Owen Sheers - I Saw a Man

There was nothing. Just more stairs, then a landing carpeted in the same deep red as the runner descending behind him. No ghost. No intruder. No Caroline. Just a part of the Nelsons’ house he’d never seen before.

He thought about turning and going back down the stairs. But now that he was there, higher in the house, shouldn’t he at least check the rooms on this floor? For whoever might have come in through the back door, if not for whatever had conjured that sudden essence of Caroline. This is how Michael convinced himself to take the last few steps up to the landing. But in reality he knew the only intruder he was searching for now was her. The resonance of the sensation he’d felt was still fading in him, as if she’d only just vacated the air on the landing before him, leading him on an impossible game of hide-and-seek.

This, at least, was what Michael’s body was telling him. His mind, still trying to keep a rational purchase on what had happened, was already dismissing what he’d sensed as no more than grief, still having its way with him after all these months. Caroline was dead. All that remained of her was in his memories, and so this, his mind cautioned him, was all he was feeling. Memory, triggered by some unseen, unheard association. Michael wanted to believe the certainty of this rational voice. But he could not. It was a voice winnowed of mystery, and devoid of that most seductive of drugs, hope.

Stepping onto the landing, Michael found himself standing between three wooden doors, one on either side of him at the ends of a short corridor, and a third ahead of him, just off to his right. This last door was closed, as was the one to his left. The door on his right, though, was open. As he walked towards it Michael saw the foot of a bed in the room beyond, the corner of a rug, and, as he got closer, an armchair collapsed with clothes — a pair of trousers, some tights, a tangle of shirts and blouses, as if their wearers had evaporated mid-embrace. Entering the room, he stood before the bed, studying its heaped duvet for the shape of a body. But there was none. Just as there never had been. Just remains, that was all that had been left of her. And that’s all they’d buried too. Not Caroline as Michael had known and loved her, but just her remains.

―

Michael had never been a violent man. The tinder he’d witnessed fire up in others was an unfamiliar fuel to him. Over the years he’d spent with Nico and Raoul in Inwood he’d learnt the contours of violence, but as an observer only. The way it entered a room, or took possession of a man’s face, drawing the tendons in his neck, flushing his cheeks with blood. He’d seen the suddenness of its flaring, too — the staccato jerk of a punch, the sardine flash of a blade. And more than once he’d been in the presence of the weight of its threat, the heaviness of a pistol on a table, the tightly bedded bronze of an ammunition clip. But never, even when he’d been threatened himself, had he felt its compulsion to harm. Until they’d killed Caroline.

The desire had risen in him a few hours after he’d discovered Peter waiting for him by the porch of Coed y Bryn. It was evening, the woods across the valley already a swathe of darkness. The sky above them was showing its first stars. Peter was still in the house, cooking them both dinner. He’d said he thought it best if Michael wasn’t left alone. But for a few minutes, when Michael had gone upstairs to change, he had been.

On entering their bedroom he’d seen the chair on Caroline’s side of the bed, piled just like this chair in Samantha and Josh’s room with her discarded clothes. Dropping to the floor beside it, Michael had slowly pushed his hands under their weight, as if reaching for eggs under a sleeping hen. Drawing them to him with both arms, he’d pressed his face into Caroline’s dresses, T-shirts, and the jumper she’d worn on the first night they’d met, its neckline falling from her one bare shoulder.

He wanted to kill them. These faceless men who’d murdered his wife from the air. The planners and officers and spies who’d played with her fate like gods. He wanted to find them, expose them, turn their hidden warrens and nests inside out. He wanted to make them pay.

For the following weeks these thoughts spread through Michael like a virus, an anger masking his pain. As the story broke across the world, as the comment pieces mounted, as Caroline’s name was spoken again and again on radio and TV shows, he learnt all he could about the U.S. drone programme. Long into the night and the early morning, ignoring advice to sleep, to rest, Michael trawled blogs, forums, and chat rooms for information. About the bases from which the Predator might have been operated. About the innocents killed or unmentioned in mission reports. About the missiles that blew apart his wife.

The more Michael learnt, the more the injustices continued to deepen. Caroline and her team had been in Pakistan, a country with whom America was not at war. This was why their vehicle had been unmarked, why Sightline or their fixer hadn’t contacted the U.S. military. Why warzone protocol had not been followed. Although the strike had been a covert operation, under pressure the Pentagon had issued a statement acknowledging the incident. It was, the statement read, a tragic accident. There would be an internal investigation. As well as Caroline, her British director, a Swedish cameraman, and their Pakistani interpreter and driver had also been killed. Among the dead was a fourteen-year-old boy. The British, Australian, and Swedish governments demanded answers. There would be a review of operating procedures, they were told, of lines of command. There would be answers. But the Pentagon statement also made mention of the journalists “working undercover,” of “entering a high-risk area.” They had known, it was implied, the dangers of their actions. And, the same statement reminded the world, an influential terrorist had been successfully targeted. The weight of blame, Michael knew, from the moment it happened, was being dissipated, thinned.

At night, when he couldn’t sleep, he thought of the interviews he’d give when he was able to face a camera or a microphone. How he would broadcast his anger. How he would make sure the story was never allowed to slip from the public conversation. How he’d demand those responsible should face justice, a glaring light, not an obscuring darkness, and how in its illumination Caroline’s death might yet prevent the future deaths of others. He would find a way, somehow, to visit pain upon those who had killed her.

Then, just as quickly as it had first washed through him, so the swell of Michael’s vengeance ebbed. It left him overnight. On waking in the small hours one morning, he’d simply known he wanted none of it. That rather than broadcast anything, he wanted to curl up from the world, to hibernate with his loss. This was, he realised later, perhaps the true moment of Caroline’s death for him. A quieter, more complete acknowledgement of what Peter had told him as he’d knelt on the gravel beside him and laid his hands on his shoulders. A lonely and terrible reckoning with the facts.

In the following months Michael refused all interview requests. He made no statements, he pursued no more enquiries. Caroline’s remains were repatriated in a Royal Air Force transport plane. A week later he and her family buried them in the chapel he’d first seen with Caroline through Coed y Bryn’s kitchen window. The coffin, Michael had known, was mostly empty. He watched it lowered into the ground, threw a handful of soil across its wood, then turned his back on it. He would let the world clamour over her death. He would let others discover the details, the reasons. Because for Michael there was only the one truth to learn, and he’d already discovered it that night when he’d sat on the floor of their bedroom pressing Caroline’s clothes to his face: in her scent, fading by the hour, and in the sheets of their bed, still creased by her body, which was no longer whole, and no longer here.