A Deniable Death

Chapter 15

He said nothing.

The questions came in Farsi and Arabic, in halting English and Pashto. English was always the last of the series.

He answered to none.

Who was he? What was his name? When the bedlam of languages had been used, and he’d answered none, he was beaten.

The goon did not use any special weapon: there was no hardwood truncheon, no lead-tipped baton, no leather-coated whip. The instrument was a length of builder’s wood. Nothing refined.

His underpants had been taken off him. They stank. He thought they would be soiled. His boot, also, had been dragged off, but his socks had been left. They, too, stank, and were sodden and tight on his feet. He could see. The blindfold had been removed. The room had no window and a light burned in a ceiling recess, covered by a wire-mesh grille that soaked up some of the bulb’s power so the room was in shadow. Two guards stood by the door. He reckoned they’d have been Basij, conscripted, part-time warriors and the lowest of the low – Home Guard stuff. They had automatic rifles that they held warily. There was a ring on the wall, and a rope was tied to it. The far end was lashed to his right ankle. He was no threat to them, and had no chance of escape. He couldn’t have risen to his feet, bullocked past the goon, incapacitated or disarmed the two guards, opened the door and charged off down the corridor. Even so, the guards were tense, and armed. He couldn’t have done anything because his arms had been pulled behind his back, and his wrists were bound together with farmers’ twine, the knot tight enough to restrict blood flow.

He didn’t answer, and couldn’t protect himself.

When he was beaten, if he tried to wriggle away, get onto his side, face the wall and present his spine, his head or his upper arm was grabbed. He was pulled back and turned, with a boot, onto his back, his privates and lower stomach targets for the wood. Twice more he had been burned.

Who was he? What was his name?

There was blood on his face from the cuts on his cheeks below the eye sockets and from his nose – already broken, he thought – and from the split on his upper lip. He didn’t answer, although he could have done. I am a detective sergeant of the Metropolitan Police Service and currently attached to Box 500. His name was Joseph Foulkes, born 8 April 1960, married first to Liz and second to Ellie, two kids the first time round.

It would have been hard to answer, though: bits of his teeth lay on the concrete floor and his tongue had swollen to double its size. Had he given his name, it was likely that more of his teeth pieces would have worked loose and had to be spat clear.

He said nothing. Defiance was natural to him. So far – cigarettes stubbed on his stomach, blows from the wood and kicks – he could absorb it. Bloody pain was manageable. It wouldn’t last long. The defiance was melded with sheer obstinacy. He was of the age when kids had gone to see black-and-white films, had read close-print books and knew of Odette Hallowes, and Yeo-Thomas, who was the White Rabbit, and of Violette Szabo. He was of the age when he had passed judgement on naval personnel captured in the Shatt al-Arab waterway who had seemed to thank the bastards of the Revolutionary Guard Corps for the humiliations and mock-executions and had almost apologised for navigation cock-ups. The stories of childhood had stayed with him. The memory of news bulletins, and older men’s disgust, was sharp. He told the goon nothing.

There was a table in the room. There had been a moment when the blindfold had been stripped off and he had seen a clean notepad on the table, with two pencils. The top page was blank. The bastard expected to fill it when he, Foxy, did the canary bit. The page stayed blank. It was his target to keep it so.

The goon did not know who he was. The goon moved on. What was his mission? He was asked in Farsi, Arabic and English, then again in Farsi and finally in Pashto. The wood was raised as he was given a second to show willingness to answer. He could see the wood but his eyes were misted and narrowed from the blows. He could have said: A colleague and I are on a deniable mission to observe the home of Rashid Armajan, bomb-maker, and using techniques of surveillance as practised in covert rural observation post procedures, with a shotgun mike. We learned that Armajan and his wife were headed for Lubeck where she has a medical consultation and he has an appointment with. ..

It was about time drifting, and he didn’t know how much was needed. What was his mission? Maybe, already, the Engineer had reached Germany. Maybe, the following morning, afternoon or evening he would be targeted – if Foxy answered the question What is your mission?. Telephone or radio calls, text messages or emails would fly, and a shield would be placed in front of the man. He would be inside a security bubble and the chance would be gone. A shite-face would say that Foxy Foulkes had not delivered and there’d be a cock-sucker on hand to agree. Pig obstinate, and knew it because Liz – first wife – had told him so.

