No Ordinary Killing

by No Ordinary Killing (retail) (epub)

“Nothing coherent? No names, orders?”

  Finch shrugged. Logic had ceased to have any place in war.

  “If he does …” said Cox.

  There was a knock on the door – the adjutant brandishing a chit. He handed it to Cox and took a pace back. Cox absorbed the information. He held up an apologetic palm while he did so.

  “Right away. Right away,” he muttered, then gave the slip back to the adjutant and dismissed him.

  The major rose. Finch had had his moment.

  “Good work, Captain. That will be all … Staff will arrange for a hot drink and some grub.”

  Finch was about to protest that he was required in surgery.

  “They’ll send it over.”

  And, with that, the major was gone.

  Finch took a minute or two to finish his drink. The guns rumbled on. He stood up and stretched his aching body. His left knee, in particular, would need disinfecting, patching up.

  Outside, feathers of sleet swirled in the air. On the wind came the pop-pop-pop of small arms fire. The infantry assault was underway. At this distance it sounded so ineffectual, so childish. He thought he heard the skirl of pipes.

  The barefoot Indian stretcher bearers were congregating, hunched together. Very soon, the first of what would be an endless stream of ambulances would come rattling into the yard.

  An RAMC sergeant with a clipboard and two staff nurses emerged and huddled under an overhang, ready to direct the wounded to the correct area – dressing, theatre or to be laid on the straw in the far end of the barn where the only attention they’d receive would come in the form of some trite ministrations from the chaplain.

  Finch asked an orderly to fetch him the strongest mug of tea he could brew, with enough sugar in it to make a spoon stand up.

  Chapter Three

  Jenkins looked up from the scrum.

  “Jesus, Finch,” he cooed, in the lilting Welsh of the Marches. “What the hell happened to you?”

  In the stable block, which had been hung with tarpaulins, three tables were arrayed, each with a coterie of doctors, nurses and orderlies gathered round a forlorn and groaning individual.

  On a tea chest was a wind-up gramophone player. The scratchy sound of Chopin’s Nocturnes issuing through the dented trumpet was fighting a losing battle with the hail now drumming hard on the corrugated roof and the shrieks of the wounded in the passageway.

  The whitewashed walls were spattered with viscera. The air was rank with human flesh. Sluiced blood ran into a gully that crossed the cobbled floor. Bits of tissue had blocked the drain. A shallow crimson lake had begun forming, reflecting the pale light of the paraffin lamps which swung with every random boom.

  “Don’t ask,” replied Finch, scrubbing up over a bowl in his grimy undershirt.

  A fair-haired nurse tied Finch’s gown at the back while he sipped at his mug of sweet, scalding tea.

  At table two lay a Highlander shivering in shock. A nurse held his guts in place while another sewed up the bayonet slash down his side.

  At three, Richards, another in their fraternity of RAMC captains, merely uttered a perfunctory ‘Lost him’ as the final squelch and gurgle of life was expelled from some other charred mass barely recognisable as a human being.

  Finch stepped over to enter the huddle alongside Jenkins.

  “So what have we here?”

  “Allow me to present Private Hamish Urquhart of the Seaforths,” said the Welshman. “A chap who’s had a spot of bother.”

  He turned to address his patient directly.

  “Mr Urquhart? My colleague, Captain Ingo Finch.”

  Finch nodded a cursory greeting to the forlorn warrior. A muffled, weak voice floated up.

  “Harold,” he croaked. “Not Hamish … Harold.”

  Said Jenkins: “Right then. Let’s have another look.”

  Wearing a kilt had at least spared Urquhart the indignity of having his trews snipped off. A bouncy, red-faced nurse simply rolled the thick, grubby blue/green tartan up around the soldier’s thighs. A phlegm-tinged sigh signalled the young man’s resignation to his fate.

  While the soldier’s foot and ankle seemed perfectly healthy, as did his knee, what lay between them amounted to nothing more than a bloody pulp, flecked with white shards of bone.

  “Dum-dum bullet,” said the fair-haired nurse.

  A rubber tourniquet pulled tightly had quelled the spurting, but there was not an orthopaedic surgeon anywhere – and Jenkins was one of the very best – who could have salvaged this limb.

