The Path of the Bullet

by M C Jacques

  That night, though, it was between him and the hospital. No good invoking a ghost from the past, especially when one’s own disposition towards that particular ghost is itself ambivalent, oscillating from one appraisal to the next memory. Many years later, even though he was scornful about the superficiality of its historical reconstruction of Jesus, McKay did – all too hypocritically for his own peace of mind, incidentally – filch and modify the title of Philip Pullman’s book for his own ends when cogitating the worth of his late father. ‘Good man, scoundrel, or both?’ he would mutter in his mind, and probably still does.

  Gunther Stendhal was a deft junior surgeon from Linz, with steady hands, a fact which, somehow, did not go unnoticed by the partially anaesthetised McKay when the cleft skin on his nose was virtually seamlessly repaired in the early hours. The staff nurse’s name badge said Julia something-or-other, Llewellyn possibly. But that detail, McKay had been too somnolent to register without qualm.

  The following morning, at around six o’clock, Julia, soon to be off duty herself and a good deal more chatty than had been the case earlier on, gave the awakening patient the welcome news that he was to be collected and driven home at around seven. An R.A.F. gentleman, reception had informed her, had called and was eager to collect him and to pamper him a little, apparently. “Now whoever might that be?” jousted McKay for his own amusement.

  “I called the White Hart at Tuxford last night, too, Mark, and they say that you are welcome whenever. I spoke to a foreign girl who seemed really upset when she heard what had happened. Also, she checked with the boss and they’re not going to charge you for last night! Thought you might like that, with having Scots’ parentage!” McKay smiled naturally, and on cue. “Anyway, Dr Stendhal is very pleased with the nose. It was a nice clean cut, you see, dear. Not all smashed up like the other fellow who came in later. Still a bit concussed, he was. He’ll be in a night or two, for sure. They can’t even get a name out of him yet, you know. He’s got two policemen outside his ward, there now!”

  Although he briefly considered trying out a variation on ‘you think I look bad, you should see the other fellow!’, he quickly dismissed the notion. His mind was roving elsewhere as he shuffled his way uneasily along the smooth, pearlescent corridor flooring towards the shower room. Could he be absolutely sure that the whole thing was not a set-up; a carefully choreographed set of manoeuvres designed to deflect his interest and suspicion from falling on the staff at the Pan Asiatic and their associates? Surely, the chef and the waiter may have conspired. On the surface, they seemed to be unlikely mates, though: the waiter, tanned, swarthy, lean and young; the chef, quite a bit older, portly, short and even ruddy by either Mediterranean or Maghreb standards. At the very least, the chef and the waiter would have known that he, McKay, had been in both places on the same day.

  Despite being beset by suspicion and misgivings, McKay delighted in the sensation of nippy water hitting him, no matter how chilling the first burst was. He showered carefully, mind, despite the confidence of Stendhal and Julia who had both, independently, assured him that he could even plunge underwater, should he desire to, and their repair work to his nose would remain integral, quite unspoilt.

  At that moment, though, drying himself gingerly, with his smarting wounds and an unfortunate collection of additional aches and pains, all McKay really sought was the faculty of mental clarity and the pleasure of that simple, physically clean feeling.

  McKay had bid his farewell and issued his profound thanks to the heroic staff before seating himself near the hospital’s main entrance. Uncharacteristically, Mountfitchet appeared, hot and harassed, at around twenty minutes in arrears of his own stated ETA of seven o’clock, on the dot! “Damn God- forsaken roadworks! Milking the council dry of funds! Traffic lights stuck here and there randomly. Not a worker to be seen anywhere! I know, tell me something new! Felt like ringing up old Siddie Broadsquare (McKay had heard the Wing Commander refer to his Colonel friend a number of times before) to group a few squaddies together and blast them out, cones, lights, signs, every last one of ‘em – take the whole damn lot out, hook, line and sinker! Would’ve done everyone a favour, what?”

  “I’m glad you didn’t, sir; I think I’ve caused you enough inconvenience already so early on a Saturday!”

