White Crocodile (9 page)

Her heart stopped.

A bird.
Christ.
She heard the clatter of wings off to her left, quickly eaten by the silence. Slowly, she let the air out of her lungs.
MacSween was right.
Fuck this.
She turned to go back. Took a step and stopped. She wanted to get out of the jungle as fast as possible, forget this whole mad plan. But she knew that she had seen something. Static, unmoving, anomalous in the patchwork of jungle green. She turned slowly back – and saw it again. A flash of incongruous colour.

She approached watchfully. A twist of fabric protruded from a pile of leaves, and she bent and pulled it out, knowing already what it was.

A pale blue woollen baby’s blanket, a teddy bear embroidered in one corner. The blanket was old, frayed and faded, the silken threads of the teddy torn so that it had only one arm.

At that moment she felt it again – the sensation that she wasn’t alone. Instinctively, she ducked down, clutching the blanket to her chest like a talisman.
Don’t let it happen. Don’t.
The Crocodile isn’t real.
Forcing herself to her feet, she walked forward; the jungle opened out in front of her suddenly, and she stopped stock still.

It was the baby’s mother, must be. She stood at the other side of the clearing, serene and proud, looking at Tess without blinking. Tess’s first thought was that the girl was afraid to walk back because they were in mined land. She was standing sharply upright, as if propped there. A fly buzzed lazily around her head. Tess took a step closer, and the sunlight fingered the delicate metal wire running around the girl’s neck, tethering her to the tree behind.

Tess’s second thought was that she was wearing a hat, something droopy and unformed. Then she realised that the top of the girl’s head had been struck so hard that the dome of her skull had lost its shape. Tess moved a few paces closer and the girl’s body, which had been half hidden by the leaves of the tree, came into sight. Her clothes were shredded, her body slashed in places, the wounds black and clotted with blood.
Tortured
. The smell hit her, so powerful she nearly staggered.

MacSween answered as soon as Tess pressed the call button.

‘Where are you?’

‘I’ve found her.’

‘And? Is she OK?’

No.
Tess spoke the word but no sound came out.

‘Tess, TESS . . . stay there. I’m coming. I’ll follow the track to find you.’

The radio clicked off, and again she was plunged into silence. Just her and the baby’s mother, facing each other. The eyes were wide and staring, focused on a spot just behind her. Tess backed up against a tree and waited. Thinking that she had almost forgotten what it was like to be this scared.

The room Dr Ung entered was cool and shady: the morning sunlight diffused by the mosquito mesh covering the windows. Trees outside cast shifting patterns against the screen. For a second the image reminded him of New York, and he couldn’t think why. Then he had it: a shadow-puppet show he’d seen one Hallowe’en in a theatre in SoHo. He often felt as though his entire experience in Manhattan was a figment of his imagination. Though he had grown up there, the legacy of wealthy parents who had bought their way on to one of the last helicopters leaving Phnom Penh as the Khmer Rouge stormed the city, America seemed to recede further every year. He could barely imagine returning now.

Ung moved over to the bed. Johnny’s eyes were closed and his body was perfectly still under the crisp white cotton sheet draping it, save for the slow rise and fall of his chest. Sitting down on the chair beside the bed, Ung eased it closer; its metal legs screeched across the wooden floor. No matter. He was the only person in the room who would hear it. Reaching out, Ung touched the tips of his fingers to Johnny’s forehead. He felt warm and smooth. The antibiotics were working, keeping the infection at bay. Early days, but this was one he might win. Physically at least.

Slipping his glasses off, he wiped his forehead on his sleeve.

Luke.

And now Johnny.

And even among his orderlies, a new name for that minefield. Or an old one, perhaps.
White Crocodile
. But Ung was an empirical scientist. In the ten years since he’d come back from New York he’d seen many things. Hundreds of land-mine victims, many less recognisable as human beings than Johnny. Some of his patients stuck in his mind; most didn’t. He’d operated on a pregnant woman sliced through the abdomen by a fragmentation mine, her dead baby curled in her uterus like a sleeping cat. He’d seen a three-year-old girl reduced to a legless torso by an anti-personnel mine, slopping in a lake of blood in the back of a bullock cart, her father unaware that he had been driving a corpse for the last few kilometres of the journey to the hospital.

