Blood And Honey

by Hurley, Graham

  Lajla was still sitting at the table in the window, her sodden coat hanging on the back of her chair. She barely spared Faraday a glance as he sat down, and Faraday had the strong impression that he’d wrecked something intimate.

  Barber returned from the counter with two mugs of tea. Lajla’s was barely touched.

  ‘Lajla and I have agreed some rules.’ Barber sat down. ‘I’ve told her that what she’s got to say is better said in front of both of us. She knows you’re in charge of the case. Pelly’s told her that too.’

  ‘He thinks you’re a good man. Wrong but good.’ Lajla’s voice was low, barely a whisper.

  ‘Who does?’

  ‘Rob.’

  Faraday raised an eyebrow. A compliment from Pelly was the last thing he’d expected.

  ‘He knows you’re here?’

  ‘No.’ For the first time she looked up. ‘I didn’t say anything.’

  ‘Tell Mr Faraday what you told me.’ Barber reached for her hand. ‘I think that’s important.’

  Lajla nodded, bit her lip, ducked her head again. Even like this – cornered, uncertain – she had a definite presence. Faraday could sense what an impact she must have made on the young Corporal Pelly, visibly pregnant, struggling through the snow with her plastic bags while the jeering Serb soldiers looked on.

  ‘You have to understand,’ she said at last. ‘It’s important you understand.’

  ‘Understand what?’

  ‘Understand how such a thing can happen. There was no choice. We had no choice. We didn’t want him here. We told him that. Rob told him that. He wrote. He phoned. Email. Everything. He wouldn’t listen. Rob shouted at him on the phone. Said not to come.’

  ‘Who?’ Faraday was leaning forward across the table. ‘Who are we talking about?’

  He waited for an answer but Lajla said nothing. Tracy Barber caught his eye and signalled for him to back off. In her own time. Slowly.

  Faraday nodded, easing away from the table. Mention of email took him back to the cluttered basement room in Southsea – Wowser Productions, the thin, pale, bearded youth who’d quarried his way into Pelly’s hard disk and emerged with fragments of a six-month-old correspondence. Lajla had never sent a single reply, he thought. Not one.

  ‘You know about the Balkans? The war? Bosnia?’ Lajla again, her voice stronger.

  ‘I know you were a refugee.’ Faraday reached for a lump of sugar. ‘I know you had to flee from the Serbs.’

  ‘They stole everything. They stole my life.’

  She nodded, her chin tilted in Faraday’s direction, a sudden blush of colour in her face.

  ‘Some of them I knew, the soldiers. They were boys. People I knew from the village.’

  ‘Serbs?’

  ‘Yes. We Muslims stuck together. Some of our men the Serbs killed. Not all of them. My father, one of my brothers, Muharem … they survived. Except my father was like me. Dead inside.’ She touched her heart then her head. ‘He’s mad, my father, crazy. You can mend a broken leg but the mind stays broken for ever. The Serbs made him that way.’

  Faraday nodded.

  ‘Were there no good Serbs?’

  ‘Of course. Of course there were. There are good people everywhere. But in war bad people take what they want.’

  ‘Rob?’

  ‘He was a good person. He still is a good person. That’s why I come here today.’ She gestured round at the empty café.

  ‘You want to tell us something about Rob?’

  ‘I want you to understand.’

  She ducked her head again, began to play with a plastic spoon. Long, thin fingers. Beautiful nails. A single silver ring. Then her fingers tightened briefly on the spoon and she talked about the day the soldiers came, the faces she recognised from her youth, faces she’d grown up with. Afterwards, she said, girls of a certain age were taken to the school. Because she had her period she was spared the first few days but watching was even worse. She felt what her father must have felt. Madness.

  ‘We stayed at the school most of the summer. It was very hot. The soldiers came most nights, often different faces. I remember every one of them. I have a camera in here …’ She touched her head again. ‘You never forget.’

  By the end of the summer she knew she was pregnant. It made no difference. Only when she started to put on weight did the soldiers lose interest. By then it was much colder. She thought the soldiers would kill them all. When, months later, they put the women on the coaches, she thought it was the end.

  ‘They even sold us tickets,’ she said. ‘Eighty Deutschmarks to be pushed out of my own country.’

