Simon Beckett - Owning Jacob - SA

Ben thought about Kale moving the pieces of metal around, studying each new arrangement. Something nudged his memory, and he remembered the first time he had gone to the house to collect Jacob. Kale had said something then about him not being part of ‘the pattern’. He didn’t like to think what that could have meant.

“What does he expect it to show him?” he asked.

“God knows. Something that’ll explain why everything’s happened. His son getting stolen, his wife stepping in front of a bus, him being wounded and his mates killed in Northern Ireland. Even being brought up in an orphanage. He thinks there’s got to be some reason for it all. And he thinks if he can see the Pattern it’ll tell him.”

She stared through the rain-smeared window at the distorted metal, as if hoping to see an explanation there herself.

“Was he like this when you first met him?”

Sandra shook her head without looking round. “He seemed different to most of the other squaddies I’d met, but that was all.” Her mouth twitched. “He didn’t try and drag my knickers off in the first five minutes, for a start. That was one of the things I liked about him. And he was quiet. Not shy, just quiet. Most of them tell you their life stories at the drop of a hat, but he was more interested in listening to me talk about mine. I didn’t tell him everything, not straightaway, and it wasn’t until I told him what had happened with Kirstie — my little girl — that he said anything about what had happened to him.”

She sniffed. Ben wasn’t sure if she was close to crying, or whether it was the dry heat of the kitchen. His own nose was tickling from it.

“When he found out about Kirstie he went quiet for ages. I thought I’d put him off, that he was blaming me the same as everybody else did. Then he started telling me about his son being taken from the hospital, and his wife killing herself.

“He said people like us, who’d had their lives messed up, were damaged for a reason. That was how he put it, damaged. He was as excited as I’ve ever seen him. He said we must have been meant to meet, after we’d both lost our kids and everything. He said something then about it being part of a pattern, but I can’t remember what. I just thought he was being romantic. A bit soft, but romantic.” She gave a short, bitter laugh. “I was just another fucked-up piece of scrap.”

He felt a desire to put his arms around her. He kept his hands in his pockets.

“Was he as obsessed about it then?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think so. Hang on a second, I’ll show you something.” She went out of the kitchen. He heard her go down the corridor to the lounge. There was the sound of a drawer being opened. A few seconds later she came back, carrying a large, vinyl-covered photograph album. She set it down on the work surface next to him. He could smell her perfume, the tobacco odour on her clothes, a faint musk of underarm sweat.

He took his hands back out of his pockets.

“This is John’s,” she said, opening it. She quickly flicked past the first few pages. Ben caught glimpses of a younger Kale, sitting on a motorbike, standing in a green army uniform, smiling with his arm around a pregnant young woman.

He recognised Jeanette Kale, Jacob’s mother, but Sandra had already moved on.

“Here,” she said. “He took these when he was in the Gulf. During the war.”

She moved slightly to one side so he could see. He felt the heat from her hip, almost touching his, as he came nearer.

There were four photographs, two on each page. One of them was a long-distance shot of a blazing oil well. The rest showed blasted areas of desert littered with debris. In one of them was a tank, its nearside track torn off. A charred body was folded over the blackened turret. In another was the wreckage of a helicopter, the limp rotor blades hanging like the veins of a dead leaf.

“He took these before his wife was even pregnant,” Sandra said. “Before everything went wrong for him. I don’t think he’d got a thing about wrecks back then, these were just like souvenirs, you know? It wasn’t until after we were married that he dug them out and stuck them in here.”

They weren’t the sort of souvenirs Ben would have chosen. If Kale’s obsession wasn’t yet formed, the seeds of it were evident. The pictures on the next page displayed the same morbid fascination. Most had been taken on a road instead of open desert. Military and civilian vehicles were scattered along it, burned, lying on their sides, tyres flat or melted, the bodywork crumpled like paper. In some shots the road stretched to the horizon — no sign of life on it, only the numberless wrecks. The bodies that lay among them looked insignificant.

Ben went through the rest of the album. To begin with there were ordinary snapshots included — a Middle Eastern shop with grinning British soldiers outside, what looked like the same group outside a tent pitched on sand — but these soon petered out until the photographs were solely of wreckage.

The desert was abruptly replaced by a colder, more familiar landscape. A troop carrier lay on its side in the road. Behind it were grey clouds, green hills and bushes. A shattered car, half in, half out of a bomb crater.

“That’s Northern Ireland,” Sandra said. He could feel her breath on his ear.

He turned the page. More of the same. Now, though, the photographs seemed to have been taken with more care paid to angles and light. Whereas the earlier ones had been little more than snaps, dramatic only because of their content, there was a self-consciousness about these that suggested a new intent. In one the wreckage of some vehicle was partially silhouetted against either a sunrise or a sunset. The sun reflected off some parts while turning the rest black. It was corny and badly executed, but not ineffective.

“Was this his last term over there?” Ben asked. “After Jacob had gone missing and his wife had died?”

“Yeah, I think so.” Sandra sounded more suspicious than surprised. “Why?”

“I just wondered.” He told himself he was reading too much into a few photographs. But he couldn’t shake the conviction that, whereas the early ones had been coloured by a morbid curiosity, in the last few Kale had already started looking for something.

He turned over again. There was only one photograph left. It was black-and-white and had been cut from a newspaper.

It showed two army Land Rovers, The first was on its roof. The second, behind it, had its doors open and its windscreen smashed. There were dark marks on its bodywork that looked like bullet holes.

“That was the ambush where John got shot,” Sandra told him. “He should have been in the first car, the one on its roof, because he was the corporal. But its radio wasn’t working, so he went in the other. About a mile after he’d changed the first car went over a landmine and everybody in it was killed. Then the bastards started on them with a machine gun.”

Ben closed the album.

“Don’t see many of me in there, do you?” she said.

The bitterness had given way to hurt.

“When did he start bringing the scrap metal home?” he said, to get away from it.

“Almost as soon as we came here.”

She moved away. He wasn’t sure if he was relieved or not.

“He started looking for a job. I thought he’d get something in a garage, or somewhere. You know he’s a qualified mechanic? He can fix anything mechanical, he’s got a knack for it. That’s why he joined the Engineers. But he came home one day and said he’d got this job in the scrapyard. I didn’t mind, I thought it’d only be temporary. I didn’t even take any notice when he started bringing bits and pieces back with him. I supposed he wanted to mess around with them. Hammer them out for spares, or something, I don’t know. Then he started talking about this Pattern.”