The Burma Legacy (15 page)

Which was why he resented that damned voice breaking into
his
space. His and Julie’s.

He forced himself to concentrate on the screen. The email from Midge was to tell him that another cargo of cheap Burmese heroin had just hit the Sydney streets.

The man we suspect of pushing the stuff is ex Australian SAS. Name of Marty Hebble. Military records show that a couple of years ago he was on a joint training exercise with your lot. We’ve asked your MoD in London to find out if Jimmy Squires was in the British unit involved. Seems impossible to believe he wasn’t
.

We need to nail these creeps before any more suckers die, Steve. Don’t know what you’re up to now, but please don’t
give up on me
.

Yours till the cows come home
,

Love

Beth

Despite having been drunk at the time, he could still recall the taste of her mouth.

‘God Almighty …’

He had no damned right to get worked up over Julie’s phone message, yet he couldn’t help himself and touched the play button on the machine one more time. It was the familiarity of the man that irked him. He sounded so at ease. So chummy. So bloody intimate.

He turned back to the PC, punching the keys to select ‘newsgroups’ on his mail browser. Then he ran a search for ones dealing with Burma. A couple came up which seemed promising. The machine downloaded scores of messages, but most were gabbles, a waste of time and space. Distractedly he clicked the ‘find’ icon and typed in
Myoman
to see if anything appeared. Nothing did. He tried hyphenating it and altering the spelling, but with the same result. Had Melissa remembered wrongly, or could he have misheard? Or maybe Harrison simply hadn’t used these particular sites.

He jumped the cursor to the top of the list, pursuing a new thought. The date of the first message was a week ago. Anything Harrison contributed would have been earlier than that. He clicked on the
options menu to see if he could reset some filter or other to reach further back in time, but failed to find a way.

He knew a whole government department that wouldn’t fail, however. Disconnecting from the Internet, he rang his controller at Vauxhall Cross. Waddell promised to get back to him within a couple of hours.

Sam stood up and crossed to the window, staring down at the street. By now the pavements were covered by a thin film of slush. This was the worst part of an English winter. However hard it was to cope with the heat and humidity of the Far East, he preferred it to this.

He felt calmer now. More rational. It was being separated from Julie that was causing the problem. They
had
to spend more time together. He decided to have another go at persuading her to join him in Singapore.

As much as anything, to get her away from the bloke with the east European accent.

On the A1(M) north of Hatfield

Melissa Dennis sat at the front of the minibus next to Toby who was driving. The wipers cut smeary arcs out of the filth kicked up by the trucks and cars in front of them. She stared through the murk, seeing nothing, her mind preoccupied with the startling twist
to events that she’d learned a few hours ago. Instead of trying to make peace with his family as she’d imagined, the man she admired most in the world could well be bent on murder.

When she’d got back to the vehicle in West Hampstead, after a pre-planned detour to an address off Berkeley Square, there’d been no sign of the others. She’d fretted, fearing the demonstration might have become more impressive after she’d dropped out, with them all being invited into 10 Downing Street to make their case.

She’d arrived at the van shortly before the agreed hour, at ten to three, but it was nearer four when the others turned up. Half-frozen by then, she’d been far from amused to learn that when the rally broke up her companions had spent an hour warming themselves in a pub. She’d demanded a seat at the front on the way back home, to be near the heating vents.

As she stared ahead, mesmerised by the sweep and creak of the wipers, her mind was an aviary of ideas. Ever since Perry revealed he hadn’t long to live, she’d known his approaching death would mark the end of one phase of her own existence and the beginning of the next.

She’d decided to write a book. A memorial to him. To pick up the story of his life from where his autobiography had left off twenty-five years earlier. She’d even thought of a title –
The Path Back From Hell – a biography of Peregrine Harrison written by his intimate friend and confidante Melissa Dennis
.

