A Life to Kill

by M. R. Hall

  ‘Yes, you are,’ he said, with palpable regret. ‘I suppose I had better write a press release to reassure them that you haven’t been appointed to do a hatchet job on the army.’

  ‘You’re sure about that? It really is just my Somerset burr?’

  ‘Would I lie to you, Jenny? After all we’ve been through?’

  She thought carefully before answering and decided to give him the benefit of the doubt. ‘No, Simon.’

  They ended the conversation on amicable terms. Only when she had put down the phone did Jenny realize that she had failed to mention her request to Colonel Hastings. No matter. Technically, it was no concern of Simon’s. The privilege and burden of being a coroner was being allowed to make one’s own decisions without reference to a higher authority. Ultimately, it was up to her alone to decide how far to go in pursuit of the truth.

  Jenny turned back to her ever-increasing stack of emails and started to sort through them. Minutes passed and there was still no sign of a reply from Hastings. Witnesses came and went in the office next door. From the little that Jenny could make out through the connecting door, all the men of 2 Platoon were reluctant talkers. Shortly after ten, Alison knocked and came through.

  ‘Steve’s popped out for a minute,’ she said quietly. ‘They’re not telling us much.’

  ‘I guessed.’

  ‘There’s only one man who was there with Kenny when it happened – Lance Corporal Jim Warman. Sergeant Bryant should be coming in later, and we’re hoping Major Norton can find time, though he’s playing a bit hard to get.’

  ‘What does Warman have to say?’

  ‘Not a lot. Norton was about to talk to the village elder when some Taliban popped up on a roof and started firing at them. They all ran for cover. A couple of grenades went off. There was gunfire and smoke for a few minutes, and when it was all over they had three men down – Lee Roberts, Dale Carter and Kenny Green. Roberts was conscious. Carter had a heartbeat, but Kenny was clearly dead. They did their best to keep the two of them alive while they waited for a helicopter to turn up.’

  ‘What do they say about Private Lyons?’

  ‘They all say the same – he vanished while they were asleep.’

  ‘Have they got any idea how?’

  ‘All I’ve got so far is the names of the four on the sangar towers. Lee Roberts and Dean Paget were two of them. We’ll be talking to Paget in a minute.’

  ‘Well, push him hard.’

  ‘I’m trying, Mrs Cooper, but Steve’s doing his best to steer clear of the subject. He’s clearly been told that whatever happened to Skippy is outside our remit.’

  ‘Skippy?’

  ‘That’s what they all call Pete Lyons. He was a little lad apparently. Barely more than a kid. Looked like one, too.’ She cocked her ear to the door. ‘That’s Steve coming back. I’ll see you later.’ She hurried out.

  Another half-hour went by. Jenny had cleared her correspondence and there was still not so much as an acknowledgement from Hastings. His silence had started to feel like a deliberate act of defiance. Decent people replied to awkward emails, even if just to explain their dilemma. Silence, in her experience, was either a sign of cowardice or the first weapon of a bully. Hastings was certainly no coward. Perhaps he had convinced himself that a woman would be an easy touch. Well, if that really is what he thinks, Jenny said to herself, he’s got another thing coming.

  She arrived at the door to Hastings’s office and knocked firmly. There was no reply. She knocked again, even louder, and when there was still no response she tried the handle. It was locked. She pulled out her phone and tried to reach him on his mobile number. Her call connected to his terse voicemail message. She declined to leave one of her own.

  Hastings knew that she was running against the clock. He must also have calculated that if he chose to avoid and frustrate her, even for a day or two, she would come under pressure to complete her inquest with or without his documents.

  Not prepared to let him avoid her for a minute longer than she could help, Jenny went in search of the one person she suspected might give her an insight into what the colonel truly thought of her: Lieutenant Gallagher.

  Jenny worked her way up and down the corridors of the second and third floors, searching the names on office doors. There was no sign of Gallagher’s. Having drawn a blank on the lower floors, she made her way up a narrow set of stairs to the fourth at the top of the building. The rooms leading off the passageways seemed mostly to be repositories for archived files and redundant office equipment. No one seemed actually to work up here. She was ready to abandon her search when she heard music coming from behind a door down a side corridor. She made her way towards it. There was no name card in the brass holder. She knocked anyway.

