by Andy McNab
The sun was well and truly up by the time we approached St Julien. This was the location of the crossing closest to Geneva airport, so the volume of traffic was normally heavy enough to ensure that anyone with an up-to-date vignette would be waved through without any hassle.
Except today.
The way ahead was blocked solid a good few Ks from the frontier post. As far as I was concerned, that could mean only one thing. And even if I was wrong, it wasn’t worth putting it to the test. I didn’t want to leave it too late and be the only driver to reverse the fuck out of there, so I joined the queue of vehicles bailing out at the next slip-road and aimed the Polo in the opposite direction.
I told Stefan to climb on to the back seat and get his head down before pulling in at the nearest service station. Every man and his dog around here now thought a boy had been stolen. The law would be taking a close look at all the local CCTV footage they could lay their hands on, and linking Stefan, the Polo and me on film was something I wanted to avoid.
I filled the tank, dug the Sphinx out from under the spare tyre and consulted the map. The Morzine area looked like my best bet. About an hour twenty away, and within easy reach of Avoriaz. I knew you could ski backwards and forwards between France and Switzerland around there all winter without having to get out your passport, so I figured it wouldn’t be that different now the snow had retreated and the Alpine flowers had taken over.
PART TWO
1
I picked up a lift map and a timetable at the Morzine station.
The most direct route to Switzerland from there was up the Vallée de la Manche and over the Col de Cou, but the whole area was hatched with hiking and biking trails. There was no way every one of them could be patrolled by border guards.
I asked the woman behind the counter if she could give me some advice. Stefan managed to conjure up one of his smiles for her, and suddenly nothing was too much trouble. I swivelled the map in her direction, pointed to the Col, and asked how long it would take to get there on foot.
She said that we could drive up to the Mines d’Or, park by the lake and walk from there. ‘Ninety minutes to the top, maybe less, for you.’ Then she glanced down at Stefan and pursed her lips. ‘But not so good for your son, I think. Six hundred metres up.’ She pointed a finger at the ceiling. ‘And steep.’
I’d already come to the same conclusion. There was no lift, and no way was I going to cycle up and down that ridge with Stefan on my handlebars.
The key chairs had opened elsewhere for the summer walking season, and I’d already IDed the ones I needed two valleys further west. But I let her come up with a whole raft of other suggestions, and nodded at every one.
‘So, you must have this.’ She handed me a leaflet with a livid green stripe and pictures of Dad, Mum and the kids climbing rocks, riding around on mountain bikes and having a great time at the pool. ‘The Portes du Soleil multi-pass.’
It gave us access to all the fun on both sides of the border, and the transport we needed to get there. It also provided the perfect place for me to hide the kid in plain sight while I came back to fetch the wagon.
‘Family?’
‘Sorry?’
She beamed and gestured at Stefan. ‘Would you like a family pass?’
Good thinking.
I turned to him. ‘Great idea, eh? Your little sister loves a swim, doesn’t she?’
He didn’t even blink. ‘I love to swim too.’
I took the six-day option for myself, my wife and two children. It didn’t cost a fortune and sent a nice cuddly message: the four of us were planning a whole lot of adventures over the course of our holiday. It wasn’t just the two of us here to cross the border without being traced.
I bought some extra-strength ibuprofen and a can of anaesthetic spray for the boy at a pharmacy across the street and hoped his ankle would hold out. If it didn’t, I’d have to carry him. Fuck it, I’d humped a Bergen three times his weight across the Black Mountains in sub-zero temperatures with an RSM yelling insults at me every step of the way. And the rest. This was going to be a walk in the park.
Next stop was a ski-hire shop that also flogged hiking kit when the snow had melted. I treated Stefan to some boots. They didn’t have crocodiles on them, but they would give him a bit more support than his trainers. I selected a pair of anti-shock poles to help with his balance and momentum. I got a pair for myself as well. They’d help me look the part.
