The Burma Legacy (8 page)

She looked at him sceptically. ‘You do realise I won’t believe any of this until it happens?’

‘Oh ye of little faith …’

She picked up her mug and headed out of the kitchen, trilling, ‘going to be late again …’

Sam ate his toast, then made a mug of coffee for
himself. As he returned with it to the living room, he could hear the hairdryer going.

He picked up Harrison’s book.

The Japs moved their headquarters soon after capturing me and took me with them. At first they tried to make me walk but I was in a bad way. In order not to hold things up they tied me onto the back of a mule. I kept looking out for Kyaw Zaw, the brave soldier who had remained behind with me when the Chindits moved on. His own capture had almost certainly led to mine, but there was no sign of him and I feared he must have been killed soon after revealing the whereabouts of my hiding place. I knew what terrible tortures he would have gone through and felt no bitterness towards him for giving me away
.

Julie bustled into the sitting room with her coat on. ‘What’s the book?’

‘An autobiography.’

‘Of whom?’

‘Peregrine Harrison.’

She screwed up her face. ‘With a name like that I s’pose I should know who he is.’

‘Not really. The book came out twenty-five years ago, and he’s not made many ripples since.’

‘I take it you aren’t reading this entirely for pleasure.’

‘Not entirely.’

She knew it was pointless pressing for details. The book was business. And Sam’s work was a
closed
book to her. She turned for the door.

‘Hang on a second.’ Sam put the volume down and stood up. ‘Is this goodbye?’

‘Sorry.’ She turned and kissed him perfunctorily, mumbling about being
very
late.

‘We’ll have a great weekend,’ he told her. ‘I promise.’

She gave a tight-lipped smile. ‘See you tonight.’

He watched from the window as she half walked, half ran down the street towards the tube.

He got dressed and shaved, then returned to the book, keen to know how Harrison had spent the rest of the war. The man’s detention in the Central Jail in Rangoon had been gruelling. The prison was overcrowded and disease-ridden, with men dying almost daily from sickness and malnutrition. But although there were frequent beatings, often for the ‘offence’ of failing to salute a guard, the systematic torture he’d experienced at the hands of the unidentified Lieutenant was not repeated.

Sam skipped through to the post-war period. Harrison described his repatriation to England as a time of trauma and despair. With his own parents dead and his only sibling, a brother, in the colonial service in India, ‘family’ in England had consisted of elderly grandparents and a few aunts and uncles whom he hardly knew. On arrival at Liverpool docks aged twenty-three, he’d had no idea where to go or what to do next. Given his discharge papers, back pay and a rail warrant to wherever he wanted, he’d picked Gloucester because his maternal grandparents lived there.

The first few months in England were a desperate time for me. I felt stateless. Not belonging. Nobody wanted to know what I had been through. Nobody seemed to care. The war in the Far East had been too far away for them. Everybody I met had had their own bad experiences closer to home, with family members lost in France, or missing in POW camps in Germany. They simply did not understand that what we had been through at the hands of the Japanese was far, far worse. Our minds had been damaged, permanently in many cases. I myself became ill. My grandparents could not cope with my waking at night, screaming and shouting from the nightmares that would not leave me alone. They persuaded me to see their local doctor, but all the man suggested was more exercise and fresh air. I considered trying to get in touch with the men I had shared imprisonment with, for mutual support, but they had dispersed throughout the country and I did not have their addresses. It occurred to me too that contacting them might make it even harder to shake off the memories plaguing me. Throughout all of that time, I kept seeing the face of the Lieutenant who had tortured me, knowing that if he were still alive he would be feeling no remorse for the condition he had reduced me to
.

‘Until now,’ Sam murmured.

He closed the book and stared at the cover. Bedraggled soldiers in bush hats standing in a jungle clearing, the image washed over with the rising sun of the Japanese flag. On the back was a photo of Harrison. Teutonic eyes set on some distant horizon, with a Buddhist temple behind. Handsome, chiselled features and a thick shock of fair hair. Not hard to see why the man had been worshipped by his women.

It occurred to him it might be
through
one of them he’d get to Harrison – if he could discover who they were.

