War Games

by Douglas Jackson

  Suddenly, the images ran through my head without conscious thought, like an old-fashioned newsreel. A red double-decker bus with its roof torn open. Smoke billowing from the entrance to a London Tube station. Screaming victims being led to safety. Two terrified eyes staring from a face made of bandages. Shock, fear, outrage. Terror. Not 9/11 – 7/7.

  On the morning of 7 July 2005 four young Moslem men travelled to London carrying rucksacks filled with home-made explosives. At 8.50 a.m. three of the bombs exploded on packed Tube trains killing dozens of people and the three bombers. At 9.47 a.m. the fourth bomber blew himself and thirteen other people up on a number 30 bus in Tavistock Square. For the first time, Islamic terrorism had come to the streets of Britain. Fifty-six people died, including the bombers, and another seven hundred were injured. It didn’t just send a shockwave through the nation, it created a religious faultline that has never completely healed.

  7 July 2005. Forty-nine days before the Crusader killed his first victim.

  *

  God’s Warrior fed his enemy her last meal of porridge and milk spiked with Rohypnol, charmingly called the ‘date rape drug’. This was irrelevant to him. He felt no sexual desire for the girl, had not known sexual desire for longer than he could remember. In any case, he was a knight, and honour and chivalry were his watchwords. He had treated her correctly, after his fashion, but in the early days she had not shown him the respect he warranted. Instead, she had raged, screamed, snarled and spat, and even tried to claw his eyes with nails that had once been long and red, but were now shattered and broken to the quick. The Rohypnol suited his purpose, because it kept her docile without rendering her completely unconscious. He looked up at the row of lead containers, the fifth already in place and awaiting its contents. Was she aware of the place she would have in history? He doubted it. Her kind didn’t understand. They were the enemy. They knew no honour.

  He felt almost content as he turned back towards the battle scene. It was laid out at the pivotal point of the fight on the morning of 24 June 1314, with the four divisions of Scots schiltrons – King Robert the Bruce’s spear-wielding infantry – advancing in their tightly packed formations from the high ground they’d denied their numerically superior English enemy for two days. Bruce held the right, with the Earl of Moray on the left, and Bruce’s brother Edward and the Good Sir James in the centre. He picked up the tiny figure in the Douglas colours. All his life he had been infused by the glory of the man. When he walked the woods and the hills around his home he could still feel his presence. As Douglas and his spearmen had waited, Edward the Second’s three-thousand-strong heavy cavalry, with the Earl of Gloucester at its head and containing the flower of English chivalry, was about to crash into the wall of spears in the impact which would be the decisive moment of the entire battle. Gloucester would die leading his armoured giants, along with Robert, Baron de Clifford, William Le Marshal, and John Comyn of Badenoch, only son of the Red Comyn, and hundreds of other English lords. As the Scots advanced, the survivors were forced back onto their infantry and into the swampland of the Carse, trapped between the boggy loops of the Bannockburn and the treacherous waters of the River Forth, where the foot soldiers died in their thousands, and the knights were forced to surrender or face slaughter. Edward fled with his surviving cavalry to Dunbar, with Sir James Douglas on his heels, leaving his army to its fate. Scotland had won the day and Bruce and Douglas eternal fame and glory. This, he knew, was when Douglas had come of age. This was the moment the lifelong friendship was forged and when they’d vowed to fight for each other and for Christendom against the enemies of God, a friendship only sundered on that fateful day on the red plain beneath the Castle of the Stars.

  He smiled solemnly. And now God’s Warrior had returned to take the fight against the enemies of God. Somewhere at the heart of him he knew those he slew were innocents, but the voices clamoured for blood and the voices could not be ignored. The people in the great towers and in the red bus had been innocents, too, and they must be avenged.

  He drew the long knife from its sheath beneath his armpit and saw the girl flinch. The familiar words came to his lips as he drew the glistening blade back and forth across the whetstone: ‘Dieu de gloire et de force, je viens devant toi dans la prière. Je viens de vous rappeler. Je viens vous remercier. Je viens d'être avec vous. Je suis un Croisé . . .’

  CHAPTER 32

  10 a.m.

  It had started to rain, which is just about average for June these days. A light, shimmering drizzle whose touch was nothing like the proper rain the bruised clouds promised was on the way. Summer storms, the clouds said. An apocalypticintermezzo between picnics.

