White Crocodile (10 page)

It was well past midnight when Tess got home. The house was dark and silent, but she knew that Luke was upstairs, in their bed, sleeping the sleep of a man who was capable of forgiving himself for anything. Slipping off her shoes, she laid them quietly by the front door. Then she stood in the hall and lifted her face to the air, eyes half closed, smelling the perfume of cut flowers – bought to atone for his attack, no doubt – mingling with the smell of cleaning fluid and furniture polish.

He had cleaned up the blood then. Of course he had.

Vague notions of fear skittered through her brain, but they didn’t coalesce. It felt strange to realise that she wasn’t afraid of him any more. It was a simple equation. He had taken everything. She had nothing left to lose.

A sudden noise. She turned around.

He was standing on the stairs, shirtless, his pyjama bottoms hanging loose around his hips. She took in the bed hair, the hard stomach, the smattering of dark hair on his chest. Three years ago, the first time they had made love, when they had peeled each other’s clothes off item by item, kissing and laughing, just the look of his hard body had telegraphed itself straight to her groin. On their honeymoon in a tiny, isolated croft in the Scottish Highlands, they had made love on every piece of furniture that was big enough. She was sure then that she was the luckiest girl in the world.

‘What are you doing?’ There was menace in his voice. ‘It’s almost one in the morning.’ He gestured to the front door. ‘And why the hell have you left the front door open?’

She stopped and faced him. ‘Where’s the sock? The pink sock?’

‘Why are you asking me that?’ His eyes were grey and cold. ‘I’ve got it. It’s upstairs.’

She nodded slowly. ‘I didn’t tell you.’

‘Tell me what?’

‘I was pregnant.’

He looked confused.

‘The sock wouldn’t have been any use though. Little boys don’t wear pink.’

‘What the fuck are you talking about?’

‘I was four months pregnant with your son when you kicked that ladder from under my feet.’

She watched the range of emotions playing themselves out on his face: confusion, doubt, incredulity, disbelief, hurt, and then anger. Always anger.

‘Why didn’t you tell me, you stupid bitch? If you’d told me, I wouldn’t have—’

‘Wouldn’t have what? Kicked a ladder from underneath me when all I was doing was decorating our Christmas tree? What would you have done instead? Been
nice
? Tried to resist the temptation to kick the shit out of me?’

Walking to the front door, she scooped up her shoes. Why had she come back here?

‘
You fucking bastard
,’ she shouted, as she stepped on to the doormat.

His face twisted with rage. ‘What?
What
did you call me?’

She couldn’t be bothered with this. She wasn’t frightened of being hurt any more. Physical pain was meaningless. ‘
You fucking bastard!
’
she screamed at the top of her lungs.

‘You’re crazy.’ He stared at her in disbelief. She’d never stood up to him like this, and she could see how shocked he was. ‘For Christ’s sake think about the neighbours.’

She spun around on the path, her arms outstretched. ‘Listen to this, lovely middle-class neighbours. He beats me up for
no reason
.’

‘Tess, please—’ Standing in the threshold, naked from the waist up, looking tense now, he stretched out a hand. ‘Come back inside.’

She tore off her wedding ring and threw it at him. ‘He stamped on my foot and broke my toe. He snapped my finger for not wearing his fucking ring.’ Her voice kept breaking into a scream now. A light went on in one of the houses on the opposite side of the street.

Cold air eddied around her, chilling her bare arms and legs. Tarmac grated her soles as she stepped from the garden path on to the pavement.

Confusion and uncertainty flashed across his face, and then recognition, understanding that she was not going to play the victim for him any longer. Dropping his hand, he tilted his head and gave a contrite smile. ‘We need each other. We’re meant to be together.’

‘
You’re insane
.’

‘You
need
me, Tess.’

‘I don’t need you.’

‘You have no one else. Your father doesn’t love you, and never did. I’m all you’ve got, Tess.’

She didn’t turn.

Behind pale, lifting curtains two neighbours watched a skinny girl with wild red hair, wearing woollen tights but no shoes, stalking down the middle of the street, a ballet pump in each hand.

‘No, I don’t need you,’ she yelled.

Tossing her sodden ballet pumps over a garden wall, she started running.

‘Tess,’ Luke shouted, but his voice was small. She glanced over her shoulder at the figure of a man, lit by a porch light, almost too far away to see now.

