Loe raamatut: «Whispers of Betrayal»

ONE

‘Bugger London.’

Peter Amadeus swore softly to himself as he stepped out from beneath the shelter of the theatre doorway and into the semi-darkness. Shaftesbury Avenue was under assault from the rain and was on the point of surrendering. Gutters ran with garbage and puddles like oil slicks were collecting on the cracked pavement. Even here, in the heart of the West End, it seemed that London was falling apart. Its streets echoed to the constant noise of nothing, while strangers huddled inside their cars, cutting corners so they could be the first to arrive at the next traffic jam, sounding their horns in impatience as they splashed down life’s muddy road. No one gave a damn about anyone else. That’s what life in the city was all about.

He lit a cigarette, drawing deep on nicotine and dank night air. The evening lights reflected from the damp roadway, forming a chorus line of red-and-yellow neon that danced around the soaked shoes of two figures beside a taxi. They were coming close to blows. One door handle, two hands. Raised voices. A dispute over occupation rights. Wars had been started for less, Amadeus supposed, but only by politicians.

Beyond the battle, on the other side of the Avenue, Amadeus searched for signs of his country, the homeland for which he had fought and on more than one occasion almost died. He found a Turkish restaurant, a Balti house, a pizzeria and three Chinese wok shops brushing up against a branch of his own bank that recently had been taken over by the French. There may be some small corner which was forever England, but it wasn’t here.

He’d been right first time. Bugger London.

Black fingers of rain began to burrow their way behind Amadeus’s collar. He shrugged, welcoming them like old friends, stamping impatiently as he waited for his wife. Marriage, he had long since concluded, was much like an examination of his prostate, something that left him wanting to be on his own for a while. She was still inside the foyer where he had left her, cheeks flushed, voice trilling as though in the heat of sexual excitement, launching opinions on a tide of gin-and-diet-tonic about a performance that had pitted two notorious thespian queens against each other, locked in a battle for inclusion in the Birthday Honours List. The only sort of combat they were fit for. And as close as she’d got to an orgasm in years. Unless, of course, she’d been …

Suddenly he felt the blood drain from his cheeks, overwhelmed by one of those fleeting moments of honesty that left him feeling physically sick. Who the hell was he to sneer at others? Amadeus was nothing but a paper warrior, whose weapons were bulldog clips. Whose battlefield was a bursar’s desk at some inconsequential fee-paying school in the suburbs, whose only recent victories were against misdirected invoices, and whose Commanding Officer was a woman intent on exacting exquisite revenge for the years she’d spent following in the dust of his career. A once-and-would-be man who now smoked too much and swore too little, who over-tightened his belt and whose bed was as cold as an Arctic foxhole. Who found himself lingering outside playhouses like some cuckold in the rain.

He needed more narcotic. He lit another cigarette. He wasn’t to know that it was a cigarette that would change the course of his life.

Life disgusts Amadeus – no, it’s worse than that. He disgusts himself or, more precisely, is disgusted at what he’s become.

His mind wanders. He’s no longer on the steps of the theatre but back behind his desk in the office at Aldershot where he commands 3 Para. He distrusts this desk, indeed any desk, and despises the fact that so much of modern soldiering is fought from behind barricades of paper. It’s one of the reasons why he leads from the front, hoping to leave much of the paperwork scattered in his wake. This is also why his battalion will follow him anywhere, for Amadeus is a soldier’s soldier.

Yet some pieces of paper refuse to be ignored.

After months of deliberation, the Defence Council has reached its judgement. The Army has been weighed in the scales that balance political convenience against the many bad cheques signed by politicians at election time, and it has lost. An Army that once ruled a quarter of the globe and refused to bow to Thug or Zulu or Hun is to be brought to its knees by a mixture of recession and the awesome incompetence of its political masters, who have ordained that an entire third – the legs, one arm and both balls – is to be hacked off. Discarded. The letters of redundancy have just arrived by courier. They are sitting on Amadeus’s desk, accompanied by details of the appeals procedure and glossy brochures about how to survive in the life ever after. More worthless paper.

