protect them from pillage and ensure their adequate care; and the dead must be searched for and their spoliation prevented… At all times the wounded, sick and shipwrecked must be treated humanely without any adverse distinction founded on race, colour, religion or faith, sex, birth, wealth or any similar criteria.'
The aircraft's wheels touched down.
She was reading, 'Paragraph 1866/Conflicts not of an International Character… Treat humanely persons who take no active part in the hostilities, including members of the armed forces who have laid down their arms or are rendered unable to take part by reason of wounds.. . violence to life and persons including murder… the passing of sentences and carrying out of executions without a proper trial upon non-combatants are prohibited. The wounded and sick must be cared.. .'
The music played cheerfully over the loudspeakers as Mary Braddock put away in her bag the notes and the two sheets of the faxed report.
Sixteen.
The pain beat against the bone behind his temples, and there were needle pricks behind his eyeballs, and there was a battering throb behind his ears. It had been a hell of a long time since Penn had been this hungover. The others were still asleep. He was padding, half-naked, round the room, moving without order, stumbling round the bed where Ulrike slept, hiking his feet over Ham's outstretched body. He should have been working to a system, should have cleared the bathroom first, then been to the wardrobe and had his shoes off the floor and his shirts and underwear and socks out of the drawers and his jackets and slacks off the hangers, and then he should have been gathering up everything that belonged to him from the shelf below the mirror including the two typed sheets that had gone for the fax transmission. But there was no system, the pain dictated that there was no order in his packing. Penn blundered around, collecting, forgetting, carrying, cursing the aftermath of the alcohol. He couldn't hold his bloody concentration, not at all. He had the case on the bed, and now he was emptying the case because the shoes and the plastic bag for his toothpaste and his shaving cream and razors were out of place, should always be shoes at the bottom and washing gear, and then the dirty clothes and then the clean clothes and then the folded trousers and then the jackets, and the whole bloody lot were out of order… Ulrike slept hard as he skirted the bed, and Ham slept deep as he stepped over his legs and that horrible bloody rifle, because both would have been awake through the night, watching for him. They were a holiday friendship, he knew, and they would be gone, belted out, when the big bird lifted off the tarmac at Zagreb airport. Ships that pass in the night, that sort of crap. They slept now because they had stayed awake through the night and watched his own sleep, and the thought of it, through the pain and the confusion of packing out of order, made Penn feel humility. He wouldn't see her again, nor would he chase after Ham's woman who had done a runner with her kiddie. But they had watched over him while he slept, a lonely woman and a small scumbag frightened because he hadn't a friend. He might tell Mary Braddock about them, because they were each in their way a part of his finding Dorrie's truth. Or then he might not get to see Mary Braddock. When he hadn't the pain in his head he could work it through whether he would see Mary Braddock, or whether it would just be the fuller report in a week's time and the full invoice of his charges, sent in the post by Recorded Delivery…
He had never been drunk incapable when he was a teenager living at home in the tied cottage, because that was the example of his mother and father, his mother taking only a sherry at Christmas and his father talking of it like it was a devil. He had been drunk incapable once when a clerk at the Home Office, and taken out to a party in the Catford flat of another clerk, and thinking afterwards that it might just have been because he was so bloody boring that they had spiked the drinks and had good sport out of him reeling and crashing and throwing up in the street; and ashamed. He had been drunk incapable once when with Five, and they had worked seven weeks on a surveillance before showing out on a shift change into the derelict van with the flat tyre that was parked up opposite the safe house, and the Irish target gone and lost, and the guys going down to the pub when the operation had been called off with heavy recrimination and an assistant deputy director general level inquest, and sleeping on the floor of the taxi home; and ashamed.
Now, he had no sense of achievement. There was no elation. It was just a report that he had written, as he had written previous reports that cut into the lives of the dead and the vanished and the criminal, as he would write further reports. He wanted out and he wanted home, and he wanted to sleep out of his system too much goddamn Scotch, and he wanted the bastard place behind him, and the fear, the shit, the pain. It was only a report… And the one chance was gone.
He had the shoes back at the bottom of the case, and the washing gear with them, and the underpants and the socks into the space between the shoes and the washing bag, and the dirtied clothes and the ones that he hadn't used. He was starting to fold the slacks and the jackets. The fatigues that he had worn into Sector North were on the floor near to where Ham lay stretched out, holding the bloody rifle like it was a baby's toy, and the fatigues weren't going with him, nor the boots that were under them, and he heard a brisk knock at the door.
Penn went round the bed and he stepped over Ham's legs.
The knock was repeated, impatiently. He opened the door of the hotel room.
Penn rocked.
She peered into the gloom. Late morning, closing on midday, and the curtains of the room were not drawn back. Mary peered past the shadow-dark figure that rocked in front of her. Yes, she had expected surprise, but the man could hardly stand, and the light from behind her in the corridor seemed to dazzle his eyes and he could not focus on her. She came into the room and with her heel she nudged the door back shut behind her. Only the light now from the bathroom, and the shadow-dark figure was backing away from her, away from the narrow strip of light from the bathroom. She came past the door and into the room. The smell in the room was foul, quite defeating the eau de toilette scent that she had sprayed at her throat and wrists in the taxi from the airport. On the plane and in the taxi from the airport, she had rehearsed what she would say to him, how she would be cool but goading, and what she had rehearsed was thrown from her mind. If she had wanted to she could not have controlled it, the sharp spasm of her anger.
'Good morning, Mr. Penn…'
No reply from him, and he was stumbling back further from the bathroom light as if to hide in the grey gloom of the room.
'… How are we, Mr. Penn?'
Just a growl of a response.
She was going forward into the centre of the room, coming closer to the bed that he skirted when she saw his case on the bed and the shape of the woman on the bed. The blouse of the woman was unbuttoned halfway down to her navel and she could see the sexless strength of the woman's brassiere and the white skin. 'A little end-of-term party, Mr. Penn? Got demob happy, did we, Mr. Penn? Hit the bottle, did we, Mr. Penn…? The bottle and a bit of skirt, Mr. Penn?' 'It's not what…' 'What I think? You wouldn't have the faintest idea what I think, Mr. Penn. If you had had an idea then you would not have ignored my telephone calls to this hotel. You would not have bloody well abandoned me.' 'You wouldn't know…' 'What it was like? Just a silly woman, Mr. Penn? A silly woman incapable of understanding? A woman to be fobbed off with a two-page fax?' The growl spluttered in his throat. She saw the gleam of his teeth and his words came haltingly. 'She wasn't my daughter.' 'What the hell does that mean?' 'She wasn't my daughter, and if she had been my daughter then she would not have been bad-mouthed to every stranger I could get my claws on.' She laughed, shrill. 'We make judgements now, do we, Mr. Penn? We know more than a mother does about her daughter, do we, Mr. Penn? Exactly what I need, wonderful…' And she was following him through the grey gloom of the room, and the woman on the bed stirred. He said to her, and the life had gone from his voice, and there was only a tiredness, 'If it was just anger then you wouldn't have come, if it had just been anger then you would have stayed away. You came because of the guilt…' 'Don't lecture me.' 'Because of the guilt, because of the shame, because she was your daughter and you didn't know her.. .' She was following him. She was drawn to him. Suddenly there was a startled grunt in the darkness ahead of her and she saw the heaped clothes that stank and the sudden movement of the body in front of her, and the rifle was coming up and the muzzle caught against her stocking at the knee.
'… It's fine, Ham, it's Dome's mother. It's Dorrie's mother who's come.'
Perhaps it was the calm that had come to the voice now, perhaps it was the gentleness that tinged the voice.