The wood came down. The goon bastard swung it with full force. Foxy’s problem – there were many but the one topping the list: he didn’t know where the blow would land and couldn’t wriggle to avoid its impact. It was on the shins. No flesh there, just skin on bone. Done with the flat of the wood to inflict pain, not the edge, which might have broken the tibia. He might not say anything but he was near to screaming.

The wood was lifted again. Foxy looked up at the face. He didn’t see hate, only frustration, and the wood came down. He jack-knifed because it was in the groin, on the shrivelled little thing that Ellie – two months back – had laughed at when he’d walked naked into the bedroom from the bathroom. She’d turned her back on him and gone back to her book. Great waves of heaving, wanting to vomit, convulsed Foxy. The wood went up again and he couldn’t help himself. He no longer had the strength to cross his legs. He was humiliated, helpless and the pain sources competed, from his feet to the crown of his skull. He didn’t know how much time they needed.

He was hit there again.

The questions came in a babble of languages. He didn’t answer.

He used the tactic he had been told of.

He hit the prisoner again with the wood. He couldn’t see the man’s privates but he could aim for the stomach, and was rewarded with a grunt. The breath bubbled blood in the mouth. When he had been in the north of Iraq, before the injury, men had been taken by the resistance – under supervision of the al-Quds – and denounced as collaborators. Those who served the Great Satan were condemned, but first they were encouraged – with planks, boots, lit cigarettes and fingernail extraction – to tell of their contacts, the safe-houses where they met intelligence officers, and the targets they spied on. Some died prematurely under questioning. Others talked in hoarse whispers and had to be carried outside to be shot. A few surrendered what information was wanted at the sight of the match lighting the first cigarette and walked to the killing place. Sometimes electricity was used but not often, or a man was hooded and made to kneel, then would hear a pistol being armed. He would feel the muzzle against the back of his head, then hear the click as the hammer came down. There was no bullet in the chamber, but he would foul his trousers and wet himself. They did that as much for amusement as to break a man.

He sweated. No window, the door shut, no fan. He had started with blows that had not exerted him and had won nothing. Now he hit with all the strength he could muster. They had been very few, the collaborators who had not bent under a beating.

His father had told Mansoor of what was done in the gaol at Ahvaz. The bombers and assassins – Ahvaz Arabs – suffered heavily as the interrogators built pictures of the networks controlling them, and were not pretty to view before they went to the gallows.

Mansoor had no doubt that pain loosened tongues and broke resolve. The frustration: he did not know who he had.

Mansoor had assumed that the man now stripped and spreadeagled in front of him, unable to protect himself, would talk after a brief display of defiance. The message sent by radio to the security section of the IRGC had not identified him as an al-Quds Brigade officer, although his name was on it, and his location at the border post on the sector that faced the Iraqi town of al-Qurnah. There, An intruder has been apprehended. Investigations are ongoing, and an officer with an escort should be sent tomorrow morning to take the prisoner into custody in Ahvaz. All deliberately vague.

The frustration grew with each blow he struck, and the silence that followed it. Twice, he had crouched beside the bloodied face and put his ear near to where the front teeth had been battered out because he was certain the man would answer him. He had heard coughing and groans. He did not know the identity of the man, or the purpose of his mission. It would have helped Mansoor had he gone outside, into the evening air, taken a chair close to a fire that would disperse the mosquitoes, and not allowed anyone close to him. Had he sat, sipped some juice and calmed, matters now clouded would have clarified. He stayed in the room, used the wood again, and yelled the questions. Who was the man? What was his mission? No answer came.

It had been a dream of glory.

In the dream, men came from Ahvaz in the morning. A prisoner would be brought from the cell at the back of the barracks and given to them. With the prisoner there would be an envelope containing a full confession, listing his name, his operation, his controller. The light would be coming up. His men would be armed, ready, and he would tell the senior investigators who had travelled from Ahvaz that he had no more time to talk with them as he would now be making a complex search of the area and would conduct a thorough follow-up. In the dream, he was congratulated for his diligence, and shown deference. In the dream, later, further praise came from his own unit. He had dreamed of the praise, had even recited in silence the words of congratulation showering down on him.

