by M. R. Hall
She couldn’t, of course. All she could offer was words: ‘It’s all right, Major. There’s no shame in this . . . none at all.’
‘I, I don’t know what to say about Kenny . . . I don’t know how to explain . . .’ His face twisted and contorted.
‘Take your time.’
‘We went into the village . . . it was my fault . . . I should have . . .’ He pressed a hand to his face.
‘It’s OK . . .’
Norton’s head whipped round suddenly. He stared at her with wild, demented eyes.
For a moment she held her breath. Her muscles locked. Her body refused to move. She cursed her stupidity at coming to him here. What was she thinking?
And then she noticed that it wasn’t her he was looking at. He was staring straight past, and out of the window. She turned to see what looked like a police vehicle approaching along the lane at high speed.
Without another word he jumped out of the car and into the Land Rover. He started the engine and lurched forward as the police car turned into the car park and blocked his path. Norton veered right, catching it with a glancing blow, and barrelled straight towards the gorse hedge that ran along the edge of the farm track.
Two military police officers leapt out of their vehicle, drawing revolvers as the Land Rover ploughed through the hedge and bounced off along the track. Three shots rang out in rapid succession that sent the military policemen diving to the ground. Jenny let out a scream of alarm as one of the shots pierced her windscreen and thumped into the passenger seat. She sat, shaking uncontrollably, as one of the officers scrambled round to her door and hauled it open.
‘Are you all right, ma’am?’
Jenny nodded. The wind blowing through the open door felt icy. An odd sensation of warmth travelled down her forehead.
‘You’re bleeding,’ the officer said. ‘Must have been a piece of glass. I’ve got a first-aid kit in the car.’
Meanwhile, the second officer ran forward through the gap in the hedge onto the track. Jenny heard two more shots. Then silence. He came back through a few moments later, shaking his head.
‘He got away,’ he called to his colleague. ‘Where does that track lead?’
‘I don’t know. Call in air support.’
The first officer returned to Jenny’s car with a first-aid kit. He popped open the plastic box and fished out a sterile dressing. ‘Do you mind if I ask your name, ma’am?’
‘Jenny Cooper. I’m a coroner. I’m holding an inquest . . .’
‘Oh, that’s you is it?’ the officer said suspiciously. ‘And Major Norton was here because . . . ?’
‘He asked to see me. Whatever it was, he didn’t get round to telling me.’ She took the lint dressing from his hand and pressed it to her grazed forehead. ‘He’s got something important to say.’ She didn’t know why she was telling the military policeman this. She felt dazed, as if she had suddenly found herself in a waking dream. She looked across at the neat hole in the back of the passenger seat. It occurred to her that if Norton had fired a degree or two to the left the hole would have been through her chest.
Another car, a small dark blue VW hatchback, careered down the lane and swung into the car park. Both redcaps span round, their hands reaching for their guns as Gallagher climbed out. He held up his hands.
‘Lieutenant Gallagher. I’m a friend of Mrs Cooper . . .’
Still shaking, Jenny climbed out from her car, dabbing away the last of the blood.
‘James?’
He looked at her in alarm, then noticed the snowflake of shattered glass in her windscreen.
‘Where’s Norton?’
‘He took off along there.’
‘You’ve let him go?’ Gallagher said to the first officer.
‘There’s a police helicopter on the way.’
‘Colonel Hastings lives the other side of that hill. Somebody warn him.’
Gallagher ran to his car.
‘Sir . . .’
‘James . . .’
He jumped in, span the VW around in a tight arc, spewing up dust, and aimed it at the hole in the hedge. He smashed through, ripping off half his exhaust in the process. The car thumped and clattered off along the track, the sound of the rasping, unmuffled exhaust splitting the air as he forced it to full revs in second gear.
The two redcaps dived for their car.
‘Leave the scene as quickly as possible, ma’am,’ the first officer yelled at her. ‘Get in your car. Go.’
She did as he asked. She leapt behind the wheel, strapped herself in and clung on to their tail as they sped, siren wailing, back along the lane.
