Song
of
the Dead
Song
of
the Dead
Douglas Lindsay
Published by Freight, 2016
Freight Books
49-53 Virginia Street
Glasgow, G1 1TS
www.freightbooks.co.uk
Copyright © Douglas Lindsay, 2016
The moral right of Douglas Lindsay to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or any information storage or retrieval system, without either prior permission in writing from the publisher or by licence, permitting restricted copying. In the United Kingdom such licences are issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1P 0LP.
All the characters in this book are fictitious and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental
A CIP catalogue reference for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN: 978-1-910449-74-5
eISBN: 978-1-910449-99-8
Typeset by Freight in Plantin
Printed and bound by Bell and Bain, Glasgow
Douglas Lindsay was born in Scotland in 1964 at 2:38 a.m.
Some decades later he left to live in Belgium. Meeting his future wife, Kathryn, he took the opportunity to drop out of reality and join her on a Foreign & Commonwealth Office posting to Senegal. It was here that he developed the character of Barney Thomson.
Since the late 1990s he has penned seven books in the Barney series, as well as several other crime and surrealist novels, written in the non-traditional style.
For Kathryn
Contents
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54
1
Friday afternoon. Standing in a queue at the supermarket, staring at the floor, the basket weighing heavily in my right hand. Dinner, milk, wine, water, orange juice.
I’ve chosen the wrong queue again. We don’t always choose the wrong queue, we just never notice choosing the right one. Glance at the old woman fumbling with change, counting the coins out slowly, as though she’s still converting from pounds, shillings and pence.
There’s another younger woman behind her. Looking at her phone.
Almost dark already. Too late to go for a drive. Tomorrow maybe. I can head off, then get out the car, walk some way up a hill. Nothing major. Nothing that requires a backpack. Up Strathconon, stop long before the end. Sit on the grass, watching the day crawl over the land, the deer mingling at the foot of the hill.
My phone rings. Much too loud. Set on full volume to make sure I never miss it. The three women beside me all glance disapprovingly. Their censure vanishes as I press the green button and put the phone to my ear.
‘Need you back in here, sorry.’
It doesn’t matter who says it, does it? The voice from the station: That weekend that you were about to start enjoying is going to have to wait.
My plans hadn’t amounted to much anyway.
I contemplate risking the wrath of someone anonymous at the supermarket by placing my basket on the floor and walking out, but instead I take a minute to walk round, putting my dinner and the drinks back on the appropriate shelves.
* * *
Five minutes and I’m closing the door behind me and sitting down in front of the Chief Inspector. He’s on the phone, but he waved me in. He’s writing as he listens. When he’s finished, he thanks the person he’s talking to and hangs up.
‘Need you to go to Tallinn,’ he says.
Looks across the desk. Humourless. Good at his job, respected. But totally humourless. Which means he isn’t joking.
‘Estonia?’
As opposed to where, I wonder, as soon as I’ve asked the question. Maybe there’s a Tallinn, Idaho or a Tallinn, North Dakota.
‘Yes.’
‘I don’t…’
‘You’re booked on the eight-thirty Gothenburg ferry from Aberdeen, so you’ll need to get going. Train from there to Stockholm, overnight ferry Stockholm to Tallinn, gets you to Estonia, more or less, for start of play Monday morning.’
He looks at his watch.
‘Sorry, Ben, but you’re the best man for the job, given your background. They’re not intending to do anything with it over the weekend, so Monday should be fine.’
‘What’s up?’
‘There was a case twelve years ago, before your time. It was news around here, but wasn’t too big nationally. A young couple went out to the Baltics, aiming to tour around. The chap, John Baden, went missing in Estonia. In the south, in a place called Tartu. It was in the papers for a few days. Then his body washed up on the shores of the lake that forms much of the border between Estonia and Russia.’
‘Murdered?’
He pushes a file across the desk.
‘Read it on the ferry.’
‘Was there anyone here who went out there at the time?’
‘Rosco.’
I nod, lean forward and lift the file. We don’t talk about Rosco.
‘So, there’s a new lead? That’s why they want someone to go out?’
No dramatic pause. The Chief doesn’t do drama, just as he doesn’t do humour.
‘John Baden, or someone claiming to be him, walked into a police station in Tartu this morning.’
Just as the boss doesn’t do drama, he doesn’t like to see his officers overreact. I remain expressionless. It was going to be something interesting, or else they wouldn’t be sending anyone out there.
‘The Embassy are involved?’
‘Of course.’
‘Is there anyone working there who remembers the case?’
‘Doesn’t appear to be.’
‘They’ve spoken to the Estonians?’
