The Burma Legacy

by Geoffrey Archer

  ‘It meant a lot to mum that you brought me over. Even if Liam isn’t easy with you.’

  Sam knew the visit had been for Julie’s benefit rather than her mother’s. She was testing him. Still trying to decide what sort of father he’d make, should they finally decide to settle down together.

  For the rest of the journey to London, they talked very little. Sam’s mind kept hopping back to Thailand and the unresolved case of Jimmy Squires. And he thought about Midge, a little guiltily.

  They arrived back in Ealing shortly before eight. While Julie bunged a frozen pizza in the oven and prepared a salad, Sam took another look at Waddell’s background file on Peregrine Harrison. The Special Branch had done sound, solid police work. Four close-typed pages. It was the section on Harrison’s family he wanted to look at again. His English wife had died ten years ago, but they’d had a son, Charles, born in 1950. Like everyone else, he’d told Special Branch he had no idea where his father was. Hadn’t even spoken to him for over a month.

  Gave the impression he didn’t care much either, the report concluded.

  Charles worked as a barrister in the Inner Temple, it said. There was an office phone number and one for his home. Sam dialled it.

  The call was answered by a woman with a deep, languid voice that conjured up headscarves, the countryside and the bark of hounds.

  ‘May I ask who’s calling?’ she enquired.

  ‘I work for the Foreign Office. The name won’t mean anything to him. But tell him it’s to do with his father.’

  ‘Oh … Has something happened?’

  ‘Not that I know of. Expecting something?’

  ‘Um …’ She sounded off-balanced by his question. ‘Hang on and I’ll get my husband.’

  He heard the click of heels on a wooden floor as she walked down a corridor in what must have been a very spacious home. A few moments later he heard heavier footsteps returning.

  ‘Hello?’ A male voice, soft and inquisitive.

  ‘I’m so sorry to trouble you on a Sunday night, Mr Harrison. My name’s Maxwell from the Foreign Office.’

  ‘What department?’

  ‘I deal with international issues …’

  ‘You mean some of your people don’t?’

  Sam ignored the sarcasm. ‘Look, I’d be very grateful for a chat about your father. We’re a little concerned.’

  ‘I’ve already spoken to Special Branch.’

  ‘I know. Any chance we could meet tomorrow?’

  ‘I’m in court all day.’

  ‘In your lunchbreak perhaps?’

  ‘God, I only get about twenty minutes …’ He broke off and Sam guessed he was calculating something. ‘Well, all right. I shouldn’t need to confer with my client unless things go horribly awry. It’s at the Old Bailey. There’s an Irish pub almost opposite called Seamus O’Donnell’s. I could meet you outside it. About one o’clock? How will I recognise you?’

  ‘I’ll be carrying a copy of your father’s book.’

  ‘Heavens … I’d hoped it was out of print by now. All right. Until tomorrow then. But I should warn you, my father’s a law unto himself. I don’t think I’ll be able to help.’

  As he put the phone down Sam smelled burning. He walked into the kitchen.

  Julie had the oven door open and was pulling out their smoking supper, conscious of Sam’s eyes on her.

  ‘There’s something wrong with this thermostat,’ she insisted, uncomfortably aware that her culinary skills could be listed on the back of her thumb. ‘You’re a man. Do something about it.’ She slid the pizza onto a board. ‘Anyway, it’s not too bad. And charcoal’s good for the digestion.’ She smiled feebly at him.

  Sam wondered if it mattered that the woman he was thinking of marrying couldn’t cook.

  Ten

  Wednesday 05.55 hrs

  Harrison was unmistakably his father’s son, even if Sam had only seen his old man in photos. The same lean features and indecent growth of fair hair. And the same intently searching eyes.

  The lawyer strode across from the Old Bailey and pointed unhesitatingly at the book Sam was clutching.

  ‘Mr Maxwell, I presume.’ He projected his voice as if still in a courtroom. He had rid himself of his robes and wore a plain, dark suit over a blue shirt and golf-club tie.

  ‘Good of you to spare the time,’ Sam mumbled.

