War Games

by Douglas Jackson

  When the music stopped and the sweat was running down my back in a torrent, she was as fresh as when we first took the floor.

  ‘You can buy me a drink now if you like.’

  We sat in two battered leather armchairs by the peat fire, not noticing as the hotel emptied around us. I had a room upstairs, and I think she knew it, but I realised this was an opportunity I could not afford to jeopardise by any of the pushy, but occasionally successful fancy-a-fuck? tactics I’d used in the past. No, it was a time for the legendary Savage subtlety. So we made small talk all night as Aelish lay back comfortably with her feet tucked under the red, green and blue tartan folds of her kilt. I learned she was an island girl, born and bred, but she was working for a PR company in Glasgow, that she had been a championship-winning dancer in her teens and that it had given her ‘calves like a Scotland wing forward’. She pushed her foot towards me, displaying the offending muscularity, but her legs looked mighty fine from where I was sitting.

  It must have been close to five in the morning with the first light of dawn painting the sky a pale orange pink when she yawned and said, ‘I’d better get to bed for a couple of hours. I’m on the nine o’clock flight to Glasgow.’

  I had been expecting to escort her home and my surprise must have showed.

  ‘I’ve got the room next to yours.’ She grinned. ‘Would you like to walk me up?’

  ‘I’d really like to see you again,’ I blurted when we reached the bedroom. ‘I enjoyed our night. How about dinner, a week on Saturday?’

  She opened the door with one of the big, old-fashioned keys we’d been given and turned to me, looking thoughtful. ‘That would be lovely. I enjoyed it, too. But I was a bit disappointed you didn’t try to get me into bed.’

  And she shut the door in my face.

  *

  God’s Warrior studied the lead container from one side, and then from the other. Perfect. Like all the rest. A precise replica of the original the craftsman had created seven hundred years earlier. When he was certain, he took the bloody object he’d carried from the kitchen and placed it reverently inside, then used the solder to seal the casket tight.

  As always he felt a sense of power when he completed the task, a sort of growing inside and a soaring wonder as if the world lay far below him and he could witness all the virtues and the evils it held. He felt no remorse, because this was war, and in war a soldier must harden himself against pity. The weapons had been different when the war began so many generations before, but the aim remained the same. To destroy the enemy.

  The knowledge that the war was not yet over had first come to him when he’d watched the bright plumes of red erupt from the big buildings and seen the falling woman. She’d held out her arms as if they were wings and there was almost an elegance to her flight; a kind of haunting beauty played out at the heart of the obscene drama of which she was such an essential part. But she wasn’t flying, she was falling. The cameras had followed her down, down . . . and then she was lost among the buildings and the smoke.

  In the days and the weeks that had followed, the images had been repeated over and over, and he had felt a terrible rage building; a rage of the mind and the body and eventually the soul. Soon the flame and the smoke had been replaced by the faces of the men he had always known were the enemy. He did not know their names, did not care to find out, for these men were dead, but he understood that they were the vanguard of a new assault on all he had learned to hold dear. He had not joined the fight then, but the voices had nurtured the rage, stoked the fires of his righteous anger. The voices had always been with him. He couldn’t remember a time when they had not steered him through his life. But now they were urgent and demanding, opening his eyes to things he had never seen before. And as the clamour inside his head grew, so did the need to act.

  The red bus was the next sign. When he had seen the red bus he had known, even before the voices confirmed it, that now was the time. But it was not until his enemy had risen up before him on the russet plain where the heroes of old had fought and bled and died that the voices had told him to strike.

  A soft whimper from the corner of the room disturbed his train of thought but he ignored it until he had placed the casket with the others on the shelf and cast a practised eye over the war game. Laid out before him was another battle, and unlike the one on the red plain this had been a victory, not a defeat. The greatest victory. It had taken him half a lifetime to create, and every time he had faltered the voices were there to urge him not to give up. Long lines of soldiers and scattered flocks of horsemen stood in their places in a landscape that was to scale and as perfect a replica of the original as the casket. But was it? He frowned and stooped to move the commander of a troop of knights a little to the left, away from the river. Better. This was the morning of the first day. Soon he would move the thousands of little men into their positions at the height of the battle proper. He knew each move intimately, had fought it a thousand times.

