The Kills: Sutler, the Massive, the Kill, and the Hit (17 page)

‘I don’t want to stay in Nottingham,’ she said. ‘I don’t, I know I don’t. I’d rather be on my own, back at home. There was a bonfire here in Wilford, by the river. A bonfire organized by the Rotary Club. And this man, a resident, threatened a volunteer helping with the car parking.’ Was he following? Did this make sense? ‘This man threatened the volunteer then returned twenty minutes later to beat him up. At a charity bonfire. In Wilford. It’s not the Middle East,’ she said, ‘it’s Wilford, Nottingham. I don’t want to be among these people. They complain about a charity bonfire, and right on their doorstep there are children as young as eleven selling drugs along the river. This, they could care less about. This is fine. Children on bicycles selling drugs. Children with dogs, Alsatians, children who hiss at you, who make suggestions of what you might like to do for them as you make your way home.’

Parson let her anger ride, anticipating its conclusion.

‘Your sister agrees, I’m better going home. I can’t do anything here. I feel useless. I’m waiting. That’s what I’m doing. I have three months of waiting. If I need to come back I can come back. I would rather be on my own. I was going to write, but I thought that if you called and I wasn’t here that you would worry and I don’t want you to worry. I wanted to tell you so you wouldn’t worry.’ She paused, a beat, as if to prompt him. ‘I wanted to tell you because you’d understand.’

‘I’ll call Gibson. He has contacts with the RAF. He’ll send some planes,’ Parson replied, ‘we’ll take Wilford off the map.’

‘You promise?’

‘I promise. The name will be forgotten. It will be a crime to speak of Wilford. Superstitions will start.’

It took them longer each time to close the conversation.

‘Soon,’ she said, ‘I’m not counting, but stay in Turkey.’

‘I’m not sure it’s possible. If nothing comes up they’ll send me back to Iraq.’

Laura consoled, advised, suggested solutions which would not fit, ideas which illuminated the gulf between how he spent his days and how she spent hers. He couldn’t begin to explain.

‘Isn’t there anyone you can speak with?’

Parson said no. It simply didn’t work like that. As long as the claims kept coming from Iraq, Gibson would keep him on site. It was simply cheaper than sending someone from London every time.

You’ll think of something, she said, because you have to. ‘You’ll figure this out. You’ll cook something up.’ Her voice rang with a clear faith, or this is what he supposed she intended.

Parson promised he would do what he could, and the line clipped short.

He sat in his car, sulky at the prospect of an eight-hour drive back to Kopeckale, his wife’s voice lingering with him. The whisky he’d drunk tasted of smoke, of cigarettes. Laura was right. The longer he remained in Turkey the less likely he would return to Iraq – and Gibson would send him back to Iraq the moment the search concluded. As he slipped the printout of Sutler into the folder an idea occurred to him:
If you set a device in an office, if you knew that this was going to explode, you would be running, and you would be running away. You would be running with your back to the explosion. You would not face the blast if you knew it was coming, not without protecting your face. You would not have scratches on your face. It would be unlikely.

There could be many reasons why Sutler had turned: a door that would not open, an unexpected delay, but surely, he would have protected himself, cringed, shied away? It would only be natural. The simple fact that Sutler had not escaped the building restored his idea that the man was moving by accident, not design. These new ideas did not sit well.

He sat for a long time and considered the situation. HOSCO had refused to settle with the widow of the translator Amer Hassan, and while this was not related, he found that he could not sympathize with their current trouble. It seemed
just
to him that HOSCO would have to struggle, and he no longer liked the idea that he was assisting them. The longer he ran after Sutler the less time he would spend in Iraq. He saw no harm in manufacturing, no, not manufacturing, but
enhancing
evidence. He did this already when he needed to sway a claim one way or another, although he’d failed to do so in the Hassan report. These shifts, these inflections, would depend on tiny
amplifications
, nothing concrete, nothing extravagant, just a matter of small unconfirmed sightings, hotel bookings, taxi rides, travel arrangements, spare and harmless details to keep Geezler off his back while he continued with his search. Geezler also remained a question in his mind, although he could not properly formulate why. The information about the bank accounts, about Sutler being responsible for the attack on Southern-CIPA, about Sutler giving gifts of watches and whisky to the men at Camp Liberty (when Pakosta and Clark had admitted that Howell had provided these gifts), was all conjecture. Too eager to bend the facts to suit a particular reading Geezler sounded like a man trying hard to convince. He probably didn’t even know he was doing this.

