Aggressor

1

The sun had been chargrilling the top of my foot, but it took me a long time to notice. The sand I was gazing at was just too blindingly white, the sea too dazzlingly blue.

I pulled it back under the table, and leaned forward to suck up the last of my milkshake. I always made a gurgling noise when I got to the dregs, on principle. Not that anyone at the Surfers’ Club seemed to mind. They were too busy surfing-and-turfing their way through the kind of mammoth lunches Silky and I had just put away.

While I waited for her to come back with a couple of ice creams, I had one last slurp and got back to admiring the view. Sun, sea, sand, and thousands of miles of bush behind me; coming here had definitely been the right call.

She returned with two cones, the contents of which were already dripping down her hands. I got the chocolate one.

‘I cannot believe you were going to go round America instead.’ Silky licked tutti-frutti off her free hand and sat down. ‘I just saw George Bush on TV. He says Iran and Syria are next on the list. I do not understand that man. What is the matter with him?’

She came from Berlin. I had known her for three months, and her accent still reminded me of the black-and-white war films I used to watch as a kid.

‘I mean, why doesn’t he just talk to them?’ She hooked her shoulder-length blond hair behind her ear so it didn’t fall across her face, before bending down to give some serious attention to her cone. ‘I have been to Syria — they’re nice people.’

‘Your fault for looking at the TV.’ I sat up. ‘I don’t even read the newspapers now. It’s all bullshit. And when you’ve got a view like that,’ I nodded in the direction of the incoming waves, ‘what more do you need?’

Her head tilted sharply and her blue eyes speared me over the top of her sunglasses. ‘After last night, you still have to ask this?’

I grinned. ‘The ocean will still be here tomorrow. But will Silky? One can never tell with you hippies.’

She arched an eyebrow. ‘Just because George Bush keeps adding to his list, Nick, doesn’t mean that you have to keep cutting from yours…’

‘That’s me. Hand luggage only.’

Silky nodded thoughtfully, dumped the rest of the cone on her plate and wiped her hands.

‘Bush can live his dream.’ I looked back at the sea. A line of surfers rode a perfect wave. ‘I’ll have mine.’

And I did. Bumming round Australia in a camper van, freefall rig in the back, a backpacker along for the ride. The only bit of pressure each day was deciding whether to risk looking like a dickhead on a surfboard, or to do something I was pretty good at, jumping out of aeroplanes. Only dress code, T-shirt, shorts and flip-flops — and the collection of friendship bracelets I’d accumulated over the last few months around my wrist. Money wasn’t a problem. When I ran short, I just drove to another boogie [freefall parachute meet] and packed rigs. I didn’t regret for a moment dumping Plan A, to buy a bike and tour the States. One look at the CNN weather forecast for November back in Washington had been enough.

Silky checked her watch. ‘Better hit the road if we’re going to make it by tonight.’

‘You still want to come?’

‘Of course. I want to meet your friends.’ She stood up and adjusted her cut-off Levis. ‘And we hippies never turn down a free bed.’

It felt pretty good to see all the men turn as she brushed her hand across her long, tanned thighs as we walked to the car park. She’d taken my lectures about sand discipline to heart. I liked to keep the stuff on the beach, where it belonged, and not in vehicles and tents.

The sun was fierce on my shoulders and head, and I knew what was coming. It was hot as an oven inside the 1980s, box-shaped, mustard-coloured VW combi. The guy who’d sold it to me in Sydney had thrown in the corrugated tinfoil window screen for free, but I never remembered to put it up.

Silky made a final check that she wasn’t bringing any sand in with her and threw a beach towel over the burningly hot PVC.

‘It’ll feel cooler once we get moving,’ I said.

‘What will?’ She pouted. ‘The van, or us?’

The air-cooled wagon chugged slowly out of the car park and through the busy streets of the little resort. It looked as if it had been around the planet a couple of times, let alone a continent. I hoped it wasn’t going to finally throw in the towel before I got back to Sydney, cleaned the thick layers of bug kill off the windscreen, and sold it to some other sucker.

We hit the highway south to Brisbane and I was soon on autopilot, elbows on the steering wheel as I stared at the long straight ribbon of tarmac and through the shimmering heat haze. Silky sorted out a cassette from the shoebox between us. There weren’t many still intact; she’d left the box on the seat one afternoon and most of them had melted so badly they looked as if they belonged on a Salvador Dalí canvas.

