Heart of Danger

Eleven.

So nearly… First would have come the crows, and after the crows had taken carrion there would have come magpies and jays, and after magpies and jays there would have been rats, and after the rats there would have been crawling insects, and the worms would have come for the final feast. The jaws seemed to laugh at Penn, the eye sockets seemed to stare at him. He had so nearly stepped on the skull. Two winters and a summer, he thought, had given every chance for the birds, rodents, insects and worms to strip the flesh and muscle and tissue from the face of the skull. The mouth leered, the eye sockets challenged him. Walking a pace to the side of the track in the late afternoon half-light under the tree canopy, his foot poised to drop and take his weight, he had seen the skull in the leaves and brambles. The skeleton was lying on what had been its stomach, but the head was twisted as if the final living movement had been the attempt to see the killing danger behind. The skeleton was clothed in a long dark-brown overcoat, and there were trousers that had also not rotted, but he could see the bones at the ankles, above the shoes, because the man had not worn socks, and he could see also the bones of the hands still clasping a farm sack of rough hessian. He was in the tree line, going towards Rosenovici, and he could see down through into the trees and into the quiet calm of the valley, and there-was a golden light settled on the valley. He had no business with it, the knowledge could not help him, but he bent and he took the finger bones from the neck of the sack and they came away easily. Inside the sack, stuffed in, were the clothes of basic winter necessity, what a man could carry for himself and for his woman. He saw it in his mind… the moment when someone in the doomed village had claimed there was a window of opportunity for flight, and frightened men and women had jumped for the window, taken what they could carry, and tried to smuggle themselves through the perimeter lines of their enemy. He wondered if Dorrie Mowat had seen this man go, wondered if she had wished him well, wondered if she had kissed him or if she had hugged him, wondered if she had told him that she would stay… He had so nearly stepped on the skeleton of the man who had been at the head of the fleeing column.

When he went forward, edging his way, he found the others. All skeletons, all dressed against the cold. The skeletons lay in a straggled line. There were the remains of women and of children and of babies. There were bulging suitcases of rotted cardboard and decaying imitation leather that were tied shut with farm twine, there were more hessian sacks, there were the heavy plastic bags that had once held agricultural fertilizer. He counted a dozen skeletons in all. In the cases and sacks and bags he found the necessities of survival, clothes and children's favourite toys and the small framed pictures of Christ in Calvary. He supposed a machine gun had taken them, traversing. Some would have run forward at the first explosion of shooting and some would have frozen still and some would have tried to go back. Last in the line was a tall woman and he could see that her body wore three dresses, and there was a bag beside her where she had dropped it and each hand still held a small swaddled bundle and the bone of the third finger of her left hand was amputated, where her wedding ring would have been. He understood what she had carried, what in her death she had not let go of because the two small skulls were close to her boots. He wondered if Dorrie had known them, if Dorrie had kissed and hugged the babies, if Dorrie had told the mother why she would stay to the end with the wounded.

He felt no hatred, because his mind was chilled.

No fear, because his mind was numbed.

