by Andy Maslen
“Maybe. But he could still lose a few pounds and get a decent wardrobe. What are you going to do now?”
“I’m going to come up to town and get Smudge and take him to Melody and Nathalie. I made them a promise and now I can keep it.”
“Will there be a military funeral?”
“I don’t know. I hadn’t thought. I’ll ask Melody.”
68
Family and Friends Only
A man’s skull doesn’t weigh much. Without the brain, most of the mass is gone. Strip away the muscle and skin and remove the lower jaw, and you’re left with a surprisingly light object. The young girl who brought the box to Gabriel, as he waited in the reception area of the American Embassy, clearly had no trouble carrying it. It was almost completely wrapped in dull, silver-grey duct tape. On its upper surface was a printed label with his name on it, and Darryl’s, along with the reference code.
“Mr Wolfe, sir?” she said as she reached the small group of sofas where Gabriel stood.
“Yes, that’s me.”
“I just need to see your ID, please.”
Somehow he’d imagined all the staff would be Americans themselves, so her east London accent surprised him.
He fished out his passport – his real passport – along with his driving licence and handed them over. She checked them, face impassive, taking her time and glancing from the two digitised photos to Gabriel face several times. Satisfied that he was who he claimed to be, she handed over the carton.
“Thank you,” he said. Then he turned and left, holding the carton reverently as if it contained treasure.
An hour later he pulled into Denman Road. As he rang the bell, he monitored his heart rate with interest. It was ticking along at a steady fifty-five, but then, as the door began its inward swing, it shot up to ninety.
Standing in the doorway, wearing a pair of faded jeans, a crumpled pale blue shirt and soft suede moccasins on her feet, was the widow of the man whose remains he carried in the carton held in both hands between them.
Melody looked down at the top of the box. Neither moved for several seconds.
Gabriel waited, watching as tears emerged from the inner corners of her eyes and tracked down her cheeks, before dropping from her chin onto the fabric of her shirt, creating dark-blue splotches.
Finally, she looked up. “Is that him?” He nodded, suddenly unable to talk, swallowing against the lump that had formed in his throat. “Sorry, Gabriel. Come in.”
In the kitchen, they sat facing each other across the table, the carton between them. Realising the experience was going to be a shock for Melody, civilians tending not to come across many skulls at all in their lives, let alone the bullet-ridden skulls of their own husbands, Gabriel brought out an envelope from his suit jacket.
“We found these, too. They’re his.”
Melody took the bumpy envelope from him and slit the seal with a pencil that was lying on the table, left, perhaps, by Nathalie. She cupped her hand and slid the contents out into her palm. She gasped as the vertebra bobbled across her skin before the two stainless steel discs fell on top of it, arresting its progress.
“Oh, God,” she said in a whisper, looking from the discs to the carton
“Here,” he said, opening a small penknife. “Let me open it for you.”
He slit the tape around the top and opened the flaps. Then he smiled, a small tight-lipped smile. Someone, and he suspected he knew who, had placed Smudge’s skull inside a soft, unbleached cotton shopping bag, such as a Mozambican woman might take to market with her. He reached in and lifted the package out and placed it softly on the table.
Her eyes widened. It was obvious what the bag contained. Her lower lip trembling, she opened the neck of the bag and reached in, then inhaled sharply as her hand touched bone. Holding the bottom of the bag with her left hand, she withdrew her right. It was fixed like a claw around the cranium.
“No!” she cried, a choking, broken sound. “Oh, no, Mike!” Sobbing, she turned the skull around on the table, pausing as the bullet hole came into view. She looked at Gabriel. “Is that?”
He nodded. “Yes. That’s where the bullet hit him. The one that killed him.”
Melody poked her index finger into the hole then pulled it out again and stared at the tip of her finger, end-on.
“It doesn’t look big enough, does it?”
Then she laughed. A cracked, mirthless eruption of emotion. “Oh, Mike. I’m sorry, my love. We’ll bury you properly, now. Me and Nat.”
This was the moment Gabriel had been waiting for. He reached across the table and took Melody’s hand.
“Melody, have you thought about the burial? He’s entitled to a full military funeral, if you want.”
She shook her head violently. “No!” she said in a harsh voice, roughened by her reignited grief. “They took him from me. He loved the SAS, but I never did. I’m not one of those army wives who feels gratitude to the Regiment. I hate them, Gabriel, I hate them!” She shouted the last three words and Gabriel realised he’d misjudged the situation. Not for the first time, he reflected.
“I’m sorry. It was the wrong thing to say. But the guys would want to pay their respects.”
“That’s up to them. It’s going to be quiet. Just family and friends. And you, of course. What were their names? Daisy and who?”
“Dusty. Ben Rhodes, really. And Daisy’s Damon Cheaney.”
“You three, then. But that’s it. No flags, and definitely no guns.”
“No flags. No guns. I’ll let them know. Will you call me with the date?” She nodded. “Thank you. I have to go.”
Another nod. She was staring at her husband’s ID discs, turning them over and over in her fingers. Gabriel got up, kissed the top of her head and left.
