‘Ma came back from helping the children to wash. A child tucked into bed and kissed goodnight by someone who cares for her, she used to say, will sleep soundly and wake with hope in her heart. Wulfstan’s shadow hung over us, but when he wasn’t there. . . Well, life was hard for us, but we’d found a kind of happiness and I didn’t want it to end.
‘That night Wulfstan made a sort of confession. He poured us glasses of his precious sherry and admitted that he didn’t always meet the high standards of behaviour he set for himself. He sermonised on the challenges and agonies of celibacy. Then he insisted on going to the dormitory, switching the lights on and telling the children a funny story, to show what a lovable man he was. They laughed with desperate mirth and it was awful to see how fear had taught them to dissemble. But still in my weakness I convinced myself that my mentor would now redeem himself. This confession was the first step. Whatever he’d been doing to the children would cease, and soon I would receive the absolution I craved.
‘I was woken at two by a shout. I got up and ran to my room, which was where Wulfstan slept when he stayed. He wasn’t there. I checked the dormitory and saw that Katarina was missing. I searched the rest of the building, then ran outside and shouted her name. There was no answer. It was very cold and I knew they must have taken shelter somewhere. I went up the track, calling out for her again and again, until I came to the place where we parked the Mitsubishi camper van and saw that it was gone.
‘Ma had an old car, so I ran down to the farmhouse. She met me outside – she’d heard me shouting for Katarina. We drove off to find them.
‘It wasn’t long before we saw yellow lights glowing from a hilltop five minutes’ drive from the refuge. We were sure it was him because there was never any traffic around at night. He’d driven up a track which was too muddy for the car, so we parked on the road and made the last few hundred yards on foot. The Mitsubishi’s interior lights were on, and he’d spun the rear seats round so they faced each other. It was like a little courtroom in there – Wulfstan sitting in a captain’s seat and Katarina kneeling in front of him. As we approached, I saw that he had his Book of Prayer open in his lap, and he was writing in it.
‘My mother got to the vehicle first. She pulled back the sliding door and unleashed such a blast of rage and contempt that for a moment I thought she might attack him. He was at first too astonished to speak. Then, when her fury abated, he found his voice. Be careful, Irene, for your own sake, and the sake of your murderer son. She shouted back at him that he could do his worst for neither of us cared any more.
‘I lifted the tailgate and beckoned to Katarina. Even in this moment of terror, she was so composed and spirited, and saw immediately that this was her chance. Wulfstan reached for her but she was too quick, and in a moment she was running towards the lights of the Volkswagen. I pulled my mother away from the door. She was still screaming at Wulfstan. I’d seen him in this mood before. Nearly always it would end with him drawing back his fist.
‘We left him there with his Book of Prayer still open in his lap and ran back to the car. We quickly caught up with Katarina, who had no shoes. I offered to carry her the rest of the way but she refused. We heard the Mitsubishi’s engine revving behind us, labouring in the mud as Wulfstan tried to wrestle it round and come after us. But whatever he intended, we made it to the car and drove back to the refuge.
‘Katarina slept the rest of the night in the farmhouse with Ma. Later, I heard Wulfstan return, and the next morning at breakfast he behaved as if nothing had happened, though I noticed he was limping. I was too much of a coward to confront him. It was always like that between us. After he had eaten, he packed his bags and left. He had a man who would come and collect him in an expensive car. I often wondered how he got in and out of Kosovo so easily, but I never asked.’
‘Did you talk to Katarina afterwards?’
‘No, but Ma did. He’d gagged her and carried her from the dormitory. When they got to where the Mitsubishi was parked, she managed to dash the ignition key from his hand. As he crouched to find it, she searched in the dirt for a weapon and by chance came up with a wrench the man who changes the oil must have left there, and when he stood up again, she hit him on the knee. That was the shout I’d heard. He’d gagged her, but he hadn’t gagged himself, and so he gave himself away when she hit him. It was a brave thing to do.’
