The Falklands Intercept (6 page)

More than the fear and pain Jacot felt humiliated. They had sailed 8,000 miles just to get themselves caught in a stupid military fuck up – without even landing a blow on the Argentines. But worse than the humiliation was the ghastly realisation that flooded Jacot's consciousness and seemed to surge into every part of his body: his platoon, his men would not have been caught in the inferno on the tank deck if he had listened to Jones' advice. God knows how many were dead or dying or burnt beyond suffering.

And then Jacot heard another roar. Faint but growing stronger. Jet aircraft flying low and fast, straining at maximum capacity. He prayed that they were British Harriers…

Jacot got up from his chair. The fire was burning low. Most of the Calvados was gone.

It had been a mainly frustrating day consisting of long talks about police procedure and fairly tedious alibi checking on some peripheral players. The low point had been a
difficult
telephone conversation with Verney's deputy, a prickly Air Vice Marshal who wanted minute by minute updates on the investigation. When Jacot declined he made it pretty clear that he ate army colonels for breakfast. In the end Jacot had referred him to Lady Nevinson but it had been a humiliating and bad-tempered exchange. The arrival of Charlotte Pirbright in his rooms just a few minutes after the Air Vice Marshal had hung up on him lifted Jacot's spirits – helped also by the arrival of the cocktail hour. Jones was right thought Jacot – she was extraordinarily good looking. Every lovesick poet in the book had tried but no one had ever pinned down in words that kind of beauty. Some had come close. Jacot liked Philip Marlowe's great reaction to being shown a photograph of Mrs. Lewin Lockridge Grayle. “It was a blonde. A blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained glass window.” She was blonde but she wasn't that at all. The curves were interesting enough and she was well dressed to make the most of her figure but the allure did not come from an in your face sexuality. It was the face itself. It was perfect. And perfect in what seemed to Jacot a perfectly English way. A high forehead descended into a strong nose – not a Barbie doll nose so popular amongst Hollywood actresses. No one would ask her plastic surgeon to reproduce it. Neither would a Jihadist on the brink of detonating his backpack think to find such features in Paradise. The teeth were white. She was wearing a little make-up but the skin appeared near flawless. And the eyes were an intense but pale blue. But what clinched it was a kind of moral quality. The gaze wasn't innocent but knowing. She seemed happy, content with whatever she was doing. In a slightly crazy world that seemed to prize tension and edginess above all else, this
beautiful
girl was happy in her own skin

Jacot felt himself about to gawp so smiled and quickly turned to his drinks tray. ‘Sherry? I have a Manzanilla.'

‘Golly, what's that?'

‘It's a very dry sherry, supposedly with a salty tang because the vineyards are almost on the sea. It's have to have stuff, I assure you.'

‘Thank you. Sounds great.'

Jacot noticed that she was looking at his hands. Encased tonight in black Thai silk.

‘What happened to your hands?' she asked, her eyes moving from the hands and gazing directly at his.

‘Oh, I was burned in the Falklands War. An Argentine missile attack.'

‘Oh dear. Were you on that ship the Oliver whatshisname?'

‘Alas, yes. The silk gloves soothe them a little.'

‘It's strange seeing a man indoors wearing black gloves. They're usually for thieves and assassins.'

‘Well white would make me look like a waiter or a magician. So I settled on black many years ago. Occasionally, I branch out into more jazzy colours.'

She sipped her ice-cold Manzanilla. ‘Sherry still seems to be traditional in Cambridge. And I have to say I rather like it.'

She sat down in an armchair by the fire. Jacot took up position on the red leather club fender that surrounded the fireplace. The rooms had a faint smell of wood-smoke. Jacot noticed that Mr. Jones had laid a single layer of coals beneath the apple wood that was used only in the fellows' rooms – it made the fire roar and crackle.

‘You knew General Verney.'

