Heart of Danger

Four.

He started to write after lunch. Henry Carter had clear handwriting, and much to be thankful for to a schoolmistress who had presided with an iron fist over a primary class more than fifty years before. He had never lost the art of legible copperplate handwriting. When he had completed the text, when the supervisor had gone for her mid-afternoon rest break, he would slip the sheet to Penny, a nice girl and respectful, and Penny would type it for him. The typed sheet would go with the file when he was ready to present it for transfer to the disk. It was always necessary, Henry Carter believed, to have background. One couldn't say when the file would be called for, when the material would be summoned up. It might be next year, but then it might not be for a decade. It might be that the person, young man or young woman, who would call up the file was now in short trousers or ankle socks. The war might be just history when the file was called for. He brushed the crumbs from his table, and he swirled his tongue round his mouth to try to lose the tang of the cheese and pickle. What surprised him… oh, yes, he could still sometimes surprise himself

… was that he had stayed with the file right through the statutory one hour of lunch break, he had not even taken the RSPB magazine from its postal wrapping. Onto clean paper, with a sharpened pencil, he wrote briskly. It would be good to have the background, helpful… OUTLINE: Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, amidst a wave of optimism for the future, the ethnic groups of the empire demanded again the nationhood that had been suppressed since the establishment of communist regimes after WW2. Communist centralism had failed significantly to blunt such demands. YUGOSLAVIA: Always artificial, originally dominated in part by the Ottoman empire and in part by the Austro-Hungarian empire. Achieved a bogus national identity between 1918 and 1941 which fractured on the German invasion. WW2: Pro and anti-Axis feelings polarized the principal ethnic groupings. Croats (RC and Europe-orientated) took Nazi side. Serbs (Orthodox and Slav) formed principal resistance (Chetniks and Partisans). Muslims (obvious) tended to regard this as others' quarrel and engendered both factions' hostility. Characteristic of Serb resistance v Croat fascism was horrific cruelty? 700,000 Serbs killed by the Croatians. TITO: Main resistance leader, communist Josip Broz Tito, by charisma and ruthless rule, bound the infant Yugoslavia together. The Serb majority were over-rewarded with bureaucracy jobs, plus internal security and military. Tito's death, can of worms unlidded again. POST TITO: Problems of different cultures, different ambitions, are not solved, nor much effort made in that direction; the adhesive is communist discipline. POST COMMUNIST COLLAPSE: Slovenes (less important) and Croats (critical) are anxious to achieve statehood. Croats are encouraged by Germans (sticky finger in the pie again), and name a date. No thought given to the fears of the several hundred thousand Serbs living within the area claimed for new republic of Croatia. Inside Serb-Croat population were strong memories of WW2 atrocities, also the knowledge that privileged status would end. Bosnia problem not dealt with, irrelevant to this file. THE WAR: Serb-Croat population formed Territorial Defence Force (ragtag militia) and was aided by Serb-controlled JNA (regular army). Principal Serb-Croat population areas were taken in military action, followed by 'ethnic cleansing' (removal or killing of Croat population in captured areas). Main effort of the war 6? lasted 5 months, cease-fire in January 1992, when 22 per cent of new Croatia had been lost to Serbs. (NB: DOROTHY MOW AT killed in December 1991 when Serb militia and JNA overran the Croat village of Rosenovici, Glina Municipality.)