  The coaches dumped them at the border. They walked to Travnik, to the refugee camp. Soon, her baby came. Older women helped her, did their best. She met Rob. He spoke a little Serbo-Croat. She could manage OK in English. He looked after her – brought her blankets, rusks for the baby, even some books. Angry with the army, angry with the war, he came to the camp one day and said he was leaving, going back to England. She remembered crying, the baby too; then he said he’d be back, as soon as he could. And that’s what happened. He came with a beaten-up old truck. He wasn’t wearing a uniform. He asked her to come back to England with him. She said yes.

  ‘You understand this? You understand my English?’

  Faraday nodded. ‘You came here? To Shanklin.’

  ‘Yes. Rob made a home for us. The old people’s place belonged to his mother. She was sick. Then she died. I helped him all I could.’

  Fida got older. She went to school. She learned English. She made friends. She put the war behind her.

  ‘And you?’

  ‘It never goes away. Never.’

  For years, she said, she thought she’d be able to forget. But then came Kosovo, and more refugees, and Rob went back, a better truck this time, and did what he could. He brought lots of people out, men and women, some of them young mothers like her. With the money he made he bought houses, gave them shelter, found them work. Lajla offered to help as well, but Rob would never let her.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because he’s a brother to me. Because he knows the way I feel about it all. Just to hear the language again …’ She shuddered.

  She paused for a moment. Barber offered tea. She shook her head. Last year, she said, a friend got in touch with her brother in Berlin. She and Muharem had known this man since he was a little boy. He came from the same village. Lajla had always liked him. But he was a Serb.

  Dragan, thought Faraday.

  ‘What did he want?’

  ‘He was still living in the village. He’s a good man. He became a priest, a Serb priest. He knows everyone; he wants everyone to be friends, to forget, to forgive. Such a thing –’ she shrugged ‘– how can he know it is impossible?’

  Dragan was close to another Serb from the same village. His name was Branko. Branko was a Serb also. He’d been the clown in class. He’d made everyone laugh, including Lajla. Then the war had come, and the soldiers, and one of them was Branko.

  ‘He came to the school?’

  ‘Many times.’ She looked up, her eyes burning. ‘Many, many times.’

  After the war, according to Dragan, Branko had become a builder. He’d made lots of money mending houses, selling them to local Serbs. Many of the houses had belonged to Muslims. One of them had belonged to Lajla’s family.

  ‘The village now is full of Serbs. And Branko is a rich man.’

  But Branko also had a conscience. Dragan said he wanted to make amends, to say sorry. He had money he wanted to give to Lajla. He wanted to explain, to tell her that it was all a long time ago, that things were different now, that maybe she could even come home, back to her own village.

  She looked up again.

  ‘This man thinks he is the father of my daughter. Who knows? Maybe he’s right.’

  Through last summer Dragan kept in touch with Lajla’s brother in Berlin. Then, somehow, Branko got hold of her telephone number, of her email address, maybe through Dragan
or maybe through Muharem. More and more Branko wanted to come. To explain. To say sorry. Lajla never replied, not once. Rob, she said, was the one who told him it was impossible, that he was to stay in Bosnia. But he never listened.

  ‘You understand now? You understand why?’

  ‘Why what?’ This time Faraday couldn’t resist the question. Tracy Barber was watching Lajla.

  There was a long silence. Outside, the wind seemed to have fallen a little. Then came a sharp crack, and Faraday looked down to see the plastic spoon snapped neatly across the handle.

  Lajla was on her feet, reaching for her anorak.

  ‘Come,’ she said simply.

  Winter parked on the seafront opposite Rose Tower. He could hear the thunder of surf on the nearby pebble beach, and the wind still tasted of salt, but the racing clouds were punctured by shafts of livid sunlight and the downpour had eased to occasional flurries of rain.

  Winter locked the car and crossed the road. The cleaners had been at work recently because there was the scent of air freshener in the lift and someone had run a cloth over the mirror. He got out at the tenth floor and paused for a moment beside the window. The view down the Solent was curtained by a line of advancing squalls, soldiers marching to the slackening drum beat of the morning’s gale. Closer, one of the big P & O ferries was negotiating the dogleg in the deep-water channel off Southsea Castle. Winter watched it for a moment as it heeled in the turn, trying to imagine the crossing those people must have had. Then he checked for the DVD in the pocket of his coat, and wandered down to Maddox’s apartment.

