by William Shaw
‘And then the raids came to Ngala. It was always at night. You never saw them, not at first. There was one on a farm fifty miles away, first. A settler’s boy was killed. White. About ten. That was really shocking. They’d already killed half a dozen blacks, but now it was that they’d killed one of us, you know? Then a week later they raided your farm, but your husband was ready. He had guns there and paid men to stay up all night. The Mau Mau weren’t expecting so many bullets to be coming their way and they scarpered. Your headman was nicked by a bullet, I think, but that was the worst of it. In the morning we went out and found the body of one of the Mickeys, hit in the middle of the chest by a bullet. The wound was crawling with ants, I’ll never forget. First real dead man I’d seen.’
He took a puff from his cigarette.
‘I was shocked by the effect it had on me. We were thrilled. We’d seen them off. Only when I told Ruth about it, I burst out crying. I couldn’t help it. The shock of seeing someone dead, I suppose. She held my head in her lap like I was a child and I sobbed and sobbed. That night she took me into her room and kissed me, properly.
‘Anyway, that was the beginning of the end of it. The worst raid was in September. I was in the police station when I heard all the Home Guard jumping into a Land Rover. Your husband was with them, Mrs F. He had his hunting rifle. Huge great thing. A Magnum.’
Breen remembered Eloisa Fletchet talking about the guns she had used to shoot elephants with.
‘They said they had heard that the Mau Mau were preparing to attack the next farm to us. There must have been ten of us. Took us an hour to get there, so it was almost dark by the time we arrived. I remember how we waited for the Mau Mau, guns at the ready. My heart was going crazy. Out there it’s so dark, you know, like a wall of black. And I was thinking: They’re out there. Soon they’ll start firing at us. Only they didn’t. False alarm.
‘So we got into the Land Rover and made it back to Ngala as the sun was coming up, exhausted. And then we heard it, over the engine noise. This wailing sound. And as we rounded the bend into the village, everyone was outside, crying.
‘The Mau Mau had come in the night while we were all away and attacked the headman’s house. They killed all his family. Two men, five women and three kiddies. All hacked to death with knives and machetes, then the whole place had been set alight. When we got back there were still bits of them everywhere. That was what they did, the Mau Mau. They wanted to make everyone afraid. And they did. It was dreadful. I wasn’t used to dead bodies still.’
‘You are now,’ said Breen.
Doyle ignored him. ‘But I didn’t cry this time. I was angry. That night I went to see Ruth. This time it was her who cried. It turned out she taught two of the children who had been murdered. I was so angry. She was grieving so hard, it shocked me. As if they had been her own children. I couldn’t stay long because I had to get back on duty. That would be the last time we were properly together. That same night, going back home to my quarters, I went down past the Home Guard station and I heard someone screaming. Someone really in pain.
‘So I went inside. “What the bloody hell’s going on in here?” There was a man called Jeremiah. A sergeant in the Home Guard. Short-arse with a round face and a big smile. He said, “We are questioning a suspect.” And I could hear behind the door this man whimpering. Saying something in Kikuyu I didn’t understand. “Let me see,” I said. So they opened the door. And there was this naked man. Tied to a chair with wire. It was real dark in the room. But I could see he was bleeding from between his legs.
‘His head was down. I didn’t recognise him at first. Then he must have realised that someone else was in the room and he looked up. It was one of the guys who ran a shop in the village where I used to go to buy beer. I said, “This guy’s not a Mickey. I know him. You all know him.”
‘“No, no, no. He’s one of them,” said Jeremiah. “He takes money for the Mau Mau. We raided his shop and we found the money.” I was shocked. First that they had been torturing this guy I knew, then that they were saying he was a Mau Mau. I’d always thought he was OK.
‘The guy looked up. I didn’t know his name, but he recognised me. “Please, sir,” he said. “Help me.”
‘I was horrified. I said to Jeremiah, “He’s a local. You can’t treat him like that.”