He went forward. He had walked half of the distance to the village that he must travel before darkness. Dorrie had been here, in the valley, and would have seen the tractors and the women and the animals, and Dorrie had stayed to the end… She pulled him forward. It was as if she had taken Penn's hand, and there was mischief in her smile, as if she taunted him, as if she dared him to come closer to Rosenovici. He did not think there was anything in his life before that had been worthwhile. She had captured him, with her taunt beckoning, with the laugh of her lips and cheeks. That horrid young woman, he would have loved her. Penn wanted to be near to Rosenovici before darkness. That angel, he would have loved her. He had put down the book because there was not enough light through the window for him to read more. He was still cold. The Headmaster sat in his chair. He was hunched, bowed, with a blanket of thick wool across his shoulders, and he rubbed hard at his upper thighs to put warmth in them. All through the day he had been cold. His trousers, soaked from the wading of the river at the ford that was not guarded by the scum boys of the militia, could not be hung on the line to dry outside in the day's spring sunshine. It would have invited suspicion to have displayed his wet trousers for the village to see. His shoes, mud-caked, could be left, discreetly, at the kitchen door because no one from the village now came to their house, that much was guaranteed. The plague was on his house, but his trousers would have been seen from the road and his wife had not complained to him, just laid them wet and filthy over the wood frame in front of the kitchen stove. Although he shivered, he felt a sense of true liberation. It had been good to pray in that place of evil, kneeling in the mud, crying silently for the forgiveness of them all. He did not think it an idiocy, which was what his wife had said it was, that he had waded the ford to go to pray in that place of evil… He made out a movement through the window, the hurrying walk of villagers going towards the crossroads near the church. He stood up from the chair and pressed his face against the cold glass and craned to see where the villagers went, hurrying. He saw the white jeeps stopped near the church, and he saw, in a blur, the Canadian policeman who had promised to bring him books for his school in return for the sharing of his secret, and the Political Officer who was an educated man. He felt his strength because he had prayed in that place of evil, knelt in that muddied pit that shamed them all, and he would wade the ford again that night, ask again for their forgiveness, pray again that the guilty would face harsh retribution. He knew that some, a few, had the courage to stand up because he had heard it on the foreign radio. There were some, a few, who had sheltered and hidden their neighbours, Croat or Muslim. There were some, a few, who had stood against the tide and shouted against the barbarism of the concentration camps and the killings and the digging of graves in the dark silence. It was worth praying for, harsh retribution for the guilty. The Headmaster climbed the stairs of his house. It was right, when he went to see the UNCIVPOL Canadian and the Political Officer, that he should wear his suit. "We have a job to do, and the job is mandated by the office of the Secretary General of the United Nations…" The Political Officer was Finnish, but it was many years since he had lived in the family home at Ivalo, up north by the Arctic Circle, close to the Russian border, and many years since he had served in the offices of the Foreign Ministry, down south in Helsinki. The Political Officer was a United Nations man, had been for seventeen years. He did not know whether he had offended a particular dignitary, whether he had made waves where oil should have been poured, but following an investigation that he had led into the use of United Nations facilities by the families of diplomats accredited to New York, he had been shipped overseas. His wife's home, where she was with the children, was New Jersey. His home, where he was alone, was the spa town of Topusko. Perhaps it was his penance, for digging too deep into claimed expenses, that he was posted to Topusko in Sector North. "When you hinder me, then you hinder the world. It is a great conceit for a little man to hinder the humanitarian efforts of the world community…"

The Political Officer had come to Salika to offer what he called 'moral weight' to the efforts of the Canadian and Kenyan police officers. He used big language, and he recognized that his words fell empty.

"You should know, Mr. Stankovic, that each obstruction of our work is logged and filed. If I were in your position, Mr. Stankovic, I would be unhappy that my actions had attracted so many reports…"

"Go get the shit out of here."

He regarded the man as a brute. The Political Officer's training was in the quiet world of diplomats and bureaucrats and functionaries. He assumed that he was regarded as a dull man at cocktails and poor company at the dinner parties of the social circuit, but he believed himself to be a man of rectitude and decency. Because of what he believed himself to be, any meeting with Milan Stankovic, was personal pain… and there were so many like men scattered among each valley of the area that he covered from the spa town of Topusko. The length of Bosnia, the width of Croatia, there had been atrocities and graves dug, through the length and the width there were thousands of old women, old men, washed-up debris on a shore, who died alone for the want of a parcel of food brought in secrecy… He made the point of calling this one by the title of "Mister', little victories were hard to come by and Mister Stankovic always wore military fatigues.

"We have the right of free access anywhere in this territory…"

"You go where I say, only where I say. I say you get the shit out."

Nothing of his upbringing in Ivalo had prepared him for confrontation with the likes of Mr. Milan Stankovic, nor for the others similar to him who ruled over similar villages. Nothing of his short work in the Foreign Ministry in Helsinki had prepared him, nor anything in the hushed corridors beyond the Secretary General's inner sanctum. Once, a year after his posting to New York, jogging with his wife and his three children at night in Central Park, he had met such a beast, seen a knife, handed over his wallet and his credit cards from the pouch at his waist. It had been his only experience of the beasts before coming to Topusko. But that beast had gone, running for bushes and shadows and cover, had not stayed in conceit to confront the weakness of him and his family… He knew the Headmaster by sight, for conversation, and he saw him coming up the road behind Stankovic. There was always a curious undressed look about a man without the spectacles that were habitual to him. The Headmaster had twice offered him a game of chess, but there had never been the opportunity. There were deep orange-blue bruises on the Headmaster's face, and welt scars on his cheeks, and the lower lip was split and angry.

"We have a file on you, Mr. Stankovic, that grows more thick each week. I promise you, from the depths of my heart, that we are not stupid men. We have the file…"

The hand was on the holster, fiddling for the locking button of the flap.

