(1995) By Any Name (32 page)

‘Captain Chaloner, may I suggest you clean yourself up?’ Simmonds prompted.

‘Later.’ Chaloner noticed that the escort had left the room at a nod from the brigadier.

‘That’s an order, Chaloner.’ Major Simmonds tempered his command when Chaloner gave him a sharp look. ‘We’re all very grateful to you, but your job is done. It’s time for the doctors to take over.’ He emphasized his professional status.

‘Major Simmonds, Brigadier Cullen-Heames and I will take it from here,’ Heddingham interrupted smoothly.

‘The prisoner surrendered on condition that I remain with him and Dr Santer during debriefing.’

‘The prisoner surrendered?’ Simmonds raised his eyebrows.

‘Yes, Major Simmonds, he surrendered.’

‘That doesn’t alter the situation, Chaloner,’ the lieutenant-colonel barked. ‘Get cleaned up and report to your CO.’

‘With all due respect, sir, not until the prisoner has been debriefed.’

‘Am I to understand that you are disobeying a direct order… ’

‘Sir.’ Chaloner looked from the lieutenant-colonel to the major. ‘I have already questioned the prisoner, sir,’ he lied, gambling on bluffing his way to the truth.

‘That was an extremely foolish thing to do, Chaloner,’ Major Simmonds criticized. ‘The man is a psychiatric patient, mentally unstable with a history of violence… ’

‘He struck me as being neither unstable, nor violent, sir. And, as I said, he surrendered voluntarily.’

Heddingham eyed the gun Chaloner cradled in the crook of his elbow. ‘Captain Chaloner, for the last time, will you leave this room.’

‘Not until the prisoner has been debriefed, sir,’

Chaloner repeated obstinately. ‘Dr Santer stated that he could be subject to a bout of hysteria, or even violence should he relive the trauma that caused his amnesia.’

‘Captain, for the last time… ’

‘Chaloner, this is for your own good,’ the brigadier interposed nervously. ‘The man is a murderer… ’

‘He is not.’

All the officers turned to Elizabeth.

‘Dr Santer,’ Major Simmonds addressed her slowly and patronizingly, as though she were a difficult patient. ‘I have bad news… ’

‘That Dave Watson is dead?’ she guessed.

‘This man,’ his glance flickered to John. ‘Killed him?’

‘He did not.’

‘If he didn’t kill him, then how do you know Dave Watson is dead?’ Simmonds asked.

‘I saw it on the news.’

‘Your kidnapper allowed you to watch television?’

‘There was no “allowed”, major. I remained with John West of my own volition.’ She knew she wasn’t telling Simmonds anything he wasn’t already aware of. ‘I haven’t left his side,’ she stretched the truth,

‘since we left the hospital, and all the time I’ve been with him, he hasn’t killed anyone.’

‘The ambulance driver?’

‘Was unconscious but alive when we left him.’

‘The captain who stormed in the office in Brecon?’

‘Had a superficial wound in his arm.’

‘That’s impossible,’ the major refuted.

‘It’s the truth which is why I refuse to leave John until I can be absolutely certain that he won’t be murdered as those other men were.’

‘Dr Santer, you’re a psychiatrist,’ Major Simmonds addressed her calmly. ‘Can’t you see what’s happened here? You’re exhibiting all the symptoms of transmitted persecution complex. This man believes himself innocent but persecuted and he has convinced you his delusions are real.’ He looked to the brigadier and the lieutenant-colonel. ‘An easily understood phenomenon when you consider the strain Dr Santer has been under since she was kidnapped by West.’

‘I am suffering neither from delusions nor hysteria, Major Simmonds. John West is innocent.’

‘This is the ambulance driver on the Libanus road all over again,’ Simmonds said impatiently. ‘You managed to convince him of West’s innocence… ’

‘Only because he is,’ Elizabeth swayed on her feet.

‘Dr Santer should sit down, sir,’ Chaloner pulled a chair out from under the table and helped Elizabeth on to it.

‘I think we should call the guards back,’

Simmonds said flatly. ‘As a psychiatrist and officer I will not take responsibility for interviewing a violent man with only one armed man present, especially, when I suspect the prisoner is a manipulative psychopath capable of exerting considerable influence over others. He appears to have mesmerized both Captain Chaloner and Dr Santer.’

