The Veteran

by Frederick Forsyth

  They were withered, of course, but they were oxeye daisies, dying in a jam jar of stale water. The headstone indicated that it covered the earthly remains of Mavis June Hall. There was a date of birth, the date of death and the letters RIP. She had been dead twenty years and even then she would have been seventy.

  ‘Look at the date of birth, guv. August 1906. Last Tuesday was her birthday.’

  ‘But who the hell was she to the limping man?’

  ‘His mum, perhaps.’

  ‘Maybe. So perhaps his name is Hall,’ said Burns.

  They drove back past the Armitage flower shop and Miss Verity identified the daisies as almost certainly hers. At the Dover nick, Skinner contacted the Missing Persons Bureau for the name Hall. There were three, but two were women and one a child.

  ‘Someone must have known this bugger. Why don’t they report him missing?’ fumed Burns. It was getting to be one frustration after another.

  The pretty and bright WPC went back to her files. Burns and Skinner went down to the cells where Price and Cornish were formally charged with inflicting grievous bodily harm on an unidentified adult male. At quarter to four they set off for Highbury Corner, where the chief clerk had exceptionally managed to find a last-minute slot in the sitting schedule. This time, the two thugs would not be returning to Dover Street. Burns intended that they should be lodged in a real prison on a week’s remand, probably Pentonville.

  Things had changed at the court. They were in Number 1 this time, where the prisoner’s dock is dead centre, facing the bench, rather than in one corner. The magistrate was now a stipendiary, or ‘stipe’, in the form of the experienced and highly qualified Mr Jonathan Stein.

  Price and Cornish arrived by police van again, but another van in the livery of HM Prison Service was on standby to take them to jail. Mr Lou Slade was at his table facing the bench, but for the CPS a young barrister would make the remand submission.

  Years ago, it was the police who handled their own prosecutions up to and through the magistrates’ courts and many old-timers preferred it that way. But for a long time all prosecutions have been handled from the first appearance to the final trial, if any, by the unified structure of the Crown Prosecution Service. Among their tasks is to assess whether a police-prepared case has a realistic chance of a conviction before a judge and jury. If the CPS thinks not, the case is withdrawn. More than one disgruntled detective, seeing a case on which he has worked long and hard against a real villain withdrawn from the lists, has referred to the CPS as the Criminal Protection Service. It is not always a happy relationship.

  A big problem with the CPS is that it is underfunded, overstretched and pays in peanuts. As a predictable result, it is sometimes regarded as a mere stepping stone for the young and inexperienced before they move into private practice and on to better things.

  Miss Prabani Sundaran was very bright and very pretty, the apple of her Sri Lankan-born parents’ eye. She was also on her first major case. But this should not have been a problem.

  The remand in custody was going to be a formality. There was no way Mr Stein was going to grant bail to Price and Cornish. Their records for violence were appalling and he had them in front of him. Remands can only last for a week, so there would be several more yet to come before the defence was chosen, engaged, prepared and ready. Then would come the process of committal, when the prosecution evidence would be produced in full and the magistrate would commit the thugs for trial at the Crown Court, complete with judge and jury. By then, Miss Sundaran would be assisting a full-fledged Treasury Counsel, possibly even a Queen’s Counsel, who would be engaged by the CPS to try to achieve a conviction. All she had to do was go through the motions. The procedures, just the procedures.

  At a nod from Mr Stein she rose and, reading from her notes, gave the briefest outline of the charge. Slade rose.

  ‘My clients will deny the charge and in due course will enter a full defence,’ he said.

  ‘We seek a remand in custody for one week, sir,’ said Miss Sundaran.

  ‘Mr Slade?’ The stipe was asking if Mr Slade intended to ask for bail. Slade shook his head. Mr Stein gave a wintry smile.

  ‘Very wise. Remanded in custody for one week. I shall . . .’ He peered at both lawyers over his half-moons. ‘Put this down to be heard before me next Friday morning.’

  The entire court knew perfectly well that he meant he would listen to, and grant, a further remand in custody for another week, and so on until both prosecution and defence were ready for committal to Crown Court.