‘So after that Wulfstan went back to England?’
‘I think so, yes. Anyway, Ma and I agreed that we must never leave the children alone with him again, and Ma reported him to the police in Pristina. Unless we had evidence, they said, there was nothing they could do. Ma decided to contact some of the children who had been taken to Skopje, in hope that they would feel safe enough to speak out. So she called Bryan Harley at the UNHCR.’
‘Yes, I saw details of the call in the log on her phone.’
‘She couldn’t get hold of Harley, so she spoke to someone else. Ma gave this man the names and he said he would check the database and get back to her. The next day a different person called and asked for details from the UNHCR papers, numbers and dates – but he didn’t say why. We never heard any more.’
‘That must be how they found out about Harley,’ I said, ‘because those children weren’t on the database. When your mother said they’d been sent to Skopje using UNHCR paperwork with his name on it, they’d have been onto him like a shot.’
‘I wish they’d called back and told us, then,’ said Father Daniel. ‘Ma was so angry she couldn’t let it rest. A few days later, she came running up to the refuge. She was crying. Keep away from Haclan Adjani, she kept saying. You must keep the children away from him. Don’t trust him. Don’t cross him. Haclan Adjani will kill you. I’d never heard the name before – who was he? She told me that Haclan Adjani was a dangerous man, a gangster. And she told me that he was Father Wulfstan’s brother.’
‘But Wulfstan is English,’ I said, astonished.
‘No, Albanian. His real name is Peter Adjani. Ma said there’d been a family feud and he fled to England and changed his name, then entered a seminary in Norwich before joining the Order of St Hugh. Ma’s father was a cousin of theirs. That was why she left me with the Order before fleeing the country. I suppose she believed Wulfstan would protect me.’
Wulfstan was the third brother Eleni had told me about, the one who’d disappeared. That was how Haclan had found out I was back in Skopje. Remembering the long form I’d filled out at the BFPO office, I realised that my name and address would have been on the parcel containing his Book of Prayer. Peter Adjani, Wulfstan, had reported all this to Haclan. Whatever the feud had been about, it was over and the three brothers had been in touch throughout.
‘Did you know about Vasilis Adjani?’ I asked.
‘No, but when Anna mentioned his name, I wondered. . .’
‘He’s a former member of the Albanian government and yes, he was at Rambouillet. That conversation Anna told us about, when the MI6 officer came to warn him that his brother’s criminal activities might jeopardise the Kosovar cause – she said later that Colonel Adjani mentioned a woman who wouldn’t be able to help any more. I think that woman was your mother.’
‘People knew what was going on, James. People in authority. But still they left Haclan free to kill my mother? If they had arrested him straight away, she might still be alive.’
‘They didn’t want to arrest him while his brother was representing the Kosovars at Rambouillet. It was shameful and I’m not defending it, but that’s the way they think.’
There was a long silence. Father Daniel sat with his head hanging over his knees and I stared out of the door at the buckled concrete yard with its ring of crumbling sheds.
Father Daniel looked up suddenly and said: ‘Thank you, James. I haven’t said that yet, have I? Without you, Katarina wouldn’t have survived and the other children would still be in Adjani’s hands.’
‘I’m not sure you’d say that if you knew the whole story.’
/> He gave me a look of kindly concern. I was touched – and surprised. In the short time I had known him, his features had always seemed impassive and melancholy, like an empty shop with a lightbulb glowing dimly through whitewashed windows. I had not thought him capable of registering sympathy.
‘Tell me what happened after she warned you about Haclan.’ I said. I was nervous now, for we were reaching the point in the story which I had been dreading but still felt compelled to hear.
‘Wulfstan came back ten days later, much sooner than expected. As usual, he said I should take time off while he was there. I refused. Then come for a walk with me, so we can discuss your spiritual state, he said. I think you may soon be ready to receive my absolution. We walked for an hour, then I told him I was going back to the refuge. He tried to delay me, but anyway, we got back and the first thing we noticed was that Katarina had gone. Then two men I didn’t know came running into the refuge. One of them stared at me, such a dark, dirty look. There were gunshots from the farmhouse and they seemed nervous. Ten or fifteen minutes later, you arrived.’
