Those Who Feel Nothing (9 page)

‘Listen. They all died a long time ago. I didn't mummify any, you know – some of the bodies had simply dried out completely in the grave. Soil composition, I suppose. I dressed them up nicely. Have you any idea what has always happened in the past when a graveyard's contents have needed to be moved? You think the contractors don't just dump them all together in a new mass grave? Every medieval cathedral has an ossuary with stacks of bones and skulls sorted by size.' He pointed at Gilchrist. ‘You might be disgusted but I haven't really done anything wrong.' He looked at his lawyer. ‘And now I'd like to go home.'

‘You need to tell us where they all are,' Gilchrist said.

‘If I can remember.' He turned to his lawyer. ‘Get me out of here. I'm tired. I didn't get much sleep last night.' He looked back at Gilchrist. ‘Well?'

Late 1978. You flew from London to Saigon with ten men. Your fourth mission with Rogers, Howe, Cartwright and Bartram, but this one was different.

You drove across country to Chau Doc then, next day, on to a riverfront hotel in Can Tho. There the ten of you picked up a boat to take you into the insane, collapsing world of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge.

You were an extraction team. Officially you were there to rescue three English yachtsmen from an interrogation camp in the centre of Phnom Penh. They had strayed into Cambodian waters and been accused of espionage. You were tasked with getting them out before interrogation and torture turned to execution. But you were planning to rescue a fourth person too.

Your journey up the Mekong at night had taken a stealthy seven hours. Patrol boats crisscrossed the river but not as many as you expected given that Cambodia was in an unofficial war with its neighbour, Vietnam, and expected an invasion imminently.

You were tense. Rogers was cracking weak jokes but you weren't in the mood. You didn't take your eyes off each floating village you passed, houseboats bobbing gently on the wash of your vessel. Rogers nudged you after some particularly fatuous joke and you flashed him a quick smile then went back to watching the swirling river as it brought you ever closer to the ghost city of Phnom Penh.

Pol Pot's genocidal Khmer Rouge regime was imploding. The Khmer Rouge, it was estimated later, had killed about three million of its own people. Most of those still alive were starving. In addition, the Khmer Rouge had been waging this suicidal unofficial war with its Vietnamese neighbour for three years, convinced the communist government was going to absorb Cambodia into a new Vietnamese empire.

In January 1978 a retaliatory Vietnamese force had got within twenty miles of Phnom Penh but decided for some reason not to finish the job. If they hoped their successful advance would be enough to damp down the Khmer Rouge they were wrong. Despite enormous losses against a better-armed and better-trained Vietnam (its crack troops seasoned in their long war with the US), the Khmer Rouge continued with cross-border raids.

These raids culminated, in April 1978, in two Cambodian regular army divisions advancing two kilometres into South Vietnam and massacring pretty much the entire village of Ba Chuc. Only two out of a village population of over 3,000 survived.

In response, in June the Vietnamese Air Force made some thirty bombing sorties a day along the Cambodian border. Now the Vietnamese army was massing along the border for a full-scale invasion.

It was only a matter of weeks before the Khmer Rouge was toppled. Although only twenty, you knew enough to know a regime in its death throes is at its most dangerous.

Unlike your colleagues, before this mission you already knew quite a lot about Cambodia – or Kampuchea as Pol Pot had renamed it when he took over in 1976. You knew that Pol Pot had immediately declared Year Zero and tried to turn back time by returning the country to a peasant society and economy. Any educated person was regarded as an enemy of the state.

Since 1976 the Khmer Rouge had forcibly depopulated both large and small urban areas. It also controlled food sources to control the people. It forbade fishing and rice planting and cut down fruit trees. The food that was produced was exported to pay for bullets for the unofficial war with Vietnam. The people starved but the Khmer Rouge refused offers of humanitarian aid from other countries because it wished to demonstrate national self-reliance.

Chillingly, Pol Pot had declared the country only needed a couple of million people to create his agrarian utopia. The attitude towards the surplus millions was: ‘To keep you is no benefit, to destroy you is no loss.'