SITUATION AT TIME OF PENN'S VISIT TO CROATIA: (NB: PENN arrived Zagreb 18 April 1993.) The indigenous Serbs occupying parts of former Croatia had declared a "Republic of Krajina'. Under the UN-brokered cease-fire agreement the territory was to be policed by a United Nations Protection Force (UNPROFOR), but increasing Serb hostility to the international community severely handicapped UNPROFOR's ability to carry out its mandate. UNPROFOR designated four areas of responsibility as Sector South, Sector North, Sector West and Sector East (Glina Municipality in Sector North). Cease-fire line maintained by both combatants in high state of alert, with Serb advantage in numbers and quality of armour, artillery. In the Sectors ongoing brutality towards few Croats left behind in general flight. (NB: DOROTHY MOW AT body recovered 3 April 1993.) He read the paper back. A little wordy, his background material, but he did not think it possible for the events of that spring two years ago to be appreciated if the context were not known. He was thirty-four years old, and it was something he had wanted to do since he was a child. Penn gazed from the window of the great train. He could justify it because one of the senior instructors had remarked over a canteen dinner at the Training School, fifteen years back, that in the days of quality field operations it was always best to cross Europe by train. The instructor had said that border checks at night, sleepy frontier guards thumbing their thick books of the names of 'illegals', were never as sharp as at the airport immigration desks. The instructor had said that if an operative wanted to get unnoticed, unhindered, into eastern Europe, then the operative always stood a better than average chance if he took a rocking and winding and slow-hauling train. That was the justification, slight enough, but the hard reason was that Penn had always wished on the chance to take a great train through the mountains of central Europe. He gazed from the window into the night, and the mountains were dark shadows except where they climbed sufficiently for the spring snow to have lasted, and the steepling forests beside the track were a mass of black, and the rivers tumbled silver in the light thrown down from the carriages. The joy of the journey was gone with the coming of the evening. The joy had been the afternoon crawl through Austria, and the images stayed with him of the tall-towered and ruined castles that perched on crags, of the farms of toy-town neatness that were in the valleys below the track, and the miniature tractors that were out in the handkerchief fields pulling the manure carts from the wood-built cattle barns. It was not his style to think the clever thoughts, that he was traversing the no man's land between the civility of old Europe and the barbarity of new Europe. His style was to inhale the beauty, the majesty, of high mountains and sharp valleys and thick forest and brutal outcrops of rock, take the beauty and majesty into his mind and imagine the delight of walking there. He wondered if there would be the same deer, the same foxes, the same badgers, as there had been in the fields and woods and hills around the tied cottage of his childhood. A place for a man to be alone. So he had taken the chance to ride the great train. He had flown in the morning from Heathrow to Munich, crossed Munich by the airport bus, and bought his ticket at the Hauptbahnhof, and eaten a sandwich, and climbed onto the Mimara Express Salzburg, Villach, Ljubljana to Zagreb. It was his dream, it was a collection of postcard prints, and the dusk and then the evening had come; and he doubted that he would tell Jane when he made it back to Heathrow and Raynes Park and 57B the Cedars, that he had taken a great train over a track that cut a route through Austria. His briefcase was on the seat beside him. He reached for it… It was the briefcase that he had purchased, second hand, from the store in Gower Street, bought with pride thirteen years back. The briefcase had been black but long usage by a previous owner had frayed the flap and scuffed the edges and scratched the surface. The briefcase might once have belonged to a higher executive officer, even to a senior executive officer, but it had been purchased by a B Grade clerk, and it was his symbol that he belonged at the heart of the Security Service. The EIIR symbol, once gold, was worn, and it had been one of the games played by the B Grade clerk to imagine what secrets had been held in the briefcase… There were no damn secrets now.

He took his notes from the briefcase. He was already in the vernacular of his client. They were the notes that he had scribbled fast on the table beside the Aga of the horrid young woman, Dorrie. How the horrid young woman, Dorrie, had killed her mother's honeymoon; how she had made a quality scene when the guest for dinner had been the local Master of Foxhounds and she had poured tomato puree over the man's tuxedo jacket; how she had made a quality exhibition with the strip dance that went to full frontal at her sixteenth birthday party; how she had taken her mother's Visa, forged the signature, and bought the current 'liaison' from the council houses a 500-cc Yamaha, new; how she swore at her stepfather where the world could hear her; how she stole, screwed.,.