"We have a file. Maybe you will be an old man when the file is presented to an examining magistrate. You are one of those, Mr. Stankovic, who tells me loudly that Serbs and Croats can never again live together I tell you, never is a long time. My experience, Mr. Stankovic, those who shout loudest that there can never be reconciliation are those who hide the greatest guilt…"

But the pistol was out of the holster. The Political Officer rated his file as a puny weapon when set against the Makharov pistol. The pistol was armed. The clatter of the metal parts seared at him. For seventeen years he had believed in the power, glory, authority, of the blue flag. The reality was a loaded pistol on a village road. There was a shout from beside the Canadian policeman's jeep, a wiry little man in camouflage fatigues trying to peer past the bulk of the Kenyan's body and into the back of the jeep. He said in his reports that went to the desk of the Director of Civilian Affairs for on-passing to the Secretariat in New York that there was so much cruelty, so much fear, and his power of intervention was so minimal. Milan Stankovic was striding away towards the jeep, and the Headmaster had reached him.

"My friend, what happened to you..,?" The question of a fool.

The small piece of paper was put in his hand. He was told it was a prescription for the lenses of spectacles.

"We will have them made, my promise, we will bring them to you. Was it him that did that to you…?" The question of an idiot.

The Headmaster shrugged, turned away.

They had the door of the jeep open, and the Canadian and the Kenyan were blocked from intervention by the rifles. He saw the bag lifted out and held high, and passed to the hands of Milan Stankovic. It was because of the bag that he had come to Salika with the two policemen, and the Political Officer had believed he possessed the seniority to argue his way through the roadblocks that curtained Rosenovici. The face of Milan Stankovic was in front of him, and the face was contorted in hatred. The white plastic bag was held up. The three cartons of milk were tipped out and each one in turn was stamped on. The three loaves of bread were kicked, as footballs, across the road and into the rainwater ditch, and the cheese and the ham, and the apples from the kitchens of the hotel at Topusko where he had his room.

Another failure.

Failure was the reality of the power, glory, authority, of the blue flag.

He had good control of his voice, did not raise it. "What, Mr. Stankovic, is a war crime? The killing of the wounded after the finish of a battle is a war crime… Who, Mr. Stankovic, is a war criminal? The leader of the men who killed the wounded after the finish of a battle… Do you sleep well, Mr. Stankovic, in your bed? Each night I add to the file…"

"Get the shit out, and stay out."

Another failure.

The Political Officer could not see in the face of Milan Stankovic if there was guilt or shame or fear. He hoped they came, journeyed to the beast in the quiet of the night, gnawed at him. It was all he could hope for, that the brute's face would, one day, quiver in guilt, shame or fear, one day…

He was losing time.

With the lost time came impatience.

Penn wanted to be close up to Rosenovici before the total darkness came down on the woodland of birches.

With the impatience came arrogance.

The wire line that marked the perimeter of the minefield ran away to his left and seemed to reach as far as the edge of the tree line. If he were to skirt the mines going left then he estimated that he would have to break the cover of the trees, and he reckoned there was still sufficient light for his movement to be seen. He looked up to the right and the barbed wire stretched away to a rock wall. To go round the minefield, going right, he would have to backtrack and then climb the cliff, and that would be serious delay. He wanted to be close up to Rosenovici… Penn could see the evidence of the mines.

The trees were thinly spaced here, as if they had been coppiced within the last five years, and there was room for armoured personnel carriers or tracked vehicles to power between the tree stumps of the old harvesting.

The evidence of the mines was from their antennae.

It was his impatience and his arrogance that led him to step over the barbed wire line. The antennae, as far as Penn could see, were laid out in straight lines. The antennae of the mines were eighteen inches high, reaching to just below his knee cap. Penn had never been on a course, not for a weekend and not for half an hour, on mines. It was pretty obvious to an impatient and arrogant man, a man running late, that the mines with the antennae were developed to catch the undersurface of a vehicle chassis if the wheels or tracks rolled clear. He could step out briskly, and ahead of him was better light to tell him that the last of the woodland was near. There would be better light because a field was ahead, and if the map of Alija was correct, if she had drawn it with accuracy, then the village of Rosenovici was beyond that field. The minefield was no problem. There was a quiet around him because the tractors were gone now, and the harsh voices of the women, and the shouting of the children was stilled.

