For once Trish slid into consciousness instead of waking with her head full of angst and the inside of her mouth clamped between her teeth. As she came to awareness that she was no longer asleep, she found herself thinking about Kim.
The phone rang. She reached for the receiver.
‘Trish Maguire.’
‘Trish. Have I woken you?’ It was Andrew Stane’s voice.
‘No, I’m up, and concentrating on Kim.’
‘Great because I’m about to have breakfast with a young captain who knew Daniel Crossman in the army. If you get your skates on, you could join us in the pub in Smithfield.’
‘I’ll be there. When?’
‘Seven-thirty.’ He gave her the precise address, adding: ‘You should still have time to be in chambers for most of your pre-court warm-up session.’
Grateful and bursting with energy, Trish thanked him and put down the phone. She grabbed the nearest black linen suit out of the wardrobe and pulled it on over a plain white cotton shirt. A new packet of tights fell into her hands like a piece of ripe fruit, and the tights practically unrolled themselves up her long legs, instead of sticking and snagging, as they usually did when she was in a hurry.
The air outside felt thicker than in the last few days, and the sun was just as bright. She wished she hadn’t needed the tights.
A clinging mixture of nylon and Lycra was the last thing to wear on a day when the heat made you feel you were inside a boiler, but no barrister had ever gone bare-legged into court.
Andrew’s talk of getting her skates on had made her think she would have to rush, but as she reached the far side of the bridge and looked round the great curve of the river towards Big Ben, she saw that it was still only a few minutes past seven. The walk up to Smithfield and through the market would take fifteen minutes at the most, so she could linger on the bridge and indulge herself with her favourite view.
The dome of St Paul’s was golden in the morning sun and the river sparkled. One day, she hoped, the cranes that disfigured the cityscape would be gone. Now they stuck up like thorns all round the cathedral, reminding her that nothing could be perfect. If she ever let herself expect that, she would be in for another crash.
‘Don’t ask for too much and you’ll end up with more,’ she told herself as a welcome puff of wind touched her face. She breathed deeply, then turned her back on the cranes.
Twenty minutes later, she found the two men in the upstairs room of the pub, surrounded by traders from the meat market. She was the only woman in the place, and the air was fuggy with steam, and loud with hoarse east London accents. Andrew Stane, who looked comfortable but out of place in his softly crumpled linen, was sipping coffee. The man opposite him was tucking into a vast plateful of meat and offal, like most of the other customers. Trish gagged and decided on coffee, then changed her mind and ordered tea.
‘I’ve just taken my platoon for a ten-mile run,’ the man explained, pointing to his half-eaten plateful as though he had to excuse his appetite.
He was good looking, probably no more than twenty-nine, with smooth golden-tanned skin and fine dark hair, cut very short. His colouring suggested a Mediterranean ancestry, but
his voice was as English as could be. It also had all the drawling confidence of a public-school upbringing.
‘No one of your shape needs to apologize for what he’s eating,’ Trish said, not minding his voice nearly as much as she would have done when she’d first come to London as a lonely, spiky law student with a degree from Lancaster and an impoverished Buckinghamshire childhood behind her. ‘Now, neither of you has any more time than I have, so let’s get down to it. What can you tell me about Daniel Crossman?’
‘You know I wouldn’t be here at all if he was still serving with the regiment, don’t you?’
A waiter picked his way between the tables, carrying four huge plates of eggs, steak, bacon, kidneys, sausages and black pudding.
‘We’ll take that as read,’ Trish said, encouraged. No one made protestations of loyalty if he had nothing dangerous to say. ‘Look, I don’t know your name. I can’t just call you “you”.’
‘Charles. Hi. OK, well, there’d always been rumours about Crossman,’ the captain said, rushing out his words in case she pressed him for his surname, ‘but never anything substantial.’
‘Rumours of what?’
‘Bullying.’ He’d produced the word as though it had no more than one syllable, like the cough of a silenced pistol, but Trish heard it all right. She nodded to urge him on.
