If I Should Die (Joseph Stark) (3 page)

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Good, good. Carry on.’

There was more than a little of the clichéd moustache-puffing army officer about Cox. Perhaps he harboured fantasies in that direction. Maybe he idolized Stark in some infantile manner.

It shouldn’t irritate her so much, she was sure, but it did. Cotton bloody wool, whatever Cox said to the contrary. It wasn’t that she’d had a particularly hard time of it. She hadn’t, really. It was just a matter of principle. You didn’t ask for favour and you didn’t give it.
Policing wasn’t about compromise. And there was something in Stark’s manner that niggled, a self-contained imperviousness. She was sure it was just a front, and fronts bothered her. Something was going on under there, something serious. Whatever it was, if it interfered with his work or, worse, hers, he’d regret it.

Perhaps she should’ve given him more time in his first week but she was busy helping CPS with an old case that was finally coming to court so she’d lent him to Dixon to go through some closed-case files, preparing them for shipping out to a data-input company so that they could be scanned into the digital world. If she was arse-deep in paperwork he might as well be too – on-the-job training and all that.

At five thirty on the dot she slipped on her jacket. ‘Right, I’m gasping. Come on, you miserable lot. You too, Williams, it’s your round.’

The Compass Rose was a dingy little pub with ceiling beams older than time and lower than comfortable, considering half of its clientele came from a profession where it used to be compulsory to be six foot tall. Friday night was Rosie’s, no excuses. If you weren’t on duty, you had a drink. More and more officers opted for something soft, these days, but that wasn’t the point.

Williams bought the first round with good grace and gradually the place filled with bodies and noise. Stark sipped at something short, she noticed, whisky by the colour. At least he wasn’t on orange juice. In every other way he seemed buttoned up and out of place. It wasn’t long, though, before he seemed to relax and join in. Dixon and Hammed, both of whom she noted were in some kind of awe of him, visibly relaxed too. There was conversation and laughter. When she next looked he was playing doubles pool, partnering Dixon against a couple of uniforms, the ones Maggie had sent him out with earlier in the week. She watched him interact with ease. She was always suspicious of good-looking lads with their effortless charm.

Groombridge slid into the seat opposite and put a fresh glass in front of her. ‘What do you think of him, our anointed one?’

‘I’m not one for messiahs, Guv.’

‘Me neither, but all that nonsense is hardly his fault. You’ve been watching him. What’s your opinion so far?’

‘Impenetrable, non-compliant, haughty.’

‘
Fran!
’ laughed Groombridge. ‘Be fair
.
’

‘Honestly? I don’t know, Guv. I’ve not had as much time with him this week as perhaps I should. But I get the impression he’s coasting – here in body but not in mind, not in heart. I’ve tried picking at the edges but he either avoids answering questions or gives answers so simple you’re left with little or no more information than you started with.’

‘Some people are just private,’ suggested Groombridge.

Fran didn’t buy it. ‘It’s more than that. I get the impression he enjoys the avoidance, but I can’t shake the feeling that he’s hiding more than his privacy.’

‘Given what he’s been through, maybe that’s understandable.’

‘If you say so.’

‘You might try cutting him some slack.’

‘Not you too!’ cried Fran. ‘Cox bent my ear on that earlier. Frankly I think he’s getting enough slack already.’

Groombridge looked at her strangely, as if he were considering something. ‘Even so,’ was all he said, sipping his pint.

Technically Stark wasn’t obliged to work Saturday – he wasn’t on the unsociable hours rota yet – but he was conscious that his hospital appointments would eat into his forty hours. Dixon was down to work so Stark offered to help him finish off what they’d been doing. Once it was done they had lunch together in the canteen. The previous evening had narrowed the chasm between them somewhat. On the subject of DS Millhaven, however, Dixon wouldn’t budge. Stark had been aware of Fran glowering at him over her drink the previous evening and had had the impression that she and DCI Groombridge had been discussing him. He was still far from sure about his new career choice and his first week had done little to alleviate his doubts; the last thing he needed was the dislike of a senior officer. He didn’t relate any of this to Dixon, of course, restricting himself to a few basic questions. He recognized loyalty in Dixon’s answers so let it drop. If she was all right once she got used to you he’d either have to be patient or let down his own barriers a little.

