Fortress

18

The track was rutted and puddled, speckling Tom’s legs with mud as he pounded along. He ran fast, filling his lungs with damp English air to clear out the last of the sticky Helmand dust. He came to the brow of the hill and paused to take in the view. A grey mist hung in the trees like smoke. Even in this light, with the rain falling around him, it was serene. There was no sound other than that of a pair of blackbirds in conversation and, further away, the drill of a woodpecker. Just where the track dipped down and disappeared into the trees a Mondeo was parked, no lights on, but a wisp of exhaust indicated it was occupied. The car looked as if it had been driven a long distance down a rainy motorway, its colour almost completely obscured by a thick coat of road grime out of which the wipers had cut clean semi-circles.

Everyone in the village and its environs knew each other, and Tom dreaded a conversation with some well-meaning neighbour eager to hear about what he was doing for his country and so on. He kept going, but something about the car bugged him. He had seen it before. As he pounded on, he replayed his movements since his return but couldn’t place it. By the time he stopped to take a second look it was gone.

For the first twenty-four hours he had done nothing but sleep — turbulent semi-consciousness crowded with shattering dreams: Dave’s limp, blood-drenched frame, his frozen, wide-eyed expression; Qazi’s contemptuous sneer. The poor Afghan kid, already wounded, helpless as he died. He knew better than to try to resist these replays. They were part of a process that had to be gone through. Emotional cold turkey, he’d once heard an army shrink call it. He woke drenched with sweat, gasping for breath, as if some unseen hand had got him by the neck, mistaking the sweat for Dave’s blood. He had taken the precaution of locking himself in his bedroom. One of his mates had once broken his daughter’s nose when she came in to wake him.

He also dreamed of Delphine, the early carefree days, but then her face dissolved into frozen blocks of pixels.

During the day he virtually barricaded himself into the TV room, flipping between the BBC and Sky’s rolling news as they ran a continuous commentary on the riots. Not only had his own world been pulled from under him, the country itself was in turmoil. No wonder Delphine had wanted out. He thought of Blakey, coming home from fighting the Taliban to this.

He turned off the track and dived into the woods, following a trail he had blazed as a boy. These were the happy hunting grounds of his childhood, where long school holidays passed in a flash as he and his mates became SOE operatives dropped by Lysanders into the French forests to blow up Nazi trains. At the edge of the woods he paused to take in the view, the field falling away to their Georgian pile, shaded by century-old lime trees, against the backdrop of the Precambrian hills, 680 million years old. Most of their land was leased to a local farmer now, since he had shown no interest in farming. Was this what was waiting for him? Was he staring at his future? What the hell was he going to do next?

When he turned on his phone there were four missed calls, three from a withheld number, no messages. He hadn’t the energy to be curious right now.

The fourth was his father. Tom dialled and waited.

‘Hello, old boy! Welcome home and all that.’

Breezy and positive was Hugh Buckingham’s default mode. Tom guessed his mother had been on to him, full of worry, but Hugh would know better than to ask questions or offer sympathy. ‘Soaking up some of your mother’s TLC, I trust.’

‘Yeah!’

‘Well, when you’ve had enough of that, come up to town and have lunch. I need your perspective.’

‘On what?’

‘On what the hell’s going on.’ Hugh knew he wouldn’t survive more than a few days down there without getting cabin fever.

‘Yeah, okay.’

His father tried not to overplay his joy. ‘Come to the club and we’ll take it from there. And…’ He paused, sounding uncharacteristically hesitant. ‘Did that chap Rolt get hold of you?’

Rolt? Tom couldn’t place the name.

‘You know, the Invicta chap — patron saint of ex-soldiers. You were at school with him.’

They’d been in the same house — hardly best buds. ‘What does he want?’

‘Just asked you to call. He’s quite a big deal now.’

Tom had no inclination to talk to anyone, and especially not if they were connected with the forces. ‘Okay, Dad. Will do. See you.’