It is Thursday. The letters are to be locked away in the regimental safe waiting for distribution to the miserable wretches concerned on Monday. Amadeus, of course, has been told that he is entirely bombproof, that his exceptional military record stretching from the battlefields of Goose Green to Bosnia and the Bogside means that his position is beyond question. They can’t touch him.

So why is his own name on one of the envelopes?

They’d avoided him after that, all his colleagues and fellow officers who had any part of the decision and who might have been able to tell him why.

Why? Why me?

In fact, it was true, Amadeus had been bombproof, right up until the very last moment. The computers of the Directorate of Manning had whirred and identified the targets for redundancy by age and by rank, and Amadeus only just crept into the zone. When the Army Establishments Committee had sat in deliberation, they’d even asked Amadeus to give evidence.

Perhaps his evidence had something to do with it. The five members of the committee had sat like hooded crows in Historic Room 27 on the third floor of the Ministry of Defence, beneath chandeliers that hung from a magnificent stucco ceiling and lit walls crowded with oils in gilded frames. They were here to discuss economies. Cuts. Surrender. The chairman was a brigadier with a reputation for soaking up whisky in much the same manner as a teabag soaks up hot water, a process that afterwards left them in much the same condition. The only traces of colour in his face were the red rims of his eyes and the reflection of last night’s decanter that still clung stubbornly around his cheeks.

‘I’m still not sure, Colonel Amadeus, why you insist that an air mobile brigade couldn’t be commanded by another cap badge. Perhaps a Royal Marine, say, rather than by a Para officer.’

‘I would have no problem with that.’

‘Really? But I thought you’d just been telling us at some length and with considerable vehemence why putting a Royal Marine in charge of a parachute unit would be tantamount to disaster.’

‘But the Parachute Regiment is not an air mobile unit, Brigadier. We’re air-borne, part of the airborne brigade. The sort of rapid deployment unit that took the Rhine crossings and Goose Green and –’

‘Yes, yes! A slip of the tongue, Colonel, you know what I mean!’

‘You ask me how we might make economies in the Parachute Regiment without undermining its effectiveness. I tell you it’s not possible. Our political masters cut the Army by a third in the 1990s, yet they kept tasking us to do more. Not just in Northern Ireland but Cyprus and Bosnia and Kosovo and Timor and Angola. And now they want to cut another third? It’s madness. Madness! They’ll be able to fit the entire British Army inside Wembley Stadium and still leave plenty of room for the other team’s supporters. Although come to think of it, we might have to leave the tank outside.’

‘No need for impertinence, Colonel.’

‘My apologies, sir. Must have been a slip of the tongue.’

The brigadier’s red eyes flashed mean and filled with the desire for retribution. ‘Let me return you to the issue. Economies have to be made, those are our instructions. So the armed forces must become more flexible. After all, since the end of the Cold War there’s no longer a need for great standing armies –’

‘Which is why we need to be more flexible and mobile. Which is why we need the Paratroopers.’

‘The threat is more “up and down”, if you like, I’ll grant you that. Yes, more flexible, I agree. So why not use the Territorial Army to plug any gaps at a time of occasional crisis?’

God, watching this man fumble with his brief was like watching a child play with a loaded pistol in the school playground. ‘The Territorial Army, sir?’

‘Yes, the Territorials, Colonel.’

‘You mean the same Territorial Army that the Government cut in half only three years ago? It would be easier to plug the gaps with traffic wardens. There’s more of them to spare.’

‘Take care about your tone, Colonel. We have a job to do here. It may be distasteful but do it we shall.’

‘So who’s going to stand up for the Army, then?’

‘I resent that, sir! I’ll have you know that my ancestors fought at Waterloo.’

‘On which side?’

The brigadier was out of his chair as though a grenade had rolled beneath it. ‘Enough! We’ve heard enough from you, Colonel. Evidence over!’

Typical of bloody Amadeus, they all said, and smiled. Yes, somebody had to stand up for the Army. Amadeus was safe.

Until the last minute. For it was only at the last minute, as the main outlines of the recommendations were being prepared for consideration by Downing Street, that someone remembered the Prime Minister had a constituency interest, a Royal Marine base on his doorstep, and a majority that was anything but robust. So the Royal Marines had to be spared. The outlines were redrawn and an additional lieutenant colonel from the Parachute Regiment was put in the slot instead.

