by M. R. Hall
‘He’d told you his family history, but given you no clue that he was deeply troubled?’
‘If I had thought that, I’d have got him straight back to Bastion. He’d be a danger to the rest of us.’
‘And I’m right in assuming, am I, that far from feeling under huge pressure, the platoon was feeling the pressure lift as the tour entered its final hours?’
‘Exactly, sir. My only concern was keeping everybody focused during the last day.’
‘Of course,’ Heaton said. ‘This must have been the very last thing you expected.’ He turned back through the pages of his handwritten notes. ‘There’s one matter I’d like you to enlarge on, if you would – it’s correct, isn’t it, that all forms of alcohol are strictly prohibited whilst at a forward command post?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘In your experience, how common is it for soldiers to brew something up?’
‘It hardly ever happens. But even when it does, the most anyone can stomach is a couple of mouthfuls – imagine vinegar stirred up with rotten fruit.’
Heaton smiled. ‘In your experience, was Private Green the sort of man who would have done this?’
‘No. I would have trusted that young man with my life.’
‘So if it did happen, it was out of character, to say the least.’
‘Completely. But we’re all human. We all make mistakes, especially when you add in a bit of peer pressure. But what I can tell you is that he was sharp as a razor the next morning. No one wanted Private Lyons back more than he did.’
‘In your opinion, did he die trying to assist Private Roberts, who had been badly injured in that initial grenade blast?’
‘It’s not just my opinion, sir. I’m certain of it.’
‘Thank you, Sergeant. I’m most grateful.’ Robert Heaton settled back in his chair and gave Jenny a look of quiet satisfaction. From his seat at the back of the courtroom, Simon Moreton did the same. Colonel Hastings and his colleagues exchanged glances. She could almost hear their collective sigh of relief.
The lull in tension would last only seconds. Claydon White, until now a virtual spectator, rose to confront the witness with the dead-eyed look of a prize fighter facing-off an opponent in the final seconds before the bell.
‘You’re something of a bully, aren’t you, Sergeant Bryant?’
‘I beg your pardon, sir?’ Bryant shot back.
‘You heard me well enough, Sergeant. It’s no secret in the regiment, is it? You pride yourself on taking no prisoners. If a soldier doesn’t jump when you issue an order, you let him know about it.’
‘Can we stick to questions?’ Jenny interjected. ‘And try not to be so combative, Mr White. I won’t tolerate witnesses being barracked in my courtroom.’
Claydon White looked at Sergeant Bryant wearing something akin to a smirk. ‘You’re free with your fists and your boots, aren’t you, Sergeant? If you think a man’s slacking, you’ll give him a punch or a kick.’
‘I don’t know where you’re getting this rubbish from . . .’ Bryant said, struggling to keep his cool.
‘I’ll tell you exactly where,’ Claydon White said, allowing his gaze to drift across the courtroom before allowing it to settle on the jury. ‘My colleague, Miss Rhodes, and a small team of assistants, have been contacting members of the regiment and their families and asking questions. That’s our job.’
‘Mr White,’ Jenny interrupted a second time, ‘let me make this clear – I am interested only in specific and reliable facts. Gossip, hearsay and allegations designed only to smear is not evidence and I won’t tolerate it.’
‘I have a very specific question, ma’am.’ He turned to the witness: ‘Did you break Private Lyons’s rib some weeks ago by kicking him when he didn’t jump up quickly enough for your liking from his sleeping mat?’
‘No, sir.’
‘Do you accept that you frequently do give sleeping men an encouraging kick in the ribs to get them to their feet?’
Sergeant Bryant hesitated for the first time. Robert Heaton shifted uncomfortably in his seat.
‘I did not injure Private Lyons.’
‘But you admit you kick men in the ribs?’
‘The army is a physical environment. Everything I do is proportionate.’
‘A proportionate kick in the ribs. That’s an interesting concept, Sergeant.’ White paused, then refocused his gaze on Bryant. ‘Did you or did you not kick Private Lyons?’