The file Waddell had given him was on the dining table. Inside was a note from a Special Branch inspector, saying the Bordhill Community had proved as tight-lipped as a convent.

Outside it had grown darker again. Rain beat against the window panes. He powered up his laptop and plugged the modem cable into the phone socket. On the Internet Google quickly found him a site for Bordhill. There were photos of a rambling eighteenth-century manor house, a potted history, a brief personality page on Peregrine Harrison and outlines of the Buddhist-centred courses held there. It all looked appealing enough, with fresh-faced twenty-and-thirty-somethings extolling the virtues of meditation.

Then he clicked onto the
Telegraph
archive and fed in Kamata’s name. Half a dozen stories came up about the car factory deal. He browsed them quickly and copied them to a file on the hard-drive. Then he searched for sites run for former PoWs. Plenty of stuff about regimental histories and torture methods, but no reference to Harrison or Kamata.

Finally he checked his email. There was one from Beth.

Sorry to walk out on you without a goodbye on Jan 1. Just seemed to make sense at the time
.

They’re putting me through the grinder here in Sydney but I’ll survive
.

Thanks for being so nice on NYE. And for the generous suggestion of how to best use that historic millennium moment! Don’t think I wasn’t tempted. Ah well. Another time, another place …

Be nice to stay in touch
.

Beth

Sam smiled, savouring the bitter-sweetness of the missed opportunity. He hit the reply key and typed.

Told you you’d regret it
…

Steve

As soon as he disconnected, the phone rang.

‘Hope I didn’t wake you.’

Sam recognised his controller’s voice.

‘No chance. Been up for hours.’

‘Brain still ahead of us?’

‘Always is, Duncan. Always is.’

Waddell cleared his throat.

‘Tetsuo Kamata’s in town.’

‘Didn’t mention this yesterday.’

‘Didn’t know. It’s a private visit. They’re signing the Memorandum of Understanding today, for the transfer of the factory. Complete bloody surprise to us. The two companies had kept it to themselves.’

‘I thought the sale was months away.’

‘It is. But the MoU sets out the terms. Gives the Japs the right to look at the books. Make sure they’re not buying more of a pig in a poke than they think they are.’

‘We’re providing protection?’

‘As discreetly as possible. He doesn’t know about it. The company’s giving a press conference at noon at Brown’s Hotel. First time Kamata’s been seen in the flesh in this country. The media’ll go mad. And I think
you
ought to be there. Get a feel for the man.’

‘Fine, but I’ll need a press card.’

‘That’ll be ready at eleven-thirty. I’ll have someone meet you with it.’

They fixed a time and place, then Waddell rang off.

Sam stared out of the window, unhappy with the way the Harrison affair was developing a momentum of its own. He wanted it to die so he could get back to doing something about Jimmy Squires.

He remembered the call he was going to make. Checking his address book on the computer, he found the number and dialled it.

The desk where it rang was deep inside the Ministry of Defence.

Sam took the tube to Piccadilly, then dropped into Waterstone’s. He browsed the travel shelves for a guide to country hotels, buying the one with the greatest number of sites in East Anglia. Then he sat in the café and read it over a double espresso. To his dismay the area within twenty miles of Bordhill seemed to be a culinary desert. In the end he plumped for a coaching inn half-an-hour’s drive away, near the cathedral city of Ely. It promised an inglenook in the bar, a bedroom with a whirlpool bath, and a menu ‘drawing its inspiration from the
four corners of the world’. He phoned from his mobile and found to his relief they had a room free.

It was twenty past eleven. His appointment with Waddell’s messenger was outside Green Park tube. A five-minute walk.

Stopping at a stationers to buy a small notebook, he reached Brown’s Hotel at ten minutes to twelve. A board in the reception area directed him to a suite on the first floor where a burly security guard checked his newly minted press card. The suite was already crowded, with half a dozen TV cameras facing the platform. He found a seat to the side, squeezing in between two tensely expectant Japanese reporters.

At precisely twelve o’clock a flustered PR girl walked onto the podium to announce a delay. Mr Kamata’s party was stuck in traffic but would be here shortly. When she stepped down again, the reporters each side of Sam spoke across him in Japanese.

