Gerald Seymour - Heart of Danger

"Find the Makharov PM 9mm pistol, match the rifling, and you have a case. Find the pistol and you have evidence. You with me, Mr. Penn?"

"With you."

"Maybe not in my lifetime, but some time… In the Hague, in Geneva, here, maybe in London… I am an old man, Mr. Penn, maybe not in my lifetime, but I believe in the long arm of law. I believe in cold and unemotional justice. I believe in the humbling of the guilty by due process. I want to believe it will be in my lifetime. I have only scraps to work from, but I see a picture. She was a fine young woman…"

Penn's voice was small in his throat. "Tell me."

He was looking down at his watch. The woman who had brought his coffee was grimacing at him, and pointing to the clock on the wall. His bags were beside his chair. He slapped his finger on a photograph, two shapes that were just recognizable as corpses, locked, legs and arms together, torsos together, skulls together. Penn stared back into the opaque watering eyes.

"I have only scraps… She was a fine young woman because she did not have to be there. The scraps give you a jumble of a mosaic, and you have to put the mosaic back together. She didn't have to be there. They were all wounded, all the men. They all had old wounds, mostly artillery or mortar shrapnel. They were the guys who had fought for the village, and they had been hurt bad, and everyone who was fit enough to quit had run out on them before the village fell. They were left behind to the mercy of the attack force. She was a fine young woman because she stayed with the wounded…" He thought that he could hear Mary's voice. The stealing of a Visa card, taken from her mother's handbag, and the forging of her mother's signature. "She didn't have an old wound. She could have gotten out, but none of the men could, they would have been, each last one of them, stretcher cases. She stayed with them. It would have been her decision, to stay with them. That makes for me a fine young woman…" He thought he could see Mary moving easily in her kitchen, and pouring his coffee and bringing it to him. "There must have been one boy that she loved. It has to be love, Mr. Penn, to stay with those who are doomed when, yourself, you can be saved. Think on it, Mr. Penn, think on it like I've told it. It's my best shot at the truth. I'm an old man, I've seen about everything in this life that you wouldn't want to see. She makes my eyes, Mr. Penn, go wet. At the end, she was trying, Dorothy was trying to shield her young man from the knives and the blows and from the gunshot. The scraps tell me that, from the way they lay…" He heard Mary and he saw her. "A fine young woman, a young woman to be proud of…" The room had filled. There was a director and there were managers, and there were staff from the mortuary. No more time for Dorrie Mowat. The Professor smiled at Penn, as if it wasn't his fault aircraft didn't wait. The director and the managers were pumping the Professor's hand and embracing him, and the women on the staff were kissing him, and one had brought flowers for him. Penn had screwed up the farewells to two months of unpaid work. He heard it said that the car was waiting, and they were running late for the flight. The crocodile swept up the stairs from the basement mortuary and along the corridors and through the swing doors, and cut a swathe across the lobby. Penn followed and Jovic was silent behind him. From the open door of the car, the Professor caught his eye, called through the crowd, and held the flowers against his chest, awkwardly. "Good luck, Mr. Penn. Build a case, stack the evidence. I'd like to think we'll meet again, in court… good luck." He didn't say it, that he was just there to write a report. He waved as the car pulled away. The Botanical Gardens were always his choice for a rendezvous. It was where the First Secretary chose to take his informants. The Botanical Gardens on Mihanoviceva, a little tatty now compared with the time before independence, still gave good cover; there were sufficient evergreen shrubs and conifer trees to offer discreet privacy before the main summer blooms. It was his second posting, and it was the fourth month of his final year as field officer in the Croatian capital, and he had known Hamilton, Sidney Ernest for most of that time. The file on Hamilton, Sidney Ernest, designated Freefall, was fat, which meant that the First Secretary, as he had told his desk chief on the last London visit, knew about as much of the repellent little man as it was possible to know. So the business was done behind trees and shrubs presented to the city of Zagreb in the cheerful days of non-alignment. The map of a route taken across the Kupa river, across the territory of Sector North, was paid for with American dollars. The First Secretary checked that the map was of some small value with minefields marked and strong points identified. He was brusque to the point of rudeness as he discussed the map and the action behind the lines. Of all his informants in Zagreb he believed that he disliked the man, Freefall, more than any other. He strode away. The map would lie in the fat file. The mortuary office was a colder place with the Professor gone. Without his presence, without his passion and his caring, it was a colder and a darker place. Penn thought the work would slip more slowly. He was an interloper, and he was not offered coffee. But they gave him what he wanted. He left with photocopies of the sketch map of the grave site at Rosenovici, and of the Professor's notes on the exhumed bodies, and of the photographs of the dead, and of the written-out detail of the killing bullet that had finished the life of Dorrie Mowat. Penn followed Jovic out of the hospital lobby. He felt a sense of bewilderment. He reckoned that he knew right from wrong, that his mother and his father had taught from the time he could remember that there was good and there was bad. Too damned simple, wasn't he? Too damned simple to understand how the wounded could have been bludgeoned and knifed and shot. It was beyond his comprehension how a man could have looked into Dorrie Alowat's face and killed her. The photocopies were in his briefcase. The spring sunshine caught at his eyes, the freshness of the air surged to his lungs.

It was good to be gone from that place of cold and darkness.

She found him in a corridor leading off the main walkway that skirted the second floor of the Transit Centre. The walkway looked down onto the inner square, but he had made his hiding place in a shadowed corner of the corridor where the daylight could not reach him.

Ulrike dropped down, squatted beside the old refugee. He stank. She put her arms around his shoulder. He shook with his tears. It was a worn, time-abused face, and the suffering lines ploughed through the white stubble of his cheeks, and the tears ran across the lines and dribbled in the stubble. She did not know him, assumed he would have come the day before on the bus.

She did not know him, and so she did not know his story, but she could anticipate it, because she had heard the story too often. When she sat in her office with a delegation from the Swedish Red Cross or the Austrian Red Cross or the German Red Cross, when she blinked into the lights behind the television cameras of RAI or ZDF or the BBC, when she wrote her letters home she always said it was worst for the old men who were brought out from behind the lines. He cried. She took his hands, frail and thin and gnarled from work in the fields, and she felt the bones hard in her fingers. She thought, from his hands, that he had worked all of his life in fields, that he would have gone into the woods with a bow saw in the autumn for the winter's fuel, that he would have struggled down a ladder each morning of each winter with the fodder for his few cattle, that he would have been a man of pride. She held tight to his hands, tried to no give the old man strength. His home, his father's home, would have been flattened by an explosive charge. His barn would have been burned. His cattle would have been stolen, and his pigs. He might know that his son, the favourite, had been killed. It was worst for the old men who had lost everything, and hope. The children always searched for Ulrike in the Transit Centre, and they had discovered her now. The children stood in the corridor and they watched her as she squatted beside the old man who cried. She could not begin to say how the children would be affected by the sight of their flattened homes and their burning barns and their family's livestock being driven away, and by the fighting. She could see it in the old man, feel the wet of his tears on her face.