The Libertines sparked up through the crackly door speakers and were soon competing with the rush of wind through the side windows.

Silky settled back in her seat, her sandalled feet resting on the dashboard. A few songs in, she turned to me and said, ‘We’re a good fit, no?’

I didn’t know where that had come from, but she was right. Coming to this place and meeting her had been one of the best things I’d ever done.

It hadn’t been a tough decision, binning George. I never got to find out which department of the CIA or the Pentagon he worked for, and really didn’t give a shit any more.

I just got up one morning, packed everything I owned into two cheap holdalls and a day sack, and went to the office. I told George the truth. I’d had enough; I was mentally fucked. I sat across the desk from him, waiting for one of his habitually scathing replies. ‘I need you until you’re killed or I find somebody better, and you aren’t dead yet.’ But it didn’t happen. Instead I got, ‘Be gone by tomorrow, son.’ The war would go on without me.

As I walked out of the building for the last time, en route to pick up my bags from an apartment I was never going back to, I felt nothing but relief. Then I thought, fuck it; George could have tried a little harder to keep me.

There was a noise like a drunken hod carrier tap-dancing on the roof and I slowed down; I knew exactly what it was. Silky jumped out and stood on the running board. Her surfboard was coming unstrapped again; the wind was getting hold of it. It didn’t matter how many extra bungees I bought her, she always insisted two were enough. She didn’t think the fact we had to stop and do this three or four times a day undermined her argument.

She jumped back in, slammed the door and smiled at me, then started slapping her thighs to the music again as we drove on. The hippie thing was just a piss-take. We’d met at a boogie just outside Sydney. She was in her late twenties and had been travelling for the last six or seven years, working the bars, fruit-picking, hitching rides. It had started as a gap year, then she’d forgotten to go home. ‘The beaches are better here than in Berlin.’ She’d laughed. ‘I bet the same happens to you.’

She’d hitched a ride north with me. Why not? It was only a couple of extra thousand miles in the magical mystery tour that she called her life. I was hoping for a little bit of that myself now.

Silky stopped slapping her thighs and went and dug around on the back seat for some water. She clambered back beside me, sorted out her towel, and passed me the bottle. ‘So, who exactly is Charlie?’ With the Libertines and the wind rush in full swing, she had to shout.

‘Tindall? Known him for years. We worked together.’

She held back her hair with her free hand as she took a swig. ‘Doing what? I thought you worked in a garage, not on a farm.’

‘That’s just what he does now. We used to do loads of stuff — a little bit of freefall, that sort of thing.’

‘Is he still jumping? Is that what we’re going to do?’ She jerked her thumb at the five-cell Raider rig on the back seat.

‘No idea, I just wanted to catch up with him while I’m here. You know how it is. You’re really close to someone for a while, then you don’t see or hear from him for years. Doesn’t make you any less of a mate.’ I picked up the map that lay between us and threw it at her. ‘Except we have to find him first.’

Four hours of long straight roads and one petrol stop later, and we were approaching a small town that sounded more like a tongue-twister than a place on the map. The instructions Charlie had emailed me took us past a store with a tin roof and three saddled horses tied to a rail. We took the track left immediately after a blue letter box at the roadside, made out of a milk churn nailed sideways to a post.

We turned a corner or two and a haphazard collection of red tin roofs and a water tower started to take shape in the distance through the heat haze. We had arrived at Charlie’s farm. Well, his son-in-law’s, but all the family had chipped in. They’d sold their houses and moved to Australia lock, stock and barrel. Once Charlie had reached the magical age of fifty-five, God’s own country had welcomed him with open arms — as long as he took out private health insurance and didn’t expect an Australian pension. His own had kicked in when he’d left the army, though it was hardly enough to keep him in caviar and champagne. Charlie had been offered a commission and taken it. As an officer, he could stay in an extra fifteen years, instead of getting binned at forty.

We drove down half a mile of track, post-and-rail fencing either side of us. About a hundred metres from the house, a woman on a horse, waving like a lunatic, overtook us. I couldn’t see much of her face under her baseball cap, just this huge smile. I slowed, but she waved us on. She stopped at a gate and we carried on along the track.

‘Who was that?’ Silky didn’t sound jealous. A perpetual traveller couldn’t be.

‘Probably Julie, the daughter. The last time I saw her she was about seventeen with a face full of zits. That would have been a good fifteen years ago.’

