White Crocodile (23 page)

Sitting cross-legged on the grimy concrete floor of an overcrowded dormitory, Dien used his body to shield from view the object he was holding in his hand. He didn’t want the other boys to see it, knew that as the youngest and smallest, he would have it snatched from him immediately – punched and kicked until he let go – if they found out he had something he treasured. He glanced over his shoulder. Without air conditioning or a working fan, the temperature in the room was already overwhelming. Most of the other boys were lying on their mattresses, two to each one, three for the smallest like him – panting like dogs, eyes closed, limbs lolling – and paying him no attention. He watched a couple kicking each other as they vied, hot, irritated and half-asleep, for more space on the mattress. Relieved that he had time undisturbed, he returned to the object in his hand.

Closing his eyes, he tried to bring a picture of his mother to his mind, just her face, her eyes or her mouth. But even in these snatched moments when the orphanage was quiet and he could creep into a corner by himself, he strained to call her face to mind. He held an image of her in his head, slight, beautiful and happy, eager to cuddle him, to comfort him. He would climb into her lap and curl up – like a cat, she used to say, and laugh and bend forward so that her body was covering his, her arms wrapped the whole way around his body, and hug him tight. She had made him feel safe.

And then that morning he had woken. Alone. He didn’t know how long ago it was now, but it had been before the rainy season. A few days after Māgha Pūjā, the Full Moon of
Tabaung
celebration, the day hot and calm. The dried boards of their hut, still soft and green with sap, had creaked as they withered and shrank in the heat. Three months, Chanthou had told him. He had been here in the orphanage for three months and in that time his mother’s face had become little more than a blur to him.

The thing that hurt him worst of all was to think that he would soon forget everything about her: her face, the sound of her voice, the feel of her touch on his skin. That his memory of her was no more substantial than his breath, floating away from him, out of the window and into the blue sky. Every day, these things faded a little more.

He curled himself into a ball – ‘like a cat, Dien’ – hugging her necklace in his hot palm, and closed his eyes, turning his little body to the wall, curling against it. Tears flowed from his eyes and he felt them trickling through the grime on his baby cheeks, hot and salty on his tongue.

Johnny could hear the barking, tugging, insistent. He hadn’t been sleeping. Couldn’t sleep. Memories filtered in at night. He kept on thinking of faces. Women’s faces, hard and crystalline, crowding his dark windows.

And something pale behind them.

The White Crocodile hunting at night.

He had to stay awake, had to keep his brain occupied. He had tried kipping on the sofa during the day, but Keav was there, moving silently around the room, cleaning, watching, spying.

The barking continued.

‘Shut up,’ he screamed. What the fuck was the dog barking at? They had sixth senses, dogs. Could it sense the women out there? He jammed his fingers in his ears, could still hear the barking, pulled them out again. He looked down to his lap, at the pistol gripped tight in his right hand. It was daytime; he was safe. The pistol was trembling like an animal. It’s trying to tell you something, Johnny. The ghosts, the Crocodile, the dog, the ghosts, the dog. Fucking dog.
Fucking dog
.

Using the arm of the sofa for leverage, he hauled himself to his feet. Too quick; he slipped and fell. His crutches clattered against the hard wooden floor, the rest of him landed soft. He banged his left hand. It was swollen, infected, stank. He didn’t want to look at it. The towel was crusted to his skin. He hauled himself up again – slowly this time – found his balance, started to hobble across the sitting room to the sliding doors, made it to the balcony, rested against the railing for a moment, panting, straightened and began to shuffle left. The balcony went around the corner and ran down the side of the house. He followed it.

The dog was tied to a chain in the yard next door. It was straining at the chain, feet planted apart, ears and tail erect, eyes fixed on something – but there was nothing there – barking. It glanced at him quickly, looked away, carried on barking. He raised the pistol. His arm was trembling. The barking was driving him crazy. He was sweating, shaking –
fucking dog
. Tightening his finger on the trigger, he took the slack, felt it snag, squeezed some more. The sound of the shot was deafening. The dog yelped, leaped and spun, the chain around its neck yanked taut, then it fell, limbs scrabbling in the gravel.

