Small Wars (15 page)

‘Well –’

‘Can you come with me?’ Hal said to Grieves.

‘Certainly, sir.’

Deirdre, affronted, watched them go.

‘What’s all this about, old man?’ Grieves asked him, as they went through the people, but Hal ignored him.

Outside it was fresher. The bright hibiscus flowers on the big bushes were crimson glowing under the electric light. They had gone round the side, and Hal, seeing the RMPs and Lieutenant Cross waiting, felt again the repellent wrongness of the whole situation.

Grieves, oblivious, had stopped on the driveway, and pulled out his cigarette case, moving his whole head in a small circle to focus on its contents. ‘My bar bill is a bloody disaster,’ he said. ‘I don’t know about you, but –’

‘Grieves. The captain is here to arrest you.’

‘What?’

He appeared to notice the RMP captain for the first time. The captain, Lieutenant Cross and the other RMP man, a sergeant, all stepped forward. There was embarrassment.

Hal nodded to the captain, who came up close to them and said, ‘I’m arresting you on a charge of accessory to murder and to rape.’

Grieves went pale and let his slack fingers rest on the row of cigarettes in the case. ‘You must be fucking joking,’ he said.

He turned his face to Hal in appeal. Hal thought he looked drunker now than he had a moment before. He would have thought being arrested would sober a fellow up.

‘Sir?’ said Grieves. He had begun to sweat.

Hal didn’t want a scene. ‘Just a moment,’ he said, to the RMP captain, and the corporal behind him looked disappointed at not being asked to collar Grieves in traditional copper fashion.

He walked away a few paces. Grieves followed him, eagerly. ‘Tell them something!’ he said.

‘Don’t be silly.’

‘This is absurd. I haven’t done anything. Are they talking about that wog the other night?’

‘Look, you need to go with them, and try to do it quietly, all right?’

‘What the hell are you talking about?’ His voice had the shrill, whining note of an aeroplane in a nose dive. ‘Look – do you think I don’t know things went too far? This whole fucking place is a crime – Hal? Come on, man!’

‘Keep quiet! You won’t get any favours from me. You’re a disgrace.’

Grieves gave a yelp of laughter. In response to Hal’s look, the captain moved towards Grieves and grasped his arm.

They had taken him, as simple as that, and left Hal alone in the dark, with the lights from the windows shining out, making wide black bars around him; he could hear the sounds of his friends and fellow officers inside.

Hal took off his cap, dropped his head and rubbed his eyes and forehead. He felt tired. Straightening, he smoothed his hair and put the cap under his arm. He glanced in, through the window, at the noisy crowd, walked round to the front, and across the asphalt to the door.

Inside, the talking, smiling, companionable faces of his friends were brightly lit by the cheap-shaded bulbs overhead and shining with sweat and laughter. Smoke, the smell of hair oil, brandy, the friendly welcome of men, like one man, that he had always known and been part of.

‘Hal!’

It was Mark, with one or two others, grinning with the schoolboy grin he got when he’d been drinking, and forgetting his wife hated him, and just remembering his own easy self. ‘Hal, come and have a drink –’

Hal went over to him. The waiter, an old pro, in his wrinkled white jacket, who always managed to keep his tray steady and the drinks on it, however thick the crowd, arrived at his elbow. ‘Sir?’

‘Thanks.’ Hal took a drink and the cigarette Mark offered him.

‘I had Trask in my office on a charge today,’ said Mark, striking a match for him.

‘Along with the rest of them,’ said Hal.

‘Yes, along with the rest of them. But he’s a good man, Trask, and I told him, I said to him, “Trask,”’ Mark was somewhere between half and three-quarters cut, and bursting with delight at himself, ‘“Trask, for God’s sake man, you’re a corporal now, you’ve an example to set,” and some other guff, normal old rubbish, and he said to me,’ Mark laughed, ‘he gave me a terrible sort of sad look, Hal, and he said to me, “I believe I forgot myself, sir.” “Forgot myself”. He forgot himself, Hal, like the bloody rest of them.’

Mark was laughing. Hal nodded, wasn’t listening. The drink in his hand was untouched, and there was no point in smoking the cigarette, with the smoke as thick as blotting paper in the room. In the morning they’d all know about a lieutenant being under guard and that he’d been the one to do it. He felt a shadow, even with Mark laughing and leaning forward to him as he spoke, as if he were looking back on a place he had left. Davis was the only other man who knew about it now, and Hal, in his loneliness, glanced around for him, but didn’t see him there. He felt impatient with himself, and not proud, and shook himself inside, like a dog in from the rain. ‘Right, then,’ he said, under his breath, squaring up.