He hit the man again, and again, and again, drew more blood and darkened more bruises. The control had gone from Mansoor’s voice and the questions were no longer soft-spoken but shouted, high-pitched.

He lit another cigarette.

He started again, at the beginning, and asked the first question: who was he? As he had at the beginning, he dragged on the cigarette, let the tip glow, then bent over the stomach. His hand crossed the skin and went towards the hair. The urine ran. He pressed the cigarette down. The man screamed.

Badger heard him.

The scream – Foxy’s – was a knife cut in the darkness. Before, there had been the dulled sounds of the frogs, the coots and the ducks, and of the pair of pigs that still rooted in the edges of the reed bed. There were sprints by water birds and territory scuffles, but Foxy’s scream was a slicing wire, and another followed it.

He sat very still and very tense.

Badger would go when he had to. Then he would switch on his communications and make a last staccato call. He would give an ‘expected time of arrival’ at the extraction point, but not yet.

He expected that the dawn would come, the sun would poke up, announcing one more stinking hot day, and he would see – in the magnification of his binoculars – the arrival of military transport, lorries and jeeps. Soldiers, not these crap guys but trained men, would spill out and the search would begin, with cordon lines and others sent forward at the sides to give cover fire. Then it would be right for him to quit. He might also see, before he slipped into the water behind him and the forest thickness of the reeds, them taking Foxy away. He might be on a stretcher or might be dragged. If he was upright, his head would be slumped and a cloth bound around it. The blood, the cuts and bruises would be easy to see, even at that distance. He would have done what he could, stayed to the limits of obligation, and he would track back towards the extraction point. He was confident he would be ahead of the follow-up force – and two things were certain.

Two? Just two.

First: no bright young spark from the Prudential Insurance sales team was going to write a life policy for Foxy. A slow smile played on Badger’s face. There had been a funeral for a CROP technique instructor, young, killed by stomach cancer, before Badger’s time but still talked of. When the coffin had been carried out of a packed church to go to the crematorium, a crackly recording of Gracie Fields doing her hit song, ‘Wish Me Luck As You Wave Me Goodbye’, had played and the whole congregation had begun to clap. Many were weeping buckets, and they’d kept the nearby pub open till past midnight. It was said to have been the best funeral moment ever. Badger always smiled when he thought of it – he wondered if Foxy had been there.

Second: an operation was unravelling and its security had been breached. There would be Cancel flashes and Abort instructions. Humour was good for squaddies and croppies, fire teams and ambulance people, but outsiders – other than the psychiatrists – reckoned it offensive and loutish. They understood fuck-all.

The scream came once more.

Fainter, with a blunter cutting edge. That would not mean that the pain was less: it was a sign that his strength was down, and the fight was draining.

He had no protection now from the mosquitoes. The clear ground where the hide had been made was around four foot above the water level. Badger’s place now was on the reverse slope from where the hide had been and his boots were just clear of the water. His body was on the incline and only his head, covered in camouflage scrim net, broke the top line. He had the binoculars with him and the night-sight. One of the bergens was against his boots and the thin rope, holding the small inflatable, with the second bergen in it, was round his ankle. He was ready to go, but not before the time came.

Badger remembered when he’d been a young police officer and they’d escorted ambulances into Accident and Emergency with knife and gun victims. He would see men and women sitting on plastic chairs in the corridors and know that behind doors or screens a life was ebbing; they were there to express solidarity, a sort of love and friendship. He would stay as long as he could. Badger could picture them now: they had politeness and dignity, and seemed grateful to him for his concern. There was often a bit of a choke in his throat when he slipped away to resume his duty, and went out of their lives. It was an obligation to stay – here and at the Royal Bristol Infirmary or the Royal United in Bath.

When he left, the location of the hide would have been cleansed. He had used reed fronds to brush around where the hide had been, smoothing out boot and handprints, then scattered the reeds they’d used for cover. He’d gone over the footfall into the reed beds, the clear ground that led over the rim where he was now and down to the water. The microphone was buried in mud and the length of the cable had been retrieved. The bird’s carcass was beached in front of him.

There was nothing more he could do.