‘That doesn’t mean it was true,’ Charles said, painstakingly decent and determined to do the right thing by everyone. ‘Sergeants have to be tough on recruits, you know. And men who’ve never been subject to any kind of discipline see harassment where their grandfathers wouldn’t have noticed anything out of the ordinary.’
‘Really?’
‘Absolutely. I mean, you should see the riff-raff we’re getting in now. No one’s ever told them what to do: they’re scruffy and unfit; they’ve never learned how to sit still for more than two
minutes or concentrate on anything. They’ve never even known what it is to be part of a team. They have to be licked into shape. It’s the duty of sergeants, in particular, to—’
‘Go back a minute,’ Trish said, gripping her cup so tightly that the handle bit into her finger. ‘You said something about having to learn to be part of a team.’
‘Yes.’ His expression was puzzled, as though he couldn’t imagine why anyone would question it. ‘Everyone in the forces has to learn that. You can’t let the others down under any circumstances whatever. You have to accept that your life is far less important than keeping the platoon – or brigade, or regiment – going. It’s obvious.’
‘Yes,’ she said, thinking of her early-morning ideas about Kim. ‘But what I want to know is how Crossman taught them to feel that they were part of a team.’
‘I don’t understand.’ There was enough stillness in Charles’s body now to tell Trish she was on the right track.
‘I’ve heard of people who force a sense of collective responsibility by using scapegoats,’ she said warily, determined not to scare him off. ‘Is that what Crossman did?’
‘How d’you mean?’
‘Say one of his men broke a rule. Did he punish the individual, or did he take someone else — someone weaker; maybe a friend – and make the offender watch him being punished instead?’
Andrew Stane stiffened, but Trish wasn’t looking at him. The captain’s face gave her all the confirmation she needed. But she wanted him to say it too, so that Andrew could hear. There was a pause, long enough to stretch anyone’s nerves. Deliberately defusing her own impatience, Trish drank some of the cooling tea. She’d left it so long that there was scum on the surface and around the side of the cup.
The waiter shouldered his way through the crowd to bring Charles a rack of toast and about half a pound of butter.
‘If you knew that,’ Charles said at last, shifting from buttock
to buttock in his chair, ‘why did you make me come here?’
‘I didn’t
know,’
she answered. Andrew Stane re-crossed his legs. Still Trish wouldn’t look away from the young officer. ‘But I—’
‘Why isn’t there anything on his record?’ Andrew burst out, as though he couldn’t bear to keep quiet any longer. ‘If you knew what he was doing, your senior officers must have known, too. We should’ve been warned as soon as we asked questions about him. A man like that isn’t fit to be alone with little children.’
‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ said the captain. ‘We’re not interested in whether our men will make good baby-sitters. We’re training them to fight side by side with each other and to be strong enough to see their best friend killed in front of them and still go on fighting.’ He dropped his knife and fork, greasy with egg yolk and dripping with tomato ketchup. Trish had to look away.
‘Don’t forget it’s men like Dan Crossman who kill for people like you,’ he went on. ‘When the next war comes … you’ll be damn grateful for men who’ve been trained by the likes of him.’
‘I understand what you’re saying,’ Trish said, meaning it. She hated the whole system he’d defended so uncomfortably, but she could see that he had to believe in it while he did the job for which he’d signed on. ‘Is there anything else that might help us? Do you know anything about Crossman’s private life? His family?’
‘No. I mean, he didn’t have any. He never spoke about his past or had any friends outside the regiment. It happens, specially with some of the long-serving non-commissioned officers.’
‘Why did you get rid of him in the end?’ Andrew asked nastily. ‘Did he do something so particularly brutal even your lot couldn’t contain him any longer?’
The captain tidied his knife and fork and stood up, pushing
his thumb and forefinger into the back pocket of his tight jeans. Trish could see the outline of all his muscles.
‘He’d done twenty-five years,’ he said, pulling out a battered brown-leather wallet. It looked as if it could have been his grandfather’s. He extracted a twenty-pound note. ‘I’ve got to go.’
Trish stood, too, and gave him back his money. ‘This is on me. I’m so grateful that you came. You’ve almost certainly helped us save at least one child, probably two.’
