Wings of the Morning

by Julian Beale

  The giant and Salacia looked at each other. There was a prevailing silence, with only the normal sounds of street and public building to reach them. White Cap had a sheen of light sweat on his upper arms but his breathing was steady and normal. Almost effortless work for him. But Salacia was snorting and throwing her head about, cascades of glittering black hair whirling around her shoulders and her limbs trembling as if in trauma. White Cap recognised the symptoms, not of fear or crisis but of battle lust and he proposed the remedy with one uplifted eyebrow. She nodded at him. Michel lay like a donkey’s dumped burden. White Cap scooped up Salacia with one arm and released his jeans with the other. He chucked her on the bed, face down, bottom up and pulled her roughly back onto him. She cursed at him to go harder. He grunted and went at it. He was over in a minute, she was dressed in two more. They left the room without a backward glance, the hessian bag and its unseen occupant slung casually over the giant’s shoulder. He passed through the lobby with a direct but unhurried gait whilst she lingered briefly at reception to pass over an envelope which made good a prior agreement. They joined up again at the front door and walked into the car park to retrieve a battered Nissan pickup. Salacia drove. White Cap tossed the sack with casual abandon into the load bed. He got in beside her and they drove off without a word.

  Michel Labarre came to briefly around midnight but lapsed in and out of consciousness during the early hours and it was not until the African dawn came blazing up around 6 am that he was able to take any stock of his position. It was not good.

  Vision for him remained very faint. He was being held in the middle of a warehouse which permitted scant daylight through its few dusty windows. Worse, he was still inside the heavy, musty sacking and his head was splitting from its treatment the previous evening. It took him some time and freshly rising panic to understand that although there were no bindings on his limbs, he was still trussed like an animal for market as he remained upside down, one drawstring still around his neck at the bottom of the sack, and a second below his feet, thus sealing him in a hessian tomb. He struggled with a desperation born of horror and this action made him swing. He fought his claustrophobia and regained just enough self control to work it out. The sack was suspending him from some fixture above, but he had no means of knowing at what height nor whether there was any sort of help within earshot. He tried to shout, but the resultant noise was feeble and blanketed. The effort also caused him to suck in more dust and he started to choke, causing yet greater panic. Mercifully, this led him to pass out again and he spent the next few hours in a state of semiconscious delirium.

  Meanwhile, there was progress of a sort. At 5 am, a ragged urchin had scrambled through one of the holes into the DuLame compound and, as instructed by Salacia, who remained at a safe distance sitting in the old pickup, left an envelope under a heavy stone at the door to the main administration block. It was addressed to the senior French executive of the company. Inside was a message from a fictitious revolutionary group demanding a ransom in CFA francs for the safe return of their captive whose battered and unconscious face was quite recognisable in the poor photograph enclosed. Cash payment was to be made according to precise instructions within forty-eight hours or Labarre would be executed.

  By 9 am, the telex lines to the DuLame Headquarters in Lille were chattering and by the end of the day, it became clear that retired Colonel Joffrey Labarre, a wealthy man in his own right and with considerable experience of the African colonies, would personally underwrite the price of his son’s return. With a speed and pragmatism of which the French are most capable when roused, the details were arranged and a note left out for collection by another small boy, which requested an extension of twenty four-hours simply to get the cash together and to parcel it as instructed.

  Salacia relayed this to Paulus, the personable double bass player from the club La Chatte who had provided the brains and the organisation behind the kidnap. He ordered an agreement to the extension. He had anyway been planning for it. Meanwhile, they were to keep young Labarre safe but scared, not fed but watered, secure from any possibility of escape and Paulus did not want to know where they were holding him.

  The other parties to the agreement were content if not happy. DuLame management did not want to rock any commercial boats by running for help to either the Niamey Police or the Niger Government. Colonel Labarre knew best and would pay for his preference to be respected. Payment would be made and young Labarre recovered. He would have to leave Niger immediately and the employ of DuLame just after that, but the parents would get their first born back – very severely chastened but nonetheless intact.

  Whilst this process took its course, Michel’s circumstances improved, if only a little. On that first day, he returned to some normality just after noon, had the beginnings of a further panic attack but fought it down and was just starting to think through the desperation of his position when he heard a heavy footfall and felt his sacking prison being first lifted and then lowered roughly to the floor. The strings were untied, the material pulled back and the unaccustomed light battered his brain. He was hauled to his feet. He made out the all too familiar features of the giant above him as his arms were swept together in front of him and bound palm to palm by White Cap using insulating tape over which he placed a heavy rope tied in a noose. The big man thrust a plastic bottle into his mouth and upturned it, waiting almost patiently while Michel choked and gurgled to get some of the warm and dirty water down his throat. Then he threw the end of the rope over the rafter from which Michel’s sack had been suspended and heaved until the prisoner was obliged to take his weight on his arms or to stand on his toes. The rope was secured to a stanchion in the floor.

  Michel was looking around as Salacia came sashaying out of the shadows, a slight smile playing over her sexy features, another slinky dress, long legs, long black hair. The nightmare returned to him and he felt simultaneously a terror at his prospects and humiliation at his filthy nakedness which he could do nothing to hide. She came right up close to him and gripped his head in her two hands.