*
The funeral took place at Camberwell New Cemetery. The day was cold, and a bitter wind blew across from the north, so that even dry eyes began leaking tears from their corners within seconds of leaving the long, black cars that brought them.
Gabriel had attended many military funerals in dress uniform. Today, he wore a dark grey suit. He stood to one side in the foyer of the chapel, with Damon Cheaney and Ben Rhodes, as the other guests arrived.
Smudge’s side of the family was numerous: he’d had five brothers and two sisters, who all arrived with spouses and kids in tow. His mother, a large lady, carried herself with the dignity of a queen, the centre of attention for her family. She enveloped Melody in a hug, crushing her against her bosom and smothering her with kisses, leaving deep red lip prints all over her cheeks.
Melody’s family was smaller, both physically and in number. Her parents were both slight, timid-looking creatures, pale-skinned and fair-haired, but they clearly loved and were loved by the louder, more colourful black family whom their children had joined together.
After the service, and the hymns, during which the soaring harmonies of the black women mourning their lost soldier made Gabriel smile despite his tears, the congregation moved outside.
Melody had asked Gabriel to be one of the pall-bearers along with her brothers-in-law. As he walked in step with the others, he pressed his cheek to the varnished coffin and whispered four words:
“I’ve got you, Smudge”.
THE END
Andy Maslen
Andy Maslen was born in Nottingham, in the UK, home of legendary bowman Robin Hood. Andy once won a medal for archery, although he has never been locked up by the sheriff.
He has worked in a record shop, as a barman, as a door-to-door DIY products salesman and a cook in an Italian restaurant. He eventually landed a job in marketing, writing mailshots to sell business management reports. He spent ten years in the corporate world before launching a business writing agency, Sunfish, where he writes for clients including The Economist, Christie’s and World Vision.
As well as the Gabriel Wolfe series of thrillers, Andy has published five works of non-fiction, on copywriting and freelancing, with Marshall Cavendi
sh and Kogan Page. They are all available online and in bookshops.
He lives in Wiltshire with his wife, two sons and a whippet named Merlin.
*
News of the fifth Gabriel Wolfe thriller coming up . . .
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Gabriel Wolfe returns in a new novel, Fury. Turn the page to read the first chapter.
FURY
1
Words in the Wind
GUY, the chauffeur, held the rear door open, but the woman who called herself Erin didn’t feel like riding in the back this evening. She motioned him to close the door and went round to the other side of the car and climbed into the passenger seat.
“How was the dinner, ma’am?” Guy asked as he settled himself beside her and buckled in.
“For a start, you can knock off the ‘ma’am’ bit. I’m not the fucking Queen. You can call me Erin, or boss, I don’t care which. And since you ask, it was a fucking train wreck. That smug bitch Simone Berrington told me moneymaking was one thing but that ‘politics is best left to those who know what we’re doing’.” Erin’s mimicry of the Foreign Secretary’s home counties accent was wickedly accurate, even down to the trace of a lisp her party-appointed speech therapists had all but erased.
“I’m sorry to hear that, m . . . boss.”
“She even gave me her card in case I ever wanted to talk about donating to the party.”
“There are always others you could approach.”
“Oh, don’t you worry. Berrington will rue the day she turned me down.”
They cruised through the streets of Mayfair, quiet now evening had fallen.
Erin looked idly out of the window to her left at the artworks and designer dresses displayed in the windows. Suddenly, the Bentley jerked to a stop and Guy swore under his breath as a Lycra-clad cyclist swerved in front of them. The lights ahead changed to red and they drew alongside the cyclist, who turned out to be a middle-aged man bearing a hostile scowl. Rather than taking a foot out of his pedal clips, he stretched out his right hand and rested it on the Bentley’s roof.
Erin buzzed her window down and spoke.
“Get your fucking hand off my car, you moron. And while you’re about it, learn some manners.”
The cyclist whipped his head round and down and spat into the open window.
“How’s that for manners, you Tory cunt?” he shouted. Then he gave her the finger and jumped the light across to the next quiet stretch of road leading towards Park Lane.
Guy looked sideways at Erin, eyebrows lifted fractionally.
She nodded back. He returned his eyes to the road and once the lights turned to green accelerated smoothly across the junction, using the full might of the Bentley’s sixteen-cylinder engine to catch the cyclist. He drew level and slowed to match the man’s speed. Then with a sudden wrench left of the steering wheel, he slammed the two and a half tonnes of car into the cyclist’s right side, crunching man and bike into the side of a stationary removals van, parked for the night.
He pulled in to the next available space. Erin got out of the car and walked back towards the fallen cyclist, her high heels clicking on the tarmac. He was unconscious, his legs twisted beneath him at unnatural angles. Two bright shards of bone protruded through the flesh of his right calf muscle and there was a spreading pool of blood beneath his head giving off a coppery smell.
She stooped and placed a small rectangle of card with a Foreign and Commonwealth Office crest on his fluttering chest, then sauntered back to the Bentley.
“Home, James,” she purred. “And don’t spare the horses. We have to be in Manhattan tomorrow and I haven’t packed.”
