White Crocodile (20 page)

A South East Asian girl slid into the room wearing a baby-pink faux silk dressing gown. She smiled at him shyly and let the dressing gown fall from her shoulders. She wasn’t wearing much underneath: only a hot-pink G-string and a matching bra that sat flat against her chest. Wessex had bigger breasts than she did.

God, she couldn’t have been more than sixteen, seventeen tops. She hardly came up to his chest, and he was not even six foot. She was so thin that if he moved her in front of the window – not that there was one in this grotty attic – he would have been able to see the fluorescent orange from the street lamps cutting straight through her body.

There was something funny about the light in the room; it cast shadows across her face and body, but even so he could tell that she was beautiful. His eyes dipped to the tattoo on her thigh. He recognised it immediately.

The wooden boards creaked as she padded across the carpet to stand in front of him. She reached out and laid a soft hand on his cheek. Wessex found that he couldn’t look at her.

He felt her hand slip to his shirtfront, her fingers undo his top button. She was halfway down when he roused himself from his stupor.

‘No.’

He looked up. And saw. It wasn’t shadow that had criss-crossed her body. It was bruises. On her cheek, striping her arms, a huge one, fist-sized, right in the middle of her stomach.

‘No,’ he repeated. ‘I don’t want to.’

The fear he saw in her eyes was intense.

‘Please, I good. Very good. Make you very happy.’

She propped her hands on her hips as she spoke; tilted to one side and jiggled self-consciously. The wretched attempt to make herself more attractive transported him back to Christmas Day: watching his eleven-year-old niece trying to copy the moves from the Rihanna DVD he had bought her. Standing up, he buttoned up his shirt, bent and retrieved her gown, held it out to her. She pushed it away, her eyes filling with tears.

‘Please. I make you happy. I very good. Make you very happy.’

He shook his head.

‘It’s not because I don’t like you. You’re—’ His voice caught. ‘Beautiful. I’ll say we had sex, I promise. I just want to talk to you. Just talk.’ He slid the gown around her shoulders, his gaze fixing on that huge bruise on her stomach, blue-black in the middle, yellowing around the edges.

‘Do they beat you up?’

She shook her head.

‘You can tell me.’
I’m police.
He couldn’t say it. Couldn’t afford to give himself away, even to her.

She shook her head again, but with such resignation it made his chest tighten to watch her. Her voice, so quiet that he had to lean towards her to hear, sounded like it had been programmed in some kids’ toy.

‘Good men. They good men who keep me here.’

A shot. The noise that cut through the still air down by the river sounded like a shot, but then there was silence, and Tess had no idea if she had heard right. She glanced over her shoulder and back along the riverbank. It was dark, deserted. Her eyes found the bar behind her, an oasis of lights. The tables that she could see – the ones close to the front edge of the balcony – were still jammed with drinkers, the hum of noise as consistent as it had been all night. No one else seemed to have been disturbed by the sound. It could have been anything. The backfire of a moped engine. A celebration.

Turning back to the river, she folded her arms around her legs and rested her chin on her knees. She knew that she should go home, but she couldn’t quite face it. So she sat and stared into the darkness, and gradually something else broke through the hush in her mind. A disturbance in the rhythm of sounds from the bar: raised voices, an urgent shout, the scrabble of feet and the scrape of chair legs.

The scene that met her gaze when she glanced back had changed in the few moments since she’d last looked. The tables close to the front edge of the balcony had emptied; a stream of people bottlenecking towards the exit, pushing down the stairs. A jostling line of heads and shoulders filled the road that ran along the top of the riverbank – a crowd forming. She thought of the noise that sounded like a shot, then immediately of Alex. The feel of his Browning in her hand.
Why don’t you just put yourself out of your misery?

Jesus, what had she done? She had sensed that he was close to the edge, but her fury at his refusal to open up to her in return had made her cruel. What the
hell
had she done?

Slithering and sliding on the muddy bank, she clawed her way to the road.

The Riverside Balcony Bar was empty now, its customers crowded by the roadside. Some were talking loudly, others whispering, others just standing there, watching, sickly-faced and silent. Grabbing the arm of a Westerner standing to the outside of the group, she pulled him around.

‘What’s happening?’

His face was pale. ‘Someone’s been shot.’

‘Who? Do you know who?’

He shook his head. She pushed her way to the front of the crowd. Another, smaller circle of people was huddled in the road fifty metres away. A moped cruised out of the darkness beyond them; it slowed, its driver interested. What he saw made him swerve and accelerate. The insect buzz of his engine shrieked as it sped past the crowd in front of the restaurant, fading, swallowed again by the night.

Tess ran along the road. She skipped sideways as a police vehicle screamed past her. It braked by the group, tyres spitting dirt. Four policemen in bottle-green uniforms and black combat boots, wielding wooden batons, spilled out of the doors and ploughed their way into the circle of people. Tess heard the sickening crunch of wood on bone, a couple of high-pitched, surprised cries of pain.