They had pulled clear of Ljubljana. They had lurched to an uneven stop at a halt station. There was the slamming of doors, and the scream of whistles. The train headed on in the night.. How she was gone, dead, buried. He thought that his own father would have taken a strap to the horrid young woman, and his own mother would have locked her in a bedroom to scream, starve, do what she cared. There were two photographs in the briefcase. There was the photograph of her hanging back and half hidden behind the posed pair, her mother and stepfather, with her face pinched in aggression. It was the second photograph that interested Penn more, the girl laughing, and a prettiness on her face, and three of the 'liaisons' from the council houses with their arms on her, as if they knew each corner of her. This photograph had been hidden in her room and found by her mother. Perhaps he would find which of the photographs was real, perhaps not… A man towered above him. It was as the instructor had said. A man in a uniform of cheap cloth, and with a cheap leather belt with a cheap leather holster slung from it, and a cheap cigarette in his mouth, waited over him, smelling of cheap lotion. His passport was checked, handed back to him. No record was taken of his passport number. He was into Croatia. Maybe it was important that no record had been taken, maybe not. He settled back to the photographs, and back to his notes. It certainly would have been easier for him if the client's daughter, Dorrie, had been more than just a horrid young woman. She knew the sound of the Jaguar. And she knew to take his moods from the sound of the Jaguar braking. The braking was sharp, noisy. God… she set her face, the smile of the little woman back home and waiting on an angry breadwinner returning from commercial warfare, with his damned nose tweaked or his damned ego bruised. She could usually massage his temper, turn anger to a sullen acceptance. Mary opened the front door. "Poor dear, what's the crisis?" The door slammed behind Charles Braddock, kicked shut with his heel… Fine for him to kick the door shut with his iron-tipped shoe heel, but heaven preserve a village boy who as much as brushed a leaning elbow on the paintwork… "The crisis is those bloody Koreans, the crisis is that they are, twenty-four hours after ink on paper, requiring re-negotiation of penalty clauses. Bloody impossible…" "Poor dear. Gin's waiting." Routine time. Into the small living room. Into his chair. Four cubes of ice, two fingers of gin, half-slice of lemon, to the top with tonic, and let him blather it out. Mary sat on the arm of the chair and her fingers made patterns at his neck, and the gin level lowered as if the anger was gulping down his throat. Curses, obscenities, giving way to resentment, self-pity, nothing changed. After their supper, when she was putting the dishes away, she might just push him down the garden towards his 'snug', and she might just ring next door and get Arnold to report for duty across the stile.

"I mean, how can you do business with people, agree everything, have those bloody lawyers sift through it, have them sign it, then the little buggers want to start haggling again? It is just not possible …"

Her fingers soothed him. "Poor dear…"

Resigned. "How's your day been?"

"He rang," she said brightly. "He rang from the airport…"

"I should think he bloody did, and bloody cheerful he should have been, with the bloody money we're paying him."

"Not, actually, cheerful. Sort of distant…"

She knew she shouldn't have said it. It was like another flint in a walking shoe.

She saw the frown burrow at his forehead and tried to escape. "I don't know… I'll get supper."

"Hold, hold, what do you mean, distant?"

"Well, it was the airport. He was just flying out. Nobody's communicative when they ring from the airport…"

"Give it me."

She took a breath. "It was as though he was uninvolved, of course he's not involved. It was as though it was just another job, of course it's just another job. Why should he be involved…?"

And she felt the tiredness, and she didn't want to talk about it, and she didn't want to think about it, and she had sat all the afternoon in Dorrie's room. She was tired and the anger in his face lowered at her and his voice beat over her.

"His problem, Penn's problem, is he's second-rate. He's not what Arnold cracked him up to be. He's offensive and second-rate. If it hadn't been for you, I tell you, I would not have tolerated his rudeness to me. He caught me, and he's a bloody second-rater. He's taking me, you, us, for a bloody ride."

