Gerald Seymour - The Unknown Soldier

'I can speak in Urdu…'

'No, no.' Jed leaned forward. 'Do you have Pashto?'

'Some, a bit, there were Afghan people in the college. I…'

Jed used his hand to gesture that the answer was sufficient. He used his desk telephone to call the central office. He requested the immediate presence of a Pashto interpreter. There was doubt as to whether one was available. He did not raise his voice, but it carried enough menace to the clerk. He dropped the 'request', replaced it with 'requirement': a Pashto interpreter to his room immediately – not tomorrow, not in half an hour. In a drawer on his side of the table the tape-recorder turned, and microphones were built into the table, on his side and on the prisoner's. He opened the drawer and stopped the tape. He waited. The quiet clung in the room. The man opposite sat bolt upright and still, except for the motion of his hands.

Jed wrote, in a fast long-hand scrawl, answers he remembered. The answers were not verbatim, but as he recalled them. Ten minutes later, when the interpreter came into the room, he passed him the two pages, now thickly covered with his handwriting. He asked the interpreter to translate them, on paper, into Pashto. Again there was silence as the interpreter crouched at the table and wrote down the translation.

He could not be sure where this would lead him. When the translation was complete, the pages in Pashto were laid in front of the prisoner ard Jed switched on the tape-recorder. The prisoner was asked to read aloud.

His host had put Bart at the end of the line.

They had been down to the paddock to inspect the first race's runners, then had climbed back to the stand. They made a party of eight and they waited for the start of the five thirty-five at Riyadh. The banker did the book. No Tote or William Hill or on-course bookmaker, the banker wrote down their little bets. Ten riyals or twenty riyals were the flutters. No money would change hands in the stand, no winnings or losses would be paid over in public, but rewards and debts would be settled at dinner at the defence-procurement man's villa.

Most of the row of seats in front of Bart was empty, and the row behind him only sparsely filled. Not like the old days, before the war in Iraq: then the whole stand would have heaved with expatriates.

'Terrorism threat' and 'personal security' were the catchphrases of the day. Only the diehards remained. He did not own binoculars and struggled, when he looked down the course to the start, to see the quartered shirt and cap that he was backing, and he listened to the talk in the row stretching away from him. Here, at least, indiscretion was possible.

'What I say is, the place is cracking up. I think it's terminal.'

'Take the servants, there's a new impertinence. I'd call it dumb insolence.'

'More to the point is Saudization – is that a real word? You know what I mean. They're stuffing lazy incompetents into jobs they can't handle.'

'I never go out at night, not now, not even with a driver. This used to be the safest city on earth, not any more.'

'Dreadful what happened to young Garnett – such a sweet girl that Melanie, beautiful children.'

'It's all become so dishonest, corrupt. The ethos is almost criminal here now. I… '

They were off, away in the distance the small shapes of the horses, and the smaller ones of the jockeys. Bart could not make out his horse and he didn't bloody care. He had not been invited because his host particularly liked him: one day he might be useful for a late-night emergency call-out.

It all came back to Ann. He wondered where she was, whether she was still shagging the owner of the Saab franchise showroom, how the kids were… Ann demanded private schools, two holidays a year that weren't package. The debts had mounted: unopened envelopes carrying final demands had littered the Torquay house, and the mortgage payments were in arrears. By 1995 – yes, he could remember the date, clear as bloody crystal – she'd started the taunting that he hadn't the balls to stand up to the practice partners and demand they offloaded private patients on to him. He'd faced ruin, and he'd faced her goading… Then Bart had responded.

In April that year he had come to the solution to the ills. Josh, a right little weasel, had been in the consulting room and had sown the seed. Josh was an NHS patient, there to have his face patched up after a beating. Josh was a dealer. Josh left an address in the bed-sit land at the wrong end of the town. Josh had a roll of banknotes in his hip pocket, a fat wad. Josh paid up on the nail, cash on delivery… and Bart had delivered. Morphine alkaloid tablets were the currency for which Josh paid cash, and heroin and cocaine.

Any patient on Bart's books who was terminally ill, or any patient with chronic pain from a back injury, could be prescribed the morphine tablets – and always, from the spring of 1995, he prescribed big. The bathroom cabinets of his patients bulged with the bottles of morphine tablets… And when there was a death, or when a back's pain was relieved, he collected what was left and took it away. Josh had the left-over tablets, and the cash from the roll of notes in Josh's hip pocket began, by the late summer of 1995, to dent the piles of unpaid bills. So simple… Heroin and cocaine were used to help, quietly, those on their way when life had little more than a fortnight to run. Relatives were grateful for the release of their loved one from suffering. Bart called it the Brompton's Mixture: a gin or sherry cocktail with the addition of liquid heroin or powdered cocaine; when he signed the death certificate, and before the undertakers called, Bart cleared the unused excess. The partnership with the little weasel, the bastard, Josh, might have lasted for ever – not for a mere eighteen months, until the catastrophe.

There was no betting slip to tear up at the races in Riyadh. His prediction had been correct: his horse was last over the line. Again, the conversation down the line of seats clamoured, as if the race had been a minor diversion from the main business of gossip and complaint.

'I really don't know whether we should all get out, cut and run. but what I reckon – back home – no one wants to employ a banker of my age.'

'That Al Qaeda, it's a cancer, and Iraq's taken the eye off the main hall. We're all targets now, that's what I feel.'

'If the Kingdom collapses we're in deep trouble, about as deep as you can get. We keep bags packed, we're all ready to go, but if it happened suddenly, without warning, how would we get to the airport? Who'd protect us? And can you imagine pitching up at Heathrow with just a suitcase each? That's assuming we got to the airport.'

'It's all so unfair. What do you think, Bart?… Bart, I'm speaking to you.' The banker's wife tugged his arm, peered into his face.

He jerked his mind away from Josh, the tablets, the cocktail and Ann. 'Isn't it more dangerous crossing the road in Riyadh?'

'Is that all you've to say about the security situation?'

He was emboldened. 'If you want my opinion, A1 Qaeda's power is overstated.'

'Have you plans for a quick bolt, Bart?'

For emphasis, Bart smacked a closed fist into the other palm. 'No, I have not.'

It was a lie – of course he had a permanently packed case. Whether he would ever use it was another matter. Would Eddie bloody Wroughton – the marionette tweaker – ever permit its use? He had nowhere to go without Eddie bloody Wroughton's sanction.

'I have no plans to run. Al Qaeda's threat is probably minimal. A few fanatics in the desert or up in the mountains, chewing dates, suffering from amoebic dysentery. I don't rate them, no.'

Shocked into silence, the other guests in the row shuffled their feet and examined their racecards. Bart thought of nobody but himself himself and Eddie Wroughton.