But as the breeze picked up outside, and the pattern of leaves danced and plunged on the window mesh, he realised that the hairs on his arms were standing on end. Getting to his feet, he checked the IV line quickly and turned towards the door. Usually, he left the patients’ doors open, so that, back in his office at the far end of the hospital building, he could hear them call. He pulled Johnny’s closed; there would be nothing to hear for some time yet.

An hour later, Tess sat on the step of the dead girl’s hut, cradling her baby and listening to the crackle of the radio and the shouted commands as MacSween called in to MCT to report what they had found, and to ask Jakkleson to telephone Battambang orphanage, tell them they’d soon have another arrival.

On the doorframe beside her was the crude carving of a crocodile, gouged into the damp wood with what looked like the tip of a knife. MacSween had said nothing when she had shown it to him. Just shook his head and cast a quick gaze behind him at the field, silent and still in the swelling heat.

‘Don’t make a big deal about it. We’ll talk later, OK?’ he murmured as he walked away.

Médecins Sans Frontières were sending an ambulance to evacuate the body of the mother; the villagers had refused to arrange a funeral for her – a simple pyre in a field, it would have been, nothing more, and still they wouldn’t do it. No one was interested in taking her little boy either. MacSween had asked, cajoled, pleaded, got nowhere.

‘So the poor bitch is an outcast, even in death,’ Tess had heard him mutter.

The baby was quiet now, settled, staring up at her with huge shining dark eyes, his face unperturbed. He held her little finger in his fist, nibbling on the tip gently with his four tiny teeth. Hugging him close, Tess rested her cheek against his warm tummy and shut everything else out. The crackle of her radio as it tracked communications; MacSween’s footsteps as he paced backwards and forwards issuing instructions; the image of the baby’s mother tethered to that tree; the acid taste of vomit still on her tongue. For a while there was only the heat from his little body, the milky, baby smell of him, the silence, the sunlight spilling on the ground.

Despite everything – all the precautions she had taken to ensure she didn’t – she had fallen pregnant. Fourteen months ago now. She hadn’t been expecting it, hadn’t kept an eye out for signs. When her period had stopped she had assumed that it was stress-related: her recent tour in Afghanistan, the physical toll of her job. Luke’s unpredictable violence.

It had only been a month or two after they were married that he had first hit her. A slap around the face for having stayed out too late with her friends, for having got drunk:
You’re a married woman now. Behave like one.
As if having tethered her to him in law, he no longer needed to maintain a veneer of self-control. With the benefit of hindsight, she realised that it had been there all along: the dark side to the characteristics she initially found so intoxicating.

One evening, a couple of days after she found out that she was pregnant, he had come home, furious. She hadn’t told him, was still agonising over what to do. Whether to tell him and see if it changed things, or whether just to leave – which would mean leaving her life, her job, her home, everything.

What had set him off? She’d forgotten – could this be true? – to buy a Christmas present for his company commander, a chore he had allocated her the previous week. The company commander, an alcoholic fuckwit Luke would rail about in the pub. But Luke always needed everything precise, everything worked out. Nothing was trivial as far as he was concerned. Details mattered. There was more to it than that, of course. These were technicalities. She’d become a sort of conduit for the rage that was there anyway, she understood that now.

He had caught her at the top of a folding stepladder, as she was hanging the nativity star on their Christmas tree. He came up behind her, silent in his rage, and kicked the ladder from under her feet. She had no warning, no time to prepare herself for the fall. Crashing to the floor, she slammed hard on to her stomach. He stood above her, as she lay, winded and shocked, delivering hard, calculated kicks into her side, aiming for the soft flesh between the bottom of her ribs and her hip. It was only when he saw the blood pooling between her legs that he stepped back. There was suddenly so much of it.

He disappeared for a moment, and when he came back he was holding the receiver of the phone in one hand, a bunch of tea towels in the other. He dropped them beside her, and over the burring of the dial tone in her ear, she heard the front door slam. She called an ambulance, the first time she had ever done so. Every other time she had just limped upstairs and cleaned herself up, quietly, alone. This time, though, the blood made her frightened, and the pain in her abdomen was crucifying.

The nurse who broke the news that her baby hadn’t survived also talked to her about domestic violence.

‘There is no
type
,’ she said, busying herself by the side of Tess’s bed, checking the drip, smoothing the sheet, tucking and tidying. ‘It’s so widespread. Before I worked here, I thought that abused women were weak and pliable, people who couldn’t stand on their own two feet. If anything the opposite is true. I see so many clever, beautiful, brave women with bruises all over their faces and broken bones. Their partners think they’ll lose them, so they start subjugating them, destroying their confidence, just so they can hold on to them.’