The snap. She was trying to call it back, the face of a small child, happy. The weight of a footfall on a dried branch. She had the body of the child and the clothes of the child. She went for the kitchen. The face was old, mature, not a child's, and screwed in dislike. She was shouting back at him. Always the image was of the screwed face of a young woman, never of a happy child. Her voice, shrill, "He should join the club. Right? Should join the club because we're all second-rate to you. Right? Starting with my daughter." The lights were dim over the platform, the electricity supply had been reduced to save power. Penn's carriage between Ljubljana and Zagreb had been empty. He took his suitcase down from the rack and he checked that his briefcase was fastened and he went to the door. He stepped down onto the platform, into the gloom of the place. A pair of Germans, suits, businessmen, jostled past him, and Penn thought they might have been cursing that they hadn't flown. Down the platform he saw two military policemen questioning a young man against the grimed brick wall, and one of them held back a Rottweiler dog on a short leash, and Penn guessed they would be checking for army deserters. He followed the Germans through the exit arch and down the corridors past the closed ticket windows. There were men, women, sleeping on the hard floor in corners, and Penn was reminded that somewhere out in the darkness, out beyond the city, there was war. He hurried. He knew where he would go because he had memorized the guidebook map. There was a mist on Zagreb. He stumbled on the cobblestones of the street. A bell rang fiercely and he looked up, startled, as a tram loomed towards him. He skipped forward and tripped on a tram line. He saw the neon sign of the hotel. Tired staff waited on him at the reception. He walked past the entrance to the bar, closed. He looked into the casino, deserted but for the croupiers. He went by the dining room, shut. A slow lift took him up. He gave the porter a pound sterling coin, and the porter grimaced as if it were dirt. He wanted German marks or American dollars, and Penn thought he could go stuff himself. There was a siren in the darkness. All around him, in the night, a hostility. A foreign place, this, not Penn's place. And just thirty-five miles down the road was the cease-fire line and the start of the war zone, and it was not Penn's war. He would have said that he was good at being alone, but in the hotel room he felt his loneliness. Not his place and not his war… He threw off his clothes. He washed. He unpacked his suitcase. There would have been other men in the hotel, far from home, nit-picking through their lives, behind their locked doors. He chose to scratch unhappily at his marriage, as if with grubby fingernails. Alone in the room he could summon the honesty to say it was not Jane's fault, he was to blame. Five years back, making small talk at a railway station waiting for a fog-delayed train, and going for a drink when the train was finally cancelled, and sharing a taxi. She was so different to the women, the girls, in Gower Street. She was pretty, fluffy, and her skirt was always halfway up her thighs and climbing, and he was the quiet one with the secret of his job to hide behind. She must have felt an excitement at being with a man who did secret work for the government, something that could not be talked about, and the excitement had lasted through to marriage, and then gone sour. Gone sour because she would come home from the estate agent's, and maybe he would be just going out for a night shift with the Transit van team of watchers, or maybe he had been up all night and half the day and gone to bed and expected her to tiptoe round the maisonette as if she was a dormouse, and maybe he would snarl because she'd woken him with the telly and the soaps, or maybe it had been a bad damn awful day that couldn't be talked through because that was the lore of the Service. Maybe it was him snapping at her friends because he couldn't answer their so bloody simple questions about his work. Maybe it was him refusing, point blank, to permit her to ask her father for more money for another house deposit, digging in his heels, bloody-minded. Maybe it was him, suggesting, almost shyly that the way forward was for him to take three years out and go to college and get a bloody degree. And maybe she was right to jeer back that no way was she going to live for three years carrying him, paying all the bills, and she hadn't passed an exam since school and Wayne who managed the estate agent's drove a fifth-hand Porsche and had never passed an exam in his life… Maybe… The baby should have helped, but it hadn't. The baby, Tom, should have bonded them. The baby had cut out her money… It was Penn's belief that a husband should provide. A father should go to work, a mother should stay home with a baby. Old-fashioned Penn, boring Penn, and he'd said that no way was she going back to work with a minder to watch his baby