We pulled up by the house, alongside a weather-beaten Land Cruiser and a pick-up truck that had seen better days.

Charlie stood on the veranda to welcome us, a big man in a green T-shirt. With his cropped, dark red hair, he was on his way to doing a pretty good impression of a traffic light. I could see Silky trying not to stare too obviously at the grey socks he insisted on wearing under his sandals. ‘Don’t worry about it,’ I said. ‘It’s a Brit thing.’

Hazel came out and slipped an arm through her husband’s. She was dressed more or less the same as him, except her feet were bare. They both walked down the steps and out into the sun to greet us.

Charlie was heading for sixty but still looked as fit as a butcher’s dog; there wasn’t an ounce of lard on him, and that ginger hair somehow added to the healthy outdoor look. The sun hadn’t been kind to him though; his skin was more burned than tanned. He thrust out a hand, small and out of proportion to the rest of him. He certainly hadn’t shrunk with age; he was still a good two or three inches taller than me, but his grip wasn’t as strong as it once had been. ‘All right, lad? Glad you’ve come.’ He kept eye contact to make sure I knew it.

We finished shaking and Hazel took over. I put an arm around Silky’s shoulder and introduced her to them both.

‘My name’s really pronounced Silk-a,’ she corrected me. ‘But Nick calls me Silky. It’s maybe easier if you do the same, otherwise you could confuse him.’

Hazel still had the same long, dark brown hair, and very clear, untanned skin. Her eyes had wrinkled with laughter when she was younger; I remembered her beaming behind the counter in Dixons in the precinct, always happy to use her employee discount for any Regiment guy who came in. They looked older and wiser now. Maybe sadder, too.

Hazel started to hustle us into the house. ‘Sure you can’t stay more than a night?’

‘No, we’ve got to move on. There’s a boogie in Melbourne on the ninth.’

Silky took Charlie’s arm as we hit the steps up to the veranda. ‘Do you still parachute? Nick said you used to.’

‘No.’ He gave me a questioning stare. ‘Not any more.’

2

‘While she’s freshening up, lad — what does she know about work, besides the parachuting?’

It was a question Charlie had to ask. He didn’t want to put his foot in it.

‘Nothing. She thinks I’m a panel-beater.’

‘With a boss who lets you take the year off? Or did you tell her you’re retired? She’s obviously got a bit of a soft spot for the elderly.’

I returned his grin just as Hazel came back into the living room with a tray of orange juice and glasses.

‘I hope he’s not trying to sell you a horse, Nick?’

A few notes of German drifted down the stairs as Silky relaxed under the shower.

‘Nah, he’s been giving me a hard time for not following his example.’

‘But you’re too young to retire…’

‘I mean about not getting my hooks into a gorgeous girl like he did.’

Hazel smiled as she put the tray down. ‘Has he told you about the lovely life we have now?’

‘Not yet, but I’m sure it’ll only be a matter of time!’

Hazel fussed around like a mother hen as she rearranged all the things neatly on the coffee table. Eventually she poured three glasses and we clinked them in an unspoken toast.

I pointed out of the window. ‘Was that Julie I saw riding?’

Hazel’s face lit up. ‘She’ll be over soon. She phoned to say she’d seen you.’

‘The pair of them — like that, they are.’ Charlie went to cross his fingers to show how entwined the two of them were, but couldn’t quite manage it. His forefinger seemed to have a mind of its own. He brought his thumb and little finger into play instead, as if he was on the phone. ‘And when they’re not together, they’re never off the blower. And Hazel emails the kids every day after school.’

‘Maintenance, my darling.’ Hazel looked me in the eye. ‘If you don’t keep checking the roof, then next time there’s a storm… Don’t you agree, Nick?’

I looked at the family gallery on the sideboard; the usual mishmash, some black and white, some colour, in a variety of silver and wooden frames. Wedding photos with ’70s hairstyles; then their two kids, Julie and Steven, at all the different stages: big ears; no teeth; zits… Then the ones of Julie’s wedding, and her own children; by the look of it they had about four of them. The air round here was obviously good for raising more than just horses.

My gaze fell on one of a young man in a Light Infantry beret and best Dress Number Twos staring proudly into the camera, the Union Jack behind him. Steven’s passing-out parade must have been about 1990, because Charlie and I had still been in the Regiment; I’d thought he’d burst with pride when he told me. I didn’t know much about him though, beyond the fact that he’d been seventeen and the spitting image of his dad.

