged, that the marker hadn’t been seen (may have been passed/lost during the explosion). May have been passed. She’d told them that she hadn’t passed it, but Jakkleson hadn’t believed her, hadn’t been certain at least.
Conclusion: still open (most likely missed mine).
Action: speak to Huan Rae (has not returned to work and has been uncontactable since).
Huan. A face on the team-room wall. A serious, circumspect face. Huan. Vital now that she knew there was more to Johnny’s injury than a simple missed anti-personnel mine. Where had Huan been the day Johnny was injured? And why hadn’t he been in contact with MCT since? Closing the file, she slid the keyboard and mouse into exactly the positions in which she had found them.
Then she began to search Jakkleson’s desk: opening and closing each drawer in turn, filtering carefully through its contents. But there was only the usual detritus: paperclips, a stapler, ruler, pens, pencils and rubbers, a stack of Mine Clearance Trust headed writing paper, all neatly ordered.
The filing cabinet then. But where would he keep the key? She hadn’t found one. Probably on a chain around his neck. Never mind. One of her boyfriends – chosen mainly to wind her father up – had taught her to pick bicycle padlocks when she was fifteen. The principle extended to any shitty lock. Taking two paperclips from the holder on Jakkleson’s desk, she straightened them and moved over to the filing cabinet, meeting Jakkleson’s cool celluloid gaze. Flicking him the finger, she eased one paperclip into the lock. Once it was as far in as it would go, she pressed it gently but firmly against the roof of the cylinder where she could feel the row of five pins. It wasn’t a sophisticated mechanism. They clicked softly as she nudged them into position. Jamming the second paperclip into the lower half of the cylinder, she twisted. The lock stayed stiff and unyielding. She repeated the process, trying not to get frustrated. Keep calm. Locks were almost like living things, her boyfriend had told her, could sense impatience and never gave in to it. Finally the cylinder turned with a satisfying click, and breathing a sigh of relief, she pocketed her makeshift tools.
The top drawer contained files labelled A to L. She flicked through them quickly, just to make sure, but wasn’t surprised when Huan’s file wasn’t there. Rae – Huan Rae – the drawer below then. But just as she was about to shut this one, she noticed a file which had slid off the runner, lying flat against the drawer’s base. It wasn’t labelled. She lifted it out and slipped her hand in, felt the familiar sheen of photographs against her palm and thought of the MCT mugshots on the notice board in the team room. Turning, she emptied the file’s contents on to the desktop.
Her mouth fell open.
Photographs certainly, but not the ones she had expected. These were personal snaps. Mementos.
The first showed a young Khmer woman lying on a grubby bed, naked, her brown legs spread. Her gaze was vacant. Unseeing eyes turned away from the camera. Tess had seen that expression before on children with rough parents, about to be smacked for something they hadn’t done. The light from the flash had illuminated the walls of a tiny room: the wooden slats of a hut, barely a foot of space between the edge of the single bed and the wall. The bed was covered in a filthy sheet, stretched tight over its frame. The flash had also caught a poster pinned up behind the bed. The baggy carcass of a condom, the words ‘Protect yourself from AIDS’ written in capitals beneath it, with a Khmer translation below.
Another photograph showed Jakkleson standing – too close to the camera, as if he was holding it himself – out-of-focus arm, torso and erect cock, the girl lying back on the bed, her hips jacked up. She could tell it was Jakkleson from the gold wristwatch that had slid from the cuff of his shirtsleeve yesterday morning, when he had shaken her hand.
As Tess gathered them up hurriedly, she realised something else. The photos were not of the same woman. They were similar, incredibly so. All Khmer. All teenagers, she guessed, some barely into their teens from the look of them. All with wide, innocent faces, dark eyes and long, dead straight black hair. But they weren’t the same girl.
Oh, God. She felt sick. Dirty herself having touched them. She remembered what MacSween had said: ‘Corruption. Exploitation. Sexual tourists and paedophiles from the West.’