  ‘Come in,’ Gallagher called out, at the same time killing the music.

  Jenny entered the small, plain room, that resembled an attic den more than it did an office, to find Gallagher hastily scrambling to his feet as if in anticipation of a visit from a superior officer.

  ‘Oh, it’s you, Mrs Cooper.’ He visibly relaxed. There was a pile of files on his desk, but little evidence that he had been working. A paperback lay open beside them.

  ‘Have you got a moment?’

  ‘Sure. Have a seat.’ He dropped back into his chair.

  She glanced at his book – a popular treatise on the illusion of religion. ‘Any good? It’s one of those I probably should have read.’

  Gallagher shrugged. ‘I’d say he knows about as much theology as I do evolutionary biology. Still, the man’s entitled to his opinions.’

  Among the several rows of volumes on the shelf to the side of his desk, Jenny noticed several translations of the Bible and a copy of the Koran. And in amongst them, many obscure and searching titles on philosophical and religious themes.

  ‘That’s quite a library.’

  ‘If you want answers, you’ve first got to isolate the questions,’ Gallagher said. ‘That bit’s still a work in progress. Anyway, you look like you’ve got questions of your own.’

  She detected a hint of warmth in his still, distant eyes, along with a suggestion of complex and contradictory layers not far beneath the surface. Her instinct was to trust him, but she told herself to proceed with caution. Her instincts hadn’t always served her well.

  ‘I’m trying to get a handle on what a lessons-learned inquiry amounts to. There was one after the incident at Shalan-Gar.’

  ‘That’s pretty standard. What about it?’

  ‘As I understand it, Colonel Hastings would have asked each man involved for his account of what happened. Is that correct?’

  ‘More or less. Though I doubt he talked to all the men. He probably just made do with Major Norton and his sergeant.’

  ‘Because?’

  ‘Because he’s a fucking colonel. Sorry—’

  Jenny waved his apology away, letting him know that she wasn’t one to take offence at a little bad language. ‘But in a sensitive case like this one?’

  Gallagher smiled, this time with a touch of mischief. ‘Like I told you, shit rolls downhill. The man at the top is not going to break sweat shovelling it back up again.’

  ‘Meaning what, exactly? He doesn’t want to know what happened? It’s just a cosmetic exercise?’

  Gallagher glanced at the door, then back at Jenny. He studied her cautiously for a moment. ‘There’s no danger of you trying to tie me up in any of this, is there? I was several kilometres away. I didn’t even catch any of it on the radio.’

  ‘No,’ Jenny assured him. ‘I’m just trying to understand how it works. And why Hastings doesn’t want to share the results of his inquiry with me – even though it may be the best evidence there is.’

  ‘This is the army. It runs on trust. Fundamentally, it’s all we have. If you want a man to risk his skin for a cause he barely understands and, if he did, he probably wouldn’t support anyway, you either have to put a gun to his head or win his complete trust. The men trust the
ir sergeant. The sergeant trusts the officer and the officer trusts his CO. With their lives.’

  ‘And if someone makes a mistake?’

  ‘The army doesn’t make mistakes. It can’t afford to. Or at least that’s the myth we all buy into. How else could we function? The trust would be broken. If something goes wrong, it must be an accident.’

  Jenny struggled to follow Gallagher’s logic. She asked if he was telling her that Hastings wouldn’t have wanted to hear that his subordinates had made a mistake, or that if he did hear that they had, he would have made it his business to ensure that any blame would be dumped on the lowest man in the pecking order.

  ‘Probably both,’ Gallagher said. He swivelled his chair and gazed through the open window at the scudding clouds. ‘I lost my sergeant in a roadside ambush back in March. We’d been in theatre less than a fortnight. We’d misread the maps and got lost. We were wandering around like idiots for more than an hour before we got our bearings and headed back to the post. It happens. It shouldn’t, but it did. I told Norton exactly what happened – chiefly because I didn’t know any better – he reported to Hastings and little more was said.’