… She'd told him, full of tears, that she hadn't listened to him, had gone back with the pram to the estate agent's, made it as far as the plate-glass window with the bright photographs of properties, and seen Wayne bending over the new girl, and a hand on the shoulder of the new girl's blouse, and she'd turned around and pushed the pram back to the maisonette. And the day after that he had gone to those he thought he believed in, on the high floors of Gower Street, and requested the chance to work on General Intelligence Group… and been betrayed. He lay in the bed. From the street below he sensed the burgeoning quiet of the night of a foreign city… but it had been Dome's place and Dome's war. The ant column had found his hand, a barrier, and busily crossed it. He could feel their unstoppable progress, and he did not dare to move his hand to shake them off. He felt as if he was dead… Ham didn't reckon he could have run another yard, crawled another foot, climbed another inch. The tree line had been the first target and the rock escarpment had been the second, and the final aim had been to reach, running, crawling, climbing, the summit of the escarpment. He felt as if he was dead… he would have been dead if they had had a good dog, or if they had had organization and discipline. He could see them from where he lay. They were below, quartering the field that was beyond the escarpment, down from the tree line of spring-green birches. Ham could hear their shouts and the whistle blasts, but they had no dogs. It was because of the wounded that they had broken off the pace of the search. It was the wounded that had saved him and the three others who had stampeded with him away from the ambush. The light caught the grass of the field, and the sun feathered down through the upper trees and dappled onto the summit of the rock escarpment. They had been hit at first light when the grey smear was settling on the fields and the trees. They had been caught, bunched and too close, on a track that, if the intelligence had been accurate, would have brought them to the rear side of the artillery position. If the ambush had been done properly, as an ambush was taught at Aldershot or out on the ranges above Brecon, then there would have been no survivors, but the ambush had been crap and there hadn't been fire control, and they had made it out and running. All of them running, and hearing the shouting and the chaotic chase behind them, and they had hit the open ground of the field without warning. Shit, bloody bad luck, the open field. It was there that the two of them had been shot. And he had run, too fucking right, and the others who hadn't been shot had run. Looking down, through the thin early foliage, Ham saw the line that advanced, crouching then scurrying, towards the two wounded men. The ants came on across his hand, and he would not move his hand and he would not twist his head. He whispered from the side of his mouth, as if he thought he hazarded his hiding place should his lips move. "Move once, you bastards, move once at all, and I'll break your goddamn necks." He could hear the three of them behind him, all trying to suppress the panting, all sobered by the ambush and by the charge out and by the climb onto the summit of the escarpment, and by the sight of the cordon line closing on the two who were wounded. Shit, no, they hadn't listened to Ham when they had crossed the Kupa river in the inflatable, and they hadn't listened to him when he had told them, swearing, that they should lay off the booze in their water bottles and they hadn't listened to him when they had moved out to get close to the artillery position under the night cover that was now gone. Shit, yes, they listened to him now… And if it hadn't been that the ambush was crap then they would, all six of them, have been on the ground, beyond help, as the cordon line closed. They listened, and struggled to control their breathing, and they were watching as Ham watched. "Nothing you can do, so don't fucking think there is anything." He knew that the brother of one of them behind him was wounded, lying in the field. It was the worst it had ever been for Ham. His throat was dry dust. His gut was knotted tight. His arms, legs, would have been stiffened, clumsy, if he had tried to move. There were tears welling heavy… Too bloody unfair… He had known guys who had been killed in close-quarters fire, and guys who had been wasted when an armoured personnel carrier had been rattled and brewed, and guys who had been mutilated when caught without cover as the rockets from the Organj launcher had come down. He had known guys from the International Brigade who had been in Osijek, in Turanj, outside Sisak, and shipped home in boxes by the embassy but that had been more than a year back, more than a year and a half. He had known guys who had said it was too goddamn dull in Croatia after the cease-fire, and who had hitched on down to Bosnia, but that was a crazy bloody place to get killed… Too bloody unfair… In the days with the Internationals Ham had been classified sniper first class, using the long-barrelled Dragunov, stationary target three shots out of four at 1000 metres. In the days after the Internationals had drifted off scene, or been booted, he had bullshit ted expertise in ordnance. No home to go back to, had to bullshit to stay. Big bullshit if he wasn't to be on the trail down to Bosnia and the crazy bloody war… Too bloody unfair… They had wanted an ordnance man to get across the Kupa river and spy out the artillery position on the high ground, and their own ordnance men would have been too precious

… As an ordnance man he would have been able to identify the type and calibre of the artillery pieces in the position, their stockpiles of ammunition, their threat… Big bloody bullshit, and the bullshit had put him where it was worse than it had ever been for Ham. He did not reckon it safe to use his binoculars. Could have been flash or shine from the lenses against the low-rising sun. He could see enough without the binoculars. He knew what he would see. He knew it because he had dreamed it in the temporary sleeping quarters behind the old police station in Karlovac town. The dream was Ham's agony. Ham knew that the wounded, struggling to keep up with those who were not wounded, would have thrown away their weapons as they had lumbered, hobbled, after those who had run. If they had had their weapons then, sure as Christ, they would have used them. Sure as Christ they would have used their weapons and kept one back for the last. There was no firing. The cordon line reached that part of the field, near to the tree line, where the wounded lay. He could see it clear enough, without binoculars. He should have looked away, and he could not. The stuff of Ham's dreams, the stuff that made him sweat, toss, sometimes scream in the night. There was a bearded man, big and well set, in the centre of the cordon line, and he had a whistle in his mouth, and his was the voice of command. Ham could not see the wounded, lying in the thick spring grass of the field, but he knew where they were because he saw the bearded man kick hard into the grass and the moan carried up from the field and through the trees and reached the summit of the rock escarpment. He saw the bearded man swivel, casually, like he played kids' football, and kick again. There was a moment of confusion, men around the bearded man and bending down and two small scrimmages of bodies. He heard the orders from the bearded man, curt in the sunshine. The two wounded were held upright in front of the bearded man, and he punched them, one in the face and one in the pit of the stomach and because they were held they could not fall. Then bandannas from the heads of two of the men who held them were used to blindfold the wounded. The knife flashed at the waist of the bearded man. The knife went low, quick, to the groin of the wounded man who had the bloodstains at his knee and down his right leg. Ham turned, his first movement, and he broke the column of the ants, and he slapped the palm of his hand across the eyes of the brother of the wounded man. He heard the howl of pain, sobbing… The tears were running on his face, and the vomit was coming. He watched it, each instruction from the bearded man, each thrust of the knife. It was worse than the dream… When it was over, when the sport was gone, then the bearded man wiped his knife on the grass and replaced it in the sheath at his belt, and all of them sat in the field, close to where the bodies lay, and they drank and they laughed.

