The Chosen Dead (Jenny Cooper 5)

by Hall, M. R.

  ‘Thank you, Dr Kerr,’ Jenny said. ‘Unless you have any questions, Mr Brightland, I’ll call Mr Harry Thorn.’

  The solicitor shook his head and returned his attention to the file in which he had been absorbed. No doubt he was performing the neat lawyer’s trick of billing two clients at once.

  Thorn marched forward. He refused the Christian oath and chose instead to affirm. The lines that gave his features the appearance of cracked earth on a drought-stricken plain had been gouged even deeper by his recent ordeal at the hands of Webley’s interrogators. The defiant spirit had left him, along with his profane eloquence. He wouldn’t have smoked a joint in days, and he was moody and monosyllabic as a result. But Jenny was persistent and determined, and unrelentingly dragged the story of what had happened in Ginya out of him.

  For nearly six months he and Adam had been working at a Dinka village named Anakubori, some forty miles from the newly drawn border that separated the mostly Muslim Sudan to the north from its largely Christian and animist neighbour, South Sudan. Decades of civil war had given way to an uneasy and patchy peace. The violence that persisted was mostly tribal: in the absence of civil authority, old scores and property disputes were often settled at the point of a gun. But the feared Arab militias, the ruthless, rag-tag Muslim mercenaries from across North African known as the Janjaweed, had largely vanished from the scene.

  AFAD’s project involved installing a trickle-irrigation system that would enable a village of five hundred Dinka, who for centuries had scratched a Stone Age living from the dust, to feed themselves and generate an income. Three-quarters of the crop was maize, and a quarter, Thorn admitted, was marijuana that was bought by middle men who shipped it north to Egypt and Morocco.

  ‘I didn’t see it as a moral issue,’ Thorn said. ‘These people needed dollars for medicine and solar panels. They weren’t going to be buying Ferraris.’

  ‘How did Adam Jordan feel about that?’ Jenny asked.

  ‘He took some persuading, but that’s Africa,’ Thorn said with a shrug. ‘It attracts idealists and creates realists. Adam was still on the journey.’

  Jenny would have liked to have known more about Harry Thorn’s adventures in the African drugs trade, but much as she might have tried to squeeze him, he wasn’t obliged to answer questions that might prove incriminating. Keeping instead to Adam’s story, Jenny took him back to a day in early May. Thorn had been busy negotiating with contractors who’d come from across the border to drill a new well and there was a disagreement over money. Harry was at full stretch keeping angry villagers and irate Muslim workers apart when a government water tanker and a jeep drove in. He sent Adam to deal with them. The two drivers had been dispatched to deliver the tanker to the village of Ginya, fifty miles further down the road, where the solar pump drawing water from their borehole had failed. Engineers were on the way, but the village was without water. The tanker driver was reluctant to go there, frightened that his face might be remembered from a skirmish he had fought in during the civil war. He was angling for someone else to drive the tanker the last leg and was willing to offer a day’s wages in return. Adam was keen to deliver the tanker himself, fearing that there might be a lot of thirsty and distressed people at Ginya in need of medical help, but Thorn needed him, and persuaded a local man with kin in Ginya to deliver the truck instead.

  The round-trip over dirt roads took the best part of twenty-four hours. The man Thorn had sent returned in the jeep with the second of the two drivers sent by the government, happy to report that he had arrived just in time; the people had been a day and a half without water – they were thirsty and had jostled to fill their buckets – but there had been no casualties. He went to collect his payment from the first government driver who had been too frightened to make the trip to Ginya, but he was nowhere to be found. Meanwhile, his colleague who had been driving the jeep took off on his own. Thorn and Adam had been too busy supervising the rebellious drilling crew to pay the disappearance much attention, but the next morning a rumour swept the village that a group of Janjaweed had been seen camping a couple of miles to the north in the bush. The boy who had stumbled on them said they had AK-47s.

  Adam smelt a rat and wanted to drive back to Ginya straight away, but Harry needed him to help keep the peace in what was still a tense situation. If the Anakubori well wasn’t sunk within the following few days, they risked missing that year’s growing season altogether.