Penn, in sight of the break of the tree line, coming to the open greyness of the field, saw the cat.

There had always been cats at the tied cottage, semi-wild and only fed in the worst of the winter. Penn knew cats.

It was a big brute with nothing handsome about it.

The cat was black-coated but the white flash at its chest alerted Penn to its advance.

Penn stopped. The cat was a distraction. Couldn't help but watch the cat, and if he was distracted by the big brute then he might blunder in the dropping light against the fine khaki wires that were the antennae. He stopped and the antennae wires, motionless, were squared about him. The big brute came fast towards him. The throaty growl of the cat called to him. He could see its ribcage.

The cat crossed open ground, a dozen paces from him, and at the centre of the open ground was the spike of the antenna's wire. Penn reckoned the cat would have been a household pet or a farmyard ratter, and the cat had been abandoned in the flight from the village, perhaps by one of those who now lay as skeletons deep in the woods.

The big brute hesitated because Penn stood still. He could see the knots and the burrs in the cat's coat.

The throated growl had become a purring roar. Penn knew cats… On the carpet floor of dead leaves there were no stones for him to throw at the cat. Unless he moved past an antenna wire he would not be in reach of a dried branch to throw at the cat. He could not shout at the cat, he was too close to Salika, down through the trees and across the river, he could not shoot the cat with his Browning 9mm automatic pistol. Penn knew the way of an abandoned cat that had found a friend.

The cat arched its back. The purr riddled the wood. A cat with a friend always wanted to show its pleasure by arching its back, then finding a surface to rub against, and the surface nearest the cat was the needle-thin antenna of the mine.

Penn cooed at the cat. The back of the cat was against the antenna. Penn slipped to his knees, and stretched out his hand and he murmured his love for the cat. The antenna wavered as the vigour of the cat was arched against it. Ten pounds of high explosive in the mine below the antenna, maybe twelve pounds, enough high explosive to take the wheel off an armoured personnel carrier, enough to immobilize a tracked vehicle. Penn urged the cat, gently, to come to him. The cat left the antenna and the wire swayed like a dying metronome. Penn's heart pounded. The cat, wary, circled Penn, and there were antennae on either side of him, and an antenna wire behind him. He cooed, murmured, urged the cat to come to him. Again the high arch of the back, again the fur bedded against the wire, to his right…

The cat came to him.

One movement…

The cat was against his knee.

One chance…

The cat howled its pleasure.

If he missed the one moment, the one chance, Penn thought the cat would sc udder out of his range and find an antenna wire to snuggle against.

Penn grabbed the cat with two hands. No friendship, no love, he held the cat tight. The cat bit at his wrists and its back claws slashed at his upper arms. Penn held the cat as if his life depended on it, as if his life rested on an antenna wire not being bent over. He tramped in the last light past the antennae, through the final trees, going towards the field with the cat hacking and spitting at him.

He was through the minefield.

Penn threw the cat hard away from him.

He stepped over the barbed wire strand.

The cat snarled, as if its friendship had been betrayed, and stayed back from him, and there were no antennae for the cat to arch against.

"All right, you old bugger, I'm sorry. Please, don't do that to me again, but I apologize."

The cat watched him. He took a slice of ham from the paper bag in his backpack and tore it into quarters, and flipped the meat towards the cat.

The cat dived for the food.

In front of Penn was the field. He could see the small wall of earth in the corner of the field. He could make out, just, the outline of the broken roofs of the village and the jagged rise of the church's tower.

It was what she would have seen, where Dorrie had been…

It was warm for the late afternoon.

Benny Stein sweated.

It was hard going, getting the sacks of seed out of the back of the Seddon Atkinson lorry, but best to be in there with the local Knin 'coolies' because that way their sticky fingers couldn't pilfer so bad. Best not to make it easy for them.

A pretty little town, Knin, pity about the people, and when they'd done the unloading then he'd try to find the energy to climb the long zigzag road from the warehouse by the football pitch down on the river and get up to the old fortress above the town. He was good at photography, prided himself, but the Canon with the 125mm lens was back at the hotel in Zagreb, and if he'd pulled out a camera up by the old fortress then the guns would have been raised and they'd have been bawling. It was the people that spoiled Knin, and the people didn't seem to him to have any bloody gratitude for him hiking down their way with his lorry and fourteen others.

He sweated, he heaved a sack of seed. He brought it down from the tail of the Seddy. He carried it to the trailer. They were good guys who worked with him, good crack.

