get the people to come and watch, and he did as he was ordered, until there was a small crowd in front of the Headmaster's home. He could not face his own people, nor could he face the Headmaster who was made to stand in front of the door of his home, nor could he face the weeping wife of the Headmaster who was held back by the irregulars. They shot him first in the legs, and then in the stomach, so that death would be slow.
When the Headmaster died, the men of the village and Milan, led by the irregulars, were climbing the track in the woods, going where the Headmaster had told them they should go.
Ulrike drove the car, and Ham talked all the way. Ham talked his bullshit, of battles and fire fights, and Ulrike drove and said nothing, and Penn lay across the back seat of the car.
He was leaving behind him Dorrie's place. He was quitting Dorrie's war.
The boot print was sharp in the mud of the track, and the man had worn military boots when he had been brought to the school. They had the clear tread of the boot to tell them that the Headmaster had not lied when the cigarettes had been stubbed out against his stomach, and the evidence quickened their pace up the track through the trees. There was a light rain falling in the trees and heavy cloud coming from beyond the hill, and Milan could see the rain, later, would be heavier. He was at the head of the column and walked immediately in front of the leader of the irregulars. His own people were behind him and he could not see their faces and he did not know what their enthusiasm for the work was. It was where the Headmaster had said it would be, the cave entrance between the two large rocks, and in the worn mud close to the entrance was the boot print squashed over the lighter traces. Milan could smell her… There were many torches crowded into the narrow cleft of the cave's entrance, and the beams caught her. There was laughter behind Milan. The torches found her cringing back at the far wall of the cave, like a trapped rat. There was more laughter behind Milan. Milan turned. He called forward Milo who had the scratches on the cheeks of his face, and he gestured forward Stevo who had the bruised privates. There were many pressing behind him to see the trapped rat that was Katica Dubelj who had fed him and most of them with their lunches at the school… She was the trapped rat and her mouth seemed to snarl at the torch lights, and she had no teeth, and she was the evidence. He knew that the man had not been found, and he knew that a lorry with failed brakes had crashed the checkpoint at Turanj, and he knew that his name was on a file in Karlovac, and on another file made by the Political Officer at Topusko, and the trapped rat was the eyewitness. He wondered if he would tell Evica…
The hand of the leader of the irregulars was on his shoulder, pushing him into the cave.
'You're not telling me, in honesty, that you wrote it up…?'
'Of course I wrote it up, Arnold, I wrote up what you told me.'
'Georgie, it was in confidence…'
Georgie Simpson didn't like to face him. Not that he would have described Arnold Browne as a friend, not really possible for Six men to be friends with Five men, but he was almost fond of the man. They had nothing in common, not hobbies, not holidays, not career paths, but he had come rather to enjoy their weekly session and weekly lunch. That would all be behind them now, the sessions and the lunches, there would be different men given the job and few enough confidences exchanged then… He didn't like to face him because Arnold Browne made no attempt to hide his quite positive anguish.
'I'm not proud, and I'm not a happy man. I put a memorandum in, I reported our conversation… This morning, Arnold, and I might face a firing squad for telling you, this morning I was summoned on high. I was instructed to telephone you, arrange an extraordinary meeting, I was to pump you, Arnold. You said your man was 'dogged'…'
'You reported my confidences back, you should know what I said.'
Georgie Simpson ignored the sarcasm, no citations to be won here, best ignored. 'You said your man would go to the end of the road… We have a listening post at Zagreb airport. We monitor Serb radio traffic principally. We have 2,500 troops in Bosnia, we have to know what's planned. Please don't interrupt me, Arnold, please don't. The radios are monitored twenty-four hours, but obviously we're not wasting our time interpreting whether General Mladic wants express delivery of new loo paper, soft tissue. We have trigger words. When a trigger word comes up then the transmission gets classified Immediate for analysis. Obviously their tongue-twisted version of 'British' is a trigger. It's been pretty shambolic transmission, but we picked up 'British spy' and 'British investigator', captured then escaped, and the transmission was coming out of a village called Salika, and there was a name… What I'm telling you, Arnold, in confidence, is that Salika is adjacent to Rosenovici, and the name of the spy, investigator, is Penn…'
He thought he might have smacked poor Arnold Browne across the bridge of the nose, to make his eyes water.
