by Andy Maslen
“Don’t die,” she said. “Come back safe with Dad.”
“I’ll try,” he said, feeling the inadequacy of his words.
At the door, Melody stopped him with a hand on his arm.
“If you need help in Africa that Barbara Sutherland can’t provide, call me. I said I had contacts there. I can put you in touch with them.”
4
PTSD
THE following day, Gabriel turned left into a quiet residential street in Islington, in north London. He found Richard Austin’s house halfway down on the right – a terraced Victorian not dissimilar to Melody’s. Only, he guessed, probably worth at least twice as much in this chi-chi neighbourhood occupied by bankers, media types and advertising agency creatives, to judge from the number of Porsches he’d spotted on the drive in.
As Austin had said on the phone, there was off-street parking. Gabriel pulled onto the graveled rectangle that had replaced the front garden. He switched off the engine and sat for a few minutes, listening to the cooling fans whirring.
He checked his watch, a vintage Breitling Chronomaster with a black face. His father had given it to him when he’d joined the Parachute Regiment. It was something of a peace offering, as well as a present, as his old man had wanted Gabriel to follow in his footsteps, first to Cambridge and then to the Diplomatic Service. It was 9.45, early, as planned. Gabriel didn’t want to sit in the car and sweat nervously for fifteen minutes, so he got out and walked back the way he’d driven to the main shopping street running east-west through Islington itself.
A cold wind had sprung up and Gabriel was glad of his overcoat. He pulled it tight across his body and tied the belt for good measure. Ahead, two young women were pushing buggies and talking to each other in an eastern European language that sounded like Polish. It wasn’t a language he spoke fluently, though he could make out the odd phrase. It seemed they were nannies and he caught the words “useless man” and “she’s having an affair”.
After a ten-minute circuit, turning repeatedly right, he ended up back on Richard Austin’s road with a couple of minutes to spare. He squeezed between his Maserati and Richard Austin’s battered, avocado-green Volvo estate and pressed the doorbell. From inside the house, a melodious peal of church bells sounded and a few seconds later, the door opened.
The man standing in front of him was in his late thirties or early forties. Tall, maybe six-one or six-two, and with the beginnings of a paunch. His eyes, pale grey, were magnified by the lenses of his glasses – thick, tortoiseshell frames that sat on a long, straight nose.
“Gabriel,” he said, holding out his right hand. “I’m Richard.”
Austin’s handshake felt odd and Gabriel looked down. The man’s right hand, and the wrist protruding from the cuff of his sweater, were horribly burnt, the skin rebuilt in swirls of shiny pink that looked like melted plastic.
Austin followed his gaze down.
“Our Bradley took a direct hit from an RPG. Got a bit hot inside.”
“Sorry. I didn’t mean to stare.”
“It’s fine, but come in, come in, don’t stand out there in the cold, you’ll let all the heat out.” Richard led Gabriel though into the kitchen. “Coffee?” he said.
“Yes, please.”
The coffee made, they went through into a small, square room. On one wall there was a painting of a field full of poppies. On another, a simple line drawing of a woman seated in a chair, reading a book. In the centre of the room, placed opposite each other on a deep-red Persian rug, were a pair of matching armchairs – low-slung affairs upholstered in soft, creased leather the colour of plain chocolate and rimmed with bright brass nailheads. Between them stood a low table, its top a frosted glass slab. On the table was a box of tissues, the uppermost sheet tugged partway out of the oval slot. One wall consisted of floor-to-ceiling bookshelves in white-painted timber. Gabriel ran his eye along one of the shelves and read out some of the authors: “Alfred Adler, Sigmund Freud, Anna Freud, Carl Jung, Francine Shapiro. All the greats – but I haven’t heard of the last one.”
Austin gestured with the hand not carrying his mug of coffee that Gabriel should take the chair nearest the door.
“No?” he said. “Most people I see arrive having Googled her. Half of them seem to know more about her work than I do.”
Gabriel sat, hitching the knees of his trousers up an inch or two. He pressed his lips together for a second before he spoke.