It had gone well – well enough for the spats between himself and Foxy to have been dismissed – and now it was worse than anything imaginable. Foxy taken. He would talk, of course he would. The screams he had heard said that Foxy would talk. In a week’s time, or two weeks, Badger would be in his room at the police hostel and the TV would be on in the corner, half hidden behind a hillock of kit, and he would hear the voice, and look up, and Foxy’s face would be on the screen. He would hear Foxy’s confession in a flat, rehearsed voice, and would remember the screams. The screams said he would talk.

Didn’t like him, did he? Never had – not that, now, it mattered much.

Foxy could barely see. The swelling under and above his eyes had almost closed off his vision. Difficult for him to hear anything because his ears had been beaten and sound was dulled. But he was lucid and could analyse the pain. The cigarettes were worst. The beatings were repetitive and taking their toll of him. What had made him scream was when the cigarettes scorched his skin. Each time it was done he had wet himself. They were the worst because his eyes could pick up the flash of the match and his nose could smell the smoke and he could make out the descent of the hand that held the cigarette. He had started to scream before the fag’s tip had touched him.

An image came into his mind, was clear, then hazed and faded. It was of a small, cramped-up guy who had been brought to speak to them in the base outside Basra. He had been an expert on SERE, American. He wore US combat fatigues and had a flash on his left arm. It showed a shield and a double-bladed military knife, vertical, that cut two lengths of barbed wire. The man said, in a deliberate, far South accent, that the symbol was of Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape through the wire barricades of the enemy’s gaols and territory. He had gestured towards the shield, and his right lower arm and hand had been missing, replaced with a multi-purpose hook.

None of the Brits had come into the lecture hall if they were off-duty; the only ones there were happy enough to have a minor diversion from their work. The others, who were resting or in the canteen, hadn’t thought it worth their time. Foxy had been at the back of the small lecture hall and had listened, half awake; like most of them he had not rated it likely that he would face a situation where he needed to know how to Survive, Evade, Resist and Escape. The start was clear: the man, the shield insignia, the hook, and the introduction by a British officer, and the story of how a man, now in his mid-fifties and therefore a veteran, had lost an arm three decades earlier and learned enough lessons from it to have been kept on in the military well past all normal retirement dates.

The next part of the memory was hazy. Something about being the number-two flier in an F-4 Phantom and hit by surface-to-air near Hanoi, limping back and getting close to the DMZ, then having to bale out, and being captured with a broken arm and escaping before the local medics had fixed the damage. He’d been with the air-force pilot, walking and getting gangrene, then the pilot, using a sliver of glass from a broken bottle, washed in a stream, had amputated at the wrist. They had come through.

The guy was a primary expert in his field, but an audience had been pressed into attending and had thought what he said irrelevant to life in the base. What had faded was what the guy with the hook had said. Foxy struggled for recall, and watched for the fucking cigarette packet to be dragged out of the pocket.

The goon would lurch towards him, drag up his head, get a handhold on his hair or ear, then use the fist on his face.

Foxy struggled to remember what the SERE guy had said, but the memories were gone. The goon, Mansoor, limped. He could give no indication that he understood a word of Farsi. Nor could he give any hint that he had watched the house and listened to conversations. He was in the business of buying time.

The time between each cigarette seemed the most important measure. Not the hands of a clock or watchface, but the time between the last cough on the cigarette, then it being dropped and stamped on, and the next brought out from the pack, put in the mouth, the match scraping the box, sometimes failing to ignite, and the delay while another was pulled out. For fuck’s sake, Foxy, not a fucking laugh. Get out of this fucking place and apply for the franchise to build a decent factory in these parts for the manufacture of good-quality matches, By Appointment to the Ayatollah. A business opportunity – for fuck’s sake, Foxy. The goon had a bad chest and had had, also, a bad wound.