  Another whimper distracted him and he turned in annoyance. The dark eyes of the figure in the cage beneath the eaves followed him around the room. The enemy. Just like the others. Except this enemy’s passing would mark the special day when God’s Warrior came of age and was driven to the great work that still continued to this day. He smiled and turned back to the massed ranks of tiny soldiers.

  Soon.

  CHAPTER 8

  Tuesday, 5 June 2007

  I woke in a cold sweat and glanced furtively to where Aelish lay on the far side of the bed, fortunately still asleep and undisturbed by my night-time horrors. The Army shrinks claimed the dreams would eventually go away, but I knew better. Therapy and pills had combined to keep them at bay for a while, but they were always waiting, locked behind a fragile door inside my head, a membrane away from breaking free to torment me again. Sometimes it was the faces of dead men I knew but couldn’t put names to. Sometimes the bowel-emptying terror of the battle itself; the bombs and the bullets I couldn’t escape. But, more and more, I was confronted by the men I’d killed. Why were they dead and I alive? At the time, I would have told them it was because I was the better man, but now I knew differently. What had I done to deserve life? Was I any better than a fairground huckster or a TV spoon-bender, selling snake oil and hope to the gullible? If I’d allowed them to live they might have become doctors or scientists, the true leaders their country needed. Their children might have changed the world. Did they really need to die? I shook my head, engulfed in a waking dream of the moment the bayonet entered a protesting body, terrified eyes at the bottom of a slit trench just before I dropped in the grenade that blew his legs off, the harsh cawing of a man with a crushed windpipe. In the whirling vortex of a night battle I had been convinced that they must die so my men could live. Now I agonised over the knife-edge decisions that decided their fate. Once, if I couldn’t find the answer, I would turn for solace to a bottle and the guilty little secret I brought back from Port Stanley. The salt taste of cold steel in my mouth. The feel of the trigger under my finger. The godlike knowledge that my fate was mine to decide and the ghosts could go and screw themselves.

  Aelish MacDonald saved me from all that. As I studied her pale features a terrible melancholy threatened to overwhelm me and I felt a moment of raw fear as real as any I’d experienced on the battlefield. I leaned across to kiss her gently on the forehead and the feeling slowly faded as her lips twitched into an unconscious smile.

  A few hours later I took the road north again, following the valley of the Gala Water and giving the Capri her head through the snaking curves of the A7. The morning was fresh and sharp, the air clear as crystal and the trees had never looked greener. The kind of day that gave a man everything to live for. This was the growing season. Sheep and cows grew fat on the lush grass and the crops were ripening in the fields. Old staples mostly, oats and barley, potatoes – tatties – and turnips, but here and there a splash of bright gold signalled a field of rape, planted for the tiny seeds bursting with oil
that made it so profitable. In times past this had also been the campaigning season, when armies on the march could live off the land. Men’s eyes would constantly drift to the heights of Middle Eildon, or Dunion Hill or Rubers Law, where the beacons were constantly tended that would signal the first flash of bright English steel on the Cheviots. Because that was when the growing season became the killing season.

  I’d contacted Assad Ali in advance, but asked him not to warn the people I planned to interview. Not that I thought the estate workers had anything to hide, it’s just that I always like to have the element of surprise. Over the years I’ve found that people talk more freely when they haven’t had a chance to decide what you want to hear.

  I parked the car at the rear of the house, between a silver Range Rover I guessed must be the owner’s second – or third – car and a more workmanlike, short-wheelbase green Land Rover, one rugged and reliable and dirty enough to make it the gamekeeper’s transport of choice. The keeper, Jimmy Wilson, normally spent most of his time on the hill, but Assad had arranged for him to be close to the house when I arrived around mid-morning. I spotted a complex of pheasant-rearing pens among the trees and set off across the field towards them. A sturdily built man in a mottled camouflage smock was bent low beside the closest pen checking the chicken-wire fencing for weak spots. I guessed he’d be in his late fifties, but there was nothing wrong with his hearing because he looked up when I was still about twenty paces away and I swear I didn’t make a sound.