“Not me. I didn’t want to prejudge or even really know what was going to happen. I’ve only been seeing Fariyah for a few sessions, so I thought I’d just do what she told me and come to see you.”
“Well, I’m really glad you did. I should tell you that, although I’m not a doctor, I work to the same ethical standards. Everything and anything you tell me is confidential and my only goal is to help you get well.”
“Thank you. So where should I start?”
Austin put his coffee down on the table and stayed leaning forward, his hands loosely clasped between his knees. In his sage green corduroy jeans and mustard-coloured cable-knit jumper, he could have been a university professor seeing a nervous first-year student about an essay.
“Did Fariyah tell you anything about EMDR?”
“Only that it stands for Eye Movement Desensitisation and . . .”
“Reprocessing,” Richard prompted. “Go on.”
“And that you worked a lot with veterans with PTSD, and it was pretty powerful juju.”
Austin laughed, a soft sound that Gabriel found reassuring.
“It is,” he said, taking off his glasses and polishing them on a tissue pulled from the box, before screwing it into a ball and tossing it with precision into the wastepaper basket in the corner of the room. “I’m going to be honest with you – we don’t know why EMDR works. Just that it does. Shapiro came across it by accident while out walking. I’m also a qualified and registered psychotherapist and hypnotherapist, so we can explore your issues from any angle that feels right, OK?”
“OK.”
“Why don’t you tell me your story? Not your life story, but we can come to that if we need to. But from the time you feel your symptoms started.”
Gabriel drew in a deep breath and let it out in a sigh.
“My Squadron was in Mozambique. We were there on a search-and-destroy mission to take out a warlord called Abel N’Tolo. Get his plans, put him down, exfil and extract. But we got ambushed on the way out of the village. We took heavy fire and one of my patrol, a trooper called Mickey Smith – we called him Smudge – was killed retrieving the case full of plans. I ordered him back into enemy fire to get the briefcase and he went down. We were carrying him out when another of my men lost an arm to a round from a Dushka. You know what that is, right?” Richard nodded. “We couldn’t go on with Smudge. I ordered them to leave him and we beat our way back to the chopper and got out by the skin of our teeth. My last sight of Smudge was from the door of the chopper. They’d crucified him on a tree with machetes.”
Gabriel stooped, eyes pricking, and snatched a tissue out of the box, wiped his eyes and blew his nose then screwed it into his fist.
“Do you want to stop for a minute, Gabriel?”
Gabriel sniffed and cleared his throat, then shook his head.
“No, I’m fine. Well, obviously I’m not fine,” he laughed. “But yes, I want to talk this out with you.”
“So you left Smudge behind. That must have weighed on your conscience.”
“It did. The nightmares started as soon as I got back to Hereford. I resigned my commission a few weeks later and I was out of the Regiment within six months.”
“And then?”
“And then I started getting flashbacks. More nightmares. And Smudge started appearing. Always with his face blown away, or hanging off. Talking to me.”
“That can’t have been easy. How did you cope?”
“Oh, alcohol is a great help. And I drive faster than I ought to a lot of the time. There are a lot of empty
country roads near me. And I had some training in meditation when I was growing up. So, you know, I manage.”
Richard pursed his lips and scratched the side of his chin.
“You probably don’t need me to tell you that alcohol is probably the most common remedy PTSD sufferers resort to. We call it self-medicating in the trade. And your driving. Risk-taking behaviour is another classic symptom. It’s been likened to a death-wish produced by what we call survivor guilt. You feel bad about having survived, so you put yourself in harm’s way and almost dare nature, or fate, or chance, or God to even the score.”
“Well, it hasn’t worked so far, as you can see,” Gabriel said, spreading his hands wide.
Richard smiled. “No. It hasn’t, has it? Are you working?”
“Advertising when I left the Regiment. That didn’t end too well, then I set up on my own as a freelance negotiator. Now I . . .” Yes. What do I do now? Freelance assassin for a deniable Government black ops department? “I do private security work. Corporate stuff, mostly, some training, a bit of protection, that type of thing.” And rescuing the families of pharmaceutical company bosses from Chechen terrorists. And going undercover in fucked-up religious cults.