The two part-Arab mares were hungry after their ten-mile hack. They tore impatiently at their hay nets hitched either side of the stable door while Richard and Lizzie Hastings unfastened their girths and removed their bridles.
‘Stiff?’ Lizzie asked as she observed her husband limping slightly as they carried the saddles into the tack room.
‘Only a touch. Nothing a warm bath won’t sort out.’
He smiled at his wife as they stowed their equipment away. There had been an awkwardness between them since he had come home that he had felt dissolve during their ride. Until this evening he had been aware that Lizzie had been struggling to adjust to his presence in the house. He seemed to get under her feet and impede her regular routines. She oversaw their home as well as its many animals with remorseless efficiency, rising before six to see to the horses, feed the chickens and exercise their two Labradors before leaving for her part-time job as a secretary in a local primary school. Her life was contained, orderly and ran like clockwork. And always had done. As the years wore on he had seemed to become less and less a part of it. Without children to bind them together, he often wondered what did, exactly.
Lizzie smiled back and touched his arm affectionately. ‘I was impressed. If I didn’t know different, I’d have thought you’d been riding every day.’
‘Thank you,’ Hastings said. Compliments from Lizzie were rare, and smiles like the one she had just given him scarcer still. ‘Even if I don’t quite believe it.’
‘No. Honestly.’
She pushed her hair back from her face and gave a quick glance towards the door. She flashed another smile. Hastings read the cue. He stepped forward and slipped his hands around her waist.
‘I missed you,’ he said.
It wasn’t entirely untrue. There had been moments during his last tour when he had felt the odd pang of loneliness and a longing for their three acres on the downs overlooking the sea.
‘You, too,’ Lizzie said.
She leant forward and kissed him. It was a tentative kiss, but he felt the urgency behind it. As he responded, she stepped in closer, pressing herself against him. Her hands travelled across his back and she pulled him hard against her. The force of her passion took him by surprise. Was she seducing him here in the dusty tack room? Really? Wonders never ceased. He went along with it, sliding his hands under her shirt and feeling the warmth of her soft flesh.
Someone coughed. A man.
Lizzie hurriedly pulled down her top and stepped away as a figure appeared outside the doorway.
‘Chris?’ Hastings first thought was that there must be some sort of emergency. Norton was meant to be hosting a dinner at the mess. Then he noticed Norton’s odd, glazed expression – and then the Glock pistol in his hand.
Lizzie had seen it, too. She backed into the corner, waiting for him to do something.
Hastings stepped forward. ‘Chris, what’s the matter?’ He spread his arms in a trusting gesture of openness.
‘Baghdad.’
‘What about it?’
Norton squeezed the trigger and shot a hole through Hastings’s thigh. Outside, the mares whinnied and bolted off across the field.
Lizzie let out a stifled scream as Hastings staggered back a step and fell.
‘Basra.’
Another shot, this time through the other thigh.
Hastings wr
ithed and thrashed, smearing blood across the bare concrete floor.
‘Helmand.’
A shot ripped into Hastings’s left shoulder.
‘Stop it! Stop it!’ Lizzie screamed.
Norton turned the gun on her and she fell silent. Hastings groaned. Blood was pumping hard from all three wounds. He was powerless and he knew it. Fighting back wasn’t an option. He was surprised to find himself supine in the face of death. The final instinct was to appeal to human sympathy.
‘Please, Chris,’ he croaked.
There was no trace of pity in Norton’s face. There was nothing. Only blankness. Hastings had never seen a face so devoid of feeling. He waited for the last bullet, feeling surprisingly calm in the circumstances.
He became aware of a sound. An engine. It could have belonged to an old tractor, only it seemed to be moving too quickly. It was approaching from the far side of the field.
Keeping the gun trained on Hastings, Norton glanced over his shoulder as the vehicle came to a halt not far away. A door opened and closed.
‘Norton!’