‘How’s your boy doing? He still in?’

Hazel’s eyes dropped to the floor.

I wondered what I’d said, then I noticed: there weren’t any other pictures of him.

Charlie leaned across and took Hazel’s hand in his. ‘He was killed in Kosovo,’ he said softly. ‘Ninety-four. He’d just got promoted to corporal.’

He put his arm around his wife. I sat back in my chair, not sure what to say to avoid adding to the wreckage.

‘Don’t worry about it, lad, you weren’t to know. We kept it to ourselves pretty much. Didn’t want GMTV round, filming us going through the family album.’

Hazel looked up and gave a brave smile. She’d probably got over the worst of it during the last ten years, but it must have been a nightmare.

Silky drifted in, breaking the moment, smelling of soap and shampoo. She’d put on a pair of pale blue cotton trousers and a white vest, and her wet hair was combed back.

There was an awkward silence. Hazel busied herself pouring another glass of juice. ‘I bet you feel a lot better for that.’

‘The shower or the singing?’ Silky smiled as she came and sat beside me. Whatever she was about to say next was drowned out by the blare of a car horn.

Hazel looked relieved. ‘Julie.’

Seconds later, a flurry of feet and young voices bomb-burst into the house, shouts and shrieks echoing off the wooden floors. The door flew open and four boys with sticky-up crew cuts and untanned skin ran into the room. The older two, about eight and seven, came up to me and thrust out their hands. ‘You’re Nick, aren’t you?’ They had strong accents. Their two little brothers ran back outside.

I bent down and shook. ‘And this is Silky.’

‘That’s a funny name.’

‘You pronounce it Silk-a really. Nick calls me Silky because he’s not very good with complicated words.’

Silky loved kids. Her older sister kept sending pictures of her twin seven-year-old boys to Silky’s PO box in Sydney. Every time we stopped in anywhere for more than a few days she got her mail forwarded and I would have to sit and listen to Karl and Rudolf’s latest adventures.

‘Where are you from, Silky? You talk funny!’

‘Funnier than Nick? I come from Germany. It’s a long way away.’

Julie and her husband Alan came in with Charlie, the two younger kids hanging off his leg. We made the right noises as we shook. Alan’s hands were big and rough. He was a bushman to his marrow, and wasn’t particularly fussed up about the visitors.

Charlie took charge. ‘Right! I’d better get that barbecue lit, hadn’t I? Who’s coming to help me?’

It was obviously the standard call to arms. All the kids jumped up and down with delight and charged outside.

3

Two hours later, everybody was stuffed full of chicken, steak, prawns and Toohey’s. Silky sat with Julie and Hazel on the settee; conversation flowed like they’d known each other all their lives. Alan sorted out a DVD for the kids, who were flaked out on cushions on the floor. He threw it in and, maybe sensing Charlie and I could do with some private time, sat down to watch it with them.

‘Why don’t you jump any more?’

Charlie was standing with me by the jug of coffee on the sideboard. We weren’t ready for it yet; we were both still on cans. ‘Wasn’t fair to Hazel. Her nerves were bad enough as it was.’

Silky joined us with three empty cups. She nodded at the gallery as she poured. ‘Charlie, you were in the army?’

‘Yes.’

‘You haven’t changed, have you? Look at you!’

Charlie smiled at the picture of his son. ‘I’ve put on a few wrinkles since then — and lost a bit of hair.’

I shot a glance at Hazel. She was smiling at Charlie for being so kind. Silky poured their coffees and went back to the other two, completely oblivious.

Charlie held up his can to me in a toast. ‘The good old days.’ We touched tins and he took a swig. ‘What about Silky? Any plans?’

‘Nah, I’m just letting her sleep with me till I find somebody better.’

He frowned at my bad joke. ‘You’re a knobber then. She seems a really good girl. Make the best of it while you can, lad.’ He looked at the sofa then back at me. ‘So, you want to come and watch the sun go down, or what?’

He couldn’t have made it more obvious he had something he wanted to talk about if he’d tried. He lifted two new cans and I followed him out onto the veranda.

He leaned on the rail. A couple of hundred metres away, a group of horses kicked up dust in the paddock.

Charlie sat on a bench and motioned me to a swing seat opposite. Whatever was on his mind, he didn’t seem ready to talk about it yet. My eyes followed his to the horse grazing on its own in a corner.