“And how are you managing with that? It sounds like very stressful work.”
“It is. But it’s what I’m good at. And to be honest, I don’t see myself sitting behind a desk for the next forty years, tapping away on a computer or attending endless meetings.”
“I can’t say that would get me going either. But it sounds like you’re almost doing two jobs simultaneously. Your security work, and keeping the lid on your psyche. Is there anything else going on in your life that you’re trying to deal with?”
After he asked this question, Richard leaned back in his chair and folded one ankle across the opposite knee. He sat very still, watching Gabriel and waiting, not attempting to fill in the silence.
Gabriel looked out of the window as a murmuration of starlings filled the iron-grey sky over Islington, an animated dust cloud that swirled and pulsed, changing shape as if guided by some inner intelligence. He watched as holes broke through in the centre and then closed, bulges of a few hundred birds threatening to break free before being reabsorbed back into the flock. Then they seemed, collectively, to tire of this game, and disappeared from the square of sky demarcated by the white painted window frame. Gabriel turned back to Richard, who hadn’t moved.
“There is something else. Fariyah thinks it may be the root cause of my PTSD. I . . .” he scragged his fingers through his short, black hair until it was standing up in spikes, “I caused my younger brother’s death.”
In faltering sentences, he repeated to Richard the story of Michael Wolfe’s fall into Victoria Harbour in Hong Kong, and his own fugue state that followed. When he had finished, he realised his cheeks were running with tears and grabbed a couple more tissues to dry them off.
“That is quite a story,” Richard said. “And it makes more sense to me than the story of your last mission in the SAS as a reason for your PTSD. I’m guessing that’s what Fariyah told you?”
“More or less, yes. She’s a very wise woman.”
Richard smiled. “Listen, the good news is that unless there’s something else you’ve got squirreled away in your subconscious, I think you have already started to face your demons. EMDR is helping thousands of people just like you all over the world as we speak. Not just veterans, by the way. Rape victims, rescued hostages, car crash survivors – all sorts. And we can start right now.”
Gabriel sat up straight in his chair. “Really? I thought maybe we had to do lots of talking first.”
“When she’s referred one of her clients to me, I leave all that to Fariyah. No, we can give it a go right now.”
A passer-by looking in through the window would have seen a puzzling sight. Two men sitting facing each other in armchairs. One holding a pencil up in front of the other’s face and moving it left to right while the other man followed it with his eyes, his lips moving as if reciting. Inside the room, Gabriel was doing just that, talking about the moments leading up to Smudge’s death while tracking the movements of Richard’s pencil, his head still, just his eyes moving.
“. . . that’s our time up, I’m afraid,” Richard said after a few more minutes. “How do you feel?”
Gabriel looked up at the ceiling and then back at Richard. “Honestly? I’m not sure. Fine, I think. Sort of light.”
“It affects people in different ways. You’ll probably sleep very deeply tonight. It takes a while for your brain to process the memories, but come and see me again as soon as you can and we’ll do some more work.”
Richard showed Gabriel to the door and they shook hands again. Gabriel looked down at the disfigured hand.
“Were you all right?” he said.
Richard looked him directly in the eye. No smile but a depth of feeling came through his gaze.
“I wasn’t. And then I was. You will be, too. Call me soon, OK?”
It was eleven o’clock. Gabriel had two hours before his next appointment. An appointment with the two people who were going to help him atone for Smudge Smith’s death. His former CO. And the Prime Minister.
Gabriel had just reached his car when a woman screamed and all thoughts of meetings left his mind.
