Whispers of Betrayal (2 page)

From beneath the blanket a thin, bone-filled hand reaches out to snatch up its prize. Eyes flicker, yellow in the night and on fire. A stare is held. A glimpse of recognition passes.

Then the eyes are gone.

Amadeus freezes, paralysed by memories of another life. Another place.

Mount Longdon in the Falklands, on the march to Stanley. Amadeus no more than a first-flush lieutenant, a Para platoon commander on a night assault in the swirling snow, up against Argentinian lines that were well dug in. In the dark it had come down to hand-to-hand combat, bayonets and guts. A lot of guts, mostly theirs. Sleepless for three nights. Exhaustion to the point of hallucination. And carelessness. When he’d jumped into the trench he’d assumed that the spic was dead, like the other three, killed by his grenade, and so he’d turned his back. That was when he had seen those eyes, and the man, advancing on him through the darkness and snow with murder in mind and a bayonet already caked in blood. He remembered a lunge, a scream, another gut-spilling twist of the blade.

But no pain, not for Amadeus.

Behind him the Argentinian, rifle still clenched in his hands, had fallen dead.

‘Behind you, bastard!’ Amadeus had heard. ‘Why, there are Welsh Guardsmen out on this fucking hill and the sheep have all scattered or been blown to buggery. No telling what those Welsh fairies might get up to without their sheep. So remember. Watch your bleedin’ back, you stupid bastard. Sir.’

And with that the eyes were gone once more, away on their mission of murder.

The eyes had belonged to Scully. ‘Skulls.’ Albert Andrew. At that time a camouflage-covered, crap-chewing corporal, and later the Regiment’s finest and most formidable Sergeant Major with an MM, a QGM and a mention in despatches as proof, and a portrait hanging in a position of honour in the mess. A man who had risked his life on occasions beyond remembering in the service of his country.

A man who now values his life as no greater than a discarded cigarette butt.

Scully.

They’d betrayed him, too.

One minute he had been sitting in a bar off a cobbled backstreet in Osnabrück, having a last drink before being sent out to Kosovo, the next he’d been spewing his mince and tatties into his partner’s hands, his leg and his career shattered by a coffee-jar bomb. Kids’ stuff, those bombs. A simple affair, nothing more than a glass jar filled with scrapyard confetti and a compression detonator, and the top screwed on. The coffee jar had been thrown from the back of a motor scooter which disappeared into the night even before the coffee jar had hit the floor. The one brief sighting of the bombers suggested they were teenagers. Truly kids’ stuff. When the glass broke less than a dick-length away from Scully’s right foot, the detonator had decompressed and exploded, and the confetti – sharp, murderous chunks of metal with razor teeth – had chewed a path halfway through his leg. All in a day’s work for a Para keeping the peace on the streets of Djakovice or Pristina, perhaps, but not in a backstreet bar in Germany, not when he was
off duty. Which is why, when they decided they had no further use for a soldier with only one leg, they offered him their very best wishes but no compensation beyond a meagre disability payment. They argued that Osnabrück wasn’t a war zone, the sort of place where you budget for a heavy cripple count. Hell, he was off duty. Drinking! Couldn’t expect the Treasury to pay for every last damned scratch. It was unfortunate, of course, and unexpected, but that’s what goes with being a soldier. Have to expect the unexpected. Of course, the two youths on the scooter might have been members of the pro-Serbian Prince Lazar terrorist group that was chucking bombs all over the place. That was entirely possible, but not provable. So, sorry, Skulls. Now, if you’d actually reached Kosovo, that would’ve been different, and Northern Ireland, too. Part of the home country. Sensitive. Soldiers weren’t supposed to get blown up and butchered on home turf, so if Scully had copped it there he’d have got a thousand pounds a stitch.

But Osnabrück wasn’t the Bogside. Scully hadn’t been an innocent victim. He’d simply been … well, unlucky. Wrong place, wrong life. A trooper with a bad break. And only one leg. As if he’d fallen down stairs on a Friday night. And if they paid out to every soldier on the basis of bad luck, where would the System be?

So Scully’s career had disappeared, and with it his wife. Then Scully, too, shortly after that.