  ‘That place is desperately noisy,’ Harrison commented, pointing at the pub behind them. ‘There’s a Prêt-à-Manger round the corner, but it’ll mean standing. How are your legs?’

  ‘Should be up to it.’

  Harrison strode ahead like a teacher. ‘I’ve got about half an hour,’ he explained, turning his head, ‘which should be plenty since there’s not much I can tell you.’

  They entered the crowded lunch spot, selecting packaged baguettes from a refrigerated display and small bottles of water. Sam insisted on paying, then they perched at a chest-high, zinc-topped counter.

  ‘Now …’ Harrison eyed Sam like the trained interrogator he was. ‘What sort of Foreign Office bird, are you, my friend? Maxwell’s not your real name, I imagine.’

  Sam flicked open his sandwich pack without looking up.

  ‘I deal with security issues, if that’s what you’re asking.’

  Charles Harrison nodded, pleased he’d guessed right. ‘And the powers-that-be have been thoroughly rattled by my father’s letter to The Times?’

  ‘That and the fact nobody wants to tell us where he is.’

  ‘In my case it’s not a matter of wanting, I simply don’t know. After you rang last night I phoned Bordhill. Ingrid Madsen’s usually been straightforward with me, but this time she was abrupt, almost to the point of rudeness.’

  ‘The press were on her back at the weekend,’ Sam commented.

  ‘So I saw. Downing Street stonewalling pretty effectively.’

  Sam took a bite from his baguette. All around them office girls were gossiping, but out of earshot.

  ‘Has he ever done this before? Disappearing.’

  Harrison sighed. ‘You see, that’s where I’m not going to be much use to you. I really have no way of knowing, since he and I only speak once or twice a year. He may do this sort of thing every other month for all I know. Or maybe he’s had a sudden onset of Alzheimer’s and wandered off into the woods somewhere.’

  ‘Is that a serious suggestion?’

  Charles Harrison shook his head. ‘Nothing wrong with his memory as far as I know.’

  ‘You sound as if you’re not too concerned.’

  ‘It’s not easy to care about a man who only ever made a token effort at being interested in my existence. Someone who made my mother’s life an absolute misery.’ He said it with vehemence.

  ‘She died ten years ago?’

  ‘Is it that long?’ He sounded surprised.

  ‘Did she stay in touch with your father to the end of her life?’

  ‘No way. Wouldn’t countenance it after he walked out on her a second time. Finally learned her lesson.’

  ‘When did you last see him?’

  ‘About six weeks ago.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘He was in hospital.’

  ‘Oh?’ This was news. ‘Why didn’t you mention that to the police?’

  ‘They didn’t ask the question. And I wouldn’t have known he was ill if I hadn’t let my teenage daughter goad me into dropping in at Bordhill on my way back from a job in Norwich. Said it was disgraceful how little contact we had with her grandfather.’

  ‘What was wrong with him?’

  ‘Old man’s disease. Prostate. Although to get him to tell me about it was like squeezing water from a stone. For someone whose life has been driven by sex, he found the mechanics of it hard to discuss. Only when I tracked down his doctor did I learn he’d been made impotent by the operation. The cancer is fuelled by testosterone apparently. Stopping production of the hormone by cutting his balls off was the only thing they could do to prolong his life.’
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  Waddell’s words came winging back to Sam – Harrison’s lawyer thought his client didn’t expect to live long. Now they knew why. And contrary to the conclusion his controller had come to, it had nothing to do with Tetsuo Kamata.

  ‘How long did they give him?’

  ‘The doc was loath to commit himself – you know what medics are like. But they were talking months rather than years.’ The lawyer snorted with derision. ‘Poor sod. No more injecting his worldly wisdom into his female students through their nether regions.’

  ‘At seventy-seven, he can’t have done much of that in recent years,’ Sam remarked.

  ‘Don’t you believe it. Until the op he claimed to have the libido of a young man. Told me once that he hoped to die in the act with a woman young enough to be his granddaughter. He was being deliberately provocative,’ he added, seeing Sam’s raised eyebrows.

