by Joy Ellis
He laughed bitterly. He hadn’t done that for many a year, not since . . . he abruptly brought his thoughts to a halt. It was far too soon to be going there.
Joseph slowed down and made himself take in the view over this weird water-world. It certainly was a strange place, and he wasn’t sure if he loved it or hated it. For one thing, it was rare to find a place that completely wrecked your sense of perspective. You could go up on the sea bank, and if the east wind would allow you to stand upright and see clearly, you could stare into infinity. Or so the long, straight paths that disappeared into the horizon would have you believe. The marshes, the rivers, the great endless fields, and the ever-present 360 degrees of sky, could reflect and magnify your moods like no other place he had ever been, and he had travelled more than most. If you were sad, the remoteness echoed your misery, but if you were happy, the sheer magnitude of the sky above, the clouds forming new landscapes every moment, could lift you to unimaginable heights.
With every trip he made, he felt more confused about it. He smiled to himself. One thing was certain, DI Galena loved it. She was a different person when she was out here. She belonged, and Joseph could feel her closeness to the place.
He dropped a gear and eased around one of those long, and incredibly deceiving bends, before continuing his train of thought.
The boss and Cloud Fen. It was quite strange. Nikki Galena was a tough, independent woman, and a bloody good copper. She might have tempered down her tunnel-visioned obsession for ridding the streets of drug dealers, but she was still steely and driven. Someone who you would place in a city, or at very least a town like Greenborough, not out here in these misty groves of solitude. Maybe she needed them, to rid her mind of the grim happenings that her job insisted she deal with on a daily basis. Maybe this was her security blanket. Perhaps she wrapped herself in the sea-frets to free herself from the dreadful things that man did to man. A place of escape.
Joseph smiled and sighed. In the distance he could see the outline of Cloud Cottage Farm, and he felt both relieved that he’d survived the marsh lanes, and apprehensive about what the night may bring.
The farmhouse looked welcoming. Evening sunlight glinted off the windows, and he thought that it would be good to arrive home each night, and find something like this waiting for you. Good, but not perfect, because after years of being alone, he was coming to realise that alone wasn’t what he wanted. It suited the boss, and until recently, it would have suited him. He turned onto the lane that led to her home, and wondered why his change of heart? It had to be his brush with the Grim Reaper.
Joseph slowed down and saw the gates were wide open for him. It was time to let the melancholy stuff go. Time to paint on another face.
He swung in and parked around the back of the property, next to a big old red brick barn. He jumped out, took a deep breath of the ozone-laden air, then went round and retrieved a bulging plastic bag and a small overnighter from the boot. At least he had the first part of the evening planned, even though he knew it was purely a diversionary tactic. He would salvage the meal. If the boss was such a pants cook, she would relish his help, and he loved to cook. Chopping and dicing, blending and sautéing was his way to unwind, to escape.
He walked around to the back door, recalling what she had told him about no one using the front, and vaguely wondered why he had bothered to lock the car. As he waited for her to answer his knock, he decided that some therapeutic cooking would definitely serve him well, because if there were ever a time when he needed to relax, it was now.
* * *
‘Okay, so where did you learn to do all that?’ asked the boss, clearly impressed. ‘And so quickly! I’d still be reading the instructions on the pasta packet.’
Joseph glanced down at the old pine table, now colourful with bowls of steaming pasta and sauce, green salad, tomatoes and olives, and richly aromatic garlic and herb bread.
‘College. I’d seen some of my fellow student’s pasty faces and pimples, and decided that I was going to pass out with diplomas and degrees, not malnutrition and scurvy.’ He picked up a bottle of Merlot that had been left to breathe while he cooked. ‘Red okay for you, ma’am?’
‘Red, pink, white, all okay for me, thank you.’ The boss sighed happily and took two glasses down from a Welsh dresser. ‘And we’re off duty tonight, Joseph. So on this occasion, Nikki is fine.’
He poured the wine into the glasses, and held his up to hers. ‘Cheers, Nikki.’