Much had been lost, but not the logic. The view Foxy had of him was difficult through swollen eyelids. The goon leaned on the table and gazed down at his prey, seeming to consider how next to inflict pain and win answers. The pages in the pad stayed clean, the pencils unused. Logic told Foxy that a military casualty was posted away and out of sight. No army unit wanted disabled men hobbling about the garrison. One had ended up with the work of overseeing the security of a bomb-maker, was posted in Nowheresville, off the map, and forgotten. Good name for him: ‘Backwater Boy’. The Backwater Boy wasn’t stupid, was switched on enough to pick up whatever signs had been left for him. He had made the trap and left it on a hair trigger. Foxy had gone into it, led by his bloody chin. Logic said, also, that Mansoor, the Backwater Boy, had been tardy in calling for back-up and the big fellows from Headquarters. He wanted to book into the limelight, courtesy of a prisoner and pages filled with confession. He might have allowed vanity to cloud good sense. But they would come. In the morning, they’d be there. He’d bought a little time, but didn’t see how he could buy enough – needed a sackload of it.

Questions… Who was he?

The struggling English with a pupil’s accent… What was his name?

Temper rising… What was his mission?

And logic said – because the big fellows were not already there – that he would be sweating on his failure. It didn’t help him. It achieved confusion and scrambled clarity. Foxy clung to his silence. There didn’t seem to be an alternative. He couldn’t believe that any crap about being a bird-fancier, an anthropologist or an eco-scientist would carry weight. He’d been caught floundering in darkness close to the home of a security target, wearing a camouflage gillie suit, designed for a sniper or for rural surveillance. He didn’t know for how long he could bottle the admissions.

Not long… He was naked except for his socks. His arms were knotted behind his back; a rope shackled an ankle to a wall ring. He had wet himself and lay in a pool of it. Mucous stuff dribbled from his backside, and among the mosquito bites and tick sores there were the new burn marks from the cigarettes.

The packet came out, was shaken, the filter ends bouncing up…

Foxy cringed away and hugged the wall, twisting his stomach to keep his privates from the goon. He tried to remember what the man with the insignia on his arm – the knife and the split barbed wire – had said of Resistance. He could not, and struggled.

… and the filter went between the lips. The matchbox was out. Foxy felt the scream welling. He was pressed hard against the wall, which gave him no sanctuary. The match flared and the cigarette was lit. The glow came, the smoke billowed, and Foxy saw that the man panted, with anger, tiredness and frustration. He came forward and the bad leg trailed on the floor. There was rage in the eyes. The man, Mansoor, crouched. There was no pity. A big drag on the cigarette and the tip burned. Foxy didn’t have the strength to fight, couldn’t worm clear.

The hand came low. Foxy screamed before the pain, and the scream still had a voice when the pain flushed in him. He didn’t think the scream was heard, and didn’t care.

He’d come late, bad traffic on the road and a meeting that had overrun. The rain had been sluicing on the path. Ellie had shrugged, explained, and he did what was asked of him.

She’d told him where Foxy had stacked the logs when they’d been delivered last August, behind the garage, and she’d given him the basket to fill. When he’d done that, she’d told Piers to fill the coal bucket from the bunker Foxy had spent an afternoon putting together on the far side of the garage. She’d explained she would have done it herself but the rain had been so fierce.

The fire burned.

What had changed that evening was that his car was not down the side of the garage, near the coal and out of sight from the lane. He’d told her he’d have been half drowned if he parked where he had last night. She’d said it didn’t really matter.

There was a meal for two from the supermarket on the table. Foxy didn’t like pre-cooked, packaged meals and bitched if they were offered him and she hadn’t cooked his supper. The bottle had come from the wine store Foxy kept topped up. A pair of candles had been lit. It didn’t really matter if the Noakes woman from down the lane walked her dog last thing, saw the extra car and only a light on upstairs, or if the Davies man went out with his, saw Piers’s car and knew she was being screwed. It didn’t matter: Ellie wasn’t staying.

Would she be going with Piers? Setting up home with him? Maybe, maybe not.

It was a decent Chilean wine: Foxy rated Chilean vineyards and said they were sensibly priced. They ate and drank; their tongues loosened. The storm brewed and rain lashed. Twigs, from the leafless trees, were blown onto the slates and rattled as they fell to the paved path. She said where she would be in the morning and that she’d already phoned them at work, pleaded the throat infection that was her most used excuse, and he’d asked whether they still bought it. She’d shrugged, like it wasn’t important.

Piers asked, ‘You going to pack it in, the job?’

‘I might.’

‘If you wanted out, you could transfer internally. I could – end up at the same place.’

‘Like where?’

‘Edinburgh, Preston, Plymouth? Two wages. Wouldn’t be a place this size. You’d be shot of him.’