Amadeus.

They couldn’t tell him that, of course, couldn’t even hint they’d destroyed his career for the convenience of the Prime Minister, so many of them simply avoided him. They left it to a wretched captain to meet him when he travelled up to the Personnel Centre of the Military Secretariat in Glasgow to exercise his right of appeal. (He was meant to be seen by a colonel, equivalent rank, but the colonel in question had heard of Amadeus’s reputation for being bloody-minded and had suddenly discovered a mountain of urgent paperwork to sort through. So he’d delegated and the captain had drawn the short straw.) The Personnel Centre was next to the bus station, a place which came complete with its full quota of derelicts and dossers, men with outstretched hands and reluctant eyes who had been unable to manage some transition in their lives. Former soldiers, perhaps. As Amadeus passed them by he wondered with a flash of alarm whether he might even have served with some of them. Yesterday’s heroes. He hurried on, ashamed.

The Personnel Centre was gaunt, built of red brick, economic, cold. This was where he had come to argue for his life. Inside Amadeus found nothing but a heartless open-plan room with cheap industrial screens providing the only means of privacy. He also found the shifty little apple-polisher who passed as a captain in the New Model Army.

The captain had Amadeus’s file open in front of him. Twenty-five years’ worth of bravery and dedication. Top in ‘P’ Company. Director of Infantry’s Prize at Platoon Commander course. His tour with the SAS out of Hereford. Instructing at Sandhurst. And the battles – the South Atlantic, the Gulf, the Balkans. The season ticket to Northern Ireland and the Queen’s Gallantry Medal that went with it. Even the little details like Warren Point, where he’d shovelled what was left of his companions into plastic bags after the bomb. Everything was there. Not many files as thick as that in this place.

‘You’ve done extremely well, sir,’ the captain began. ‘I see from reports that you’ve had an excellent career …’ The captain read on, prattling, patronizing. Anything to avoid looking Amadeus in the face. ‘A difficult matter, sir. But you see, a decision had to be made. And I see you have a problem with dyslexia.’

‘It’s only a problem if you can’t tell the difference between an order to shit and shoot, sonny. Haven’t made that mistake yet. So how about you?’

‘Sir?’

‘You ever had an order to shoot?’

Flustered, the captain pushed a piece of paper across the table. ‘If you want to go through the formal appeals process, Colonel, you will need to fill in this form.’ More nervous shuffling of papers. ‘And I’ve got some additional details of the assistance we offer with resettlement, just in case.’ At last the captain summoned up the courage to look into Amadeus’s slate green eyes. ‘Do you need any help filling out the form, sir?’

Amadeus picked up the form, and with it a glass of water. His mouth had suddenly gone dry. And as he read, and sipped, he realized something had happened to him. Tiny almost imperceptible waves upon the water in the glass were catching the light from the overhead bulb. As he watched, transfixed, he thanked all the gods that the bumped-up little creep of a captain couldn’t see what had happened.

For the first time in his life, Amadeus’s hand was shaking.

He is back outside the theatre, in the rain, feeling homeless in his own homeland. In a moment of silent fury he tosses away the half-burnt cigarette, the cigarette that will change his life, then in considerably less silence he mouths a curse more suited to a sergeants’ mess after the beer has run out. As the wind carries his curse away into the raw night, a figure darts from the shadows, barely dodging the front end of the now-departing taxi and forcing it to a sudden halt. The brakes screech in protest but the figure pays no heed. It is a figure that belongs to the night, of no definable appearance, swaddled in a grime-streaked blanket. A man, by its size, bent and scurrying awkwardly, with no apparent care in the world other than to retrieve the still-smouldering cigarette from the damp, evil pavement.

From beneath the blanket a thin, bone-filled hand reaches out to snatch up its prize. Eyes flicker, yellow in the night and on fire. A stare is held. A glimpse of recognition passes.

Then the eyes are gone.

Amadeus freezes, paralysed by memories of another life. Another place.