  I sat in the car and double-checked the equipment in my rucksack. Two Ordnance Survey Landranger 1–50,000 scale maps covering the eastern Borders, because the Range Rover’s satnav doesn’t like country roads. One flask of strong, sweet coffee to help while away the hours I might have to wait in the car. Two Cheddar cheese rolls and a Mars bar, ditto. One lockpick, rake and tension wrench ‘gifted’ to me a year earlier, along with instructions on how to use them, by my former comrade-in-arms and thief Vinnie ‘Albert’ Hall. One two-foot steel crowbar, just in case the former didn’t do the business or I wasn’t up to the job. One thirty-foot length of half-inch climbing rope. One torch. One roll of duct tape. And, finally, one thick woollen walking sock packed solid with slightly damp, Grade A building sand, in lieu of the spring-loaded cosh that would have been my preference. No gun and no knife. Hopefully, I wouldn’t live to regret it.

  The best way to get to Jedburgh from my place is along the east bank of the Tweed to Mertoun Bridge and from there to St Boswells, where you hit the A68 and turn south. Six miles on and the switchback road takes you over the rise where ‘Fair maiden Lilliard’ helped defeat an English raiding party in 1545. The inscription on her grave claims that when she had her legs cut off ‘she focht upon her stumps’. They make their women tough down this way.

  I reached the outskirts at about eleven and drove along a street lined with former council houses whose uniform ugliness was offset by the evident love and attention the residents lavished on their little patch of ground. Jedburgh is a small town with a long history and, like every town of ancient lineage, it is a place of contrasts. Cradled in a loop of the River Jed, it has a historic centre that runs more or less north to south from Dunion Hill, with factories on the outskirts and modern housing clinging to steep valley sides. The car park where I left the Range Rover just off the main road was new and overlooked by a Victorian pile that advertised itself as the town hall. Beyond it, I basked in the shadow of one of the most glorious buildings I’d ever seen. Where Melrose Abbey towers, Jedburgh Abbey soars; a ruin, but a ruin that will forever retain its majesty. Another medieval masterpiece with a square keep a hundred feet high dominating the east end, matched at the west by a glorious rose window that has miraculously survived the ravages of four centuries of war and the Reformation.

  The word ‘medieval’ was still echoing in my ears when I found the library just across the street from the local police station,on Castlegate, a steep hill which leads to what was once a castle, and later the county jail and place of execution.

  Light slanted in from windows set high in the walls. I heard a murmur of voices as I pushed through the heavy double door. No-one was behind the counter and I considered shouting for some assistance, but a child’s voice in my head reminded me that you don’t make noise in a library. Instead, I wandered among the bookshelves to where a group of five small children had gathered in the centre of the room listening to a serious-faced young woman I assumed must be their nursery teacher. She sat perched on a tiny chair at the same level as her listeners and, judging from the rapt expressions and shining eyes, she was doing a good job. I watched for a while, waiting for her to finish, but it must have been a long story. Eventually I tiptoed back to the counter and started leafing through a pile of local tourist brochures, breathing in that distinctive scent of pap
er in various stages of ageing that is the trademark of all these hallowed places.

  ‘Are you looking for some help?’ Her voice was like silk whispering across soft flesh and I could understand why the kids had been so attentive. She certainly caught my attention. Dark, quizzical eyes regarded me from between the bookshelves. For some reason I felt the same way I did when I was caught smoking behind the toilets at school.

  ‘No, I’m looking for the librarian. I phoned yesterday, but I think she must have gone out.’ She smiled, and her whole personality changed. I’d bracketed her as only just handsome, but the woman who walked behind the counter was beautiful in a way that defied categorisation. Dark, shoulder-length hair you’d call raven, but I doubt any raven’s plumage ever shone with such lustre, and skin that glowed with health and hinted at a lot of time spent outdoors.

  ‘I’m the librarian, Hazel Wright,’ she introduced herself smoothly. ‘And you must be Mr Savage.’ She held out her hand and I took her slim fingers in mine, making sure not to squeeze too hard.

  ‘Please, call me Glen.’

  A tiny, dark-skinned girl with curly hair appeared from nowhere at my side and gravely shook my other hand. The unthinking innocence of the gesture made me smile and she smiled back, revealing small white teeth like perfect rows of seed pearls, before her natural shyness intervened and she darted back to the sanctuary of the shelves.

