Gerald Seymour - Heart of Danger

She was led by the hostess down the length of the aisle to the cabin door.

The pilot, coming from the cockpit, ducked his head to her in embarrassment.

The purser shook her hand, said something into his chest that she could not understand, but she smiled back at him warmly, the sham smile.

There was an official from the Airport Authority at the hatch of the aircraft. She thought that he had probably done it before. He had no smile for her and no handshake, and no anodyne small talk. He took her grip bag. He unlocked an outside door at the start of the extended tunnel from the aircraft and gestured that she should follow him. The rain and the wind caught her, trapped her skirt against her thighs and billowed her raincoat. She followed him down the steep staircase, skipping the last step onto the apron. The handlers had already started to unload the baggage from the cargo hatch, and they took the suitcases and string-tied cardboard boxes from the hatch and threw them carelessly onto the open trailer. There was a young woman from Customs edging towards her, unsure, and pushing the documentation under her nose. She signed with the pen she was offered and the ink ran as the rain dripped on the paper. Two men in black suits, the one working his jaw round spent chewing gum and the other cradling in the palm of his hand a dead briar pipe, waited statuejstill beside the hearse. There were no more suitcases, no more cardboard boxes coming from the hatch. The men from the hearse moved forward as if to a signal. She heard the noise of the scraping from inside the cargo hold.

The coffin was of grey sheet metal and it was heavy and awkward to manoeuvre in the confined space.

The pipe was pocketed, the chewing gum was spat out.

The coffin was lifted clear. She stepped forward. She laid the single rose on the coffin's lid beside the documentation that was fastened to it with adhesive tape. The wind seemed to come fiercer off the tarmac and she walked beside the coffin with her fingers steadying the rose until they were sheltered by the length of the hearse. The back door closed on the coffin and she could see her rose through the rain-blurred windows. It was driven away.

Was she being met? No, she had her own car… Did she need a lift? Yes, that would be very kind, to the long-stay car park…

Mary Braddock had brought her daughter, her Dorrie, home.

"I said we could go out and get something in a pub. I said I'd have a go at knocking something up. She wouldn't hear of it. Said something about being too tired to go out, and something about me needing a proper meal. She was into her kitchen and putting it all together."

"She's so strong, she's a grand woman."

"Sorry, Arnold, but it's a facade. It was all over her face, she'd been weeping, the poor darling, all the way home. I couldn't go with her, you see. Well, you know that… The contract is eleven million sterling, it's got to be in day after tomorrow. She said, anyway, quite definite, that she was going and going alone. Damn the little bitch… I married Mary, not her bloody daughter… You'll have another?"

Charles Braddock's hideaway, what he called his 'snug', was at the bottom right corner of the acre of garden behind the Manor House. The Manor House, Elizabethan brick and good timber, was hidden from them except for the tall chimneys by a succession of screens provided by the old azaleas and rhododendrons, and a yew hedge, and the wooden frame that supported honeysuckle and climbing roses, and the flint stone wall of the vegetable garden. Under the big bare branches of the oak and beech trees that separated the garden from a farmer's fields, he had designed, then built, the wooden hut that was his hideaway.

There was power in the hut for a small fridge, and space for a small cabinet. He came to his 'snug' to read, meditate on problems at work, sleep through weekend summer afternoons, and curse. Alongside the hut was the boundary fence to his neighbour's smaller garden, and set in the fence alongside the cage for compost and grass cuttings was a stout stile that provided his neighbour access to the ice and Scotch and gin. It was the way of things that when Arnold climbed heavily over the stile and took the offered plastic cup Charles Braddock would do much, most, of the talking.

"She wasn't easy…"

"God, and that classifies as understatement. She was hopeless, impossible…"

"And dead, Charles."

"Are you going to read me the lecture? Mustn't speak ill, that sort of stuff? If she hadn't been Mary's girl I tell you what, I would have said "bloody good riddance". I would have said…"

"Best you don't, Charles. Not many medals to be won there. I think we all know what sort of young person was Dorrie. Thank you…"

Charles Braddock passed the refilled plastic cup. It was always plastic cups that were used in the 'snug', no washing up afterwards, and a bin bag in the corner for the throwaways. He valued Arnold. He thought of him as sensible and logical and calm. Probably, he used Arnold. Senior partner in the practice, major architectural projects, country-hopping for business, taking home before tax a minimum of 300,000 a year, he found from Arnold a patience and an understanding. God, the man knew just about every secret in the life of Charles Braddock and his second wife, Mary… But then Arnold was good with secrets.

And it was secrets that paid him a salary considerably less than fifteen per cent of Charles's gross. They talked about Charles's work, interminably, and about Charles's domestic scene, often. Charles knew the exact nature of Arnold's job, and it was off limits and his family was not mentioned. They stood in the front of the hut, huddled in their overcoats straight from the day's work in London and the 6.17 train from the capital. Charles knew that Arnold was always on the 6.17 down to the Surrey and Sussex border village, and he had made the big effort to be on the same train and home early.

"Is there anything I can do, or say?"

"She doesn't know how Dorrie died, in the middle of a war zone. She doesn't know what the wretched girl was doing there, in a village that was fought through. She doesn't know what happened. She says that she's the right to know… You know Mary, it'll nag and fret and worry with her. The bitch, living, damn near ruined our marriage, now the bitch, dead…"

"I'd like to speak to Mary."

The cups were finished, thrown into the plastic bag. The Scotch was placed back in the cabinet. The light was switched off and the door of the hut slammed and locked. They hurried in the dark along the path of slab paving that wound around the azaleas and rhododendrons and under the wooden frame and past the vegetable garden wall. Charles was a big man, sixteen stones, and his neighbour was slighter and barely filled out his high-street coat. They ran as best they could through the rain and towards the kitchen door. They came to the long thrown light from the kitchen window.

His wife was sitting at the wide refectory table in front of the Aga cooker.

Charles Braddock cursed. "The bloody girl, dead, and hurting worse …"

His wife had her head in her hands.

"She's the right to know," Arnold said quietly. "I promise that I'll do what I can."

His wife shook in her sobbing.

The journey had taken all of the day and all of the night.

It had taken all of the day because the tyres of the car had been bald and the front left had punctured on the road between Belgrade and Bijeljina, and it had been at pistol point that they had persuaded the owner of the garage in Bijeljina to replace it. And the rear left had gone between Derventa and Miskovci which was a bad place and close to the front line, and not even a pistol had won a replacement tyre from the garage in Miskovci because there were none, and they had had to wait while the puncture slash was repaired.