‘You know what, Charlie? You were the one that I picked. I never told you that, did I?’

The training major always gave just one piece of advice to the newly badged troopers. ‘When you get to your squadron, shut up, look and listen. Then pick one man you think is the ideal SAS soldier. Don’t let him know you’ve picked him, but watch and learn. There will be times on operations when you don’t know how to act or react. That’s when you ask yourself what your man would do.’

Charlie had started out as the one I picked, but he very quickly became even more important to me than that. In my mind, I awarded him the highest accolade one soldier could ever give another. I could honestly say that I would have followed him anywhere.

He took another swig and rested his can on the rail. ‘I know, lad. I used to see you watching me. You learn much?’

‘I think I did. In fact I thought about you on the last day of that Waco job. Do I deck the bloke or not? I know I made the right decision.’

‘I’m not sure everybody at Waco did.’ Charlie turned his head to look at me. ‘Remember that young lad from DERA, the gas man? He killed himself a year later.’

I hadn’t heard. I’d left the Regiment by then. ‘His name was Anthony. He was all right.’

He sat back in his chair. ‘Good men, fucked over by the system. It’s nothing new.’ He picked up his beer with a trembling hand, as if the emotion of the moment was getting the better of him. ‘You know, I fell for it when I was a lad. I really did believe all that shite about Queen and country. We were the good guys, they were the bad guys. It took me thirty-seven years playing soldiers to realize what a load of old bollocks it was. Maybe you got there sooner? That why you got out?’

Charlie wouldn’t know what I’d done after I left, and he would never ask. He knew that if I wanted him to know, I’d tell him.

‘Sort of.’

He looked back at the solitary horse in the corner of the field. ‘Did you know I was in the troop when my boy was on foot patrol in Derry?’

I nodded. A couple of guys had had sons in the green army, and all of them had been operating over the water at the same time.

He gave a little self-mocking laugh. ‘I used to kid myself that every PIRA guy we dropped meant one less who could take a pop at my boy. Kind of felt I was looking out for him. But we weren’t doing the job full throttle, were we? We were only dropping the ASUs [active service units] that Thatcher and Major thought would hold up the peace process.’ His eyes narrowed. ‘We were actually protecting Adams and McGuinness so they could have secret talks with our “We do not deal with terrorists” governments. Seemed there were good baddies and bad baddies, something I hadn’t really thought of before.’

I shrugged. No-one had ever officially admitted it, but we had all known what was going on. Eliminate the ones who were objecting to any sort of progress, then hope the rest were going to fall in behind our guys, Adams and McGuinness. ‘Maybe it worked. We’ve got a sort of peace.’

‘Whatever. Only thing that mattered was, all the time I was running around working was time I didn’t have to sit and worry about Steven.’

He gazed at the horse, lost for a moment in a world of his own. ‘And afterwards… after he was killed… I didn’t care how they did it, just so long as they kept me busy.’

I lifted the can. ‘Must have been grim, mate.’ I hesitated. ‘I’ve kind of been there myself…’ I tailed off again, because I wasn’t sure what I was going to say next. In any case, Charlie was giving me that slightly challenging look you see in the eyes of the bereaved when people say, ‘I know exactly how you must be feeling,’ and they have no fucking idea. I shrugged. ‘She wasn’t my own, but fuck, it felt like she was. If it had hurt any more, I couldn’t have taken it.’

Charlie shifted in his seat. ‘Who was she? Stepdaughter?’

‘Kev Brown’s kid — he was in Eight Troop, remember?’

Charlie tried to, but couldn’t.

‘He and Marsha had made me guardian in their will.’

‘Oh yeah, I heard about that. Shit, I had no idea it was you who’d stepped in.’ His voice dropped. ‘So what happened to her?’

‘She got killed two years ago in London.’ I stared down at the can. ‘She was fifteen. I took her back home to the States and buried her, then, well, I buried myself, a bit like you.’

Charlie nodded slowly. ‘Then you just wake up one day and wonder what the fuck it’s all about…’

‘Something like that. I always used to pretend I didn’t give a fuck, but, well, you know, I loved her. Losing her fucked me up big-time. Next thing I knew, I was sitting at the wheel of a combi with long hair and a wrist full of these things.’ I jiggled the friendship bracelets.