He heard screaming. A woman. Women screaming. He squeezed off another shot, then another. One bullet hit the dog’s prone, twitching body. The other missed, ricocheting off the concrete yard and splintering into the side of the house. Johnny stood, staring. The dog’s back legs paddled, twice, as if it were dreaming. He saw movement out of the corner of his eye. A man. The dog’s owner, he realised, coming out of his house. Johnny saw his face, the shock and fear. Saw him raise his arm. Something whined past him, so close he could feel its breath on his face. Plaster showered over his shoulder as the bullet slammed into the wall behind him. He leaped back, pressing himself against the wall. The man couldn’t see him; he was hidden by the lip of the balcony. He shuffled left, hugging the wall, heard another shot – way off target – edged around the corner, felt the cool glass of the balcony door behind him, and then its metal frame, grabbed it, turned, his back pressed against the frame, and slipped inside.

Keav was standing in the living room, her hands on her face, staring at him, frozen in shock.

‘The ghosts,’ he hissed.

Suddenly the house, the street, were horribly silent and still.

‘The ghosts were out there.’ He stumbled forward, stretched out his left hand, swollen, throbbing, reaching for her. ‘Those women – they’re coming back.’ She backed away, started to scream. Barking. Screaming. The dog. The ghosts. He brought the pistol up, right arm stiff, closed one eye, squinted along the barrel. Screaming. Barking.

‘
Help me
.’

The sound of the shot filled the room.

When Tess woke it was hot, the air in the room close; she felt sweaty, her head muggy with snatched sleep. Kicking the sheet off, she sat up. The sun was high in the sky. Bright rays poured through the open bedroom window and flooded the bed. No curtains. A man’s smell, musty with sweat and aftershave, but Alex wasn’t there.

Reaching over, she put her hand on the crumpled dent in the sheet where he had lain, where they had made love. It was warm, but a crisp, dry warmth from the sun. She reached the other way to the bedside table and grappled for her watch. It was half past one – she’d been asleep for nearly four hours.

Sliding off the side of the bed, she padded into the bathroom. The window was open in here too, but the air was cooler, damp and woody, the leaves from the trees in the garden shading the room. An emerald-green gecko had crawled in through the window and was clinging to the white tiles of the shower, tongue flicking in and out, tasting the moist air. She stepped into the shower, switched the tap on and gasped as the cold water hit her; the gecko skittered up the tiles and disappeared out through the open window.

After her shower, she dressed, made herself a coffee and went into the sitting room. Alex wasn’t there either and yet he was everywhere. The coffee table was littered with his things: an empty packet of Camels; a spare magazine for his Browning; a Khmer phrase book, the pages thumbed and curled; his white boxer shorts crumpled on the floor where she had tugged them off and thrown them. His scent on everything.

She wandered over to the bookshelf. Most of the shelves were tightly packed with books; the middle shelf held a few photographs in solid wooden frames. Some of the books were in English. She tilted her head to read the titles:
The Psychology of Behaviour
,
Human Instinct
,
Logical Chess
. Nothing military, or about mine clearing. Another life he had lived.

Dropping her gaze to the middle shelf, she studied the photographs. One was of a large white house at the end of a curving drive. Big picture windows looked out over a sweeping lawn; bougainvillea climbed up the walls from a flowerbed beside the front door and spread outwards above the porch, its flowers deep pink in the sunlight. The villa looked American – Palm Beach – or Spanish or Italian. Not Croatian. At least not what she would have expected Croatian to be from the news coverage of the Balkans conflict. Alex was right. She had watched and thought, as he had predicted, that they were all savages. All the same.

Was that what was happening out here in the White Crocodile minefield? Someone making judgements about those women, someone who thought they understood what was going on in their minds, their imaginations? Using the myth of the White Crocodile to terrify, kidnap and kill?

Family.
It’s about family
, she had told Alex. Was she right, or was that just her own past, the unfinished family business in her own life, talking?

Putting the photograph back, she ran her eye along the shelf. There was another photograph, unframed, lying on its face. Picking it up, she turned it over, and started.