Until tonight.

Amadeus was about to launch himself after the RSM, but now his wife was at his side, dragging him back, as always she dragged him back. Anyway, Amadeus knew there was little point in pursuit; if Scully didn’t wish to be found then he would not be found.

Suddenly Amadeus found himself overcome by a feeling he could only describe as envy. Envy of Scully, of this man in the gutter. Of his freedom, his ability simply to be able to disappear and leave the whole miserable mess behind him. God’s bollocks, it had come down to that. He was jealous of a fucking tramp.

His wife was summoning him, demanding he find a taxi. The call of duty. At one point in the Gulf War, during his tour with the SAS, Amadeus had been leading a Scud hunting patrol and in the darkness
of the desert night had stumbled across a recce company of Iraqis. They shouldn’t have been there, according to the oxymorons at Army Intelligence, and even if they were they shouldn’t have offered any resistance, certainly not a fire fight. With only seven men Amadeus had captured 43 Iraqi regulars – 49 if you counted the body bags. Stopped an entire Iraqi company. For that they’d given him the Military Cross. Now all he did was stop taxis. Two young women brushed by, arm in arm, their young faces full of life. They were laughing – not with him, not even at him, they simply hadn’t noticed he existed. To them he was just another anonymous, middle-aged man stuck in a crowd. A cold, sodden cloak of self-loathing suddenly wrapped itself around Amadeus’s shoulders. He found himself reaching for another cigarette, his hand shaking, the cigarettes all but tumbling from the packet.

Then the loathing overwhelmed him. His hand clenched tight and, with all the strength he could find, he crushed the pack of cigarettes as once, when his rifle jammed, he had crushed the neck of an Iraqi conscript until the terrified eyes had begun to bleed in their sockets. All in the service of his country. A country that no longer wanted him, and thousands of others like him, like Scully. A country whose leaders had betrayed those who had served them most loyally.

He spilled the offending cigarettes into the gutter, slamming his heel down and grinding them to pulp underfoot. He didn’t want them any more. What he wanted, what he truly bloody wanted out of this mess, for himself, for Scully and all the others, was … what? Not their careers back, not even justice, it was surely too late for that. But perhaps an apology, an acknowledgement that they had been treated wrongfully, that all this cut and slash had gone too far. Belated recognition that they were men. Of valour, and of value. Not to be discarded like some cigarette pack in the rain.

It wasn’t much to ask for, an apology, but to men of honour even a small sign of contrition can heal so many festering wounds. Amadeus stood in the rain, at one of those turning points that mark a man’s life and throw his future unto the hazard, looking up and down this foreign-infested street, and decided upon his course. It was time for action, in the tradition of any wronged British soldier.

He would write a letter. To the
Daily Telegraph
.

Less than half a mile away from the cracked paving stone on which Amadeus stood resolving to change the world, Thomas Goodfellowe was entering upon a personal crisis of his own. The rain had hesitated and he decided to avoid the scramble for taxis in New Palace Yard after the House had adjourned. With a wary eye cast at the low clouds swooping overhead, the Honourable Member for Marshwood unlocked the chain securing his bicycle – it wasn’t safe nowadays, even left in Speaker’s Court – and resolved to risk the ten-minute ride back to his apartment in Chinatown.

He needed the fresh air. The last two hours had been spent in the manner of a small schoolboy on detention duty, wriggling in discomfort on his seat while he endured a debate about the war against drugs. The war was going exceedingly well, according to the Minister, a former car assembly worker by the name of Prosser who had MUM tattooed on the knuckles of one hand and DAD on the other, a diminutive man who kept rising and falling on the tips of his toes as though peering over the top of a trench under enemy fire. Drug seizures had declined sharply in the last year – proof positive, in the Minister’s view, that the smugglers and cartels no longer saw Britain as a soft touch, scared away by sniffer dogs and the force of his own Napoleonic will. His new shoes squeaked in acclamation.

Trouble was, this was the self-same Minister who, a year previously, had bobbed up and down at the Despatch Box to claim credit for a sharp
increase
in drug seizures, ‘unambiguous evidence,’ he had claimed at the time, of his ‘commitment in the war against these weeds of evil’.