‘I don’t recall,’ Bryant answered.
His answer was greeted with raised eyebrows in the jury box and grim expressions among those who only minutes before had been so smug.
‘You don’t recall,’ Claydon White repeated at the jury, and shook his head as if to say that the witness was taking them all for fools. ‘Well, unless your memory returns, Sergeant, we’ll just have to draw our own conclusions.’
Jenny felt the heat of Simon Moreton’s stare across the length of the courtroom. He was pleading with her to rein Claydon White in, but his questions were perfectly proper. White was a grand performer – audacious – but more than bright enough to tread on the right side of the line. She had to admit that she was a little in awe: Sergeant Bryant was an imposing man; Claydon White was treating him with an almost casual contempt.
‘Forgive me, Sergeant, I’m about to shoot in the dark here a little. I’m going to accept what you say – that there was nothing in Private Lyons’s past to suggest he had depressive or suicidal tendencies. So, accepting for a moment that he was mentally stable, give me your best guess as to why he took the incredible risk of going over the wall.’
‘I’ve already said – there is no credible reason.’
‘From your perspective, maybe. Let’s look at it from his. The boy had suffered a humiliation at the start of the tour when you left him behind. He got over it, proved himself over many hard months. Then, on the penultimate day, he fainted during a predawn patrol – another humiliation. Back to square one – in his mind, at least. Are you with me so far?’
Sergeant Bryant gave him a cold look.
‘He’s still nursing a fractured rib. While the others are relaxing, he’s digging a latrine as a punishment. When he finally gets to bed down, you wake the platoon up. Please correct me if I’m wrong, but I imagine you screamed at the top of your lungs – and announced a kit inspection for six a.m. the next morning. What do you think Private Lyons would have done at that moment?’
‘I imagine he checked his kit,’ Bryant said.
‘Am I right in thinking that allowing equipment to fall into enemy hands is a serious disciplinary offence?’
‘You are, sir.’
‘When had Lyons last been outside the post? Was it when he fainted on patrol earlier that morning?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Where was the patrol when it happened?’
‘About a kilometre from the post.’
Jenny could have kicked herself. White was doing precisely what she should have done – pursuing the logical line of questioning and coming to an obvious answer. Why hadn’t she? Had she really allowed herself to be overawed and intimidated away from doing her job? Clearly she had. This realization brought another: the ominous feeling that had gripped her at the end of the lunch break was nothing but her own cowardice.
‘Bayonet and scabbard. Pistol and holster. Night-vision goggles. Which of these items is he most likely to have left behind while out on patrol?’
There was a brief moment of silence. Then Bryant’s shoulders seemed to sag.
‘Sergeant?’ Jenny prompted.
‘We may have taken his goggles off when he fainted. It was getting light, anyway.’
‘You took off his goggles and presumably also his pack – while you tried to revive him?’
Bryant nodded. ‘He came round pretty quick. He was on his feet again in a couple of minutes.’
‘And no doubt you were in a hurry to get back?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Seeing that he w
as conscious and able to walk, would you have considered it Private Lyons’s responsibility to make sure he had all his kit?’
‘I suppose so, sir.’
‘But in the confusion Lyons might have left his night-vision goggles behind. A valuable piece of equipment that could be of enormous use to the enemy.’
Bryant was forced to agree.
Claydon White exchanged a look with Carrie Rhodes. He seemed surprised at his own success. At the other end of the lawyers’ bench, Robert Heaton was whispering reassurances to his solicitors: the evidence was unexpected but didn’t harm them. It was premature advice.
‘All right,’ Claydon White said, pretending to be thinking aloud, ‘what it seems we’ve stumbled on, Sergeant, is the most likely explanation for Private Lyons leaving the post – he wanted to get his goggles back. And if that was the case, he can only have taken such an incredible risk if he feared the alternative was worse.’