‘Everyone’s on board. Baden’s been taken to a military hospital. They’re going to keep him there over the weekend, try to get to the bottom of it on Monday. You should arrive just in time.’
‘And his partner from twelve years ago? Has she been notified?’
‘We’re trying to find her. However, at the moment we just want to know where she is and what she’s doing. We’re not telling her yet. Presumably… presumably this isn’t him. Look at the file. He was dead, his body was identified by at least three different people. This was an open and shut case.’
‘Except someone just opened it again.’
‘Yes.’ He nods towards the door. ‘You’ve just got a passenger booking, no need to take your car over. Mary’s got the details.’
I lift the folder, and
get up. ‘You’ll let me know if you find out where the partner is?’
‘Of course.’
I walk from the office, closing the door on my way.
I’m glad I’ve got nothing to cancel this weekend, but I’d be lying if I said that there’s anything I’d likely be doing that was going to be more interesting than this.
I go back to my office, lift my watch off the desk, and am strapping it onto my wrist as I get to Mary on my way out.
She’s ready for me and holds out a few pieces of paper, clipped together, as I approach.
‘Have a safe trip,’ she says.
‘When am I coming back?’
‘Open booking,’ she says.
I nod and walk out the station without stopping.
2
I was in Goma in 2007. Was supposed to spend six months there, give or take. The kind of operation that some people might find exciting. Me too, probably, a few years previously. By the time I got to Goma I’d had enough. Too many games, too many times looking at myself in the mirror and not recognising the person looking back. Yes, that’s a cliché, but it was right on.
Who was that guy? I couldn’t tell the colour of his eyes or whether there was any life behind them. I’d shut something down when I joined the security services. I wasn’t a natural actor or liar. Could only play the game by being nothing, letting nothing out. Nobody knew who I was. The people who’d known me before wondered who I’d become and what it was I was doing now. Gradually I lost touch with them all.
Goma was the end of it. I’d done two tours in Helmand, been in Kabul and Islamabad, and run some guys in Baghdad for a few months. Goma was always going to be the last. They knew. They knew I needed to be back in London for a few years. At any rate, I was thinking I’d be back in London for a few years; they were probably thinking that they’d wring one last drop of effort from me, and throw me on the scrapheap. At least it wasn’t the seventies, when the scrapheap meant a bullet in the back of the head so no one would ever be caused any embarrassment.
Goma was me being thrown into the midst of the Rwanda-DRC border conflict that’s been on-going since ninety-four. It was us, the United Kingdom, still trying to be a player. Still trying to influence events.
I don’t blame our government, not at all. You think we’re just going to screw up everything we touch? You should see everyone else.
There was a night, about four months in, when I was due to meet a couple of guys on the edge of town. A small shack that had once been a teahouse, but which hadn’t been much used the previous few years. Now it was nothing. An empty building, home to spiders and insects and small animals. You’d think someone would have moved in, but no one had. Maybe they knew. Maybe it should have been a warning.
I’d met them a few times previously. Maybe as many as five or six. I was trying to groom them to be our guys on the inside of the FDLR. They weren’t supposed to know who I was working for. As far as I remember, I genuinely thought they didn’t. They probably saw through my lousy South African accent the first time I sat down opposite them in a bar.
Such a stupid game. I mean, really? A fake South African accent? And me as well, trying to carry it off by saying as little as possible.
They arranged a meeting for me about half an hour by plane into the jungle, due north, heading towards Uganda. The fact that they didn’t let this get any further was also tantamount to their amateurishness. They could have played me far longer than they did. They could have milked the UK government for far more than they did.
Maybe they were worried that I would get too close. I don’t know. Never will.
The plane was a small four-seater, a basketcase, there was no faking that. I took one look at it and wanted to run. Had had my share of horrible flights in war zones the previous few years, of planes that could barely take off, and helicopters taking evasive action under fire.
But what was one more flight?
I could tell there was something happening. They were more nervous than usual. But I’d been in enough tough situations to not doubt my ability to extricate myself from it. Don’t second-guess, just play along and deal with whatever happens.
We took off, the two of them in the front, me sitting next to a couple of black plastic bags in the back seat. They wouldn’t tell me what they were. Turned out they were parachutes.
Five minutes in, when we’d risen steeply away from the edge of the city, out over Nyiragongo, I had a gun at my head and they were tying me to a chair. They took the money I’d brought along, as though that was it, that paltry sum was all my life was worth, they put on the parachutes, left the plane pointing straight ahead, lodged the stick against the control wheel and jumped.
