tattoo, and the table in the guardhouse was stacked with cartons of Marlboro cigarettes. The guards at the barrier had wanted Jovic gone. Fast instructions. Penn guessed the cigarettes were black market, and knew it was not his business.
'The front line was already north of our village. It was not possible to go by road. We were isolated in Rosenovici. The fighting was all around our village and at night we could hear the guns, and in the days we could see the tanks of the Partizans moving forward on the main road, but the war had not yet come to Rosenovici. We felt some safety because we had always had good relations with the Serb people in Salika. We put our trust in those good relations. They were our friends, they were our neighbours, they were our work colleagues. We felt that they would speak up for us. We were no military threat to the Serb people in Salika, there were very few guns in our village, we could have done nothing to intervene in the war…' Her name was Maria. She shared a room with her sister that would have been small for the occupancy of an officer cadet. She said her sister was in the city that day, searching for work. She said that she had been secretary to the export manager of a furniture factory in Glina. She said that she was divorced. The room was spotlessly clean. Penn thought she had little to do, a refugee, but clean the room. As he listened, his eyes roved over the room, and he saw there were no ornaments, nothing of the past of a woman he estimated to be in her mid-forties, no bric-a-brac, nothing to sustain memories. 'She came with a boy from Australia. She came because he returned to his home. When the war started there were many boys who came back to their country. I suppose they wanted to help, wanted to fight. They were not soldiers, this boy was not a fighter. We believed we would be safe, and when we found that we were not safe, then all the roads to the north were blocked. It was a Tuesday night when the artillery guns and the tank guns were turned on Rosenovici. Some people tried to flee that night, they went into the woods and they said they would try to walk in the woods and the hills until they reached the lines of the Croatian army. I don't know what happened to them. The rest of us, we thought that it was a mistake by the regular army to fire on our village, we thought that there would be liaison with Salika, with our friends and neighbours and work colleagues. We thought they would tell the Partizan officers that they should not fire on us. They fired on our village all through the Wednesday. There were only rifles in the village to shoot back at them. It was on the afternoon of the Wednesday that her boy was wounded…' Seeing Mary Braddock in the kitchen, drinking the coffee, feeling the warmth of the Aga, listening to the calm telling. The sixteenth birthday party, and Charles away on business, and Mary trying to do the right thing, and inviting in the teenagers of her friends in the village on the Surrey/ Sussex border, and buying a new dress for Dorrie, and Dorrie not wearing it, and the village boys from the council houses crashing the evening, and Dorrie dancing. 'Across the lane from the church was a big farmhouse, Franjo's and Ivana's farmhouse. It was the oldest building in the village, it had the best and the biggest cellar. It was where the wounded fighters were taken. It was the fighters who were hurt because they tried to hold a defence line, they could not hide in buildings. Some were hurt, dead, some were hurt, wounded. She brought him back from the defence line to the cellar in the farmhouse of Franjo and Ivana. She was so small and he was a heavy boy and he could not help himself. She carried him back across the fields from the defence line and the snipers were shooting at her, and we could hear their voices, the snipers, and they were shouting to each other and making bets as to which would hit her. She brought him to the cellar and she went again across the fields to the defence line to bring another back.. .' Dorrie dancing. Dorrie in her jeans and black T-shirt. The boys, her friends, smoking their marijuana and passing the pills, and the teenage kids of Mary's friends drifting away and frightened. Mary coming from the kitchen, helpless and control lost, and Dorrie on the oval walnut-veneer table that had cost Charles 2,800 at auction and stripping out of her jeans and the T-shirt and her pants as she danced. Mary standing in the doorway, stunned, silent, seeing Dorrie's shallow breasts and seeing the straggle of the coming hair, hearing the splintering of the antique table. 'She was alone with the wounded fighters all through the Wednesday night. By the time the darkness came on the Wednesday night, the Partizan snipers had come so close that the farmhouse of Franjo and Ivana was cut off from the rest of the village. We could not reach the cellar and the boys there were too hurt to make their own way out. She could have come. In the darkness she, alone, might have managed to come. I think she chose to stay.. .' The council house boys clapping their hands, speeding the dance, the white flashes of Dorrie's body. The dance finished when the table had collapsed and splintered. Dorrie drunk, Dorrie smoking, Dorrie popping the pills, Dorrie swearing abuse at her as she stood stunned, silent, in the doorway. Mary had told it calmly. Mary had said that it was done to hurt her. 