Safe from Harm

by RJ Bailey

  He scoops me up with a hand under my waist and manoeuvres me to the edge of the bed and gently pushes his way into me. There is a pause, where I enjoy the feeling of him inside me. Been a while. He begins to move slowly but easily. I want it fast but I force myself to look at a spot on the wall to stop me from coming too quickly. I’m frightened to breathe.

  Tom grabs my waist and slides me further onto the bed. He’s on top of me now and fully in me, holding his body above me, light but strong. But I want to feel the weight of him, so I push to unlock his elbows and pull him down, reaching behind to grab the loops of the jeans that are now slung under his buttocks. I yank him closer so that our hips lock together and I whisper: ‘Now.’

  Afterwards, I lay on the bed, splayed out like a starfish, while Tom went to work on his coffee machine. I felt as if I had been filleted, that if I sat up – tricky with no spine – my limbs would flop like rubber. There were aftershocks playing over my lower belly. I swore if I looked I would be able to see the skin rippling. ‘How did that happen?’ I gasped.

  ‘I think the man gets an erection and then puts it in the lady’s—’

  ‘Tom, stop it. You know what I mean.’

  He offered me my coffee and as he did so his eye went down my body. An unexpected wave of embarrassment hit me. I set about gathering up the sheets and pulled the covers around me. ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘Don’t look at me.’

  ‘Don’t look at you? We’ve just . . . well, I think we might have moved beyond that sort of coyness.’

  I took the coffee but kept the covering in place. Little flashes of what we had just done came back to me.

  ‘What are you feeling?’

  ‘Joy and pain,’ I replied glibly.

  ‘Like sunshine and rain.’

  ‘Yes. That song was one of . . .’

  Ouch. I felt a sourness in my mouth as Paul’s shade shimmered between us and then faded.

  ‘And I thought you were only going to give me a new sweatshirt.’

  He banged his palm on his forehead. ‘Doh. I’ll . . .’ He indicated going to fetch something.

  ‘No. It’ll wait.’

  Tom sat next to me and ran his fingers through my hair. It was bizarre, to be touched like that, with a tenderness. I couldn’t tell if I liked it or not. I wasn’t used to contact with a stranger.

  Well you’d never have guessed that from what you just did. Twice.

  Thanks, Freddie.

  Tom cleared his throat. ‘I really didn’t mean this to happen. I mean not straight away. Not today.’

  ‘Did you want to book an appointment?’ I asked. ‘My diary is really not that full.’

  ‘Nor mine.’ I was strangely glad to hear it. ‘Look, I’m not a “girl in every canal basin” kind of guy. It was just as much a surprise to me.’ The beat was just perfect. ‘A nice surprise.’

  He pulled on some tracksuit bottoms and a T-shirt. ‘You off now?’ I asked.

  ‘No, I just can’t say what I have to say naked. Doesn’t feel right. Or respectful.’

  It was a bit sudden for a proposal, so it couldn’t be that. And how respectful you can be while wearing a Robert Crumb T-shirt was a moot point.

  He composed his face into something serious. ‘The last time we met, I wasn’t entirely straight with you.’

  ‘About?’

  ‘About who I am. My name isn’t Tom Buchan. Well, it is now, but it wasn’t when I served with Paul.’

  I really did feel as if the centre of the bed had turned to marshmallow and I was sinking into it.

  He touched my wrist and I pulled away, the warm glow I had felt inside doused by icy water. ‘Let go. What the fuck are you talking about? Served with Paul where?’

  ‘In the army. Look, as I said, I didn’t want it to happen like this. In this order.’ I made to speak, but he shushed me. ‘Please . . . just listen. When you told me about Paul dying, I knew that something wasn’t quite right. You see, a couple of months ago I heard that Gary Shepherd, a Scouser, had been the victim of a hit-and-run accident about a year back. Only it was a bizarre hit-and-run, because they took the trouble to reverse over him, making sure to squash his head. Then, a week later, I read that Norrie Newton, another one in our squad, he’d been found floating in the sea off Cornwall. Two of them, you see. Out of seven. Then, you told me about Paul.’

  ‘One is possible, two is probable, three is definite,’ I said softly.