  Adam made the journey to Ginya four days later. On his return he would say that he was greeted by a vision of hell. The village was a collection of large thatched huts surrounded by a wooden stockade. As he approached along the dirt road he was struck by its unnatural quietness. No swarm of excited children came running out to meet him; thirsty, emaciated livestock were wandering freely. He drove through the entrance to the stockade and into a wall of flies. There were bodies everywhere – men, women, children, babies – all of them bloated and disfigured beyond recognition. They lay in contorted positions that could only have been caused by agonizing death throes. There were no signs of violence and no damage to the buildings, which led him to wonder if they had been poisoned by the water. He went from hut to hut searching for survivors, but found none. He was heading back out of the village, having given up hope, when he saw a solitary young woman walking across the scrub from a cattle shelter that stood outside the village perimeter. It was Ayen. She told him she was the only person left alive. Adam’s assumption was right: she claimed that the water had poisoned everyone except her.

  A tremor of emotion entered Thorn’s voice; a glimpse of the man he must once have been before. He paused to take a drink with an unsteady hand before continuing his story.

  Adam brought Ayen back to the village, but Thorn insisted he take her straight to the hospital in the nearest city, Malakal, and that for his own safety he not come back. Thorn realized that as soon as the villagers found out what had happened, his life would be in danger, too: there were blood ties between Anakubori and Ginya, and outsiders could all too easily become scapegoats in the search for revenge. He left that night, only a few hours after Adam, and hadn’t been back since.

  ‘Do you know who sent that tanker?’ Jenny asked.

  ‘Not for certain,’ Thorn replied. ‘But during the civil war there was a notoriously bloody battle near Ginya. Nearly a hundred Janjaweed were captured and massacred. I heard stories that the Southerners decided to give them a taste of their own medicine and killed them the sharia way: buried them up to their necks and stoned them to death. It’s not too much of a stretch to imagine a party coming back over the border to settle the score.’

  ‘Who did you tell about this incident, apart from the local police?’

  ‘That was it.’

  ‘Didn’t you think it was worthy of further inquiry – a massacre of innocent people?’

  Thorn was defiant. ‘My organization has saved the lives of tens of thousands. No one wants us to succeed. No one wants to give us money. All anyone ever wants is to profit from us or use us for political ends. I don’t believe it was a mistake they came to our village. Whoever it was, whatever they represented, they wanted to destroy our work and our reputation beyond all hope of redemption. I told Adam to leave the girl in Malakal –’ he glanced over at Ayen – ‘a pretty girl, she’d find a husband, but he wouldn’t do it. He hadn’t grasped the fundamentals. We were there for the many, not the few. You start caring about this person or that person, you’re no longer an aid worker, you’re a social worker, you’re a street cleaner, not a street builder.’

  It was an impassioned speech that shook the hall like a peel of thunder, but one that left Thorn standing stooped and hollow. He had paid a high price for his tough brand of compassion. The man who counted the value of lives in numbers had had the love burned out of him by the African sun, leaving him as pitted and dry as bones in the desert.

  Jenny let him end his evidence there. The later events at AFAD’s offices were still under joint investigation
by detectives from the Metropolitan Police and agents from Ruth Webley’s department, and fell outside the agreed scope of the inquest. All that Jenny knew was that Eda Hincks had been working in the office when two men of Middle Eastern appearance had burst in demanding to know the whereabouts of Ayen Deng. When she refused to talk, they had violently assaulted her, slashed both her breasts and left her for dead. Detective Superintendent Williams had found her, alive but unconscious. If he’d been fifteen minutes later, Eda Hincks would surely have been dead. In a short statement she had given from her hospital bed, Eda had confirmed that she knew nothing about the events in Ginya and had never heard of Ayen Deng.