‘I would have reported him to Major Norton, that’s all. He would have dealt with it.’
‘Not administered some rough justice of your own? Another dig in the ribs?’
‘No, sir.’
‘You didn’t send him out to get those goggles did you, Sergeant?’
Bryant bristled at the suggestion. ‘If I’d known they were missing, I’d have sooner gone myself.’
Claydon White knew when to stop. Jenny reasoned that, having struck paydirt with Bryant, if he managed to persuade a few more soldiers to testify that their sergeant had crossed the line from administering military discipline to violent bullying, he would have all he needed for a verdict that laid the blame for Lyons’s death at the army’s feet. He would also have a powerful argument that the mission to Shalan-Gar followed as a direct consequence. He was tantalizingly close to establishing a case of gross negligence and was probably already smelling the commission.
White’s objective was now to protect what he already had rather than risk too many questions that might have given Bryant an opportunity to rehabilitate himself. He struck a markedly less confrontational tone as he explored the death of Kenny Green.
He began by suggesting that Major Norton had been reckless in leading a party to Shalan-Gar when it would have been open to him to communicate by means of their local interpreter, or even by radio. Bryant dealt with this swiftly: trust and personal contact were everything when dealing with the locals. Nothing would have been achieved by radio contact. And besides, he and Major Norton had sat down with Musa Sarabi more than a dozen times during the course of the tour. He had proved nothing but cooperative.
Realizing that he was on weak ground, White shifted his attack to Bryant’s choice of personnel, in particular to his selection of Private Green, a soldier who had been on sentry duty until two a.m. and had had less than four hours’ sleep.
‘You were leading him into a potentially dangerous situation. One in which life and death might depend on a split-second decision. Surely, given the choice, you want the freshest, most alert men at your disposal?’
‘Maybe there were fresher men,’ Bryant conceded, ‘but when bullets start to fly, an hour or two’s sleep won’t make a damn of difference. If he hadn’t been on guard duty, do I honestly think that Private Green wouldn’t have gone to Roberts’s aid? You have to be kidding me. I don’t think anyone has said it yet, so I’m going to take my chance: Kenny Green died like a hero.’
All across the courtroom heads dipped and eyes lowered in respect. Paul Green finally found himself clutching his wife’s hand, and Sarah Tanner, who had retained her composure throughout the afternoon, wiped away tears. Jenny would have shared in the spontaneous moment of emotion had her eye not been caught by a solitary dissenting figure: Lieutenant James Gallagher seemed to pull a face and shake his head slightly. He for one wasn’t buying the hero line, and he seemed to want her to know it.
THIRTY
Jenny could have cut the day short when Bryant stepped defiantly down from the witness box, but the faces in the jury box were still alert. She detected an appetite among them to continue. The sense in the courtroom was of a story that remained half-told. She exchanged a glance with Alison, who seemed to be having the same thought: the end of a long and eventful day was when truth was most liable to slip out – when resistance was low and well-laid plans had been ravaged by events.
She called Major Christopher Norton to the witness box.
As Norton left his seat alongside Colonel Hastings, Jenny observed the woman who, since their meeting two days before at the cafe, she knew to be his wife. She was seated at the end of a row by the aisle her husband had to walk along. She looked up at him as if expecting him to glance her way, to acknowledge her and her support. If he saw her, he gave no sign of it. As he passed by, the hope seemed to leave Melanie Norton’s face. She watched him go into the box and recite the oath as if he were a stranger.
The tall, angular, stubble-headed figure held the room’s attention in an entirely different way from his sergeant. He stood perfectly still. Little or no emotion registered in his polite, measured responses. He didn’t merely exhibit the stiff upper lip so beloved of the British Army, Norton transcended stiffness as he seemed to have transcended fear. He managed to be both soft and hard; approachable and unreachable.
