by M. R. Hall
Meanwhile, she was agonizing over Kenny Green’s notebook and wondering how far to pursue the issue. Should she recall Bryant and Norton to the witness box? Would she be forced to go through every member of the platoon asking the same questions? If she did, it would become the news story of the day. Even if it had simply been lost, it would become the smoking gun, the missing piece that would ensure that neither Kenny Green’s parents nor his fiancée would ever know any peace. Sometimes, exposing the whole truth was far from the most desirable outcome. Over the course of the day, this case had developed that smell about it. Now in the small hours, it was becoming a stink.
Two a.m. Jenny climbed out of bed and tramped downstairs to the kitchen in search of the emergency sleeping pills she kept at the back of a drawer. She rifled through and retrieved the packet, but found it empty. Michael. It had to have been. One of his many irritating habits – finishing things and failing to mention it.
She caught her reflection in the uncurtained kitchen window. She looked exhausted. Wrung out. Hardly the stuff of a young man’s dreams – or any man’s for that matter. This nervous wreck of an insomniac was meant to be holding court in the morning. It would be funny if it wasn’t so serious. She grabbed some milk from the fridge, tipped a cupful into a pan and set it on the range to warm. Mixed with some brandy, it might just do the trick.
Waiting for it to heat, she reached for her phone and by force of habit flicked through the emails – all junk – that had accumulated since she’d last checked it at midnight. There was nothing from Michael. There hadn’t been a message all day. What was he thinking? In her rundown state her imagination started jumping to conclusions: either he cared so little about her that he hadn’t thought to get in touch, or he felt that whatever he did have to say couldn’t be said yet. Either way, it was bad news. She put the phone down in disgust and tried to resist the urge to cry. Pull yourself together, Jenny, for God’s sake – people are depending on you. Easy to say. So hard to do.
She poured the milk into a cup and sat at the table to drink it. Her mind refused to quieten. Her fears and anxieties seemed to accumulate to form an impossible burden from which there was no escape. She searched for points of hope, but one by one they shut off until all she was left with was a series of taunting phrases that endlessly repeated themselves: You’re a failure, Jenny. An imposter. No good to anyone. You used to at least have some guts, but you’ve even let that go. You deserved this case, it’s shown you up for what you are – a sell-out, a disappointment to everyone. The truth will never be heard.
She felt herself approaching the depths of despair. And then it struck her: the piece that she had been searching for.
She reached hurriedly for the phone and, with no thought to the fact that it was the middle of the night, dialled Andy Kerr’s personal number.
There were nearly a dozen rings before he answered groggily.
‘Two thirty in the morning. This is a new one,’ he croaked.
‘I need something tested for tomorrow.’
There was a pause as Andy Kerr came to terms with the fact that his night’s sleep was over.
‘Only for you, Jenny.’ He gave a sigh of resignation. ‘Tell me what you need.’
THIRTY-TWO
No amount of make-up could hide the fact that Jenny had managed only three hours of restless sleep. She was physically drained, jittery from too many cups of coffee and deeply preoccupied with thoughts of what Andy Kerr might deliver later in the day. Most of all, she felt for the relatives. She wished she could tell them to brace themselves for more trauma, but she couldn’t afford to give even the merest hint of the line she was pursuing. If she stood any chance of unearthing the whole truth, she would need to retain the element of surprise. Nothing would happen for a few hours yet. Andy hadn’t been hopeful of any result before the afternoon. Her principal task for the morning was to stay calm; to keep things on an even keel and to chip away at the remaining witnesses.
Just as Jenny had anticipated, the remaining members of 2 Platoon who passed through the witness box during the morning session were barely more than monosyllabic, and bore all the signs of having been ordered to say the minimum. None of them was going to be tricked or seduced into going off message as Private Todd had the previous morning. Soldier after soldier from A, C and D sections repeated the same line: the first they knew of Private Lyons’s disappearance was when they were readying themselves for kit inspection on the morning of the 22nd. None of them would admit to having any idea why he would have left the compound or to ever having witnessed Sergeant Bryant administering brutal discipline. Each time Claydon White suggested that perhaps no one had noticed Lyons climbing over the wall because they had been drinking home-made booze, he was met with blank faces and stubborn denials.