  He straightened as I approached and subjected me to a long, appraising look. He had an unkempt grey beard and his eyebrows knitted above unreadable eyes sunk deep by a lifetime of squinting into the sun and rain. Gamekeepers develop an instinctive sense for the animals they work with, and occasionally that instinct extends to humans. I reckoned Jimmy had me tried, convicted and sentenced before I reached him.

  ‘You’ll be Jimmy Wilson?’

  ‘Aye?’ he said, which translated as ‘What the fuck do you want?’

  I looked him up and down, just to show he didn’t scare me either. ‘I’m here to talk to you about Gurya Ali, Mr Wilson. Her father thinks I can maybe help find her.’

  He snorted and his face turned a deeper shade of beetroot, which told me he didn’t think much of my chances. Not that it made him a bad judge of character.

  I shrugged. ‘You know the estate better than anyone else. You’re a man who’s out and about at times and in places no one else is. I’m betting that if anyone saw anything unusual it would be you.’

  ‘Aye, that would be right,’ he said in his slow drawl, the accent so thick you could have soled boots with it. I had a bet with myself that it would be the longest sentence I’d get out of him. As it turned out, I was wrong.

  ‘Last Saturday we’d be talking about?’

  ‘That’s right, Jimmy.’

  The eyebrows formed an even closer acquaintance. ‘It wud be aboot five. Ah was on the hill yonder, checkin’ for vermin.’ He gave a tight little smile and I knew he’d been checking his buzzard baits, but that was somebody else’s problem, not mine. ‘Ma eyes are no’ so good these days but I thought I saw a flash o’ pink, like the wee lass’s bike, ye ken?’ Once I’d translated his words my heart beat a little faster. If he was right, this was the first confirmed sighting of Gurya after she left the village. ‘An’ aboot the same time I saw the faither’s motor – the sil’er one – going in the other direction . . . t’wards the village.’

  I stared at him. ‘But that would mean . . .’

  ‘I’m only tellin’ ye what I saw, son. It was the car right enough. I couldnae say for sure about the lass.’

  But if it was Gurya it meant her father would have met her on the road. Assad Ali had told me he hadn’t left the house until he realised Gurya was overdue, some time around six.

  ‘Does anyone else use the Range Rover?’

  He laughed. ‘Not likely. D’ye think the likes o’ us wid be allowed tae set foot in the big man’s fancy cars?’

  ‘So Gurya might have met her father?’

  ‘It’s possible.’ He paused. ‘Did he tell you aboot the wind farm he’s planning tae build on top o’ the hill?’ I shook my head, puzzled by this abrupt change of direction. ‘Well, the wee lass liked the idea about as much as I do.’ He turned away, and I knew I wasn’t going to get anything else out of him, but there was one more question I needed to ask.

  ‘Do you know a boy called Donnie from the other side of the hill, Jimmy?’

  He looked over his shoulder. ‘Donnie McLeod? Aye. The lad asked me for a job, but there was nothing doing at the time.’

  I waited, allowing the silence to ask the rest of the question for me.

  Jimmy gravely shook his head. ‘A man’s business is his ain, Mr Savage, an’ I’m a gamekeeper, no’ a babysitter.’

  He went back to his fence and I headed towards the house wondering what to make of what he’d said. A couple of things puzzled me. I couldn’t think of any reason why Assad Ali shouldn’t tell me he was out in his Range Rover around the time Gurya disappeared. The man was paying me a small fortune to find her; why hide a detail like that? And what did Jimmy Wilson’s hint about the wind farm mean?