  ‘What about the inquest?’

  ‘I wrote a statement and was never called on again.’

  ‘A truthful one?’

  ‘In as far as it went.’

  ‘Norton told you to tone it down?’

  Gallagher gave her a sideways glance. His expression seemed to say he had already said far more than he had intended.

  ‘You stuck to the facts of the incident,’ Jenny ventured. ‘Perhaps you were told that was all that was necessary?’

  ‘What was the alternative? Let his family know he died as a result of a cock-up? In whose interests would that have been, exactly? I’m a professional soldier, Mrs Cooper, and I went to war wanting action, not a scrupulous and possibly humiliating inquiry were my guts to be spilt on the ground.’

  ‘I see,’ Jenny said, with a note of doubt.

  Conversation lapsed. The fact that Gallagher tolerated silence between them without embarrassment told Jenny that they were already on the way to forming their own bond of trust.

  It was he who spoke first. ‘All right. This is probably what happened. Norton will have briefed Hastings fully on the incident, and depending on how delicate he considered the situation to be, Hastings might have a heads-together with the men present. He’ll have written a confidential report which he will have passed up to General Browne. One of the several reasons he won’t be keen on releasing it to you is that it will have dealt with the circumstances of Private Lyons’s disappearance. And as I understand it, that’s outside your terms of reference.’

  ‘Moot point,’ Jenny said.

  Gallagher’s eyes slid questioningly towards her.

  ‘I decide my terms of reference,’ Jenny explained, ‘not your colonel.’

  ‘Well, you should know, Mrs Cooper – he’s a warrior. A real cold bastard when he needs to be.’

  ‘I’m used to those,’ Jenny said, touched by his concern. ‘Now, you don’t have to answer this, Lieutenant, but I’ve one last question before I leave you in peace. How plausible is it that Private Lyons was kidnapped from inside the post?’

  Gallagher smiled faintly. ‘You realize you’re asking me to disobey an order? I’ve been told not to say a word to you on that subject.’

  Jenny tried to read his expression. Had she pushed him too far? Had she destroyed their trust already?

  ‘I’m sorry . . .’

  ‘But if I were to be reckless enough to give you an answer, how about you being stupid enough to meet up for a drink?’

  Jenny felt the blood rise to the surface of her cheeks.

  ‘I get the feeling we might find a lot to talk about,’ Gallagher said, perfectly relaxed. ‘I’d like to hear more about your work. It sounds interesting.’

  Jenny didn’t know whether to be flattered or insulted. He was half her age, only a year older than her son, and asking her out on a date. She struggled for an appropriate response, but failed to find one.

  ‘Good. Let me know when you’re free,’ Gallagher said. ‘I’m not doing much outside office hours, or inside them, for that matter. ‘Now, Lyons –’ he carried on, seemingly oblivious to her embarrassment, ‘short of the gate being left wide open and the men on watch being unconscious, I can’t see how that could have happened. Is that what you want to know?’

  ‘Thanks,’ Jenny said mutedly and got up from her chair. She turned to go, but paused at the door. She had to say something, but the words that came out only dug her in deeper: ‘I’ll see you around.’

  ‘Any time,’ Gallagher said.

  Jenny smiled awkwardly and hurried from the room.

  The statements of Sergeant Bryant and the men who had accompanied Major Norton on the ill-fated mission to Shalan-Gar were even sketchier than Jenny had feared. They contained only the barest details of events leading up to Private Lyons’s disappearance and their description of events in the village were monotonous and identical. They entered the village with their local interpreter and fixer, Yusuf, who had told them that he had information that Taliban in the area were holding a British soldier hostage. Their intention, as far as she could make out, was to use the village elder, Musa Sarabi, as a go-between with the hostage takers. A few moments after arriving outside his house, they came under fire. None of the soldiers claimed to have seen Private Green being hit.

  Jenny reached for her phone to call Alison through. She needed to prime her before she met with Major Norton. Whether he liked it or not, she was going to insist that he provide her with a full and detailed account. If he refused to part with the facts now, she needed him to know that they would be wrung out of him in court.