They had no organization and no discipline.

After they had drunk and told their jokes, they moved off again towards the tree line, but the heart had gone from the search. They did not go far into the birch trees that covered the hillside and they did not come near to the rock escarpment.

They went back the way they had come and there were the marks of their boots in the wet grass and the trails where the two bodies were dragged.

Ham watched. He wiped his face, furtive, and his tears smeared the camouflage cream. His eyes, all the time, held the broad and powerful back of the bearded man, who walked easily, walked without care. Piece of cake, if he had had the Dragunov SVD 7.62mm, not the Kalashnikov, piece of cake for a sniper first class.

Ham murmured, "That's a right bastard…"

The brother of the man who had been castrated whispered, calmly, "That is Milan Stankovic."

"That right bastard needs sorting…"

"He is Milan Stankovic, he commands the TDF unit at the village of Salika. He has grown the beard now because he would think that makes him more of the Serb soldier. It is, perhaps, ten kilometres from here, his village. He was a clerk. He was a junior clerk in the administration of the co-operative at Turanj. All the farmers in the region came to the co-operative with their produce, and it was marketed from there. We came, my brother and I, to the co-operative each week in the summer. It was the job of Milan Stankovic to check the paper we brought, to see that we did not cheat, and then to stamp the paper. To check paper and to stamp it, now he is an important man. He would have recognized immediately the face of my brother. Often we used to bring him the best cabbages, or carrots, or a side of meat, some cheese, because then he would check our paper and stamp it more quickly. We would always look after Milan Stankovic. He knew my brother… and he killed him. That is Milan Stankovic…" They were gone into the trees on the far side of the field. Ham sat. He understood enough of the war to believe that if the brothers, one dead and one living, had captured the bearded man who they knew, then another knife would have flashed, another knife would have gouged. He said, "Nothing we could have done, if anyone had fired we'd all have been gone… It's called SERE, guys, that's Survive, Evade, Resist, Escape…" They would lie up the rest of the day. At dusk they would move for the Kupa river. The streets were cheerful, the shops had good stock, the gutters were clean. The bars were full and the espresso machines rumbled, and the chairs of the pavement cafes were taken. The sun shone, warm enough for Penn to have turned on his heel after a hundred-yard walk, collected his room key again, and dumped his coat and his scarf and his gloves. A fine morning to walk, and for the second time he passed the taxi line in the road outside the hotel. It was all a culture shock for Bill Penn, and he had the guidebook to tell him that this was an old city, historic and finely preserved, and he could not square the city with what he had seen in his hotel room on the television from the satellite news. On the news, across country, was Srebrenica where a town was being shelled and starved to surrender, and on the same bulletin had been clear colour pictures of British squad dies hand-So ling charred bodies, and a young officer had said his men would need counselling if they were not to be scarred for the rest of their lives. And there had been film of an American aircraft carrier, across the water, taking off with the bomb loads in place for practice runs. A war in Bosnia across country, and nothing of it to be seen by Penn as he viewed, for the first time, the capital city of Zagreb. He walked quickly. He was not a tourist. He was on assignment. He had polished his black shoes in his room, he wore his charcoal-grey trousers and his blazer and he had brushed the flecks from the shoulders. He had his white shirt and a quiet tie, and he carried his old briefcase, and it was difficult for him to realize that the months had passed by, that it was not a 'government' assignment. He had a starting place but not yet a programme. He went up Haulikova and across Andrije Hebranga and up Preradoviceva and came to a wide square. He felt comfortable; he liked the feel of the place; he would write a good fast report; he thought that Jane would have liked the feel of the city… On Ilica, looking left, jumping out of the path of a damned tram, he saw the flag. Red and white and blue, and looking as if it needed a full wash and tumble, and hanging limp. It was an old building and there was an arched entrance to the inner courtyard, and a brass plaque at the side door. Of course the embassy was Perm's start point. He