The photograph showed Alex and Luke in a beer garden – the Riverside Balcony Bar – she recognised the wicker chairs and tables, the huge spreading trees shading them which made you feel as if you were sitting high up in the middle of the jungle. Luke had his hand up, two fingers raised in the victory sign, and he was laughing. He looked drunk. Alex, sitting across from him, was tilted back in his seat, arms folded across his chest. He wasn’t looking at the camera, he was looking at Luke, and the expression on his face was one of contempt. There was a cluster of empty beer bottles in the middle of the table, and something else. Tess shifted sideways so that the light from the window fell on to the photograph and lit the object on the table. It was baby pink, and she knew instantly what it was.

She heard something behind her and spun around. Alex was standing by the patio doors; he was staring at the photograph in her hands.

‘You shouldn’t look at people’s things.’

‘You shouldn’t leave people alone in your house if you don’t want them to look at your things.’

‘I’m not sure that it’s supposed to work like that, Tess.’

She held his gaze for a moment, turned and put the photograph back on the shelf, face down as she had found it. ‘You sent me the sock, didn’t you?’ There was challenge in her voice. ‘The pink sock.’

He dropped his gaze. ‘I wanted you to come to Cambodia. I wanted to meet you.’

‘And then you wanted me to leave again.’

‘I had no idea that things would escalate like this.’

Tess bit her lower lip. ‘How did you know I would come?’

‘Because I knew you before I met you. You’re a female mine clearer – there are precious few of those. And from what he . . . from what Luke said about you. You didn’t seem the type to leave well enough alone.’

‘You were right.’ She smiled. A smile that didn’t touch her eyes. ‘But perhaps I should have done. Though it’s too late now, isn’t it? For either of us.’

The sun was high, the sky clear. Heat shimmered off the tarmac of the airport’s runway as they drove past it, melting the outline of the buildings and vehicles beyond. Half a kilometre further on, Alex slowed and swung the Land Cruiser left to join a track which ran up a densely wooded hill towards Battambang’s orphanage.

Tess clutched the email she had forwarded herself from the police station. Alex had waited in the Land Cruiser while she ran into the King Fy Hotel and slipped the girl behind reception a couple of dollars to print out the email and the photograph. As Alex negotiated the throng of bicycles and mopeds clogging the town centre, she read it out loud to him. Detective Inspector Wessex, from Greater Manchester Police, wanted help in identifying a Cambodian woman who had been found dead in south Manchester. ‘Could you look at your missing persons lists?’ DI Wessex had written. Alex laughed.

‘Missing persons lists. Who does he think he’s dealing with? Interpol? The only list Battambang Provincial Police will have is a list of local businesses who haven’t paid their protection money.’

‘Don’t be such a cynic, Alex.’

The description DI Wessex had provided could have fitted eighty per cent of the teenaged Khmer women Tess had seen since she’d arrived in Battambang. Oddly, there was no photograph of the woman. The photograph was of a little boy, Dien Yathay, four years old. DI Wessex had also asked Battambang Provincial Police to see if they could track Dien down, and then call or fax him to let him know if the boy was safe.

‘I promised his mother,’ he had written.

Dien’s mother, Jorani, was working as a prostitute in Manchester. The fax didn’t make it clear how Dien or his mother were linked to the dead woman they had found.

‘I can’t believe you stole that email,’ Alex muttered, glancing across. ‘You would have been strung up if the policeman hadn’t believed your crap about Rolexes.’

Tess shrugged. ‘Well he did. Testament to my great acting skills.’

‘It doesn’t have anything to do with the White Crocodile.’

‘Why are you so sure? Another dead Khmer woman, a teenager, who has given birth.’

‘Found in Manchester. Thirteen thousand miles away from here.’

‘And another little boy missing his mother. Here, in Battambang.’

They almost missed the turning in the trees. Alex had to brake and reverse, then swing the Land Cruiser into the grassed-over drive. The ground was ridged with tree roots, and tangled undergrowth on either side created a natural alleyway, dragging against the doors of the Land Cruiser as they drove down it. After a hundred metres they pulled into an open grassed area in front of a squat two-storey building which reminded Tess of a Second World War bunker. It was austere and institutional-looking: beige paint peeling from its concrete walls, corrugated-iron roof dented and rusting, thick mosquito netting covering the small square windows.