Tess had listened to all this, lying still as a corpse, her eyes jammed shut. ‘You were
four months gone
, my love. A little boy.’ The nurse had held her hand as she wept, sitting quietly on the edge of the bed, the tilt of the mattress and the warm pressure on Tess’s hand the only indication that she was still there. Some time later, she had left, seeming to sense that Tess needed to be alone.

After she’d gone, Tess had opened her eyes. She was in a hospital room, clean and white, cold winter sun cutting in through the net curtains on to the bed, a drip stand next to her.

Four months gone.

She had made a shrine for her unborn baby in the corner of the graveyard – next to the grave she had chosen for her mother – a navy-blue teddy bear she had picked up in the hospital shop, already sodden and bedraggled, seated on a small pile of stones.

When she was old enough to begin to analyse people’s motivations, it had become easier to pretend to herself that her mother had died, rather than to think she was out there somewhere, knowing that she had a daughter. It made her feel less worthless, imagining a mother who couldn’t come back, rather than one who didn’t care enough to want to. So she had found an old grave in the far back corner of Amesbury graveyard, the headstone cracked, carved letters obscured by lichen.

She left Salisbury District Hospital in the middle of a sudden shower, caught the bus out through the rush-hour traffic on Fourmile Hill. By the time she reached Amesbury the rain had stopped as suddenly as it had started and the sun had come out, light glinting on the ruffled surface of the Avon, casting long shadows of the low brick buildings in the high street.

The only things that moved in the graveyard were wild rabbits, but they skittered for cover as she drew near. She exchanged smiles with an old woman standing by another grave. The corner where she had imagined her mother buried was overgrown, snarled with bracken and blackberry bushes. It was hard going – the grass was wet and unkempt. By the time she reached the stone, the shadows were getting long, and her flimsy ballet pumps were sodden and studded with seed heads.

She had nothing to bury. Four months wasn’t viable, not really a baby, the nurse had said. Her little boy had been what is termed a foetus, a miscarriage, without the right to a proper funeral. While she had been lying in the hospital bed, refusing to surface into her new reality, he had been tossed into the hospital incinerator along with the rest of the hospital’s refuse.

She sat there for a long time, still and silent, a pair of stone angels watching blankly from a nearby monument. After a while her thoughts curled in on themselves. What was she waiting for? Luke? Her mother? God? She looked at the sodden teddy bear on its pile of stones. It was stupid and pointless and not enough. She had lost and there was nothing left, and she nestled in the cold wet grass clutching the teddy and cried, wishing she could no longer feel.

Ten p.m. It had rained heavily for an hour just after the sun went down, and the air was cool and fresh; vapour steamed from the surface of the road. Behind her, shanty huts lined the riverbank. The smell of charcoal, a cooking fire, drifted over the water. Down the street there wasn’t a soul to be seen. Tess glanced each way again, just to be sure, then monkeyed over the padlocked gates and dropped with a crunch on to the gravel drive. The key to MCT House was hidden under the fallen statue to the side of the door – all the platoon commanders had been told this, in case of emergencies. She felt around until her fingers brushed its shaft, and slid it out.

The air that met her in the hall was musty. The house had a peculiar smell, damp but with a sweet undertone, like incense. A slant of memory intruded: the candied smell of rotting flesh, sunlight fingering the wire tied around a woman’s neck, and the feeling – so intense for a split second, it was almost as if she was back in the jungle clearing – of being too frightened to move, even to breathe.

She backed against the wall and stood still, taking slow, deep breaths, flooding her lungs with oxygen. It was twelve hours since she had found Jacqueline Rong’s body, and she had kept herself busy since then, knowing that if she stopped occupying her mind even for a moment, it would find its own entertainment.

She knew now that she couldn’t afford to wait passively for answers. She had to be proactive, take control, before another person died. But in the solitude of this house, with its smell and that stifling silence, the morning came back to her: Jacqueline, propped, eyes wide. She had an almost physical ache to switch on the lights, illuminate every corner of the house, but she couldn’t risk anyone knowing she was here.