  ‘You were never too attractive,’ she said, ‘and you’ll look and smell horrible by the time we’re finished. But you’ll be alive at least. So do as you’re told. No shouting or you go back in the sack. No complaining or Claude here will beat the shit out of you. And he’ll enjoy it’.

  Behind her, White Cap gave a slow, broad grin, full of infinite menace. She looked into Michel’s face for a long time until he could no longer bear her gaze and he dropped his eyes in abjection. Only then did she turn on her heel and walk off into the darkness of the building’s extremities.

  And so began for Michel Labarre a terrible test of endurance which had brought him, four days almost to the hour after his abduction, to a point of suicidal despair. By day, they left him roped up to a height at which he could choose to give some slight respite to either his arms or his feet. But not both together and increasingly he came to stand on tip toes. At night, they placed a stool by him on which he could climb to rest and try to sleep vertically, overcome by exhaustion until he fell over or was disturbed by the rats which crept out of the shadows to sniff around the droppings from his increasingly nauseating body and even to nibble at his feet. They kept him alive on water only. He saw only Claude whom he once asked for something to eat to be rewarded with a kick in the groin and belt welts to his back and buttocks. Sometimes, he thought of home and wept. He tried to keep his hopes alive, knowing that he was worth money and that money would be found and paid if only the communications would work.

  Michel could not know that they did work, and pretty smoothly in the circumstances. The delay stretched beyond the deadline, but Paulus was not fazed by that. An intelligent man, well educated in Kinshasa, he had spent some years living in France. He knew the systems and could read the characters. He had seen the opportunity and acted decisively. But this was a big job — the largest which they had pulled together and as soon as they had the cash safe, it would be time to move
out. It would be best to be on his own for a few months, give the band a rest, let Salacia go back to a little whoring in the expatriate community somewhere, encourage Claude into more body building. While for him — well, perhaps a trip back to France would be good. He was relaxed.

  But then it all went horribly wrong.

  The ransom sum was assembled and packaged as demanded. It was delivered to the petrol station and truck stop on the route out of Niamey towards the border with Mali to the north. Inconspicuously parked amongst the big vehicles, Paulus could see the drop made, just another 45 gallon oil drum amongst so many others, and he could see Claude arrive five minutes later to collect the drum with the big red stripe and sweep it into the back of the old Nissan whilst Salacia waited at the wheel. They did as he had told them, and went to the pumps to buy fuel so that he would have some minutes to see if there was any suspicious car looking to follow them. Nothing and no one. Salacia and Claude drove out of the truck stop to circle the city back towards the warehouse where Michel was hanging from his rope, shortly to be released to find his way towards help and home, filthy, naked and lost whilst the three perpetrators and the rest of the band would make their way quietly from the city, dividing their takings and then go their separate ways.

  But as Salacia drove at modest speed with Claude beside her, she put an alternative scheme to him which he liked very much indeed. They had done all the work and taken all the risks. Why share the profits and why anyway on such an unequal basis as Paulus proposed? As a partnership, they felt confident together. She the style and brain, he the unstoppable bulk. But they had to be ruthless, with nothing left behind to assist either Paulus or the authorities. And thus was sealed the fate of Michel Labarre.

  They drove the pick up into the warehouse and shut out behind them the waning sunlight. Michel was unmoving and looked at them through a face masked with the pain of standing on his toes. Salacia walked right up to him, just as she had done when she left him three days before. She wrinkled her nose at the smell but managed a sexy, secret smile. Michel was far gone in fear and exhaustion, but he opened his eyes as she stroked him gently and gazed at her as she stepped back a pace, lifting her arms above her head, pushing her hair out onto her shoulders, striking a provocative pose with one leg cocked in front of the other. Michel was never conscious of White Cap circling behind him.

  ‘Well Monsieur’, said Salacia, ‘most men say that I have a body to die for. I hope you agree?’ She smiled as Claude broke his neck from behind with the speed and indifference which a farmer might use on a chicken.

  Claude stuffed the corpse of the young man into the sack in which he had arrived. He put this next to the oil drum with the red stripe in the load bed of the pickup, and then took the wheel himself as they drove sedately out of the city towards Ouagadougou, capital of Upper Volta. Eighty kilometres later, and by now in complete darkness, Claude took the body in its sack and carried it a further kilometre over rough desert ground away from the road and there abandoned it in a slight depression in the ground.

  Claude returned to Salacia with the keys of the car in his pocket. You can never be too careful. But probably, they did not go much further together. Not only had they made an enemy of a brighter man, but they had also made a serious mistake. Paulus had no cause to suspect them, but he was ever cautious. Thus, they had collected the drum with the stripe as he told them, but that was not the drum with the money. Paulus himself had awaited their departure from the fuel station before moving in to find the correct article and even now he was counting the money to share with his confederates. But two of them would not now dare to return.

  The body was never found. Over time, decay and vermin stripped away the flesh, whilst the searing sun and desert wind bleached the bones. There was never to be Christian resting place for Michel Labarre, and it was to be many months before his family could accept that he was forever gone from them, and in circumstances which they would never know.