‘I loved you,’ she whispered, sinking to her knees on the kerb. A car passed her, and she heard it slow for a moment – felt the eyes of its occupants sizing her up, their indecision plain from the idling engine – heard it accelerate away again. Pushing herself to her feet, she turned the corner and started to walk, rubbing the backs of her hands fiercely across her cheeks to wipe away the tears.

I don’t fucking need you. I am enough. I only need me.

Tess slid Jakkleson’s photographs back into the file and returned them to their secret place at the bottom of the drawer. She slid the drawer shut, leant for a second against the cabinet, trying to make sense of what she’d seen. She was tempted to leave now: just walk straight out of the room, with its ludicrously prim facade and its dirty little secrets.

But she had come to Cambodia for a reason.

Crouching, she turned her attention to the bottom drawer, and in here, the files she had been looking for, M to Z. Huan Rae’s file should be here. She went straight to the Rs – there were only three – and none of them was Huan’s. She checked again, taking each file out in turn to make sure that Huan’s hadn’t slid inside one of the others. But it had not. Putting them back, she moved to the front of the drawer, working through each file in turn, taking it out, flicking through its contents, putting it back in its correct place so that nothing was left out of kilter to give her away. When she had gone through the last file and still found nothing relating to Huan, she pushed all the files to the back of their runners and felt around under them, running her hand back and forth across the cool metal base of the drawer. Nothing. Huan’s personnel file was missing.

Shutting the drawer, she straightened and locked the filing cabinet, the muscles in her jaw tensing with frustration. Jakkleson was the admin man, known to be pedantic to a fault, and he kept records of everything.
Think
. There must be something of use in here. She just hadn’t found it yet.

She stood still and emptied her mind of any expectation, as she had been taught to do when clearing mines.
Look with an open mind.
She went through the cupboard, each shelf in turn, rummaged through the notices on the board, lifting them to see if anything was hidden underneath, pulled all the books from the bookshelf and shook each one by the spine to see if anything had been slipped between their pages. It was only when she was putting the last book back that it occurred to her she hadn’t checked the waste bin. Reaching into the dark space beneath Jakkleson’s desk, she retrieved it and placed it on the desktop. At the bottom of the bin was a mess of curled, blackened paper and ash. Enough to have been something substantial that Jakkleson had burned – a whole file, not just a sheet or two of paper. So this was it, surely? Huan’s file. She picked through the burnt remains, but they all crumbled to ash in her fingers. He’d been thorough.

She took one last quick look around the office to make sure everything was where it should be, and switched off the light.

Closing the door carefully behind her, she headed back down the stairs. She paused for a moment on the landing, as she had on the way up. A full moon hung low in the sky. Turning from the window, she started towards the flight down to the hallway. And froze.

Footsteps, and then a voice. ‘What the hell are you doing here?’

She recognised the accent before she made out the figure standing in the pale wash of moonlight below.

‘I was emailing my father. He doesn’t like speaking on the telephone.’ She’d prepared this answer before setting out, but it suddenly rang hollow and mechanical even to her ears.

The man in the hallway didn’t reply, though the expression on his face made it clear that he didn’t believe her. One measured step at a time, Tess made her way down.
Attack is the best form of defence.

‘So what about you, Alex? What are
you
doing here?’ She stopped in front of him, taking in the undone shirt, the messy hair.

He ignored her question. ‘Come into the team room.’

‘Why?’

‘I want to talk.’

She didn’t move. ‘We can talk here.’

‘There are chairs to sit on in the team room. I only want to talk and I . . . would like to sit down.’

He clocked her hesitation and put out a hand to touch her arm. She jerked away and he let his hand fall back to his side, the movement weary, dispirited.

‘Johnny’s accident has hit him hard,’ MacSween had said yesterday. ‘They’re good friends.’ What did she have to lose?

‘OK. Let’s talk.’

As he turned, she noticed the butt of a pistol stuck into his belt. A Browning nine-millimetre. Her father had one just like it, bought on the black market in Iraq during the first Gulf war and smuggled back to England in his kit bag. He kept it in a tin in a kitchen cupboard, rolling around with its bullets. She had discovered it when she was nine years old, tall enough to reach the cupboard door. He never was one to make allowances for mundane things, like his daughter’s safety. It occurred to her that perhaps she should be worried Alex was carrying, but she felt strangely ambivalent.