  There was a knock at the door as she was lifting the receiver. Jenny set it down again and called her visitor in. It was Hastings. His sudden appearance caught her off guard. He was in a hurry – dashing between back-to-back meetings, he said – and apologized for not having answered her request earlier.

  ‘I could have written you an email, but I always think face-to-face is better.’ He sat on one of the smart green leather chairs. ‘I’ll get straight to the point, Mrs Cooper. The material you have requested, even if it exists – and I am not even prepared to confirm or deny the fact – is out of bounds. My private discussions are private. They are what enable me and every other officer in the army to do our jobs. Have I made myself clear?’

  He tried to draw the sting from his words with a disarming smile.

  ‘Perfectly,’ Jenny said. ‘But you know where this leaves me?’

  ‘I’m afraid I don’t.’

  ‘I’ll have to ask the High Court to make the order for disclosure. Given the circumstances, I can probably get before a judge this week, but it will be a public hearing.’

  Colonel Hastings stared at the floor and tapped the tips of his fingers together. Jenny felt his impatience like a malevolent force.

  ‘If you insist on playing hardball, Mrs Cooper, I can assure you, you will soon wish you hadn’t.’ The lines in his face stretched tight like strings of tensioned catgut.

  ‘That sounds rather like a threat, Colonel.’

  ‘Merely a statement of fact.’ He stood up. ‘Take my advice – don’t pick fights you don’t have to. It never ends well.’ He managed to bring his agitation under control and offered a smile that lifted the corners of his eyes. ‘Good day.’

  Jenny could have let him leave the room unchallenged, but succumbed to a surge of anger. ‘I’ll instruct counsel this afternoon. You have until close of business to reconsider.’

  Colonel Hastings turned slowly to face her. In a clear and level voice, he said, ‘My job is ultimately to kill people, Mrs Cooper. To kill them so that you and everyone else in this island gets to visit the supermarket and go about your business in safety. The banal, everyday reality we all take for granted depends on bullets, on blood and on good young men and women laying down their lives.
But whatever way you cut it, killing is a foul and ugly business and it’s our job. We are the butchers and the slaughtermen who keep you fed. If you don’t like our bloody aprons, then you’ve no business eating our meat.’

  He turned and left the room.

  Without missing a beat, Jenny picked up the phone and dialled the number of her most trusted lawyer. Ellen Goodson answered from an echoing corridor in the Royal Courts of Justice.

  ‘Ellen, it’s Jenny. Is there anyone you’d gladly kill right now?’

  ‘Several. I’ve just spent a week in the Family Division failing to stop a seven-year-old boy and his younger sister being sent to different foster homes.’

  ‘Well, bottle that rage. I need it. Right now.’

  FIFTEEN

  Jenny had banked on it taking at least a week before a High Court judge could be found to hear her application, but by some mysterious back-room process, an appointment before Mrs Justice Talbot, who was currently hearing a murder trial in Bristol Crown Court, was found for nine a.m. on Thursday morning – thirty-six hours away. She had expected the Ministry of Defence to object vociferously to being given so little notice, but to her great surprise they proceeded without protest. Before close of business on Wednesday afternoon, Jenny’s barrister, Ellen Goodson, and her opposite number, Robert Heaton QC, counsel for the Ministry of Defence, had exchanged skeleton arguments together with lists of the legal authorities on which they sought to base their presentations. In truth, there was very little dispute over the law and none over the facts. The judge’s task was to perform a simple balancing exercise: did the interests of justice outweigh the threat to national security that the Ministry of Defence claimed would occur if army officers were forced to disclose their personal notes and records of lessons-learned inquiries?

  From the moment the application was filed with the court late on Tuesday afternoon, Jenny had been on edge, expecting Simon Moreton to turn up in her office at any moment. The hours ticked by and he didn’t put in so much as a phone call or email. His silence began to spook her. Surely he must have known the case was being heard? She had toyed with the idea of phoning him as a courtesy, but decided against it. If he really was white with fury there was little to be gained by talking to him.