Ever since she was very young, Melissa had believed she would write a book one day. Books had
played such a part in her life. Her schooling had been conducted in the confines of her own home under her parents’ tutelage – an isolated house in the depths of the country where books had provided the only window into the wider world. Under the critical eye of her mother she’d studied their construction. Later, at university, she’d listened to authors spelling out the joy and pain of creation. And she’d continued to read widely. Biographies, histories, novels. She knew she could create a written work herself. Knew she had to now. Because even though Perry would die soon, the memory of him mustn’t.

At first, the one thing she hadn’t been able to decide was how to set about it. Whether to remain at Bordhill after Perry’s death and write about him from within the community, or take herself far away in the hope of doing it with a clearer head. The problem was she had nowhere to go. Her only relatives were her parents. They lived at the far tip of Cornwall and she’d had almost no contact with them since the ‘great upheaval’ eight years ago.

The thought of rebuilding those links purely to get a roof over her head while she wrote was anathema to her. And the atmosphere would make work impossible. They would want to control what she did. Want to deconstruct her every sentence until the very pith had been sucked out. And at some point they would turn on her as they had in the past. Focus on her all that energy and pressure which
they
thought of as positive and beneficial, but which had driven her to the breakdown that had ended her university studies in 1992.

No. No more of that.

The minibus turned off the motorway onto the A505, climbing over the downs that joined Hertfordshire to Cambridgeshire. It was a landscape she loved. Sweeping empty skies above huge fields of furrowed grey earth, speckled with chalk and flint. Rolling grassland with small copses of wind-bent beech and blackthorn. In the three years she’d lived at the Bordhill community she’d often come here on summer weekends, striding up to the highest points and marvelling at the distances she could see. Now it was mid-winter and dark, but with her eyes closed she could visualise it all exactly.

Twenty minutes later, as the minibus dipped towards the plains of Cambridgeshire, all Melissa could think about was Perry’s tortured soul. Could he really be bent on revenge? It went so against her perception of him. Peregrine Harrison was a force for good, a man who believed his position in the next life depended on the merits he’d scored in this. And however much of a pick-and-mix attitude he’d had to the
dhamma
, reincarnation was something she knew he believed in. Surely he would never willingly harm another living creature? It would be his own acts of inhumanity he’d need to attend to, not those of others.

In the weeks before his sudden disappearance she’d watched Perry become preoccupied with the fate of his Burmese family and after much cogitation had convinced herself that it was to the present-day state of Myanmar that he must have gone.

Despite the hot air blasting at her thighs, Melissa
shivered. From fear – not of what might be happening to Perry, but of the alarmingly adventurous plan she’d spent the last few days working out.

If she was to write authentically about his final moments, then she knew she had to experience them with him. At that very moment her passport was sitting in a grubby cubby hole at the Myanmar Embassy off Berkeley Square, awaiting its visa stamp. But the idea of actually travelling to such a far off place terrified her. Her furthest venture abroad so far had been to Paris for a weekend. And
where
in Burma would she find him, particularly now it appeared his journey there might have a double purpose?

The headlights picked out the gateposts to Bordhill. Toby braked gently and turned in. Melissa looked up at the half-lit old manor, knowing the only place to find an answer to her questions was in that darkened wing of the upper floor which until a few days ago had been Perry’s secure domain. A place sealed off by a combination lock whose code she wasn’t supposed to know.

But she did know it.

West London

Sam’s controller rang at ten to six to tell him to look at his email.

‘I’ve sent you the list of Matsubara’s global interests. And IT have come up with a clutch of newsgroup postings involving your man’s login. They’ve copied them to you.’

‘Excellent. There’s something else I need. The address and phone number of a man called Robert Wetherby. He’s a friend of Harrison’s and lives in Suffolk. I’ve checked the directories but there’s no record.’

‘We’ll find it. Oh, and we’re moving on the search of the premises.’ He cleared his throat. ‘Should have a result in the morning.’

A couple of minutes later Sam was online downloading.

Then Julie walked in.

