Quintin Jardine: Stay of Execution

He reached out his right foot, in its brightly shining shoe, and touched the ground: it was as if he was caressing it. ‘They never found her body, Mario,’ he murmured. ‘In a sense, we’re standing on her grave.’

‘Man, why didn’t you say?’ exclaimed McGuire. ‘I’d never have. .’ He stopped, abruptly. ‘Come on, let’s get out of here.’

‘No, no,’ Mawhinney retorted. ‘Really, it’s all right. I come here often, and not just in uniform. Sometimes, like a lot of people, like those we saw earlier, I bring flowers. Maybe it’ll change in time, but right now, like many of the bereaved, I just don’t have anywhere else to go.’

They assembled in the centre of Brussels, all thirty-seven of them. All of the squad were men; even in the twenty-first century there were no women allowed among the ranks. Whenever they were challenged about this their stock excuse was that the uniforms just did not fit women properly. As they lined up for the photographers they stood smartly at attention, twelve of them with heavy ancient weapons shouldered.

The troop carrier, as they called it, stood ready and waiting, its engine running in the evening chill to charge the heating system. There was only one bus, for on this special journey there would be no camp followers; no wives, no lovers, and especially, no children. After all, as the colonel put it, they were setting out on a symbolic invasion.

‘They won’t know what hit them,’ said the commander, confidently, to the newspaper, radio and television reporters gathered in a group, looking across at his company, displaying them with pride in his eyes, and an outstretched arm.

‘How many stops will you make?’ asked a young woman, holding a microphone.

‘Five,’ replied the officer, a short man with white hair, a clipped moustache, and a slight paunch that pressed against the buttons of his heavily braided blue tunic, on each shoulder of which three crowns and a bar shone. ‘First in Hull, where we land tomorrow. Then we are on to Manchester, then Newcastle. But those are just training runs, you might say. The real invasion will begin at a town called Haddington. We complete our preparation there. And then,’ he paused, eyebrow raised dramatically, as if he had seen Robert Newton’s Long John Silver. . and he looked almost old enough to have been at its première, ‘the final assault: Edinburgh itself. It’s an honour, a great honour.’

‘Indeed, Colonel. I imagine it’s the greatest honour you’ve ever had,’ the reporter ventured.

The other eyebrow rose, the forehead ridged, and the nose seemed to go a deeper shade of red. ‘I meant, young lady,’ the colonel boomed, theatrically, ‘that it is a great honour for the Scots. It’s time those brigands were taught a few lessons in the finer military arts.’

He turned his back on her, dismissed his troops and waved them towards the waiting bus.

The reporters watched, as the various implements were cased and loaded into the cavernous luggage space beneath the cabins of the long coaches. ‘He really means it, doesn’t he?’ the woman murmured to the man next to her.

‘Oh yes. He means it.’ The other reporter, old enough still to be using a notebook rather than a tape, scratched his chin with the end of his pen. He looked at his colleague. ‘You think he’s as mad as a wasp, don’t you?’

‘As a nestful,’ she said agreeably.

‘Maybe he is now, but he wasn’t always. Auguste Malou was a real soldier once, in the Royal Belgian Army.’

‘Do we have real soldiers in the Royal Belgian Army?’

‘Come on, girl, you know we have; though not like him, not any more. When our boys go abroad these days they’re usually wearing the blue UN cap. Malou’s from another era, forty years back. I believe he may have been infantry at one point, but he told me that the later part of his career was spent in the administration of the band of the First Guides Regiment. That’s no joke either; it’s world famous. When he retired, fifteen years ago now, he came upon this lot and decided to put a bit of discipline into them.’

‘What went wrong?’

‘Don’t be so bloody cynical, nothing went wrong. . other than age, at both ends of the spectrum. A marching band has to be sharp. When Malou took over, he brought in some new faces, guys he had known in his army days. And he formed the Musket Platoon, to give them a bit of extra pizzazz. The Bastogne Drummers. .’

‘Why are they called that?’ the woman interrupted. ‘They’re from Brussels, not Bastogne.’

‘They were named in honour of the fallen in the great siege of World War Two. They were famous at first, but they had fallen away, until Malou revitalised them.’

‘Revitalised? They look a little shop-soiled to me.’

‘He could only do it once. The men he brought in are in their forties now, and beyond, some of them; their crispness has gone, and the youngsters. . some of them haven’t found theirs yet. But don’t be too hard on them; they’re still not bad, not when they’re fresh at any rate. They were invited to Edinburgh, remember.’

‘They were? I thought they volunteered.’

‘No, the trip is official. It may just be too long, though.’

‘Why? Won’t they get better with all these stops?’

The journalist grinned. ‘That’s the problem. Them getting better, that’s not how it works. You take a few dozen old soldiers, free of their wives and their fancy women, you put them on buses and you send them away for ten days; before you know it, well, they’re not as fresh as they might be.’

The woman looked puzzled. ‘Why?’

The veteran shook his head. ‘I have to spell it out? The baggage compartments on those buses are very large. There’s room for all the luggage, and the instruments, and the muskets, and for still more; so they fill it up with as many cases of Stella as they can get in.’

‘You mean they get drunk?’

‘They’re Belgians, aren’t they? Our country is proud of two things above all others: its chocolate and its beer. Those boys aren’t too keen on chocolate, that’s all.’

‘But can’t the colonel keep discipline?’

Her fellow journalist frowned. ‘He’ll try, I suppose, for a couple of days: this is an important trip, and it will reflect on Belgium, and on the army. But old Auguste isn’t in the army any more, and besides. . Did you see the colour of his nose?’

Deputy Chief Constable Robert Morgan Skinner peered into the goblet that he held cupped in his big hands, swirling the sweet sticky Amaretto around the sides, then watching as it settled back at the foot. Finally, he took a sip, nodded and smiled at his hostess.

‘I like this stuff,’ he said. ‘I’m not a great one for liqueurs: your VSOP and your Armagnac would be wasted on me, and I positively dislike whisky, but I do like this.’

Louise McIlhenney, née Bankier, laughed. ‘You could have fooled me. You didn’t have any aversion to the hard stuff when I knew you at university. Whisky and dry ginger ale as I remember it.’

‘I was young then, though,’ he countered. ‘My dad took a nip now and again, so I did too, till it came to me that it didn’t make me a better person. When I realised that, I stopped.’

She looked across the space between them, her mind transporting them back twenty years and more. ‘You used to talk about your father all the time. You don’t any more. What happened?’

Bob sighed and let his head fall against the high back of the armchair. ‘He died,’ he said softly. ‘And I haven’t passed a day since then without missing him. It hurts too much to talk about him.’

‘It shouldn’t. You were so obviously proud of him.’