  “Think nothing of it, old man. Good to see you. Super. Wonderful. Now, somebody’s given you a bit of a biff on the boko, that nice Welsh nurse tells me. Damn fine job with the needle and cotton – positive improvement, old man! Don’t suppose she’d be free tonight by any chance, would she?” He slapped McKay on the back, just a little too crisply for the recipient’s welfare, who, having had a moment’s warning, braced himself and then recommenced his cheerful amble towards the door, checking his pockets as he did so. For, although he had, on the previous evening, purposefully deposited his wallet, containing only selected items, in the Pan Asiatic for sound, disinformation purposes, he had no desire to risk repeating that with the fuller contents of his wallet that morning.

  The bright morning augured well as they reached Mountfitchet’s light grey Rover which had been reversed meticulously, with near flawless linearity, McKay realised, into its bay. Behind the still splendid machine, which bore metal badges proclaiming membership of both the Royal Automobile Club and the Automobile Association, was a large, unmistakable white-on-crimson sign which read ‘Strictly No Parking’.

  They sat themselves down in the copious seats and the V8 engine purred into its barely detectable life. “Right, old lad, where’s it to be? I’ve a thought; what about a good brekkie out at Lode, to get you up to speed? There’s a mill near there, and oodles of parkland too; National Trust, I think, if memory serves. We can have a stroll. Bit of fresh air into the deal. Good for wounds! Nothing like it!”

  McKay smiled his approval faintly before slumping fast asleep, part curled in the cosseting leather of the armchair-like front seat into which he was belted. It was only the change from tarmac to gravel which awoke him, some thirty-five minutes later, as the gentle glide to their destination near Lode drew to a close.

  By that time, it had become a most glorious morning, he acknowledged to the Wing Commander as they walked across the car park’s crackly gravel to the garden centre’s café. A little mist clung pessimistically to the nearby waterway, but the sky was totally unsullied: broad and relentlessly marine. The effects of his sedation had finally begun to wane; perhaps his doze on the way over had helped, too. Outside the double, propped open doors, through which customers entered the conservatory-like structure, stood a brightly emblazoned sandwich board announcing the café was OPEN 8 TIL 8. Inside, upon the large and intensely floral menu cards of all the available items, the one which caught McKay’s attention, and held it, was that of the centre’s ‘All Day Veggie Breakfast’. Mountfitchet did similarly with the carnivore equivalent and opted for a cup of tea rather than McKay’s ‘bucket’ of darkest coffee.

  “So, old man. Where now? What next?” McKay looked slightly puzzled by the question. “Sorry. I mean with regards to the RWM business. Was last night anything to do with that, d’you reckon?”

  McKay shook his head ruefully. “I’m by no means certain, but I tend to doubt it. I need to speak with John Foote later today.” (He must email him at the very least, he thought.) “It might just have been all contrived, but I doubt it. My wallet had not been opened or tampered with; not one of the spoiler tabs had been separated.” The older man nodded approvingly, feeling more assured now he knew that McKay had thought to lay ‘bogies’ (as Duggie Mountfitchet always used to call them when he had been in service).

  “Also, don’t forget that fellow Gould out at Lakenheath. You know, ‘Jay’ they call him; can never get why that is, mind. Good chap, though. Handy with his fists, too, I understand. Division champ or something like.” This time McKay nodded his approval, grinningly, Mountfitchet’s eyes fastening on the trimly stitched wound across the bridge of McKay
’s nose. “Don’t want you getting in any more scrapes, that’s for sure! Anyhow, what are your thoughts about the next move, old man?”

  McKay allowed himself a little time before answering. Mountfitchet looked up, watched, sipped, looked up and watched again. “There is something I’m not picking up here, sir. I’ve tried to tip-toe around a couple of characters (McKay had Sarah Millar and Lisa Fothergill especially in mind at this point) because I’ve been waiting for some background and profiles to come through. Also, I’m aware of Millar’s possible stroke probable connection, in some way, to some degree, with what Burrows thinks might be a fundamentalist sleeper cell of some sort – probably hailing from the Maghreb judging by the accents I’ve heard so far – and it’s important that is sorted out. Fundamentalism is one big motivation to do away with a British and, from their perspective, an occupying soldier, in uniform, too. A number of people have noticed Millar lurking around the place, especially the Warfare on Land Hall, out of hours, usually around twilight; much later and she would have to start switching lights on here and there on her own, and the presence of anybody she may have been with would’ve been apparent.”