  ‘Yes. Someone murdered Paul, but I doubt it was this Blade of Islam you keep going on about.’

  ‘Do you know who it was?’

  He shrugged, as if not wanting to commit.

  I found I was shouting. ‘Do you know who killed my husband?’

  He swallowed hard. ‘Yes.’ And then his voice became cracked and small. ‘I did.’

  THIRTY

  ‘After Bosnia, we were sent in next door as part of K-FOR. You know what that is? Paul must have talked about it. A United Nations peacekeeping force in Kosovo, trying to stop the Serbian-Albanian conflict tearing the country apart. Jesus, it was a mess. The UN Mandate was a piece of toothless shit. We couldn’t fire our weapons, except in self-defence. The protocols of engagement meant we couldn’t intervene in any situation unless we were ourselves in danger. We watched the KLA ethnically cleanse a village of Roma. No, not watched. Heard it. We saw the bastards go in, knew they were up to something, and we just stayed where we were, outside, next to our Warriors and personnel carriers and Land Rovers, engines running, weapons cocked, and listened to the pop of small arms and the screams of women and children. Two hours, while our captain tried to get permission from UNMIK to go in. Not a bad bloke, Charlie Clarkson, but he was a stickler for procedure.

  ‘But you know, we soon became part of the problem. The United Nations Mission, I mean. Just like in Bosnia ’95. Christ, it’s happening now in the Central African Republic. Right now. The peacekeepers, the aid workers, the NGOs, well, they’re men, mostly. So, in Kosovo as elsewhere, the locals, very enterprisingly, opened up brothels to offer the usual services to the men. But brothels need prostitutes to service the clients. Clients they had by the thousand. And so they filled those whorehouses with girls they’d kidnapped, duped or bought. They gathered them from across the region – Moldova, Bosnia, Romania, Bulgaria, Ukraine. Two grand would get you a beautiful fifteen- or sixteen-year-old. Selling her cherry covers most of that, then you get two years of clear profit, maybe three, before she’s a worn-out husk of a woman. Or girl. And then she’s shot in the head and dumped in a river or in landfill. Nobody cares. Who was doing this? Every-fucking-one. Every side. Jesus, there were even some UN troops involved in the trafficking, running girls and women from mountain villages down to near the bases for a fee or a few shags on the tab.

  ‘So, you have to understand we were pretty hacked off with the situation, right? Same old shit – we’re soldiers but we aren’t allowed to fight. Which makes us police, except we can’t arrest anyone. So this day, we are heading towards a village where we have had reports of a house set on fire. Three vehicles, a Land Rover, a Bulldog PC, and a Warrior armoured infantry carrier. We were in the latter, seven of us. Me, Paul, who was a first lieutenant at the time, Norrie Newton, Captain Clarkson, Harry Transom, a medical support officer, Gazza – Gary – Shepherd and Alan Findlay, big Scottish lad. Good boys, all of them. So we are about halfway to this village and the bloody Warrior throws a link on the track. Not a disaster, but time-consuming to fix. And one thing we learned is that when you get notice of something going down, unless you are on it straight away, you tend to get there when there’s nothing but ash and cinders left.

  ‘So we have a quick conflab, and the captain decides he’ll go ahead with the Bulldog, which is where our translators were, and the Land Rover, which is the most vulnerable vehicle. He gives us a corporal, Rog Lloyd, in his place and that leaves the seven of us and the Warrior crew to replace the damaged section of track. The right decision. That puts Paul in charge. We get out and
stretch a bit, have a fag or two while the crew get the right part ready. And we realise it’s a beautiful day. This section of the road snaked through a lovely valley, with wooded hillsides and a stream running next to the road. And it was quiet, apart from the crickets. We’d got so used to shouting and screaming and gunfire and arguments and burning buildings, we didn’t know what real quiet was. So nobody said much. We took off our helmets and either sat there at the roadside or leaned against the Warrior.

  ‘About five minutes in we hear these bells. A tinkling. And about halfway up a slope, comes this little herd of goats. We guess they’re heading down to the stream, ’cause the sun is well up and it’s getting hot. Ten, eleven, then maybe twenty of the buggers. And behind them, a girl, goading them on with a switch, a long thin stick. I don’t know how old she was. Sixteen at a guess, if that. As she gets nearer, we notice she’s got a shotgun slung over her shoulder. Now, back then and there, nothing surprised us. Who could blame her for wanting to protect herself?

