His was one of those faces whose expression had been softened by a smile. He was square-jawed, with wide, blue eyes and a sprinkling of freckles across a flattish nose. Sandy hair dropped into precisely trimmed sideburns; perfect rectangles below the maroon beret.
“He doesn’t look all there to me,” Kitson said.
“They all look a bit weird,” Holland said. “But maybe that’s because we’re looking at it after the fact. Because we know what happened later on.”
“I think you’ve got to be slightly odd to join up in the first place.”
“Not a lot of choice for some people,” Holland said.
Kitson shrugged, conceding the point. “No stranger than wanting to become a copper, I suppose.”
“At least they get to travel…”
“Why did you join up, Dave?”
Behind them, Stone finished telling Mackillop the same, vaguely offensive joke he’d been telling everyone for days. The TDC laughed on cue.
“The mental stimulation, I think,” Holland said.***
“Don’t tell me. It’s the Spurs-Arsenal game.”
“Well, as you mention it…”
“You want tickets for the match next weekend.” Alan Ward sounded amused rather than pissed off at the imagined imposition. “I seem to remember I told you I could get them.”
“It’s not the tickets,” Thorne said. “Actually, I just wanted to pick your brains about something. Have you got a minute?”
“Glad to get out of this bloody edit, tell you the truth. Hang on
…”
Thorne could hear Ward’s own voice being broadcast in the background. Then he heard the man himself talking to someone: telling them he wouldn’t be long, that he’d be outside if there was any problem.
Thorne had walked east to Holborn and then kept going toward the City. Past Smithfield Meat Market and into the ossified heart of the Barbican. This was the only residential estate in the City. Almost as free from pedestrians as it was from traffic, its looming tower blocks were connected by a series of elevated walkways. Despite the arts center, the museums, and the smattering of trendy shops and restaurants, there was a strangely hostile feel to the place; something humming in the endless walls of concrete that rose up at every turn.
“Right, I’m all yours,” Ward said.
Thorne stepped into shadow, pooled with water beneath an overhang. Pressed the phone to his ear. The small talk was about as small, and over about as quickly, as it could be. Both said they were very busy without going into any detail. Ward said he’d seen Steve Norman quite recently and asked if Thorne had. Thorne told him that he hadn’t, and they chatted about football for another minute or two.
“I wanted to ask you about the Gulf,” Thorne said. “Did you go over? The first time…”
“Yeah, I was there. I was a baby reporter back in ’91.”
“Right, good.”
“I wasn’t a baby by the time I came back, mind you…”
“No, I bet.”
“It was fairly heavy,” Ward said. “You know? I’d not been involved in anything remotely like that until then. Not that I was doing a great deal other than poncing around in front of the camera. But you still see stuff…”
“That’s what I wanted to talk to you about, really. Not about things you might have seen necessarily, but things you might have heard about.”
There was a pause. “Is this connected to the roughsleeper murders?”
Thorne had been right when he’d thought this would need careful handling. Ward was sharp; worse, he was a journalist. It hadn’t taken much to pique his professional interest. Thorne guessed that Ward had got a sniff of something straightaway; the minute he’d answered his phone, and a copper he’d met once, for five minutes, had reintroduced himself.
“What makes you say that?” Thorne asked.
“Nothing particularly. It’s the case I’d presumed you were working on, bearing in mind that we met after the press conference.”
It was Thorne’s turn to be professionaclass="underline" “I’m sure you understand that I can’t comment on an active investigation.”
“Of course. But I’m seriously intrigued…”
Ward laughed then, and so did Thorne.
“While you were out in the Gulf, did you ever hear anything about war crimes or atrocities?”
“Atrocities?”
“On our side…”
Another pause.
“There was some stuff that came out a few years ago,” Ward said. “In an American magazine- The New Yorker, I think. There was an incident, an alleged incident, on the road from Kuwait to Basra a few days after the cease-fire, when retreating Iraqi columns were attacked by Apaches and tanks. They called it the Battle of Rumailah, but it was just a massacre, by all accounts. A ‘turkey shoot,’ the magazine said. There were civilians in trucks, there was supposedly a bus filled with schoolkids…”
“Jesus…”
“There was another one just before the cease-fire, when four hundred Iraqi troops surrendered to a U.S. scout platoon. Some of them were wounded, bandaged up, in clearly marked hospital trucks. They were gathered together, fed and what have you, then, according to reports, another unit turned up in Bradley Armored Vehicles and just shot the lot of them. Opened up with machine guns. This is supposedly based on evidence given by soldiers who were there at the time, but having said all that, I don’t think anybody’s ever been prosecuted.”
Thorne moved into sunlight again. He looked up as a jet roared overhead. From where he was standing, the plane appeared and disappeared between the tower blocks before emerging into a muddy sky and banking toward City Airport.
“What about U.K. troops?” Thorne asked.
“In terms of war crimes, you mean?”
“Did you ever hear anything?”
“Stuff goes on,” Ward said. “It always does. Some of the troops were based in Dubai for a lot of the time. I was there myself later on. You could buy sets of photos in corner shops, you know? Soldiers posing with bodies; with arms and legs. Trophies…”
“But you were never aware of any specific incidents?”
Ward suddenly sounded a little wary. There was an amused caution in his voice, as if Thorne had changed the steps to the dance they were performing. “I think you’re going to have to be a bit more specific yourself…”
Thorne had known he might have to venture into this kind of territory, and he wondered for a second or two if it was worth plunging into the murk. He hardly knew Alan Ward, and couldn’t be certain that anything valuable would be gained from talking to him.
But he was equally unsure there was a great deal to lose…
“Did you ever hear of anything involving a British tank crew?” Thorne said. While he waited Thorne watched a couple on a walkway ahead of him. They seemed to be arguing.
When Ward finally answered, his voice was close to a whisper, and Thorne could hear the excitement in it.
“What have you found?”
“Like I said before, I can’t-”
“Okay, I get it. Look, there were one or two rumors about something. No more than that, as far as I can remember.”
“About a tank crew?”
“Yeah… I think so.”
“So, here’s the thing,” Thorne said. “If someone else was involved, someone apart from the four men in a tank crew, who might it be?” He glanced up again. The couple on the walkway were now embracing.
“I’m not with you,” Ward said. “It could be virtually anybody. You’re not really giving me a great deal to go on.”
“Another individual. A fifth man, present when this incident took place.”
“A fifth soldier, you mean?”
“I suppose so…”
“Where precisely are we talking about?”
“I don’t really know. We have to presume it’s somewhere off the beaten track.”
“ Everywhere was off the beaten track, mate,” Ward said. “You just mean that geographically, the incident happened in isolation, right?”
That much, Thorne could be fairly certain of. “Yes.”
“So we’re talking about someone with access to a vehicle, then. An officer, perhaps?”
Perhaps, thought Thorne. They were certainly talking about someone who’d had no problem telling the four crewmen what to do. Someone whose orders had been followed.