  Jenny called the young African woman sitting between Harry Thorn and Gabra forward to give evidence. Ayen Deng was slightly built, with hair knitted in tight cornrows, her eyes permanently wide and startled. With one hand grasping the Bible and with the other pressed to her chest, she spoke her oath in English that carried a strong hint of an Irish accent. When Jenny asked if she had understood the proceedings so far, Ayen said she had understood them perfectly. Until the age of twelve, she had been educated by Irish nuns, the Sisters of Charity, who had run a mission school in Ginya. They had stayed for much of the war, but when the fighting got close, the villagers had made them leave; the Janjaweed would have slaughtered white nuns like goats.

  Jenny could picture Ayen as a child sitting straight-backed in the mission school classroom. She delivered her evidence with the same earnestness and attention to detail that she must have shown in her studies. Despite all she had seen, she remained rigorous and attentive, rooted in something deep and substantial Jenny could only assume was the faith inculcated by the Sisters. Having spoken just a few sentences, Ayen had the jury – and Jenny – captivated.

  She had lived in Ginya all her life, she said, and had four brothers and two sisters. When she was young and at school, she had hoped to leave the village and train to be a nurse, but then the war came. Many of the men, including two of her brothers, were killed by the Janjaweed, their throats cut and their bodies left unburied. There was no hope of leaving after that. Life became a little easier when, a year or so ago, the old well was replaced by a borehole that went deep into the earth. It was wide enough only for a thin pipe through which water was sucked by a solar pump, but there was always sufficient to drink. It had always worked without a problem until one morning the pump was found broken. A young man was sent to the next village, where there was a telephone from which he could call the government office in Malakal. For nearly two days they went without water until a tanker arrived. It was like a gift from God.

  The tanker water had tasted good: clear and cool, far nicer than the water they drew from the well. Everybody drank until their bellies were swollen and could hold no more. It was some hours later during the night that people started to fall ill. At first it was the children and the very old. It began with headaches and fevers, then their skins erupted in rashes, their faces and limbs started to swell and the whites of their eyes turned black. They started to fit as if devils were dancing inside them. By morning adults were falling sick, too, even the strongest men. Ayen prayed with her sisters just as the nuns had taught them, but it was no good. One by one they were all struck down. Some of the old people were saying it was a curse, others said the water had been poisoned. Ayen hadn’t known what to believe: she had drunk the water and felt fine. By the second night she was the only person left in the village who wasn’t sick, and more than half the people were already dead. None of her family survived till morning. She waited for death to take her, too. But it didn’t come.

  ‘I went out of the village to pray,’ she said. ‘I remembered the stories of Lazarus, and of Legion and the swine; I prayed the evil spirits would leave us and go into the cattle.’ Ayen paused, raising her hand to her mouth as if she might cry, but no tears came. ‘Then I saw the jeep coming. I saw Mr Adam.’

  Her account grew sketchier as she tried to recall the events of the bewildering days and weeks following her rescue from Ginya, a place she had left only twice in her twenty years of life. Jenny extracted the barest details of her journey to the hospital at Malakal, where the doctors could find nothing wrong with her. She had nowhere to go and asked Adam to help her find the nuns who had run the school in Ginya. She wanted to go to their convent in Juba, but he told her he wanted to take her back to his country. He said he would look after her and that she could help to find out what had killed all the people in her village.

  They stayed in Malakal for several weeks, getting her papers and a passport, then Adam brought her to England to the house in Bristol. He told her she wouldn’t have to wait long, that he was going to find out what caused the disease in her village and then she would tell her story. When people heard it, he told her, there would be no more people dying like they had in Ginya. One morning he came to find her and said they were going to meet a man, a doctor, who would scrape her mouth to find out why she hadn’t died like the others. They travelled a long way in Adam’s car. She sat with his son, Sam, in the back seat.

  ‘Is the man you met that day with Mr Jordan sitting in this room?’ Jenny asked.

  ‘Yes,’ Ayen replied. ‘That’s him.’ She pointed to Guy Harrison.

  They had met beside a petrol station. He scraped the inside of her mouth with a cotton bud, then handed something to Adam that looked like a silver bottle. They drove again, this time to the place where Adam’s father was buried. His father had been very precious to him, Adam had told her, and he wanted to talk to him before they told the story of what had happened in Ginya.

