Ken McClure: Resurrection

Edinburgh, Scotland.

August 1997.

The children went very quiet. Their mother, who had been sitting on the grass happily reading her new Virginia Andrews in the sunshine, looked over her glasses at the ground in front of her and listened intently for a moment. No longer reassured by the background noise of laughter and argument, she called out.

‘Jemma? Graham? Where are you? What are you up to?’

There was no reply so she turned round to face the trees and called out again. This time there was a response.

‘Mummy,’ said Jemma’s voice, sounding very small. ‘There’s … a man.’

The woman dropped her book and scrambled to her feet in ungainly fashion to dash into the trees, still in stockinged feet, fearing some hideous assault on her children. She stopped as she came to the clearing where Jemma’s voice had come from and saw the pair of them standing side by side, looking up into a tree.

Relief was quickly replaced by horror as she raised her line of sight and saw a pair of light tan-coloured shoes revolving slowly at eye level. She had the ridiculous thought that a man had levitated up into the branches before reality insisted she face facts.

‘Oh my God,’ she exclaimed. ‘Come here you two!’

The children rushed towards her and she gathered them in her arms, letting them bury their faces in her skirt as they sought reassurance and safety. She was left looking up into the tree.

At first she thought she couldn’t see much from where she was because of the leaves but a movement of the corpse in response to the wind alerted her to the fact that she could see more than she’d imagined. Brown cord trousers and a greenish brown jacket were providing unwitting camouflage. She looked up to where the face must be and waited until the corpse had revolved to face her. She drew in breath sharply as she saw the lop-sided purple face with bulging eyes and lolling tongue peer at her through the leaves.

‘Is he dead, Mummy?’ asked Jemma.

‘I’m afraid so, Jemma. We’d better tell the police.’

The police arrived within five minutes of the call, a Panda car followed some ten minutes later by three other vehicles, all using sirens and flashing lights to speed their passage. Chequered tape boundaries were set up and almost before she knew it, the woman had told the police everything that she could, not that it amounted to much. She was obliged to give her name and address just in case they needed to get in touch again but they doubted that would be necessary.

She walked away from the scene with her children on either side of her, feeling a distinct sense of anticlimax and maybe even resentment. She was responsible for raising the alarm; she had started the whole thing off and now, quite suddenly, she was being treated as irrelevant. She wanted to know more, who the man was, why he’d done it but they weren’t going to tell her. She was an outsider again after a brief starring role in a nightmare. The door had been closed. She and the children were surplus to requirements.

The children sneaked fearful backward glances at the trees as they walked away, holding their mother’s hand. They would remember this picnic for the rest of their lives. The man in the tree would return periodically to decorate the trees of their dreams for all time.

‘Well?’ asked the Inspector in charge of his subordinate after the corpse had been lowered to the ground and a preliminary examination carried out. ‘What d’you make of it?’

‘Straightforward suicide, I should think sir. He’s foreign. A post graduate student at the university. He’s carrying a matriculation card, name of Hammadi, Ali Hammadi.’

‘Photograph on the card?’

‘Yes, it’s him all right.’

The sergeant handed over the card and sifted through the contents of the dead man’s wallet. ‘Thirty five quid in cash, two credit cards, a few names and telephone numbers, a phone card, an invitation to a party and an electronic key to a university building, the Institute of Molecular Science.’

The forensic pathologist arrived, a short bald man, overweight and out of puff by the time he’d reached the clearing with his bag.

‘Well, this is a nice change,’ he said.

‘Nice change?’

‘It’s usually pissing down and the middle of the bloody night when Lothian’s finest call me out.’

‘Oh, very droll.’

The pathologist knelt down beside the body and started to carry out his scene of crime examination. As he worked, he asked, ‘Do we know anything about him?’

‘A student. Molecular science we think.’

‘Obviously not physics,’ said the pathologist, examining the dead man’s neck. ‘He got the jump wrong. Neck’s not broken. He strangled himself.’

The inspector adopted an expression of distaste. ‘Students,’ he snorted. ‘Why do they have to make failing their bloody exams everybody else’s’ problem.’

‘We don’t know that he failed any exams, sir,’ said the sergeant through gritted but still respectful teeth. He was a lot closer to the dead man in terms of age than his superior.

The inspector gave him a black look. ‘It’s the usual bloody reason, isn’t it? Papers will probably describe him as brilliant. Always do.’

Saudi Arabia

September 1997

The wheels of the long-base Land-Rover ceased their constant struggle for grip on the sand as the engine died and the vehicle came to a halt in a deep hollow between two flanking dunes. The four men aboard unwound the keffiyeh from their faces and stepped out to shake the sand free from their clothes and savour the velvet silence of the night. Above them the stars shone down from a cloudless sky dwarfing them in an almost lunar landscape, making them feel like the sole inhabitants of a strange and distant planet.

‘Time to take a look’, said their leader. Despite his Arab dress, he spoke English; they all did. One man stayed with the vehicle while the other three climbed to a point just below the crest of the dune on the north side to throw themselves flat and wriggle up the last few metres to start scanning the desert. They used top quality night vision equipment as befitted members of an elite British military unit. Officially they were attached to the Saudi forces as ‘advisers’. Unofficially they wore Arab clothing, carried no formal identification and did their own thing. At present they were one of a number of units patrolling the border area where Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Iraq met. If Saddam was up to anything in the area, they wanted to be the first to know about it.

‘Quiet as the grave,’ murmured one of the men.

‘Sand, sand and more bloody sand,’ whispered another.

Their leader checked his hand-held GPS navigational system and mentally thanked the American satellites above that had just given him his map position on the surface of the Earth to within three square metres. He noted it down in his log book and checked his watch before adding the time.

‘Skip, there’s something happening over there,’ said one of the soldiers. He said it quietly and without excitement. Understatement was a matter of professional pride among these soldiers. The others took their cue from his line of sight and picked up on two vehicles travelling on the Iraqi side of the border.

‘Convoy of two, they’re heading straight for the border.’

‘Don’t think it’s a convoy … more like a chase.’

‘You’re right. We’ll take an interest in this.

Two of the soldiers kept their glasses on the approaching vehicles while the leader of the unit, took a studied look around at their surroundings, mentally planning the best way for them to stage an interception, should the approaching vehicles actually cross the border into Saudi territory.