Sweating, gulping, "Heh, wasn't that the Hun Frau at Turanj? Wasn't that the Frau there?"

A good guy, packed in stockbroking to make five hundred quid a week driving a lorry into Sector North, "Too old, Benny, you are, for looking at skirt…"

"Too bony for me, the Frau. What was she there for?"

A good guy, a banker who had dropped out of gilts, taken a money cut to run a truck into Sector North, "Getting fruity, Benny? Getting the hots? She was waiting for a refugee bus…"

"You know what? She had that look, a lot of broads give me that look. Half Hackney's broads, most of Palmers Green's, they have a sincere romantic problem 'cause of me. I take cold baths, I walk away from it, too bloody complicated for me, but she had love. You know the Argie one…?"

The tickle of laughter from the one-time banker and the onetime stockbroker. Benny recited,

'… An Argentine gaucho named Bruno,

Once said, "There is something I do know:

A woman is fine

And a sheep is divine,

But a llama is Numero Uno!"

'… Well, you know what I mean… Perhaps she's got a big fellow, a big NigBatt guy, and she's pining. There's not a refugee bus scheduled through today… that's all."

He knew when the refugee buses came through. Refugees were something from Benny Stein's past. He'd had his little laugh from the Frau, and he thought her the grandest woman he had ever met, and when they were not driving, nor doing maintenance, then he would hitch a ride down to Karlovac and head for the Transit Centre, and his last project had been carpentry for the little desks and low stools of the kindergarten… He understood about refugees because his grandparents had walked out of Czechoslovakia fifty-five years before and his father had walked with them, and all they had owned was stacked in an old pram that they had pushed as they had walked. He'd thought, looking at the Frau's face, that it wasn't just a bus arrival she waited for.

He had walked into a gate, and he had ripped the shins of his trousers on fallen wire, and he had cracked his knee on a dropped gravestone, and he had been in the ditch.

It was black dark in the village and Penn had a little chat to himself, waspish.

It was imbecile to be padding about the ruin of the village in the black dark, and he should get a better grip of himself, slow down, stop the charge. Do it like he had done it as a child, when he had gone early in the morning into the top copse where the keeper bred the pheasant chicks in the summer, and sat under the widespread oak and waited for first light when the sow brought her badger young from the sett. Going back to the basics of his life… The only course where he had beaten the graduate intake into Gower Street had been the rural surveillance course and crawling up in the wood's night, so quiet, that when he had put his hand from behind over Amanda Fawcett's mouth she had squealed and wet her jeans. The only time he had won an instructor's praise, and Amanda Fawcett, stuffy bitch with a 2.1 out of Sussex, had had to wear her shirt tails outside her trousers for the rest of the morning, and a fucking malicious grin she'd given him on his last day, coming out of Administration when he'd given in his ID. And Amanda bloody Fawcett, graduate, General Intelligence Group, paper pusher, wouldn't have made it a hundred yards off the river bank

… After the little chat to himself, Penn stood a long time quite still, and he allowed the night sounds of the village to play around him.

The owl's shout, the whine of a swinging door, the creak of a dislodged roof beam, the motion of the stream against the piles of the bridge, voices that were distant and brought on the wind.

He stood in what he thought had been a square and the only building clear to him by its size was the mass of the body of the church. There were lamps lit in the windows of the houses across the stream where a community lived, breathed, and he could see sometimes a wavering torch on the move. There was an occasional small beam thrown up from the bridge, and it was from the bridge that he heard the young men's voices larking their boredom at guard duty. He stood quite still. He thought that when Dorrie had crossed the road, where he was now, with the torn lengths of the women's clean clothes, she would have had flares to light her way, and there would have been buildings burning. He could not see the farmhouse outline where the cellar had been, where she had run to. He had the map in his mind.

When he had calmed himself, then he moved again.

