‘None taken. I just get bored quickly – short attention span.’
Lying of course. The truth was that sitting about waiting for some gunman to fire on me was certain to give me the willies. I’d fought my wars from moving platforms. I hated the idea of stooging around until some Greek thought I was a tasty target.
‘They also serve who only stand and wait,’ Collins said portentously. ‘Today that means the rest of us.’ John Milton, ‘On His Blindness’, if you didn’t know it. The soldiers and the MPs seemed to melt into the tree belt around us, and settle down. Warboys tossed me his cap as he left. He had tied a light khaki cloth around his head Arab fashion: it fell over his shoulders. I know I’ve said it before, but Lawrence of sodding Arabia has a lot to answer for. Collins sat down, and leaned against a tree adjacent to our radio vehicle. I sat alongside him.
I was suddenly cold, drew my jacket around me, and filled a pipe.
‘Permission to smoke?’ I asked.
‘Sure. I couldn’t stop these blighters smoking to save their lives.’
‘Not worried about the terrorists coming back, and smelling us out?’
‘No. If they were going to make a scrap of it they would have left more than that boy behind.’ Despite what he had said I could sense that it had troubled him.
I said, ‘It wasn’t your fault. You couldn’t have known.’
‘Is that what I have to tell the priest on Sunday?’
‘Are you a Catholic?’
‘I am, as it happens.’ That wasn’t going to make it any easier.
‘OK, Captain. Let’s pass the time by you telling me about being a Catholic, while I sit and worry silently about Mr Warboys.’
That brought a smile to his lips I hadn’t looked for. He gave me a very old-fashioned look.
‘I shouldn’t bother. Tony’s murdered his way from one end of this island to the other. He’s a homicidal maniac. The Cyps – particularly the GCs – are terrified of him. They think he has the supernatural power of invisibility. Some even think he can change his shape into that of a big cat, and pass unseen.’ I worked out that GCs meant Greek Cypriots. The Turks, I presumed, would be the TCs.
‘So I don’t have to worry about him?’
‘Only if you see him crawling towards you with his knife in his teeth.’
There didn’t seem to be anything else to say. Even though I was cold the sun was shining through the trees casting a dappled shade on us. The leaves of the brittle oaks were rustled by a choppy little breeze that periodically silenced the insects. This was a deceptively beautiful place; hell probably will be as well. I wondered where Pat had got to – maybe he was fleecing a couple of MPs with a pack of playing cards.
Warboys came in dirty and thirsty mid-afternoon. He was carrying a woman’s cotton dress which had been torn, but there was no blood or dirt on it. He’d identified two hill farms, a monastery and a hamlet in the general direction a small group of people had appeared to travel, and marked them precisely on Collins’s map. I examined the dress myself, and for a moment held it up to my face. The scent it still carried spoke of jasmine. A gentle purple.
I said the obvious – my speciality.
‘No blood, and it’s still clean.’
‘Looks like they tore it off her to see what they’d got. No sign of the pilot. Maybe they didn’t get him.’
‘What do you know about the girl?’ I asked Collins.
‘Flirted with the enlisted men. Had a Greek boyfriend, but threw him over for a Turk. Trouble on legs, my people told me.’
‘She’s bitten off more than we can chew this time,’ Warboys observed. Then he asked, ‘Drink for a thirsty soldier, or have you lot swigged it?’
Twenty minutes later we heard the 7th Cavalry grinding up the slope in small lorries and armoured cars. Collins stood up and stretched, and his men began to come out of the trees. In the Land Rover, as we drove down through the foothills looking for the road to Nic, Collins repeated, ‘Flirted with the enlisted men . . . Christ, she’s sixteen years old. What did they expect – bringing her out here?’ It was then I realized he was on her side after all.
We left them at Wayne’s Keep, and on the road back it was warm enough for me to shuck my jacket. I retuned the radio and we got that intermittent signal from Radio Luxembourg. We listened to Dan Dare fighting the Treens, and then Eartha Kitt was singing that her heart belonged to Daddy. It quietened us for a few minutes.
Chapter Eleven
Murder Mile
As I went off duty for my first long weekend I asked de Whitt, ‘Who covers my targets when I’m not here?’
‘Someone comes in. They’re not as good as you, but we’ve scheduled your watches against the previous frequency of the Saudi exchanges, and again, they don’t do much at night or on holy days. Between the two of you, you get most of it. If you knew how much an improvement this is on before, you’d know why we were so pleased to see you.’ He was so open and sincere it was hard not to like him, but I did try.
‘Who is it? Anyone I know?’
‘No, and you don’t need to. What are you going to do with your days off?’
‘I thought I’d drive over to Nicosia if I could find some transport. Then maybe Famagusta again. There are some ruins just north of the city – someone told me they were quite spectacular.’ The someone had been Alison. She had been going to take me there, but somehow