However, it was too expensive to use bullets to kill so many so the Khmer Rouge beat people to death with iron bars and wooden staves or hacked them to death with machetes. Thousands of people from the capital and elsewhere were taken to what became known as the Killing Fields – the Choueng Ek extermination centre – to dig their own mass graves. Often batches of up to a hundred were buried alive.

Many of those whose lives had ended in the butchery of the Killing Fields had first been imprisoned in the Security Prison-21 interrogation camp in the converted school in the centre of Phnom Penh. Your destination.

Sarah Gilchrist and Kate Simpson met for an early dinner in a French brasserie in what had once been Brighton's music library. There were people sitting at tables outside in the sunshine but they took a table in a quiet corner, deep inside.

Gilchrist was used to towering over other women – not to mention Bellamy Heap – but Kate was wearing flat shoes so Gilchrist felt even more Amazonian. She also felt slightly awkward. She liked Kate but they had been thrown together originally by circumstances and become flatmates almost by accident. Kate was ten years or so younger and they didn't have that much in common.

They ordered a bottle of house white and fizzy water.

‘How's the flat?' Gilchrist asked.

‘It's great.' Kate grinned. ‘I bet yours is feeling spacious.'

Gilchrist smiled. ‘I've spread out a bit,' she admitted.

‘And now you can have a string of men back without worrying about the girl on the sofa bed.'

‘Hardly,' Gilchrist said, curiously embarrassed. There was a moment's awkward silence.

‘What's happening at work?' Kate said, too brightly.

‘Usual organized chaos. You?'

Kate produced Southern Shores Radio's morning show,
Simon Says
. ‘Why is every man in Brighton called Simon a prat?' she said.

‘That bad, huh?' Gilchrist said. ‘But how many Simons do you know?'

Kate swirled the wine in her glass. ‘Two?'

Gilchrist laughed. ‘Remind me not to ask you for statistical advice. I thought you liked producing Simon's show.'

‘I like producing per se but producing Simon's show has one main drawback.'

‘Simon?'

Kate grinned and nodded.

‘I thought you got on really well,' Gilchrist said. ‘You sound as if you do during the show.'

‘The badinage? That's acting. The minute the microphones are turned off he's a total, self-absorbed pain in the bum. He'd treat me like dirt if I let him.'

‘So you're not happy being a media star?'

‘Happy and Southern Shores Radio do not usually coexist in the same sentence.'

They tucked into their food. They'd both gone for the grilled salmon salad on the understanding they'd make up for their healthy choice with a dessert after. Kate said between mouthfuls: ‘Tell me about Bellamy Heap.'

Gilchrist was surprised. ‘Bellamy? What's to say? He's a boy-policeman. Eager, far more intelligent than I am – though that's not saying much. He's the butt of a lot of jokes because of his height and his shyness—'

‘I don't think he's shy.'

Gilchrist examined Kate's face. ‘I don't think he is either.'

Kate picked up her glass. ‘And, actually, though he's short, he looks as if he's perfectly formed.'

Gilchrist smiled and chinked her glass. ‘That he does, Katie.' She took a sip of her wine. ‘That he does.'

Katie looked a bit embarrassed at what she probably perceived as her forwardness. ‘I phoned the cemetery today to see about exhuming the Trunk Murder victim's remains for DNA analysis,' she said abruptly.

‘Really?'

‘But I'm too late.'

Gilchrist frowned and put her drink down. ‘What do you mean?'

‘Someone has despoiled the grave and taken the bones.' Kate put down her fork. ‘It's that bloody documentary I did. I gave too much information about where she's buried.'

Gilchrist thought for a moment. ‘Maybe. But I can think of someone else who might have done it.' She leaned forward and lowered her voice. ‘Look, keep this to yourself …'

When Gilchrist had finished outlining the gruesome find at Rafferty's house, Kate said: ‘But if he did dig up the murder victim, that's great. The woman's remains are at least out of the ground so they can be analysed.'

Gilchrist shook her head. ‘I think you have to accept they are lost.'