‘If I’d known she was your mother, I would have—’
‘It doesn’t matter now. They killed her the way I killed my father, then daubed anti-KLA slogans on the wall to make people think it was Serbian militia.’
‘I’m sorry,’ I said gently. ‘What happened after you found her?’
‘I ran. My head was full of the horror. I could not go back to the refuge. May God forgive me for abandoning the children.’
‘Those men would have killed you too, Daniel. It was better that you survived.’
‘I was mad with grief. I couldn’t hold my thoughts together for more than a second at a time. I was near the Macedonian border when you called. I listened to your message and told myself Katarina would be all right, because that’s what I believed at the time. I was blinded by my own misfortunes. I wandered round with groups of refugees for days and days, doing what I could to help them. Eventually I decided to go to Skopje to look for her.’ He paused, then said: ‘Ma must have been alive when you found her.’
A picture of the scene of butchery reared in my mind. What could I possibly say to ease his grief?
‘I comforted her as best I could. There were three of them, though, not two – the third was hiding in the attic and shot one of our unit. By the time we’d—’
‘By the time you’d killed my brother,’ said Father Daniel, ‘my mother was also dead. Is that what you mean to say?’
I rocked back as if I’d been bludgeoned in the chest. The room reeled before me. The pale throat my fist had crushed was the throat of a boy hiding in terror while his mother was slaughtered below. I’d always known that, hadn’t I? It accounted for the feverish aftermath, the feeling of being on the run not just from my actions, but from myself. It accounted for the need to prove myself one of us, for only one of us could be cold enough to live with such a thing.
‘My half-brother, I should say.’
‘We didn’t know. . . He opened fire. I’m sorry. We thought he was with the killers.’
‘Nico? No, he was a very kind boy. I would have taken care of him. I don’t know where his father is – he and Ma were only together for a short time.’
‘Did you find him when you found your mother?’
‘No. I feared for him, of course, but I only heard that he’d died when I came back to fetch the children.’
I stepped out into the yard. The sky was a strong, deep, midday blue. Birds courted noisily in the woods, periodically scattering as a rumble of artillery fire echoed down the valley. Beside me was the galvanised bin I’d hidden behind while Ollie checked the farmhouse. I thought of how I must have seemed to TJ’s men: one of the officer race, ignorant, arrogant, eager. Had they guessed that the boy I had punched to death was not a member of the Bura gang? Probably. But they’d tried to protect me from the knowledge that I’d killed an innocent boy. It’s one of the things good soldiers do for each other, along with covering their arses and avenging their dead.
We walked back to the refuge. As we came level with the church, I said: ‘Want me to check?’
He nodded, so I went. Corpse. I beckoned him from the doorway.
‘We could deal with the body, if you like?’
We dragged it out of the church and round the back, then rolled it over the escarpment. It crashed into a clump of blackthorn forty feet below. It weighed a ton – a good few hearty meals for the scavengers hereabouts. For what you are about to receive, I said (to myself, for fear of offending Father Daniel), the world will be truly thankful.
We went indoors and ate, but though Daniel offered beans and some ancient crackers, all I could manage was tinned fruit. I told the rest of my story and Father Daniel watched me with those luminous eyes that had always seemed to invite you to wonder what it was that made him so sad – and I realised the look had gone. No, the sadness was still there, but the mysterious entreaty was not. Something pent up had been released, the shutters pulled aside. Daniel Cady had stepped clear of the hell Wulfstan made for him.
I came to the moment when I arrived back at Anna’s apartment and found he’d run off.
‘I might have killed you that night. The details in Wulfstan’s book were harrowing. Where did you go?’