  The moment he stepped inside he knew something was wrong. He could hear a stir of movement from deep inside the flat. Then he saw the big cashmere coat discarded across the occasional table where Maddox normally left her keys.

  Winter froze, chilled to the marrow. Softly, he closed the door behind him. He could hear the murmur of conversation now, then a yelp of pain or perhaps pleasure. He crept along the hall. The big lounge was empty. Beside the champagne bottle on the low table in front of the sofa, two glasses.

  Back in the hall Winter stood motionless. The nearest door led to the kitchen. The two doors at the end belonged to separate bedrooms. The spare bedroom door was open. He moved towards it, knowing already that the room would be empty. The voices were coming from Maddox’s room. And they weren’t interested in conversation any more.

  For a moment Winter hesitated, reluctant to put his feelings to the knife, to hazard the temporary truce his body seemed to have declared, to shatter everything Maddox had brought into his life. Then, with a terrible certainty, he knew there wasn’t a choice to be made. He was, in the end, a detective, the guy who had to find out.

  He turned the handle and opened the door. Maddox was straddling a figure on the bed, easing herself up and down, a string of pearls round her neck. The naked body beneath her belonged to a middle-aged man. He was lying on his back, his head hanging over the end of the bed, his face contorted in a snarl of pleasure. Winter looked at him a moment, knowing that life had brought him full circle. First Steve Richardson’s DVD. Now the real thing.

  ‘Mr Wishart,’ he said softly.

  Maddox’s rhythm slowed. Finally she stopped altogether and slipped off the bed. She paused beside Winter, kissed him on the lips. Winter studied her a moment, totally lost.

  ‘The drawer beside the bed,’ she murmured.

  Wishart’s eyes followed her out of the room. Anger had given way to something else. Uncertainty.

  Winter told Wishart to get dressed. The drawer in the bedside cabinet was open. Propped inside was a small cassette recorder. Winter took it out, checked the cassette. Forty-five minutes.

  Down the hall, from the bathroom, came the hiss of the shower. Wishart had recovered himself. He sat on the edge of the bed with a towel over his lap, a big man, overweight, his chest and lower belly matted with curls of greying hair.

  ‘What’s this about?’ He nodded towards the door, towards the splash of falling water, towards Maddox.

  Winter didn’t answer. He’d rewound the tape and now he pressed the PLAY button, the tiny cassette machine still in his hand. A moment’s silence, then Wishart’s voice. He sounded suspicious.

  ‘What are you doing down there?’

  ‘You want some of this?’

  ‘Ah …’ Wishart’s tone softened. ‘Is that what I think it is?’

  ‘You want to try?’

  ‘Silly question. Come here.’ Winter’s first thought was a toot or two of charlie. But then came Maddox’s soft command – ‘Roll over, spread your legs’ – and Winter’s gaze began to roam over the wreckage of the bed, looking for whatever appliance Maddox had come up with.

  ‘Here? Is that good?’ She was taunting him now. ‘Deeper? Quicker?’

  Wishart was eyeing the cassette. From the tape came a long groan of pleasure and a flurry of movement. Winter was trying not to visualise what Maddox was up to, satisfying Wishart’s insatiable appetites. A job, he told himself. She’s doing a job.

  There was a movement in the hall behind Winter. He glanced round. Maddox was barefoot on the carpet in a long silk dressing gown. She had a towel in her hand. Water was still dripping from her hair.

  ‘It’s further on.’ She nodded at the cassette machine. ‘About fifteen minutes in.’

  Winter pressed FAST FORWARD. The cassette whirred. He pressed PLAY again.

  ‘You could, you know.’ Wishart’s voice – reflective, satisfied, rich.

  ‘I know. You’ve told me before.’

  ‘I’m serious though. My pleasure. Cheque, cash – whatever. Just name it.’

  ‘What about your wife?’

  ‘She’ll never know. It just comes out of the business account.’

  On the tape Maddox began to laugh. It was a taunting laugh and whatever she was doing to Wishart made him laugh too.

