Killing Ground (13 page)

She sat alone on the cliff, her place.

The headmistress had said, 'There were four hundred applicants for your job, eighty applications from inside the county. If we'd realized that there was the faintest possibility you would just walk out on us, then you wouldn't have even won an interview, let alone a short-listing. Don't you feel a responsibility to the children? Don't you feel something for your colleagues here who made you so welcome? When you return from this little episode in idiocy, don't think that this job will be waiting for you, and I doubt that any other job in teaching will be opening its arms to you after the report I intend to attach to your record. You've failed me, and your colleagues, and your children . . .'

In the common room, mid-morning break, she had announced her departure, and she had seen the expressions on their faces, orchestrated by the reaction of the headmistress, change from astonishment to hostility. The sneer of the divorced head-of-year teacher who always looked at her with the ambition of getting his hands into her knickers. The angered resentment of the young man who taught 3A and ran the library and took scouts on weekends and whose eyes mooned after her in the common room every day.

The rank envy of the teacher of 1A who had three children of her own and her husband had run and her life was dictated by minders and baby-sitters. Charley had shrugged, she had muttered that her mind was made up. She hadn't said, couldn't see the point in saying, that she thought them all pathetic and limited, small-minded and trapped.

From the bench above the cliff she saw the peregrine preen the pure white of its chest feathers, worrying at them.

Axel had said, 'You don't only have rights in this world as some gift of God. If you are given rights, you have to take the downside on board. You have to acknowledge obligation and duty. If the citizen has rights, then the citizen also has obligation and duty. You are the citizen, Charley. Bad luck. You cannot always hand over your obligations and duties to other people. Cannot walk away, cannot cross over the road. I don't have to give you syrup thanks for what you're doing, I don't tell you that we're all grateful to you. I'm not thanking you when all that's asked of you is to perform your duties and obligations as a citizen. I hope you didn't want a pretty speech.'

They had sat in his hire-car up the lane from the lights of the community, and Danny Bent had come by and stopped to peer in through the misted window and had spat onto the ground when he had turned away. Too right, she had wanted a pretty speech. She had wanted to feel proud, flushed and pleasured, and his quiet and cold voice gave her nothing. She had sent the fax. Three days later, the last evening when she had returned from a day at school, the envelope from the travel agent in London had been on the table in the hallway of Gull View Cottage, beside the telephone, under her photograph, and enclosed had been the ticket to Palermo, via Rome. He had said, cool and devoid of emotion, what she should write in a fax to be sent in the morning, why she was stopping two days in Rome, when she would reach Palermo. He had told her, brusque, where accommodation would be reserved for her in Rome, at what time he would meet her.

When she had pushed herself out of the hire-car and kick-started the scooter, Fanny Carthew had been watching her. When she had reached home, pushed the scooter up the drive, Zack Jones had spied on her with his binocular lenses. She was turning her back on them, and she knew so little of the man for whom she danced.

Where the sea crashed upon the rocks at the base of the cliffs, a shag bird strutted and held out its wings, drying them in the formation of a blackened cross. It was her place.

Her father had said, 'When that Italian telephoned, maybe I should have been a bit firmer with him. Perhaps I should have told him direct, "She's not coming, there's no question of her travelling to Palermo." Those sort of people, because they've money, they believe they can buy anything. There's a job down the drain, God knows where you're going to find another one. And what are we supposed to think, your mother and I? But I don't suppose we matter to you. You are treating us like filth, and after all the love we've given you. What are your mother and I supposed to think? You let that American into our house, you skulk out in the garden. You come back from drinking with him, but, of course, your mother and I are not told, and you stink of alcohol. Mr Bent and Miss Carthew, they both saw you last night, with that American, but we're not told. All we're told is that "if we talk about it we might be responsible for hurting people". What sort of an answer is that to two loving, caring parents?'

She had felt then a depth of sadness, and the mood must have been mirrored on her face, because her father had broken his whining attack and her mother had come from the kitchen and put her arm around her daughter. It had been the only time since the American had first come that she could have wept, cried out her heart. Charley had said, head against her mother's chest, looking into the bewilderment of her father's eyes, that she was sorry. She had said that she was sorry, but that she could not tell them more.