‘Jesus, it’s a grim place,’ Tess said.

‘I imagine it’s cheap.’

They parked and climbed out of the Land Cruiser. They could hear voices from inside the building, and shouts and snatches of laughter, slightly louder, which sounded like they were coming from the far side. In one of the rooms a tinny radio played Kylie Minogue, accompanied by a warble of voices.

Inside the building was dark; it took a moment for their vision to adjust.

The hall was a rectangular space with a corridor that ran off it, left and right. A window at the back of the hall let mottled, rust-hued light through the mosquito netting. The walls of the hall were a dull coffee colour, the floor concrete laid with a couple of straw mats, worn to nothing in patches by too much tread. The air in the building was hot: a heavy, claustrophobic heat, and there was a strong smell of disinfectant, masking the slightly weaker tang of faeces and urine.

‘Can I help you?’ From the corridor to the left, a middle-aged Khmer woman had appeared. She was a head shorter than Tess, straight black hair cut into a neat bob and a gentle, open face. She was dressed in plain black shirt and black trousers: practical clothing.

‘
Sue-saw-day
.’ Tess held out her hand. ‘I’m Tess. Tess Hardy.’

‘
Sue-saw-day
.’ The woman shook it. ‘My name is Chanthou Long. I run the orphanage.’

Tess indicated Alex. ‘And this is my, uh, my friend, Alexander Bauer.’

The woman smiled and gave a half-nod towards Alex but made no move to take his hand.

‘We just wanted to talk with you, if you have a moment.’

‘Of course. Please.’ She turned.

Tess followed, down a narrow, dimly lit corridor which cut through the centre of the building. Doors opened off either side of it at intervals of a couple of metres, some closed, others ajar. Tess glanced into the rooms as they passed. Four metal-framed bunk beds were laid tightly together in each room, crammed into the four-metre-square space. The beds were mostly occupied, some children squashed together in sleep, others sitting on the floor, playing with plastic toys and chattering. They passed a room full of cots: twenty or more babies lying like little brown dolls, silent and unmoving.

They were quickly encircled by a clamorous pack of little children, in torn, stained T-shirts or dirty sagging shorts, but never, it seemed, both. The children pulled at Tess’s clothing, their little hands finding their way into her pockets, grabbing at her legs, trying to hold her hands.

Chanthou turned and tried to shoo them away, but Tess smiled and shook her head. ‘It’s fine.’

She clasped the hand of one little girl – four or five, she must have been – and the little girl grew a couple of centimetres in height in the short walk down the corridor, swelling with pride at being singled out for adult contact, her face split into a huge grin. Tess smiled down at the others, patted a couple gently on the arms, but kept walking, feeling as if she was pushing through a tide of children. She glanced behind her at Alex; he looked uncomfortable with the attention. He had his hand pressed to his stomach and for a moment Tess didn’t understand why, until she realised he was trying to keep the children from grabbing at his Browning.

The room they entered was large and in contrast to the hall and corridor, the air was cool and fresh. Double doors in the far wall opened out on to a patch of grass behind the building, where Tess could see a plastic swing set and slide, and a large window at the front looked on to the courtyard where they had parked. A few small children played on the slide, while others lolled on the grass in the sun. An elderly white woman was sitting under a tree, reading a book to a group of older children.

‘Please.’ Chanthou sat down behind a large teak desk covered in papers and indicated a chair across from her; it was the only other one in the room. ‘Sit down.’

Tess sat. She could sense Alex hovering somewhere behind her.

‘We don’t get many visitors out here, and particularly not Barang . . . Westerners,’ she corrected. She had a pleasant, almost melodious voice and spoke English virtually without an accent. ‘How can I help you?’

‘This might sound a little strange, but one of my friends met a Khmer woman, Jorani Yathay, in England – that’s where I come from. She’s . . . she’s working there. She said that she had left her son Dien in Cambodia, that he might be in an orphanage. My friend promised her that he would find out what had happened to her son. He asked me if I could look for him, make sure that the little boy was OK.’ Tess slid the printed photograph across the desk.

Chanthou took it. She was silent for a few moments. When she looked back up, Tess saw that her expression had changed.