It was happening right under his nose.
*
Johnny opened his eyes, sticky with mucus, stared through the crack of his vision at the white of the ceiling, at the rattan fan spinning above him – thwack – thwack – thwack – tilted his head towards the window, to the leaves of the trees outside casting shifting patterns of light and shade over the mosquito mesh.
He felt secure in this cool, tranquil room. Safe.
Safe?
The thought surprised him, and he frowned groggily. What was there to be afraid of? He tried to think but his thoughts were grains of sand slipping through his fingers.
He closed his eyes. That smell. What was it? The gunpowder smell of TNT. Another. Raw, metallic. Blood.
And something else. Emptiness. An absence – the vacuum left by sheared nerves. As though he’d been bitten.
His eyes snapped open.
18
Amesbury, Salisbury Plain, ten months ago
It was well past midnight when Tess got home. The house was dark and silent, but she knew that Luke was upstairs, in their bed, sleeping the sleep of a man who was capable of forgiving himself for anything. Slipping off her shoes, she laid them quietly by the front door. Then she stood in the hall and lifted her face to the air, eyes half closed, smelling the perfume of cut flowers – bought to atone for his attack, no doubt – mingling with the smell of cleaning fluid and furniture polish.
He had cleaned up the blood then. Of course he had.
Vague notions of fear skittered through her brain, but they didn’t coalesce. It felt strange to realise that she wasn’t afraid of him any more. It was a simple equation. He had taken everything. She had nothing left to lose.
A sudden noise. She turned around.
He was standing on the stairs, shirtless, his pyjama bottoms hanging loose around his hips. She took in the bed hair, the hard stomach, the smattering of dark hair on his chest. Three years ago, the first time they had made love, when they had peeled each other’s clothes off item by item, kissing and laughing, just the look of his hard body had telegraphed itself straight to her groin. On their honeymoon in a tiny, isolated croft in the Scottish Highlands, they had made love on every piece of furniture that was big enough. She was sure then that she was the luckiest girl in the world.
‘What are you doing?’ There was menace in his voice. ‘It’s almost one in the morning.’ He gestured to the front door. ‘And why the hell have you left the front door open?’
She stopped and faced him. ‘Where’s the sock? The pink sock?’
‘Why are you asking me that?’ His eyes were grey and cold. ‘I’ve got it. It’s upstairs.’
She nodded slowly. ‘I didn’t tell you.’
‘Tell me what?’
‘I was pregnant.’
He looked confused.
‘The sock wouldn’t have been any use though. Little boys don’t wear pink.’
‘What the fuck are you talking about?’
‘I was four months pregnant with your son when you kicked that ladder from under my feet.’
She watched the range of emotions playing themselves out on his face: confusion, doubt, incredulity, disbelief, hurt, and then anger. Always anger.
‘Why didn’t you tell me, you stupid bitch? If you’d told me, I wouldn’t have—’
‘Wouldn’t have what? Kicked a ladder from underneath me when all I was doing was decorating our Christmas tree? What w
ould you have done instead? Been nice? Tried to resist the temptation to kick the shit out of me?’
Walking to the front door, she scooped up her shoes. Why had she come back here?
‘You fucking bastard,’ she shouted, as she stepped on to the doormat.
His face twisted with rage. ‘What? What did you call me?’
She couldn’t be bothered with this. She wasn’t frightened of being hurt any more. Physical pain was meaningless. ‘You fucking bastard!’ she screamed at the top of her lungs.
‘You’re crazy.’ He stared at her in disbelief. She’d never stood up to him like this, and she could see how shocked he was. ‘For Christ’s sake think about the neighbours.’
She spun around on the path, her arms outstretched. ‘Listen to this, lovely middle-class neighbours. He beats me up for no reason.’
‘Tess, please—’ Standing in the threshold, naked from the waist up, looking tense now, he stretched out a hand. ‘Come back inside.’