‘To you, Joseph.’ The crystal made a small ringing sound. ‘You have no idea how much better this meal is than the one I had planned.’
‘I doubt it, ma . . . Nikki. I’m sure you are a perfectly good cook, it’s just not your thing, that’s all.’
‘Not quite what my daughter used to tell me, but hey! Let’s eat!’
Half way through the meal, Joseph lay down his napkin. ‘I just wanted to say thank you for not making me fess up to my past in front of the team.’ He sipped his wine. ‘Frankly, I don’t think I could have done it.’
‘That would have been incredibly insensitive,’ said Nikki. ‘I may be a hard-arsed cow at times and I want to catch the killer, but not at the expense of my sergeant.’
Joseph nodded. There was something about the atmosphere in the old kitchen. They were sitting talking, as dozens of others must have done over several generations, and it felt warm and intimate. ‘You do know that you are probably the only person I could share this with, don’t you?’
Nikki looked at him across the top of her glass. ‘Well, I guess we’ve been through a couple of pretty emotive situations in the short time we’ve known each other.’ She smiled at him. ‘And you were the one to accompany me ‘down where it’s twisted and dark’ when I needed to offload. So I guess it’s just a reversal of roles this time.’
Joseph decided that he felt very comfortable in this old room with the pine furniture, the Butler sink, the pottery chickens and the ancestral memories. He poured some more wine, and they finished their supper.
‘Does cognac keep?’ she asked, as he stacked plates into the dishwasher.
‘Not in my house. But that’s just due to my propensity for fine brandy. Why?’
‘When the builders were clearing the attic to work on the wiring and the insulation, they found some old boxes belonging to my father. I brought them down to sort out and found an unopened bottle of cognac.’ She raised an eyebrow at him. ‘Worth a try, do you think?’
‘Is it ever! What’s on the label?’
‘Several layers of dust, I should think.’ She opened the larder and removed a tall straight bottle with two rather scuffed and faded off-white labels on the front.
Joseph carefully took it from her and his eyes widened. ‘We can’t drink this!’
‘Oh, gone off has it? Then we’ll revert back to the whisky and I’ll pour that down the sink.’
‘No!’ Joseph almost choked at the threat of tipping the spirit away. ‘This is a Croizet 1961! It’s rare, Nikki, and would probably cost you over £300 to buy!’
‘God, my father is a sneaky old devil! What on earth was he squirreling that away for?’ She stared at the bottle in disbelief, then grinned and said, ‘Oh well, at least its drinkable. I’ll get a couple of balloon glasses, then we can do it properly.’
Joseph touched the bottle with something like reverence, then laughed out loud at his boss’s total disregard for the heritage of such a fine spirit. But who was he to complain? He’d tasted some fine brandy before, but this would be a first.
Nikki returned from the lounge, glasses in hand. ‘You do the honours, Joseph. The way I look at it is this; I never even knew it was there. My poor father doesn’t know what year it is any more, sadly he doesn’t even know his only daughter, so he won’t be objecting. And if I’d never returned to live here, then that bottle would either have been left in the attic for some other bugger to lift, or taken to the dump, so . . . ?’
‘Let’s say the house is welcoming you home, shall we?’
‘I like that. Want to go through to the sitting room, or would you rather stay here?’
‘Stay here.’ He replied without even thinking. ‘I love the feel to this room.’
‘That’s what my mother always said. She said it felt safe, and even if she was on her own, she felt as if the family were around her.’
As Joseph carefully unsealed the bottle, he knew exactly what the perceptive woman had meant. ‘Okay, here goes nothing!’ He poured the amber liquid into the brandy balloons and gently sniffed one of them. ‘Oh my! That is something else. Let’s hope its anaesthetic properties are as good as its bouquet.’
Nikki took hers from him and sipped it tentatively. ‘No way would I pay three hundred quid for it, but it is very nice. Thank you, Daddy.’
Joseph was lost for words. He just sat there smiling inanely and wishing he had been born to an indecently wealthy French family.