‘Yes, her son is here. He has been here for a couple of months, ever since his mother—’ She tailed off. ‘His mother . . . she was a young single mother, living in a rural village near one of the huge minefields, out west of Battambang. She left . . . three months or so ago.’

‘Left?’

‘Disappeared. She is one of the disappeared. You’ve heard?’

Tess nodded.

‘Taken,’ Chanthou continued in a murmur. ‘By the . . . by—’

‘By the White Crocodile?’

Chanthou blushed. ‘It is ridiculous to believe these tales in this modern day, but they are buried deep.’ Pressing her hand to her chest, she continued. ‘Somewhere right in here, the heart, not unfortunately up here –’ she raised her hand and tapped a finger on her forehead – ‘where logic and reason would enable us to see sense. Come and I will show you where he is. He is one of my favourites. So little to be left.’ She shook her head. ‘So little.’

Chanthou led them back down the corridor, shooing the children out of the way as she went, and across the hallway into another, almost identical corridor. She walked slowly, reaching back to touch Tess on the arm, talking non-stop about the orphanage, the challenges they faced: the lack of interest from most Khmers in the children’s plight and the lack of money to do anything but keep the children as clean and well fed as they could, and teach them to read and write, little else.

‘We have some Western donors – small charities which support a number of Cambodian orphanages and send Westerners over here to work. And your Bob MacSween, of course. He comes here on a Sunday, once a month or so, to help out with odd jobs. And he gives us what money he can.’

‘MacSween?’ Tess couldn’t hide her surprise. ‘How did you know that we were from MCT?’

‘The Land Cruiser. The MCT logo. MacSween always drives an MCT Land Cruiser when he comes here.’

‘And he’s given you money?’

‘Not much.’ She smiled. ‘But when you have as little as we do, every cent is precious.’

Tess glanced back at Alex, but he didn’t seem to have heard. He was walking a few paces behind, his gaze cast to the floor, his mind somewhere else entirely by the look of him.

She looked back to Chanthou, who had stopped.

‘In here,’ she said, pushing a door open.

This room, like the others, was oven-hot and crammed with small bodies pressed tightly together in a mosquito-bitten, overheated, testy doze. In the far corner of the room, beneath the window, was what Tess thought for a second was a little brown dog curled in sleep. But when she crossed the room, she realised that it was a little boy, limbs curled into his chest, hands pressed tightly together, and twitching slightly as if he was dreaming.

‘That’s him – Dien,’ Chanthou whispered from the doorway. She didn’t seem fazed that he was asleep on the floor and when Tess knelt by the boy she realised why. Though it was dirty, it was also cool – the deep, permanent cool of concrete.

Dien had thought that he heard the dried boards of their hut creaking as they withered and shrank in the heat, but the sounds had faded as he drifted back to sleep. It was only when he heard his mother’s voice calling his name that he opened his eyes. His mother was kneeling on the floor next to him.

Dien sat up. He reached his arms out for his mother.

‘
Meak
,’ Mummy,
he said, and he smiled dozily waiting for her to fold him into her arms, to hug him.
Like a cat, Dien, like a cat.

Tess heard his sleepy mumble, watched the range of emotions playing across Dien’s face as he sensed her presence and began to wake: happiness, the corners of his soft mouth tilting upwards, then his forehead furrowed and he seemed to lose himself for a moment in uncertainty. He looked up at her and his eyes, unfocused with sleep, met hers.

‘
Meak
.’ Mummy. A huge smile spread across his face as he uncurled, his arms stretching out to her. ‘
Meak
.
Meak
.’ Mummy. There was something clutched in his fingers, a gold necklace bearing a tiny purple amethyst in the shape of a heart. He was trying to give it to her, she realised. She put her hand out and touched his arm, shook him gently to try to wake him fully.

‘No. I’m not your mummy, sweetheart.’ And she watched as he finally remembered where he was, why he was here. Recognised that moment between sleep and full cognisance where the brain was still living in the past – a self-constructed, dreamlike, perfect past – before reality cut in. Saw the joy at believing he was still safe at home with his mother fade into naked fear as reality dawned.