Kenneth O’Connell came to us with unimpeachable references. His history in brief: Sergeant, Royal Irish Regiment; service duty (multi-deployed) but including: Falklands and Bosnia; left the Army in 2000 (aged 36) to join the London Metropolitan Police (served 3 years); signed up with the Baycombe Group in September 2003. He has held two positions here in Iraq: 1) Lead trainer of restraint techniques at the Baghdad Police Academy from 1.11.03 to 1.02.04; 2) Personal Security Officer to Spennyfield Construction 14.02.04-ongoing. Spennyfield Construction are a UK firm, currently working out of Karbala.
O’Connell’s documentation is held at our Cape Town office. I have requested a copy to be faxed to the number you gave me, with the proviso that his name, next of kin, and present location are blacked out. Faxes go astray or fall into the wrong hands and the safety of our personnel is important to us. I trust this meets your requirements and that any suspicions you have of Mr. O’Connell can be speedily laid to rest…
Email from Bill Fraser to Alastair Surtees
…It is now two weeks since I requested information on Kenneth O’Connell. In the absence of documentary evidence supporting his claim to a legitimate passport, his name will be posted with the British Embassy and all attempts by him to exit this country will be blocked. Furthermore, if I have any suspicion that Mr. O’Connell has left the country under a different name…
From: [email protected]
Sent: Tues 20/07/04 23:15
To: Dan Fry ([email protected])
Subject: Sorry!
Dear Dan,
I received your first email so you don’t need to keep bombarding me with new ones. I’m sorry you’ve been feeling sick and I’m sorry that my long silences are making it worse. It has nothing to do with not trusting you, it’s just that I’m finding it hard to write anything at the moment. The only reason I haven’t given you a telephone number is because the lines here are hopeless and I’m having to use my mobile to email. As soon as I’ve worked out a better arrangement, I’ll let you know how to contact me.
Please don’t worry. I am fine. I’ve tucked myself away in a valley in the south-west of England where soft winds blow and people are scarce. It’s very pretty and peaceful-rolling fields of golden corn, a chocolate-box village half a mile away and a tumultuous sea just out of sight beyond an upland. I spend most of my days alone, and I really do like it that way. The house is quite big, but very basic. There’s even an old well in the garden-heavily disguised as a woodshed-though thankfully I’m not expected to use it. I do have running water and electricity, although the rest of the mod cons leave a lot to be desired. Hence the telephone problem. I’ve made friends with some sparrows. I’ve found that if I scatter birdseed around my feet, they appear out of nowhere to feed. It’s only now that I realize I never saw a single bird in Baghdad. There’s also a fishpond with no fish. I’m thinking of buying some so that I can sit and watch them in the evening.
As for Jerry Greenhough and the stick you’re getting, can you please keep stonewalling for me? I honestly don’t care what the Baghdad police and an unknown Yank think about me. It’s all so far away and unimportant at the moment. They won’t sack you, Dan, because you’re too important. Also, you have broad shoulders, and I can’t think of anyone better qualified to say “get stuffed” to the men in suits!
I realized on the plane going home that it was going to be worse talking about it than not talking about it. I know you believe counselling worked for you but you’re much stronger than I am and you don’t mind admitting your weaknesses. It’s a form of bravery that you and Adelina have…and I don’t. Perhaps I’ll feel differently in time, although I doubt it. My nightmares are never about what happened, only about the way I’ve gatecrashed other people’s lives in seach of a story. Nothing is ever straightforward, Dan. I’m far more troubled by my conscience than a few forgettable events in a cellar.
I’ll always be pleased to hear from you as long as you stick to other subjects and shelve your concerns about my mental state. If you don’t, I won’t answer! Let me thank you one last time for your care and kindness and end with love, Connie.
8
OF COURSE I looked for scars on Jess’s wrists and of course I found them. They were only obvious if you knew they were there, and I did it as surreptitiously as I could, but she must have noticed my interest because she took to buttoning her cuffs. I compensated with over-friendliness, which made her even more suspicious, and she stopped coming after that. The odd thing is, her absences didn’t register at first. Like a toothache that suddenly stops, it only occurred to me at the end of the week that the niggling irritation had gone.
It should have been a relief, but it wasn’t. I started jumping nervously every time my parents phoned, and peered cautiously out of the windows as soon as darkness fell. For the first time since my arrival I felt anxious about being alone, and my mother picked up on it one evening when I refused to speak until she did. “What’s wrong?” she asked.
I told her the truth because I didn’t want her imagining something worse. She was quite capable of populating Dorset with Iraqi insurgents and al-Qaeda terrorists. She listened without interrupting and, at the end, said simply: “You sound lonely, darling. Do you want me and Dad to come down next weekend?”
“I thought you were going to Brighton.”
“We can cancel.”
“No,” I said. “Don’t do that. You’re coming at the end of the the month, anyway. I’ll be fine till then.”
She hesitated before she spoke. “I expect I’ve got it back to front, Connie-I usually do-but from the way you describe them Jess has been a better friend to you than Madeleine. Do you remember Geraldine Summers…married to Reggie…they had two boys about your age who went to university in America?”