A voice travelled across the field. Through the fog of pain, Hastings vaguely recognized it. ‘Norton. Put that down. The MPs will be here any second. There’s a helicopter on the way.’
Hastings saw Norton look up at the sky. Then turn his head at the faint sound of a police siren approaching along the road. It was still a long way distant, perhaps half a mile or more.
Lizzie whimpered. It was a pathetic sound. Hastings longed to tell her to shut up, but he hadn’t the strength to speak.
‘Toss the gun away, Chris,’ the voice outside said.
Gallagher. James Gallagher – that’s who it belonged to. What the hell was Gallagher doing here?
That was the last thought Hastings had before he felt the bullet burst through the muscle into his stomach and a sensation like an explosion of fire tear through his body and consume him.
‘For all those boys,’ Norton said.
But Hastings hadn’t heard him.
Jenny skidded to a halt on the gravel driveway outside the Hastings’s modest, stone-built farmhouse. As she jumped out, the two military police officers had already spotted something and were running across an area of lawn at the side of the house towards a wooden post-and-rail fence that divided it from a paddock. Following a reckless impulse, she went after them.
‘Stay away! Stay away! Get down!’ the first officer ordered.
She ducked behind the trunk of a cypress tree that stood in the centre of the lawn and watched the two redcaps throw themselves to the ground by the fence and take aim across the fifty yards that separated them from the two figures in the field. Gallagher was walking very slowly towards Norton, who was standing outside a stable block, aiming the pistol at him.
‘Stop! Stop there!’
The shout from the redcap carried across the field. Gallagher did as he was asked. He stood no more than twenty feet from Norton now. He appeared to be talking. Jenny thought she heard the sound of a woman in distress coming from inside the stable.
Gallagher slowly held up his left hand as if in reassurance to the redcaps and, putting his right hand out in front of him to receive the pistol, walked towards Norton. As the gap between them closed, Norton appeared to raise his hands as if in surrender.
Then, at the very last moment, he changed his mind.
As Gallagher lunged forward to disarm him, Norton dodged sideways, pressed the gun to his temple and pulled the trigger.
THIRTY-FIVE
Anna Roberts had been through every kind of emotion in the day and a half since she had seen Sarah Tanner in the witness box being forced to confess, in front of all those people, that she had been cheating with Steve Price. And while she was pregnant, too. Anna hadn’t known whether to feel fury or pity, whether to blame Sarah for being weak or Price for taking advantage of her loneliness. Whoever was to blame, it made her feel sick. It made her remember the few occasions on which, while Lee had been away, she had felt a guilty twinge of desire for another man. Burning with shame, she had fetched the expensive underwear she had bought two weeks before and thrown it out with the rubbish. That part of her life was over. She wanted nothing more to do with it. Not ever.
Then on Saturday she had heard the news about Major Norton and Colonel Hastings: Kathleen Lyons had called and told her before breakfast. Her phone hadn’t stopped ringing all morning. Everyone had wanted to know what had happened and why. Claydon White, the lawyer, had called three times asking if she had heard anything more, but she had to tell him that there was no more news. No one had any answers. In the afternoon she had plucked up the courage to phone Melanie, but her sister had answered and said that she wasn’t able to talk to anyone at present. She didn’t think that she would be ready to speak to anyone for several days. There was a rumour that all the men in the platoon had been called in for a meeting with General Browne and told not to say anything, not even to their wives and families. Anna had tried calling Sergeant Bryant. He sounded as if he’d been drinking and told her that he knew as much as she did. He hadn’t been told anything except that Hastings was badly injured and clinging to life in intensive care. Bryant had sounded almost human as he told her this – as shocked and confused as everyone else – and had asked after Lee. He confessed that he had always felt safest when out on patrol with Lee. ‘Any problem, your Lee would spot it a mile off. I always said he had two sets of eyes.’
His parting words had turned over and over in her mind all through the night. Two sets of eyes. That was the Lee she knew: sharp, alert. He missed nothing. At five a.m. she gave up trying to sleep and dragged herself out of bed. She knew she had to go and see him straightaway.