A pack of energy bars and a couple of water bottles from a nearby Casino went into the day sack, and after getting some painkillers down the boy’s neck and giving his foot a spray we were good to go.
I drove up to Les Lindarets and found a parking space almost immediately beside a restaurant with big green parasols that backed on to the hill. The goats in the street seemed to outnumber the people and there wasn’t a traffic warden in sight. This was my kind of place.
We reached the end of the village in a couple of nanoseconds and kept on going. The first of the four lifts we needed was a K and a half south-east. The valley wasn’t filled with trippers, but we weren’t alone. I could see a mixed bunch of enthusiasts ahead of us, from bearded tree-huggers in open-toed sandals shepherding their wives and kids uphill to manic endurance freaks with top-of-the-range everything bent on breaking land-speed records. We fitted comfortably at the lower end of the scale.
As a pair of middle-aged men in Lycra pedalled past, drenched in sweat, I showed Stefan how to get the best out of his poles. His expression made it clear he didn’t think it was rocket science. To hammer the point home he set off at speed, arms pumping, with only a hint of a limp.
I told him we still had a fair distance to go, there were no prizes for getting there first, ‘And if you fuck that ankle of yours again, you can get some other dickhead to give you a piggyback …’
He slowed as the incline steepened and was ready for a pit stop by the time we’d got halfway.
An energy bar and half a litre of water took us to the base of Les Mossettes, a four-seat chair to the ridge. When I’d done winter training here as a young squaddie we used to stand up there with a brew and watch the big-timers somersaulting down what they called the Swiss Wall. If you failed to negotiate the concave bit at the top of the slope you wouldn’t see your skis again until you got back from the hospital.
When we were almost there, the Suunto told me we were 2,200 metres above sea level. I showed the read-out to Stefan. He shrugged. I guessed his room in Courchevel was almost as high.
There was a uniform waiting at the top station, but it belonged to a lift attendant. And he seemed to be paying more attention to the dudes filming themselves biking along the Col than to us. A lad on an ATV buzzed around the bare hillside below us.
On the way down into Switzerland, I realized that something the Omani had said, when we were giving ourselves lung cancer and becoming new best mates, was still nagging away at the back of my mind. Very spiritual, he’d called Mr Lover Man.
A true believer.
I tried to remember if I’d ever seen the Nigerian with a prayer mat, and failed. ‘Your BG, he’s your godfather, isn’t he? Does that mean you go to church together?’
The kid was gazing at the rooftops of Les Crosets, on the wooded slopes at the far side of the valley. ‘We used to go when I was young. Not very often, though. Then he started going to the mosque instead.’
I didn’t know whether that was important. Maybe the atmosphere of fundamentalist lunacy that was gripping Europe right now was gripping me as well. Just because he’d converted to Islam didn’t necessarily mean he’d suddenly turned into Jihadi John. But I tucked the int away for future reference.
Two more lifts and not much hiking took us to Champéry, another Disney village. It was on the outer edge of the Portes du Soleil area, so our multi-pass got us into its bike park.
Stefan thought he’d died and gone to heaven when we stepped through the entrance. The whole area was heaving with über-cool teenagers in mud-spatter
ed kit pulling stunts on mountain bikes. There was some kind of competition going on.
The main track was like a rollercoaster, part bare earth, part grass, in the open and running through the trees. A series of smaller circuits featured more bumps, jumps, ramps and bridges than you could bounce over in a week.
He was even happier when I bought him a full-face helmet, a pair of Ali G goggles, a T-shirt with go-faster stripes, some gloves and elbow pads. He wasn’t going to get on a bike, but he’d fit in nicely. And there was no way he’d be recognized in that gear unless he collided with someone he knew.
I told him to be within reach of the finishing line every thirty minutes until the bike park closed, and I’d come and find him. Then I gave him a cheery dad-like wave and headed back the way we’d come.
There were two obvious routes to Champéry from Les Lindarets. I chose the one via Lac Leman. It was forty Ks further but only about twenty-five minutes longer.