  “Captain Finch, a second opinion?”

  “Sorry Harold,” said Finch.

  “First class ticket to Cape Town and a luxury cruise home,” said Jenkins. “How does that sound? Fit you with a peg, you’ll be doing the Gay Gordon come Hogmanay.”

  The bouncy nurse placed a gauze mask over the soldier’s mouth and cradled his head in her ample bosom. She poured on a few drops of chloroform.

  “Right then. Counting back from 20,” said Finch as he felt for the patient’s pulse and timed its weak flutter against his pocket watch.

  With a nod from Finch, Jenkins reached for the trolley. He raised his chosen tools and made a show of clanging them together, like an overly-lubricated father about to carve the Christmas turkey.

  Moments later the rasping of the saw had stopped, the job was done. Jenkins blew away the dust like a gunslinger puffing satisfied on his muzzle. He gave a nod to Finch, then yelled an ironic ‘Next!’, at which a Hindu porter carried off a foot-shaped bundle to be plopped in a bucket.

  It was the signal for Finch to perform his part of the sombre ritual – clamping things off, performing his needlework. At least at night, in the cool, the overhead lamps were a distraction for the horseflies.

  As a family doctor back home, he had never before cut into anything more than a lab rat. In just a few short weeks he had been raised from a lancer of boils to some kind of surgeon. Truthfully, he felt more like a tradesman – a carpenter or plumber – removing bits, stemming flows, procedures far too gruesome for even the most cast iron of stomachs to bear.

  Christ, he was tired. So tired he almost didn’t care.

  * * *

  With dawn breaking, Finch stepped outside. He had passed through the pull of slumber into a fuzzy altered state. He felt like an undead character he had read about in a story by Edgar Allan Poe.

  His own raw knees had been bandaged, but the left one was causing him particular difficulty. He could hardly bend it. He rubbed his chin. Bristles rasped. He needed a shave. He needed a bath to purge the sweat, blood and grime – his and others’. More than anything, he needed his bed.

  It had been more than 72 hours since Finch had had any sustained sleep – before Lord Methuen had moved the 1st Division up over the Modder River, trying to beat a path to relieve besieged Kimberley. Extrapolating from the volume of casualties that had passed through their own hands during the night – 200 or more – Finch deduced that the army had failed.

  Against a wall, an Indian orderly sorted through a mound of bloody odd boots, which had grown considerably. That he was barefoot made for an altogether bizarre spectacle.

  Finch crossed the courtyard. He passed the horse paddock – the animals now stirring – and limped up the small hillock, the highest point on the farmstead. The ground was covered with a coarse and patchy grass.

  He leaned on the splintered wooden fence and gazed off into the distance. The eastern horizon, deep in the Boer heartland, was being kissed by a crimson glow. In every direction, the black veld stretched away endlessly, pock-marked by the low, flat-topped kops and, to the north, the twin scars of the Magersfontein and Spytfontein ridges.

  He didn’t ordinarily smoke. As a doctor, he still harboured suspicion that inhaling hot tobacco fumes might not be as providential for one’s lungs as the advertisers liked to boast. But he needed to balm his shredded nerves before retiring.

  He sparked a lucifer and lit a cigarette from an overpriced packet of Na
vy Cut he had purchased at the Mess Co-operative. A slippery slope, he conceded. The match fizzed. The cigarette crackled. The embers glowed. Finch drew the vapours in deep and willed the relaxation. Wisps curled up into the lightening sky.

  Away from the groans, all that could be heard now was the chirping of the dawn chorus in a cluster of jacaranda trees, as familiar a sound as the one back home. The windmill on the water tower creaked, turning slowly in the light breeze. It was blowing from the north this time. It already felt warmer. It smelled different … of baked earth. This weather was insane.

  Before Finch retired to his billet, he checked in on the young lieutenant they had rescued. An orderly revealed that he was being kept in a wooden hut behind the main living quarters.

  ‘Kept’ seemed the operative word, for when Finch arrived, he found two muscling soldiers on the door, standing at ease, hands at the throats of their Lee-Metford rifles, their caps adorned with a scarlet crown, the red letters ‘MFP’ – Military Foot Police – on dark blue bands around their left biceps.