5
Shining Armour
GABRIEL ran to the end of the street, straight past his car, in the direction of the screams. Rounding the corner, he cannoned into a pair of figures sprawled on the pavement, struggling over a rust-orange handbag. First to his feet was a scrawny white youth in a grey hoodie, with angry red spots all over the lower half of his face. He snatched the bag from the woman’s hand. She was late fifties, well-dressed in a cream coat and matching broad-brimmed hat. Turning to run, he stopped long enough to kick Gabriel in the face. The kick was a poor one and his scruffy trainers did little damage. Then he was off, sprinting up the road towards an estate of high-rise blocks painted in optimistic shades of bright blue and yellow.
“Is Birkin!” the woman screamed in Russian-accented English. “Save it. Please. I reward.”
Gabriel didn’t know what a Birkin was, but he guessed it was worth more than everything the young mugger owned. He jumped to his feet and ran after the youth. His brogues were hardly made for running, but he was fit and minded to rescue what he saw as a damsel in distress. Even if this one was probably an oligarch’s wife and more than capable of replacing her stolen bag.
Ahead, the youth veered right into the grassy area in front of the blocks of flats. He was heading for the warren of walkways and alleys that he clearly hoped would baffle and defeat his pursuer. Gabriel was gaining, but by the time he arrived at the entrance to the estate, the youth was crashing through a door into the ground level of the nearest block.
As Gabriel hit the door, swinging it back on its hinges with a bang, he caught a couple of curious faces staring at him from the shadows, sitting on low-slung BMX bikes that looked about five sizes too small for their riders. He could hear feet pounding up stairs just ahead and put on a burst of speed, desperate to catch his quarry before he reached his own flat.
He turned a corner just in time to see the scruffy trainers disappearing onto the half-landing on the flight of stairs. He took the stairs three at a time, and as he reached the first-floor walkway, the gap between himself and the mugger had closed to tackling distance. He didn’t want to risk a dive, so lunged with his leading foot and tripped the man with a well-aimed tap to the trailing heel. Down he went, rolling expertly into a ball, bag still clutched in his left fist, and was up again and facing Gabriel.
Panting, Gabriel stood still and thrust his hand out.
“Give me the bag. Now!” he shouted.
The man bared his teeth like a cornered animal. “Fuck you!” Then a knife appeared in his right hand, its long, narrow blade sliding out from the grip with a metallic snick. His chest was heaving and his marred face was bloodless.
He l
unged at Gabriel.
Which was a mistake.
Gabriel half-turned, grabbed the incoming wrist with both hands, then completed his turn and threw the man over his shoulder and down, hard, onto the concrete walkway.
The knife skittered away and bounced off a bright-blue front door, coming to a spinning halt in the centre of the walkway. It was in Gabriel’s hand a moment later.
His opponent wasn’t finished yet. He was back on his feet and leaning over the guardrail of the walkway.
“Oi! Fed. Tox. Up ’ere. Fucking cunt’s robbing me!” he yelled in a cracking voice that sounded like it hadn’t broken much earlier. Then he turned to face Gabriel, who’d stowed the knife in a trouser pocket. “You’re fucked now, mate,” he said, revealing small teeth that gleamed in the shadows of the walkway.
Gabriel could hear two sets of feet pounding up the stairs behind him. He jumped forwards, straight-arming the man in the face so that he staggered backwards, finally releasing the bag that had caused so much trouble. Gabriel tripped him again, only this time he reached down, grabbed his waist and hauled him up to and over the guardrail.
Transferring his grip to the man’s ankles he pushed him right over the rail until he was head-down over the glass-strewn concrete.
Fed and Tox arrived just in time to see their friend swinging over the drop. It wasn’t a huge distance, perhaps fifteen feet or a little more. But being dropped onto your skull from even half that distance would earn you a hospital trip. The full fifteen would take you straight to the mortuary. The confederates stumbled to a stop, palms raised in front of them.
“Whoa! Mate! Chill, man. Don’t drop him. Easy, yeah?” the taller one said, his eyes wide.
“Get me up!” their friend screamed from six feet closer to the ground.
“Yeah, man. Let him up, OK? He ain’t done nothing to you.” This was lieutenant number two. Stocky, greasy hair lank across his face, crude tattoos on his neck. Neither one of them could have been more than seventeen.