Charlie smiled. ‘I guess everybody deals with it the best way they can. Know what Julie bought me for Christmas? Slippers. Fucking slippers! Ever since Steven died, that’s how she and her mother want things to be. They want to live in a bubble. Everything nice and fluffy, and Steven’s a happy face in a photograph. That’s what this place is all about. It’s Hazel’s own self-contained eco-climate, like a fucking Eden Project for happier times.’

He took another swig of beer and looked me square in the eye. ‘Coming here was the worst thing I could have done, lad. Far too much time on my hands. People look at me and think I have a slice of paradise, but it’s driving me fucking mad. If you keep moving, keep doing, there’s no time left to think. But now I spend half the day thinking about him. It’s that same old feeling I had over the water, that I should have been there, should have been looking after him. I know there was nothing I could have done, but that doesn’t stop you thinking it, does it?’

He gave me a rueful smile as he nodded over towards the paddock. ‘You see that one in the corner, the bay? He was a stallion once. In his prime he covered three or four mares a day, and spent the rest of the time kicking down stable doors. He doesn’t get to use his gear at all these days. Too knackered. Only difference between him and me is that instead of eating grass and shitting all day, I’m pruning the fucking gum trees and watching the sun set. You know the best thing I could do for him?’ His jaw tightened. ‘Put a fucking gun to his head and put him out of his misery.’

I chanced a smile. ‘Or buy him slippers, mate.’

‘Yeah, or buy him slippers. But some guys do it for themselves, don’t they? Guys like Anthony. I used to think they were copping out, taking the coward’s way, but I’m not so sure any more. Maybe they’re the smart ones.’

I didn’t know where he was going with this, and I didn’t get the chance to find out. Julie pushed the door open and hurried from the house, a child’s hand gripped in each of hers. She had a horrified look on her face, completely at odds with the bright tone in her voice. ‘That was a silly film — come on, let’s go. It’s bedtime anyway.’ Something not very good had happened inside, and she was trying to make light of it. She shepherded them down the steps just as her mother appeared in the doorway. Hazel looked distraught.

Charlie got up and took a couple of steps towards her, then jerked his head at me to go and check.

I pulled open the screen door and went in. Silky and Alan were standing in front of the television. This was no kids’ DVD; the screen was filled with jerky, urgent images. I heard screams and the rattle of automatic gunfire.

Silky turned to me. ‘It’s near Russia somewhere. A siege. They’re shooting children.’

The picture cut to soldiers trying to make entry into a big square concrete office block. The rolling captions announced that terrorists were holding an estimated three hundred people hostage. The town of Kazbegi was in the north of Georgia, on the border with Russia. Many of the hostages were thought to be women and children.

I watched as a small group of soldiers fired their AKs wildly into the windows and others tried to make entry with sledgehammers.

The camera shifted to an armoured vehicle ramming into a door. Screams filled the TV’s speakers.

Women and children tumbled out of the building, only to be caught in vicious crossfire. Black smoke billowed through broken glass. Elsewhere, I could see panic-stricken faces pressed against the panes.

Soldiers gesticulated wildly to get them to stand aside, but it wasn’t happening. They were frozen to the spot.

The picture cut again to a reporter hiding behind an armoured vehicle, her pretty dark eyes wide as saucers as she extracted and processed information from the chaos. All around her, what looked like half the army was popping up and firing pistols and assault rifles. I was watching a gangfuck, Georgian style.

As two attack helicopters rattled overhead, she shouted into her microphone, in an Eastern European accent with an American twang, that the building was a regional government office; a census was being conducted and that was why there were so many people inside. The attack was thought to be an Islamist militant group protesting against the Caspian pipeline. Fuck knows how CNN had got someone there so quick, but they had. The breaking news caption now put the death toll at thirty.

Silky held her hands to her face. ‘Oh my God, those poor kids!’

A soldier ran across the screen. Cradled in his arms was the limp body of a child, his clothing charred and smouldering.

There was an explosion inside the building. The camera shuddered as a rapid flash hit the windows on the first floor. Glass blew out, then smoke billowed from the holes.

I could hear a series of shouted orders, but the chaos continued. Usual story; more chiefs than Indians.

A couple of soldiers who had successfully made entry jumped back out of a ground-floor window, one of them with flames dancing on his uniform.

The camera zoomed in on a fleet of ambulances coming down a road, some civilian, some military. The two helicopters still rattled overhead.

Two blood-covered women dashed from the building, gathering up whatever dazed and bloodied children they could as they ran.