  They seemed far more suited to the parade ground than battle, their webbing blancoed to a brilliant white rather than drabbed down and camouflaged with battlefield dirt.

  They sprang to attention as Finch approached. The shorter of the two, a lance corporal, peered up sharply from beneath his peaked cap.

  “Five minutes, sir. Orders.”

  Finch had never, in his entire career, had a time-limit placed on a bedside visit, but had no intention of lingering. Plus he was too tired to kick up a fuss. He pushed hard at the stiff door – warped in its frame – and went in.

  From the single window, the room was bathed in the burgeoning dawn light. A nurse was tending to the man, who lay peacefully asleep, barely recognisable from the traumatised soul they had hauled back from the abyss.

  He had been well cared for at any rate – a camp bed, fresh bandages around the crown of his head and right forearm, a horse blanket that seemed almost 50 per cent clean.

  The hut was the farm’s workshop, smelling of creosote and oil. Above a workbench with a vice bolted to it hung a rack of chisels, hammers and saws – a home-from-home to surgery, Finch mused.

  The brisk nurse gave Finch the vitals – bruising, lacerations, two broken ribs, a fractured collarbone, but he would be okay with rest; he was severely dehydrated, drifting in and out of consciousness. When Finch asked why on earth the man should be under armed guard, she shrugged, excused herself and bustled out.

  He stood over the man. There was still no name. What was he, about 27 …28? Red hair. Eyes? Unknown at present, they were closed. Athletic build. About 5ft 10ins … 5ft 11ins? He had around three days’ worth of beard and, judging by the dense carpet of freckles, had probably been up-country since the get-go.

  Finch tried hard to recall the specifics of the events of the previous night, which seemed now like a lifetime ago. He had been ordered to attend to a man fitting the description given to him by Cox. Said individual was alive. It was all that had seemed to matter.

  But that was in broad daylight, when both British and Boers had downed arms to lay out the wounded together. The Boers had come out of their trenches to a man. Someone said that their general, De La Rey, was amongst them, working alongside his men.

  And then the bloody artillery had started up …

  He cast an eye up. The shorter of the two guards was looking in on him. He nudged his colleague.

  Surreptitiously, under the guise of taking the man’s pulse, Finch sat down and started feeling around in the lieutenant’s belongings.

  There was nothing in his jacket pockets or his trousers. No identity card. The holster on the Sam Brown belt no longer housed a pistol.

  A sudden yelp. He began to stir, a twitching seizing his face, his lower lip starting to quiver. He rolled his head to his left, opened his lids and with bright blue eyes fixed Finch.

  The lieutenant’s left hand gripped Finch’s. Tight. Had he recognised him?

  “Ssshhh-ssshh! Don’t excite yourself.”

  “You must …”

  There was fear. Real fear.

  “Don’t let them …”

  He raised his right arm weakly, a finger pointed towards the door.

  “Moriarty.”

  “Moriarty? You mean …” Finch asked with incredulity, “…like Sherlock Holmes?”

  In a flash, both MFPs were into the room.

  “I’m sorry, sir. I must ask you to leave,” said the short one, curtly.

  “This man has just come round. I’m his physician.”

  “Please don’t force our hand, sir. We did say five minutes. You’ve had your time.”

  “On whose authority?”

  “The Military Foot Police, sir.”

  “Why has this man been placed under arrest?”

  The big one said nothing still. The little one cut across.

  “Please, sir. Orders.”

  Though dog tired, Finch was not yet fully spent.

  “Well I’ve got an order for you, the pair of you. You’ll salute an officer. You understand!”

  Neither had on his arrival. Both men now complied. There was a hint of sarcasm. Then the bigger, mute MFP positioned himself behind Finch, as if to march him out.

  The lieutenant had lapsed back into unconsciousness again. There was a glance exchanged between the two military policemen.

  “This is absurd,” Finch huffed, but exited anyway.

  The sun was on the up now, its long, low shadows striping the land. Steam was rising from the rich earth. On his way back to his billet, Finch stopped by Cox’s office. The lights were out. The major would be asleep.

