Redemption aka A Conspiracy of Faith

34

The Helmand region had been Kenneth’s personal hell, the desert dust his nightmare. One tour of Iraq, two of Afghanistan. It was more than enough.

His mates sent him e-mails every day. A lot of words about comradeship and great times together, but nothing about what was actually going on. Everyone just wanted to stay alive. That was all that mattered.

And for that reason he was done with it. He was clear about that. A pile of debris on a roadside. The wrong place in the dark. The wrong place in the daytime. The incendiaries were everywhere. An eye put to a telescopic sight. Luck wasn’t the kind of companion on whom one could rely.

So here he was in his little house in Roskilde, trying to blunt his senses and forget. Trying to get on with his life.

He had killed a person and had never told anyone. It had happened very quickly, in a brief exchange of fire. Not even his comrades had noticed. A corpse, slightly apart from the others. His corpse. A direct hit in the windpipe. No more than a boy, the terrifying whiskers of the Taliban warrior little more than fluff on his chin.

He had told no one, not even Mia.

It wasn’t the kind of thing to drop into a conversation when you were breathlessly in love.

The first time he saw Mia, he knew he would be hers unconditionally.

She had looked deeply into his eyes when he took her hand. Already then, it had happened. Total surrender. Pent-up longing and hope, suddenly liberated. And they had listened to each other with senses agape, knowing it was only the start.

She had trembled as she told him when her husband might be back. She, too, was ready for a new life.

The last time they saw each other had been Saturday. He had turned up on the spur of the moment, the newspaper in his hand as they had agreed.

She was alone but in a state. Let him in reluctantly but wouldn’t say what was wrong. She clearly had no sense of what the day might bring.

If only they had had a few more seconds, he would have asked her to come with him. To pack some things, pick up Benjamin, and take off.

She would have said yes if her husband hadn’t turned up, he was sure of it. And at his place, they would have had time together to unravel the knots of their ill-spent lives.

But instead he had to go. She’d been insistent. Out through the back door. Off into the dark like a timid dog. And without his bike.

He had thought about nothing else since. Not for a second.

Now three days had passed. It was Tuesday, and he had been to the house several times since Saturday’s unwelcome surprise. So what if he ran into Mia’s husband? So what if things came to a head? He no longer feared other people, only himself. What he might do to the man, if it turned out he had harmed Mia.

But when he returned the first time, he found the house empty, likewise when he came again. And still he felt compelled to come back. A suspicion, rooted in instinct, grew inside him. The same instinct that had taken hold of him the time one of his comrades had pointed down an Afghan side street where ten local citizens were later killed. He had just known they should stay away from that street, the same way he knew this house contained secrets that would never see the light of day without his help.

He stood at her front door and called out her name. If the family had been going on holiday, she would have told him. If she no longer wanted him, her radiant eyes would have avoided his gaze.

She did want him, but now she was gone. Even his calls to her mobile remained unanswered. For some hours he had reasoned that she was too frightened to answer, because her husband was there. Then he convinced himself her husband had taken the phone away from her, and that he knew everything.

If he did, he was welcome to come and confront him, he told himself. It would not be an equal fight.

And then on Monday, for the first time, he began to think that the answer might lie elsewhere.

His attention had been caught by a sound. It was an unexpected sound, of the kind a soldier was trained to hear: faint sounds that could mean death in a second if overlooked.

It was such a sound he heard as he stood outside the house and called her mobile.

The mobile that chimed so faintly inside the walls.

And then he’d snapped shut his own phone and listened. Nothing.

He had dialed Mia’s number one more time and waited for a moment. There it was again. Her mobile was somewhere upstairs behind the closed, slanting window in the roof, responding to his call.

He’d stood there for a second, considering what to do.

She could have left it behind on purpose, but it was unlikely.

She called it her lifeline, and no one would give up a lifeline just like that.

That was something he knew.

He had come one more time since then and heard the mobile chime again inside the upstairs room above the front door. Nothing had changed. Why did he have this enduring suspicion that something was wrong?

Was it the hound in him, sniffing danger in the air? Was it the soldier? Or was it being in love that made him blind to the possibility that he had already become a parenthesis in her life?

And for all the questions, all the possible answers, this nagging suspicion remained.

Behind the curtains of the house across the way, an elderly couple sat watching him. As soon as he called out Mia’s name they were there. Perhaps he should ask them if they had noticed anything untoward.

It took them a while to open the door, and they were hardly accommodating when they did.

Why couldn’t he leave their nice neighbors alone, the woman asked.

He forced a smile and showed them how his hands were shaking. Showed them how frightened he was and how much he needed their help.

Reluctantly, they told him the husband had been home several times during the last couple of days. His Mercedes had been in the drive, but they had not seen his wife or their child for some time.

He thanked them and asked if they would be kind enough to keep an eye out, then gave them his phone number.

When they shut the door again, he knew they would not call. Mia wasn’t his wife. That was the fact of the matter.

He called her number one last time, and one last time he heard her mobile chime inside the room upstairs.

Mia, where are you? he thought to himself with increasing anxiety.

Starting tomorrow, he would come back to the house at regular intervals during the daytime.

If he saw nothing to put his mind at rest, he would go to the police.

Not because there was anything tangible to go on.

But what else could he do?