Leanne was tired and scratchy, her mood not helped by having been cooped up on buses for most of the morning. Her interest in the handful of books Anna had brought to entertain her during the journey had run out by Bristol bus station along with the cereal bars and three cartons of juice. Anna let her play with her phone, but the battery soon died. Bored, and frightened by the prospect of going to see her dad in a hospital, Leanne started to moan and grizzle. On the last leg of the journey, the local bus to Selly Oak, she had a full-blown tantrum that brought impatient sighs and looks of disapproval from the other passengers. Anna had wanted to slap them. If only they knew where they were going, she thought. Eventually, Anna pacified Leanne with sweets bought from the shop in the hospital reception, but by then her nerves were in pieces and she was fit to drop.
As they set out early that morning, Anna had tried to prepare Leanne for the shock of seeing the man she would probably not recognize as her father. He would be very sleepy, she warned, and the doctors had had to shave off his hair. Leanne had simply listened, or half-listened while pretending to be interested in something else, and to Anna’s astonishment didn’t ask a single question. The child who, since shortly after her second birthday, couldn’t go more than ten minutes without asking ‘why?’ had simply accepted what she was told. Anna concluded that her infant mind was sharp enough to know that she didn’t want to know why. Anna had overheard the talk of bombs and guns among the kids at playgroup enough times to know that Leanne’s imagination must be peopled with dark and sinister characters she would rather not think about. She couldn’t blame her.
For once, Anna’s arrival coincided with official visiting hours. Gently reminding Leanne that her daddy would probably still be asleep, she led her along the corridor to the door of Lee’s room. She glanced through the observation pane. He was still as she had left him: propped up on pillows, staring vacantly into space. A feeding tube had been added to the drips and catheter and his cheeks looked even more hollow. She hated the idea of Leanne seeing him like this, but there was no choice.
‘Sweetie, Daddy isn’t very well,’ Anna said. ‘But he’s OK. The doctors and nurses are looking after him.’
Leanne glanced up at her with a sad, serious face, but said nothing. Anna pushed open the door.
‘Lee?
It’s me, Anna. Look who I’ve got with me.’
She lifted Leanne up and carried her towards the bed.
‘There’s Daddy, look. I told you he’d be sleepy.’ She reached out and stroked Lee’s arm. ‘Do you want to hold Daddy’s hand?’
Leanne shook her head and buried her face in Anna’s shoulder.
‘OK. I’m just going to sit you down over there with one of your books.’ Anna carried Leanne over to the chair in the corner, trying hard not to cry. A foolish part of her had expected Leanne’s presence to work a miracle and wake him from his torpor. She sat her on the chair and hurriedly fetched out the handful of books. ‘Here we go. I just need to talk to Daddy for a minute.’
‘But he can’t talk,’ Leanne said with brutal honesty.
‘Well,’ Anna said, ‘I can still talk to him.’
She went and sat on the side of the bed and took hold of Lee’s hand. She spoke to him in a whisper, although she was aware that Leanne would hear every word.
‘Something happened, Lee – the day before yesterday. Major Norton went crazy. No one knows why, but he went to Colonel Hastings’s place and shot him . . . Then he shot himself.’
She studied his face. It remained a blank.
‘Norton’s dead, Lee. It’s to do with Kenny and Pete, isn’t it? . . . I think you know why he did it . . . Lee? It turned out Kenny had a phone. He was sending texts to Sarah. She sent one to him saying they needed to talk the night before he was killed. She’d been sleeping with Steve Price. There was something different about him that morning, wasn’t there? . . . You were with him, Lee. You must have seen it.’
Lee’s eyes seemed to come into focus. Anna felt tension return to the slack muscles in his hand.
‘Norton’s gone. Couldn’t live with himself. Whatever’s happened, you can tell me now. It’s safe, babe. You’re home now. You’ve got me and Leanne. You’re safe.’
Very slowly, but with strength that surprised her, Lee’s fingers curled themselves around Anna’s and he squeezed them tight.