Jenny began by trying to establish the nature of the relationship he had enjoyed with his men. He explained that he was on first-name and nickname terms with all the platoon, but operated at more of a distance than his sergeant. He was friendly with the men but not friends. While the men socialized, he would often be engaged in planning and administrative tasks. Although he was embedded with 2 Platoon, he had overall command of the five forward command posts stretched out along a twenty-kilometre stretch of valley. He was in constant radio contact with the other platoon commanders and with HQ in Bastion as they struggled to leave their area of Helmand in a state in which the Afghan National Army could continue to keep the peace after their departure.
On the evening of 21 August he had been working at the fold-up desk in the tarped-off area that served as both his office and his living quarters, ‘If you could call them that,’ he added with a trace of a smile. His attention that evening had been focused on arrangements for travelling back to the UK. He was also liaising with other platoon commanders over the radio, attempting to finalize inventories of equipment. At the same time, he was compiling a closing report on what he felt their mission had achieved. He judged it a qualified success: while insurgents had been largely but not entirely removed from the valley, he felt there was a sporting chance that, once the British had left, those who remained would be reabsorbed into the local population. There was plenty remaining to deal with – the opium trade, the lack of education for local women – but he and his men had helped deliver Helmand from the grip of ideological extremists. It was, as he had frequently told his platoon, an achievement to be proud of.
Norton confessed that, absorbed in his work, he had been only vaguely aware that Private Lyons was digging a latrine pit. Earlier in the day he had been informed that Lyons had fainted whilst on patrol, but had not regarded it as a major issue. No harm had been done. He had conferred with Sergeant Bryant midway through the evening and they had disagreed over whether to mount a patrol the following morning: their last. Norton had felt it might not be necessary whereas Bryant had been keen to continue with business as usual.
‘Sergeant Bryant was right to press the point,’ Norton added. ‘He was determined to do the job until the last moment.’
Following that discussion, he had continued working late into the evening and had retired shortly before Sergeant Bryant announced his early-morning kit inspection.
‘Did you consider that reasonable of him?’ Jenny asked.
‘If he thought it necessary to ensure discipline and safety, then it was perfectly reasonable.’
‘And what of the suggestion that Bryant was, to quote Mr White, “free with his fists and boots”?’
Major Norton gave what Jenny cou
ld only interpret as a knowing smile based on long experience. ‘A malingering soldier may need some robust encouragement. I have never seen Sergeant Bryant assault a man. There is a line, and he is someone I would trust never to cross it.’
‘Was he a bully?’
‘No.’
‘Do you have any idea how Private Lyons’s rib came to be fractured?’
‘It could have happened any number of ways. The injury was never reported, so I had no cause to investigate the circumstances.’
Jenny had no choice but to take his word for it. Unless one of the soldiers testified that they had witnessed Private Lyons being kicked, there was no evidence to prove it.
They turned to the events of the following morning. Major Norton had woken before six to the news that Lyons was missing. He had immediately set about drafting plans to carry out a systematic search of the surrounding area. The first search party was due to leave when Yusuf, their local fixer, arrived with the news that a group of Taliban were holding Lyons and demanding a ransom. They wished to communicate through Yusuf’s grandfather, the elder, Musa Sarabi. Norton had weighed the options and decided that negotiation was the best way forward. He didn’t assume for a moment that Lyons’s captors expected to receive $100,000. The demand was typical Afghan hyperbole. He felt confident of being able to negotiate something far more modest: he had in mind a few rifles.
‘You seem to have been placing a lot of trust in a young Afghan fixer, not to mention his family. Might your decision to lead a party into Shalan-Gar have been a little reckless?’
Major Norton bristled. ‘There is nothing reckless about trying to save a life,’ he said in such a quietly withering tone that Jenny felt her confidence dissolve.
She tried to press on: ‘Couldn’t you have negotiated through your fixer?’
‘And had that failed, would I and my men have been better soldiers? Your question seems to imply that we would.’
‘I’m asking what risks you weighed up, Major.’
‘There was a risk that Private Lyons would be murdered. My duty was to stop that happening.’