  ‘But as she comes down the hill we can see other figures in the trees. On both sides of her. Paul stands up and shouts at her to go back, but she just waves, thinking it’s a greeting. We have no translator with us, they’re both in the Bulldog. So then the men emerge into the open and there’s about eight of them, ranging from fourteen to fifty. To this day I can’t be sure, but I thought they looked like the guys who did the Romas. They’ve all got a weapon of some description – pistols, shotguns, old hunting rifles, one AK.

  ‘And they start heading towards her. You know, straight for her. It takes a while for her to notice. When she does, she unslings the shotgun. But I don’t have to tell you, it’s one thing having a weapon, another having the guts to use to it. Plus, they’ve spread out. You know that technique, right? It makes it difficult to choose a target, when you’ve got a crescent of them on either side.

  ‘So now we’re all on our feet, waving her down. You know, come to us, we’ll look after you, leave the fuckin’ goats, but she’s frozen, unsure of what to do, who to shoot. The men get closer to her. Paul lets rip with a burst in the air. Birds break from the trees. The men stop, look at us, and then one of them, fast as a snake, steps in and rips the shotgun out of the girl’s hands.

  ‘Now she realises exactly what they want, and you can feel her fear even from that distance. It’s sickening.

  ‘One of the men, an older one, starts to jeer at us. They make all sorts of gestures, which looked pretty obscene. Goading us. They knew we couldn’t touch them. Some of the younger ones had begun to paw and prod at the girl. She was lashing out at them, which only made them laugh more. It was like a vile game of “It”.

  ‘Then another guy, I’d say about thirty, the one with the AK, he walked down the hill, ten, fifteen metres down, so he is closer to us. He unbuttons his pants and flips out one of the biggest cocks I’ve ever seen. I mean, there’s always one, isn’t there? In a group like that, always one hung like a donkey who takes every opportunity to whip it out. His looked like you should have a licence to take it for a walk. The others cheer. He waves it about a bit at us, points at it, then at the girl. Just in case we were particularly slow.

  ‘So he starts working at it while we watch, running his hand up and down the shaft, pulling back the foreskin, until he has this great stonker on. Two of the men have the girl by the wrists at this point, so she can’t go anywhere. The rest are clapping, this sort of rhythmic, almost flamenco-like dance clapping. As if this is some kind of cabaret.

  ‘The man with the hard-on raises his hands above his head, standing there like a three-legged stool gone wrong, when Norrie puts a bullet through him.

  ‘Bang.

  ‘The sound echoes down the valley, seems to take an age to die away. Nobody moves, except the guy who falls forward, jamming that erection into the ground like a tent pole.

  ‘Paul yells at Norrie. “What the fuck did you do that for?” Norrie shrugs. And then we all realise something at exactly the same time as the men do. We’ve started, so we’ll finish.

  ‘You see if word got out that K-FOR troops had exceeded the mandate, had interfered . . . well, the whole place would go up. Political chaos. Court martials. Glasshouse. Disgrace. We didn’t have a choice. Even Paul saw that, even though he tried to stop us at first. We advanced up the hill, firing. They scattered, but we got most of them. One of the little bastards was quick, though. He zigzagged like a good ’un. You could see rounds hitting the ground around him, but he was like bloody Billy Elliot, dancing his way through the gunfire. So I took Paul’s Browning pistol off him and went after this kid.

  ‘He bolted into the trees and he knew the terrain but he had a desperate man after him, and after about hundred, hundred and fifty metres, he had to cross a clearing. I knelt down, took aim, and blew his left calf muscle out. He went down heavy.

  ‘I could hear the Warrior starting up. The crew had got a move on when they realised what had happened. A hillside full of bodies was no news once we hit the road. A hillside full of bodies with British soldiers with red-hot smoking barrels nearby . . . no thanks. So they wanted to get out of there. I heard someone call my name.