‘Yes, very well. I met him in the Antarctic. I was at the American base at McMurdo on Cape Evans for a couple of months gathering data for my PhD. In the summer it gets quite busy with over a thousand living and working there – people not penguins. I became a sort of unofficial guide to Scott's hut, about fifteen miles from the base. The one from his first expedition is within walking distance but you need transport to reach the hut he built for his second and fatal expedition, the one everyone knows from the photographs. I was the person organizing the tours. Most people heading for the Pole pass through. One day this British general turned up and I showed him round. It was fate really. Captain Scott has always been my passion – an unfashionable one of late to be honest. And then suddenly out of nowhere and in the middle of nowhere there was another aficionado. We kept in touch. It turned out that Verney was privately wealthy and he helped fund some of my research, supplementing my meagre fellow's stipend. We were both working on various aspects of Captain Scott's last expedition. Verney provided the inspiration and I provided what you might call the academic muscle. I completed my PhD a few years ago and I know my way round the Scott-Wilson Austral Studies Institute, SWASI we call it, here in Cambridge. You know, the modern world underestimates Scott and his
achievements
. Curiously, he doesn't play well in the United States whereas Shackleton has been adopted as a magnificent example by various American leadership gurus. But General Verney and I had no doubt whose side we were on.'

Jacot like many men of his generation was awkward asking personal questions. His analytical training had overcome this to some extent but he didn't like it at all. So he forced himself to ask, ‘Were you having an affair?'

She laughed. ‘Good Lord, no. He wasn't at all attractive and to be honest I didn't really like him that much.'

‘Why work with him then?'

‘Well. It's funny. I enjoyed working with him to be fair. We were both obsessed with
“Captain S” as we called him. We both felt he had had a hard time historically. We both felt that he was a great man. Also, and I shouldn't really say this as an academic, we both despised most of Scott's detractors – as chippy a crew as you could wish to meet. And we both had a sneaking suspicion that despite the lionization of Shackleton in recent years there was something not quite right with him. Scott, of course, felt this too. His diary entry for the day they get further south than Shackleton had done some years before talks about being ‘beyond the record of Shackleton's walk'. Funny way to put it and I have always detected a double entendre in his use of the word ‘record'. It was as if he didn't believe Shackleton's account.'

‘But that's unfair', interjected Jacot. ‘Shackleton was a leader there is no dispute about that. His epic journey from Elephant Island to South Georgia in an open boat puts him up there with the greats, surely. During the Falklands war we trans-shipped from the QE2 to the Canberra off South Georgia in the teeth of the Austral winter and I can tell you it was dodgy enough in a 50,000-ton liner let alone a small lifeboat.'

‘Of course, Colonel. Shackleton had and has his admirers and I think Scott's rivalry with him was one of the motors for his own competitive instinct. It may not have been his fault but part of my preference for Scott it is that Shackleton became the kind of leader lionized on Wall Street. Imagine all sorts of extremely dodgy bankers flocking to leadership seminars as their balance sheets went down the tubes. They would not have dreamed of going to a lecture about good old-fashioned Scott. Anyway, the next
paragraph
in Scott's diary is even more interesting – it was one of the things that got old Verney and me going.'

‘Pray, do tell.' Jacot smiled. He was enjoying his talk with this striking and intelligent young girl.

‘Well, as you know Scott experienced some strange weather on his way to the pole. Lots of people have put this down to whingeing but we now know that he was unlucky – March 1912 really was the coldest March. It was a big breakthrough when an American scientist called Susan Solomon, whose main interest was the ozone layer or rather the hole in it over the poles, explained all this in her 2001 book of that name. She used the temperatures gathered by both Amundsen and Scott and modern automatically gathered readings to show that Amundsen experienced comparatively warm temperatures. Of course he makes it to the pole six weeks before Scott which helped, but it's clear that the temperatures experienced by Amundsen are at the warm edge of the mean whereas Scott's are closer to the mean itself or slightly below. When you add it all up most of what Amundsen had to put up with was between minus ten and minus twenty degrees Fahrenheit. Scott's party was fending off between minus twenty and minus thirty.'

‘But so what? If the two explorers experienced radically different temperatures surely it was just the luck of the draw.'