“Vaguely. Is she the fat one who used to turn up out of the blue with cakes that no one ate?”
“That’s her. They lived about thirty miles from us. Reggie was a tobacco planter and Geraldine was a teacher before he married her. They met in England during one of his leaves, and she came home as his wife after only knowing him for a couple of months. It was a terrible mistake. Reggie had never read a book in his life, and Geraldine had no idea how isolated the farm was. She thought she’d be in the middle of a community and able to get a job as a teacher, and instead she discovered that Reggie and the radio were going to be her only source of stimulation.”
“I remember him now,” I said with feeling. “Thick as two short planks, got sozzled on gin and told smutty jokes all evening.”
My mother laughed. “Yes. He was worse after the boys were born. They inherited Geraldine’s brains, and he had trouble keeping up with them. It turned him to drink even more, because he thought alcohol made him witty.” She paused in reflection. “I always felt rather sorry for him. He’d have been much happier with a country bumpkin and two strapping sons who liked driving tractors.”
I wondered why she was telling me this story. “What happened to them? Are they still together? Still in Zimbabwe?”
“Reggie and Geraldine? They went to South Africa. The last I heard, Reggie wasn’t very well. I had a Christmas letter from Geraldine which said he’d been in and out of hospital most of last year. I wrote back but I haven’t had a reply yet.” She returned to the point. “The thing is, Geraldine drove me mad when she first arrived. She saw me and your father as the antidote to Reggie, and she plagued us with visits because she was so discontented. In the end, I had to be quite firm with her and tell her she wasn’t welcome. It was all rather difficult, and she took it very badly.”
“What did she do?”
“Nothing too shocking. I received an unsigned letter about a week later, telling me how cruel I was, and one or two strange phone calls. I didn’t see her again for two years…by which time her first baby had arrived and she’d managed to come to terms with her frustrations. Poor woman. We found ourselves at the same party in Bulawayo and she was terribly embarrassed…apologized profusely for being a
nuisance and even owned up to the poison-pen letter and the phone calls.”
“What did you say to her?”
“That it was I who should apologize for being unkind. I felt far worse about rebuffing her attempts at friendship-even if they were annoying-than she could ever have felt about her letter. Geraldine was so thrilled to be back on speaking terms that she took to plaguing us again…and this time we had to put up with it. But you know, darling, she turned out to be the best friend we had. The Barretts and Fortescues-people we’d grown up with-wouldn’t come near us when your father was accused of profiteering, but Geraldine and Reggie drove over immediately and stayed throughout the siege. It was very brave of them.”
I was out of Zimbabwe when this happened, but I’d kept in close touch via telephone. It was in the early days of Mugabe’s push to evict white farmers, and a local Zanu-PF apparatchik laid trumped-up charges of tax evasion and profiteering against my father in a bid to stir up trouble. He had no chance of succeeding in the courts because my father kept scrupulous accounts, but the accusation was enough to incite anger among Mugabe’s war veterans. For a week, a gang of over fifty camped on our lawn and threatened to overrun the house, and it was only the courage of Dad’s own workers, who mounted a permanent picket in front of the veterans and refused to let them pass, that brought the siege to an end.
It was why my mother had been so keen to leave. She knew the intimidation would be worse a second time, and she didn’t want to ask the workforce to intervene again. For Zanu-PF it was tantamount to treason for blacks to support their white employers, and Mum wasn’t prepared to see anyone die for the sake of a few square miles of land. She and my father chose to overlook the Barretts’ and Fortescues’ refusal to help-“they were afraid”-and turned out to support them when their own farms were invaded. But, privately, she never forgave them, and their lifelong friendships ended with my parents’ departure for England.
“So what’s the moral of the story?” I asked with a smile. “Don’t judge a book by its cover?”
“Something like that,” she agreed.
“And if Jess produces a carving knife?”
“Your doctor friend should be struck off for negligence,” said my mother rather dryly. “He shouldn’t have left you alone with a dangerous patient.”
I SUPPOSE I could have checked with Peter, but there didn’t seem much point. I decided my mother’s logic was sound. We make our decisions in life on who we believe as often as what we believe, and I had no reason to think the local doctor would wish a disturbed lunatic on to me. I was a lot less sure about Madeleine’s motives. There was no question she and Jess hated each other, and the old saying “Half the truth is a whole lie” applied to both. If I believed Jess, Madeleine had deliberately abandoned her mother to die of neglect; if I believed Madeleine, Jess was a dangerous stalker.
There was probably a grain of truth in both stories-Madeleine didn’t visit Lily as often as she might and Jess visited too often, which suggested jealousy was at the heart of their hatred-but I was discovering at first hand just how quickly whispers become accepted as fact. According to Dan Fry’s latest email, even Adelina Bianca was hinting that I’d faked my abduction. In an interview with an Italian magazine, she was quoted as saying: “Of course there’s money to be made out of pretending to be a hostage-the public loves horror stories-but anyone who does it belittles what the real victims go through.”
