Gerald Seymour - Heart of Danger

He said quietly, "Do you know, my dear, there was only one thing that I ever did well when I worked here. I was good at standing in safety on the right side of some of life's most hideous barricades, waiting for some poor devil to come back from the wrong side. I wish so much that I had been there, waiting, not able to intervene, but sharing… So kind of you to help me with the telephone."

He sat on his desk. He dialled again.

He heard the clip of her voice.

He kept his silence.

Who was there? What did they have to say?

He heard the annoyance of her voice.

Would they, whoever they were, not waste her time? Who was it?

He put down the telephone, cut from his ear the growing anger of Mary Braddock, mother of Miss Dorothy Mowat. So tired now… It had all been such a long time ago. He had cut from his ear the authority, annoyance, confidence and anger of her voice.

A little while ago, only a few minutes, it had seemed important to speak to her, to tell her that an old desk warrior had bludgeoned a file into shape, made it ready for burial on a disk. He gathered up the papers of the file, the photographs and the maps, and his own crude plan of the two villages separated by the stream.

He walked across the open-plan space of Library to the day supervisor's position.

"Finished then, Mr. Carter?"

She was leafing through the material that would be transferred to the disk. She turned the typewritten pages, and the photographs of the grave site and the cadaver and of Bill Penn, and the maps, and his sketch plan, and there was that curl at her lip to indicate that in her opinion the material had not warranted the smelling socks and the stubble on his cheeks and the demands made of her staff. She came to the last page in the order he had assembled the material. He had written a heading in his own copperplate writing.

She read.

"They may be able to run but they can't hide."

(L. Eagleburger, SOfS, USA)

Geneva/ Brussels airborne brief. 16.12.1992.

Eagleburger announces programme to prosecute war criminals in former Yugoslavia.

List below of those prosecuted by UN-sponsored tribunal:

But the sheet was blank.

She flushed. She wondered if he ridiculed her.

He intervened in her confusion, best dress smile, the one that he kept for Christmas and family.

"Assuming that somebody, some day, for some reason, should actually read the file, I thought they might be interested to know what was achieved in the two years after Mr. Eagleburger's brave words

… If only our masters would abstain from saying things they don't mean then life would be so much more bearable, don't you agree…? Thank you for the kindness of your staff. Whistling for the stars, ami

… Good day."

He cleared his desk, packed away his empty thermos in his briefcase, and shrugged into his coat.

Quite chill that morning.

It was behind him, all of it. It was as if it had never happened, as if by conspiracy brave words became hollow and empty.

Quite a brisk wind off the old Thames catching him as he strode towards the station. All of it was behind a sentimental old desk warrior. His step was lively. Ahead of him was the short train journey, the quick change of clothes and socks, and the brushing of his teeth, a good shave with a new blade, then the drive to mid-Wales and the railway line at Tregaron, and the sight of the soaring freedom of the kites. Henry Carter thought that, after where he had been, he needed to find a place of freedom.