3.9

Ford waited in the van with Martin, while Nathalie, Eric, and Mehmet ran errands in the market. Martin elected to stay with the equipment and sat with the camera nestled between his legs. Still peevish he leaned out of the window and avoided conversation, pretending he couldn’t hear because of the street. Parched, Ford hoped that Nathalie would remember to buy bottled water. She’d made a list but left it on the seat, and he suspected some other agenda behind the trip. Late afternoon and the sun scalded his bare arms.

He began to entertain Eric’s ideas that Martin preferred men, or rather boys, or rather his students, and that through some perversity he was attached to Nathalie, who could, in her own manner, be considered peerless. How then, and why, would such a woman satisfy herself with such a man? Whatever Martin’s charms, whatever his appeal, Ford couldn’t see it.

Martin, lost to his thoughts, tugged at his beard.

Ford redirected his attention to the town.

Larger than Narapi, Birsim’s streets span out from a central market. Mehmet had parked facing the main square and left them with a packet of coloured pencils to hand out to children. It was better, he said, to give crayons, but the children wouldn’t accept them. Instead they bothered Martin for cash, or took the pencils and poked him with them, then slapped the van’s sides when he refused to give them money. Bored, Ford watched a line of mules progress toward them. A whole other order of information: sweaty and exhausted beasts hauling sticks and sacks of concrete with tourist shops on either side; glass windows, white tiled floors, then these animals of bone and pelt tethered one to another, exhausted by the heat. The streets busy. The shops empty. No tourists, not this far east, not this season.

A gentle percussive
ba-boom
, nothing more suggestive than a firework pop, reverberated down the street. Martin perked up, sat forward, and some moments after the stink of scorched rubber overpowered the air. From the far side of the market rose a pall of grey smoke. Martin sniffed and muttered that something was on fire. The smoke, now black, ran thick across the square and clogged the mouth of the street. Wisps of ash – burnt paper, rubber – coiled delicately down upon them.

The crowd immediately became confused. People facing the square collided with people escaping so that the street became impassable. Alarmed by the acrid stink and the unearthly black snow the mules stopped immediately alongside the van. One slumped hard against the door so that the vehicle began to lean. Camera ready, Martin struggled with the door in an attempt to shove the beast aside, but the animal would not budge. Ford clambered into the front seat, wound down the window, and pulled himself out, then up, to the van’s roof.

Martin struggled after, and Ford helped him up, his arms streaked with ash. When children attempted to scramble onto the van he pushed them down and they slipped back into the adult crowd. The smoke began to thin, and from their vantage point they could see the source of the fire.

On the far west side of the square smoke pumped through the open windows of a burning bus, the contents of the hold – shoes, clothes, baskets, suitcases, fruit, tatters of paper – spat out across the market. Flames roiled from the undercarriage.

Martin filmed the muddle using Ford as a support, and Ford sighted Eric and Nathalie among the crowd in the square with a pinch of relief. Behind them, a good number of red and black berets of the military police. Bothered by the crowd Nathalie wrapped her arm about Eric’s shoulder and Eric directed her forward. Behind them, only just in view, came Mehmet, surrounded by soldiers. When he spotted Ford and Martin on top of the van he began to shout.

Ford drank his share of the coffee, then helped himself to another cup. The bus-burning came as a reminder of the promise he had made in Kopeckale that he would avoid crowds, keep away from public spaces and gatherings, situations which he could not control. Eric finished and then re-started the novel because there were things he didn’t follow, he said, things he’d missed, and there wasn’t anything else to read but old newspapers. The idea that you could read the chapters in any order appealed to him, even though it wouldn’t change anything he already knew. He might go into town. He might try the hammam. He asked Ford if he was interested: you could get proper coffee with hot milk at the barber shop served by a giant ape of a man. There were pastries, honey and almond, yet to be tasted.