It was dark. The plane juddered and dipped. I couldn’t see anything, and there was no radio to try and contact anyone, even if I’d been able to get my hands free.
Did they intend that I should fly on until the plane came to the Ugandan border, and then it would get shot down? If they thought that might cause some sort of diplomatic incident they could try to exploit, they’d have been wrong. There was no way the British government were going to acknowledge my existence.
The plane never got as far as the border. I struggled with my bonds, but couldn’t break them. At some point, the plane started to skirt the tops of trees. I couldn’t see anything, but I could feel it. Feel the underside of the fuselage flirting with the roof of the jungle canopy.
I was scared then. I’d been through a lot by that time and something was going to scare me sooner or later. And that was it. Sitting in a plane, no control, knowing that it was about to crash.
The left wing must have caught the top of a tree, and the plane was hurled round. I was thrown into the side wall, still tied to the chair, and then the plane was crashing through the trees, before rudely thumping against a thick trunk and plummeting quickly to the ground.
There was no explosion. Just as well, as I had no way to get out. Someone found me, someone cared for me, and somehow I ended up back in London, sitting in front of one of the DGs, being thanked for my work.
They’d wanted to fly me back from DRC, but I insisted otherwise, and chose to make my way from the eastern border of the country all the way to Dakar, by a patchwork of trains and roads, much of which was likely to be far more dangerous than travelling by air. From Dakar I hitched a boat to France, and then a train back to London.
It took eleven days in all, and I haven’t been on a plane since.
3
There’s a flat calm on the North Sea. A disconcerting, silent calm. Even the dull throbbing of the ferry’s engines seems subdued. Swallowed up by the sea and the dank air and the poor visibility.
Still water beyond the wash of the ferry. How can the sea, so tumultuous at times, ever be this lifeless? As though it’s been decreed: today the sea will not move. There will be no waves. There will be nothing.
The mist restricts the view to little more than a few hundred yards. There could be land over there and you’d never know, although the map on the television in the cabin shows that we’re in the middle of the sea, edging slowly towards Sweden.
Standing on deck with the smokers. Coat on, freezing November chill in the air, looking out at the grey nothing, impossible to tell, a short distance away, where the sea becomes the sky. There is no sky.
I could imagine, as I did last night on the ferry, that I would spend much of the daylight hours on deck, looking out at the sea. Standing out here now, however, I’m cold and dissatisfied. Slightly bored, even. How can you be bored looking at this? I position myself as best I can to escape the cigarette smoke, as though the removal of that annoyance might help. But the disaffection remains, and soon enough I decide to go back inside.
I stand still for a few moments. There’s a slight bustle around, the constant movement of passengers, from one activity to the next. Café, restaurant, cinema, floor show, amusements, shopping, a parade up and down, possibly everyone as dissatisfied as me.
* *
*
I position myself in the café so that I can look out upon the grey early afternoon. A cup of coffee and a cinnamon bun, another short while in the grey day, and then back to the cabin to read the rest of the file.
‘We could be anywhere.’
I turn. There’s a waitress standing beside the table, her fingers resting on the saucer of my empty cup, following my gaze out the window.
‘There’s a timelessness about it. Like we’re trapped.’ She’s not looking at me as she speaks. Almost as though she’s addressing the room, or maybe just herself. I follow her gaze back out over the sea.
A ghost ship, looming out of the fog, would not be out of place.
‘There’s something unsatisfying,’ I say.
‘You’re right.’
‘Why is that?’
I glance round at her, but she’s still not addressing me, even though we’re talking.
‘You can’t be part of it. You’re looking at something that you can’t become one with. The same as all views of mountains or… I don’t know, a great plain and a big sky. Snow is different, because you can interact with the snow. You can play in it, make things from it, feel it. Same with a beach and a warm, turquoise sea. You can dive in.’
I don’t know what to think about that, so I don’t think anything. We’re not really talking anyway. She’s talking, and I’m sitting here, vaguely in her vicinity.
‘When you stand out there, leaning on the railing, do you get the urge to jump in?’ she says. ‘Even though you know it’d be unbelievably stupid. Even though you know you can’t. You still want to. It’s like there’s something calling you, dragging you over the side.’
I nod. She’s right.
‘That’s because you want to be part of it. That’s the only way to truly appreciate it.’
‘You can climb a mountain,’ I say.
In the slight reflection in the window, I see her nod.
4
Papers are laid out on the bed. Ones which I’ve read and thought might need to be cross-referenced. There’s a small pile of one-and-done pieces of information.
The file would have been compiled by DI Rosco. We may not talk about him, but he was a decent enough officer, when the mood took him. Maybe this wasn’t one of the good ones.
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