A centimetre at a time, she felt her way across the hall to the stairs, where she started to climb, keeping her feet to the edge of the wooden treads to minimise the sound of her ascent. She reached the landing and stopped. A break in the clouds admitted a faint square of light through the picture window behind her. Shifting into the milky glow, she called, ‘Hello,’ into the emptiness, quietly at first, then louder. No response. Not that she had expected there to be.

She turned to the window. The garden was deserted, lit by a wash of moonlight which outlined the faint shapes of the trees and unkempt grass. Transposed over it all, in the glass, was her reflection, just the ghost of an imprint, like the negative of a photograph. Reaching out, she touched her image, trailing her fingers down the side of her cheek – hollowed from lack of sleep and missed meals.

She continued up the stairs to the next floor, past MacSween’s office – deserted, the stacks of papers arrayed on his desk like abstract chess pieces – along the narrow, dim hallway to Jakkleson’s door. The handle resisted, screeched thinly and then gave. His office was a small, square space tucked at the back of the building, one window facing the garden and the high stone wall beyond it.

Now, finally, she allowed herself some light. The single bare bulb flooded the room, illuminating four clean white walls, a filing cabinet, a computer on a large teak desk, the plastic of its monitor and keyboard cracked and yellowed with age. No papers, no mess, nothing out of kilter, the notices on Jakkleson’s board pinned in careful rows, an identical gap between each. A smell of the outdoors – of fields and pine forests – despite the closed windows.

A vase of orchids nestled on top of the filing cabinet, alongside the only personal thing in the room – a single photograph in a silver frame. A sleek blonde woman and two pale-skinned, azure-eyed girls, layered in wool and fur against the Swedish winter, Jakkleson standing behind them, his features flushed with cold. Her gaze moved to the vase. A hint of coral tinged the base of each sculpted white petal. She reached out and fingered one. It felt delicate, feminine, an alien presence here.

She sat down at Jakkleson’s desk and placed her hand on the mouse. The screen flickered, changing resolution, and an egg timer appeared, turning itself over a couple of times, emptying and refilling. The screen flickered again and a white skull and crossbones replaced the timer, the words ‘Danger!! Mines!!’ spelt out in blood red below it. A ‘File open’ icon drifted in the middle of the skull’s tombstone grin.
Jakkleson’s idea of a joke, maybe?

Moving the mouse to click the icon, Tess surveyed the list of folders. At the bottom, a line caught her eye:
Safety Records.
Her fingers moved across the keyboard and with a click she dropped lightly into the still water of the file.

Two icons this time, each with a name. The first, ‘Jonathan Douglas Hugh Perrier (injury) 18/10/12’.

And the second?

Quickly, she looked – away – back. ‘Luke Martin Hayder (death) 29/04/12’. Words jumped out at her from the block of text on the screen.

Anti-tank mine.

Booby trap.

Koh Kroneg.

Conclusion: Accident. Action: none

It sounded so formal. As if a piece of equipment had been lost in that minefield, not a person
.

Sitting back, Tess rubbed her eyes. Dropping her hands, she read the document carefully, ignoring the confusion of emotions, trying to see if there was anything that could help her.

But there was nothing. Just that Luke had been killed in a fuck-up with a booby trap. Totally plausible if she hadn’t been sure, beyond question, that there was more to his death than a simple, wholly believable accident.

Why didn’t I listen to you when you telephoned? Find out what was scaring you?

‘Luke,’ she said suddenly, dropping the mouse and turning towards the door. Her sudden sense of him was almost as if he’d walked into the room.
Luke, it’s because –
she curled her hands into fists on the desktop, digging her nails hard into her palms
– it’s because of what you did to me.
What I let you do to me. It’s my fault too . . .
She stopped open-mouthed, gazing around the empty room. Turned quickly and looked at the blank white wall behind her, ducked and scanned under the desk – she couldn’t help herself.
I’m going mad.

Dropping her hands back to the desktop, she fixed her gaze back on the screen, took the mouse in her hand, guided it firmly back to the first of the two icons. And in this document was everything they had discussed in the meeting yesterday morning. That Johnny had gone in the minefield to check out a skull, that the field had been muddy but not waterlogged, that the marker hadn’t been seen (may have been passed/lost during the explosion).
May have been passed.
She’d told them that she hadn’t passed it, but Jakkleson hadn’t believed her, hadn’t been certain at least.

Conclusion: still open (most likely missed mine).

Action: speak to Huan Rae (has not returned to work and has been uncontactable since).