Alex didn’t switch on the light when they entered the team room. So he too didn’t want to be seen here. The thought buoyed her with some confidence. He leaned against the window ledge and motioned her to a chair opposite him.

‘Sit.’

She stayed where she was. ‘I’m not a Labrador.’

‘Please. Sit down,
please
.’

She did as he asked, hooking a chair back into the darker depths of the room with her foot before she sat down, so she wasn’t framed in the moonlight washing in through the window. ‘What do you want to talk about?’

‘What are you doing here?’

‘I’ve already told you.’

‘Ah, yes.’ He glanced away, a grim smile pulling at the corners of his mouth. ‘I might feel like shit but I am not an idiot. Do you always break into offices after ten at night to send emails?’

‘I could ask you the same question. Because I guess there’s a reason we’re sitting here in the dark?’

He nodded. ‘You could.’

‘So what
are
you
doing here?’

Looking out of the window into the wild garden, he didn’t speak for a few moments. Watching his back, she noticed the same tense set of his shoulders she had seen at the hospital the day before yesterday, and it dragged her straight back there, to the hurt and fear.

‘You don’t think that it – Johnny – was an accident, do you?’ he murmured.

She drew in a breath, held it for a couple of beats of her pulse while she thought, made a decision. ‘No, I don’t.’

She saw his knuckles whiten as he tightened his grip on the windowsill. ‘Why?’

Should she tell him the whole lot? About her connection to Luke? About the White Crocodile drawing on the envelope containing the pink sock she had been sent from Cambodia? About the anti-tank mine she had found under the anti-personnel mine that maimed Johnny? But she knew that she wouldn’t tell him. What was the point in sticking her neck out any further than she already had? She was in a dangerous enough position as it was.

‘Because it just didn’t feel right.’

‘So you came here to look around? Find some evidence, some proof?’

‘I wanted to see if I could find Huan’s file. It was his lane. He was off sick that day. He hasn’t been seen or heard from since.’

‘So you think he’s responsible?’

‘I don’t know. But the mine Johnny stood on was in ground that had already been cleared by Huan.’

Alex straightened, rubbing a hand over his eyes. ‘In the meeting with MacSween the day after Johnny’s accident, you said you didn’t know whether the mine was in cleared ground or not, and now, suddenly, you remember it clearly?’

‘I’ve had time to think about it. There were a couple of scorched craters in Huan’s lane beyond where Johnny was injured. So mines had been cleared further along the lane.’

He shook his head. ‘It was . . . crazy out there. There’s no way you could remember details like that.’

‘I can, because I remembered that tree,’ her voice rising against his. ‘That lone tree in the middle of the minefield, that creepy fucking tree that’s bent and twisted. There were shadows – the shadows of the leaves on Johnny’s face. His face was in shadow and his lower body, his . . . his injured leg was in sunlight. And then I looked beyond him, further down Huan’s lane, while I was waiting for the medics, I remember, and I saw a couple of burnt-out craters. I thought they were shadows, but they weren’t – couldn’t have been – because that tree was the only thing out there casting shade.’

‘Big fucking deal. So the mine was in cleared ground. Missed mines happen.’

‘There was also the skull. In the middle of a field, right next to a live mine? It was a come-on. There to draw Johnny in.’

A hard light shone in his eyes. ‘This is Cambodia. Two million people were murdered by the Khmer Rouge, in fields just like that one. The skull means nothing.’

‘Bullshit. It’s not that easy to miss a mine. And the skull was just sitting there on the earth – it wasn’t buried or anything. You’ve done this job as long as me, Alex. You know what this is about. Laying mines is a game of wits, us against them. If something looks like a come-on, that’s exactly what it is. Someone set a trap for Johnny.’

He shook his head, but with a little, almost imperceptible delay before he did it, as if he was weighing up alternatives, making a decision. ‘I talked to his troop. They said that you were panicking, shouting at his clearers, yelling at the medics. You can’t
possibly
remember things so clearly. Your version of events is fiction.’

Tess met his gaze. ‘I acted
entirely
professionally. I walked down the lane to prove to the medics it was clear. That saved your friend’s life. What the fuck would you have done?’