So two and a half hours after saying goodbye to the goats and the green parasols I was back at the bike park with a big wad of Swiss francs in my pocket and a bigger one in my day sack, telling Stefan to get a fucking move on.
We still had more than three hundred Ks to travel.
2
Stefan went quiet as we hit the main to St Gallen. I glanced at him from time to time, between keeping eyes on the rear-view and wing mirrors as well as the road ahead. His body language told me it wasn’t because he’d run out of things to say: he was miserable.
It didn’t take a genius to work out that any kid whose dad had been killed in front of him only forty-eight hours ago wasn’t always going to be a bundle of laughs, but this was about something different.
‘I guess you must be getting to know this part of Switzerland quite well by now …’
He turned his face to the side window and shook his head. ‘I have never been here.’
‘Never visited your mum’s new house?’
That didn’t even earn me a shake.
After a while he muttered, ‘She’s not my mother.’
‘I know, mate. Your real mum was a friend of mine.’ I hadn’t forgotten that. I’d buried it somewhere in the darkness, along with a whole lot of other shit. Tracy had been a mate since my Regiment days. That was why Frank had asked me to go and dig her and Stefan out of a hole in the ground in Somalia, and why I’d been with her when she took a round and died there, trying to save her son.
I decided to take another tack. ‘The woman I called Mum wasn’t my real mum either.’
He didn’t turn back towards me, but I sensed that I’d sparked his interest.
‘She used to get really pissed off with me. But you know what? She looked after me too.’
The wagon ate up another K or two before he spoke again. ‘Pissed off?’
‘Yeah. Angry. You know. Cross.’
‘Why?’
‘Me and my mate Gaz … we used to do all sorts of stupid stuff when we were your age. Our favourite hiding place was on the roof of his block of flats – his apartment block. We sat up there and watched the world go by. One time we—’
‘My father owns apartment blocks. He owns many apartment blocks.’
‘Your dad was a very rich and clever guy.’ I paused. ‘Gaz didn’t own his apartment block. The council did. But maybe I’ll explain that some other time—’
‘You were going to tell me why your stepmother got pissed off with you …’
‘Pissed off … yeah. Very, very pissed off. We made some bombs – not real bombs, tomato sauce, you know, ketchup, in, er, plastic bags – and went up on the roof and threw them at people in the street. Hardly ever hit anyone, but we made a bit of a mess. Explosions of red all over the place.’ I’d lied about the bags. We’d nicked a packet of Gaz’s dad’s condoms, but now wasn’t the time to explain.
He did turn then, and I could see he wasn’t enjoying the story as much as I’d hoped. ‘Did she beat you?’
‘Nah.’ I tried to make light of it. I suddenly had a fairly good idea of where this was leading. ‘She clipped me across the ear. She and Gaz’s mum went ballistic because they didn’t know we climbed up on the roof and they thought we might fall off and kill ourselves. It was a fair way down to the pavement.’
He went quiet again. He seemed to be watching the very well-behaved Swiss houses and countryside sweeping past his window, but I knew he wasn’t taking much in.
‘Remember all that shit, eh? It’ll help the cover story. You remembering some stupid stuff your dad did back in the day.’
‘My stepmother beat me.’
It was my turn to shut up. I didn’t have much choice. I spent a minute or two wishing I hadn’t sparked this up in the first place. I pictured him flinching when I’d raised my hand outside the chalet. I should have read the signs.
Then I told myself, Fuck it, why worry about what you can’t change? ‘What did she beat you for?’
He took a long, halting breath. ‘I think maybe because I am not her son.’
He probably wasn’t wrong about that. There was a fair chance that Stefan jumping ahead of her in the inheritance queue and being groomed to take over the business empire had also had something to do with it.
Another of my chats with Frank rose to the surface and swam towards me. On a landing strip in Malindi. We had just snatched Stefan back, first from his al-Shabaab kidnappers, then from the Georgians who were trying to use the kid as a lever against him.