After lunch he went home and spent the rest of the day rearranging the little flat he’d taken for twelve months, moving things from where he’d unpacked them to where they ought to be. Try as he might, though, he couldn’t occupy himself enough to avoid thinking about the next day. It had taken all his determination to phone Margaret Collins. She’d sounded happy enough to hear from him but it had to have been forced, especially when he asked to see her in person. God knew, she probably dreaded seeing him too, though she’d remained polite despite his unwillingness to explain himself. He regretted arranging the meeting now. He hadn’t had the first week he might have hoped for, his wounds ached and he would’ve liked a day free to recover at leisure. But it had to be done.

The crunch, crunch, crunch of your boots, your laboured breath, wafts of acrid black smoke from the burning Land Rover, the jangling
of your kit, quiet as the regimental band, for fuck’s sake! The crack of the AK47s and the surreal whine of bullets tells you Terry Taliban’s overcome his surprise.

Jump down the low wall and stagger, nearly fall, turn and help one of the others down. Collins points at the house, if you can call it that. Set off, heart pounding, kit killing your shoulders, rubbed raw – at least Terry won’t get his hands on any of it. Not today. The whoosh of an RPG; detonates well behind. Nearly there, expecting muzzle flash from that window any second. Never comes, and you’re there, slammed against the wall, gasping for breath. Check the safety’s off for the tenth time. A nod, Collins kicks the door and you pile in, weapon raised, Collins behind you. Movement in the corner! Collins shouts. Swing, SHOOT!

Stark twitched so hard his body left the mattress, the sickening crack of shots echoing in his ears. Limbs tangling in the sheet, trapping him, panic rising, dust and cordite choking him, he fought to free himself in the dark; and all the while the mother’s eyes stared up at him as she crouched in the corner cradling her child, stared right along the barrel of his gun. He choked off a sob, kicking free of the tripping sheet as he staggered out into the living room where the orange streetlight streaming in drove her face from his mind.

He snatched up the bottle and downed long slugs of burning whisky. Gripping the bottle, he came within an inch of hurling it at the wall but fought down the frightening anger, the loathing. Instead he screwed the top back on and slammed it down on the table. Next to it sat the phone with an accusatory red blinking three. He’d been in no mood to listen to his voicemail last night. He yanked the lead out and threw it into the corner, then slumped on to the sofa, face buried in his hands, rocking forward and back.

Her face came flooding in, imploring, defiant, terrified. And the child, small, maybe three, a boy, just one dark, peeping eye visible through his mother’s protecting hands. A millisecond, frozen for ever. Stark opened his eyes wide before the memory drove him mad. He could still hear Collins’s shout, echoing down through time.

Standing, he limped to the window and scanned the calm, cool urban night, the thick vegetation, the lush deciduous trees struck orange and black in the familiar sodium light. Helmand in August
could have been Mars compared to this, the Taliban and Afghans some weird alien creatures, light years away. But the mother and her child, human, so very human, brought the whole thing to your doorstep. He could have been looking out on the boy, playing, laughing with the soldiers, entreating them for boiled sweets, bottled water, NATO bloody ballpoints.

Your decent movie hero would punch his ghostly reflection now, bloody knuckles a token penance. Stark grunted through his exercises instead, showered and fell asleep on the sofa.

Later, as he was pulling on his shoes to leave, he noticed the phone still lying where he’d thrown it. He plugged it back in and pressed play. His mum sounding worried and cross, then his sister sounding cross and stressed out: the standard tag-team guilt trip. Last but not least, a female captain shiny-arse, Pierson, asking if he’d received the MoD letter, and if so why he’d not responded. Another woman voicing disappointment in him. Well, it was Sunday and they could all wait.

He’d done the tourist thing the previous weekend and
had
been looking forward to more, before Monday’s letter. He’d always enjoyed learning; a trait inherited from his father that had just about survived the mire of mediocre comprehensive schooling. He’d left with decent A levels, but with his little sister struggling at school and his mum’s solitary wage already stretched, university was impossible. They needed income. So he’d settled for a library card and joined the police. Only the force was duller than he’d imagined. It had its moments of excitement but spread out in an eternity of lost hours. Lost walking streets, standing with his back to football matches, filling in paperwork, locking up drunks, stopping-and-searching dodgy wasters, standing outside the crime-scene tape while others went in.