She wondered if she’d made the right decision to confide in him. Now he knew almost as much as she did. She looked past him to the window and the wild garden beyond. Thick foliage, indistinct in the moonlight, the stooping shapes of the trees. There wasn’t a soul out there, not in the garden or on the road beyond the gates. It was just her and Alex. Her eyes dropped to the Browning in his belt and she thought again of her father. He had drummed into her from an early age that emotions were weakness, that it was unacceptable to cry in public or let others see that you were hurt or scared. Female emotions were a Pandora’s Box to him. One day, aged seven or eight, she had come home with a bloody nose and a black eye, having had a fight with a couple of boys in the park who were kicking a pigeon with a broken wing around as if it was a football. They’d turned on her. It had taken her half an hour longer than usual to walk home that day. Dawdling along, crying all the tears that she wanted to cry at the pain, the humiliation of having been beaten, so that by the time she got home she could be dry-eyed and stoic, just how he expected her to be. At times like this she ached for her mother. The idea of a mother anyway; what she imagined having a mother might be like. Her dad had been so proud when she told him what had happened that he almost burst. For him, stoicism and bravery were the only attributes that really mattered.

Then she had met Luke, Luke who’d been through so much himself that he saw through her immediately, through the accreted layers of defiance and stoicism, seen her terrible need for someone she could confide in.

‘I know that mine Johnny stood on was planted.’

Alex shook his head, but didn’t reply.

‘I think Huan laid a mine and planted a skull beside it to draw Johnny in.’

He still didn’t reply.

‘I drove out to Koh Kroneg, last night.’

He dropped his gaze and met hers. ‘You did
what
?’

‘I drove out to the field.’

‘Are you crazy? This is Cambodia for Christ’s sake, not – where the hell do you come from – England? – this is not England. This place is dangerous.’

‘It wasn’t dark. It was evening, still light.’

‘It was stupid.’

Her eyes flashed. ‘I can look after myself.’

Alex shook his head and said almost gently, ‘You could have asked me to go with you.’

‘Oh, please. We barely know each other. And you haven’t exactly been engaging company, the couple of times we have met.’ She moved away. Went to stand by the window, staring through the dusty glass. A white Land Cruiser drove down the street, and she tensed, but it didn’t slow as it neared the gates to MCT House and drove straight past.

A moment later she heard a movement behind her, felt his hand brush her arm. ‘What did you find, Tess?’

She turned slowly to face him. ‘I found an anti-tank mine, laid under the anti-personnel mine that maimed Johnny. Fuse out. Set to sympathetically detonate.’

‘
What?
’

‘It would have vaporised him if it had worked.’

‘Jesus.’ He groaned. ‘Are you certain it was an anti-tank mine?’ His dark eyes scrutinised her face.

She gave a grim smile. ‘It’s under my bed at the boarding house if you need proof. And I do know an anti-tank mine when I see one, whatever the hell you might think.’

He held up his hands defensively. ‘OK, OK, so why didn’t it work?’

‘Maybe the distance between the two mines was too great, or maybe the explosive in the anti-tank mine just failed. It was a Russian TN52, fucking ancient. Either way, it does prove that the “missed mine” theory is bullshit, unless Huan forgot to switch his detector on at all.’

Alex rubbed a hand across his eyes.

‘Planted deliberately, Alex. Someone tried to kill Johnny.’

‘Planted by Huan? That’s what you think, isn’t it?’

‘He couldn’t have missed an anti-tank mine in his lane, he
couldn’t
have done. He was “off sick” the day Johnny stood on the mine. If he had been there, he would have gone in to check out the skull, not Johnny. And he hasn’t been seen since Johnny was injured. Why? Where is he? If he had nothing to do with it, why doesn’t he just come back?’

‘Johnny wasn’t worried about Huan.’

‘Does Johnny worry about anything? OK, you know him better than me. But I don’t think he was brought up to think that anything impinged on his world.’ She met his gaze. ‘Do you know Huan, Alex?’

‘I know Huan, but I don’t
know
him. I don’t think anyone does, except Johnny perhaps.’

‘Because Johnny was his platoon commander?’

Alex nodded. ‘He was one of the quiet ones. Worked well. Johnny said he was a good clearer. Reliable. Nothing else.’

Tess looked down at her hands, pressed together. ‘So what do you think, Alex?’