I’ve no idea if she was referring to me-there was a US deserter who faked his kidnapping before fleeing to the Lebanon-but that’s how her words were interpreted. Dan told me that four of the main terrorist groups had denied holding me, and the Arab press was full of articles claiming a foreign correspondent had sought to make money out of passing herself off as a victim. Thankfully, the Western press ignored it-either from fear of a libel suit or because they knew my story hadn’t appeared-but it made me even more reluctant to advertise where I was. It turned me against Adelina. I knew her words had probably been “rearranged” to suit the editor’s take, but I did wonder if the reason she was able to give interviews was because nothing much had happened to her.
When I finally went looking for Jess, she said she could always tell when Madeleine had been spreading her poison. It didn’t matter who the recipient was, or how sensible they were, they never smiled as freely afterwards as they’d done before. She said I’d tried harder than most but I’d made my interest in her wrists too obvious. She took the hint after a couple of days and left me to get on with it. There were some things in life that weren’t worth bothering with, and convincing strangers that she wasn’t planning to knife them was top of the list.
It was an interesting rebuttal, since I hadn’t told her I’d spoken to Madeleine. Was Madeleine so believable that everyone reacted in the same way? If so, it was frightening. I did ask Jess why she allowed half-truths to stand instead of coming out fighting, but she shrugged and said there was no point. “People believe what they want to believe,” she said, “and I refuse to be something I’m not just to prove them wrong.”
I couldn’t follow her logic. “In what way?”
“I despise them,” she said rather dryly, “and I’d have to pretend I didn’t if I wanted to change their minds.”
“You might feel differently if you got to know them.”
“Why? It won’t change the fact that they believed Madeleine.”
This was part of a conversation we had in her kitchen after I plucked up the courage to drive to her house. There was no alternative, since she hadn’t responded to either of my telephone messages, but I was terrified her mastiffs might be roaming free. I drove up the half-mile track to the farm and slowed to a halt in the middle of the yard while I tried to work out where her front door was. I had my window down because it was a rare day of sunshine in an otherwise wet month, and I heard the dogs barking furiously as soon as I put the gears into neutral. The sound was too loud for them to be inside and I looked around nervously to see where they were.
The house was separated from the yard by a beech hedge that was tall enough to mask the ground floor, but there was no obvious gap to suggest an entrance. To my left was a barn, and to my right the track appeared to follow the line of the hedge round a sharp corner at the far end of the house, although flashes of prowling mastiff behind the beech trunks persuaded me that getting out for the purpose of exploration was a bad idea. As I was pondering my options, I heard the sound of a powerful motor and a tractor came roaring around the bend, towing a hay baler behind it.
I had a brief glimpse of Jess’s scowling face before she swerved past me and into the barn. Half a second later, she reversed out again, missing the back of my car by six inches as the baler swung in the opposite direction from the tractor. She performed a neat three-point turn, with the tractor a whisker away from my wing mirror, before she reversed the whole contraption back under cover. She wasn’t taking any prisoners that day, and I’m sure I did look scared as a couple of tons of metal looked like flattening my Mini.
She killed the engine and jumped down from the cab, whistling to the dogs to quit their noise. “You’re in the way,” she told me. “Another time, park up by the hedge.”
I opened my door. “Sorry.”
“There’s nothing to be afraid of,” she said curtly. “I wasn’t trying to hit you.”
“I realize that. I’d have moved except I couldn’t tell which way you were going to turn…and I didn’t want to make matters worse.”
“The opposite of what you’d expect. I thought you grew up on a farm.”
“I meant the tractor.”
She crossed her arms. “Did you want something?”
“No. I just thought I’d…see how you are. You haven’t been around and you didn’t anwer my messages.”
To my surprise, a slight flush rose in her cheeks. “I’ve been busy.”
I pushed the car door wider. “Is this a bad time? I can come back later.”
“It depends what you want.”
“Nothing. I just came for a chat.”
She frowned at me as if I’d said something peculiar. “I have to unhitch the baler and grease it. You can talk to me while I do that if you like. You’re not dressed for it, though. The barn’s pretty messy.”
“That’s OK. Everything’s washable.” I climbed out of the car and picked my way across the rutted yard in my long wrap-over skirt and leather flip-flop sandals. She eyed me disapprovingly and I wondered what was offending her. “Is something wrong?”
“You look as if you’re going to a garden party.”
“I always dress like this.”
“Well, you shouldn’t. Not on a working farm.” She nodded to some sacks of potatoes inside the barn entrance. “You can sit on one of those. What do you want to talk about?”
“Nothing in particular.”
She eased the baler forward and worked it loose from the tractor tow before pushing it back against the wall. For a small woman, she had extraordinary strength. According to her, anyone could do anything when they needed to. It was mind over matter. Until it came to talking. Her expression said very clearly that if I expected her to start the conversation, I was going to be disappointed. I watched her take a handful of grease and work it into the twine-tying pivots.
“Do you have to do this every time you use it?”
“It helps. The machine’s twenty years old.”
“Is it the only one you’ve got?”
“It’s the only baler.” She jerked her chin at a combine harvester at the other end of the barn. “That’s what handles the crops.”
I turned to look at it. “Dad had one in Zimbabwe.”
“It’s pretty much standard these days. Some people rent them but I bought that secondhand at a farm auction.”
The Devil's Feather Page 9