Huan. A face on the team-room wall. A serious, circumspect face.
Huan.
Vital now that she knew there was more to Johnny’s injury than a simple missed anti-personnel mine. Where had Huan been the day Johnny was injured? And why hadn’t he been in contact with MCT since? Closing the file, she slid the keyboard and mouse into exactly the positions in which she had found them.

Then she began to search Jakkleson’s desk: opening and closing each drawer in turn, filtering carefully through its contents. But there was only the usual detritus: paperclips, a stapler, ruler, pens, pencils and rubbers, a stack of Mine Clearance Trust headed writing paper, all neatly ordered.

The filing cabinet then. But where would he keep the key? She hadn’t found one.
Probably on a chain around his neck.
Never mind. One of her boyfriends – chosen mainly to wind her father up – had taught her to pick bicycle padlocks when she was fifteen. The principle extended to any shitty lock. Taking two paperclips
from the holder on Jakkleson’s desk, she straightened them and moved over to the filing cabinet, meeting Jakkleson’s cool celluloid gaze. Flicking him the finger, she eased one paperclip into the lock. Once it was as far in as it would go, she pressed it gently but firmly against the roof of the cylinder where she could feel the row of five pins. It wasn’t a sophisticated mechanism. They clicked softly as she nudged them into position. Jamming the second paperclip into the lower half of the cylinder, she twisted. The lock stayed stiff and unyielding. She repeated the process, trying not to get frustrated.
Keep calm
. Locks were almost like living things, her boyfriend had told her, could sense impatience and never gave in to it. Finally the cylinder turned with a satisfying click, and breathing a sigh of relief, she pocketed her makeshift tools.

The top drawer contained files labelled A to L. She flicked through them quickly, just to make sure, but wasn’t surprised when Huan’s file wasn’t there.
Rae – Huan Rae – the drawer below then.
But just as she was about to shut this one, she noticed a file which had slid off the runner, lying flat against the drawer’s base. It wasn’t labelled. She lifted it out and slipped her hand in, felt the familiar sheen of photographs against her palm and thought of the MCT mugshots on the notice board in the team room. Turning, she emptied the file’s contents on to the desktop.

Her mouth fell open.

Photographs certainly, but not the ones she had expected. These were personal snaps.
Mementos.

The first showed a young Khmer woman lying on a grubby bed, naked, her brown legs spread. Her gaze was vacant. Unseeing eyes turned away from the camera. Tess had seen that expression before on children with rough parents, about to be smacked for something they hadn’t done. The light from the flash had illuminated the walls of a tiny room: the wooden slats of a hut, barely a foot of space between the edge of the single bed and the wall. The bed was covered in a filthy sheet, stretched tight over its frame. The flash had also caught a poster pinned up behind the bed. The baggy carcass of a condom, the words ‘Protect yourself from AIDS’ written in capitals beneath it, with a Khmer translation below.

Another photograph showed Jakkleson standing – too close to the camera, as if he was holding it himself – out-of-focus arm, torso and erect cock, the girl lying back on the bed, her hips jacked up. She could tell it was Jakkleson from the gold wristwatch that had slid from the cuff of his shirtsleeve yesterday morning, when he had shaken her hand.

As Tess gathered them up hurriedly, she realised something else. The photos were not of the same woman. They were similar, incredibly so. All Khmer. All teenagers, she guessed, some barely into their teens from the look of them. All with wide, innocent faces, dark eyes and long, dead straight black hair. But they weren’t the same girl.

Oh, God.
She felt sick.
Dirty herself having touched them
.
She remembered what MacSween had said: ‘
Corruption. Exploitation. Sexual tourists and paedophiles from the West.’

It was happening right under his nose.

Johnny opened his eyes, sticky with mucus, stared through the crack of his vision at the white of the ceiling, at the rattan fan spinning above him – thwack – thwack – thwack – tilted his head towards the window, to the leaves of the trees outside casting shifting patterns of light and shade over the mosquito mesh.

He felt secure in this cool, tranquil room. Safe.

Safe?

The thought surprised him, and he frowned groggily. What was there to be afraid of? He tried to think but his thoughts were grains of sand slipping through his fingers.

He closed his eyes. That smell. What was it? The gunpowder smell of TNT. Another. Raw, metallic. Blood.

And something else. Emptiness. An absence – the vacuum left by sheared nerves. As though he’d been bitten.

His eyes snapped open.