‘Worth thinking about.’

‘You could tell him. What’s he going to do? Bite your head off? Just tell him.’

‘When?’ She gazed at the front door and the wind rattled it. For a moment she listened hard, as if expecting the crunch of tyres on the gravel. ‘I might and I might not.’

‘When? When he comes back? Do you know how long it’ll be until.. .’

‘Don’t know when he’s back, or where he is, or why… Are we going to talk about him all night? That what you want?’

Her eyes danced. The candle flames lit them and she held her glass across the table. He filled it and she raised it as if in a toast. It seemed a waste to have lit the fire, then abandon it. She left the plates on the table and led him by the hand to the stairs. She might stay with Piers and she might not. What was certain for Ellie, she would be on the pavement tomorrow, mourning the homecoming of a hero. It seemed important to be there each time, as if it was a drug. She was not ready to wean herself off it. She took him up the stairs and he was pushing her. They almost ran the last few strides into Foxy’s bedroom.

Had there been a fly on the wall, it might have noted that Len Gibbons, at a corner table of a restaurant down by the Holsterhafen – one bottle killed, another damaged – Len Gibbons said, ‘I just cannot credit it. We set up a most successful operation, and the whole thing is put at jeopardy because one of them is idiotic enough to go back to collect a microphone and some cabling. I’m almost apoplectic. We get back, garbled, an interpretation that says it would be unprofessional and against regular procedures to leave the gear behind. Does it bother the Iranians if their DNA is on the bombs that mutilate our soldiers today, and have done for the last eight years? Of course not. They couldn’t give a toss. One would have thought, given a modicum of common sense, that they’d have upped sticks and done the fastest possible runner, but that’s not the case. Result: disaster. The other is hanging about there, can’t do anything, and should have high-tailed it hours back. I tell you, whoever gets back from this is going to have their arse kicked the length of Whitehall. How could they do it to us? And I’ll you something else, my friends, it won’t be Len Gibbons – faithful dog in Her Majesty’s darker affairs – who takes the rap for it. Sorry to rant, but I just cannot comprehend how such imbecilic things can happen… Well, it’s what comes of using increments, getting in casual labour. So much work done and all of it wasted.’

Had there been a bug in the socket beside the table, it would have been able to pick up and pass on the quieter tone of the Cousin. ‘I would hesitate, of course, Len, to gainsay you, but, forgive me, I will. Where are we? We’re in Lubeck. Also in the town, or soon to be, are Herr Armajan, the bomb boffin, and his Frau. Now, halfway to the other side of the world it’s the middle of the night, and in some bog a group of peasant militia have their hands on a high-importance target. They get on the phone, are connected to some idiot manning the switchboard, who knows his commander will kick his balls in if he’s disturbed. What I’m saying is that the local man will fail, during the night, to raise anyone of real import. That’s the way those places work. Some time tomorrow morning, there’s a possibility that it might land on the desk of a man who knows who Armajan is, where he is, who is responsible for him. Very few in VEVAK will know, and perhaps only one man in the embassy in Berlin. My analysis, if we get close tomorrow, we’ll have a clear run in.’

Had there been a waitress who hovered at a table further out in the restaurant and who was blessed with sharp hearing, she would have eavesdropped on the quiet voice of the man called the Friend, who said, ‘I’m more inclined towards the optimist than the pessimist, the glass half full rather than half empty. I think we’ll have him tomorrow morning. We go, gentlemen, and stake out. We’re old men but a bad evening in Lubeck is a good enough opportunity for old skills to be dusted off. I’m confident we’ll locate him and then the opportunity will present itself for the strike. The morning, tomorrow, would be best. I would like to say that it’s been a real pleasure to be a colleague of both of you. If we travel tomorrow, early, there will be no chance of farewells. I do it now, gentlemen.’

They went out into a bitter night: one to go to Roeckstrasse, one to the medical school on the university campus, and one to meet the ferry from Telleborg to greet a man considered expert at his work.