He reached for the ashtray, on a stand a couple of feet away, and put out his cigarette, crushing it hard into the heap of stubs and ash, wincing with distaste at the filth getting on his fingers as he did it. He caught the eye of the waiter and deposited his untouched drink on the tray. ‘I’m off home, Mark,’ he said. Then, feeling fond of him and oddly emotional, he patted him briskly on the shoulder. ‘Good man. I’ll see you in the morning.’

Hal left the mess and found Kirby waiting for him. He would go home to his wife, and pray to God she was asleep already when he got home, or at least pretending to be.

Chapter Eight

The summary hearings were held immediately, within forty-eight hours of the crimes being reported.

Both Colonel Burroughs’s and Hal’s offices were too small to hold all the people required, so they were assigned a room at the club that was sometimes used for private dinners. There was a big polished table, various dim photographs on the walls and louvred blinds to keep out the sun. Grieves would be first.

The procedure was as official and court-like as possible, given the circumstances. The room was full of people; Grieves was under guard, and pale. Officers from the army and the RMP, as well as a plainclothes SIB man, were there, and Lieutenant Davis, who came in last.

Much time was spent deciding where everyone ought to stand, with murmured politeness and shuffling of papers.

Hal was on Burroughs’s right; he stood rigid and correct. Physically uncomfortable as he was, he felt peace bordering on the blissful.

The heat of all the men, in their stiff uniforms but sweating underneath them, thickened the atmosphere quite quickly and the smell of Greek cigarettes mixed with the air. Tumblers of water, glinting, were arranged next to a jug in the middle of the table and were untouched. There was a thin white cloth over the jug, with beaded edges to stop it slipping, so that no flies could get into the water but flies circled and landed and circled all through the hearing.

The colonel asked the questions, and occasionally spoke in an undertone to his adjutant, who was the only man seated, and held a fountain pen, although he did not write.

Francke was sent for; he came in under guard. He stood opposite Hal and the colonel, flanked by privates.

Hal tried to see something in Francke that perhaps he might have seen before. He pictured him hitting the women’s faces, holding their hair to keep their heads still, as Davis had described. He imagined him kicking the Greek man as he lay down, and saw him on top of the women. He remembered, suddenly, that it had been Francke who had ransacked the old couple’s village house that day. He remembered the bayoneted bedding, smooth oil on the tiles and the olive-wreath plate in pieces. He had known Francke was dangerous. He ought to have checked him. He ought to have done something.

Colonel Burroughs began to question Francke, with Hal’s notes held firmly in front of him, referring to them.

Francke had decided confidence and bluster would get him through. His answers were bold, almost swaggering:

‘Reasonable force, I’d say, sir – only reasonable. But we had to stop them, didn’t we?’

‘No, sir, there was women there, but we never touched ’em.’

‘I saw him coming for me and I shot him – he was coming at me, sir.’

And on.

After Francke, it was Private Miller’s turn. He, too, apparently, had only the vaguest recollection of any women present and didn’t remember Davis being there either. He had seen Francke shoot the man, though, ‘And thank God he did, sir, ’cos if he’d got to him he would’ve killed him, sir.’

Hal was facing the room, with Davis at about a forty-five-degree angle to him. He allowed his eyes to move left until he could see his expression. Davis was agitated; his mouth was working, biting his lip or the inside of himself. Hal wanted to reassure him, to communicate his amusement and dismay, but he kept a neutral expression.

Then it was the turn of one of the RMP sergeants. Yes, he said, there was a body, recovered from the house on Starsis Street, and yes, the bullet had gone through the head, but the range from which it was fired was impossible to tell without a more detailed post-mortem. The body had been sent to Nicosia: the morgue there had chilling facilities, the one in Limassol was just a marble-lined basement.

Burroughs asked about the alleged victims, where they were, and if statements had been taken. The sergeant was regretful: there were rumours in Starsis Street, but all their best efforts had not discovered any women prepared to come forward.

‘Neither of the women?’

‘No, sir.’

‘Nobody who knows them?’

‘No, sir.’

Davis gave his evidence. He kept his answers short and simple; Hal was pleased with him. The silence in the room grew heavier as they moved from the account of the street, and who was with him, ‘Lieutenant Grieves, sir, Private Francke, Private Miller…’to the getting down of the men in the doorway, ‘I would say excessive force. Kicking. A torrent of blows –’ to the appearance of the women. Once inside the house, though, his story changed.

At the first false note, Hal felt his head jerk up a half-inch, alerted to the difference. He had read the notes over and over. He had heard, exactly, what Davis had seen; two or three times in life and innumerable times in his head ever since. This was different.

‘The room I had entered was to the left. There was a curtain over the door. I heard struggling.’

Heard.
He heard struggling. Hal shifted his head slightly to look Davis full in the face. His eyes were locked with the colonel’s. The question and answer between them drew out, a protracted rally, a slow screwing-down of detail.