Ape
. This choice of word, surely a poke at Martin?

Nathalie sat on the bench with her back against the wall, a bowl of olives on her lap. She’d had words with Eric and now they weren’t speaking. Her sights fixed on Martin, visibly brewing discontent. Martin picked dough from the bread and rolled it into pellets which he stacked on his plate. None of them were interested in making conversation. Ford couldn’t see his place in this. Nathalie moved the bread from Martin’s reach, and with a deep intake, a long single breath, she asked if Ford could help settle an issue.

‘Tell me, and be honest, I want to know what you think. Was it wrong to take pictures yesterday?’

The discussion which should have been exhausted still had legs.

‘Why are you asking him?’ Martin spoke in French.

‘Do you think it was right to film that bus? Do you think he had any business being there?’ She challenged Ford to take her side.

‘What difference did it make? There wasn’t anything we could do and he had the camera with him.’

‘You don’t understand,’ Nathalie disagreed, ‘he didn’t do it because he
happened
to have a camera.’

Martin interrupted. What was her problem? Seriously?

‘The problem is all about taking pictures like this,’ she reached across the table and held her hand flat, close to his face, ‘with the camera this close. It’s a terrible thing to do, to watch and do nothing. Suppose that somebody was hurt, what would you have done?’

‘Nobody was in trouble. I’m not a doctor. I make films. I couldn’t have helped even if the situation was different.’ Martin reached for his cigarettes.

‘But you were filming.’

‘You know what goes on here. It wasn’t an accident. The fire was deliberate. What do you expect? This is exactly why I came here.’ The appearance of one digital camera on the streets of Birsim was a ridiculously small infringement of anyone’s liberty. ‘I don’t see why you have a problem with this?’

‘I don’t care,’ she said, ‘but that isn’t the issue. You know this. What would you do if your students behaved like this? Anyway, now you have what you wanted.’ Nathalie untied her hair and drew it back inside a closed fist, her voice an aside, low and sulky. ‘Go see for yourself, now we have someone watching us. Just like you said.’

Martin stood up, a motion left incomplete, his hands dithering on the armrests. He asked what she was talking about.

‘There is a man, outside, just as you said, he’s been there all morning.’

‘What man?’

‘Go see for yourself. Your activities have finally brought you to the attention of the police.’

Sulky and wronged, Nathalie stood up, and said pertly that she would see them all later, she was going out. Martin could do as he pleased.

They gathered in Mehmet’s small office at the front of the house, Ford, Martin, and Eric, and leaned cautiously into the window for a view of the street. A car, a grey and dusty Peugeot, was parked on the opposite side in a street with no other vehicles. Inside, as Nathalie had said, sat a man, visible in silhouette.

An hour later Ford and Eric checked the street and found the man still outside, waiting. Ford kept an eye on the street and kept up the reports: ‘He’s still there . . . hasn’t moved . . . I think she’s right,’ while Eric and Martin downloaded the digital film onto separate portable hard drives. When Nathalie returned the man in the car did not disguise his interest – he turned to watch as she came to the door, then kept his attention on the house once she was inside.

3.10

Anne sat with her back to the café and gave her order in English.

See
, she told herself,
see how well this suits you
. Relaxed, she looked to the hotel and wondered if she should call Eric. She wanted to clear her mind, to have absolutely nothing in her head so that she could approach her work without the framework of other worries or concerns. But she worried about speaking with him. She worried that he could somehow divine her thoughts, and guess that she had read his private discussions, this online
banter
with other men. She thought of herself as a bad spy, the world’s worst, possessing no cunning, not one ounce. Above her, blinds and shutters clattered open as the hotel rooms were cleaned, sunlight bold on the upper storeys.

The street curved toward the Campo di Fiori – a street busy with scooters. It was disappointing not to have heard from him. If Eric called the conversation would open up as something natural, easy, he would talk about his holiday and they would have a subject to discuss. If she called, it would be her prerogative to steer the discussion, and she had nothing to say – or rather, she knew that whatever she had to say would sound false and he would immediately sense her unease. Disappointed not to have heard from him she checked her mobile for new messages. She called, in any case, and left a message.