The Meadow (42 page)

They were not stopping here anyway. The old man motioned Haider to keep going. ‘Vail Nagbal,’ he said, referring to another village two miles further on. The nearest police station was now twenty miles back. Haider felt for the reassuring grip of his pistol in its holster, and followed. But Vail Nagbal came and went, and still the old man didn’t stop. This was much further into no man’s land than Haider had
intended to go, and he was becoming more worried. At last they reached a clearing in the forest, and then he saw it: something lying on the ground, surrounded by small bundles of firewood.

Haider took in the crime scene. He had been to so many of these since the militancy had flared up that he felt nothing at first, although some things stood out. The corpse was dressed in mismatched olive fatigues, with green sweat pants underneath baggy
shalwar
trousers, and its arms and legs had been trussed with rough twine. The head was missing. ‘It made the scene appear as some kind of nasty execution.’ From the large maroon stain on the ground beneath the body, death had been caused by decapitation at this very spot. Haider poked around, and found what he was looking for forty metres away: the head. He rolled it over, and gasped. Blond curls and a strawberry-blond beard matted with blood. The eyes, half-open, were the grey-blue of Tar Sar. It had to be a hostage, or possibly a Chechen fighter enlisted into the Kashmiri
jihad
. If it was a hostage, Haider knew that the political ramifications would be momentous. The militants had broken new ground here, he thought, capturing a foreign tourist and killing him so brutally.

Lighting up a Classic, DSP Haider turned to see his constables arriving in the Gypsy. They shouldered their weapons as Haider rolled the body over. Everyone gasped. ‘We all saw right away that the blood on the corpse’s neck was still oozing, which meant that the killing was recent,’ said Haider. Whoever had done this might still be nearby, watching. They had to act fast. They might be outgunned. Haider saw that a note was pinned to the victim’s shirt, and plucked it off: ‘We have killed the hostage because the government has failed to accept our demands. Indian dogs, if you do not fulfil our demands, in 48 hours the others will suffer the same fate.’ The DSP felt bewildered, incensed and distraught.

He ordered the twitchy constables to make a rapid search of the area while he looked over the butchered corpse for anything that would aid identification. Terrified, the two men ran around, safety catches off, while Haider poked at the cadaver. Although there were brown socks on both feet, there was only one black boot, trademarked
‘Micro’, on the left foot. The right foot poked out of its sock, and was dirty and blistered, as if the victim had walked a considerable distance without footwear.

Feeling inside the man’s torn green
shalwar kameez
, Haider found what felt like a square of paper forced into one of the seams. He wriggled it free, and saw that it was a page torn from an Indian magazine. On one side was a banal cigarette advertisement, some scantily clad Bollywood starlet running across a beach. On the other was an advertisement for ‘Arvind Cotton Classics’. Haider was perplexed. It had to contain an important or personal message, since the hostage had clearly gone to the trouble of concealing it. Scrutinising the page more closely, he spotted tiny, handwritten words marching antlike along its margins. On one side was a list of countries: ‘Turkey’, ‘Greece’, ‘UK’, ‘Bolivia’, ‘Brazil’. On the other was a list of local place names: ‘Magam’, ‘Pahalgam’, ‘Kapran’. On the reverse were the titles of dozens of songs by David Bowie, the Waterboys and Led Zeppelin. Nothing significant, Haider concluded as he shoved the page into his pocket.

The corpse was wearing a green T-shirt. Haider reached for the label: ‘Janus of Norway J’. The Norwegian hostage? It had to be. He lifted up the T-shirt, and recoiled. A message had been carved into the dead man’s chest in ten-inch-high letters in what looked like Arabic or Urdu script. He called his men, who helped him decipher it. No one was quite sure, but then he got it: A-L F-A-R-A-N.

One of the officers had found a long knife among the deodars. Haider suspected it was an army-issue bayonet of some kind. Covered in blood, it was probably the murder weapon. ‘The foreigner had been frog-marched here, before being forced down and sacrificed like a goat for
Eid
,’ he thought.

Haider knew they had to get out of here as soon as possible, with the body. As he and one of the constables slid it into the back of the Gypsy, the other constable came back with another trophy: a green rucksack. In it were a handful of colour photos, a small purse containing shipping receipts and credit cards, and a passport that confirmed the dead man’s identity: Hans Christian Ostrø. ‘I scooped up the head, wrapped it in a strip of cloth and put it on the seat next to me, where
it remained, rolling this way and that, all the way back to Anantnag,’ DSP Haider recalled.