  ‘We have a reading for the local nursery children every Saturday,’ the librarian explained. ‘It lets their mums do the shopping in peace. You’re not what I expected.’

  The sudden personal note caught me off balance and I tried to hide it with a joke. ‘A lot of people think I should be older.’

  ‘No,’ Hazel Wright said seriously. ‘I mean you don’t talk or act like a racist.’

  Is it any wonder I’ve got grey hairs? When a man is kicked in a certain vulnerable place, the result is usually instant. Acute, agonising pain accompanied by a slow, cross-eyed collapse as all his strength drains from him. That’s exactly what happened to the inner Glen Savage, but the outer me is made of tougher stuff. I took it on the chin, as it were, and stood my ground.

  ‘If you knew about that, why did you agree to talk to me?’

  ‘Because I don’t always believe everything I read in the newspapers.’ She shrugged. ‘Because you seemed genuinely interested in what I know and . . . because I wanted to see what you were really like.’

  Well, that was honest, but for some reason it annoyed me, as if I was being paraded in some kind of freak show. My smile tightened and I had a feeling I must look like a village idiot.

  ‘And are you impressed?’

  ‘The jury’s still out, Mr Savage. I’ll need a little more time before I decide the verdict.’ She said it with a smile, and it surprised me how much that smile meant to me. I found myself attracted to Ms Hazel Wright, which is something that hadn’t happened to me in a long while. The knowledge brought on the knife-twist of guilt. My wife, who I’m devoted to, was lying in a hospital bed. How could I allow myself to feel like this?

  ‘I came to hear about the Douglases.’ The words emerged as a belligerent growl, but the smile didn’t falter.

  ‘Okay, I’m just about to close for lunch. Would you like to go for a walk?’

  It was fifteen minutes before she managed to unite the kids with their mothers and a wagon train of buggies headed off down Castlegate. We gave them a chance to clear before we followed them. The rain had stopped, but the clouds still carried their threat and Hazel put on a hooded Gore-Tex top over her white cotton shirt and jeans.

  When we reached the town square we turned right towards the abbey. ‘Sir Walter Scott made his first appearance as a defence lawyer in that courthouse,’ she said, indicating an impressive grey stone building that dominated the open space with an intricate fountain at its centre.

  ‘Did he win or lose?’ I wasn’t a great fan of Scott.

  ‘Lost, probably. He wasn’t much of a lawyer; that’s why he spent half his life in debt.’

  ‘You like Jedburgh?’ I’d worked out she wasn’t local, but her Home Counties accent had been softened by about five years of Scots burr.

  ‘Jethart,’ she corrected, grinning. ‘Yes, I love being surrounded by all this history, and the people are friendly. They have a very individual sense of humour.’

  I nodded. It was something you noticed right across the Borders. Wit as dry as an Andean salt flat and as pointed as a stiletto.

  She looked up at the abbey to our left. ‘Incredible that it’s survived as it has. In the mid-sixteenth century, during what they called the Rough Wooing, Henry the Eighth told his warlord Sir Ralph Evers not to leave a stick standing.’

  ‘It’s lucky he wasn’t good at his job.’

  ‘Oh, he wasn’t that bad. In a single raid he burned seven monasteries, sixteen castles, five market towns, two hundred and forty villages and three hospitals. He also had instructions from Henry to put “man, woman and child to fire and sword, without exception” and he obeyed them to the letter.’

  I looked around the square with its pastel-painted houses and small shops struggling to scrape a living, and tried to imagine everything in flames, men dying to save what was theirs, raped women and speared babies in the street, and blood running down the gutters.

  She saw the look on my face. ‘You were a soldier, weren’t you?’

  ‘Tell me about the Douglases.’

  She shrugged. ‘There are a lot of Douglases.’

  ‘Tell me about the Black Douglas.’

  ‘Ah, the Good Sir James. My favourite Douglas.’

  We were turning the corner by the abbey’s massive tower. On the opposite side of the road stood an inviting pub, the Carter’s Rest, with seats outside, and I thought she’d suggest stopping for a drink. Instead, she continued until we could see the line of the main A68 road disappearing into the trees half a mile away on the other side of the River Jed.

