The Perfect Soldier (48 page)

‘What’s happened to Bennie? You heard from him at all?’ Middleton’s eyes didn’t leave the page.

‘Top drawer,’ he said, ‘Africa desk.’

McFaul limped across to the workstation by the door. A big Michelin map of Africa was pinned to the wall above the computer screen. The map had been laminated in clear plastic and white chinagraph ringed areas where Global was involved. McFaul paused, looking at Angola, hunting for Muengo. The town had earned itself a red pin, Middleton’s private code for operational disaster. Red pins meant withdrawal under fire, the job incomplete, the worst possible outcome after months of patient fieldwork.

‘Top drawer,’ Middleton said again, ‘and good luck with the writing.’

Bennie’s letter lay beneath a sheaf of telexes from the British embassy in Luanda. It ran to five pages in all, a long, rambling account of what had happened in Muengo. According to Bennie, everything had gone wrong. The organisation had been shit, the support non-existent, standing rules violated, operational procedures ignored. Terra Sancta had arrived out of nowhere, uninvited, and the result had been a shambles. Was Global there to clear mines? Or play at showbiz? Wasn’t Angola dodgy enough already without people like Todd Llewelyn around?

McFaul folded the letter and returned it to the drawer. Middleton was unpacking the other boxes. McFaul watched him a moment then nodded at the drawer.

‘You see him at all? Bennie?’

‘Yeah. He was down here yesterday. Looking for back pay.’

‘What did he say?’

‘Say?’ Middleton glanced up for the first time. ‘He said you’d gone ape. Walked out on him. Got hold of a gun from somewhere.’

McFaul looked at him a moment. If he said yes, if he admitted it, Middleton would sack him. Carrying a weapon in the field was a capital offence, stripping Global of its neutral role. Middleton was still watching him, still waiting for an answer.

McFaul shook his head.

‘It’s bollocks,’ he said briefly.

He reached for the cassettes he’d brought down from Southsea and laid them on the desk beside the edit controller. Middleton peered at them then picked one up, weighing it in his hand, the issue of the weapon dismissed.

‘Is this the stuff you talked about?’

‘It’s a couple of hours’ worth. You wouldn’t want to watch much more.’

‘And you shot these?’

‘I shot two of them. The other one belonged to Llewelyn. The bloke Bennie talks about in the letter.’

‘So what do we do with that?’

‘Use it.’

‘Does he know? Is he the legal owner?’

‘Fuck knows. Does it matter?’

Middleton frowned, looking at the cassette again. One of the reasons for Global’s success had been his passion for detail, for the smallest print of each successive transaction. From the outset, Middleton had realised that wars are won inch by inch, skirmish by skirmish. Take on the heavies, confront the arms industry and the Establishment, and you can’t afford a single mistake. Get it wrong, leave a single loophole unguarded, and they’ll hang you out to dry.

‘If it’s his property we’ll need his permission. You have to find him.’

McFaul shrugged. It seemed logical enough.

‘OK.’

‘You know where he is?’

‘No. Last time I saw him he was half-dead.’

‘How come?’

‘Cerebral malaria. They must have flown him out of Muengo. Back here, I imagine.’

‘Yeah, they did.’

Middleton abandoned the box. In the drawer in the Africa desk he began to rummage through the sheaf of telexes. Finally he found the message he was after.

‘Last week,’ he said. ‘They flew him home on that woman’s ticket. Pissed off the embassy people no end.’

‘Why’s that?’

‘They were trying to get rid of her.’ Middleton stuffed the telex back in the drawer. ‘Talk to the Hospital for Tropical Diseases. He’s probably still there.’

‘Or dead.’

‘Yeah,’ Middleton was already eyeing the editing equipment again, ‘or dead.’

Towards the end of the evening, past ten, they drove to a pub on the main road called The Fox. McFaul sank into a chair by the fire, exhausted, while Middleton ordered the drinks. It had taken him a while to get the editing gear working. The edit controller came with two video-players and two monitor screens. You loaded the rushes into one player and compiled the pictures you wanted onto the other. Middleton had experimented with a sequence or two, trying to crack this new technical challenge, but he’d quickly realised
his own limitations. Editing was clearly an art. They needed someone who knew what they were doing.

Middleton came back from the bar carrying McFaul’s Guinness.

‘There’s a bloke I know down near Salisbury,’ he said briskly. ‘Wrote to me last year.’

‘Oh?’