  Price and Cornish, still handcuffed but now flanked by prison officers, disappeared below decks in the direction of the Ville. Mr Slade went back to his office knowing that by Monday morning he would have an answer to his application for Legal Aid. His clients clearly had no assets with which to pay for their own defence, and he would have to try to find a barrister from one of the four Inns of Court to take the case for pretty small pickings.

  He already had in mind a couple of chambers whose all-powerful chief clerks would consider it, but he knew he would probably get a freshly qualified sprog who needed the experience or an old blowhard who needed the fee. No matter. In an increasingly violent world a GBH does not set the Thames on fire.

  Jack Burns returned to Dover Street. His desk was full. He still had a huge workload, now forming a backlog. And on the matter of the limping man he had some problems to solve.

  DAY FIVE – SATURDAY

  Mr Paul Willis came in at nine a.m. on the Saturday as promised. There had been no change in his patient and he was becoming worried. The rescan was quickly effected and the surgeon studied the results acutely.

  There was certainly no fresh haematoma to account for the continuing coma. The blood vessels he had tied off remained leak-proof. No blood was pressing on the brain. It had expanded quickly to its full and usual size. No fresh leaks had developed to create pressure from a different source.

  And yet, intra-cranial pressure remained too high, and blood pressure was the same. He began to fear the neurosurgeon’s nightmare. If there had been catastrophic and diffuse axonal injury inflicted by those kicks, it would not show up, even on the scan. But if the brain stem or cortex was damaged beyond self-repair, the man would remain in a permanent vegetative state until the life-support system was switched off, or he would simply die. He resolved to do brain-stem tests after the weekend. Meanwhile, his wife was much looking forward to the lunch party in Oxfordshire with the people they had met in Corfu and she was waiting downstairs in the car. He looked down at his patient once again and left.

  The adoo were coming out of the dead ground near the old stone fort and there were scores of them. He had seen them before on his tour with B Squadron in this bitter and secret war, but they had been distant figures against the dun brown hills and appearing in ones and twos. This was a full-scale mass attack and the fanatical bastards were swarming everywhere.

  There were only ten of them, him and his mates; plus about fifty mixed askaris from the north, local gendarmes and some levies, the untrained and wild-firing firgas. Among his mob there were two ‘Ruperts’, two sergeants, a lance corporal and five troopers. He put the adoo already at over 200 and they were coming from all sides.

  Lying flat on the roof of the Batthouse, he squinted down the sights of his SLR and slotted three adoo before they even knew where the fire was coming from. Not surprising, the roar of mortars and shells, the chatter of small arms was unremitting.

  Had it not been for that single shot as the rebs swept over the outpost at Jebel Ali an hour earlier, they would have been finished already. The alert had given them a few minutes to take position before the first wave of attackers swept towards the wire. As it was, sheer numbers were moving the situation from piss-poor to desperate.

  Down below, he could see the body of an askari face down on the muddy track that passed for Main Street. Captain Mike was still trying to cover the 400 yards to where Corporal Labalaba, the fiercely brave Fijian wit
h half his jaw shot away, was firing the obsolete 25-pounder field gun over open sites at point-blank range into the oncoming waves of tribesmen.

  Two keffiyeh-covered heads came out from behind the DG fort to his right, so he blew them both off. Three more came over the low ridge to his left. They were trying to drop the ducking and dodging captain in the open ground. He gave them the rest of his magazine, slotted one and discouraged the other two.

  He rolled over to change magazines and a bloody great rocket from a Carl Gustav screamed over his head. Ten inches lower and he would have been hamburger steak. Below the rafters on which he lay, he could hear his own ‘Rupert’ on the radio to base, asking for a Strikemaster hit and to hell with the low cloud. With a new magazine, he caught another couple of adoo in the open and dropped them both before they could get Captain Mike, who had just disappeared into the gunpit with Medical Orderly Tobin to try to help the two Fijians.