  ‘Everything comes out of your business account, doesn’t it? What about me? Do I come out of your business account? What about this? Do you like this? Come here. Talk to me. Pretend I’m real for a moment.’

  ‘That’s nice … Slower … Yeah …’

  ‘Well?’

  ‘Forget it. Come here.’

  Maddox began to dry her hair. The sound of her own voice had put a smile on her face.

  ‘It’s the next bit,’ she said. ‘Just listen.’

  On the tape her voice had lowered. She was whispering something to Wishart, sharing a confidence, telling him a story. Wishart, still on the edge of the bed, was staring up at her.

  ‘Whore,’ he said softly. ‘You fucking whore.’

  Winter was enjoying himself now. He caught Wishart’s eye, gave him a smile, then turned to Maddox.

  ‘What were you saying to him?’

  ‘I was telling him about Victor. How big he was, how strong, what he liked to do to me.’ She nodded down at the cassette machine. ‘It’s coming up now.’

  On the tape the sound of Maddox’s throaty laugh.

  ‘Twice,’ she murmured. ‘Twice in a couple of minutes. And me a working girl. Can you believe that?’

  ‘Shame.’

  ‘Shame? I loved it.’

  ‘Shame about Victor. Shame he had to go.’

  ‘Go?’

  More laughter, Wishart this time.

  ‘You should have seen him. He knew he was in trouble. The man had screwed me. Silly thing to do, really. He knew exactly what was coming. I could see it in his eyes every time he turned round on that silly bike of his. The man might have had balls the size of melons but it doesn’t matter in the end, does it? Not in a situation like that.’

  ‘Situation like what, darling?’

  ‘Nothing. Dick around in business and you should expect consequences.’

  ‘You were jealous.’

  ‘Not at all. I was settling accounts.’

  ‘My account.’

  ‘Yeah? Is that what you believe? You think I’d kill a man because he fucked you witless?’

  ‘Yes.�
��

  ‘You’re wrong.’ The laugh again, harsher. ‘Come here. And remember who paid you to screw that monkey.’

  Winter’s finger found the STOP button. There was a moment of silence. Then came the sigh of the wind and the faraway keening of a ship’s siren. Winter was still gazing down at Wishart. Then he felt Maddox’s hand on his arm. She wanted to know what to do. Winter gave her his mobile and told her to phone Jimmy Suttle.

  ‘Tell him to come round. His number’s in the directory. Tell him to bring some handcuffs.’

  Maddox stepped into the hall. Both men listened to the soft pad of her footsteps as she retreated into the living room. Then came the beginnings of a murmured conversation as she got through to Suttle on the phone.

  Wishart had his head in his hands. For the first time Winter caught sight of the huge purple dildo, abandoned on the carpet beside the bed.

  ‘You know something, my friend?’ Winter slipped the cassette into his pocket. ‘You’re fucked.’

  The rain had stopped by the time Faraday arrived at the nursing home. He got out of the car, opening the back door for Barber and Lajla. Neither woman had said anything on the drive up from the cafe. Now Lajla led the way round the side of the house towards the garage. Beyond the garage was an outhouse. Lajla opened the door and disappeared briefly inside. When she came out again, she was carrying a garden fork.

  ‘Please …’ She gestured towards the garden.

  Barber and Faraday followed her across the sodden patch of lawn. A cinder path led between patches of vegetables. Faraday recognised sprouts and a row of onions. Towards the back fence, set aside, was a small flower garden. The carefully turned soil was edged with pebbles and there were stands of daffodils nodding in the wind. Amongst the daffodils, a clump of tulips. The tulips were a deep red, newly flowering, the boldest of flags, impossible to miss.

  Lajla paused for a moment, eyeing the flowers, then drove the fork into the wet soil. She began to dig, turning the soil aside, plunging deeper and deeper. Finally she hit something solid. She glanced up at Tracy Barber, wrinkled her nose, then squatted amongst the wreckage of the tulips. With her bare hands she began to scrape the soil away. Slowly the shape of a skull began to emerge, the pale whiteness of the bone matted with hair and a grey slime that must once have been flesh. Faraday could smell it now, the sweet stench of death, and he took a tiny step backwards as Lajla’s fingers dug beneath the skull and pulled it clear of the hole.