She had gone away to her room to lay out on her bed the clothes she would pack to take to Palermo. She had not told them that the hostility of the common room had given her raw satisfaction, nor had she told them of the sparse moments of delight when she gained the fast, cracked smile from Axel Moen, nor had she told them of the brutal excitement she felt at the chance to walk away from a life that was trapped on tracks of certainty. She had not told them, 'I want out, I want to bloody live.' She had gone into her room and laid out on the bed, beside the sausage-bag, her best jeans, two denim skirts, her favourite T-shirts, her underwear from Marks and Spencer's, two pairs of trainers and her best evening shoes and a pair of sandals, the severe cotton nightdress that she had been given the last Christmas by her mother, her make-up bag and her washing-bag, two dresses for the evenings, her bear that had been in her bed for twenty years and which still carried the yellow ribbon for the safe return of the Beirut hostages, and the leather-framed photograph of her mother and father from their twenty-fifth anniversary, and the airline ticket. She had checked what she had laid out. She had packed the bag.

When she could no longer see the peregrine on its perch, and no longer see the shag on the rock washed with the sea, when the darkness had closed over her place, she rode home and back to her small room and her packed bag, and the bungalow was like a place for the dead.

It was raining. The wind drove the rain to run in rivers on the windows. Charley settled in her seat. She didn't screw her face against the glass, she didn't look back, she didn't try to see whether her mother and her father still stood on the Totnes platform and waved. Maybe she was a proper little bitch, and maybe that was why Axel Moen thought he could work with her. A mile out of Totnes station, as the big train gathered speed, the world she had known, and felt she was condemned to, was slipping, blurred, away. Behind her was the suffocation of home, the smallness of her place on the cliff, the drear routine of the school. She had thought she lived. The train powered towards Reading. She felt the adrenalin thrill. At Reading she would take the shuttle bus to Heathrow airport. She believed, at last, that she was challenged.

From where he sat at his desk, Dwight Smythe could see the man through the glass of the partition wall and through the open door. Axel Moen was clearing the desk that had been given him since he had come to London. He could see him take each sheet of paper from the drawers, fast-read it, then take the sheet to the office shredder and mince it. Each last sheet, read and shredded, so that when he boarded the plane he would carry nothing. There were handwritten sheets and typed sheets and note jottings, and each one was destroyed. Dwight's telephone rang. Ray wanting him. Ray had finally got round, taken him four days, to going through the budget figures.

He walked out of his office and across the open area. Axel Moen was sat on his desk and turning a file's pages and seemed not to notice him and he had to manoeuvre round him, awkward, and Axel Moen never shifted to make his way easier. There was a small bag on the floor beside the desk, and there was an Alitalia airline ticket laid down beside the file that Axel Moen was reading, hard concentration.

Ray hated figures. He was like a bad housewife when it came to accounting. He went through the budget figures as if they might bite him, and scrawled signatures on each sheet, and didn't seem to know what he was signing. Ray pushed the budget sheets back.

'That's a good job, thanks. Thanks for taking the weight. Is he about cleared up?'

'Given him his ticket, given him petty cash.'

'What time they going?'

Dwight Smythe peered out of the Country Chief's office and across the open area towards Axel Moen, still bent over the last file.

'Oh, they don't travel together, hell, no. He doesn't hold the hand of that poor kid. She goes British Airways, I was instructed to book him with Alitalia. She doesn't get any comfort treatment. You'd have thought . . .'

'You hooked into his file?'

'I did what I was told.'

'There was an area blocked off to you.'

A bitter, droll response. 'There was an area of the file to which I was not admitted. Not suitable for an administrative jerk.'

'I hooked in, but my key code doesn't get blocked.'

'That is privilege to aim at, that gives my life a goal.'

'You have, Dwight, don't mind me saying it, a rare ability to get stuck in my throat so's I want to spit. He was in La Paz, Bolivia.'

'I got that far - have you anything else for me, Ray?'