  He could not know then, but would learn later, that the fearless Labalaba had just taken a second bullet, this time through the forehead and was dead; nor that Tobin was mortally wounded just after patching up Trooper Ti, who had taken three bullets but would still somehow live. By luck, he saw the terrorist who was manning the Carl Gustav that had nearly killed him. The adoo was between two hummocks of sand just by the torn and sagging perimeter wire. With precision, he put a nice cupro-nickel-jacketed 7.62 NATO round straight through his throat. The Carl Gustav went silent, but the numbing blasts from the mortars and one remaining 75mm recoilless rifle the adoo were using went on.

  At last, somehow, the Strikemasters came, racing in off the sea below cloud no more than 100 feet up. Bombs and strafing finally broke the will of the adoo to carry on. The attack wavered and then fell apart. They began to run, carrying their wounded and most of their dead with them. Later he would learn that he and his mates had fought off between 300 and 400 of them, and sent about a 100 to paradise.

  Lying on his roof as the firing died, he began to laugh with relief and wondered what Auntie May would think of him now.

  In the ICU unit of the Royal London, the limping man was still far, far away.

  DAY SIX – SUNDAY

  Jack Burns was a man of simple pleasures and one of them was his Sunday morning lie-in. That day he did not get it. The phone rang at seven fifteen. It was the desk sergeant at Dover nick.

  ‘There’s a man just come in here who takes his dog for a walk early in the morning,’ said the sergeant.

  Burns wondered blearily just how long, if he really put his mind to it, it would take to strangle the sergeant.

  ‘He’s clutching a wallet,’ said the sergeant. ‘Says his dog found it on waste ground, about half a mile from the housing estate.’

  Burns came awake fast. ‘Cheap, plastic, black?’

  ‘You’ve seen it?’

  ‘Keep him there. Do not let him leave. I’ll be there in twenty minutes.’

  The dog-walker was a pensioner, Mr Robert Whittaker, upright and neat, nursing a cup of tea in one of the interview rooms.

  Mr Whittaker gave and signed his statement, then left. Burns called the POLSA team and asked the grumpy team leader for an inch-by-inch search of the half-acre of waste ground. He wanted his report by sundown. It had not rained for four days but the sky looked heavy and grey; he did not want any wallet contents degraded by a good soaking.

  Finally he studied the wallet. He could see slight indentations made by the dog’s teeth, a slick of canine saliva. But what else might it yield? With tweezers, he lifted it into a plastic evidence bag and called Fingerprints. Yes, I know it is a Sunday, he said again, but this is a rush job.

  During the day the searchers filled eight binliners of rubbish from the patch of waste ground and sere grass alongside Mandela Road and the examination of it lasted into the night.

  But nothing turned up that could have come from the wallet which, as Mr Whittaker had stated and Burns had confirmed, was completely empty.

  DAY SEVEN – MONDAY

  He lay huddled and fearful in the near darkness, a single flickering night light at the end of the room casting strange moving shadows towards the ceiling. Down the length of the orphanage dormitory he could hear the other boys murmuring in sleep and occasionally a whimper from a bad dream. He did not know where he would go, what he would become, now that Mum and Dad were gone. He only knew that he was alone and frightened in this new environment.

  He might have dozed but he came awake again when the door opened, and there was an oblong of light from the passage outside. Then she was bending over him, gentle hands tucking the sheet and blankets tighter round him, soothing his sweat-damp hair back from his face.

  ‘Now, now, lad. Not asleep yet? Now, you go to sleep like a good boy, and God and all his angels will look after you until Auntie May comes back in the morning.’

  Thus comforted, he slipped away into the long, warm darkness of the endless night.

  It was the duty staff at the ICU in the Royal London. She had tried the Dover nick, but Burns had earlier given the ICU his personal number for emergency calls.

  ‘DI Burns? Royal London. I am sorry to have to inform you that the patient you were interested in – the unidentified man in intensive care – he died at ten past six this morning.’

  Jack Burns put down the phone facing another full day. He now had a murder case. At least it would go straight up the priority ladder. There would be a post-mortem and he would have to attend it. The two animals in the Ville would have to be brought back to Highbury and recharged.