McFaul grinned, reaching for the Guinness. Middleton had just sat through sequence after sequence of appalling pictures. A man blown up, his leg in shreds. More bodies at the hospital. An amputation without anaesthetic. A cow butchered in close-up. And finally Katilo’s little prank in down-town Kinshasa, a teenage mugger and his accomplice blown apart yards from the watching lens. Yet not once had he registered the slightest emotion, simply an acknowledgement that time was short and the material deserved professional attention. As far as Middleton was concerned, McFaul’s pictures were bullets for Global’s gun. The quicker it was loaded, the better.

‘He’s a pro editor,’ Middleton was saying, ‘name of Geoff. Wanted to tell me some idea or other.’

‘Is he good?’

‘Yeah. He sent me some stuff he’d done. Sailing films. I know fuck all about boats but it seemed pretty good to me.’

‘So what do we do?’

‘I’ll phone him. Get him over. You go and find Llewelyn. If we have to, we’ll buy his fucking pictures.’ He paused, struck by another thought. ‘The black guy, your pal, the big bugger.’

‘Katilo?’

‘Yeah, him. That stuff at the end. In Kinshasa. Where he blows those kids away. Is that actionable? Are we talking murder charges? Or what?’

McFaul thought about the question a moment. Nothing he’d seen in Kinshasa indicated much concern for law and order. McFaul reached for his Guinness again, lifting the glass in a silent toast.

‘No problem,’ he said.

‘Sure?’

‘Absolutely certain.’

‘OK.’

Middleton hunched over his orange juice, telling McFaul what he planned to do with the film once it was ready. As ever, his mind was outrunning the technical problems, leapfrogging ahead, looking for ways of maximising the impact. There’d be massive publicity, for sure. And that might sit nicely with another little plan he’d hatched.

‘What’s that?’

‘EDM. Early Day Motion. We have to take this whole thing to the politicians. Make them see the logic of the case. Make them understand.’

‘Good fucking luck.’ McFaul pulled a face, swallowing another mouthful of the Guinness. Middleton had been knocking on politicians’ doors for years now, lobbying MPs, organising fringe meetings at the party conferences, enlisting support wherever he could. Each new contact was another entry for his Filofax but the biggest windfall by far had been an eight-minute sequence in a television documentary about Cambodia. Middleton had directed the producer’s attention to a Global operation in Battambang, a province near the Thai border, and the TV crew had returned with heartbreaking pictures of crippled kids. Middleton had appeared in the programme himself, a terse, angry condemnation of First World complacency, and letters of support had poured in for weeks afterwards. Ever since then, Middleton had done his best to acquire more screen time but the more
programmes he did, the more he realised just how chancy television had become. In the hands of a dud producer, or an overbearing senior executive, items could actually backfire. What Global needed was total control, a property so hot that no one else would interfere. And now, thanks to McFaul, they’d got one.

‘An EDM,’ he was saying again. ‘Parliament’s the key. We link the EDM to the film. Get those bastard politicians onside. Shame them into it.’

‘Into what?’

‘Into legislation. I think they’ll sign up to the protocol but that’s not enough. Not any more. We want a total ban. Manufacture. Sale. Transfer. Stockpiling. The lot. Anything that qualifies for the word mine.’

‘You kidding?’

‘No.’ Middleton looked at his watch, the orange juice gone. ‘You hungry?’

They went to an Indian restaurant in the town centre. Middleton handed the menu to McFaul and told him to choose. The waiter knew his own order by heart. McFaul ordered chicken vindaloo and a couple of side dishes, listening to Middleton fine-tuning his assault on the politicians. A protocol agreement already existed that voluntarily bound signatory nations to a ban on the export of land mines. The USA had signed up and so had France and a number of other major players. To date, the UK had said no, determined not to tie the hands of British arms manufacturers. Britain, as the Foreign Office never failed to point out, owed a hefty slice of its export earnings to arms sales. Agreeing to a ban was tantamount to economic suicide.

McFaul returned the menu to the waiter, adding another Guinness to his order. Thanks to Middleton, he’d left the last one at the pub.

‘You’re telling me they’ll sign the protocol?’

‘Yeah. Bound to in the end if only to keep themselves in the game. Just like they handle the EEC. You know the way it works. Get in there and wreck it. Stop the buggers doing anything daft.’

‘You mean extending the ban?’

‘Of course.’