‘Jeremiah just smiled. And then I heard a voice behind me. “Of course he can. This is an emergency.” It was your husband. And he was standing there, cool as anything.
‘I said, “What’s happening? There must be a mistake.”
‘But your husband said no, the Mau Mau must have had spies in the village, you see. The Mau Mau were all holed up in the Aberdare Mountains, miles away. The moment we had gone, somebody would have snuck out and told the Mickeys the village was undefended. That’s how they caught us with our pants down.’
Breen looked toward the window. The first daylight was breaking beyond the curtain. Doyle reached in the pocket of his shorts and pulled out his pack of tobacco again.
‘You see, the shopkeeper had confessed. Milkwood told me how it worked. Behind our backs, the Mau Mau extorted locals to support them. They might not even want to, but they had to. Otherwise they’d be attacked. That’s why they’d killed the village headman and his family. Because he wouldn’t pay. That’s how the Mickeys survived. And it turned out this shopkeeper was their book-keeper. They even found this ledger with the names of people in the village in it and sums of money next to it. The shopkeeper claimed it was just the money they owed him on account, but Jeremiah wasn’t having any of it. Far as I was concerned, if he was the one that took the money, that made him just as bad as the men who chopped up those women and children.’
Doyle licked the new cigarette he was making. ‘I was shocked, I admit. I had trusted this guy. I had bought goods from him. Given him ciggies. And here was your husband telling me he was a terrorist. Of course I believed him. I thought of Ruth’s girls, chopped to pieces in front of their own mother and father. Fair enough. Hurt him all you want, I thought. He deserves it.
‘I never found out what happened to the shopkeeper. I guess he died. If you’d asked me then, I’d have said, “Serves him right.” I’d seen the dead bodies. I’d seen what the Mau Mau did, with my own eyes.’
He stopped talking and lit the new cigarette. He sucked in smoke, then leaned down to pick up the gag. Then he walked behind Breen and tied it around his mouth, so tightly that Breen’s cheeks were drawn back against his teeth.
Breen tried to call out, but all he could manage was a squeak through the cloth.
‘Only then, a couple of days later, I walked into the village for supplies and I saw the shop was still open, so I went in, apprehensive like. And there, standing behind the counter, large as life, was Jeremiah, with this big smile on his face. “Welcome to my shop,” he said. “For you, sir, a special discount.”
‘I remember your husband saying, “So what? The loyal ones deserve their reward. If we don’t support them, we’ll be as bad as the bloody Colonial Office.”’
Doyle sucked the cigarette once more until it was hot, then held it against the skin on Breen’s right arm, just below his shoulder. Breen squealed with pain. He was going to torture him to death, just as he was killing Eloisa Fletchet.
‘That was only the beginning. The Mickeys had more guns now. It seemed as if the Mickeys raided all the time at the end of the year. Always at night. It wasn’t like you ever saw them. Sometimes we fought them off OK. Once they killed a couple of the Home Guard. Another time they caught two girls and raped and killed them. It turned out they were Jeremiah’s cousins. Another time we found a body in the rice fields. This Mickey had been hit and had tried to crawl off, but he hadn’t got far. I felt fine, looking at him, that time. Happy, even. It tears your sanity away, in the end.’
Doyle removed the cigarette, pulled on it a few more times, then pressed it against Breen’s skin a little lower down. Again, Breen’s scream was muffled by the gag.
‘At the beginning, I remember asking your husband, “How can you tell which is real and which isn’t?” “That’s the trick,” he said. And he pulled out this lanky guy and we took him into the screening room. Because that’s what we all called it now. The screening room. First off, Fletchet asked him for his ID. Guy said he had lost it. I remember Fletchet smiled at me. See? But that didn’t prove anything, did it? I thought: Loads of them don’t have proper ID.