As she reached the circle’s edge, it began to part and separate. She caught glimpses of the police: shoving with their batons, baying orders, faces hard, arms outstretched. People began to peel reluctantly away from the group and drift back down the road, their attention still locked on what they had left.

In the photograph, Johnny was standing with two other guys; he couldn’t even remember their names now. The grey earth and shrubs of Angola spread out behind them, a flat, featureless landscape as far as the camera lens could see. He was smiling, his expression innocent and open. His two legs were tanned and muscled and he looked so damn young.

His first day of humanitarian mine clearing, fifteen years ago now.

Almost all of your adult life, Johnny.

Picking the photograph up, he held it close to his face and studied it, unable to take his eyes from the image of his own younger, perfect self. Turning it around, he slammed the glass frame against the edge of the bookshelf. The glass shattered; slivers rained on to the wooden floor. A jagged triangle of glass was still hanging in the frame. Closing his fingers around it, he pulled it out and used the end to slice through the photograph, top to bottom, left to right, corner to corner.

Dropping the frame on the floor, he ran his eyes along the other shelves, over the photographs, the souvenirs, a decade and a half of mine clearing. The first mine he had ever cleared lay on the middle shelf. A PMN anti-personnel blast mine, its brown plastic body and black pressure pad glossy as a priceless museum exhibit where Keav had polished it.

The PMN produces a substantial fragmentation hazard within a few metres.

Reaching out, he put his finger on the pressure pad, pressed it gently.

It was a game. It had started out as a game. He had just been playing with those women, playing with their lives.

The large explosive content, combined with the fragmentation, leads to very serious injury and can prove fatal.

His hand was trembling.

For fun. Just because it was fun, and their position in life, their choices, made them irrelevant to him.

Once armed this mine cannot be neutralised.

He tensed his arm, trying to steady his hand, spread his fingers and gripped the sides of the pressure pad. It wasn’t his fault. How the hell was he supposed to know it would go this far? That he was playing the game with a mad man?

Explosive type: TNT. Operating pressure: 8–25 kg.

He lifted the pressure pad, teeth clenched against the jitters in his body, and peered inside. It was empty.

He was still staring into the empty case of the mine when he heard Keav come into the room and cross the wooden floor towards him. He dropped it.

‘I told you to get rid of this mine-clearing stuff.’

‘I will get rid.’

‘I don’t want to think about this shit any more. I’m out of it. I want it gone from my life.
All of it
.’ He closed his hand around the glass shard.

She gasped. ‘Johnny . . .’

‘
Now
,’ he bellowed. ‘Get rid of it all
now
.’

He saw her hesitate, then turn for the door.

Blood was seeping through the gaps in his fingers. He opened his hand. The glass was embedded in his palm. He stared at it, detached, then he was suddenly aware of the quantity of blood. It had run down his arm and was all over the sleeve of his shirt. Huge globs had fallen to the wooden floor. Pinching the top edge of the shard between the fingers of his other hand, he tried to pull it out. The skin of his palm sucked on to the edge of the glass, lifting with it; he felt a nerve connection all the way up his arm. He tugged again and the glass pulled away, releasing a fresh gush of blood.

Keav came back into the room carrying a wooden box. She saw the blood and the box slammed to the floor. Ignoring her, Johnny turned and shuffled to the bathroom, leaning heavily on one crutch.

Pulling a towel from the rail below the sink, he pressed it to his hand. His palm felt numb, his fingers swollen. Curling his palm over the rim of the basin, he picked up one end of the towel and then the other, wrapped them over the back of his hand. It took him some time to make a knot: gripping the towel with his teeth, tightening, gripping, tightening.

His palm was throbbing now, fingers bloated and stiff. He held his hand up in front of his face, catching his reflection in the mirror beyond it. Alcohol-washed blue irises, marbled with red, stared back at him from a pale, haunted face, stubble beginning to soften and curl into a beard.

Hobbling back to the sitting room, he slumped down on the sofa.

‘Get me some more whisky.’

Keav had almost emptied the shelves. ‘I just finish.’

‘
Now
.’

Dropping the box, she scurried out of the room. By the time she came back, he had staggered around the room again, checking the window locks, bolting the door to the balcony. He had found his Makarov and was loading rounds into the magazine, his left hand lying impotent on the sofa beside him. Wedging the pistol between his knees, he slipped in the magazine, cocked it, checked the safety, and jammed it in his waistband.

He could look after himself.

Glancing up, Johnny saw Keav gaping at him. He put his hand out for the whisky and she handed it to him at arm’s length. He lunged for her and she jumped back with a startled yelp.

He sat slowly back on the sofa, hands trembling.

Craning her neck, Tess tried to shove forward through the crowd. Suddenly she heard a sharp exchange in Khmer, one of the voices familiar. Jumping, she caught sight of Alex’s face. She stood on tiptoes and shouted over the heads of the people between them.