Mount Longdon in the Falklands, on the march to Stanley. Amadeus no more than a first-flush lieutenant, a Para platoon commander on a night assault in the swirling snow, up against Argentinian lines that were well dug in. In the dark it had come down to hand-to-hand combat, bayonets and guts. A lot of guts, mostly theirs. Sleepless for three nights. Exhaustion to the point of hallucination. And carelessness. When he’d jumped into the trench he’d assumed that the spic was dead, like the other three, killed by his grenade, and so he’d turned his back. That was when he had seen those eyes, and the man, advancing on him through the darkness and snow with murder in mind and a bayonet already caked in blood. He remembered a lunge, a scream, another gut-spilling twist of the blade.

But no pain, not for Amadeus.

Behind him the Argentinian, rifle still clenched in his hands, had fallen dead.

‘Behind you, bastard!’ Amadeus had heard. ‘Why, there are Welsh Guardsmen out on this fucking hill and the sheep have all scattered or been blown to buggery. No telling what those Welsh fairies might get up to without their sheep. So remember. Watch your bleedin’ back, you stupid bastard. Sir.’

And with that the eyes were gone once more, away on their mission of murder.

The eyes had belonged to Scully. ‘Skulls.’ Albert Andrew. At that time a camouflage-covered, crap-chewing corporal, and later the Regiment’s finest and most formidable Sergeant Major with an MM, a QGM and a mention in despatches as proof, and a portrait hanging in a position of honour in the mess. A man who had risked his life on occasions beyond remembering in the service of his country.

A man who now values his life as no greater than a discarded cigarette butt.

Scully.

They’d betrayed him, too.

One minute he had been sitting in a bar off a cobbled backstreet in Osnabrück, having a last drink before being sent out to Kosovo, the next he’d been spewing his mince and tatties into his partner’s hands, his leg and his career shattered by a coffee-jar bomb. Kids’ stuff, those bombs. A simple affair, nothing more than a glass jar filled with scrapyard confetti and a compression detonator, and the top screwed on. The coffee jar had been thrown from the back of a motor scooter which disappeared into the night even before the coffee jar had hit the floor. The one brief sighting of the bombers suggested they were teenagers. Truly kids’ stuff. When the glass broke less than a dick-length away from Scully’s right foot, the detonator had decompressed and exploded, and the confetti – sharp, murderous chunks of metal with razor teeth – had chewed a path halfway through his leg. All in a day’s work for a Para keeping the peace on the streets of Djakovice or Pristina, perhaps, but not in a backstreet bar in Germany, not when he was off duty. Which is why, when they decided they had no further use for a soldier with only one leg, they offered him their very best wishes but no compensation beyond a meagre disability payment. They argued that Osnabrück wasn’t a war zone, the sort of place where you budget for a heavy cripple count. Hell, he was off duty. Drinking! Couldn’t expect the Treasury to pay for every last damned scratch. It was unfortunate, of course, and unexpected, but that’s what goes with being a soldier. Have to expect the unexpected. Of course, the two youths on the scooter might have been members of the pro-Serbian Prince Lazar terrorist group that was chucking bombs all over the place. That was entirely possible, but not provable. So, sorry, Skulls. Now, if you’d actually reached Kosovo, that would’ve been different, and Northern Ireland, too. Part of the home country. Sensitive. Soldiers weren’t supposed to get blown up and butchered on home turf, so if Scully had copped it there he’d have got a thousand pounds a stitch.

But Osnabrück wasn’t the Bogside. Scully hadn’t been an innocent victim. He’d simply been … well, unlucky. Wrong place, wrong life. A trooper with a bad break. And only one leg. As if he’d fallen down stairs on a Friday night. And if they paid out to every soldier on the basis of bad luck, where would the System be?

So Scully’s career had disappeared, and with it his wife. Then Scully, too, shortly after that.

Until tonight.

Amadeus was about to launch himself after the RSM, but now his wife was at his side, dragging him back, as always she dragged him back. Anyway, Amadeus knew there was little point in pursuit; if Scully didn’t wish to be found then he would not be found.

Suddenly Amadeus found himself overcome by a feeling he could only describe as envy. Envy of Scully, of this man in the gutter. Of his freedom, his ability simply to be able to disappear and leave the whole miserable mess behind him. God’s bollocks, it had come down to that. He was jealous of a fucking tramp.