They came to Lubeck. It had been a slow train with stops, and the carriage had been crowded. For part of the journey he had stood and she had sat. For the first twenty-five minutes out of Hamburg she had been sandwiched between a black-skinned girl, who ate pastries, scattering crumbs, and managed to talk continuously on a mobile phone, and a youth with orange-dyed hair in a standing strip over the crown of his head, the sides shaven, metal rings in his ears and eyelids. When they’d left the carriage, the girl had brushed the remainder of the crumbs off her lap, but the boy had said something politely that she did not understand as he had stepped over her feet.

She was exhausted. He had looked for a lift to take her from the platform to the concourse, but there was none, and it had been a laborious effort for her to climb the steps.

The Engineer had sufficient English to ask for the hotel, at an information kiosk. He said that the hotel into which he was booked with his wife was on Lindenstrasse. The woman had been filing her nails and looked at him as if he were an interruption; she had pointed out where they should go, and passed him a small map with the street heavily underlined.

His wife asked if they could take a taxi, and he said it was, on the map, only a hundred metres or so… They should have used a taxi. She leaned more heavily now on his arm and the case squealed on its wheels. There was sleet in the air and a thin film had settled on her shoulders and in her hair. They passed a bench where a bearded old man sat with an opened bottle beside him, then statues to Wilhelm I and Otto von Bismarck. He did not know who they were or why they were commemorated. He looked again at the map and realised he had gone too far along the street and must turn to the right. She sighed heavily, blamed him.

They had to cross a major road but went with other pedestrians, and then they were in Lindenstrasse. The hotel was an old, white-painted building. He had expected something modern, glass and steel. He helped her up the steps and bounced the case after him.

They were at Reception. A girl was there, young and blonde. She wore a low-cut blouse and leaned towards him across her desk. He sensed Naghmeh’s recoil. She queried his business there and he answered that he had a reservation. She asked, of course, in what name. In what name? He turned away from her. He felt a fool. He had to reach inside his jacket pocket, produce the Czech passports, flick one open and look at the name. He should have memorised it on the first flight, the second or third, or on the train. He grinned, played the idiot, and displayed the page of the passport that carried a name and his photograph. Both were taken, photocopied, handed back. Registration forms were given to them. He said, in his difficult English, that his wife was not well. He made a meaningless scribble on his form in the signature box, and asked for the key. It was given him, with a sealed envelope.

They took the lift, went along a corridor and heard TVs. He unlocked the door. It was an ordinary room, with a double bed and a wardrobe, a small desk and a television on the wall. A door led to a bathroom with a walk-in shower.

She looked around her and sagged. In the hotel in Tehran there had been a bowl of fruit and a vase of flowers because of who they were. Not here. He opened the envelope as she sat heavily on the bed. It was handwritten, not signed, on the hotel’s paper, and said at what time they would be collected. He checked his watch. They had an hour and ten minutes to pass. Was she hungry? She shook her head.

She lay down, eyes closed. Pain seemed to cramp her. He had created her exhaustion, her loss of dignity, because he could not face life without her. Her breathing was ragged.

The Engineer found a magazine and read about Lubeck, what an old Hanseatic trading city offered the visitor and where marzipan could be bought.

How long could he hold out? Two more cigarettes had been lit but he had seen at least another six in the packet. He might hold his silence for the next and perhaps the one after that. Foxy didn’t know how long his body would allow further resistance. Pain travelled from the burn points, the cuts, the bruising, the splits and the wrecked gums to his brain.

The goon, Foxy realised, was not trained. He had no experience of the dark interrogation arts. He understood only physical force and the infliction of pain. But men would come, elbow him out. They would have the same skills as the interrogators from the Joint Forward Intelligence Team in Basra, whom he had sat alongside and done ‘terp’ work for. All the basics were used by the Brit interrogators: sleep deprivation, stress postures, hours under the hood that was a thick hessian sack made for sandbags, slaps, kicks and shrieking in the ears. Big, proud men were broken by them, as he would be. Foxy would be broken, lose the resolve… so what had all the pain been for? Might he not at the start have coughed who he was, his name and mission… He had bought time.