‘Then Fletchet said, “You’re one of the ones who raided the Home Guard last week, aren’t you?” The guy just shrugged. No. Not me. And he glared at Fletchet. This real dead man’s glare. So Fletchet picked up this gun and swung it round at the man’s head so hard he knocked the guy right off his feet. Crack. The guy got up and still said he had nothing to do with it. He was scared now, though. You could tell.
‘So was he a Mickey or not? Fletchet said to me, “You think I’m being too hard, don’t you? Well, I already have a list of five people who have already told me this guy is a Y1.” We used to classify people as Z, Y or X. Y1 was a Mau Mau of lower rank. Fletchet used to write it all down in a ledger. Name, address, classification. He had all these little code letters too to show what we’d done to them; how far we’d had to go before they confessed. All neat it was, like it made what we were doing official.
‘So this guy was down on his knees now. Pleading with us. I had thought he looked so genuine. The pleading looked real enough too. Your husband said, “See? You can’t tell, can you?” But, look, we already knew he was one of them. I believed Fletchet. This man had taken the oath. And if they broke the Mau Mau oath, they’d be killed. So he had to deny it. No choice. Fletchet said the only way you’re going to get it out of them is to make them more scared of you than they are of the Mau Mau. And he handed me the gun. “Go on,” he said.’
Doyle moved around to the other side and started there. Fresh skin. Fresh pain. Breen threw his head backwards and forwards, trying to loosen the gag, but he couldn’t.
‘I thought of that girl who had been in Ruth’s class. I had seen her body. One of her little hands had been cut off where she’d tried to stop the killer. And this guy in front of me was one of them. So when Fletchet handed me the gun, I had a go too.
‘It wasn’t as hard as you’d think, once you’d hit them the first time. I whacked him in the guts with the butt and it didn’t take long until he started spilling names of people. I didn’t enjoy it, but it was a result. It had to be done. And when I hit him, he gave the names of other people in the village. Fletchet wrote it all down in his book, but then he said, “We could send him to the magistrates’ court. But they’re so backed up with cases they probably won’t even try him till next year. And if they do, one of those coloured lawyers from Nairobi will end up defending him. Maybe even getting him off. That would be ridiculous.”’
Doyle shook his head, as if in answer to something Breen had said. ‘I couldn’t do it. Not that time, anyway. Fletchet did it.’ Doyle made his fingers into a gun and held it to Eloisa’s unconscious head. ‘Bang.’
He stubbed the cigarette out on Breen’s left arm. The pain was excruciating.
‘Like I said, you get used to it,’ said Doyle. He sat down in a chair. Blinked, relaxed. ‘I didn’t tell her what we were doing. But Ruth knew. It was only a small place. I remember going to visit her. She’d be sitting on that bench outside her house. After that first man I interrogated, that was it. When she saw me coming she stood up, she went inside and bolted the door. I knocked, but she wouldn’t answer. She wouldn’t have nothing to do with me after that. I was hurt at first. I said, “He was a Mau Mau. He’s the reason why your pupils are dead.”
‘Your husband said it again: “You never know which side people are on, around here.” I refused to believe that. I thought maybe it was just too dangerous for her to be seen with me now. So I spent more time with your husband and Milkwood. And anyway, things got worse. We spent each day screening people. The attacks carried on. I was spending all day in the station now. More and more and more of them.’
He left the room for a small bedroom to the right. Breen craned his head, but couldn’t see where he was going.
‘You quickly learned there was a point when everyone was going to start naming people. But I noticed something else. As people became more frightened, of us and the Mau Mau, that point became further and further away. Each day, what we had to do to get them to confess got worse. Your husband had started using pliers on their hands, by then. He would cut off fingers. Then we were putting electricity on their balls. They would jump up and down in the chair. I didn’t do it. They did. I watched, though. You just got used to it. We really believed that unless we did it, the tide would engulf us.’
When Doyle returned he was holding a hunting knife.