The silence that engulfed them was as comfy as a pair of old slippers, and Joseph suddenly knew that he had run out of excuses. There was nothing left to come between him and the horrors of his past.
‘You said that when you go through a difficult time with someone, you feel very close to them afterwards, or words to that effect.’ He stared into the glinting crystal goblet. ‘So I think you’ll understand when I say that it was like that with my army comrades. They say you’re brothers in arms, but that doesn’t even get close. Those men are everything to you. You love them in a way that . . .’ he paused looking for the right words, but not truly finding them. ‘You’ve got to have been part of something like that to know just how much your mates mean to you.’
He took another sip of the cognac and looked across at his boss. He had the feeling that she was a going to be a good listener. It took a very special person just to listen, and not butt in, criticize or compare your story to something from their own past.
‘It was never my intended career, but I loved being a soldier, Nikki, and I was a good one.’ A sigh slipped from between his lips. ‘A natural.’
‘I can believe that,’ said Nikki softly. ‘I’ve seen how you react under pressure.’
He nodded, and wondered how long he could make one sip of that rare cognac last.
‘You already knew that I was with UK special forces. But I was actually part of an elite team that dealt with very delicate special ops. And I thrived on it, Nikki, until Billy Sweet poisoned everything.’
He gripped his glass tightly, and his next drink was more of a slug than a sip. He knew that Nikki’s company, his relaxed surroundings and the brandy were making the telling of this story as easy as it would ever be, but he still wanted to run away before he had to fully enter that dreadful pit of memory.
Nikki seemed to sense his difficulty, and reached across to refill his glass. ‘You had a bad mission, didn’t you? Where were you?’
‘Africa,’ he whispered.
There was no turning back. Joseph set his jaw firmly forward. ‘I know it’s Sweet that you are interested in, but to appreciate what happened, you have to know a bit about what we were doing.’ He took a deep breath. ‘Four of us were sent out to the Democratic Republic of Congo to look for a small unit of men who had disappeared without trace.’ He swallowed hard, as the filthy smells and the stinking heat rushed back at him. ‘The country was a living nightmare. Hell on earth. Massacres, child soldiers, systematic rape, and a refugee crisis that helped to destabilize the whole of the eastern Congo. It was worse than anything I’d ever seen, and I’d been in some shit-holes before.’ He swirled the cognac around and around in the glass, and tried to lose himself in the topaz vortex. ‘No matter what I say, Nikki, it could never convey how terrible it was, but try to imagine this. In the area where we were deployed, three quarters of all the children had disappeared. Three quarters!’ He closed his eyes and tried not to hear the heart-rending wails of the women.
‘So why were the first group out there?’ prompted Nikki, trying to keep her voice steady.
‘It was to do with precious metals and minerals. The whole place is a great big geological treasure chest, but greed and the conflict have just left it like one blasted, shameful battlefield. The group had been sent to a village called Zutu. There was a mine there, one that was being overseen by European scientists and engineers. It had rich seams of valuable minerals. Not just gold, copper or diamonds, even though they were common enough, they were mining minerals like niobium, pyrochlore, coltan, and germanium. All needed by hi-tech industries, like for nuclear reactors or space technology.’ Joseph shivered a little, even though the kitchen was still warm. ‘We knew that one of the scientists had been murdered, and two engineers were missing, that’s why the first group went out. To get the remaining staff to safety, and find and bring home the missing men.’
‘But they disappeared too?’
‘They accomplished their mission, retrieved the hostages and got the rest of the staff extracted by helicopter, but they went back to Zutu.’
Nikki frowned, but said nothing.
‘They contacted HQ with their coordinates saying that they had discovered something else, something that intelligence had not briefed them about.’ Joseph shifted uncomfortably in his chair. ‘After that, they sent just one communication, regarding a neighbouring village called Ituga. A terrifying report about women and children being taken as slaves and forced to opencast mine minerals, sometimes with their bare hands, and give everything they found to their rebel captors. These women were also expected to prostitute themselves, and if they refused you can guess what happened to them. The unit’s plan was to recon the other mine, assess the potential for an evacuation, and either request assistance or deal with it immediately. It was a covert mission, and imperative that the identity of the sponsor was concealed. It couldn’t be known that the British government was involved, not in that hotbed of political shit.’ He drank more brandy. ‘My team was Kilo Charlie Zero. We were a four man patrol, and we shipped out as soon as communication with Ituga broke down.’