I remembered Mr T leaning in towards me, eyes fixed on mine. ‘My wife’s name is Lyubova. It means “love”. She has much of it.’
I’d admired his optimism. Lyubova knew Frank was a world-class shagger without a doubt, but at that point he hadn’t told her Stefan even existed.
‘I believe she will embrace my son as her own. I hope she will forgive me. I hope that I may become the husband she deserves.’
His words still echoed in my head, even when the image of his precise, sharply chiselled features faded, and was replaced with hers. The portrait on the bedroom wall. The photographs in the green room. Those eyes. That calculating face. They now told me that forgiveness wasn’t high on her list of favourite things.
I took Stefan’s distress about his stepmother seriously. It sounded like Frank’s embracing scenario hadn’t happened. I had no idea whether he had even got close to becoming the husband she deserved. Whatever, the magic hadn’t worked. Had he binned her, or had she binned him? Had he become the ex-husband she wanted to kill?
Ly … u … bo … va …
Had she told Mr Lover Man to pull the trigger? Had she paid him to? Was Hesco her fixer?
I’d already asked myself why the chateau wasn’t Frank’s number-one choice of bolthole as soon as he had perceived a threat. As the tarmac unrolled in front of us, all sorts of possible answers were bouncing around inside my head. They all pointed to the fact that I needed to go and grip the ex-Mrs Timis. And that she would not be laying out the welcome mat.
Stefan reached out and patted my wrist, and I suddenly became aware that I’d been holding the steering-wheel tightly enough to throttle it. I tried to give him an encouraging smile. ‘Mate, I need to pay her a visit. But don’t worry, I won’t leave you without an ERV.’
It sounded pretty weak, even to me.
The atmosphere inside the wagon was suddenly heavy with the things that we weren’t saying to each other. He was the one to cut through it.
‘Nick?’
‘Steve?’
‘How do you know who you can trust?’
Given what had happened to his mum and his dad, he’d already had enough first-hand experience of betrayal in his life for there to be only one answer to that question: You don’t. Ever. So trust no one. But I couldn’t bring myself to say that. It wasn’t my job to tell him the world was a heap of shit.
He was too switched on for me to fudge it. On the other hand, I did want him to know that there was the occasional light at the end of the tunnel. A small handful of individuals had sh
own me that, over the years. They hadn’t helped me find God or inspired me to rush out and hug some trees, but they had probably kept me out of prison.
‘It’s not easy. I don’t have to tell you that. There are going to be people who … let you down. And people who don’t, however bad things get. The trouble is, you can’t always tell the difference between them – because maybe there’s some shit happening in their world that we don’t know about …’
‘So?’ He wasn’t about to let me off the hook.
‘So … we have to understand that we don’t hand out trust like chocolate bars. People have to earn it. But it’s brilliant when they do.’
‘It’s like being a soldier, then.’
I didn’t answer immediately. I’d known a good few soldiers who hadn’t earned my trust. Ruperts, mostly. And a handful who had, big-time. ‘When you’re in the fight, you do find out pretty quickly who you can trust.’
He nodded slowly. I’d never been around a kid who took the job of decoding life’s mysteries so seriously. I’d been through some gangfucks when I was his age, but I couldn’t remember trying to learn from them until much later.
‘We’re in the fight, aren’t we?’
‘We are, mate.’
‘And I trust you, Nick.’
I hesitated, but only for a nanosecond. ‘Same.’
I sensed him giving the faintest of smiles.
He let another few Ks speed past his window. ‘Nick?’
‘Yup.’
‘Er … maybe you could be my actual dad.’ He paused. ‘Would that work for you?’
He had tried to keep the question matter-of-fact, but failed. Even I could hear the tremble in his voice.
Since we’d exited the chalet, he’d done a really good job of convincing me, most of the time, that he was a tough little fucker. He’d grown up fast – because he’d had to. This was a wake-up call – to remind me that there was still a lonely seven-year-old kid hiding behind the armour plating.