‘Lost how? Her bones are in his house somewhere.'

‘But they might as well still be in the ground. We don't know which are her bones and we can't be doing DNA tests on every single bone in his house. It would cost an arm and a leg.'

‘So to speak,' Kate said. ‘I see that. But how frustrating.'

‘Why?' Gilchrist said. ‘We'd need familial matches for it to make any sense.'

‘Well, not just that. You know they can figure out where your mother was living when she was pregnant with you? We can find out all sorts of stuff.'

‘I know, Kate. But we've recovered the remains of at least thirty women. Do you know how many bones that means? We would need to take samples from every bone; that's the only way to be sure we've covered everybody.'

‘Small price to pay for closure,' Kate said.

Gilchrist looked at her over her wine glass. ‘Closure is overrated,' she said finally.

Y
ou disembarked beyond the harbour three miles from Security Prison-21. There were two trucks waiting, provided by your local collaborators. Howe and Rogers huddled with their leader before you boarded. They drove you through the deserted streets. There were no other vehicles moving.

Your mission was hazardous but straightforward. ‘A simple smash and grab,' Rogers had called it. Break into SP-21, release the three Englishmen and get them out of the country. But as you made your way from the dock through the ravaged capital, past packs of dogs tugging at corpses abandoned in the streets and rotting bodies hanging from lampposts, you also burned to kill every Khmer Rouge soldier or official you came across.

You knew that the prison was heavily guarded but the guards usually faced inwards, watching the compound. The guards were mostly teenagers armed with old carbines with only a few bullets between them. They were terrified of making mistakes since to do so would result in their own arrest, torture and death.

They were not allowed to take naps, sit down or lean against walls whilst on duty. They were fed poorly. In consequence, at night, whether on duty or off duty, all were exhausted.

What you didn't know for certain was where the fourth person was in the camp.

Aside from searchlights anchored at each corner of the compound, there was little in the way of electric light. There was what looked like a cook-fire dug into the earth by the front gates. Oil-lamps hung from posts and balconies.

You isolated the electric cable at one small section of the razor wire at the rear of the main building and cut through. You left two men on guard and you led the way in a crouching run to the single cells in building C that housed the foreign prisoners.

You had lightweight ladders. You climbed to the top floor on the outside wall a little shakily. You looked through the window of the stairwell. There was a guard at the opposite window looking into the compound. Rogers went through the window and slit his throat. Bob Cartwright took the guard's place whilst two others went down the corridor to deal with the guard at the other end. You then moved down to secure the next floor. And the next.

You left the ground floor until it was time for your exit.

It was a hot night and mosquitoes were everywhere. You looked out into the compound and looked again when you saw three men hanging from what looked like a set of soccer goalposts. They looked like they had been crucified since they were hanging from their hands with their arms racked up behind them. The weight of their bodies would eventually tear their arms out of their sockets. Their shoulders would already be horribly dislocated but you could not hear them making any noise. You didn't know if they were dead, unconscious or simply suffering in silence.

The single cells all had heavy, ill-fitting wooden doors that were secured from the outside only by bolts. You oiled the bolts and drew them slowly, conscious they still scraped and screeched. Most people were awake but remained silent. As prisoners, they were forbidden to speak or utter any noise. Unable to see who was behind the torch shining on them, they assumed you were a guard. They cringed in terror.

It upset you to lock them in again. You wondered about leaving their doors open so that they could try to escape if they wished. But the Englishmen came first. You couldn't afford to have your mission jeopardised by other escaping prisoners alerting the guards.

You found the three sailors in adjacent cells. Gaunt, semi-naked and filthy. You warned them to be silent. You squatted down beside the oldest of the three. He'd been badly knocked about.

‘Where's Michelle?' you whispered.

‘Michelle?' he croaked.

‘Your daughter.'

The man – you knew his name was Westbrook – looked at you with sudden alertness. You broke open his crude shackles.

‘You'll never find her,' he hissed. ‘There are hundreds of people here.'

You could hear stirring in the other cells. You did not want anyone crying out.