He didn’t know how much more he could buy. The man across the room from him, exhausted, breathed heavily. His eyes were wide and bloodshot. His fingers trembled and the wood shivered in his hand. Frustration, obvious, built in the goon’s head. The next spate of violence would be uncontrolled aggression and Foxy would suffer… knew it. But didn’t know how long it mattered that his silence held. When he had been the interpreter for the JFIT people in Basra, he had never seen one of them show anger, lose their cool. He knew the routine: questions, silence, beating and kicking, silence, burning – knew it and waited for it. How long did they need? More than an hour? More than one more beating and two cigarettes? Foxy couldn’t remember what the gaunt little American, with the hook for a hand, had said or what was called a ‘code of conduct’ with a prisoner.

He lay on the cell floor, trussed, roped to the wall and knew it was coming soon: a bad beating and kicking, and a burning.

A decision that only Mansoor could make: to give up on him and wait for the senior officers to come, or to try one more time.

He had been exhausted and had spent time leaning against the table – not sitting. He had been brought a glass of juice by one of the Basij peasants; the guard had had no stomach for what he had seen, the prisoner on the concrete floor, and had vomited his last meal. He had drunk the juice, which had refreshed him, given clarity to his thoughts. The two guards inside the cell, minding the door, had not spoken during the long hours. He thought they were terrified by what they had seen. He knew they looked away when he used a cigarette to burn. They did not interrupt the growing understanding he had.

When his mind cleared it was as if he had slapped his own face hard. He was, himself, exposed. He could have been naked, lain alongside the man on the floor. He could have been beaten and accused.

It was about the man he was tasked to protect – clarity came in a burst. A puzzle that had been obstinate slid into place: so simple. Some who examined his actions might find it hard to credit that mere enthusiasm, and vanity, had led him to create circumstances where the prisoner remained in his custody and not in that of officers with experience and rank. He was tasked to protect Rashid Armajan, a man of great sensitivity. He had pulled from the water an agent in a camouflage suit who offered no explanation and he imagined that the couple now travelled anonymously, without a cordon of guards. He thought he had put them at hazard – perhaps killed them. Some would say – suspicious men with the cold eyes of investigators – that the denial of information about the capture was itself an act of treason.

He could go from the cell, down the corridor and into his office, slap on the lights and telephone to the Crate Camp Garrison. He could demand to speak first with the duty officer, and then that the commanding officer, from the al-Quds Brigade, be woken and brought to the telephone. He would tell of an arrest made five and three-quarter hours earlier, a failed questioning, and no message of such an important matter passed up any chain and…

A great sigh. Almost a sob of desperation.

He dropped the cigarettes onto the table, pushed back the flap of the packet, flicked the box of matches and reached for the wood.

Mansoor believed that salvation, for him, lay with a confession from his prisoner. Then he would telephone the Crate Camp Garrison and get the connection to the duty officer. He steeled himself, took rambling steps across the cell, away from the table, and towards the man on the floor.

The scream went to the marrow of Badger’s bones. He looked again to the east, away into the blackness of the night, and did not see the dawn’s first softening. He would not go until that early light signalled the day’s start.

Until his death, he would hear Foxy’s screams, never be free of them. There would be, even in a deniable world, an inquiry – like a fucking inquest – and the questions would be asked by those who had never been in a shallow scrape, covered with scrim net and watching the movements of the guard detail around the home of a target who made the bombs that killed the guys brought back through the Wiltshire town. Likely the questions would be asked by those who had never gone without water when the thermometer hit 110 degrees plus, had never lain in a scrape and pissed into a bottle. They would not know of a meeting of a landmine clearance group with a terminally ill woman, who stood tall with courage, and did not see small kids kick footballs and ride tricycles, unaware that their mother would soon be dead but that their father would beat her to the grave. They would know nothing, but would demand answers to their questions.

Wasn’t your job, Constable, to get Sergeant Foulkes into position, then support him in every way possible and do the donkey work of extracting him?… You were aware, Constable, that Sergeant Foulkes was nearly twice your age?… How was it, Constable, that you permitted Sergeant Foulkes, an older and less fit man than yourself, to go forward to retrieve the cable and microphone?… Did you not feel retrieval was your job?… Did you, Constable, pull your weight on this mission?

The shout came from deep in his chest, rose in his throat, burst from his mouth, was silent and hurled towards the coots, the ducks, the marauding otter and the browsing pigs on the edge of the reed bed.

‘You weren’t fucking there. If you weren’t there, you don’t know.’

He would stay until dawn, but there was no light yet, no smear, to the east.