  That meant that the Clerk to the Magistrates would have to be informed, and the defending solicitor, Lou Slade. Procedures, more procedures, but they had to be done and done right. There could be no question of Price and Cornish walking away on a technicality discovered by a clever-dick lawyer. Burns wanted them inside grey stone walls for years and years to come.

  The Royal London has its own small mortuary and pathology department, and it was here that the PM took place at midday. It was conducted by Home Office pathologist Mr Laurence Hamilton.

  Odd birds, forensic pathologists, was Burns’s private opinion. They did a job that disgusted him. Some were effulgently cheerful, given to light banter as they cut and sawed a body into bits. Others were more professorial, regarding what they found with boyish enthusiasm, as a lepidopterist finding an amazing new butterfly. Others were dour and spoke in monosyllables. Mr Hamilton was of the first variety. For him, life could not be better nor his job more wonderful.

  Jack Burns had attended several in his career, but the smell of ether and formaldehyde almost always made him gag. When the disc saw bit into the skull he turned away and looked at the charts on the wall.

  ‘Good Lord, he’s taken a beating,’ said Hamilton as they surveyed the pale and bruise-covered body lying face up on the slab.

  ‘Kicked to death. Last Tuesday,’ said Burns. ‘Just took him six days to die.’

  ‘Unfortunately “death by kicking” is not quite the result I shall have to produce,’ said Hamilton genially. He began to cut, dictating what he found to his theatre sister and the microphone linked to a tape recorder that she held out to him as he moved around the table.

  It took a good hour. There was a lot of damage and Mr Hamilton spent time on the old wound, the right femur and hip shattered long ago, held together with steel pins, which had caused the man to limp for the rest of his life.

  ‘Looks as if he was hit by a truck,’ said Hamilton. ‘Terrific damage.’ He pointed out the scars where the bones had come through the flesh and the neater one where the surgeon had opened the victim to get access to the damage.

  Everything else, and there was much, stemmed from the previous Tuesday: crunched left hand, stamped into the pavement, smashed front teeth, three cracked ribs, broken cheekbone. Burns checked the right fist, but Carl Bateman had been right. There was no damage. Puzzling.

  ‘Cause of death?’ he asked at length.

  ‘Well, Mr Burns, it will all be in my o
fficial report.’ Of course. He would be a major prosecution witness at the trial. ‘But between you and me, massive axonal damage to the brain. The neurosurgeon did all he could, but he would not have seen this. It doesn’t show on a scan. Assisted by general trauma due to multiple injuries which, though not individually life-threatening, would have had a collective effect. I’ll put him back together for the relatives. Are there relatives?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Burns. ‘I don’t even know who he was.’

  He spent the afternoon covering all the formalities for the next day: the Clerk to the Magistrates, Pentonville Prison. Lou Slade was suitably regretful. His Legal Aid had come through and he had spent the morning trying to find a barrister to take the case. Like Burns, he had run into the August syndrome; half the people he rang were away. But he thought he had a young junior from King’s Bench Walk who would take it. At least with a murder he would now excite more interest. It is an ill wind . . .

  ‘I still have to defend them,’ he said.

  ‘Don’t try too hard, Mr Slade,’ said Burns and put the phone down.

  There was bad news in the afternoon, but it was superseded by the good news. Chivvied by Detective Chief Superintendent Parfitt to hurry up, forensics came back with their results. There was nothing in the way of blood or fibre samples on the clothes of Price and Cornish to link them physically with the dead man. The blood on the T-shirt was uniquely from one source, and that was its owner, Price.

  Burns was philosophical. If the men had wrestled body to body there would have been fibre traces passing from fabric to fabric. Price and Cornish would have been too stupid to be aware of the extraordinary advances in forensic technology of the past twenty years. Clues showed up nowadays that could never have been seen when Burns was a copper on the beat at Paignton.

  But the limping man had been felled by a punch and a kick behind the knee. On the ground only toecaps had hammered into his body and after twenty-four hours the boots removed from Price and Cornish had been scuffed and dust-covered by a day’s extra use, and yielded nothing that would stand up in court.