‘Alex.’

He saw her and raised a hand; he was talking to one of the policemen. The man was waving dismissively, his face devoid of emotion. Alex shook his head, clearly exasperated, and turned away. She watched him push his way through the crowd. When he reached her, he pulled her to him.

‘What the fuck is going on?’

‘You shouldn’t be here. Come on, we’re leaving.’

‘Alex, who is it?’

‘A Khmer man. I never saw him before.’

There was something in his face that frightened her, and she suddenly realised that he knew exactly who was lying on the tarmac.

‘Bullshit.’

She tried to tear herself from his grasp, but he held her tighter. She felt the tension in him.

The crowd had thinned, dispersed by the police; people were flowing past, back towards the restaurant. One of them bumped into Alex hard and he staggered. She took her chance, twisted herself out of his grasp and slipped past him.

The man was lying flat on his back, arms and legs splayed as if he had been picked up by a huge hand and flung on to the road. His face was calm, eyes open and blank. Blood had pulsed from a huge hole in his chest, wound in thick rivulets down the slope of his shoulders and pooled in the cleft of his throat.

She realised that she knew him too, from his photograph on the team-room wall, from that quick glance she’d had of him at the hospital with Ret S’Mai before he’d run.

‘Huan.’ Unable to find her voice, it came out as a whisper. She took a breath – ‘Huan,’ she yelled and ran forward. A policeman whirled around and swung at her with his baton. She felt the blunt wood whistle past her shoulder. Heard Alex shout at the man in Khmer, felt the force of his body as he jammed himself in front of her and shoved her back.

‘Alex, let go of me. I have to see him.’

‘He’s dead, Tess.’

‘He might know something. Have something.’

‘He’s dead.’ He tightened his arms around her. ‘Huan is dead and if you keep shouting like that the police will start asking you questions, and you do not want that to happen.’ Looking down at her, he stroked the back of his hand gently across her cheek. ‘We need to get out of here now.’

‘Alex, for Luke, I need to . . .’ Irritated by his touch, she grabbed his wrist and pulled his hand away from her face. ‘Please let me—’ She broke off. ‘What have you got in your hand?’

‘Nothing. Let’s go.’

She gripped his wrist, saw him blanch from the pain as she tightened her grip. He tried to pull his hand away, but he still had his other arm wrapped around her waist and was constricted. Forcing his fingers uncurled with her other hand, she grabbed the tiny metal tube in his palm.

She’d seen dozens of these littered around the shooting range on Salisbury Plain. ‘It’s a bullet casing.’ Had fired plenty of handguns that used this calibre. ‘Nine-millimetre.’

‘Tess.’ His voice was strangled.

She pressed it against her cheek. It was warm.

‘Huan was dead when I got to him. I saw someone running away. I shot at him.’

She started to shake. ‘But you missed?’

‘He was thirty metres away before I even had the safety off.’

She was shaking all over, like she used to when Luke beat her up. She felt Alex’s arms restraining her, and made a physical connection from Alex to Luke that she had never made before. She looked past him to Huan, lying on the ground with that gaping bullet wound in his chest, and she felt sick. ‘I picked up the casing because I didn’t want the police to find it. You can’t trust the police – not out here.’

She looked into his face. His eyes were dark and totally expressionless. She thought of the scars on his arms.
Guilt. Punishment.
Thought of the lie he had just told her.
Just a Khmer man. I don’t know him.
Thought of a terrified old lady who would outlive her son.
Why would Huan be frightened of you?
She forced herself to relax. The shaking slowed.
Me. Us. Us at MCT.
She said that he’s frightened of us at MCT.
She smiled up at him, and thought the smile must look sick and twisted.

‘You believe me?’ she heard him ask.

She felt herself nod, heard herself reply, ‘Of course.’ Felt herself reach up and put her hands on his chest, start to lever herself away from him.

‘Are you OK now?’

‘Absolutely.’ She felt herself step away from him.
I’ve been lucky. But once, almost. I got too close to someone else’s fuck-up.
He was there. Alex was there when Luke died. She sensed his grip on her arms loosen. Willed him to let go. ‘I’m going to go home now, Alex.’

‘What is it, Tess? You don’t believe me, do you?’

‘I’m going home.’

‘I didn’t kill him.’

‘I didn’t say you did.’

‘I found him. I tried to save him.’

‘Who was it? Who shot him?’

‘A man. I don’t know, Tess. For fuck’s sake, it’s dark. I couldn’t see.’

‘You’re a fucking liar.’

‘Tess, stop it.’

‘You were there when Luke died. You were there, and I’ve only got your word for it that you weren’t involved. Only your word.’

She was pouring sweat, and the stench of the river and the blood and the gabble of voices behind them and the bland lights of the hostels lining the road felt malevolent. ‘You’re sick.’

‘Tess, stop it. Please.’

He tried to catch hold of her; she slapped his hand away.

‘Get away from me.’