  Sam fiddled with the cap of the mineral water bottle. If Harrison was terminally ill there could be a tragically simple explanation for his disappearance. He might have driven somewhere remote and piped the car exhaust through the window.

  ‘How was he when you saw him? Depressed?’

  ‘Hard to say. Still hadn’t grasped what had happened I suspect.’

  Sam scratched his head. ‘I can’t understand why the people at Bordhill didn’t mention this to the police.’

  ‘Under strict instructions not to, probably. And there’s no reason why anyone other than Ingrid Madsen would’ve known. My father was quite remote from most of the residents.’

  ‘Apart from the ones he was sleeping with.’

  ‘Quite.’

  ‘Any idea who his latest was?’

  ‘None at all. The only woman I know at the manor is Ingrid, and I’ve always got the impression that when it comes to earthly pleasures she’s not in favour of them.’

  ‘It amazes me he got away with it for so long,’ Sam commented.

  ‘Masters write their own rules. Anyway, for my father, Bordhill Manor was never about religion or philosophy. It’s about having people on tap to play his own private games with.’ He looked at his watch, a reminder that their time was short.

  ‘I’m trying to get a feeling for how his mind works,’ Sam said. ‘So we can anticipate what he might do.’

  ‘That letter really got to you people, didn’t it?’

  ‘In the context of his disappearance we have to see it as a threat,’ Sam said solemnly. ‘I’m curious. When you were a child, how aware were you of what he’d been through in the camps?’

  ‘Never knew anything about it until that book came out.’

  ‘You astonish me.’

  ‘I was only three when he abandoned my ma first time round and went back to Burma. Didn’t really meet the man until he returned in ’62. I was twelve.’

  ‘Your mother …?’

  ‘Avoided mentioning him. Certainly never talked about his past.’

  ‘So when he returned it was a bit of a shock.’

  ‘Highly unsettling. Until then it had just been her and me at home. A family of two, with a few photos to remind me I’d once had a father. Then, suddenly he turned up. And instead of mum telling him to bugger off after dumping her like that, she welcomed him home. Settled him in front of the fire like he’d merely popped down to the post office. I felt thoroughly displaced. Particularly as my father had no knack with children. We had polite but meaningless conversations for a year which felt like a decade. And never any mention of what had happened in the war. Then he left again to set up the Bordhill Community. My hapless mother tried to pass this second desertion off as father having been called by God to live in a monastery. But I wasn’t fooled. I could see the defeat in her eyes. He broke her spirit, Mr Maxwell. It was a bad time for us.’

  ‘I can imagine. But surely, at that stage, your mother must have told you what the Japs had done to him? As a way of explaining his strange behaviour.’

  ‘Nope. I’m telling you, it simply didn’t feature in my childhood. Like sex, it was a subject one simply didn’t discuss at home. It may have been because she didn’t dare tell me about it. I was a rather precocious twelve year old, with very firm views. To me, the dropping of the atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was a far greater obscenity than what the Japs did to the likes of my father.’

  ‘So what did you think when he spilled it all out in Jungle Path to Hell?’

  ‘I was shaken. Naturally. I was twenty-five when the book came out, my mind rather more open by then.’ He took in a deep breath, as if trying to prevent some deep-seated emotions coming to the surface. ‘Mixed feelings, you could say. The details of his childhood I certainly found fascinating, but I felt cheated having to learn it from a book.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘And the descriptions of the war in Burma, his capture, the torture and so on … it brought it all home. To discover someone related to me had been through all that and survived – well, you simply have to stand up and salute, don’t you? Whatever your reservations about the man in question.’ He squeezed his jaw. ‘You’ve read the book? All of it?’

  ‘Not all. But a lot.’

  ‘I wonder if you can guess the part I found hardest to take?’

  Sam said he couldn’t.

  ‘Learning I had two half-brothers. That he’d had two more sons by a Burmese woman after abandoning my mother that first time.’

  ‘You never knew that?’

  Harrison shook his head.

  ‘Your mother …?’

  ‘Didn’t know anything about it either. That’s what resolved her never to speak to him again.’

  ‘Not surprisingly.’