saw the posters on the stair walls. Edinburgh Castle, British butterflies, a Cotswold village, badgers outside a sett, Buckingham Palace, it was the world to which he had once belonged… Inside a small lobby, and the Englishwoman at the desk smiling and asking him with studied politeness, "Can I help?" "My name's Penn, Bill Penn. I'd like to see one of your diplomats, please. It's in connection with Miss Mowat. It's about the late Miss Dorothy Mowat." It was as if he had sworn, or unzipped his flies, because the smile was suddenly gone from her. She gestured for him to wait, and her face was cold. He wondered if she had been here, Dorrie, turning the faces cold. He thought that Mary Braddock would have been here, sitting on the hard chairs in the small lobby and turning the pages of the English magazines, killing the smiles. He could see the Englishwoman blurred through the frosted glass of the adjacent office. He wondered if anyone had jumped when Mary Braddock had come the first time to start a search for her daughter and failed. The blurred shapes meandered across the face of the glass and towards the door. He thought the papers would have been sorted here, stamped here, duplicated here, for the repatriation of the corpse. The Englishwoman stood in the door and gestured Penn forward, and stepped aside. The room had been large once, perhaps the salon of a well-proportioned apartment, but it was now sub-divided into rabbit hutches. There was a tall man, in shirtsleeves and braces, rather young. He didn't offer a handshake. Cigarette smoke curled from an ashtray. He didn't give his name. The desk was a confusion of paper. He stood. "I'm the First Secretary. Who do you represent, Mr. Penn?" "I represent Miss Mowat's mother. I've been hired by Mrs. Mary Braddock." "And what are you, Mr. Penn?" Pederast, no… pusher, no… pimp, no… private investigator, yes… "I am a private investigator, I have been employed by Mrs. Braddock to examine the circumstances of her daughter's murder." "Why do you come here?" Penn bridled. "As a starting point. She was British, I'm British, natural enough to attend Her Britannic Majesty's talking shop…" "We gave Mrs. Braddock every possible help, she left here knowing as much as it was humanly possible to know." "Can't accept that. She wrote a note, Mrs. Braddock, of what she had been told, which I read. She had been told nothing. If she hadn't been told nothing, then I wouldn't be here. Because…" It was a sharp little voice, reedy. "We have a full load of work and about half the staff necessary to accomplish it… No, don't interrupt, listen. Mrs. Braddock was told everything about her daughter's death that it was possible to discover, everything. I wouldn't imagine that private investigators have too much time to read newspapers. If you read a newspaper regularly then you would know that there was a pretty horrible war going on down here, and facts, truths, tend to be rather a long way down the order of priorities. Where Miss Mowat died only a lunatic would have been. She died because she was a fool. As regards facts, in that dirty little war some 20,000 Croatians lost their lives, more than 30,000 were wounded, 7,000 are missing presumed dead, 250,000 have fled their former homes… Do I make myself clear? There has been an earthquake here of human misery, and against the reality of that destruction the demands of a mother for a fuller investigation into the death of one young lunatic woman is quite unreasonable. First day here, is it? Well, get yourself a map, Mr. Penn, learn a bit of geography. Where she died is behind Serb lines, where she was killed is closed territory. I wouldn't want to see you or hear of you again, Mr. Penn, because if I see you or hear of you again then it will mean you have caused trouble. I've enough to concern me without freelancers interfering in sensitive areas and making trouble…" He had torn a sheet of paper from a notepad. He wrote fast on it, passed the paper to Penn. '… I imagine you have to justify an inflated fee. I don't suppose you speak fluent Serbo-Croat, no? That's an interpreter. Second is the name of the man who runs the Croatian war crimes unit, he won't know anything, but he'll be impressive on your report. By the by, do you know how Mrs. Braddock came to know that her daughter was here? A demand for money. Do you know how she came to know her daughter was missing? The money wasn't collected, it was sent back. Didn't she tell you? We're not talking about a very caring young woman, you know… Go away, Mr. Penn, and I suggest you allow the dead to sleep." He walked to the door and opened it for Penn. Penn took himself past the Englishwoman to the main door. He went out onto the street, numbed. It was as if