There was another prolonged and totally indiscriminate exchange of gunfire as the camera zoomed in on two kids jumping from a first-floor window to escape the flames.

Hazel hit the remote and the TV died. ‘Enough. Not in my house.’

4

I sat next to Silky on the veranda as the sun came up, listening to last night’s events being endlessly dissected on the radio as I cut orange after orange for her to put through the juicer. Getting the Tindalls breakfast seemed the least we could do to repay their hospitality, and I hoped it might help put a spring in their step. The atmosphere had been pretty subdued after Hazel switched off the TV. We’d helped clear up in near silence, then gone to bed. Hazel hadn’t been at all happy about the way the real world had come in uninvited, and Charlie had been tense, preoccupied.

‘Hear that?’ Silky whispered. ‘They now estimate about sixty dead and a hundred and sixty injured.’ She poured another few oranges’ worth of juice into a jug. ‘That’s over half the people who were in the building. It’s terrible.’

‘It’s not so bad, you know, as sieges go.’ In the corner of the paddock, the old bay was treating himself to an early-morning dust bath. ‘You have to work on the basis that they’re all dead from the beginning anyway. Even a single survivor is a bonus in a situation like that.’

She stopped squeezing and straightened up. ‘I keep thinking about that poor child. The one who’d been burned. Did you see the soldier holding him?’

I cut another couple of oranges and passed them across. It seemed to be taking an awful lot of fruit to produce not very much juice. ‘The place was probably rigged with explosives. We saw one lot go off. I’m surprised there aren’t many more dead.’

‘But all those soldiers looked out of control. They didn’t know what they were doing.’

‘You know, if twenty per cent or fewer get dropped it’s a success. What those soldiers were doing was reacting to what was happening, whether it was the correct thing to do or not.’

‘Dropped? What is dropped? Killed? For a panel-beater, you seem to know an awful lot about these things…’

‘Don’t you box-heads read Time magazine?’

Silky pulled a face before going back to her task. ‘You certainly don’t. The only magazines you read have parachutes on the cover.’

I was still laughing when Hazel appeared in the doorway in her dressing gown. Her hair was a mess and her eyes were red and shiny.

Silky jumped to her feet. ‘Hazel, are you all right?’

Atear rolled down her cheek. ‘He’s gone.’

‘Gone?’ I said. ‘What are you on about?’

‘He’s not here.’

A lot of thoughts raced through my mind in the next split second, and all at a thousand miles an hour. Charlie had withdrawn into his shell after the news broadcasts. ‘That stuff really seemed to get to Hazel,’ I’d said. ‘She’s been like that ever since Steven died,’ he’d replied. ‘She wants to shut out the real world, keep us all from being hurt like that again. That’s what this place is all about.’

He’d been very morose all evening, come to think of it, but I’d put that down to the Toohey’s; it had been looking more and more like he had a drink problem. And all that stuff about shooting horses… fuck, he wouldn’t have taken it into his head to drive off into the night and top himself, would he? He wouldn’t have been the first.

Silky wiped her hands on her jeans and wrapped her arms around Hazel. ‘Charlie has gone somewhere? Would you like some coffee, or maybe some tea?’

I glanced across at the parking area at the side of the house. The Land Cruiser was missing. ‘Maybe he’s gone to fetch some croissants.’ I gave her my biggest smile. ‘I noticed a little bakery about a thousand miles back.’

Silky glared at me as she comforted Hazel. ‘It’s not funny, Nick.’ She was right; wrong time, wrong place.

‘I’m sorry. You sure he hasn’t left a note or something?’

She shook her head. ‘He didn’t say anything to you? You two were talking together a long time out here.’

Silky’s head bounced between the pair of us as she tried to get Hazel to sit down. ‘Anyone want to tell me what’s going on?’

I touched her hand. ‘Later.’

She got the hint. Hazel finally sat down and Silky disappeared inside the house to make that tea she’d promised.

‘I’m scared that something’s happened, Nick. He wasn’t himself when he came to bed. You sure he didn’t say anything?’

Silky was back in the doorway. ‘Hazel, the telephone’s ringing. Do you want me to—’

Hazel was already moving. Silky stared at me quizzically but I wanted to listen, not speak.

I started through the door, but Hazel was already on her way back. ‘That was Julie. The Land Cruiser’s at the train station. What’s happening, Nick? Everything’s going to fall apart again, I just know it…’ She buried her face in the front of my shirt, and clung to me like a woman drowning.