McFaul nodded. The British were no longer interested in simple land mines, the kind of stuff that littered the Third World. The crude anti-personnel mines, like the Type 72s, often came from factories in China and Pakistan at a couple of dollars a throw. That kind of money wouldn’t feed workers in Leeds or Birmingham. What they needed was something far more sophisticated, something that would command a decent price tag. One answer was a mine that would self-destruct after a certain period. Another was a device that would make mines switch themselves on and off. In both cases, the technology didn’t come cheap. But the smarter the mine, the bigger the profit.

Middleton was scribbling now. He carried a little notebook everywhere and he had it open at his elbow. Finally, he ripped off the top sheet and handed it to McFaul.

‘Contact at the Hospital for Tropical Diseases,’ he muttered. ‘I had to send a bloke there last year. Where was I?’

‘The protocol.’

‘Oh, yeah. The Brits want to defend their position. You know that. Hi-tech mines. Freedom to manufacture. Freedom to export. All that. We have to stop them. Blow the argument apart. The only ban that works is a total ban. Dumb mines. Smart mines. The whole fucking lot. Otherwise we’re pissing in the wind. You agree?’

Without waiting for an answer, Middleton got up and disappeared into the lavatory. When he came back, he was
wiping his hands on his trousers. McFaul leaned forward, tapping the plastic tablecloth with the end of his fork. A couple of hours with Middleton and you were in danger of losing the thread.

‘The woman I came back with,’ he said. ‘The one you paid for.’

‘Jordan? Mrs Jordan?’

‘Yeah. She lost her son.’

‘I remember,’ Middleton nodded, ‘you sent a report.’

‘Well … she’s seen it all. She’s been there. And she might have one or two things to say.’ McFaul shrugged. ‘That’s all.’

‘And she’d do it? She’d play ball?’

McFaul hesitated. The last time he’d seen Molly had been at the airport. They’d said goodbye beside the escalator that descended to the tube. He’d asked her whether it felt good to be back and she’d nodded a couple of times but he could tell from the coldness in her eyes that she was far from convinced.

‘Yes,’ he said at last, ‘I think she might.’

Molly spent the next week sorting out the cottage. Two sets of clothes. Two sets of books. Endless records, tapes, mementoes, postcards, every last trace of the two men she’d shared her life with. Downstairs, in the dining room they’d so rarely used, she made space on the carpet for two piles. By far the biggest contained the things she’d get rid of. The other pile, tiny by comparison, was reserved for the items she knew she’d keep for ever, photographs, letters, James’s school reports, odd certificates that Giles had picked up. The task was enormous, occupying infinitely more time than she’d ever anticipated, and after nearly breaking down on the first
morning she began to play a game, telling herself she was a stranger to the cottage, a visitor, a nice, well-intentioned middle-class lady in from the village helping out at a difficult moment in someone else’s life. The subterfuge worked for a while. She even slept well. Then halfway through the third day, she found an old attaché case full of letters at the bottom of Giles’s wardrobe, and abruptly the charade was over.

She fingered the letters, then picked them up in thick bundles and lifted them to her nose. They smelled, unaccountably, of lavender and when she delved into the case again she found a couple of the little hand-sewn muslin sacs she’d made those first years they’d been married. She’d used them to sweeten drawers of clothes, the way her mother had taught her, and the thought of Giles doing the same with these letters of his made her gulp. For a minute or so, she fought the urge to cry. Then she bent double, hiding her face from an empty house, howling. Her hands were hot with tears. Her whole body shook. Grief, she thought dimly, smells of lavender. Finally, when she thought she could cry no more, she sat back against the sideboard, blowing her nose, letting the room slip back into focus.

The letters were on her lap and she picked one up, then another, reading them. Most were in her own hand, wild outpourings after she and Giles had first met, first been to bed with each other, but the rest, a tiny handful, had been written by James to his father. She went through them one by one, eavesdropping on a correspondence she’d never been properly aware of, numbed by how distant, how faint, the voices already seemed. However much she resented it, her days in Angola had thrown a wall across her life, cutting her off from her past, turning her in another direction. For this, she knew she ought to be grateful. Nothing could be worse than being trapped here, a sitting target for endless
phone calls, endless commiserations. Word had gone round the village that she was back and the invitations were flooding in. Could she possibly make up a bridge four? Might she lend a bit of tone to an otherwise dull dinner party? Was there a chance of playing a walk-on role in the village panto? She fielded each request with a weary gratitude, wondering how best to say no without causing offence. These were nice people, kind people, true friends. They meant no harm. On the contrary, they were offering support, company, even hope. But none of them knew what she really needed. A little peace. And a little quiet.