Girls came and went. Mates got on with their lives. He needed something else. So, at the end of his two-year probation, he’d decided to hedge his bets.

The Territorial Army was everything he’d imagined. One night a week, one weekend a month and a two-week training course each year. Weapons, demolitions, engineering, strategy and tactics: what wasn’t to like? More than once he’d seriously considered transferring
to the regulars, but staying a weekend soldier gave him the best of both worlds and breaks from both.

He was in good shape going in and kept up with the kids around him. The great thing about the TA: it wasn’t just kids around you: there were guys and girls younger and older, from different backgrounds and levels of qualification. The TA prided itself that this enabled them to learn quicker, to go from reserve to combat-ready in short order. They tried to talk him into going Red Cap, Military Police, but he’d politely declined. The best of both worlds.

That was enough for many. Others, like Stark, sought deployment. You didn’t come out of training shy of a fight. Scared or otherwise, you wanted deployment. Not to look back and say, ‘Yes, I served, but I stayed at home.’ You wanted to serve your function and, as an infantryman, that meant boots on the ground. There were plenty whose function kept them from front-line duty and were no less crucial for it. PONTIs, some called them, Persons of No Tactical Importance. The expression infuriated Stark. You put yourself in harm’s way when you enlisted, full stop; whatever role you were assigned was vital and there was no telling where you would end up or in what danger. It was all too easy to forget that when you were being shot at, but if you were hunkered down with an empty belly or no ammunition you’d soon remember. Or if you were relying on the person at the other end of the radio to correctly relay the co-ordinates of a nearby enemy position to the American aircraft about to drop a bloody great bomb, you should be hoping they were having a very comfortable, stress-free day back at base following a good night’s sleep and that their hands, as they typed, weren’t trembling like yours.

Deployment. Three weeks’ intensive training, six months in theatre. It could’ve been any number of benign places but there were only two truly hot tickets in town and Stark was both happy and apprehensive when he had drawn Iraq.

Operation Telic. Telic, meaning ‘directed towards a definite end, goal or purpose’; the understated British name for what the Americans called Operation Iraqi Freedom. Fifteen-hour shifts, seven days a week, boiling in the day and freezing at night, bored shitless ninety per cent of the time, scared shitless the rest. He’d walked patrols, driven patrols, guarded things, smiled at the locals, won hearts and
minds, helped officers wipe their arses and on several occasions been shot at. Most of the time it was impossible to see where it was coming from. If anyone could confidently see where it
was
coming from, you shot back. Stark couldn’t say whether he’d ever hit anyone, most likely not. Contacts like those were exhilarating, terrifying, surreal and not a little sickeningly pointless, the only way in which it was anything like a video game. Of the company Stark augmented, seven were wounded, two killed. They were lucky. Luckier than the poor people of Basra, that was for sure.

Then had followed two months’ ‘Decompression & Normalization’, army speak for making sure you were safe to let out of the box. This was particularly important to TA veterans who, not having army ‘family’ close through living on or around a base, were twice as likely to suffer mental-health issues, through drink, depression or domestic disharmony. Stark had read that nearly 6 per cent suffered PTSD symptoms compared to 2.5 per cent of regulars. The TA downside. Stark got ten days in Cyprus on the way back, sitting on the beach with occasional lectures on stress followed by twenty-four hours’ family leave, then straight off for a week on the Brecon Beacons, hiking up and down in the rain, and the rest on barracks guard duty, still in the rain. Then he was back on Civvy Street, the same but not the same. He’d done his bit, but it wasn’t enough.

A lot had happened since then. If not, he’d probably still have been sitting on the fence between two vocations. But here he was, career copper, and finding the lack of alternative uncomfortable. He’d give it a year, see how he felt about it then, see how he healed, see what was left.

All these thoughts bounced around in his head whenever he looked up from his book to stare at the countryside and townscapes flitting past the train window. Two changes and a taxi ride later he stood before a white plastic front door in a generic brick house in a cul-de-sac in a development of dozens like it. His hand hesitated, then pressed the bell.

‘Mrs Collins,’ he said stiffly, as she opened the door.

‘At ease, Corporal,’ she replied, forcing a smile. ‘You’d better come in and tell me what’s so awful you had to come all this way.’