His eyes opened a little wider. Suddenly he looked very young. Then he nodded crisply, fighting for the impervious mask he needed to cope with the life he’d chosen.
‘Listen,’ he said, leaning closer to her and sounding far more intimate than he had before, ‘you need to know where Crossman was coming from. He’d seen service in the first Gulf War. D’you know what that means?’
‘Only what I read in the newspapers.’
‘Then look at them again, and think what it must have been like. He had to watch men he’d trained since they were boys stuck in range of the enemy’s guns when their tank seized up in the sand. They burned. Do you know what that means? What the temperature is inside a tank that’s on fire?’
Trish shook her head.
He told her, adding, ‘Six of them died in that inferno.
They
were his family then. Doesn’t that make a difference? Don’t you think that kind of experience would make any man impatient with a whining little girl?’
‘We don’t know she whined.’
‘I bet she did.’ His full lips twisted in an unhappy grimace. ‘I’ve got sisters. I know what they do to get what they want.’
‘Are you really saying that killing and seeing other people killed excuses terrorizing a child?’ Andrew’s voice was hostile.
The captain’s mouth twisted even more. ‘No. But that kind of experience does things to you.’
Trish was only a couple of inches shorter than him. She took a step back so she could look him straight in the eye.
‘So does growing up in terror.’
He opened his mouth, shook his head and turned away. After two steps he came back. Trish wanted him to give in, to admit the humanity she knew existed in him. All he said was: ‘Andy Stane promised me absolute discretion. You’ll abide by that, too.’ There was no question in his voice; he was giving her orders, just as he’d been trained to do.
‘I won’t pass any of this on to anyone else,’ she said, thinking: Andy? Where did these two meet? How did Andrew get him here so promptly? If he knew about this captain before, why didn’t he consult him until now?
‘I can’t be quoted in court or made to appear as a witness. Or anything like that. Andy promised me.’
‘I understand. That’s fine. Don’t worry. We just needed the information to help us help the child to talk. You go on. We won’t get in your way.’
He nodded again, seemed to be on the verge of saying something else, then turned on his heel and marched himself out of the hot, friendly pub.
‘How did you know that?’ Andrew asked when she’d got herself back under control and was sitting down again.
‘What?’ She looked at him and saw unusual resentment in his nice round face.
‘The way Crossman punished his men.’
‘It was something that came to me overnight. I’d been thinking about Kim and the baby again. But it wasn’t only that. I can’t explain.’
‘You think he punishes the baby when she does something wrong?’
‘Or vice versa.’
‘What could either of them do that’s so bad?’
‘I don’t know, but I’d guess it has something to do with
making too much noise. Anyway, thanks to your friend Charles, I’ll know what questions to ask her this afternoon.’ She pushed her tea away to the far side of the table. ‘You know Crossman must have had a hellish time when he came out of the army if he really had as little real life as Charles said.’
‘He certainly married Mo pretty quickly, which suggests there was a huge gap to fill.’
All round them, men were pushing back their chairs and paying their bills. Breakfast was over.
‘God! I feel sorry for her.’
‘Your trouble is you feel sorry for everyone, Trish. Even a brute like Crossman.’
‘Only a bit.’ She picked up a napkin and wiped her face. The steam from the coffee machine and the heat of the bodies around them were making the atmosphere like a sauna. She thought of Crossman’s wife and the two children.
‘What must it be like in that flat? Crossman can’t have any idea how he feels, or what his emotions are making him do, let alone what drives Mo, or what the kids need.’ She put down the napkin and stood up. ‘I’ve got to—’
‘Run,’ Andrew supplied, smiling for the first time that morning. ‘I know. On your way.’
‘Oh,’ she said, coming back to the table a second later, ‘did you manage to sort your crisis? The one that dragged you away from Caro’s bedside?’
The smile deepened. ‘I did. Thanks for remembering it.’
The compliment triggered another memory just in time, and she left him with enough money to settle the bill for all of them. One day she would ask him how he’d found the perfect source of information on Crossman’s army career so quickly, but there wasn’t time now.