She tore off her wedding ring and threw it at him. ‘He stamped on my foot and broke my toe. He snapped my finger for not wearing his fucking ring.’ Her voice kept breaking into a scream now. A light went on in one of the houses on the opposite side of the street.
Cold air eddied around her, chilling her bare arms and legs. Tarmac grated her soles as she stepped from the garden path on to the pavement.
Confusion and uncertainty flashed across his face, and then recognition, understanding that she was not going to play the victim for him any longer. Dropping his hand, he tilted his head and gave a contrite smile. ‘We need each other. We’re meant to be together.’
‘You’re insane.’
‘You need me, Tess.’
‘I don’t need you.’
‘You have no one else. Your father doesn’t love you, and never did. I’m all you’ve got, Tess.’
She didn’t turn.
Behind pale, lifting curtains two neighbours watched a skinny girl with wild red hair, wearing woollen tights but no shoes, stalking down the middle of the street, a ballet pump in each hand.
‘No, I don’t need you,’ she yelled.
Tossing her sodden ballet pumps over a garden wall, she started running.
‘Tess,’ Luke shouted, but his voice was small. She glanced over her shoulder at the figure of a man, lit by a porch light, almost too far away to see now.
‘I loved you,’ she whispered, sinking to her knees on the kerb. A car passed her, and she heard it slow for a moment – felt the eyes of its occupants sizing her up, their indecision plain from the idling engine – heard it accelerate away again. Pushing herself to her feet, she turned the corner and started to walk, rubbing the backs of her hands fiercely across her cheeks to wipe away the tears.
I don’t fucking need you. I am enough. I only need me.
19
Tess slid Jakkleson’s photographs back into the file and returned them to their secret place at the bottom of the drawer. She slid the drawer shut, leant for a second against the cabinet, trying to make sense of what she’d seen. She was tempted to leave now: just walk straight out of the room, with its ludicrously prim facade and its dirty little secrets.
But she had come to Cambodia for a reason.
Crouching, she turned her attention to the bottom drawer, and in here, the files she had been looking for, M to Z. Huan Rae’s file should be here. She went straight to the Rs – there were only three – and none of them was Huan’s. She checked again, taking each file out in turn to make sure that Huan’s hadn’t slid inside one of the others. But it had not. Putting them back, she moved to the front of the drawer, working through each file in turn, taking it out, flicking through its contents, putting it back in its correct place so that nothing was left out of kilter to give her away. When she had gone through the last file and still found nothing relating to Huan, she pushed all the files to the back of their runners and felt around under them, running her hand back and forth across the cool metal base of the drawer. Nothing. Huan’s personnel file was missing.
Shutting the drawer, she straightened and locked the filing cabinet, the muscles in her jaw tensing with frustration. Jakkleson was the admin man, known to be pedantic to a fault, and he kept records of everything. Think. There must be something of use in here. She just hadn’t found it yet.
She stood still and emptied her mind of any expectation, as she had been taught to do when clearing mines. Look with an open mind. She went through the cupboard, each shelf in turn, rummaged through the notices on the board, lifting them to see if anything was hidden underneath, pulled all the books from the bookshelf and shook each one by the spine to see if anything had been slipped between their pages. It was only when she was putting the last book back that it occurred to her she hadn’t checked the waste bin. Reaching into the dark space beneath Jakkleson’s desk, she retrieved it and placed it on the desktop. At the bottom of the bin was a mess of curled, blackened paper and ash. Enough to have been something substantial that Jakkleson had burned – a whole file, not just a sheet or two of paper. So this was it, surely? Huan’s file. She picked through the burnt remains, but they all crumbled to ash in her fingers. He’d been thorough.
She took one last quick look around the office to make sure everything was where it should be, and switched off the light.
Closing the door carefully behind her, she headed back down the stairs. She paused for a moment on the landing, as she had on the way up. A full moon hung low in the sky. Turning from the window, she started towards the flight down to the hallway. And froze.
