The Convenience of Lies (28 page)

Out
of this gathering darkness stepped McCall’s priest, ready to hear his confession.

Forty-Five

Father
Steffen Kohler was German, the grandson of a colonial administrator from the Kaiser’s time when cries for freedom were silenced by the hangman in the land which would become Namibia. Though he’d no personal responsibility for his family’s past sins, Father Steffen made the ultimate act of contrition following his ordination forty years before.

He
was sent to Namibia and opted to stay among the voiceless dispossessed, sharing their marginal existence and the dangers which went with it.

His
gentle grey eyes and deep-lined face, buffed brown by the African sun, suggested an inner serenity derived from an unwavering conviction that he was doing God’s work. He would live - or die - as the Lord saw fit.

But
appearances were misleading. Father Steffen was a troublesome priest, long since committed to undermining South Africa’s occupation of Namibia and the cruelty of its inhumane racial laws. Pretoria’s secret police suspected he helped terrorists. Koevoet might have killed him but for the appalling publicity the assassination of a respected white priest would generate.

‘So
you’ve returned, Mac. Welcome, you are most welcome.’

They
hugged warmly. The priest seemed more bony and stooped than ever.

‘What
has brought you to us this time?’

‘I’m
on a sort of holiday,’ McCall said. ‘I thought it’d be good to meet up again.’

‘Of
course, but tell me, why did you never send me the story I helped you with?’

‘I’m
sorry but there wasn’t one.’

‘But
why not, Mac? That story almost cost you your life.’

McCall
looked away, looked up to where bats skittered in the satin glow of starlight hunting moths.

‘I
think that’s the point, Father. The debt was mine but it was paid by others. I couldn’t bring myself to write it.’

‘I
see, so you blame yourself for what happened at the kraal?’

‘There
is no one else.’

‘No,
you are wrong. It was me who brought you here. If you are guilty, I am more so.’

‘You
weren’t to know Koevoet were looking for me so actively.’

‘Do
you think I wasn’t aware of their methods or what they were capable of?’

‘But
the women here… that little boy. They died because I was amongst them.’

‘And
I should’ve realised how great the risks were to them.’

‘So
we’re both guilty, priest and penitent?’

‘I’m
afraid we are and I pray every night for the forgiveness of those I had to bury.’

From
somewhere in the distant bush, they heard a sudden squeal as the jaws of one creature closed over another. Then all went quiet again.

‘So
what am I to do with the guilt I feel?’

‘Mac,
I am a priest but I cannot offer you absolution any more than I can give it to myself. I must believe God brought you to me for reasons beyond my understanding and that the deaths of these poor people have some purpose in His plan.’

‘That
doesn’t quite relieve me of what I feel inside,’ McCall said.

‘Then
tell your story… tell the story of the people you saw die and how they didn’t die in vain. You may feel bad about it but what you write could be their memorial.’

‘My
act of contrition, you mean?’

‘In
the worst of times here, I would tell people what another priest once said… that when everything has been taken from you, you’ll still have two hands. Put them together in prayer and you’ll be the stronger for it.’

‘Yes,
but they believed, Father. They had a god.’

*

They could have eaten at a new hotel nearby, styled on a traditional Namibian roundhouse with thatched lodges waiting for much-needed tourism and set amid camphor bushes, bougainvillaea and white pan lilies.

But
Father Steffen preferred humbler surroundings - his rooms within the plain brick and plank church built by German missionaries almost a century before.

They
drove to it in reflective silence. It’d been a long day. McCall was physically and emotionally emptied out - all the travelling, returning to the scene of the massacre, subconsciously worrying about Lexie.

The
head injury sustained when Benwick’s yacht blew up was also giving him periodic double vision. Even worse were the nightmare flashbacks to his buried-alive ordeal, leaving him incoherent with fear and afraid to go back to sleep.

Father
Steffen’s quarters were simple and book-lined, sparsely furnished but offering monastic calm. McCall washed and changed into a pale linen suit before sitting down to supper of chicken and rice.

When
they finished, he pushed a package across the table to Father Steffen.

‘What
is this?’

‘A
gift.’

‘A
gift for me? But why?’

‘Because
I want to make a practical contribution to your work.’

Inside
was a wad of traveller’s cheques with a value of ten thousand US dollars.

‘I
can’t possibly accept this, Mac.’

‘Please,
you must. Use it for the benefit of the kids around here, buy some equipment for your school, some toys, books, medicines. I don’t mind. Whatever you see fit.’

McCall
was only too aware of how shallow his motives were.