‘So you were in the other room?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘What exactly did you see?’

‘I saw an attack.’

‘Did you see Private Miller’s face?’

‘Not exactly. I knew it was him.’

‘At what angle were you standing?’

‘It’s hard to say.’

‘Behind the curtain?’

‘Yes.’

There was a curtain.

‘Were you in this “other room” all the time?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Just…watching?’

‘No. I was conducting a search for weapons, sir.’

He was conducting a search.

‘You say here – you “heard” the rape?’

‘Sir?’

‘Can you explain to me what a rape sounds like?

The room was getting hotter and a thin trickle of sweat moved slowly down Hal’s temple, then his cheek, from the inside of his cap where the leather band pressed on his head. Davis’s eyes did not leave the colonel’s face. Hal stared at him, willing him to return his look, but even when he was dismissed, turning – with uncharacteristic accuracy, in fact – to leave, he didn’t glance at Hal once.

Another RMP sergeant who had attended the scene was summoned.

Colonel Burroughs asked him if he had visited the house, whom he had seen there, and if he had spoken to the women.

‘Couldn’t persuade them to talk to us, sir.’

It seemed the re was no witness to the alleged rape and murder but Lieutenant Davis, and no physical evidence at all – except the body of the young man, on its way to Nicosia.

And then it was time for lunch.

Burroughs and Hal lunched together at Burroughs’s house, by an open window. with a white cloth on the table and their caps on the ledge beside them. Evelyn wasn’t at home. The view from the back of the house, from the window, was wide and bright.

Hal was silent, trying to organise his thoughts, trying harder to keep his temper.

‘Well. Quite a morning,’ said Burroughs, putting his napkin on his lap.

They were brought chilled cucumber soup with bread rolls and there would be roast lamb and boiled potatoes afterwards.

‘Yes, it was,’ Hal began, ‘quite a morning. Look, sir, Davis has –’

‘It’s a very tricky business. Particularly a rape. Very hard to get anywhere.’

‘Yes, sir, but that’s not –’

‘It’s always very hard to get concrete evidence in a case like this.’ The colonel was hungry, and making quick sawing movements with his knife on his bread. ‘And, you know, Hal, there’s a brothel on every other corner in Limassol. For a lot of the men, raping one or two of them is rather like shoplifting. They just don’t see it like you or I might.’

‘It’s not bloody shoplifting.’

‘Voice down. Calm down.’

Burroughs’s tone was the tone you’d stop a charging dog with, and make it cower.

‘Now, look, Hal, I don’t know what business you had bringing this to me at all.’

‘You saw my notes, sir.’

‘Yes – what were you thinking? I can’t take this business any further. A lot of hearsay. Davis is obviously completely unreliable. I’m only glad he spends most of his time with the SIB. Not the sort of fellow –’

‘No! He was perfectly clear before. Perfectly. He’s changed his story.’

‘In twenty-four hours? Pretty poor memory. Seems to me you should have made sure what sort of a witness, what sort of a
chap
he is, before stirring up all of this. Well, quite frankly, Hal, it’s a mess, and I’m very disappointed indeed. You’ve dragged everybody through the mud. I don’t need to remind you it was your company who behaved like a gang of thugs on Monday night –’

‘Following your orders!’

‘What did you just say to me?’

Hal was cornered by honesty and sought to free himself. ‘Sir,’ he frowned, ‘the arrest and questioning of what amounts to half the population of the town was a – tall order. It was bound to result in some loss of discipline, I think.’

Silence. Colonel Burroughs smiled coldly. ‘A loss of discipline is never “bound” to happen, Hal,’ he said quietly, ‘and you, as an officer, ought not to accept it so easily.’

Then, very calmly and with precise movements, Burroughs began to eat his soup. Hal was quite still, absorbing the sting. When Burroughs put his spoon down, his voice was friendly again. ‘Also, don’t forget, there’s the shame of the women to be taken into account. It’s very shaming for them. Particularly these Orthodox women.’

Hal brought his eyes back to meet the colonel’s pale look.

‘I need to have at least a reasonable hope of convictions,’ said Burroughs. ‘The purpose of these hearings is to establish whether or not that’s likely. A court-martial, for any of these men, as I’m sure you’ve gathered, Hal, would be an absurdity. Their overzealous questioning, and the use of violence, can be dealt with at company level. Obviously the death of the man is a quite different matter, and will be approached with all proper seriousness. I’ll review Francke’s position myself, in light of what will, no doubt, thanks to your rashness, be a very nasty scandal indeed.’

Colonel Burroughs took a sip of water, then looked back at Hal. ‘Now, shall we have some wine, or do you think we’ll nod off this afternoon? It’s terribly hot in there.’