The Country Chief's finger, a moment, jabbed at Dwight Smythe's chest. A lowered voice. 'He was in La Paz, Bolivia, that was '89 to '92. Only the best get to go down to Colombia and Peru and Bolivia. Three-year postings for wild guys.'

The lip curled. 'You talking about cowboys?'

'Don't push. They move into coca-leaf-production country, where the campesinos grow the goddam stuff. There's remote estancias up there, with the small airstrips that the cartels use to ship the coca out for refinement in Cali or Medellxn. Back in La Paz life is behind razor wire and walls and with a handgun beside the pillow and checking under the car each morning. Up-country it's serious shit. Our people have CIs out there, our people try to hit the airstrips when the CIs report there's going to be a shipment. We have to fly with the Bolivian military. A Bolivian helicopter pilot might get to earn $800 a month, he's wide open to corruption, but you have to tell him where you're flying, you have to trust him. You can't reckon to fly with your own people every day.

You have to trust. You wouldn't know about that, Dwight, living that sort of stress, waiting for betrayal, and pray to God you never learn. They were up near the Brazil border, hot news from a Confidential Informant, two Huey loads of Bolivian special forces, Axel Moen and another agent. They came in over the strip and there were three light aircraft being loaded - it's what his report in the file says. Understand, when you come in on a Huey you don't go round a couple of sweet circles for recce, you go in and you hit. It was bad, compromised, it was a fuck-up, ambush time. He, your friend Axel Moen, took a high velocity in the stomach, one of the birds was busted, three Bolivians KIA and six more WIA and that was out of twenty-two of the poor bastards.'

'I never found war stories that interesting.'

'Hang around. The high-velocity in the stomach was flesh at the side. They hadn't much choice but to get themselves off the open strip and to the cover of the buildings. It was quite a fire fight. When they got to the buildings they met up with the Confidential Informant. Couldn't do much talking with her. She was dead. She'd been gang-banged.

She'd had her throat cut. She'd been nailed up, through the hands, to the inside of the door of the building. Are you hearing me? It's a hard world out there, it's better out there when you don't make emotional relationships with a Confidential Informant, it's better when you're a cold bastard.'

'Thanks for checking the budget figures, Ray.'

Across the open area Axel Moen fed the last sheet of paper into the shredder, and then a photograph. Dwight Smythe had only the most fleeting glimpse of it. It seemed to show a slight and inoffensive man of middle age, perhaps at a function or a wedding or a reception because there were others in suits around the small man, whose head was ringed in red chinagraph. The target? Shit, and the guy looked nothing and wouldn't have stood out in the photograph if it hadn't been for the red ring around his head. As Dwight Smythe came across the work area, Axel Moen checked that the band holding his hair was secure, then picked up and pocketed his airline ticket, and heaved up his small bag.

Axel Moen waved, desultory, at Ray, and was heading for the door.

Dwight Smythe thought that once the intruder had left he'd spray an air freshener round the office area. He didn't know the world of Confidential Informants and fire fights and high-velocity flesh wounds, and hoped to God he never would. And he thought the girl from the small bungalow was an innocent.

He growled, 'I'll see you some time. Have a good flight. I'll see you, maybe—'

'Yes, if I want some expenses signed.'

Gone through the door, gone and not closed it behind him.

When the aircraft had lifted, yawed and climbed, as she sat small in her seat and buckled tight, Charley had felt that she crumpled. She had thought then that she was the most minuscule of the marionette puppets locked in the cupboard behind the teacher's desk, not her desk, in class 2B.

As the aircraft cruised, on automatic flat flight, and she sat numbed in her seat beside the honeymoon couple in their best new British Home Stores outfits, Charley felt numbed. The couple did not seem to notice her, and after she had seen the rampant love bite on the girl's lower throat and the girl was younger than Charley, she did not even consider trying to talk to them. What would they have understood of her acceptance of an invitation that would provide access? Damn-all of nothing . . . She sat far down in her seat, refused the tray of food, turned the pages of the in-flight magazine and retained not a word of the printed text, not a frame of the glossy photographs.