  She had left him by himself and was walking with Sam in the field when the men came. There were three of them in a big vehicle. She heard shouting and saw Adam running towards his car. He managed to get inside, and she saw him drinking down the contents of the silver bottle as the men beat on the windows. One of them saw her and chased her into the woods, where she managed to lose him.

  Ayen dipped her head in shame. ‘I ran away. I left the baby and I ran away through the trees. It was like the war again.’

  She spent the night hiding, sure that she was going to be hunted down and killed.

  ‘Why did you think you would be killed?’ Jenny asked.

  ‘The men who took Adam spoke the language of the Janjaweed.’

  ‘They were speaking Arabic?’

  ‘Yes. I heard them shouting. I had heard that tongue during the war.’

  ‘Did you see them take Adam Jordan away?’

  Ayen nodded. ‘Yes. They pulled him from the car and drove him away.’

  She had woken to the sound of voices. From the cover of the trees she watched policemen arrive and saw them take Sam. Too frightened to show herself, she stayed hidden until late in the morning, when the policeman standing by Adam’s car walked away from it along the road. She ran to the car to fetch the doll she had given him as a present when he rescued her from Ginya. She had carved it herself.

  ‘Why did you do that?’ Jenny asked.

  Ayen looked at her, puzzled, as if the answer were obvious. ‘While people were dying, I held it in my hand and the sickness didn’t touch me. There were good spirits for me in that doll.’

  The good spirits had continued their work. A car stopped for her on the road and the woman driving it had taken her to Bristol. Frightened to tell her story and not knowing who to trust, Ayen had pretended not to be able to speak English and told the woman nothing. For days she hid in her room, too frightened to leave, even to fetch food, then Mr Thorn arrived. He told her he was taking her to Ireland, to the Sisters of Charity who had taught her in school. She went in his car with Gabra, but in the hurry to leave she had forgotten her doll and there were no spirits to guard her. The police caught them before she could get on the boat.

  Jenny reached down into her briefcase and brought out the figurine that had been lying on the floor of the abandoned bedsit. ‘Would you like it back?’

  Ayen’s eyes lit up. Jenny got up from her se
at and handed it to her. She seized hold of it in outstretched hands and pressed it to her lips.

  ‘Thank you, Miss Deng. You may step down.’

  Clinging to the doll, Ayen made her way back to her seat.

  Honouring her agreement with Fitzpatrick, Jenny asked the single reporter present to leave the hall while the next witness gave evidence. Stirring from a semi-doze, he dutifully did as she asked.

  Every bit as gawky as she remembered him, Guy Harrison kept his eyes fixed on the floor, too shy to look directly at the jury, as Jenny led him through his evidence. He had been working for Combined Life Systems first as a lab technician, then as a senior technician, since its establishment by the late Professor Roman Slavsky ten years earlier. From the outset, a premium was placed on security. All employees were required to sign a strict confidentiality agreement containing punitive penalty clauses: leaking company secrets wouldn’t only cost your job, you would be sued for everything you owned. The quid pro quo was that everyone down to the receptionist was granted generous share options: Slavsky convinced them he had a vision that would make their company one of the richest pharmas in the world; they were all going to be millionaires.

  The concept was simple and, as Slavsky often repeated to them, a perfect example of beating swords into ploughshares. As a Soviet military scientist, he had spent many years developing work first commenced by his American counterparts in the 1960s. In its first incarnation, the idea had been to study populations that showed immunity to certain common viruses and bacteria, with a view to developing weapons that would attack only certain ethnic groups. The work had limited success, but in the early 1980s US biotech companies started perfecting cheap laboratory techniques that allowed DNA from one organism to be spliced into any other. The fruits of much of this work filtered back to Slavsky and his colleagues in Moscow, who began to see new possibilities for targeted biological weapons. What if an agent like botulism could be adapted to attack only the cells of a person who carried a given set of genetic characteristics? It was a tantalizing prospect for military planners, but Slavsky’s work hadn’t progressed beyond the theoretical stage when he fled across the Iron Curtain in 1989.