Fair enough, Goodfellowe had concluded, consistency in politics was usually nothing more than evidence of a closed mind, but in Prosser’s case it seemed scarcely a mind at all. The man hadn’t the wit to appreciate the absurdity of his logic, nor the grace to laugh it off when it was brought to his attention. Goodfellowe had done so, brought it to his attention, intervened in jovial fashion to remind the House of the words the Minister seemed to have lost somewhere along the way.

The Minister, however, had been unappreciative. His eyes narrowed, his knuckles cracked, Mum had chased Dad around the Despatch Box and Goodfellowe had been reduced to parliamentary
pulp. Such was the prerogative of Ministers. And the lot of backbenchers.

Goodfellowe had shuffled tediously through the final Division Lobby feeling much like a cow passing through the gates of a milking shed. It had been a long night and several of his colleagues were showing unmistakable symptoms of ‘the staggers’, the parliamentary equivalent of BSE in which the victims stumble aimlessly about their democratic duties, particularly after a heavy dinner – although the political variant of the disease rarely proved fatal. Many members had been known to survive in that condition for years. Thank God they had the Whips to prod them along and to take over when their own faculties failed.

Particularly Whips like Battersby.

Battersby was an oversized man with a figure like a deflating balloon and a face that brought to mind a cauliflower. A couple of outer leaves stuck out from the top of the cauliflower in passing imitation of hair. The Battersby mind could never be described as broad but, in the exercise of his duties, it was extremely singular. He was what was known as the Whip of Last Recourse. It was his function to deal with those Members who had reached that point of utter confusion in which they started rambling about ‘conscience’ and ‘principle’ and refused the invitation to enter the milking shed. At that stage Battersby would reach into his badly cut and over-large jacket and pull out a little black book. The production of this well-thumbed volume was a gesture that inspired remarkable piety, for in it were recorded all the known telephone contacts for that particular Member. Starting with The Wife, of course. Then The Parliamentary Secretary. Also The Constituency Agent. In the case of an alcoholic, the book held the number of The Doctor or The AA Group, and with a gambler, perhaps even The Accountant or The Bookmaker.

But the most potent entries in that little black book seemed to be those numbers that a Member struggled to keep most private – the ‘OI’ numbers, as they were referred to in Battersby’s shorthand. What those in the Whips’ Office called ‘the numbers of the night’. The places where the Member was mostly likely to be found in the hours after the sun had set. The numbers of The Mistress or The Lover.

In Battersby’s book and in his meticulous script, these names were divided into two categories and marked as either ‘OI-1’ or ‘OI-2’. These categories differentiated between ‘Occasional Indiscretion’ and ‘Ongoing Involvement’. Of course, the collection of these numbers was more of a hobby than a necessity since all his Members had waistband pagers by which they could be contacted, but Battersby liked to keep ‘that little personal touch’, as he explained it.

The errant Members themselves were marked with an ‘FU’ designation. ‘FU-1’ indicated ‘Family Unaware’, thereby rendering the Member open to coercion. These Members he liked, even had affection for, so far as his politics allowed. But he drew the line at the ‘FU-2s’. From Battersby’s point of view, those marked with the awesome ‘FU-2’ branding were outcasts, worthy only of eternal exile or – still better – execution as soon as an appropriate scaffold could be nailed together, for it indicated the small number of Members who had not only sniffed at the skirts of perversion but who had grabbed at them and lifted them high. These were the most dangerous of parliamentary colleagues, the Members who were in the habit of
switching off their pagers
. Who were ‘Frequently Untraceable’. And therefore ‘Fundamentally Unreliable’. And many other things besides.

All were recorded, noted down in Battersby’s lexicon of lusts. His diagnostic skills were something of a legend; a Member need only to have tarried for a few hours beneath a duvet he hadn’t bought himself and Battersby would have discovered not only the number of the bedside telephone but even the tog-value of the duvet. Production of the dog-eared manual at the regular surgery he held in the Whips’ inner sanctum had a similar effect to a cattle herder producing a revolver – cures amongst those beasts afflicted by the disease of conscience proved almost miraculous.