‘You disgrace yourself if you do nothing.’
‘She climbed too fast.’
The agha Bekir rose from his chair. The silk robe swirled around his body. Behind the sweet words and the wringing hands, Haquim could see detestation for the young woman who had taken him to the edge of Kirkuk. His feet, snug in light embroidered slippers, slid across the floor towards the inner door. Haquim thought the bastard would sleep well.
He felt old, weary, and the dusty uniform clung to his body. The double doors behind him were opened silently: the audience was concluded.
Haquim went out of the building and into the night that had fallen heavy on Sulaymaniyah. His last effort for her had won no reward.
He drove away towards the dark lines of the mountains where the air was clean, where he could still dream of the city that had been their goal, and the flame.
Meda walked into the cell, the door rattled shut behind her and the boots went away down the corridor.
She had been woken, taken to a room where harsh lights burned, read a statement from a typed sheet of paper, then wheeled round and marched back to the cell. She was alone, and when the boots had gone there was only the quiet around her. She sagged to her knees, crawled to the hole, put her mouth close to it and whispered, in a small voice, that she was to be hanged at dawn. She asked for him to hold her hand till dawn came. She heard his laboured breathing. She reached with her arm deep into the drain but in a moment of respite he slept and did not take her hand. She did not shout into the hole to rouse him, did not cry for him, because she thought it would be cruel to wake him. It was many hours since she had heard the rifle fired, and she looked up at the high window where the stars were and she did not know how long it would be until the light dismissed them.
‘My colleague, Dr Williams, did most of the talking and I did most of the listening. Fred, that’s Dr Williams, wanted a witness. Fair enough – it’s not every day a civilian comes in off the street to learn about the Iraqi armed forces. It could have been a can of worms for Fred if he’d turned out to be a mercenary, looking for kicks from killing people, so I sat in.’
It was still dark outside the building. Ken Willet could hear the chatter in other offices of the early-morning work of the cleaners, muffled by the Hoovers. He knew the block, Centre for War Studies, from his own years at the Royal Military Academy, but the psychiatrist had not been there at that time. Rupert Helps had pleaded a busy day, a first lecture at 8 a.m. then a filled, sacrosanct diary, and an evening engagement. Dr Williams was at NATO in Belgium for the week, but the psychiatrist had heard – on a routine visit to the Commando Training Centre at Lympstone – of the interest in Augustus Henderson Peake and had offered his help. Willet would have bet that Rupert Helps would have run barefoot over broken glass to help.
Ms Manning asked, ‘What did Dr Williams tell him?’
‘I didn’t listen that closely – Fred’s the expert, you see. We hear it every lunchtime in the mess, his views on the Iraqi armed forces – myself, I think he’s slightly overrated.
Anyway, a resume to give an idea of the usual lecture. The Iraqis are a defensively minded and centralized military machine. Faced with the unexpected, they will be slow to react because middle-ranking officers are not able to take field decisions. So, at first, they can be caught out, lose ground and positions. Once they’ve steadied their nerve and had orders from on high they are efficient. That was the germ of it – a sudden attack will make early advances, then there will be a regrouping, consolidation, counter-attack… then reprisals. I don’t think he’d thought of that. He was jolted. I’d wager my shirt on Fred having the right appraisal of that scenario, but it is pretty obvious. The insurgents -
Kurds, yes? – would go through villages and towns, and think they were a force of liberation, but God help the poor bastards who cheered them. It’s the same through history – do you know your ‘Forty-five rebellion? The Young Pretender marched south and took Carlisle, Lancaster, Manchester, and idiots cheered him to the roof, but they were backing a loser. There’s always some nasty little creature who remembers who cheered the liberators loudest, who is going to dangle from a rope when the tables are turned – there were a great number of hangings in those northern English cities when the Highland army retreated… Back in Iraq, the same is true – the reprisals would be brutal.
He went very quiet, like the wind was out of his sails. Fred told him about the terrain he’d be in, a little about how to cope with hunger, thirst, lack of sleep, heat. Then I chipped in.’
‘What exactly was your contribution?’ Willet asked drily. He had taken a fast and certain dislike to the psychiatrist. Perhaps it was the time in the morning, dawn not yet on them, perhaps it was the man’s flamboyant bow-tie of vivid green and primrose yellow, perhaps it was the long hair gathered at the back of his head with an elastic band.
‘If I’d reckoned him a mere psychopath, I’d have stayed quiet.’
Willet persisted, ‘What would interest a psychiatrist like you?’
Rupert Helps beamed, and preened pleasure at being asked for his expert opinion.
‘He’s not a rounded man. I assessed him as an innocent, rather juvenile – a child, unwilling to grow up and shed a world of romance, but decent. You with me? Peter Pan syndrome. The talk of reprisals was the give- away.’
‘Sorry, but you haven’t told me what your contribution was.’
‘I told him to forget it. He should nurse his own problems and ignore other people’s difficulties. I said he should put himself first.’
Ms Manning gazed into the psychiatrist’s face. ‘Did you expand on that opinion?’
‘You know-’
‘No, certainly I don’t.’ Willet thought she was a cat, about to pounce, ready for the kill.
‘Be so kind as to tell me.’
‘Well, because he seemed to be searching for fulfilment, I suggested he should push at work for promotion, never said what his job was. I didn’t gather that he was in a very meaningful relationship – he could put more effort into that. He should find a hobby and develop it further. He could move home, get a garden, have a larger mortgage and therefore self-inflict the pressure to earn more through greater endeavour. If he needed to do good works I told him to drive at weekends for the elderly or the sick… I was trying to help. Did he go?’
She said brutally, ‘Oh, yes, he went, completely ignored you.’
‘Has he survived?’
The steel was in her voice. ‘We don’t know. We have very little access to intelligence from that region. Tomorrow I have a meeting at which I may find something out. Isn’t there more to living than work, loving, hobbies, mortgages, charities? Shouldn’t we rejoice that one man, alone among the dross, climbs towards further horizons?’
‘You don’t understand.’
‘What don’t I understand?’
‘If he survives, he’ll be damaged. He won’t win, can’t. Should he make it back, he’ll be a damaged, altered man. I was just trying to help, damn you. He can’t win, and it will all be for nothing – dead or damaged.’
She rose imperiously, ‘Thank you. Perhaps that’s a worthwhile sacrifice. Come on.’
Willet followed her out. They passed a column of cadets starting out on a cross-country run.
‘The pompous bastard didn’t even offer us coffee, gets us out of bed as though he’s the only one with an important day, and no bloody coffee,’ he said. ‘Well done for putting him down, laying him out on the floor like that.’
‘Don’t patronize me.’
It was a brilliant dawn of ochre and gold and red thrown up from behind the mountains in the west. The dawn was a flame to which two men were drawn.
Chapter Seventeen
‘Will you send my body back to the mountains?’
The commander seemed to ponder that last request. They were in her cell, the door open behind him. He seemed to think on it as if he were slightly confused. He had taken no part in the stripping of her military clothes,
