more precious than your mother.’
‘I do,’ I said, feeling a little guilty. I hadn’t spoken to my mother in over a week.
Hannah nodded as if my answer satisfied her.
‘It was cancer,’ she said quietly. ‘There was nothing they could do.’
‘I’m sorry,’ I said again.
She shook her head. ‘It wasn’t anybody’s fault, was it?’
I didn’t reply.
‘My father is a scientist, did you know? Extremely rich. Extremely clever. He couldn’t do anything, either.’
I nodded. She was right. Death just came at you sometimes. Sideways, from behind, head-on like a high speed train. And whichever way it came at you there was nothing you could do about it. I knew that better than most.
‘My father gave Mom a first-edition copy of Tender is the Night on their twentieth wedding anniversary. She treasured it like it was the most valuable thing in the world to her.’
‘Maybe it was…’ I paused for a moment. ‘After you, I should imagine.’
And got a smile this time. A sad one, though.
‘When she went it was like the light had gone out of the world, Mister Carter. All the warmth.’
‘Call me Dan, please.’
Hannah didn’t seem to be listening, lost in her own memories. ‘I feel sometimes that I’m still walking in the shadows, waiting for dawn,’ she said.
I thought of my mother and my dear departed dad and I knew how she felt. ‘The dawn does come,’ I said. ‘Eventually it always does come.’
‘Hope is the feathered thing.’
‘Emily Dickinson.’
‘You are a man full of surprises, Mister Carter.’
I let the mister ride and held my hand out. ‘It’s Dan, remember?’ I said.
‘I certainly do,’ she replied, shaking my hand and meeting my eyes this time and holding the grin. I smiled back at her myself. I was ahead of schedule.
‘I shouldn’t have told you my dad was a scientist,’ she said.
‘That’s okay. I know how to keep a secret. Kind of goes with the job.’
‘I guess so. I didn’t know they had private detectives in England. I thought it was all bobbies and police boxes.’
‘And some of us.’
‘Are you ex-police?’
‘Royal Military Police. Redcaps, we call them.’
‘You served overseas, then?’
‘I did.’
‘Like Jack Morgan?’
‘Jack was in Afghanistan. I was in Iraq.’
‘So what made you leave the military?’
I looked at Hannah for a moment or two before replying.
‘It’s too long a story for this flight,’ I said. She seemed to accept that and returned to her novel.
I closed my eyes and leaned back, the memory of that day flashing into my mind as clearly as though it had been yesterday.
The pain every bit as fresh. Remembering.
I didn’t know it at the time but it turned out that Hannah and I had a lot more in common than I thought.
Chapter 7
9 April 2003. Baghdad City, Iraq.
There were four of us in the jeep that afternoon.
Three men, one woman. One mission accomplished. Operation Telic. Signed, sealed, delivered. The end of the war.
At least, it felt like that. We were on our way to check into some reported post-conflict celebrations that were maybe getting a little rowdy. We couldn’t blame the boys – and had no intention of any strong-arm stuff. Enough people had been hurt as it was. Enough bodies sent home to be buried way before their time.
You couldn’t blame the lads for having a drink or two. Letting off a little steam. If you couldn’t celebrate today – then when could you?
The sun was shining as it had been every day since I’d started this tour of duty. But even that seemed different somehow. A brighter, cleaner, excoriating light. I knew that was nonsense but it felt that way.
The excitement in the air was certainly palpable. I hadn’t felt anything like it since I’d been a very small child and my whole street had turned out for a party to celebrate the Queen’s silver jubilee. That had been a hot, glorious day too.
The Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins once wrote some lines: ‘The world is charged with the wonder of God. It will flame out, like shining from shook foil.’
Well, God’s grandeur wasn’t evident around us then, truth to tell. We were in a particularly devastated area on the western outskirts of the city. Blown-up buildings left, right and centre, their roofs and top floors shattered and cracked like a scattering of ruined teeth. The scars of incendiary bombs and smoke and ash and wreckage strewn all around.
The city had been literally smashed apart. But what was in the air that day was hope. Hope – maybe that was what God’s grandeur really was all along. Because without hope what do you have? The three other people in the jeep with me all had fixed grins on their faces.
In the front passenger seat was Captain Richard Smith. He was in his thirties, a husband, a father, my superior officer and a man I would have followed into the very fires of hell. And sometimes in the last few weeks it had felt as though that was just where we’d been.
Beside him at the wheel was Lance Corporal Lee Martin, in his twenties. An irrepressible practical joker, a man who never had a bad word to say about anyone and would give you the last pound in his pocket.
Sitting by me in the back was my fellow sergeant, Anne Jones. Cropped blonde hair, could drink pretty much any man in the unit under the table and beat most of them at arm wrestling – but had a secret passion for the romantic novels of Catherine Cookson. I’d caught her reading a copy of The Cinder Path one day and she had threatened to cut off my manhood with a rusty knife if I told anyone about it.
Each one of us had a smile on our faces as we bumped along the uneven track through the bomb-blasted area. And it wasn’t just to do with the sun beating down and the banter and jokes as though we were on our way to a barbecue. It was do with the sense of achievement. A sense of closure.
Had I been consulted I would have said that I was against us ever coming to Iraq in the first place, but it wasn’t my place to say so and I was certainly never asked for an opinion. I was in the service. I did what I was told. That was what being in the army meant.
What felt so good that day was knowing that it was all over. Finally. There would be a clean-up operation for sure, but the armies had done their part. The weapons of mass destruction would be found now. No one had any real doubt about that – not on our side, at least.
The combined forces of mainly American and British troops had brought down a despotic regime. Justice was going to be seen to be done, finally, for the long-suffering people of this blighted land.
I looked across to my right where Sergeant Jones was flicking through some photos she had taken on a small digital camera. She paused at one photo and zoomed in a little. The huge twelve-metre-high statue of Saddam Hussein, erected in 2002 as a celebration of his sixty-fifth birthday, being pulled down by US troops in Baghdad’s Firdus Square.