‘Back to the refuge. I’d realised I wasn’t going to hunt down Haclan Adjani and avenge my mother’s death. There was nothing more I could tell any of you about Katarina, and I felt that my presence there was just a strange form of torture for Anna. And I was frightened of you, James. I knew there were things I’d done or not done which could be misconstrued, and. . . Well, you carried about you at that time an air of pure violence.’
He meant it as a compliment, I suppose, the kind of thing to make a soldier puff out his chest, but I was appalled.
‘I thought I was ready to face Wulfstan without quailing again. That proved not to be true,’ Daniel Cady said ruefully. ‘He wasn’t here when I arrived, and the children were fending for themselves. They were just about OK, but frightened – and lonely in the way even large groups of children are when they’re not being looked after. Six of them were missing – Katarina and the five other girls you rescued from the ship. The Mitsubishi had gone, but I wasn’t going to wait for Haclan’s men to return. We walked to the border – the weather was mild and we only encountered one Serbian patrol, who turned out to be just ordinary young men not really sure what they were doing and pleased to give the children chocolate and help us on our way. After three days we reached Blace, where I handed them over to the care of the UNHCR – with some misgivings, but at least the case officer’s name was not Bryan Harley.’
‘It was all recorded in the UNHCR database. A friend of mine went to their HQ in Skopje and checked.’
‘So the children are all right? They’re all accounted for? You know that for sure?’
‘They’d just been transferred to Stankovic Two, we were told. I guess the children from the ship will have joined them by now. Sixteen children like Katarina. What do we know about them?’
‘Not much – in one or two cases, nothing at all.’
‘None of them are all right, though, Daniel, are they? Not really. And there aren’t just sixteen, there are thousands of Katarinas all over the Balkans. Orphans, refugees, slaves, corpses. Not one of them is all right.’
‘Will this war do any good, do you think?’
‘Nobody knows. Least of all the people who started it. We should get going.’
‘I’m not going with you, James. I belong here now. It’s the only good work I’ve ever done, and I am supposed to be a priest, after all.’
‘Kosovo is a dangerous place, Daniel – and it’s not going to get better any time soon.’
‘That’s why the refuge must stay open.’
‘Why not go back to Northampton first? Someone has to take over the running of the Order. And Father Neil ought to know what’s happened.’
I couldn’t dissuade him – and in fact I en
vied the certainty his calling granted him. I collected some food and stood at the door. It was a strange moment. I had spent several weeks of my life believing this timid and unworldly man to be the most evil creature I had ever encountered. Now, the ties of destiny that bound us were permanent and profound. Yet the simple, comfortable quality of friendship itself was entirely absent from our relationship, and we did not quite know how to say goodbye. That would change over the coming years. For the present, we shook hands, and I looked into his eyes and felt that if Daniel Cady had not now earned the right to a benevolent hand from God or fate, then no one ever could.
52
I made slow progress, my jarred back obliging me to walk with soft steps and the throbbing in my throat distracting me from the route. Orienteering was not my strong suit anyway, and it was as well that I was in no hurry to get anywhere.
I kept following paths and tracks heading south, only to find myself looping round the flank of a hill and looking up at a vista of mountains I’d already seen. Meltwater sluiced down ditches and gullies hidden beneath my feet and a scent of damp moss filled the air. The intermittent skirmishes of war still chattered in the distance, but it felt as if I’d been released into a different dimension and permitted to meander through these deep, sheltering forests, sunlight filtered by the canopy of trees splashing my shoulders with a lattice of sinuous gold.
A part of me was distraught at the discovery – or rather the confirmation – that I’d killed an innocent boy; but already I felt a sense of relief, too. I was weary of evading the truth, of twisting away from its insistent light. I could not bring Nico back to life, but I could face up to what I had done. By comparison with the events I had witnessed over the last weeks, the state of my soul seemed a matter of indecent triviality, but it was all I had and it needed the truth. How else could I be sure that I would not make the mistakes I had made with Nico and Katarina all over again, in some other time, some other place?
Say A Little Prayer (A James Palatine Novel Book 2) Page 35