'What are you going to do?'
'Your people are out of their depth, Arnold. They are meddling in matters beyond their remit… Our station officer, Zagreb, if your dogged Mr. Penn gets safe back to base, will pick him up by the scruff of his neck and throw him on the first plane to Heathrow. And your lovely lady will be told by my hairy-arsed director to cease interfering. Your Penn is a busted flush, I'm afraid, and we'll be taking his legs off at the knees… Sorry, Arnold, but it's a sharp game, ours, and that's the way it'll always be…' corner.
Penn dictated and Ulrike typed and Ham whined away in the corner. He was rambling, contradicting himself, coming to stand behind her and reading what she had down on paper and changing it. It was full of errors because it was an old stand-up typewriter that she had begged from reception and the arms were forever sticking because it had been on the floor of the back office and was clogged with muck. Ham was muttering to himself, wallowing in his own pity, and they ignored him except for when he filled the glasses.
'No, I need what Alija said before I have what Sylvia said, and what Alija said should be in direct quotation, because she is the more important eyewitness. 'The women who were with me, they said she was so brave. The women said she was an angel…'I want that in direct quote.'
'So, where then does Maria go, does she go after the American? You know what this will do, Penn, when it reaches them? It will break them, you know that…? Right… for the top copy, Maria and then Alija and then Sylvia, and then your journey…'
Ham said, splashing the drink from the bottle, 'Get it down you, squire, 'cause you bloody earned it, and don't leave yourself short of credit. Take the bloody credit for what you did. We never got the bloody credit for what we did, the Internationals, when we held those fuckers at Sisak. If they'd broken us at Sisak, where Billy and Jon Jo were zapped, where Herb who was A.W.O.L. from the Guards was fragged, where the big Oz guy went, they'd have been in fucking Zagreb for tea. Didn't give us any bloody credit… You make double bloody certain, squire, those posh smart arses know what you did…'
Slow going in the hotel room, the writing of Penn's report.
And what it would do to them, that was not his problem.
Because Mrs. Chadwick had the flu, Mary worked in the kitchen alone. Most times, when there was dinner for friends, Mrs. Chad-wick came in to help. Mary was happier alone actually… Other friends, of course, had daughters still at home who would flick the recipe pages and find the outrageous and get the exotic into the Aga. The sun was going down, slanting through the window and onto the wide pine table… She hadn't a daughter… She worked briskly at what she did best, boring food. She had the clock on the wall to guide her, and if she worked briskly then everything would be in place, and there would still be time for her in the last light to walk the dogs through the village to the church… The report was two sheets, closely spaced typing, and there were Penn's last notes handwritten in the margin. He glanced down at the two sheets, and the words were a jumble for his eyes. There was precious little left in the bottle, and there was precious little down on two sheets of typing paper… precious little to tell of eleven days. They were all allocated their lines, and they had caps for the typing of their names. He should have felt an elation, should have felt proud and strutted the length of the room. But there was only an emptiness… He should have wanted to share his pride. He had no conceit. It did not seem significant to him that he had made the march, learned, and ultimately broken clear from the certainty of death… He had been close to Dorrie and he thought that he had joined the queue of those who had failed her. In his terms, her life was worth just a report. It was the measure of how she had driven him, mocked him, that his best effort was just a report. It was as if, in his mind, she had given him the one chance of his life to walk alone from the herd, to walk tall above the herd, and he had failed to take that chance. He felt a failed man, not a changed man. The old disciplines were supreme. A clear and brief report sent immediately, a fuller report to follow, just what he would have done after a week's session in the surveillance team, what he would have done for a client of Alpha Security… He would never forget her, and now he would turn his back on her. He would go back to the office above the launderette, and the