a cold wind had come. The hunger strike was spreading on the third floor. Men were smoking more in the sleeping rooms and she had shouted and threatened. She had more families coming from Bosnia in the morning and the accommodation area was already saturated. She had received, smiling and cheerful and a sham, a delegation that afternoon from the Swedish Red Cross. It was close to midnight and she was exhausted. She had had the police in, accusing the children of stealing in the town. Men from Prijedor, on the second floor, had been close, almost, to a riot at the counter for "Onward Movement'. Another day ending for Ulrike Schmidt as she slipped, dead on her feet, out from the high heavy doors of the Transit Centre. She went to her car, parked in the square, and she did not look back at the old barracks building that was the Transit Centre for Bosnian Muslim refugees. The end of another eighteen-hour day and she had no need to look back on the building. The building consumed her attention, eighteen hours a day. She slumped behind the wheel of the little Volkswagen Beetle, bit at her lip, turned the ignition key. Ahead of her was a cold supper in the fridge of her apartment, a night's heavy and unrewarding sleep, the clamour of an alarm clock. That was the life of Ulrike Schmidt, paid by the United Nations High Commission for Refugees to administer the Transit Centre at Karlovac. The men were on hunger strike because they had been promised entry with their families to Austria, the papers were in place, but the visas were delayed. The members of the delegation of the Swedish Red Cross were disarming and friendly, but adamant that they could offer only medicines, not entry permits. If the men smoked in the rooms of the barracks where the floors were covered with mattresses, where each family made personal boxes from hanging blankets, then the fire risk was just appalling. If the police came in and demanded the right to search, and if the police took away children for thieving, then there would be fighting. And if more families came in the morning, and the resident families had to be pushed into making room for them… if more entry permits were not available at the "Onward Movement' counter… She drove away. She left it behind her, for six hours, the misery of 2,400 refugees who were her charge. Ulrike Schmidt had told the delegation of the Swedish Red Cross that the Bosnian Muslim refugees were the most traumatized people in the world. She had told them that where they stood, grasping their fact-sheets, was the most traumatized place in the world. How did she cope? she was asked by a severe-faced woman from Gothenburg. "When you fall over you have to pick yourself up, wipe off the dirt, start again." And she had smiled, and they had all laughed, and they did not understand what was her life for eighteen hours of the day. She drove through the deserted streets of the front line town towards her apartment. It was the day a letter usually came from her mother in Munich. Her life, her emotions, were shared only with her parents who wrote to her once every week. She allowed no one else access to her emotions. The jeep passed her. Her headlights caught the open back of the jeep, and then the vehicle, arrogantly driven, cut across her. She braked. She slowed. There were four men in the back of the jeep. Her headlights snatched at their faces that were indistinct from the dirt and the camouflage cream. The jeep stopped hard outside the sandbagged entrance to the old police station. She was at crawl speed. Three men out of the back of the jeep, jumping down, pulling after them their weapons and their backpacks. One man left in the jeep. As she went by him she looked into his face. The man sat in the open back of the jeep and his hands were locked onto the barrel of his rifle. He was older than the others and he had weight at the jowls and the cheeks of his face. The eyes were full of fear and shock. She saw the trembling of the body of the man and he blinked into the headlights of her car, and he had made no movement to climb down from the jeep. She saw the filthy uniform that was mud-covered and soaked wet. Ulrike Schmidt understood. She drove on. The fear and the shock and the trembling belonged to those who came from behind the lines, across the Kupa river. After her six hours, after the alarm had gone in the morning, she would be at the crossing point at Turanj and she would meet the new party of refugees, for whom she had no space at the Transit Centre, and she would see the same fear and shock and trembling in those who had come from behind the lines.

She speeded her car.

A silent little prayer played at her lips that the letter from her mother would be waiting at her apartment.