Jenny knew she wasn’t hearing the truth. Occasionally she would glance across at Lieutenant Gallagher and see that he was sharing her frustration. A sense of inevitability began to descend. Jenny saw the hope bleeding from the faces of the relatives as satisfied smiles appeared on the faces of the three men in suits behind Robert Heaton. Anna Roberts, who had remained loyally at Sarah Tanner’s side, held her friend’s hand. Paul and Rachel Green both stared disconsolately into space; Kathleen Lyons seemed to have disconnected altogether and drifted elsewhere.
On meeting the same stone wall for the twelfth time, Claydon White erupted at Private Matt Laws: ‘Are you honestly asking me to believe, Private, that for one hundred and eighty days in the searing heat and in fear of your lives, you stayed as clean and sober as a troop of Girl Guides?’
‘I wouldn’t know, sir,’ came the soldier’s deadpan response. ‘They’ve never let me go camping with them.’
Laws’s joke prompted an outburst of laughter and made Claydon White look ridiculous. The harder he had tried to drive a wedge between the men, the tighter they had locked together. With each new witness, the gains he and Carrie Rhodes had made the previous day were eroded further. Their whispered exchanges grew increasingly agitated as they felt the jury’s sympathy slipping away from them. They badly needed to score another point.
Lance Corporal Jim Warman was the only member of the party to have entered Shalan-Gar village who was yet to give evidence. Like the others in B Section, Warman claimed to have been mystified by Lyons’s disappearance and had no qualms about helping secure his release. He remembered being with Privates Green, Carter and Roberts in the square when the first grenade hit. He saw Carter and Roberts go down and ran for cover on Sergeant Bryant’s order. Mindful of the need to fire at their attackers from a wide angle, he had run past Major Norton and dived into an alleyway between two buildings some fifteen yards from Musa Sarabi’s house. He had been seen by one of the gunmen on the roof and had come under repeated fire. Unable to retaliate without risking being shot, he’d set off along the warren of passageways intending to re-emerge on the left side of the square. During the time it took him to work his way back to the square, he heard another grenade explode and multiple bursts of automatic fire. He got an angle on a gunman retreating over rooftops and was able to take him out with a single shot.
When he returned to the scene of the ambush, Privates Paget, Allerton and Marsh had arrived and Sergeant Bryant and Major Norton were taking stock of the three casualties. There wasn’t time to think or to be shocked, it was all hands-on. If he felt anything, he admitted, it was relief that he was still standing.
As Robert Heaton asked the lance corporal a few gentle questions designed to cast him and his comrades in an even more heroic light, Jenny watched from the corner of her eye as Claydon White and his assistant argued over tactics. Carrie Rhodes seemed to stand her ground and get her way. It was she who rose to cross-examine the witness.
‘Lance Corporal, you’re an experienced soldier – if it were your decision, would you have led a party of men straight into the heart of Shalan-Gar village as Major Norton did?’
‘Ma’am, really – is this a relevant question?’ Robert Heaton
objected.
‘You can have this one, Miss Rhodes,’ Jenny said.
‘Would you have, Lance Corporal?’ Carrie Rhodes urged.
Warman thought hard about his answer. As the silence stretched on, Jenny saw Claydon White daring to hope that he was finally about to get what he had so desperately wanted: a soldier ready to say that the whole enterprise had been a reckless fool’s errand.
‘I can’t see he had any choice,’ Warman pronounced finally.
‘It took you a long time to think about it. You don’t seem entirely sure,’ Carrie Rhodes persisted.
‘Well, the way I see it, what you’re trying to get me to say is that Private Green was killed because Major Norton led us into the village.’