‘This
is very generous but it isn’t necessary for you to do this.’

‘You
think I’m trying to buy forgiveness, don’t you… that this is blood money?’

‘I
didn’t say that nor would I.’

‘No,
but I can’t deny it. The truth is I don’t know what else to do to even start to make up for what I did.’

‘I
thought you to be a good man when we first met, Mac. Nothing that’s happened changes my view. I will use this money as you suggest so some good might come of the wickedness which moved amongst us.’

*

Apologists for regimes - invariably communist - appalled McCall when rationalising the slaughter of political opponents as a necessary evil for a greater good. Thus mass murder became the cliché of eggs being broken to make an omelette.

In
no sense was Father Steffen inured to violent death, the waste and stink and pity of it. But he’d enough political awareness to fit the massacre McCall witnessed into the context of a long bush war on the march to independence. They were both free to draw whatever comfort they could from this.

Father
Steffen invited McCall to stay for a while, perhaps sensing a deeper malaise beneath his evident remorse.

It
was now October. The township where Father Steffen lived was hot and dry and in urgent need of the coming rains. Discarded plastic bags swirled in the desert wind gusting through the stalls of the open market. Inscrutably beautiful women bought vegetables as exotically coloured as their full length dresses as their excited children pointed at McCall’s white face then ran away, giggling.

Next
morning, he was invited into their school’s cinderblock classroom and answered innumerable questions about London, Princess Diana and the Queen of England. Father Steffen found him later in the cool of his church, sitting beneath a cross on which a tortured black Jesus hung in agony.

‘Are
you all right, Mac? You look troubled.’

‘No,
I’m not really. Well, maybe I am… just a little.’

‘It’s
not still something to do with the kraal, is it?’

McCall
thought for a moment. Morality was the preserve of priests. Maybe now more than ever, he needed guiding counsel.

He
began telling Father Steffen about the sensational story he’d uncovered in London, of the links between Ruby’s kidnapper, a paedophile MP who might yet become Prime Minister, and a cabal of spies and profiteers from the arms industry.

‘How
very intriguing, Mac. Even I would read that.’

‘I’m
sure you would but there’s a serious complication.’

‘The
laws of libel in England?’

‘No,
I know my way round them,’ McCall said. ‘The problem is more ethical than legal. I fear that if I wrote this story, an untold number of people could suffer and I’d have even more deaths on my conscience.’

McCall
explained how a huge consignment of munitions secretly intended for Iraq had been blown up on a ship in the North Sea. The politically sensitive question of whether Saddam Hussein received these weapons or not - and the conspiracy to destroy them - were indivisible parts of Ruby’s story.

‘So
who sank the vessel?’

‘The
Mossad.’

‘Ah,
I see. Have the Israelis made threats against you if you reveal what you know?’

‘They
don’t have to, not directly,’ McCall said.

He
laid out Saddam’s end game - according to Evan - and how, if it became public that Israel had sunk the arms shipment, he’d seize on that as an act of war.

‘He
would use this to justify an attack Tel Aviv, maybe with chemical weapons but then Israel would retaliate even harder and the conflict will just get deadlier.’

‘So
you’re struggling between your professional instincts to satisfy the public’s right to know and your heightened sense of guilt because of those deaths in the kraal.’

‘Yes,
it weighs heavy having blood on my hands.’

‘The
question is simple, Mac. It doesn’t need a theologian or a philosopher and I suspect you know the answer already.’

‘Tell
me, anyway.’

‘All
conspiracies unravel, in my experience,’ Father Steffen said. ‘From what you tell me, too many people already know about this one for what you’ve uncovered to stay secret for long. Therefore, I believe you should write this story as well. Tell the truth, Mac, and if that offends any government or any wrong-doers, so be it.’

‘So
publish and be damned?’

‘Yes,
I suppose so,’ Father Steffen said. ‘But when you do, I shall offer prayers for the day to come when men no longer live in a state of perpetual conflict and condemn themselves to die with weapons in their hands.’

*

The phone message waiting for McCall in reception at his hotel in Windhoek simply said
Ring Evan soonest
. It’d been received three days before. An international operator connected him to Evan’s direct line in Cambridge. A female student answered and said she was his research assistant.

‘He’s
in a meeting but he left me a note if you called,’ she said. ‘You should get back to the UK as quickly as possible because Lexie’s had to have another operation.’

‘Oh
God, she hasn’t, has she? Do you know how it went?’

‘Not
really but Evan says she keeps asking for you, no one else.’