At last she raised her head. ‘Please help me find him, Nick. Please…’

5

Even with the door closed, the racket Julie’s kids were making carried into her father’s office. Then the TV came on, and cartoon voices took over from their shrieks and the clatter of small feet across wooden floors.

I looked up from Charlie’s desk. ‘He won’t have done anything stupid, Hazel. You know that’s not his style.’

She nodded as if she wanted to believe me, but couldn’t quite bring herself to. ‘I pray you’re right, Nick. I want him home.’

She’d already told me Charlie had been suffering from depression over the last few weeks, and the episodes had been getting worse and more frequent. She wanted so much to convince herself he wasn’t off in the bush having a final dark night of the soul.

‘Promise you’ll try to find him for me?’ She sounded lost, bewildered. She had changed out of her dressing gown but her hair was still a mess, and she’d given in to little bouts of weeping over the last hour. I’d never seen her look so vulnerable, and I wanted to do whatever I could to make her smile again.

She leaned down and switched on the worn, stained-plastic PC for me. I listened to the modem shaking hands with the server on the line. I certainly wasn’t going to admit to what Charlie and I had talked about. Maybe without realizing it I’d said the wrong thing and got him all sparked up. ‘You go back to Julie, Hazel. I’ll give you a shout if I find anything.’

As she left the room, the PC played the Windows music and went into msn. It was a very uncluttered office; the desk, the swivel chair I was sitting in, a filing cabinet, and that was about it. A venetian blind over the window cast big wedges of light and shadow. There was a strong smell of wood.

The monitor sat in front of me, covered with kids’ stickers. Shrek had a starring role on the mouse mat. A glass tankard full of sharpened pencils and pens, engraved with a winged dagger, doubled as a paperweight.

Family pictures were Blu-tacked to the walls. It didn’t surprise me to see that there were none of Charlie’s SAS days. There’d always been two types of guy in the Regiment: the ones who displayed nothing to do with their past, no certificates or commendations, no bayonets or decommissioned AK47s dangling off the wall. Work was work, and home was home. Then there were the others, who wanted it all to hang out for the whole world to see.

I picked up the tankard. Everyone got presented with one when they left. I couldn’t remember where mine was. The squadron sergeant major had handed it to me almost as an afterthought when I gave him my clearance chit. ‘Hold on,’ he’d said. ‘Here, I think this one’s yours.’ He’d fished around under his desk and given me a box, and that was that. ‘See you around.’

Fair one. I was the one who’d chosen to leave. When you’re out, you’re out. There isn’t a Good Lads Club or annual reunion or any of that malarkey.

I read the engraving and had to laugh. To Charlie. Good luck. B Squadron. By Hereford standards, that was emotion running amok.

I went through the paperwork it had been keeping in place; unpaid bills for fencing posts and animal feed, and two or three utility bills that had reached the red stage.

I started to mooch around on the PC. The only documents on the desktop were one about poultices for horses’ feet, and something about the exchange rate between the Australian dollar and Turkish lira. I knew they’d honeymooned in Cyprus. Maybe Charlie was planning a surprise return trip. Maybe he’d just gone into the city to pick up the tickets.

The email folder didn’t yield much either. The bulk of it was Hazel’s daily exchanges with Julie and the kids, even though they lived within spitting distance. I wondered what it must be like to be part of such a strong family unit. Maybe it was a bit too claustrophobic at times. Maybe Charlie had just gone off to find himself some space. Enough of that; I was starting to sound like Silky.

I spent the next hour searching all his document folders, but found nothing. I went online. The browser’s history had been cleared. What did that mean — that Charlie was hiding something, or just that he was a good housekeeper? Whatever, if he’d been planning something he didn’t want Hazel to know about, he would hardly have left a sign saying THIS WAY on his PC.

The filing cabinet had four drawers. I opened the bottom one, P — Z, and pulled out the folder marked T. Charlie had done himself proud. The last couple of years’ phone bills were not only in date order, they were itemized. I pulled out the last couple of quarters and ran my eye down the lists.

It didn’t take long to spot a pattern.

Over the last month or so, and with increasing frequency, there had been several long calls to an 01432 number in the UK.

I looked at my watch. It was just after 9 a.m., so still well before bedtime back home.

I picked up the phone and dialled.