  DAVID HEAVEN — 1943 to 1965

  David Charles Heaven was born on the 9th May 1943, the youngest by six years of four children. His father, Lawrence, was the headmaster of a boys’ boarding school in the home counties of England to the west of London. Running a school may have been a worthy occupation during the war years, but it was a hard and thankless task for a man who felt jilted of his opportunity to join up and see some action.

  As he grew up, David had difficulty in establishing much of a relationship with his father who was austere and preoccupied with his own disappointments. In school time, the boy tended to merge as a statistic into the crowd of responsibilities as David started his education, quite literally, at home.

  David’s three older siblings were all girls, which served to increase the already considerable age gap. Almost nothing is recorded about these sisters, and not much more about their mother Esther. There seems to have been no sense of family. No Christmas together, no birthday celebrations, no holidays, no wedding announcements. Most significantly, no photographs of the individuals, still less the family as a group, saving one only of a school assembly showing David, just discernible in the back row with his father looking stern in the middle of his teaching staff.

  So, a rather sad childhood and an unpromising start in life, yet many people have risen from beginnings more different and difficult. At the age of thirteen, David went on to school at Lancing College in Sussex where he prospered in his work and especially on the sports field and the running track. But as for earlier years, there is scant record of social activity and of course, an absolute absence of family events.

  In 1962, rather older at nineteen years and some months than was the norm for those days, David went up to Oxford University to read history at Brasenose College. Behind him, he left those shallow roots and slight beginnings. Oxford and the society he kept became overnight his home and his heartbeat.

  David Heaven made the most of his time at Oxford and loved all of it. He worked quite hard out of enjoyment as much as duty and took a creditable degree. He socialised, debated, became an enthusiastic club man and was active if not outstanding in his chosen sports. He lived life to the full. He drank and dined and womanised. He became like a sponge in his eagerness to soak up the benefits, the warmth and the experience of all the relationships which could be persuaded to come his way. He was making up for lost ground in earlier years. Very seldom did he feel any sense of abiding commitment. He was fulfilled by just working his way around the smorgasbord of life. He was well spoken, but no snob: he had a bit of money, but was not flash with it: he was not bad looking and was easy company: he had a sharp sense of humour and was apparently game for just about anything.

  And so he flirted with everything which crossed his path, and in later life he thanked his stars and a rather remote God that he had not been irretrievably hooked or damaged by any of it. Looking back, he could see that all the experiments with bookmakers and poker players, with dodgy booze and nameless drugs, with women both wanton and weary, and once, disastrously, with a cultured chorister, all this frenzied activity had been as for a child on a first outing to the sweet shop.

  David made four significant friendships at Oxford, one woman and three men.

  First, there was Alexandra Labarre who was a little younger than the rest of them having come up early to university to escape the aftermath of a family tragedy which was never articulated. Neither age nor gender could hold her back. Alexa — as she liked to be called — was of Anglo French birth and a most magical girl. She had stunning, ethereal looks and a most beautiful figure, the highest quality wrapping for a razor brain and a diamond core. Being bilingual from childhood, it was perhaps too obvious that Alexa should be a language specialist but she nonetheless distinguished herself. Her French father Joffrey travelled extensively in South America and spoke both Spanish and Portuguese whilst her English mother Elizabeth was an authority on the churches in Venice and thus fluent in Italian. Alexa was competent to masterful in all these languages, but trumped her parents�
�� aces by taking Russian at Oxford. She was extremely talented but wore her ability lightly and was ever marvellous company. David enjoyed a tide of laughter with her and endless, provocative debate on any subject. Never once did he look like winning either the arguments or access to her bed, and perhaps he loved her all the more for it.

  The three men batted in no particular order. Rupert Broke Smith, who came to be known to one and all as ‘Pente’, was a gentle giant of a man who entered the priesthood immediately after leaving Oxford and abandoned forever the study of physics which had won him an exceptional degree. Pente had a background not dissimilar to David’s. He was the lonely, only child of ageing parents who lived in a remote part of Herefordshire, eking out a living in the rare book trade. Pente was schooled locally, and had hardly been beyond Bristol until he surprised everyone by gaining entry to Oxford in considerable style. He was the brightest of David’s contemporaries and would have succeeded in any subject. Pente was tremendous company too. A huge beer drinker and an energetic party animal, he was an impressive rugby player reckoned to have missed a Blue only through insufficient training. But during one vacation, he vanished for six weeks into the Hindu Kush and returned with the ‘call’ from which he never wavered. He was no Holy Joe, did not tax his friends with the strengths of his vocation and was in no way a lesser companion. He may have been a little better behaved, but he still drank a great deal and laughed even more as he became overnight a man with a mission and a faith.

  And the sobriquet? He won it at the seminary which he attended for an introductory course following his return from India and the story always warmed David despite his natural disregard for most men of the cloth. It went that his fellow students suffered just so much of his fondness for mixing pickled onions and pints of bitter with explosive results to his digestion before they nicknamed him ‘Pentecost’ to recall another rushing, mighty wind and of course, the abbreviated version became his for a lifetime.