'It was on the Thursday afternoon that the village fell. On the morning of the Thursday, before it was light, many people had left the village, gone with what they could carry into the woods. I and my sister, we could not go, our home where we had sheltered was close to the store in Rosenovici and that is on the east of the village and it was open to the shooting from Salika. 'There were very few of us left in the village when it fell. I had thought that it would be the regular troops who would come into the village when the flag was raised. There was a sheet tied to a stick and it was held out from a window of the store. It was people from Salika who came into the village, it was our friends and neighbours and work colleagues. They came across the bridge from Salika. They all wore uniforms, but I knew them as the carpenter who had made the table for my kitchen, and the gravedigger who had made the grave for my father when our own gravedigger was ill, and the postman who brought the letters to our village, and others that I knew, and commanding them was the man who was a junior clerk in the co-operative at Turanj. They took everything that we had, our wristwatches and our earrings and our necklaces and our money. They put us onto a lorry and they took us to a camp at Glina, what had been the prison there. I urinate blood because of what was done at Glina 'And Dorrie, what happened to Dorrie?' 'She was with the wounded in the cellar of Franjo's and Ivana's farmhouse when the village was taken…' 'What happened to her?' The tears streamed on the woman Maria's face. Jovic said, 'She doesn't know. She has told you everything that she could know…' Penn had been hunched forward on a small hard chair, and he had been writing hard. He sat back. He saw the face in the doorway, and the shabby washed-through uniform. He did not know how long the van driver had been listening, the man with the full and round face and the cropped skull and the tattoo on his neck. The woman, Maria, was speaking, and she had taken Penn's hand with urgency. She was choking the words. When he looked back to the door the face of the van driver was gone. He realized what the tattoo was, the wings and the parachute. Gone. Jovic translated, without emotion, without expression. 'She was an angel. She stayed with them when no one else stayed with them. She was an angel in her prettiness, and an angel in her courage…' Penn squeezed the woman's hand. He followed Jovic out into the sunlight. There were children playing, kicking a ball, there were women hanging out washing on lines slung from the trees that were in first blossom. Jovic asked, cool, 'It will be good for your report, yes?' The potential reader had to know the man. If the man were not a composite, not a picture, then quite impossible for any future reader of the file to comprehend. Not easy, damn difficult, to make the picture. Henry Carter, sweating now because Library was so damned hot, tried to make a shape of the morsels available. NAME: Penn, William Frederick. DOB: 27 May 1958. FOB: Cirencester, Gloucs. PARENTS: George Wilberforce Penn (farm labourer) and Mavis Emily (nee Gordon). 4, the Farm Cottages, Ampney Crucis, Nr Cirencester, Gloucs. EDUCATED: Driffield Primary, and Cirencester Comprehensive (name unlisted), 5 O levels, A levels in Geography and History.
EMPLOYMENT: SUBSEQUENT
EMPLOYMENT:
MARRIED:
MARITAL ADDRESS:
HOBBIES: RECREATION: INTERESTS: SUMMARY:
Home Office 1978-1980, clerk grade. Security Service 1980-1992 (resigned). Worked in F Branch (Subversives) and A4 (Surveillance). 'Capable officer in area of field work, but limited in ability to analyse complex material.'… (Join the club, young man!)… Resigned after being informed by Personnel that progress into General Intelligence Group was restricted to academic graduates.
Alpha Security Ltd, Wimbledon, SW19, as private investigator.
Jane Felicity (nee Perkins) 1989. 1 son, Thomas Henry, DOB 9 January 1993. 57B the Cedars, Raynes Park, Surrey.
None listed. None listed. None listed.
Had reached a plateau at Security Service. Was unwise to challenge promotion system. Could have continued at existing level. Perhaps believed he would be persuaded to stay, to withdraw his resignation. 'Deeply wounded' that no such persuasion was offered? (my note HC).
Not much there, damn all there, the old desk warrior thought, and absolutely nothing there to give prior warning as to how the young man would react when confronted with that bloody awful place, with that surfeit of bloody awful misery.
More for Penny to type up when the dragon, the day shift supervisor, went for her rest-break and canteen