‘The Home Guard station had become a prison camp now. We’d made them build these huts and it had wire all around the place. By Christmas we were holding two, three hundred people, waiting to screen them. It was exhausting. I have never been so tired in my life. Every day we would be interrogating. All day, every day. We lost our minds. Every day this thing ran deeper. More people. More confessions. Then in the evenings we’d clean up, go to your house for a lovely gin and tonic, like everything was all perfectly normal. “Any news from home?”, “What about the cricket?”
‘Inflicting fear and pain becomes a kind of science. Your humanity disappears. But it worked, in a way. By the next spring, attacks were dying out. We had rounded up so many Kikuyu that we had ripped the heart out of the Mau Mau.’
Doyle stood in front of Breen; he held one hand on Breen’s thigh, keeping him down. He sucked on the cigarette, then held it by Breen’s nipple and pressed.
Breen bucked and wriggled, felt his eyes rolling back into his head. This was tender skin; Doyle had known that the pain would be far worse than before.
Doyle stood back and sucked the cigarette into life. ‘Ruth never came near me all that time. Then one day, in the middle of the night, I heard a knocking on the door of our house. I was a little bit pissed. We’d been drinking at your place. I was drunk every day then, after work. It was the only way I could sleep. You had to be careful opening the door at night. I remember poking my gun out the door and looking round. And there was Ruth, scared to be out late, scared in case anyone saw her coming to see the white policeman.
‘I was so happy to see her. I thought she’d come to see me. I realised how much I’d missed our conversations. I must have been babbling on to her, but she put her finger to her lips and said I was being too loud. She said we had arrested this boy. A former pupil of hers. She asked us to be merciful with him. She swore he was nothing to do with the Mau Mau. That he was a good, Christian boy. “How do you know?” I said. She wrote his name down on a piece of paper for me. I said I would do what I could but she’d have to kiss me first. If he was not a Mau Mau, he’d be fine. I was drunk still from all your gin, Mrs F. All I wanted was a single kiss. But she pushed me away.
‘I was angry with her. It was hard, what we were doing. She should have understood that. Understood that I loved her. Next day I looked out for this fellow, all the same. I would have done anything for Ruth. Couldn’t find him anywhere. I searched all the quarters. Asked all the Home Guard men. They all shook their heads.
‘That night at Fletchet’s place, I asked, casual like, about him. “He was a Mickey,” Fletchet said.
It turned out Milkwood had already interrogated him. He had confessed. One of the Home Guard had executed him that morning. “And why are you so interested in him, Nicky?” said Fletchet. “Would it have anything to do with that visit last night you had from the schoolteacher, Miss Wairimu?”
‘I should have realised. Milky had heard Ruth coming to our quarters the night before. He’d heard her asking about the boy. “Did she offer to fuck you, for information?” said Fletchet.
‘I was drunk again. Your gin, Mrs F. I told them they were talking rubbish. Ruth? She would never do that. Everything was getting out of hand. Fletchet called me naive. He laughed at me. Milkwood knew she was sneaking into my room at night, he said. She was a spy. How fucking dare he say that? I remember standing up and smacking him one in the face. That was the last thing I remember. Milkwood clocked me on the head. A gin bottle, I think it was, Mrs Fletchet. I went down like a sack of shit.’
Breen had discovered that if he sat still, the pain seemed to lessen. Some blood still trickled out of the wounds, down onto his naked thighs, but not much. He tried to listen.
‘I woke up locked in our quarters. I screamed and hammered on the door but nobody came. They put food through the front door. Milkwood arrived, eventually, the next morning. He said they were sending me home to England. Compassionate grounds. I said, “Where’s Ruth?”
‘He said, “Forget about her.” I ran to the screening station. They had taken Ruth that previous night after they’d knocked me out. I think they were both drunk. They raped her and tortured her, then left her for dead. She had confessed too, they said. She was a Y, they said. I saw her body too. They had left it in the ditch behind the screening camp. They had tortured her for the whole night and day. They had tortured her with cigarettes. They had cut her breasts. They had cut her stomach. Cut fingers off both hands. They had pushed a boiled egg into her vagina.’