‘OK,
tell him I’ll somehow shmooze my way onto a flight home,’ McCall said. ‘And say to give Lexie my love, will you?’

It
was suddenly difficult for him to breathe. The unthinkable demanded to be thought. His guts were like slush and he felt very far from all he knew and all he wanted.

Forty-Six

McCall
crossed the concourse at Lisbon Airport to await a connection to London. He couldn’t stop picturing Lexie, re-attached to tubes and drips and being too tender to touch. Why was she asking for him? There could only be one reason. He had to get back before it was too late.

A
boy of about fifteen, olive skin, dark hair and dressed in jeans and a yellow T-shirt, walked across to McCall.

‘Here,
you dropped something,’ he said.

He
spoke English with an accent, possibly Spanish. McCall looked at him, puzzled.

‘No,
I haven’t dropped anything.’

‘You
did, over there, by the newspaper kiosk.’

He
pushed a white envelope into McCall’s hand then turned and was lost in the crush. The envelope wasn’t creased so couldn’t have been in his pocket or rucksack. This had to be a very personal delivery.

Inside
were a photograph and two press cuttings. The first story came from the Daily Mail’s diary page and was published while McCall had been in Namibia.

Would-be
Tory Prime Minister, Guy Inglis, 48, unexpectedly married his trade unionist sweetheart, Kaye Simon at a discreet register office ceremony in central London yesterday. They then hosted a friends-only reception at Bramshill, the Jacobean mansion and police staff training college in Hampshire.

Kaye,
37, works in human resources at the Association of Federated Trades in Birmingham but will relocate to their London office - and live in Mr Inglis’s elegant Georgian house in Highgate - when they return from honeymoon in Barbados.

A
close colleague said: “We never thought this day would come. Guy’s always been the archetypal bachelor about town but maybe with his eyes set on Number 10, getting spliced was the inevitable price he’s had to pay.”

I
bet it damn well was, McCall thought. Where better to hide his sexual proclivities than behind the skirts of a tactically acquired wife?

The
second cutting was from the communist Morning Star. It reported another extremely convenient event - that of Ray Gillespie’s death. The piece carried a single column mug shot taken from the right hand side so his birthmark wasn’t revealed.

We regret to report the passing of Ray Gillespie, a great socialist and supporter of progressive politics the world over.

Ray worked tirelessly for workers and the wider trade union movement through his role within the leadership of the Association of Federated Trades at its headquarters in Birmingham and in branches across Britain. He was a forceful and amusing speaker at the TUC, always joking that he was married to the AFT because no woman would have him.

It’s understood he had been off work recently with health problems. Funeral arrangements have yet to be announced.

McCall knew now he was being covertly observed. He stared at the faces of those leaning over the balconies above him or riding the moving stairways to the duty free shops. He saw only strangers but knew he was standing centre stage in a little drama being put on for his benefit. Only one person had the incentive and capability to do this. If McCall had any doubts, the photograph dispelled them.

It
had been taken around dawn. The early morning light caught the sheer stone walls of a bleak, castle-like structure in the background. He recognised the location immediately. This was the pumping station at Manor Hill where Ruby once played and her mother had died.

And
floating face down at the edge of the reservoir was a man’s naked body.

McCall
looked more closely. On the left side of his neck was a dark stain. So this was how the tireless old socialist ended his treacherous days. Ray Gillespie - black arts merchant, pimp to the powerful and the spy in their camp.

On
the back of the picture were the words
you win some, you lose some
typed on a square of white paper. Here was Kidon justice - Benwick’s justice - natural not legal and with not a fingerprint to be found. Ruby had finally been avenged.

The
London flight was called. McCall, desperate to leave now, gathered his belongings and made for the departure gate. Lexie had gone from his mind. All that concerned him was how to fly Ruby’s incredible story by the lawyers then splash it across the papers and television. The picture of Gillespie surely meant Guy Inglis was as good as dead in the water, too.

A
security guard checked his boarding card and nodded him airside. McCall then heard his name being shouted from the noisy concourse behind him.

He
turned slowly, knowing full well who’d be there - and maybe always would be. Larry Benwick stood watching him, dressed Miami cop-style in white slacks, his arms folded across a blue jacket. He could have been seeing his kid brother off on a foreign jaunt.

‘You
take great care, Mac, and watch your step,’ he said.

There
was no obvious menace in Benwick’s voice, only meaning.

‘And
don’t go doing anything I wouldn’t do.’

Then
the fraternal smile died on his lips as he seemed to pass a forefinger across his throat. The gesture took but a moment and then he was gone into the crowd.