‘No. I’m merely asking—’
‘No, you’re not,’ Warman said, cutting her off and taking her aback. ‘I’m sorry we lost Kenny – he was one of my best mates, but he had the wrong head on that morning. He was normally a calm lad, but he was right on edge – I could see it in him.’
‘Maybe he had doubts about the wisdom of the mission?’
Warman shook his head. ‘We were all angry about Skippy being taken – he was furious.’
‘Thank you for your observations,’ Carrie Rhodes said, attempting to cut her losses.
Lance Corporal Warman hadn’t finished. ‘There’s no disgrace in it. He cared about his mate. I was standing closer to him than Sergeant Bryant or Major Norton when it all kicked off. The last I saw of Kenny he wasn’t hiding behind a tree, he was out in the open giving it everything. It can happen when you’re that angry – you think you’re invincible.’
Carrie Rhodes tried her best to patch up a fraying case with several follow-up questions casting doubt on the quality of the lance corporal’s recollection, but the damage was already done. The jury left for their lunch break picturing Kenny Green standing in the middle of the bullet-riddled square, ignoring Bryant’s order to take cover and going berserk. As Jenny stood and made her way out, she saw Claydon White turn to comfort a bewildered Sarah Tanner. She didn’t envy him having to explain to her that Warman’s evidence might just have destroyed their case.
Had he known what would be sprung on them later that afternoon, his job would have been even more painful.
The three remaining witnesses, Privates Allerton, Paget and Marsh, had all been posted outside the Shalan-Gar village compound while the others went in. Mike Allerton proved the most taciturn and obstructive witness Jenny had encountered that day. When all she managed to elicit from him was a series of grunts and single-word answers, she began to believe that he must just have been as blinkered and unobservant as he claimed to have been. He was the kind of young man who seemed to have joined the army so that he could have all his decisions made for him. There was no danger of him deviating from the official line, and even Claydon White seemed to accept the fact. He offered only a desultory cross-examination during which Jenny began to sense that he had begun to write the case off. He had rolled the dice and come up short. His thoughts were probably already racing on to the next set of clients he would be taking for rides in his limousine and dining in expensive restaurants. The Helmand 2 were not going to buy him a villa in the Algarve after all.
Private Dean Paget was nineteen years old, smooth-skinned, boyish-faced and had a spark of mischief in his clear blue eyes. He struggled not to smirk as he took the oath. Jenny got the impression that he was one of the jokers in the platoon. He did his best to perform like the others had, but it quickly became obvious that he had an engaging, lively spirit that couldn’t easily be suppressed. He clearly wasn’t a young man who was used to thinking carefully before he spoke.
Jenny tried him with some open questions designed to prompt an unscripted comment or two. He admitted that Sergeant Bryant was prone to fly off the handle and that Private Lyons had incurred his wrath by answering back from time to time, ‘But that was just Skip,’ Paget said. ‘He was like a little terrier – always yapping, even when the sergeant was standing right behind him ready to go off like a bomb.’
‘Did you ever see Sergeant Bryant kick or punch him?’
‘When you can shout as loud as he can, you don’t need to smack anyone,’ Paget said.
There was an eruption of laughter from the soldiers in the courtroom and the jurors exchanged glances at what they instinctively felt was a nugget of truth.
It was as much insight as Jenny would get from him. His account of events at Shalan-Gar mirrored Allerton’s. They had been guarding the Land Rovers when they heard the first grenade blast and gunfire. They held their position, fully expecting to receive incoming fire themselves, while trying to make contact on the radio. It was Sergeant Bryant who had called them in over the radio about thirty seconds after the action started. They had lost almost a minute trying to beat down the heavy gates at the village entrance. By the time they had made their way through to the square the fighting was over. Through the fog of dust they saw bodies on the ground and Sergeant Bryant and Major Norton crouching over them.
The light left Paget’s eyes as he relived the scene. ‘Sergeant Bryant yelled at us to call for medevac. I got straight on the radio but it was hard to communicate for all the screaming.’
‘Screaming?’ Apart from Major Norton’s passing reference, it was the first Jenny had heard of it.