Footsteps, and then a voice. ‘What the hell are you doing here?’
She recognised the accent before she made out the figure standing in the pale wash of moonlight below.
‘I was emailing my father. He doesn’t like speaking on the telephone.’ She’d prepared this answer before setting out, but it suddenly rang hollow and mechanical even to her ears.
The man in the hallway didn’t reply, though the expression on his face made it clear that he didn’t believe her. One measured step at a time, Tess made her way down. Attack is the best form of defence.
‘So what about you, Alex? What are you doing here?’ She stopped in front of him, taking in the undone shirt, the messy hair.
He ignored her question. ‘Come into the team room.’
‘Why?’
‘I want to talk.’
She didn’t move. ‘We can talk here.’
‘There are chairs to sit on in the team room. I only want to talk and I . . . would like to sit down.’
He clocked her hesitation and put out a hand to touch her arm. She jerked away and he let his hand fall back to his side, the movement weary, dispirited.
‘Johnny’s accident has hit him hard,’ MacSween had said yesterday. ‘They’re good friends.’ What did she have to lose?
‘OK. Let’s talk.’
As he turned, she noticed the butt of a pistol stuck into his belt. A Browning nine-millimetre. Her father had one just like it, bought on the black market in Iraq during the first Gulf war and smuggled back to England in his kit bag. He kept it in a tin in a kitchen cupboard, rolling around with its bullets. She had discovered it when she was nine years old, tall enough to reach the cupboard door. He never was one to make allowances for mundane things, like his daughter’s safety. It occurred to her that perhaps she should be worried Alex was carrying, but she felt strangely ambivalent.
Alex didn’t switch on the light when they entered the team room. So he too didn’t want to be seen here. The thought buoyed her with some confidence. He leaned against the window ledge and motioned her to a chair opposite him.
‘Sit.’
She stayed where she was. ‘I’m not a Labrador.’
‘Please. Sit down, please.’
She did as he asked, hooking a chair back into the darker depths of the room with her foot before she sat down, so she wasn’t framed in the moonlight washing in through the window. ‘What do you want to talk about?’
‘What are you doing here?’
‘I’ve already told you.’
‘Ah, yes.’ He glanced away, a grim smile pulling at the corners of his mouth. ‘I might feel like shit but I am not an idiot. Do you always break into offices after ten at night to send emails?’
‘I could ask you the same question. Because I guess there’s a reason we’re sitting here in the dark?’
He nodded. ‘You could.’
‘So what are you doing here?’
Looking out of the window into the wild garden, he didn’t speak for a few moments. Watching his back, she noticed the same tense set of his shoulders she had seen at the hospital the day before yesterday, and it dragged her straight back there, to the hurt and fear.
‘You don’t think that it – Johnny – was an accident, do you?’ he murmured.
She drew in a breath, held it for a couple of beats of her pulse while she thought, made a decision. ‘No, I don’t.’
She saw his knuckles whiten as he tightened his grip on the windowsill. ‘Why?’
Should she tell him the whole lot? About her connection to Luke? About the White Crocodile drawing on the envelope containing the pink sock she had been sent from Cambodia? About the anti-tank mine she had found under the anti-personnel mine that maimed Johnny? But she knew that she wouldn’t tell him. What was the point in sticking her neck out any further than she already had? She was in a dangerous enough position as it was.
‘Because it just didn’t feel right.’
‘So you came here to look around? Find some evidence, some proof?’
‘I wanted to see if I could find Huan’s file. It was his lane. He was off sick that day. He hasn’t been seen or heard from since.’
‘So you think he’s responsible?’
‘I don’t know. But the mine Johnny stood on was in ground that had already been cleared by Huan.’
Alex straightened, rubbing a hand over his eyes. ‘In the meeting with MacSween the day after Johnny’s accident, you said you didn’t know whether the mine was in cleared ground or not, and now, suddenly, you remember it clearly?’