She smiled and looked up at him under her eyelashes. ‘It was warmer for Amundsen. Made it easier for him but also made it different in many other possibly significant  ways.
We have concentrated very much on what it must have felt like for the men and dogs and in Scott's case the ponies. What effect it had on their discomfort, energy levels and above all with Scott on their intake of food. The colder it gets the more calories you need to walk and haul equipment. In the end Scott and his companions just ran out of calories. Rotten luck really – they were just a few square meals short. A bit more food and a bit more paraffin and they would have been home and dry – even with the ghastly weather they had to put up with. Remember they were only 11 miles from One Ton Depot. Eleven miles. Or in Cambridge terms a walk through Grantchester to Byron's Pool and back twice. It must have been hard.'

In her account the expedition had come to life again. Jacot continued ‘To think it's the centenary of Scott's last expedition this year and here we are talking about some of the men involved as if it were current affairs. But back to Verney.'

She tilted her head back and took a long sip of the ice-cold Manzanilla. She uncrossed her legs and leant forward. ‘More Manzanilla please colonel.'

He took her glass and turned for the bottle.

‘Are you sure Scott was second to the Pole?'

It was an extraordinary thing to say and he nearly spilt the refilled glass of Manzanilla. Jacot laughed. ‘I bet you say that to all the boys – it's a good chat-up line. But…'

‘All right. All right. Just messing about but I hope you will read our paper on Scott when it's ready. I keep a copy close to hand on a little memory stick tucked away in a private place.' She pointed coquettishly to her bra and laughed. ‘Back to Verney. He was an interesting man too.'

‘In what way?' Jacot was alert now.

‘He was incredibly indiscreet about his intelligence work. I think he sensed I didn't like him that much and certainly wasn't interested in him in any other way. I think he told me stuff to jolly me along. It was a rarified form of flirting.'

‘Did you know anything about his family?'

‘Yes a bit. He was married and there are some grown up children. I think a boy and two girls. But he was a cold fish. He spoke of them with affection in the usual way but not with any great passion. He appeared neither uxorious nor over-interested in his
children
. What really fired him up was his career. I always thought making general was pretty good but he seemed determined to become an even bigger sort of general. In a way it was all-consuming for him with a little time off every now and again for some Antarctic studies.'

Her mobile pinged with a text message. She finished her sherry and stood up.

‘Listen, Colonel Jacot.'

‘Dan is easier.'

‘Listen Dan. I have an urgent appointment to go to. Academic stuff. Why don't we reconvene another time? I was horrified by General Verney's death. I hope I haven't been rude about him. We got along OK. It's just that he wasn't very inspiring. Unlike you I
don't think there was anything untoward about it but I still want to help you get to the bottom of the whole thing.'

And with that she was gone. Jacot heard her light steps on the staircase and watched through the window as she crossed the court with long-legged strides. A young woman at the peak of her powers and attraction. She was perfect of her type. As ever it was a cause of joy – for a moment or two you felt close to the driving life force of humanity – hope, the future, the fun in the present – all the good things. Some of those who saw Nureyev at his peak told of a weird sense that at the top of some of his famous balletic leaps he seemed to almost hang in mid air defying gravity. Of course it was a trick of the eye or the senses. In the same way the beautiful and clever young seemed just for a moment exempt, free, not subject to mortality. In part it was their own obliviousness. In part an exhilarated wishful thinking by the observer. But as with Nureyev's leaps there was a quick falling away that only multiplied the underlying melancholy.

She was a golden girl for sure. At least she wasn't thinking about coming to dust just now.

Jacot decided on more Manzanilla, lots more and some Mozart. Kiri Te Kanawa's voice came through his iPod speakers. It was as if she was in the room. ‘
Ruhe sanft, meine holdes Leben'
. Sleep soundly my beloved. Zaida's ravishing lullaby for grown ups lifted his melancholy and soothed the long buried guilt re-awakened by his earlier interview with Jones.

My, young Charlotte Pirbright was a head-turner. It was still not late. Time for a little more sherry. His mobile pinged with a text message. Lady Nevinson's driver would pick him up at King's Cross at 2230 – she was working late.