Paget nodded. ‘Women screaming. It was almost the worst thing about it.’
Jenny made a note of this detail and passed the witness over to the lawyers.
Seizing on a last glimmer of hope, Claydon White rose to cross-examine. He began unconfrontationally, winning Paget’s trust with a few easy questions delivered with good-natured bonhomie. He got him to agree that he, along with most of the men in the platoon, was frightened of getting on the wrong side of Sergeant Bryant, and that, for all his bravado, Private Lyons may have been more frightened than most.
‘Is Sergeant Bryant the sort of man who keeps soldiers in line by teaching them a lesson?’
‘I suppose.’
‘Would it have surprised you if he had kicked Lyons so hard he cracked his rib?’
‘He was a little lad. Wouldn’t have taken much doing,’ Paget said with a shrug.
‘Why do you think Private Lyons didn’t complain about this injury?’
‘He wasn’t the kind to complain. He just got on with things. Everybody liked Skip, even the kids from the village. They’d all swarm around when they saw him – he’d give them the sweets out of our ration packs. They loved it.’
‘Not just his own rations?’
‘No, he’d cadge them off us, too – swapped his ciggies for them.’
‘You gave away your sweet ration? Didn’t you need all the calories you could get?’
‘Hearts and minds. We tried to be friends with the locals.’
‘And were they friendly?’
‘On the whole.’
‘I suppose we must be talking about the children and young men? I presume the women stayed well out of your way?’
‘They did.’
Claydon White traded a look with Carrie Rhodes. She gave a nod as if to say they had nothing to lose.
‘It was these young men you got your cannabis from? What did you give them – sweets? Money?’
‘No—’
‘You must have given them something in exchange?’
‘No, I mean, we didn’t—’
‘You didn’t what? You didn’t buy a little hash off the locals and smoke the odd joint to take the edge off before you went out on patrol? Are you putting your hand on your heart and telling me, Private, that never happened? That Major Norton didn’t look the other way because he was a commanding officer who pushed his men hard and took them out on patrol more often than any other platoon in that valley?’
Paget took on the look of a startled animal, and Jenny realized that Claydon White had acted his part brilliantly. He had given Allerton a gentle ride to soften Paget up, and he had swallowed the bait.
Robert Heaton turned a deep shade of crimson and was rising to his feet, but Claydon White pressed on.
‘I’ll bet you all had a slug of something and a smoke before you set out to Shalan-Gar. The ragheads had got hold of your mate. This was showdown time, wasn’t it? You were ready to shoot those bastards to pieces, weren’t you?’
‘Mr White, please!’ Jenny interjected.
Claydon White shouted over her. ‘Is that or is that not the truth, Private?’
Paget’s frightened eyes widened even further. He struggled to find his voice. ‘No . . . no, it’s not.’
Claydon White turned to the jury with an expression that let them know exactly what he thought of Paget’s feeble answer. Keeping his gaze on them, he made his final remark to the witness: ‘I admire your loyalty, Private. After all, as we have been repeatedly reminded, it is the most important quality in a soldier.’
Robert Heaton fumed with indignation and demanded that the latter part of Claydon White’s cross-examination be scrubbed from the record. Jenny did her best to pacify him and reminded the jury that their only concern was the evidence. Facts and facts alone were all that must concern them. They listened, but with the scepticism of people who suspected she was trying to pull the wool over their eyes. Claydon White had done it again: planted a theory that had captured their imaginations far more dramatically than anything as mundane as facts.
Jenny turned to Alison, ‘We’ll have the final witness please, usher.’
As Alison stood to call Private Danny Marsh to the witness box, a familiar figure appeared at the back of the court. It was Andy Kerr and he was clutching a document in his hand.
‘Actually, usher, I think we have another witness to recall first. Dr Kerr – would you like to come forward, please?’
The lawyers all looked up in alarm.
It was Heaton who got in first, ‘Ma’am – we’ve received no notice of additional evidence—’