*
The sheet of pale-blue, lined notebook paper swirled high above Central Park, snatched by the wind from a home office desk in Erin Ayer’s twenty-first floor, 5th Avenue penthouse. Written on it, in elegant, sloping calligraphy, was a list of eight items:
House
Car
Money
Teacher
Comrades
Friends
Boss
Girlfriend
A gust of gritty, fume-laden air rose up from the canyon that was 5th Avenue between East 84th and East 85th Streets and carried the list south. It whirled away, over the spire of St Paddy’s, then shifted eastwards onto Park Avenue. Caught in a vortex of air moving around the stainless steel cladding of the Chrysler Building’s terraced crown, it fluttered over and over, traveling southwest towards Mott Street in Chinatown. A downdraft like a cold, wet hand pushed it out of the thermals, so that it dropped out of the grey sky into a cobbled alley running between a vacant lot and the backs of a row of Chinese restaurants. It landed in a puddle of week-old cooking oil. Moments later, a rat darted out from a pile of rotting cabbage stalks, sniffed at the paper and, perhaps deciding it would make good nesting material, fastened its long, yellow incisors into it and pulled it free from the oil before trotting off to a grating and disappearing. The list had vanished. Its consequences would begin two weeks later.
*
In the kitchen of a flat in Chiswick, west London, Gabriel Wolfe and Britta Falskog were drinking Pol Roger champagne. She held the flute in her left hand; her right was heavily bandaged.
“So, what’s the special occasion?” Britta asked.
Gabriel raised his glass to his lips, sniffed the stewed-apple aroma of the wine and took a brief sip.
“There’s something I want to ask you.”
“What is it? If it’s a trip anywhere except to bed, the answer’s no.”
He smiled and shook his head.
“I want to ask you if you’ll marry me.”
Her blue eyes popped wide with surprise. She put her glass down. Then she turned to face him. His breathing was steady but his heart was beating fast as she opened her mouth to speak.
“It would be tough on our kids, you know,” she said.
It wasn’t either of the answers Gabriel Wolfe had been playing in his mind. “What?’ the ex-SAS Captain asked. “What kids? You’re not . . .?”
“No, idiot! But can you really see us as a cosy married couple with a couple of, what is it, ankle-biters? Daddy off to kill bad men in Africa for the British government’s black ops hit squad, Mummy going undercover to defeat a terrorist plot? I mean, it’s not exactly home sweet home, is it?”
Gabriel scratched the back of his head and ruffled his short black hair into spikes. He had just proposed and somehow hadn’t been expecting a logical analysis of the pros and cons. More fool him for not knowing how the redheaded Swede standing opposite him, glass of champagne in hand, would react.
“No, I guess not. But we don’t have to have kids.” He noted her eyes flashbulb in surprise, the whites showing all the way round the irises. “Not straight away, anyway. Do we? We could just be . . . unconventional.”
“Well, for one thing,” Britta drained her champagne and started counting off points on her fingers. She’d picked up the habit from Gabriel who in turn had adopted the mannerism from his boss at The Department and former CO in the SAS, Don Webster. “Yes, we do have to have kids. Otherwise what’s the point of getting married? Two, ‘unconventional’ doesn’t really begin to cover it, does it? Children need stability. You of all people should know that.” Gabriel’s eyes fell and his mouth compressed into a thin line. “Oh, Jesus, sorry my darling. I didn’t mean about Michael.”
Michael Wolfe was Gabriel’s younger brother. Until very recently, Gabriel would have sworn he was an only child. Then a series of events had led him to realise that not only was that untrue, but he had been responsible for his brother’s death, while Michael had been just five years old.
She closed the two-foot gap between them and wrapped her arms around his waist. “Okay. Answer time. I can’t think of anything I’d like more. So, yes, please. But,” she added hurriedly as his face broke into a wide grin and his dark brown eyes crinkled at the corners, “it’s a yes, please with conditions.”
“Fine! Tell me. SAS and Swedish Special Forces guard of honour with fixed bayonets? Knife-throwing at the reception? Tell me.”
“Give me till the end of the job they’re sending me on next. Just to work out some of the practicalities.”
*
The gondola seemed like a tourist cliché, but the assassin was happy enough to trail her long, maroon-tipped fingers in the green water as her muscular gondolier poled the narrow craft along the canal. She looked up at him. You look good enough to eat, she thought, a smile curving her black-cherry lips upwards. He caught her expression and smiled back, puffing his chest out a little further and sucking in his stomach. That’s my boy. Maybe I’ll invite you back to my hotel after we’re through. A buzz on her left hip switched her frame of mind back to business. She had few friends, and those she did have never contacted her on this phone.
She pulled the customised, steel-grey iPhone from her pocket and glanced at the display. Unknown caller. Well, this should be interesting. Not one of her regulars.
“Sasha Beck,” she said. Then waited.
“Ms Beck, my name is Erin Ayer. I have a job for you, but I don’t know whether I should come to you or have you flown out to meet me here. I’m in Manhattan.”