‘The truth has mesmerized me,’ Elizabeth muttered.

‘You have conclusive proof of his innocence?’

Simmonds questioned.

‘No guilty man would willingly surrender himself,’ Chaloner pointed out.

‘Not even if he was suffering from exposure, Chaloner?’

‘We had food, shelter and everything we needed,’

Elizabeth looked at John who was watching and listening but contributing nothing to the argument.

There was a rap at the door. Heddingham shouted

‘Enter!’

Sergeant Price marched into the room. ‘Sergeant Price reporting to Brigadier Cullen-Heames, as requested, sir!’

‘We’re in a briefing, sergeant!’ Major Simmonds barked.

The sergeant kicked the door shut. West turned pale.

Elizabeth looked at the sergeant’s gun and registered the scar on his thumb. It ran the whole length with small lines like centipede legs spreading out from the main injury. She unzipped her suit, threw herself to the floor and removed the gun John had given her in one swift movement. Pointing the barrel at the sergeant, she closed her eyes and fired. West hurtled forward, knocking the sergeant off balance.

Someone hit the light switch and the room plunged into darkness.

Elizabeth had fallen behind a filing cabinet.

Around her the air was filled with noise, disembodied shouts, screams, and the sharp crack of gunshots. She clenched the gun and murmured over and over again.

‘Please let him be all right. Please God let him be all right.’

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Even in the darkness John continued to see the scar. It seared a glowing brand in a velvet blackness that prevented him from seeing his own body, let alone those of others. He crouched on the floor, his bound hands protecting his head as shouts, screams and gunshots resounded around him – and – the soft plop of a gun fitted with a silencer being fired. It was that sound that took him out of the room, out of Stirling Lines and back to London in another time…

‘Damn, blast and fuck British weather.’

‘You’ve had it too soft for too long, Richard McKenna.’

‘Not that soft.’ He switched off the ignition and turned from the dismal, rain soaked scene framed in the windscreen to the woman sitting in the passenger seat beside him. Slim, silver blonde hair, pewter eyes that could turn an uncompromising, steel-grey, or like now, a warm, loving silver. His wife was more beautiful than he remembered, and the separation had been a long one even by Special Forces standards.

Ten months, and the most difficult element of every parting was the embarrassment of getting to know her all over again. But while he and Bonnie both insisted on following their chosen professions, there was no other way they could live. Not for the foreseeable future.

‘I can’t wait to see her.’

‘I think her mother deserves your undivided attention first,’ Bonnie teased in the Vasser, Eastern seaboard accent that had attracted him the instant he’d heard her speak over an internal telephone system in NASA headquarters. It had taken two days of hard manoeuvring for him to contrive a meeting after that.

‘So,’ he took her into his arms and kissed her briefly on the lips. The house she had chosen to rent didn’t appear to be overlooked on first inspection, but she had mentioned a baby sitter, and he didn’t like the thought of his private moments being under scrutiny.

A phobia that came from having every move he made analyzed in his working life. ‘What’s the world of space technology doing these days?’

‘It could have disintegrated since I’ve been on maternity leave for all I know.’

He reached out and fingered her hair. ‘Thank you for picking me up from the airport.’

A stupid, commonplace remark to make to your wife when you haven’t seen her for forty weeks three days and ten hours, but his voice was husky with suppressed emotion.

‘Don’t mention it, colonel, sir, but we can’t sit out here all night. I’ve a baby sitter to relieve, dinner to cook, and – ’ mischief glowed in the depths of her magnificent eyes, ‘a bed already warmed.’

He opened the door and walked around to open the passenger side. Lifting the hatch back he took out his bag which was only marginally larger than an overnight case and a preposterously massive, giant pink hippopotamus he had bought for his daughter, Rachel. Eight weeks old already and he’d yet to see her.

The baby sitter was hovering in the hall when Bonnie opened the door.

‘She was very good, Mrs McKenna. Not a peep out of her. I’ve laid the table, and finished the ironing.’

‘Thank you very much, Joanne.’

‘You’re back earlier than I expected,’ the teenager gave Richard a shy smile. ‘I owe you some money.’

‘Put it towards your college fund.’

‘If you need me again just contact the agency.’

‘I most certainly will, and thank you again, Joanne.’