  ‘This is Douglas country,’ she said, and I felt a thrill of what might have been recognition as I looked out towards the narrow river valley; a greener green, snaking southwards through a gently rolling sea of field and forest. ‘While Robert the Bruce fought a pointless war in Ireland he left Sir James Douglas to hold the Border, which meant holding Scotland. Douglas had to defend a line from Berwick to the Solway, but eventually he decided that the Middle March, here, where the great abbeys of Jedburgh, Melrose, Kelso and Dryburgh attracted English armies like wasps to rotting fruit, was the gate he had to keep closed.’

  I thought about what she said. When I consulted the mental map in my head I could see that Douglas had been right. The broad waters of the Tweed created a defensive ditch for Berwick in the east, the treacherous Solway sands a barrier in the west. Here, though, in the central Borders, the valleys were like highways. When Agricola’s Romans first came north they’d driven a road through these hills and if history has a lesson it’s where the Romans lead other armies always follow.

  ‘When would this be?’

  ‘In the years after Bannockburn, say from 1316 to 1320. Douglas made his base about three miles south of here,’ she said, looking up at me, ‘at a place called Lintalee.’

  She told how Bruce had granted Douglas the manor of Linthaughlee, and how, during a truce, the knight had planned to build a great house there. But then the English came again.

  ‘Would you believe the Earl of Arundel sent an army to cut down the entire Jed Forest? It would have covered everything you can see from here to the border. Every man was issued with an axe and they crossed into Scotland by the pass at Carter Bar.’

  My breath caught in my throat as I remembered the Isolation Chamber vision of marching men with axes. Another signpost. ‘My guess is you’re English yourself,’ I teased. ‘You don’t sound as if you approve.’

  ‘Let’s just say that, in this case, I support the underdog. Anyway, unless you want to interrupt again . . .’

  I waved her to carry on.

  ‘S
o, thousands of English soldiers are marching down the Jed Valley towards Douglas at Linthaughlee. Because of a truce, Douglas only had fifty men-at-arms and a company of archers, but they were the men of his personal guard, so I think we can take it that they were the elite. He led them out to intercept the English vanguard headed by Sir Thomas de Richmond.’

  ‘You can’t defeat an army with fifty men, no matter how good they are.’

  ‘You’re interrupting again,’ she screwed up her nose. ‘Douglas had his men cut stakes and create a fence of branches in the woods at the top of a hill overlooking the point where the road ran over a narrow height above the river.’

  ‘So the English men-at-arms and cavalry couldn’t get at them?’

  ‘Exactly,’ she nodded. ‘De Richmond walked into a trap. The archers did their stuff then the Scottish men-at-arms charged the survivors. Douglas personally killed de Richmond with a dagger. When he heard of the defeat, Arundel decided the forest of Jedburgh wasn’t worth the effort and retreated back over the border.’

  ‘He must have been quite a soldier,’ I said, staring out over those tranquil yet blood-soaked hills and valleys.

  ‘He was. Probably a better soldier than Bruce, but promise you won’t tell anyone I said that.’

  I smiled. ‘I wouldn’t do that. Tell me, do you know a guy from around here called Pete Campbell? I heard he’s interested in Douglas, too.’

  She looked at me in surprise. ‘Pete lives in a cottage out at Lintalee.’

  ‘I know.’

  She grinned. ‘Lucky you didn’t come a couple of weeks later.’

  ‘Why’s that?’

  ‘He’d be off to his Spanish bolthole for a month.’

  CHAPTER 33

  In 2003, Pete Campbell had served in the second Gulf War and returned traumatised by the loss of a friend in an Iraqi ambush. From the way he acted when I met him it was clear while he was out there he’d developed an intense hatred for Moslems in general and Arabs in particular. In 2004, he’d retrained as a stonemason and started working with Historic Scotland. A year later, he started his own business working as a contractor restoring ancient buildings. That job gave him the freedom to travel almost anywhere in the south of Scotland in his ubiquitous white van, which in turn gave him the opportunity to be in any of the places the Crusader killer’s victims had been kidnapped and where their bodies were dumped. It also gave him access to the type of lead the toy Saracens were made of. He was single and a loner. Okay, so plenty of people are, but it ticked another two boxes in the serial-killer profile. Hazel Wright also revealed that Campbell regularly signed out books on medieval history, including the Douglas family, and ,most crucially of all, Pete Campbell had bought a holiday home in Spain less than fifty miles from where José Caracol had been murdered on the anniversary of the Black Douglas’s death. Sandy Armstrong had lied to me to protect his friend. Pete Campbellwasthe Crusader killer.