He went slow and he had one arm outstretched in front of his face and his other arm in front of his legs. Twice his fingers brushed into low rubble and once his fingers caught at a lowered telephone wire. It was a rough lane that he took, and sometimes his lower hand flicked against the taller weeds that grew between the ruts of the lane. He tried to make each stride a measured one, and he counted each stride that he took because Alija had told him that the house of Katica Dubelj was 150 paces from the square. There was a new sound catching at him, and he could not distinguish it. A few paces from Katica Dubelj's house, where it should be, and the new sound was there again. He had counted out his strides, and he groped off the lane and his fingers found a fence set around with clinging thistles and sharp nettles. He tracked the fence and he came to the wall of the house of Katica Dubelj. He came to the door. If she were alive she would come back to her home every night, or every third night, or one night in each week, if she were alive… It was what Penn thought, what had brought him to the village of Rosenovici, that there was the small, minimal, chance she would come. It was past the house of Katica Dubelj that Dorrie had been marched to the field, with the wounded, to the grave. He would wait through one night for her to come, if she were alive… His fingers were off the stone, then into the void, then feeling the rough plank surface of the door… It was the sound of a man who cried out. Penn was drawn forward. The words of a man with pain in his mind. At the end of the lane was the broken strut of a gate, across the entrance to a field. He had that sense of the openness beyond the gate that his fingers rested against. He heard the words cried staccato and growing in his eyes was the failing light of the torch beam. The shapes were appearing, gathering strength. The words were of anguish. He saw the earth wall around the pit, it was what he had seen from the tree line in the dusk. Going closer, going in stealth. He saw the shape of the man who knelt in the pit. Penn looked at the grave, at the burial place of Dorrie Mowat, and a man knelt in the pit in prayer. An old man spoke the prayer of a personal agony, and knelt in the pit with his head hung. Going closer, drawn forward, he could think of no threat that would come from an old man, in prayer, kneeling in the pit where Dorrie Mowat had been buried. Going closer, as to the sett of the old badger sow. Crossing the ground where she had been stabbed, bludgeoned, shot. Going covert, as to the culvert drain where Amanda Fawcett hid. Stepping silent in the loose slither of the mud over which had been dragged the joined bodies of her lover and Dorrie Mowat. Drawn forward… It was luck. His father said that men who got lucky, most times, deserved their luck. He came at the old man from behind. He came in a sharp movement, across the small torch beam, threw an instant shadow, and was over him, and the strength of Perm's hand was across the old man's mouth. If he prayed at the grave he could be no threat, if he was no threat then he could be a friend, and Penn needed some luck. Into the blinking, staring eyes. Did he speak English? The head nodding. Would he shout out? The head shaking… Penn needed some luck. He took his hand from the old man's mouth, and he came around the old man and he saw the tremble in the old man's body, and he thought of what the fear had done to Amanda Fawcett. He took the old man's thin hands in his own and he held them as he had held his grandfather's hands on the night before death. He squatted in the mud in front of the old man and the small beam of the torch was beside him. The old man wore a suit and a tie knotted slimly at the collar of a white shin, and to the thighs the suit trousers were soaked wet, "Who are you?" "My name is Penn…" "Why do you come here to a place of evil?" "I come to find the truth of the death of Dorrie Mowat…" The old man took back his hands and he reached with his fingers for Penn's face. '… I come to find how she died, and to find who was responsible…" The fingers brushed in gentleness on the harshness of Penn's jaw and followed the contours of his nose and his mouth, as if to be certain that he had not discovered fantasy. '… I come to find the eyewitness, if she is alive, the woman who is called Katica Dubelj." The old man switched off the torch. He took the sleeve of Penn's coat, and they stumbled together out of the shallow pit. Getting closer to the tart mischief of Dorrie Mowat, edging nearer to her… The old man led Perm away across the wetness of the field. All together, huddled in darkness, Branko and Stevo and Milo had taken a position in a ruin that was across the square from the church. They shivered and chewed on cubes of cheese and had a small corked bottle of their own home brew. Nothing, not a cat, not a man, no one could move through the village without passing them. Across the stream, the big clock in the tower of the church at Salika beat out the chimes of midnight. The Headmaster wheezed as he climbed the track. "I am the Headmaster of the school.. ." Penn wished he would shut his face. "I am the Headmaster, but I am now rejected because I have spoken out against the shame of our people