‘Trust an American to land in a strange country and have an entire life and all the trappings, including house, and babysitter sorted in next to no time.’ He dropped his bag to the floor and closed the door. The house Bonnie had rented for the week, all the leave he had been able to wangle before taking up his next post, was smaller than the last one they had rented in the States. But then British houses were generally smaller than American.

It had been so long since he’d lived in his home country he’d almost forgotten how cramped some suburban houses could be. But it would do. He’d have to live on the job for his next two weeks of work. And after that they had promised him eight weeks leave.

Not that he hadn’t earned it. Eight weeks that he and Bonnie planned to spend on her father’s farm in Virginia.

‘She’s upstairs’ Bonnie smiled, knowing he wouldn’t be interested in a tour of the house.

Domestic details bored him once they progressed beyond the stage of affecting his comfort. ‘Follow me, Daddy.’ She began to climb the stairs. ‘There are only two bedrooms and one bathroom, but the garden’s walled. I know how you appreciate privacy, so I thought it would do for a week.’

‘You’re leaving at the end of the week too?’

‘No, I know you won’t have time to visit us, but I thought I’d stay on, do some shopping, see some shows, visit some galleries, that way we can fly back to the States together.’

‘I wish I could stay here with you.’

‘I knew what I was getting when I married a man who was married to his job, but did you know what you were getting yourself into when you took up with me, Buster?’ She lifted her skirt and ran her fingers through her hair, eyeing him seductively from beneath half closed lids.

Unable to resist a moment longer, he took her into his arms, and kissed her the way he’d wanted to, when he had first caught a glimpse of her waiting outside the barriers in the airport. He breathed in her perfume, the clean smell of her hair, kissed her lips, her neck…

‘You have a daughter to get acquainted with, remember.’ Holding her finger to her lips she opened one of the three doors on the landing and tiptoed into a room illuminated by the gentle glow of an amber nursery light that shone down on a china hedgehog tea party. He left the hippopotamus in the corner of the room and joined Bonnie at the end of the cot. The baby was sleeping on her back; two tiny fists closed either side of a scrunched pink face, her mop of black, curly hair the only touch of strong colour in a muted, pastel-shaded world.

‘Her eyes are still blue, and the doctor thinks they’ll stay that way,’ Bonnie whispered. Rachel moved, her dark eyelashes flickered, but to his dismay she curled back into sleep.

‘Can I pick her up?’

‘She’ll wake in half an hour and I’d rather you picked me up until then. Can you wait?’

He smiled. ‘I’ll try.’ He followed Bonnie across the landing into the second bedroom. Nightlights burned either side of a four poster double bed, bathing the room in a soft glow. Delving into the pocket of the blazer he was wearing, he pulled out a box and presented it to her. ‘Something small for a gorgeous and clever wife on presenting me with a beautiful daughter. And an apology for not being around when she was born.’

‘You were there for the most important part; afterwards I looked grotesque, like an elephant.’ She opened the box and gasped. ‘Richard, they are magnificent.’ She gently removed a gold band fashioned in the shape of two hands clasping a single glittering diamond, and matching drop diamond and gold earrings. ‘They must have cost a fortune.’

‘Only a small one.’ He picked her up and lifted her on to the bed. ‘God I’ve missed you, you’ve no idea how much.’ He couldn’t get enough of her, her hair, her eyes, her smile and wondered why photographs can never convey a person’s inner light. The vibrancy, the personality the core of being that he’d fallen so much in love with.

‘Pretty important job you’ve got for yourself, colonel,’ she said after he’d kissed her. ‘Martin stopped by and told me you’re in charge of the security for the peace conference.’

‘Martin came here?’

‘Yesterday. He was on his way out of the country.’

‘That’s Martin up for a court martial.

Disseminating classified information is a serious offence.’

‘Then it’s just as well he’s the other side of the world where you can’t get at him.’

‘Where?’

‘Canada for two months.’

‘Arctic training. Do him good to cool his tongue for a while.’

‘I don’t suppose you can tell me where you’ve been for the past ten months?’

‘Same place I spent eight months last year.’

‘An undisclosed Arab country?’

‘You get a straight A for that one.’ He kissed her again, his hand exploring beneath her sweater.

‘As we only have half an hour let’s get undressed and into bed so we can do this thing properly.’

It was always the same, a strained reticence that gave way to a bout of crazy, mind blowing passion, and afterwards – thank God – it was always all right.