Ken McClure - Dust to dust

‘I don’t think he could,’ said Leslie. ‘It was all very hush-hush. He said he couldn’t tell me either when I kidded him about having friends in high places and getting special treatment.’

‘How long was he back for?’ asked Brian.

‘Between two and three weeks, I reckon. He must have been on his way back to join the unit when the incident happened.’

The inflection Leslie put on the words caused an electric pause in the room. Brian looked for clues in the young marine’s face. ‘What are you trying to tell us, son?’ he asked suspiciously.

Leslie drew up his shoulders and spread his hands. ‘I wish I could be more specific, Mr Kelly, but it’s just that no one seems to know what really happened to Mick. Like I say, he’d been home in the UK and was on his way back to the unit when next thing I knew was that he had been wounded and was lying in a field hospital. I tried to get down to see him but when I got there he’d been transferred to the bigger medical unit at Camp Bastion. A few days after that we were told he’d … died.’

‘Are you saying there might have been something funny about how he got wounded?’ asked Brian, beginning to sound angry. ‘Like it was his own side who shot him, for instance? Friendly fire? Is that what you’re saying?’ He managed to inject such distaste and loathing into the phrase that Leslie recoiled a little. ‘Tell me, son, were those American fuckers involved… shooting’ at people from miles up in the sky to keep their own arses away from trouble?’

‘I really don’t think it was anything like that, Mr Kelly, Mrs Kelly. But whatever it was, it happened before he re-joined the unit because he never made it back. I would have known if he had. That means that something must have happened between the airport and the camp — and the airport road’s pretty busy and well defended. If anything had happened — an ambush or an IED going off or any kind of air incident — we would have heard about it. But there was no word of anything happening, then or afterwards, when you’d expect the guys to be talking about it… absolutely nothing. That sort of suggests that Mick was alone at the time… so where were the others who came in on his flight? There’s something not right and no one’s talking.’

‘We’ve obviously not been told the whole story, son,’ said Brian. ‘But by Christ… I’m going to get to the bottom of this.’

May looked as if she’d just become involved in something she’d rather not pursue.

Steven caught the nine o’clock British Airways shuttle from Glasgow to London in the morning and found himself circling over West Drayton an hour later while the aircraft queued for a landing slot. For once, he didn’t mind the delay. He had mixed feelings about returning to work — perhaps as an aftermath of his last assignment. It wasn’t just the danger he’d found himself in — danger had been part of his life for a very long time — but more a case of hoping that nothing like it would happen again, particularly not on his next investigation.

He’d done his best to assure Tally that last time had been a one-off and that his job was usually much more routine, involving paperwork rather than guns and car chases. Tally, who’d been caught up in the nightmare, clearly needed the assurance and he feared that the long-term relationship he hoped to have with her might well founder if he found himself in trouble again.

He’d fallen in love with Tally and she with him, but she was an intelligent woman who knew that love needed firm foundations. The big question was whether or not his job with Sci-Med could ever be compatible with that requirement. Steven reflected on this as he watched the shadows on the cabin wall change as the aircraft continued to circle. He considered how different life might have been had he marched to the drum of convention and followed a career in medicine.

Steven had been born and brought up in the village of Glenridding in the Lake District where he’d enjoyed an idyllic child hood, playing and climbing in the Cumbrian mountains. He’d done well at school and, like so many bright children, been pushed towards a medical career. He’d complied with this pressure — mainly to please parents and teachers — but, after graduating and doing his registration year, he had admitted to himself and everyone else concerned that he had little heart for a future in medicine.

Instead of drifting along as many did, he took the major decision of resigning from the hospital where he was working as a junior houseman and joined the army. His strong build and natural athletic ability ensured that at last he now felt like a fish very much in water. His career had progressed through service with the Parachute Regiment to membership of the Special Forces, with whom he’d served in trouble spots all over the world. The army, always keen to maximise resources, never lost sight of his medical degree and he had become an expert in field medicine — the medicine of the battlefield, where deserts and jungles had been his emergency rooms.

With his middle thirties approaching and Special Forces being the young men’s game it was, he had been faced with an uncertain future as a civilian. The medical profession had little need of the skills he’d acquired in the military and he felt it was too late to retrain. This left some kind of peripheral job — perhaps with a pharmaceutical company or as an in-house physician with some large commercial concern. In the end, however, he had been saved from the humdrum by John Macmillan — now Sir John Macmillan — who ran a small investigatory unit, the Sci-Med Inspectorate, inside the Home Office. The unit looked into possible crime or wrong-doing in the high-tech areas of science and medicine where the police had little or no expertise.

Macmillan recruited science and medical graduates but never the newly qualified: he insisted that all Sci-Med investigators must have held demanding jobs in the real world before joining the unit and proved themselves in high stress situations. Weekend paintball fights and white-water rafting with the chaps in the office didn’t count; coming under fire in Kosovo did. Above all else in his people, he valued common sense.

Over the years, Steven had quickly become Sci-Med’s top investigator, but at some expense to his personal life. It was a very long way from being a nine to five job and, although he persisted in downplaying the risks — even to himself — it could be dangerous and had proved to be so in the past. His denial had its roots in guilt, the guilt he felt in acknowledging that he had wilfully continued in a hazardous job when he was the father of a little girl who had already lost her mother. However happy and settled she was with Sue and Peter in Scotland, his responsibility remained.

Steven’s belief when Lisa died that he would never find another woman he would want to spend his life with had been challenged on several occasions over the years, as time proved to be the great healer it was always mooted to be. Such incidents had always caused him to re-examine the situation with regard to Jenny and family life, but circumstances had always changed before the Rubicon had required to be crossed. Looking back, he had been profoundly unlucky in love for a whole variety of reasons, ranging from tragedy to simple, practical incompatibility. But now Tally had come into his life and all the old questions were lining up again.

Tally had had a first meeting with Jenny and the early signs were good, but Tally had a successful career of her own to consider. She was currently a senior registrar at the hospital in Leicester but would soon be thinking about applying for a consultancy, and that could be anywhere in the country. She couldn’t be expected to throw all that up in order to come and play Little House on the Prairie.