His wife was summoning him, demanding he find a taxi. The call of duty. At one point in the Gulf War, during his tour with the SAS, Amadeus had been leading a Scud hunting patrol and in the darkness of the desert night had stumbled across a recce company of Iraqis. They shouldn’t have been there, according to the oxymorons at Army Intelligence, and even if they were they shouldn’t have offered any resistance, certainly not a fire fight. With only seven men Amadeus had captured 43 Iraqi regulars – 49 if you counted the body bags. Stopped an entire Iraqi company. For that they’d given him the Military Cross. Now all he did was stop taxis. Two young women brushed by, arm in arm, their young faces full of life. They were laughing – not with him, not even at him, they simply hadn’t noticed he existed. To them he was just another anonymous, middle-aged man stuck in a crowd. A cold, sodden cloak of self-loathing suddenly wrapped itself around Amadeus’s shoulders. He found himself reaching for another cigarette, his hand shaking, the cigarettes all but tumbling from the packet.

Then the loathing overwhelmed him. His hand clenched tight and, with all the strength he could find, he crushed the pack of cigarettes as once, when his rifle jammed, he had crushed the neck of an Iraqi conscript until the terrified eyes had begun to bleed in their sockets. All in the service of his country. A country that no longer wanted him, and thousands of others like him, like Scully. A country whose leaders had betrayed those who had served them most loyally.

He spilled the offending cigarettes into the gutter, slamming his heel down and grinding them to pulp underfoot. He didn’t want them any more. What he wanted, what he truly bloody wanted out of this mess, for himself, for Scully and all the others, was … what? Not their careers back, not even justice, it was surely too late for that. But perhaps an apology, an acknowledgement that they had been treated wrongfully, that all this cut and slash had gone too far. Belated recognition that they were men. Of valour, and of value. Not to be discarded like some cigarette pack in the rain.

It wasn’t much to ask for, an apology, but to men of honour even a small sign of contrition can heal so many festering wounds. Amadeus stood in the rain, at one of those turning points that mark a man’s life and throw his future unto the hazard, looking up and down this foreign-infested street, and decided upon his course. It was time for action, in the tradition of any wronged British soldier.

He would write a letter. To the Daily Telegraph.

Less than half a mile away from the cracked paving stone on which Amadeus stood resolving to change the world, Thomas Goodfellowe was entering upon a personal crisis of his own. The rain had hesitated and he decided to avoid the scramble for taxis in New Palace Yard after the House had adjourned. With a wary eye cast at the low clouds swooping overhead, the Honourable Member for Marshwood unlocked the chain securing his bicycle – it wasn’t safe nowadays, even left in Speaker’s Court – and resolved to risk the ten-minute ride back to his apartment in Chinatown.

He needed the fresh air. The last two hours had been spent in the manner of a small schoolboy on detention duty, wriggling in discomfort on his seat while he endured a debate about the war against drugs. The war was going exceedingly well, according to the Minister, a former car assembly worker by the name of Prosser who had MUM tattooed on the knuckles of one hand and DAD on the other, a diminutive man who kept rising and falling on the tips of his toes as though peering over the top of a trench under enemy fire. Drug seizures had declined sharply in the last year – proof positive, in the Minister’s view, that the smugglers and cartels no longer saw Britain as a soft touch, scared away by sniffer dogs and the force of his own Napoleonic will. His new shoes squeaked in acclamation.

Trouble was, this was the self-same Minister who, a year previously, had bobbed up and down at the Despatch Box to claim credit for a sharp increase in drug seizures, ‘unambiguous evidence,’ he had claimed at the time, of his ‘commitment in the war against these weeds of evil’.

Fair enough, Goodfellowe had concluded, consistency in politics was usually nothing more than evidence of a closed mind, but in Prosser’s case it seemed scarcely a mind at all. The man hadn’t the wit to appreciate the absurdity of his logic, nor the grace to laugh it off when it was brought to his attention. Goodfellowe had done so, brought it to his attention, intervened in jovial fashion to remind the House of the words the Minister seemed to have lost somewhere along the way.

The Minister, however, had been unappreciative. His eyes narrowed, his knuckles cracked, Mum had chased Dad around the Despatch Box and Goodfellowe had been reduced to parliamentary pulp. Such was the prerogative of Ministers. And the lot of backbenchers.