By the time they arrived at Anantnag, the town’s police station was besieged. Amid chaotic scenes, the body was hustled inside on a rusty stretcher. Someone took a photograph showing Ostrø’s head propped unceremoniously between his thighs as Haider screamed, ‘Get these parasites out of here!’ He ordered the stretcher to be taken to a private room. ‘Doctor!’ he shouted, calling for a police medic. While he waited, he again studied the torn page he had found in the man’s clothes. What was he missing here? As he scanned the song titles more carefully, his eyes lit on a phrase: ‘Good luck to you all. If I should die, I am wearing a message to my family in my balls.’ The hostage, he realised, had cleverly hidden a significant message amid otherwise random writings that he knew the kidnappers would not be able to understand. Instead of waiting for the police doctor, Haider began to manhandle the body. It was difficult, but eventually, feeling along the creases, he retrieved a roll of papers from the victim’s underpants.

Inside was a blizzard of words, but frustratingly they were in Norwegian. Just as he was wondering where he could find a translator, an Inspector poked his head through the door to say that a helicopter was on its way. BB Cantt had commandeered the corpse, on the Governor’s orders. Ostrø belonged to the army now. Once again, Haider was being sidelined. Growling, he pushed the papers into his pocket.

As they filed into the German Embassy dining room for lunch, Marit Hesby was alarmed to see that she was seated beside the Ambassador, Frank Elbe. What on earth would they talk about? This world was new to her. She was relieved to see Jane Schelly slip into the chair on Elbe’s other side. Before the Ambassador arrived the two women chatted for a few minutes, discussing the latest rumours. Someone had heard that the hostages had had their shoes taken away to prevent them from escaping. After Elbe arrived, the meal got under way.

Halfway through the main course, a succession of Embassy staff got up to leave. Hans Christian’s sister Anette noticed it straight away. ‘The German Ambassador disappeared. I thought, “Oh, it’s the press, they’ve found out we’re all here and they’re asking for interviews.”’ But one by one the diplomats filed back in, and said nothing, although their faces looked gloomy. ‘We had our dessert, cherries jubilee,’ recalled Marit, ‘but Ambassador Elbe didn’t touch his plate.’

The families were ushered into another room for coffee. ‘Our Ambassador, Arne Walther, was standing over in a corner with the British High Commissioner,’ said Anette. ‘I thought, “That’s strange, Arne wasn’t invited to the meal.” There was also a doctor who I recognised from the British High Commission. They called us all to attention. Then they told us that the body of a Caucasian male had been found, although not formally identified. We should all go back to our respective embassies and wait for news.’ The women shrank back in horror, and then the sobbing started.

Marit was stunned. ‘I remember looking at the other families and feeling sorry that one of them would soon be told their loved one was dead.’ Someone, nobody could recall exactly who, starting weeping and saying that she wanted to go home. Jane remembered the stunned atmosphere as everyone wondered who it was who would receive the terrible news: ‘You didn’t want it to be your loved one, and yet you looked around the room and thought with horror that you could not wish this on anyone.’ Jane felt she had to say something on behalf of all the families. She asked if it were possible that the body might be that of someone else, since all the papers were reporting that Westerners were still trekking in the Pahalgam area. ‘Elbe looked at me as if he did not understand my English, and said absolutely nothing,’ Jane recalled.

As she walked out, Marit noticed the German Ambassador putting his arm around Jane, and a guilty wave of relief washed over her. ‘It must be Don,’ she thought. However, when Marit, Anette and Hans
Gustav arrived back at their Embassy, the Ambassador called them into a private room. ‘There’s a rumour,’ he said quietly, ‘it’s Hans Christian.’ The family was stunned. Could it be a mistake, Hans Gustav asked desperately. Walther didn’t think so. The police in Kashmir were asking if Hans Christian had any distinguishing marks. Marit immediately thought of the scar running diagonally across the right side of her son’s back. When he was six years old and living in Tromsø, a neighbour’s dog had attacked him. ‘Yes,’ she said hesitantly. ‘All I had in my mind’s eye was a picture of my beautiful boy lying dead somewhere,’ she remembered. It was senseless and cruel. How could someone have killed her son, a boy with so much love in his heart? If it was Hans Christian, she needed to know how he had died. Ambassador Walther looked away with an expression that suggested this was something he had not prepared himself for. ‘We don’t know,’ he murmured.