…" They made enough noise going up the track, without adding to the noise with talk. "I should now have been the mayor of the village, but ignorance rules and savagery…" Penn thought that Ham would have punched the old man, the Headmaster, until he stopped his talk. "When we had only one school, before I was Headmaster, the children from Rosenovici came to our school in Salika, and Katica Dubelj was one of the women who gave the children lunch. Because I know her, I have a responsibility for her…" Penn had been led, at a brisk pace, into the woods at the top of the field. The tight grasp, sharp fingers, all the time held at the sleeve of his fatigue coat. He could not see ahead of him, beyond the immediate drooped shoulders of the Headmaster, and the lowest branches whipped off the Headmaster and into his face and across his body. He guessed the path that wound up through the wood was the secret of the Headmaster and the lowest branches that cut at his face and snapped back at his body told Penn that the path was rarely used. It was a good way to go, and between the brisk pace of the climb there were rest halts when the Headmaster gasped for breath and his lowered shoulders shuddered from the exertion, and Penn heard the chime of the far-away church for the half-hour and then for the hour. Once there was a cacophony of noise rushing away from them, the stampeding flight of a wild pig or of a grown deer. "We lived together, in the old days, we had our friendships across the prejudice of birth, until the madness came. The madness has destroyed what was a fine community, destroyed, because Rosenovici is across the stream from us but always with us. We cannot shut away the sight of Rosenovici. We look at what we have done, every hour of daylight we see what we have done. The heart has been torn from us. I help you, Penn, because you have the power to hurt the madness…" It was the smell that first caught Penn. He was wondering who would believe him, Mary Braddock or Basil at Alpha Security or Arnold Browne, and the smell was of stale excreta. He was wondering whether any of them, safe at home and deep in their beds, would believe that he had trekked behind the lines, gone there because he had taken the money, and the smell was of unwashed filth. He was wondering whether Jane would believe him if he shared it, whether she would back away from him and hold little Tom clear of him, and the smell was of lingering dirt. He was wondering if it mattered, whether anyone believed him… What mattered to him was truth, and the truth was Dorrie Mowat's smiling cheek, and he had never before searched after truth. It was in his mind to think about those who rejected the truth. They were in their beds and in their chairs in front of the droning televisions and in their bars with their elbows slouched on the counter, and they were bored with the truth. They were in the other maisonettes of the Cedars, and in the roads of Raynes Park, and in the pubs, and they were hurrying with their bags of washing to the launderette before it closed, and they were the late workers in the offices of Five, and they turned their fucking backs on the truth. They were 900 miles from him, and they had not the space in their hearts to yearn to find truth. Bloody good, old chummies, wash your hands of it, scrub them with soap, old girls. Lucky old you, old chummies and old girls, because the truth is boring… The torch beam now shone ahead, and the Headmaster mouthed small cries, as if warning of their approach. Penn thought, from what the torch beam showed, that in daylight he would have walked right past the mouth of the cave, but he would not have walked right past the smell.

It was as if the Headmaster called, softly, to a frightened cat, or to a dog, or to a wild crow that should come for food.

The torch beam trapped the narrow mouth of a cave set behind a rockfall.

"I used to come here with food. I used to take the food from my wife's cupboard. You take food from a woman's cupboard and she notices, she questions. She said that if I took more food, for the Ustase bastards, then she would denounce me. Do you understand, Penn, that in the madness in which we live a wife can denounce her husband …? I have my own shame, because I do not bring her food any more …"

The Headmaster tugged at Penn's sleeve and dragged him, hunched low, into the mouth of the cave. He could have been sick, was swallowing back the bile, coughing, the smell was like a cloud. The torch beam played faintly around the walls of the cave where the water dribbled, glistening, then wavered on deeper into the cave.

It was not often that Penn had a big thought, not in his childhood and not with the Service and not with Alpha Security. The rag bundle was cowered in the recess of the cave. Perhaps a big thought could only come in a place such as this. It would only have been a rag bundle if there had not been the brightness of the eyes reflected back by the torch beam. Penn's big thought was that this was the one chance in his life to find truth. She was so small. She was wrapped in sacking rags… He followed the Headmaster down onto the floor of the cave, sat cross-legged.

The Headmaster talked.

Her voice cackled back.

Penn heard the clock chimes come faintly from across the distant stream.

"She saw it herself. She saw them taken past her house and into the field. They had to wait while the bulldozer dug the pit. She could see it from the window. Each of them killed one man, but she says that she saw the girl killed by Milan Stankovic… I have to go back, across the stream. What more do you want?"

Penn said, "I want her to walk me through what she saw, each place and each moment what she saw, right to the killing of Dorrie Mowat."

The Headmaster was glancing furtively at his wristwatch, shining the torch beam onto the hands. He said that he would return the next evening. Did Penn know the risk of staying? But the intoxication of the truth had caught him, and he waved his hand, dismissive, to reject the risk. The Headmaster was gone.

Truth was evidence. Evidence was the naming of Milan Stankovic.

Penn sat on the floor of the cave and could not see her, the eyewitness.