Joseph stood up and walked slowly around the kitchen, touching ordinary homely objects, as if trying to ground himself in the present. ‘We found the unit in a cave close to the mine. Three of them had been butchered, and the fourth was sitting there with the bodies, too traumatised to speak.’ He ran his hand across the cold surface of a marble chopping block. ‘I’d served with one of them before, Terry Bourne, he was a fine soldier, and an extraordinary human being.’ A picture of the tousle-haired man with a boxer’s nose and a big smile came unbidden into his thoughts. Rough and tough on the outside, but inside, a rare gentleman. ‘We radioed our findings in, got the bodies to a place of safety ready to be brought home, and took the remaining soldier with us. We requested a helicopter evacuation for him and our dead, but there was heavy rebel fighting close by and they couldn’t comply. My commanding officer made the decision that we go in and finish the job ourselves.’
‘Find out what was going on at the Ituga mine?’
‘Yeah, and send back full intelligence,’ Joseph sighed, ‘And that’s where it all went pear-shaped.’ He flopped back down into his chair. ‘I’m not sure if any of us really knew what happened, but we got a radio message telling us that a group of rebels had been seen bringing in a new batch of women and children. According to our information, they were being held in a large hut prior to selection for duties, and the rebels were regrouping ready for their next sortie in a cave close to the perimeter of the mine.’
Joseph licked his lips and steeled himself to speak. ‘Our intel was wrong. It was the women who were in the cave that we attacked. Somehow in the bedlam that followed, we managed to get only two of the woman out, most of them died.’ He glanced across at Nikki’s face. It was set as if in stone, and he had no idea what she was thinking.
‘And the children?’ She finally asked.
‘There were no children this time.’
Nikki’s face softened. ‘Thank God for small mercies. And Billy Sweet? Where does he fit in?’
Joseph took another gulp of his drink. This was the worse bit. The bit he had relegated to the deepest, darkest part of his memory. The accidental killing of the women had been devastating, life-destroying. But what had come next was the stuff of nightmares. He rubbed his hand across his mouth.
‘We were hopelessly outnumbered, and we’d lost the element of surprise. We fell back, taking the two women and the silent soldier.’ He stood up again, and began to pace. ‘As night fell, we found a deserted building, an old shelter, a store of some kind. It was way outside the perimeter and well hidden.’ Joseph saw it in his mind’s eye, saw the sun-bleached wood and the corrugated metal sheets that served as a roof, and suddenly he was there, back in Africa.
‘All clear!’ he called out, as he checked the last part of the deserted shack. He relaxed a little, but kept his rifle at the ready. ‘Get the women inside; it’ll get cold pretty quickly.’ He stood back as his comrades entered the building.
‘It’s going to be a long night, Bunny.’ His friend, Cameron McBride, hitched up a rag of material that was hung at the glass-less window and tried to decide how best to keep guard until morning. ‘The terrain sucks. Too many dead spots for snipers to hide in. Two hour watches, two men awake at all times, I reckon.’
‘Yeah.’ They called him Bunny because of his surname. He was the Easter Bunny.
‘I’ll take the first watch.’
‘Me too,’ added Teddy Churchill, wiping grime and other unspeakable substances from his boots.
‘I’ll sort out some rations, get the women and this lad fed.’ Kenny Williams’ dirty face crinkled up in frustration. ‘Daren’t risk a fire though, its cold grub or nothing.’
Joseph’s stomach was in no fit state for food, hot or cold, and he was grateful to get outside into the night. The bloodbath in the mine was still playing itself out in his head. How could everything have gone so wrong?
He was still hearing the screams echoing around in his mind, when Teddy sidled up to him and whispered.