  “Andy Fordham is another curious one.” McKay elaborated, “He turned up quite late at the White Hart a few evenings ago. And he does call in to the museum out of hours; I managed to trip him up and he realised it, too! But Graham Locke would give him a clean bill of health, certainly as far as murdering anyone is concerned.”

  To the younger man’s surprise, the Wing Commander was by no means downcast by what he had heard; quite the contrary.

  “Good stuff, Mark, old man! Making things happen, that’s the thing! We’ll ferret the roosters out, just you see!” The older ruminant’s eyes fell upon the two clean, although fractionally greasy, plates, beaming up accusingly as they sat on the functional, naugahyde-like table surface. “Now then, what about a stroll around Lode Mill, walk some of this off, and maybe the Abbey grounds, then off into town for a good old session? I’ll park up the old bus at the hotel, and then we’ll darn well cut loose on Jesus Lane, or just below it, at any rate! A session and a half, old man; just what the doctor prescribes after a night like you’ve had, eh!”

  Even though McKay really did query the Wing Commander’s thinking on this matter, he let it ride on this occasion and went with the flow. It was futile to protest, in any case; McKay knew that already. The die for the remainder of the day, and evening, then, was well and truly cast.

  23

  The following week…

  On the Monday morning, McKay had taken breakfast in his room at the White Hart. It had comprised a comprehensive bevy of items and had been served enthusiastically and energetically by the foreign girl whose name, McKay had elicited, was Matilda, or a near equivalent, and that she had arrived at the White Hart, Tuxford from Budapest, via Cologne and London.

  On the Sunday evening, he had successfully called John Foote in Manhattan and been scrupulously appraised of precisely what John had rooted out about Sarah Millar through this means and that. Most of his information had been unearthed by a monotonous trawling of dozens of radical-edged anti-US sites and anti-Iraq war sites. Anti-War on Terror sites were already numerous and still proliferating, it seemed. Anti-Zionist sites featured quite prominently, too, and John had logged these in a distinct column.

  She had made a total of eighty-seven posts on at least thirty-six websites. Some posts by an IB Anonymous of Cambridge, John had noticed, bore remarkably similar verbal and phraseological traits to those professedly hers, yet a number of others by the same IB Anonymous of Cambridge, including some very strongly militant and radical posts, bore absolutely no stylistic or verbal similarity at all. Some of the posts in her own name were simply terse observational comments. For example, on the ‘Release El-Mughrabi Now!’ blog, she had slammed the previous blogger (who had had the nerve to suggest that the decision about his release should have been made by the families of those killed over Lockerbie) with the terse counter: ‘So then we’d better let all the thousands of Afghan and Iraqi families who’ve suffered at the hands of UK/USA troops decide what happens to our soldiers!’

  But other comments were longer, more carefully composed and even more philosophical. On one Alabama-based blog, entitled ‘Take Jesus to Al-Qaeda’, Millar had painstakingly traced and plotted the early life of Mohammed, Prophet from the Blessed One, and listed many reasons – based upon Koranic teaching and especially upon the verba at acta Mohammhadi – why the vast majority of Muslims had no option but to reject the corrupt and ethically moribund corporate societies of the US and Western Europe. She had then gone on to insist that the charity disclose its success, nay, failure rate, in such an enterprise to the world’s readers.

  Her cynical blog had been left uncountered for quite some months until a certain venerable Maisy Elwood Jnr of the Proclamation Baptist Community, Birmingham, in the same US state, having been ‘roused and stirred by the Lord’ entered the fray. She had, at once, proclaimed that the same Lord God’s plans for Islam knew of no bounds whatsoever and that the very nature of Biblical faith, in fact, required soldiers of that faith, waiting for the good Lord, to redeem some accursed Muslims to claim salvation and to condemn others to scorching Hell, in His own good time. Millar’s response to this was even more cursory than her previous blog: ‘Exactly, creeps!’

