THE HEART OF DANGER (10 page)

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went his socks and his underclothes. Penn told his wife, quiet

voice,

that he thought he would be away for a minimum of a week and he told

52

her the name of the hotel where he was booked and he told her about

Mary Braddock. On top of his socks and underclothes he laid two pairs

of slacks, charcoal-grey. "So, I'm just supposed to sit here and

wait

for you to show up again?" All his shirts were white. It was like a

uniform to him, that he wore charcoal-grey trousers and white shirts

and quiet ties. He had always worn the uniform when he had gone to

work at Gower Street. The jeans and the sweaters and the casual

shirts

that were right for Section 4 of A Branch had been kept in a locker.

"If you hadn't made such a fool of yourself then you wouldn't be

running round with that deadbeat outfit, would you?" Their home,

two

bedrooms, one floor, had cost 82,750. Their mortgage was 60,000.

They

could not have bought the house and furnished it without the help

of

her father, digging into his building society savings. They were

not

quite 'negative equity', but damn near. They could not sell the

house

without slashing into what her father had loaned them, or what the

building society had advanced them. They were trapped in the bloody

place. And it was not a home any more, but a little brightly painted

prison. He thought there was enough in the case for a week, and

something to spare. "What you do now, it's grubby, isn't it? It's prying into people's lives. How do you hold your head up?" Well,

he

held his head up because there was a cheque coming into the bank each

month, and that should have been a good enough reason to hold his

bloody head up. He would wear his blazer on the aircraft, not fold

it

away in the case. He did not take Jane home any more to his parents

and the tied cottage, and they had not yet seen their grandson, Tom.

Nothing said, but understood amongst them all, that he did not take

Jane home. If his mother rang and Jane answered the telephone then

his

mother just rang off. The maisonette was a brightly painted prison

and

the marriage was a locked cell door, but he hadn't the time to be

thinking about solicitors and he hadn't the money to be thinking about

new rent to go with the old mortgage. He closed the case and fastened

the lock, and put the case on the floor at the end of the bed. "And what's the point of you going there, what's anyone to gain from it?"

It was the way of her, to goad him. He looked into the frightened

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small eyes of her face, and they were reddened from crying from before

he had come home. She was looking at his lip, which was better now,

but still ugly. Penn said softly, "I am not going into a war zone, the

war zone is Bosnia. I am going to Croatia, the war finished in

Croatia

more than a year ago, the war's gone on by to Bosnia ... I am going

to

trawl round the embassy, I am going to see the ministries there, I

am

going to interview and get transcripts from a few refugees, I am going

to write a report. That's what they're going to get, a nice little

typed-up report. I am going to get a good fee from it, and they're

going to get a good typed-up report .. ." The tears had come again.

"You'll be sucked in." "No chance." He couldn't talk it through with

her. Never had been able to, but it was worse now. It was his habit with her, to hide behind the denials. He could have talked it through

with Dougal, his best mate in the Transit team, but Dougal Gray was

in

Belfast, had extended his tour, and the postcards with the dry

tourists' messages didn't come any more. It was only with Dougal

that

he had ever talked through work problems and Jane problems .. . and

had

a few laughs .. . and once substituted white paint thinner for milk

in

the silver tops of an old misery's house .. . and once .. . the best

times in the Transit were with Dougal, and then Dougal hadn't been

around to talk through his being dumped by the Service. And Dougal

had

been long gone when he had spent the worst, foul, hour of his life,

going home on the train, walking from the station to the front door,

preparing to tell Jane that the job was finished. "You'll be sucked in, because you always want to belong." "No way." "Won't you?

You'll

be stupid Penn knelt beside the chair. He had so little to say to

her.

He did not have to offer a checklist of their social arrangements

that

he would not now be able to meet, because they had no social life.

Men

from PO Box 500 were not a part of any outside community, and the

pariah status remained for a reject. There was no amateur dramatics

society to be told he would miss a rehearsal. There was no pub

skittles team to be told that he was missing the next league outing.

54

There was no evening education class because he could never guarantee

his attendance. There was no dinner party or meal out with friends,

because Five men, ex-Five men, avoided the great unwashed. He would

be

gone for a week and no one in their block of maisonettes, in their

street, would know or notice. Might just be the story of his goddamn

life ... He put his hands on her arms and she flinched from him, and

was holding tight to their baby. Wouldn't she just understand,

couldn't she try to understand, that he might just want to go .. .

?

"I promise that I won't be stupid. It's just a report, Jane, it's

not

Rambo nonsense. It's just a report that will put some poor woman's

torment to rest. It's nothing special." "Don't think, if you play the

hero, they'll have you back." "If you'd met her .. ." He remembered the woman, in torment, sitting with her dogs beside the grave, and

he

remembered that the flowers on the grave had lost their brightness.

He

thought it a pity that the daughter, Dorrie, had been just a 'messer'

and a 'tosser'. He thought that the work would have been more

interesting, more fulfilling, if the girl had been worthwhile.

There

was nothing worthwhile that he had been told about the girl when he

had

sat beside the Aga in the kitchen and drunk the instant coffee.

"I won't even be able to get close to it, not even if I wanted to.

The

people who did it, killed the girl, are beyond reach, they're behind

the lines .. . it's only to write a report."

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

55

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

56

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

57

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