  ‘He’d admitted having relationships during the decade away, but nothing about children. Nothing about having lived with one particular woman all that time, even going through a form of marriage with her.’ Harrison exhaled through pursed lips. ‘It was bigamy. My parents weren’t divorced.’

  ‘These half-brothers – you’ve met them since?’

  ‘No. Don’t even know their Burmese names. He uses English ones in the book. George and Michael.’

  ‘Never tried to make contact?’

  ‘No. Too far away, both culturally and geographically. I’m not a great traveller, Mr Maxwell. We prefer our summers in Cornwall or the Lake District. Only go long distances if we really have to.’

  ‘And your father made no effort to put you in touch.’

  ‘None. I have a feeling he felt bad about his Burmese woman. More so than he did about my mother. Tried to shut it out. But … well, his attitude to women is absolutely outrageous, as you know. He uses them with great selfishness. And yet they forgive him.’ He tapped his fingers on the book which lay next to their sandwich wrappings. ‘When this little time-bomb came out, the News of the World did an exposé on Bordhill. Tracked down a couple of young women who’d spent a few years there. Each told the same story of a secret and highly intimate liaison with my father, which ended when he moved on to the next young initiate. Both took it without protest and said they felt privileged to have been chosen by him. Now, that’s power, Mr Maxwell, when you can get women to love you so unconditionally.’

  ‘Enviable power,’ Sam muttered. ‘His women may have been forgiving, but what about your father himself? Any sign he’s prepared to put the past behind him now he’s nearing his end?’

  ‘Not when it comes to the Japanese, no.’

  ‘You ever discuss that with him?’

  ‘In recent years, yes. I told him his refusal to buy Japanese goods was daft. But he wouldn’t be shifted. He hates them with a passion and won’t do anything to benefit them financially, or in any other way for that matter.’

  ‘Is he still having nightmares?’

  ‘Oh yes. The same dream every time. The face of the man torturing him. You know the worst thing for him?’

  ‘The utter brutality of it?’

  ‘No. They were fighting a war and dreadful things were done by all sides. No. What he couldn’t forgive
was that the Japs destroyed his self-respect.’ The lawyer leaned forward, lowering his voice while strengthening its intensity. ‘They reduced him to a level where he was forced to confront his own weakness, Mr Maxwell. Once, a few years ago in about the only moment of openness I can remember, my father told me he’d cried like a baby when they tortured him. Wept with self-pity and self-loathing. And that man, Tetsuo Kamata, had just watched. Looked down at him with utter contempt. That’s what my father can’t forget. They cut out his pride, you see. Systematically. Like excising a tongue. Something that could never be restored. That was the reason he had those breakdowns after the war, the ones my mother nursed him through. Because the Japs had made him feel completely worthless. And,’ he added with one eyebrow raised, ‘it didn’t help that his fellow countrymen showed no interest whatsoever when he and his fellow POWs returned home. Oh yes. His hatred of the Japanese makes perfect sense to me, even if I wish he’d been able to get over it.’

  ‘You believe he’ll try to kill Kamata?’

  Harrison pursed his lips and upended the mineral water bottle into the plastic beaker. He stared down at the bursting bubbles, warily watching each one as if it were a new piece of evidence he’d not expected.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Could he do it?’ Sam pressed.

  Harrison flicked a glance upwards. ‘He killed Japanese soldiers during the war. Used a bayonet on several of them. Hasn’t got the same physical strength today, but you don’t need brawn to end a man’s life. You need brains and determination, and he’s got plenty of those.’

  ‘So where’s he gone? If he were going to kill Kamata, where would he do it?’

  The lawyer shook his head. ‘Guessing’s not my thing.’ He looked at his watch again. ‘Now I really have to go.’ Leaning forward one more time, he added, ‘I’ll tell you one thing for free, though. Now he knows about his cancer, uppermost in my father’s mind would be the realisation that he has to act soon.’

  ‘Because …’

  ‘… if he doesn’t, he’ll die before Kamata does. And he wouldn’t like that, Mr Maxwell. Wouldn’t like it at all.’