  The Alis’ housekeeper, Mrs Rennie, gave me more to think about. Up to now no one had a bad word to say about Gurya, but that changed as we talked in the little office beside the kitchen where she did her accounts. ‘Thinks she’s the Queen of Sheba, that one. Traipsing in and out of here trailing mud and who knows what into my kitchen.’ Mrs Rennie was a sharp-faced woman, strung wire-tight and with a voice to match. While she spoke she twisted her hands together in her lap. She reminded me of one of my Sunday School teachers; all injured dignity and part-time piety. ‘I am on the staff here, Mr Savage. But I am not a servant and I will not be treated as one. No doubt she’ll be on the phone soon and everything will be right as rain again.’ She noticed my look of surprise. ‘Oh yes, this isn’t the first time. Takes after her mother, that one. She can twist anyone around her little finger and doesn’t care what it takes to do it.’

  ‘So you don’t think she’s been taken against her will?’

  Mrs Rennie – she’d said her name was Janice but women like Mrs Rennie never really have a first name – shook her head and gave me a glare John Knox would have been proud of. ‘She’ll be off gallivanting. Ask those half-dressed hussies she runs about with in the village, or that no-good boyfriend of hers.’

  I needed time to think so I went out to the car for a while and stared through the windscreen at Gurya’s horses as they stared back from the paddock, their big sad eyes asking me why they’d been ignored for a week. It seemed everyone in Chapel House, and by extension everyone in the village, knew about Gurya’s boyfriend – except her father. That might or might not be significant. I wasn’t sure yet. It was also becoming clear Assad Ali hadn’t been entirely straight with me. In other circumstances that might have been enough for me to walk away. Information is the lifeblood of investigation. If you don’t get enough, or if the information you do have is polluted, it can be fatal. But I couldn’t afford to walk away from Assad Ali’s money just yet. Equally, I couldn’t just carry on as if I didn’t know.

  When I knocked on the front door I thought I heard a barked order and the sound of shuffling feet, but by the time he opened it Mr Ali appeared his usual self, if a little flustered.

  ‘Mr Savage,’ he frowned. ‘Has something happened? Do you have news for me?’

  I shook my head. ‘Just a few more questions, Mr Ali. May I come in?’

  He looked over his shoulder in a way I found interesting before he allowed me inside. On the way in I noticed that the muddy riding boots had been taken away.

  ‘What can I do for you?‘ He led me through to the same room where we’d sat a couple of days before. ‘Are you making any progress?’

  I let that one hang in the air for a few moments. ‘It depends on what you call progress.’

  He stared at me, half-puzzled and ha
lf-irritated. ‘Progress, Mr Savage, is anything that brings us closer to getting Gurya back. I would have thought that was obvious.’

  I nodded, accepting his rebuke, and pulled out the notebook I never use, opening it at an empty page and pretending to read. ‘Did I miss it on Saturday when you told me about the other time that Gurya had gone off without telling anyone?’

  His head came up and just for a moment I caught a flash of anger in the dark eyes. A hint of an Assad Ali I hadn’t met before. But I wasn’t the only one who could count to ten, and when he spoke his tone was more measured than I expected.

  ‘No, I didn’t think it worth mentioning.’ I blinked. ‘It was a misunderstanding, nothing more. Gurya wanted to go on holiday with her friends. She thought I would say no.’ He said it as if he was apologising for her. ‘She is a strong-willed girl. She called from the airport and we discussed it. I gave my permission. That was the end of it.’

  ‘You were happy for her to go?’

  ‘Not happy, Mr Savage. Of course, you have no children of your own? You cannot chain them to you. They must be allowed some freedom.’

  He smiled, but the smile barely touched his lips and never came close to reaching his eyes, which is the measure of a smile. I studied the notebook again. ‘You said you went looking for Gurya after six, when you realised she was late and couldn’t get an answer on her phone. Is there any possibility you were on the village road earlier?’

  The stillness that followed the question was the kind of stillness you get before a battle, full of anticipation and with a hint of menace. Or maybe that was just my fevered imagination. I could see him working through the implications. He was a clever guy. It didn’t take long.