Goodfellowe had shuffled tediously through the final Division Lobby feeling much like a cow passing through the gates of a milking shed. It had been a long night and several of his colleagues were showing unmistakable symptoms of ‘the staggers’, the parliamentary equivalent of BSE in which the victims stumble aimlessly about their democratic duties, particularly after a heavy dinner – although the political variant of the disease rarely proved fatal. Many members had been known to survive in that condition for years. Thank God they had the Whips to prod them along and to take over when their own faculties failed.

Particularly Whips like Battersby.

Battersby was an oversized man with a figure like a deflating balloon and a face that brought to mind a cauliflower. A couple of outer leaves stuck out from the top of the cauliflower in passing imitation of hair. The Battersby mind could never be described as broad but, in the exercise of his duties, it was extremely singular. He was what was known as the Whip of Last Recourse. It was his function to deal with those Members who had reached that point of utter confusion in which they started rambling about ‘conscience’ and ‘principle’ and refused the invitation to enter the milking shed. At that stage Battersby would reach into his badly cut and over-large jacket and pull out a little black book. The production of this well-thumbed volume was a gesture that inspired remarkable piety, for in it were recorded all the known telephone contacts for that particular Member. Starting with The Wife, of course. Then The Parliamentary Secretary. Also The Constituency Agent. In the case of an alcoholic, the book held the number of The Doctor or The AA Group, and with a gambler, perhaps even The Accountant or The Bookmaker.

But the most potent entries in that little black book seemed to be those numbers that a Member struggled to keep most private – the ‘OI’ numbers, as they were referred to in Battersby’s shorthand. What those in the Whips’ Office called ‘the numbers of the night’. The places where the Member was mostly likely to be found in the hours after the sun had set. The numbers of The Mistress or The Lover.

In Battersby’s book and in his meticulous script, these names were divided into two categories and marked as either ‘OI-1’ or ‘OI-2’. These categories differentiated between ‘Occasional Indiscretion’ and ‘Ongoing Involvement’. Of course, the collection of these numbers was more of a hobby than a necessity since all his Members had waistband pagers by which they could be contacted, but Battersby liked to keep ‘that little personal touch’, as he explained it.

The errant Members themselves were marked with an ‘FU’ designation. ‘FU-1’ indicated ‘Family Unaware’, thereby rendering the Member open to coercion. These Members he liked, even had affection for, so far as his politics allowed. But he drew the line at the ‘FU-2s’. From Battersby’s point of view, those marked with the awesome ‘FU-2’ branding were outcasts, worthy only of eternal exile or – still better – execution as soon as an appropriate scaffold could be nailed together, for it indicated the small number of Members who had not only sniffed at the skirts of perversion but who had grabbed at them and lifted them high. These were the most dangerous of parliamentary colleagues, the Members who were in the habit of switching off their pagers. Who were ‘Frequently Untraceable’. And therefore ‘Fundamentally Unreliable’. And many other things besides.

All were recorded, noted down in Battersby’s lexicon of lusts. His diagnostic skills were something of a legend; a Member need only to have tarried for a few hours beneath a duvet he hadn’t bought himself and Battersby would have discovered not only the number of the bedside telephone but even the tog-value of the duvet. Production of the dog-eared manual at the regular surgery he held in the Whips’ inner sanctum had a similar effect to a cattle herder producing a revolver – cures amongst those beasts afflicted by the disease of conscience proved almost miraculous.

Battersby was a bully. Goodfellowe found him breathing down his collar as he waited his turn in the milking shed.

‘Still shagging that waitress, Goodfellowe?’ Battersby enquired, addressing the back of Goodfellowe’s neck. It was meant without undue maliciousness, almost as humour, as one might have asked after a result at tennis, but Goodfellowe had already played the victim once that evening and was in no mood for a rematch.

‘Did you have garlic for dinner, Alfred?’ Goodfellowe responded, not bothering to turn round. He sniffed. ‘Yes, definitely garlic. And Guinness.’

‘Something’s taking your eye off the plot,’ the Whip growled, responding in kind, his tongue working around his teeth as though in search of a lost sweet. ‘Must be the waitress. ‘Bout time you came round, old chum, and remembered the first duty of every backbencher.’