  ‘So I reach the kid, who has turned over onto his back, and I can see he’s even younger than I thought. Twelve, maybe. Probably not capable of doing anything to the girl at his age. He says something to me in between gasps – he’s in a lot of pain. A nine mil to the leg is no laughing matter. Might have shattered the bone for all I know. There’s a lot of blood. I have no idea what he’s jabbering about, but he’s obviously pleading for his life. Just like that little girl would have done.

  ‘I heard a burst of gunfire. I’m being summoned back.

  ‘I raised the pistol, pointed it at his head, closed my eyes and squeezed the trigger.’

  I felt like I hadn’t drawn breath for fifteen minutes while he’d been talking. My chest ached. Finally I sucked in a good lungful. He hadn’t looked at me once while he had been speaking, just stared at the floor or the ceiling, anywhere but me.

  I waited until he had run out of words and asked, ‘The girl?’

  ‘Elona? She was OK. Bit shook up. We took her with us and got the translators to convince her that silence was the best option. She wasn’t stupid. She knew what had happened. We had saved her life. We’d broken the mandate, but saved her life. As far as I know, she never spoke of it. And if it is any consolation at all, Paul didn’t begin it. He held back, until it was all too far gone. Then he had a choice, stick with his mates, his comrades, or get them sent down as criminals. He chose his squad.’

  ‘I’m not going to judge you, or him, on that,’ I said quietly. I knew that what happened out in a combat zone can seem starkly black and white in hindsight. A war crime is a war crime, no excuses. In reality, the truth gets very blurred out there. Was it the right thing to do? Ask the girl. ‘But what about you being responsible for Paul’s death? You said . . .’

  ‘I didn’t kill the kid. I couldn’t. I shot the ground beside his head. Went back and told them he was done.’

  ‘Won’t blame you for that, either,’ I said.

  Now he looked directly at me, his eyes blazing with an intensity that made me feel very vulnerable wrapped just in a few scraps of sheets. ‘While I was away from here, when I left that morning, I went to do some digging. About the boy I let live. His name is Leka. They call him the equivalent of “Hoppy”, because of his limp. He’s a warlord of sorts. The nastiest kind of warlord. Drugs, women, extortion, violence for the sake of it. I think he grew up wanting to find the men who killed his father, his uncle, his brothers. I think he’s got people here hunting that squad down. I think by letting him live, I killed Paul.’

  THIRTY-ONE

  I am not a detective. Not Sherlock Holmes, Inspector Morse or even Hetty Wainthropp. I am a PPO, a bodyguard. I live in the moment, most of the time. What will happen in the next thirty seconds concerns me, not what happened yesterday or a week ago, not unless it has a direct bearing on the security
situation. Anticipation, that is the key on The Circuit. Mind reader, crystal-ball gazer, that helps. But I can’t do crosswords and I am useless at sifting clues and evidence. So what to make of Tom Buchan’s claims?

  I was sitting in my car, opposite the Bounds Green Fatih Mosque, churning his story over in my mind. I was right about the mosque. It didn’t quite match up in grandeur to its Istanbul cousin. It looked as if it had been converted from a double garage, opened up and built upon. It was sandwiched between a multi-occupancy house and a 24-hour greengrocer’s. And it was busy. But then it was Friday morning. It was also the day the Sharifs were due back, although Ali was doing the airport run, which was fine by me.

  There was a constant stream of men of all stripes coming and going from the place of worship, from those who looked like photo-fits of swivel-eyed extremist clerics (although I was well aware that looks can be deceiving in that department) to the smartly dressed who were popping in on the way to work. The owner of the grocery store had set up a little street stall where a young lad with a mop of black curly hair was selling soft drinks as well as access to ‘washing facilities’ out back.

  There was a separate door through which women entered. All who did so were heavily covered, not in full niqab, but with just the oval of their faces showing. They would also be devoid of perfume. Yet Mrs Sharif left the health club car park wearing a casually draped headscarf and, most days, a dab of Éclat d’Arpège. Not good enough to pass muster for entrance to Friday prayers.

  But Mrs Sharif didn’t come here on a Friday anyway. Saturday. What for? Private prayer? Instruction? Perhaps she didn’t want the secular Mr Sharif to know she retained an adherence to her faith, despite the Western trappings of her existence.

  So, that was one Puzzle of the Day.