  Curious as he was to this whole business, it would be a cruel man to drag another from his bed.

  Finch’s own one was calling to him. The matter could wait.

  Chapter Four

  Kimberley, Cape Colony – December 10th, 1899 … the day before

  In the main square, across from the great, deep hole of the Kimberley Mine, the regimental band of the Royal Garrison Artillery gave its matinee recital.

  Mbutu recognised the tune. He had heard it many times – Rule Britannia. It was a highlight of the repertoire, whites discreetly clapping along while the cheery conductor waved his baton, throwing a smile of appreciation over his shoulder.

  In the lull between church and Sunday lunch, this weekly turn by the musicians in their scarlet tunics and polished brass buttons seemed to lift spirits. Clinging to normality was an obsession – a stoic, civic duty amid all the strangeness.

  Gathered around the bandstand they were a fine sight, these masters and mistresses. You could not deny it. Silks, satins, bows, white gloves. Servants to hoist frilled parasols. Men preening in their well-cut morning suits.

  Such cumbersome garments – thick, stiff, awkward. No good in the sun. A sign that one didn’t contend with the daily indignity of manual labour.

  As he knew from his days down the mines – as everybody knew who toiled down the mines – 90 per cent of the world’s diamonds came from Kimberley … and 90 per cent of Kimberley’s diamonds were mined by De Beers. The company owned the town; the company owned you.

  What was certain to Mbutu was that 90 per cent of the world’s folk were not a fraction as wealthy as the folk gathered here – and that 90 per cent of them had never been underground.

  The smashing of the rocks, the chipping of the stone, that was left to black men, the ‘mine boys’ – Basutos like himself; men from Bechuanaland, from Matabeleland; men who trekked hundreds of miles to this scorching hell where the wind blew off the Kalahari.

  Here, they worked for a pittance and lived in the compounds – enclosures surrounded by fences with chicken wire roofs. Such quarters were situated outside the town so that blacks could not offend white eyes – or steal their precious stones.

  For all the riches, for all the diamonds mined in the last 30 years, their entire quantity would barely fill a bucket. Such was their value. They were small, these s
tones, tiny, just shimmering motes in the mud and clay – easy to conceal, which meant stripping and searching and keeping the workers under lock and key.

  The British in the Colony said that the Boers were bad, un-Christian – that they had no respect for their African brother; did not fulfil their obligation to raise him up, to treat him as one of God’s children. It was true, the Afrikaners he had worked for had treated him like a dog. But they had never locked him in a cage …

  …Or wedged a wooden block between a man’s ankles and shattered his bones with a sledgehammer. That was what you got for stealing those motes of shiny dust. Let that be your Christian lesson.

  Mbutu was lucky. Very lucky. Fortunate enough, now, to be out from behind the wire and living in a shack. To hell with those who spat upon him, calling him a traitor. He was looking after his wife and child. It was his duty.

  Mbutu’s talent was that he could run. Run fast. A gift, to him, as priceless as any stone. No one could cover the town and its surrounds like Mbutu – the British called him ‘Johnny’. Johnny/Mbutu, Mbutu/Johnny, both could run like the wind.

  He knew the terrain intimately. He carried messages and telegrams – to the villages of Beaconsfield and Kenilworth; along the redoubts and earthworks; from the Kimberley Club, where the men with purple, pitted noses sipped gin and tonics; to the great Sanatorium, the palatial health spa, where Cecil Rhodes himself had taken up residence.

  Mr Rhodes, the man who ran De Beers. To the north, he even had a country named after him. A man more powerful and rich than an emperor. Mr Rhodes stayed put when he could have fled, crowed the masters. What loyalty!

  But it was to ensure a British rescue, Mbutu knew. To save Kimberley … To save De Beers … To save his diamonds.

  They thought he was mute, this Johnny. Johnny-with-the-fleet-foot – a man to stand quietly in the shadows and wait for the envelope.

  But this Johnny had heard with his own ears what the General had said.

  Being able to ‘take it’ was all bluff. The food was running out. They would need to start slaughtering the horses. The blacks’ rations were to be halved. The Boers had severed the water main on the first day. The town’s most valuable commodity was its wells, not its jewels. And if those same wells turned septic …