At the back of the room TV producers paced, phones clamped between head and shoulder, reporting the bad news to their lunchtime bulletins. Time slots allocated to this story would need filling with something else if Kamata didn’t show in time. Sam studied faces, fearing that by some dreadful coincidence he might stumble across the press man who’d ambushed him fifteen months ago.

At twenty past the hour the PR girl reappeared to announce the imminent arrival of Mr Kamata. The TV people switched on their cameras and the elderly saviour of the Walsall motor factory was ushered through the throng by a quartet of aides. He was tall
for a Japanese, and for an octogenarian remarkably straight-backed. Sam watched him take his seat, studying this face that had haunted Peregrine Harrison’s dreams, while trying to picture him fifty-six years ago in drab jungle fatigues. Kamata displayed signs of nervousness. Sam guessed he’d been warned of the viciousness of the British media.

The table was draped in the red, white and gold of the Matsubara logo. On Kamata’s right sat a much younger Japanese. The name card described him as the company’s Development Director. To the chairman’s left sat a slick-haired Englishman who stood up and introduced himself as the chairman of Brassinger-Mulholland Public Relations.

‘Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to this press conference. On behalf of the Matsubara Corporation I’d like to apologise for the late start, particularly to those with imminent deadlines.’ He attempted a mollifying smile. ‘First, I’d like to read a brief statement. Afterwards Mr Tetsuo Kamata, the chairman of Matsubara, will take questions. His answers will be given in Japanese and will be translated for you by his interpreter, Miss Kimura, who is seated at the end of this table.’

He indicated an attractive young woman dressed in a smart, dark suit, wearing oval designer spectacles, with a pearl necklace round her slender neck. She bowed her head.

Clearing his throat and glancing at the cameras, the spokesman began. ‘The Matsubara Corporation is pleased to have signed a Memorandum of Understanding this morning with the Walsall Motor Group.
It is the company’s intention to complete the purchase of the plant and assets as soon as possible, so work can begin on adapting the factory to produce Matsubara cars in the UK. It is also the company’s intention to re-employ as many as possible of the Walsall Motors workforce and to keep redundancies to a minimum. The signing of the MoU today means Matsubara can now have privileged access to the group’s accounts and business records, a full examination of which will be necessary before the purchase of the company can be completed. Matsubara believes it
can
produce cars profitably in the UK, selling them both here and elsewhere in the European economic zone.’

Sam stared at Matsubara’s Development Director looking for any sign of the disagreement he undoubtedly felt. The expressionless face gave nothing away.

‘Matsubara’s chairman, Mr Tetsuo Kamata …’ the PR man nodded deferentially to the tense figure beside him, ‘… wishes me to state that he is particularly pleased to be forming this new bridge of friendship between Japan and Britain, which he hopes will be of real benefit to very many people in this country. Mr Kamata is now ready to answer a few questions.’

The PR man looked round, trying to identify who would be gentlest with his client. Hands shot up.

‘The time available is strictly limited, so please keep your questions brief and to the point.’ He aimed a finger at the reporter he’d selected, but it was too late. A pushy television correspondent had stepped forward.

‘Mr Kamata. Do you recognise yourself as the same man who tortured British prisoners of war fifty-six years ago? A man for whom the sanctity of British lives was at that time of no significance whatsoever to you?’

The PR man winced and turned to his client. As the question was translated, the chairman’s only reaction was to blink. Then, staring at some fixed point high up on the far wall, he began his reply. His voice was thin and reedy, the words coming out as a monotone. His answer was brief.

‘War changes a man,’ Miss Kimura translated in a strong, clear voice with an American accent. ‘But fortunately once that war is over a man can change back to the way he was before.’

‘Did you enjoy torturing British soldiers, Mr Kamata?’ the TV man persisted. There was a growl of ‘oh come on!’ from further back in the room.

‘Please,’ the PR interjected, puce-faced, ‘we’re here to talk about the MoU and the rescue of a car factory.’

Kamata listened to the translation of the question. For a split second there was a flash of anger on his face, then he curbed it and began to speak. He was in control and had every intention of staying that way.