‘Hi, lover!’ She kissed him softly on the mouth. A supermarket bag swung from her hand.

‘Hi, sweetheart. Message on the machine for you.’

She didn’t ask who from, but went straight to the recorder to play it. Sam tried to concentrate on the
screen, but when he heard the contorted vowels from the loudspeaker again he glanced across. Julie had her face turned away. He watched her press the erase button, stand up, then walk towards the door.

‘Going to take a shower,’ she announced without meeting his eyes.

Sam bit his tongue. This was a game he didn’t want to play. He stared determinedly at the screen.

The first of Harrison’s
Myoman
messages had been posted to the Burma newsgroups at the end of November. It was a request for information about a political prisoner in Myanmar and seemed to have been a response to earlier mailings by others. The prisoner was called Khin Thein. Harrison had wanted to know where he was being held, his profession and his alleged crime. Sam clicked through the responses but found nothing relating to it.

The more he read, the more he realised the one-sidedness of what the cybersnoops had uncovered. Several replies to Harrison’s missives had been missed. Sam typed a list of the correspondents’ logins and e-mailed it to the IT men so they could expand their search.

As he sorted the mailings into chronological order he found Harrison’s concerns diversifying in late December. Early outpourings about the stifling of democracy in Myanmar had been replaced by anger at plans for some foreign-funded diesel truck factory to be built at Mandalay.

Foreign investment does almost nothing to improve the life of ordinary Burmans. Instead, it encourages the junta to believe
it can go on ruling for ever. And don’t be fooled when they claim the factory is for trucks and buses to improve the transport infrastructure. The vehicles will be for the army, and a good share of the investment money will end up in the pockets of the generals
.

Diesel trucks. An odd issue to get worked up about. In search of a connection, Sam opened Waddell’s file on Matsubara’s global activities, skimming through the country list to see if Myanmar featured. It didn’t.

The sound of Julie splashing in the shower was making it hard for him to concentrate. Then the noise stopped. He stood up. He couldn’t work like this. Had to have it out with her. But halfway to the door he halted, fearing he was about to make a complete ass of himself.

He sat down again, dithering like a teenager. Then he dialled into the Internet one more time. He’d had an idea.

The archive of the Singapore-based
Straits Times
opened on the screen. He tapped
Myanmar
and
diesel
into the search bar and hit return. Ten seconds later he had his answer.

NIPPON CAR GIANT PUTS

OUT FEELER TO THE GENERALS

Reports that the Matsubara Corporation and Myanmar’s military rulers are in talks about building a diesel engine plant at Mandalay are not being denied in the Japanese motor giant’s home town of Kyoto. Rumours of the plan which first surfaced last month have triggered protests from
Burmese pro-democracy movements in Thailand and the United States. The objectors want an international ban on all foreign investment in Myanmar (formerly Burma), claiming the generals use slave labour for construction projects and divert foreign funds into their own pockets
.

‘Gotcha,’ he murmured.

The article went on to reprise the story of Kamata’s past and his desire to make amends to Britain through a car factory investment and concluded, ‘
Now it’s his fellow Buddhists in Myanmar who are in line to benefit from an old man’s wish to improve his karma before his next reincarnation
.’

Sam felt a buzz of satisfaction. The case for Harrison having gone to Myanmar was building. If they could discover Kamata was due there soon it would be as good as certain.

He printed the article, then logged off, reaching for the phone to ring Waddell. But before he could pick it up, Julie walked back in. She was dressed in a grey sweatshirt top and track-suit bottoms. Her hair was wet and the expression in her eyes was combative.

‘What are you looking so serious about?’

‘Am I?’

Bare-footed, she flopped onto the sofa, stuck a heel on the arm and unscrewed the top of a nail varnish bottle.

‘You don’t mind, do you?’ She held the brush poised over her toes.

‘As long as
you
don’t,’ he told her. ‘Solvents make me randy.’

‘Tell me something that doesn’t.’