  “There’s definitely something going on with that one,” John said after a while and referring to Sarah Millar. “I don’t think that we’re going to be able to uncover a whole lot more, Mark, so just see her when you’re ready, in your own time. Read through the data I’ve sent by email, there’s about thirty-five pages in all – oh, yes, check out page eleven well and good. I probably could have bowdlerised it more ruthlessly but I wanted to let you reach your own conclusions or, indeed, let you not reach any conclusions whatsoever. Anyway, the data’s there for you to look at! Get back to me when you can.”

  Page eleven, page eleven… McKay’s fingers scampered as nimbly as they were able to amidst the wad of bright, crisp A4 sheets. There it was. His eyes scanned the page with the rhythm and regularity of an optical reader; about two-thirds of the way down he read the only passage to which his friend could have been referring:

  Cambridge Arabic Music, Dance And Culture Society (CAMDACS)

  Membership List:

  117 Sarah H Millar

  Meet every Tuesday eve

  Venue: Secret Rooms Club (below Pizza Express), Jesus Lane, Cambridge

  “Good old John!” he exclaimed out loud, with such gusto that a couple leaving an adjacent room broke their step along the corridor momentarily, then murmured, sniggered, and carried on their way downstairs to the bar.

  24

  Monday afternoon at The Old Forge

  By four o’clock on that otherwise quite oppressive and gun-barrel grey afternoon, Andy Fordham and the well-developed Lisa Fothergill had had sex twice, once on the rather creaky cane-framed sofa in the conservatory, the second time on the Fothergills’ king-size pine bed where the rampant couple were well on their way to completing a third round.

  To Lisa, Andy was youngish – almost exactly sixteen years her junior, in actual fact – lean and hungry with a Byronic dark side. But most pleasing and reassuring of all to her, he was wildly obsessed with the married woman’s enormous cleavage. Even as she could feel him stiffening inside her for the third time that afternoon, she marvelled to herself that he didn’t mind about her stubby legs, her thirty-three, but pressing on thirty-four, inch waist, her far too flaccid thighs. He didn’t even moan about the older woman’s flushing and hot tantrums. (And, now it had come in to her mind, neither did their mutual friend, the toothy and clingy Annie, mind these things.) Finally, sodden through a third dosage of semen and sweat, they moaned and groaned each other into a yawny slumber more befitting a Sunday morning than a workday afternoon.

  About an hour later, after Lisa had made and served
them both coffee, downstairs again in the conservatory, he commented to her that it had been three months since they had slept together for the first time. That first time he had been kitted in his grimy blue RWM overalls and buried, involved in some exacting work on linkages around the front axle of Matt’s, in her husband’s treasured Second World War Willys Jeep. Rising up from the vehicle’s bowels, he had struggled to his feet, stretched his arms and glanced across, momentarily at the rear glass window of the conservatory which swept along virtually the entire breadth of the house’s rear. There he spotted the short, dark Mrs Lisa Fothergill standing motionless, patently surveying him, grease and all, up and down; she had silvery tights on, he recalled, with dark heeled shoes, a blue-green pleated skirt, various items of jewellery and a cream bra with wiry straps and two mesmerising, half-football-like cups: taut, shiny and packed.

  It wasn’t that he didn’t love Karen, he’d reasoned to himself later on that fateful day as he sat alone sipping long, consoling pints of Old Speckled Hen in the bar of the Canal Tavern but, compared with Lisa, she was like a schoolgirl: young, frothy, trivial. And, besides, he was willing prey; Lisa had sprung a trap using precisely the right bait stuff. The only ‘downer’ was her furious possessiveness and green-eyed fury now that she had entrapped him. And the way she had hated Cathy, his half-sister, before her disappearance after her flat in Royston had been broken into. No, he didn’t care for that side of Lisa.

  For her part, she loved the way that her ‘Andy-in-all-departments’ man (as she frequently referred to him when joking riotously with her girlfriends from the county set in her health club’s sauna or Jacuzzi) would do just about anything she asked.