Anette was mute. She idolised her big brother, who had taught her everything she knew about music and poetry, and could not imagine life without him. She made her excuses and went up to her room. For a moment she sat on the bed, trying to collect herself. Hans Christian had always been there for her: ‘He just couldn’t be dead.’ Still unable to cry, she called her boyfriend in Stockholm. He had already seen it on the news. ‘Eric told me to prepare myself for something terrible. The reports in Sweden were saying that Hans Christian had been beheaded. I just couldn’t get this. I couldn’t understand this. I was in complete shock. This kind of thing – in Norway, it was totally unknown to us.’

On the afternoon of 13 August, in the Welcome Hotel in Srinagar, Tore Hattrem was sitting and reading. It was his week on as the duty liaison officer representing the relatives’ interests now the families were down in New Delhi. In recent days the British High Commission and the American, German and Norwegian embassies had organised themselves into a more manageable group they called the ‘G4’, in an attempt to simplify and coordinate arrangements between the four nations whose subjects were involved in the kidnapping. ‘Someone called to say a body had been found,’ Tore recalled. ‘A car was waiting to take me to Badami Bagh, the army HQ.’ He would have to inform the G4 straight away, and he was told that General Saklani was
preparing to call an emergency meeting of the Indian security forces’ Unified Command.

At the military hospital, dozens of worried-looking officials, some of them in uniform, were milling around. Silence descended as the Norwegian diplomat entered, and they parted to allow him through. The sight of Ostrø’s mutilated corpse on a gurney in the mortuary room, his head lying between his thighs, made Tore retch. It was the first time he had ever seen a dead body, and the fact that it was someone he knew made it all the worse. ‘It was terrible. Sad. I barely recognised him as the young man who’d come into our Embassy. Blood was spattered across his face, as if he’d been in a battle. Only one boot had been found, which everyone was puzzling over.’

A few days previously, when all of the hostages had been alive, the kidnappers had sent a new set of photos to the Press Enclave in Srinagar. The pack comprised single shots of each hostage sitting on the same metal chair against the wooden wall of what looked like a sizeable village house, as if they were in a macabre passport photo studio. At the time much had been made of the fact that Hans Christian was wearing only one sock – his family had hoped that this was some kind of secret sign. Looking now at an army doctor examining the body’s blistered right foot, Tore was more inclined to believe the rumour that after John Childs’ escape the other hostages had been punished by having their footwear removed.

After identifying the body, Tore was shown the note that had been found pinned to Hans Christian’s shirt and the roll of papers that had been hidden in his underwear. Could he translate the hidden writings, asked a policeman impatiently. Tore flicked through the sheets of paper. ‘There were so many things to read, letters to family members, poems, stories.’ He translated a few passages as the policeman, whose nametag read ‘Kifayat Haider’, stood agitated at his elbow. ‘He wanted to know what all of it meant immediately. I guess they were hoping to find clues about the kidnappers’ location. But I found it very hard to decipher what Hans Christian was saying. I told them I would need some time to do it. And I felt that I really should not be reading these private letters.’

But Haider was insistent, and he wanted Tore to get started immediately. ‘I could see there was a high level of anger and frustration on the part of the writer, and that he seemed to be reflecting on his own death,’ Tore said, but he told Haider he was not going to translate any more: ‘This was a job that needed to be done properly, and respectfully, and not standing around a gurney.’ Another officer, his nametag identifying him as DSP Gupta from CID, entered the room, and Haider blanched. Gupta stretched out his hand and asked Haider for the paperwork.

Tore had spotted a letter, presumably from Paul Wells, addressed to Catherine Moseley, and tried to get it back too so he could pass it on. ‘Not yet,’ Gupta said, taking everything, then hustling Haider out of the room and into a neighbouring office, from where Tore overheard a furious row. ‘You didn’t tell me he was in the army!’ Haider shouted at Gupta. ‘He had a bayonet, Norwegian army issue. Some of his clothing too. Why was he here? Was he in intelligence, and was that connected to his death?’ Gupta tried to shut Haider up, telling him he was ‘out of his depth’. Gupta had come to do his job and take photographs of the corpse, particularly the Arabic inscription on the chest. It was not for him to explain to Haider why CID was ‘taking complete charge of the case’. He now raised his voice too: ‘Just let it go! This is a CID matter.’