Severed

The major's expression hardens. 'No, but you never did anything for us, either.'

'What do you mean?' I demand, although I think I already know the answer.

'We sacrificed our careers for you when you were hit by that bomb.'

'I didn't ask you to.'

'I know you didn't. But you could have shown some appreciation. We lost everything. Not you. You bounced back, Tyler. You rejoined the army. You carried on your career like nothing had happened. And did you ever think about us?'

'I did,' I protest. 'I thought about you a lot. All of you.' But I know my words sound hollow.

He shakes his head. 'I don't think so. You were always an individual, Tyler, never a true team player. Yet it was you, the least deserving, who seemed always to be the most successful. You left the army, ran a thriving business, took Harry Foxley's woman-'

'Don't be daft. She was never his woman.'

The major sighs, concedes the point. 'Do you know what annoyed me about you, Tyler? The fact that you never paid for anything. You enjoyed an easy, good life and you never paid a price for it. Until today. Now you have. It will have made you a better man.'

'And that's it… just because I didn't do things entirely your way, and I've been reasonably successful, you put me through all this?'

'Don't flatter yourself, Tyler. It wasn't revenge. We needed you today, that's all. It was just that no-one was too worried about what happened to you afterwards.'

I take a deep breath. It's difficult to believe I'm hearing this. That people I cared about have hated me for so long.

'Why don't you start from the beginning?' I ask him. 'What is the relevance of the briefcase I picked up, and what the hell does it contain?'

'The briefcase contains materials a number of people, some very high up, are extremely keen to avoid being made public, because those materials could help to convict them of some truly horrible crimes.'

I think again of the finger. 'Go on.'

'These materials were gathered by an individual who was blackmailing several men. One of those men was Eddie Cosick.'

'Don't you mean Colonel Stanic?'

A half-smile forms on Ryan's granite features. 'Yes, Colonel Stanic. I was hoping you wouldn't get to him, because I knew then that you'd make the connection.'

'So, what was Stanic to you?'

'He was a business associate of mine.'

'You don't hang around with very nice people, Major.'

He glares at me. 'Let me tell you something, Tyler. When I left prison, I had nothing. My wife had left me. I had no money, no pension. I needed to survive. I'd always had a good working relationship with Stanic, so I made contact with him again, and helped him move his operations to the UK. I had help from others as well. Men like Foxley, Maxwell and Spann. We got a good business going, and as a result I've made back some of the money that was taken from me.'

'It looks like you've done very well,' I tell him, looking round the room. Nothing in here's cheap.

'It's nothing less than I deserve,' he says firmly. 'After the way the establishment betrayed me.'

The major was always a ruthless man. I notice now an arrogance to him that I've never really seen before, or perhaps it's something I've simply forgotten over time.

'You said you knew the real identity of the blackmailer,' he says. 'What was his name?'

'Iain Ferrie,' I tell him.

The major raises his eyebrows. 'I recognize that name. He served in the regiment, didn't he?'

'That's right.'

'Ah, so that's how you knew him.' He nods slowly, pondering this information. 'What a coincidence.'

'Ferrie told me that the case contained something terrible, something I never wanted to see. So, what exactly was the kind of business you were in?'

The major's half-smile returns. 'I thought Mr Stanic and I were in the same business – smuggling contraband, drugs, weapons, occasionally people – but it turns out that our businesses were actually diverging. You see, Mr Stanic made a lot of money from prostitution in this country, which was an area of the business that we – and by "we" I mean my former army colleagues and me – weren't involved in. However, he discovered what you might term a niche in the market.'

'What do you mean?'

'Some of his customers had rather bizarre tastes. They liked to do more than simply have sex with the girls. In some cases, they liked to beat and torture them. Even in a couple of cases, kill them.'

'Jesus, you're joking.'

'You were a soldier, Tyler. You saw what people are capable of doing. Sometimes even for pleasure. No, I'm not joking.'

There doesn't seem much that I can say to that, and I tell him to continue.

'I never knew about this side of Cosick's business,' he says. 'If I had, I wouldn't have approved. But someone else did. The blackmailer. Our old colleague, Ferrie. I'm not sure how he found out about what was going on, but he did. And he gained evidence of what was happening as well, and, more importantly, who was involved. My understanding was that he was blackmailing several customers, and those customers, terrified of exposure, contacted Stanic. Stanic tried to deal with matters himself since, as you can imagine, he wasn't keen on anyone else finding out what he was up to. I believe he set up a rendezvous with Ferrie to hand over a payment in exchange for the evidence in the briefcase, and then tried to have Ferrie killed. But when that failed, and Ferrie began demanding even more money, Stanic called on my expertise.

'We knew that Ferrie wouldn't trust any of Stanic's men turning up again to make the exchange, so we needed to bring in someone new. Someone gullible enough to fall for our set-up, and who could be trusted to follow instructions without running away with the money. Who could take all the risks without ever being able to point the finger at the people who sent him. Who was resourceful, brave and able to fight his way out of any trouble. And who, of course, was utterly expendable.' He stares me right in the eye as he speaks. 'That was you, Tyler. That was you.'

I feel like I've been kicked in the face. 'And you murdered Leah? Just to make sure I did what I was told?'

'It was unfortunate,' he says sharply, 'but, we thought, necessary. She was collateral damage.'

I think of Leah, the woman who for three short weeks I'd cared so much about, then of Major Ryan's cold, pitiless description of her. Collateral damage. She was nothing to him. I wonder how he could have become so twisted in his outlook on life. I feel the rage building within me. I want to tear this bastard apart, beat his head against the wall and make him suffer just a little of what Leah and Lucas suffered, but I force myself to keep calm. When I have the answers I still need, I'll take my revenge. Because I'm going to kill him for this, even if it has to be in cold blood.

I think about asking whether my relationship with Leah was a set-up, whether she too had been working for my enemies, but this is one answer I can't bring myself to hear. Better simply to leave the memories as they are.

'So, tell me,' I say, still trying to put all the pieces together, 'if Colonel Stanic was your business partner, why did you kill him?'

'Because the two of us had very different ideas about what we wanted done with the contents of the case. He, of course, wanted them destroyed, because they incriminated him and his so-called "special" customers. But I didn't. I wanted them made public.'

'Why?' I ask, frowning.

'Why do you think? These customers are high-ranking members of the establishment. There are the names of judges in that case. Of politicians. The very people who destroyed the careers of good men, men whose boots those bastards weren't fit to lick. I fought for this country for more than twenty years, in every war they sent me to. I followed every order I was given, but the one time, the one solitary time I asked them for support, they hung my men and me out to dry to appease a bunch of bombers and thugs. And they weren't content simply to wreck our careers, they had to grind our noses in the dirt as well, trying us by media, then throwing us in prison like common criminals.' His face darkens as he speaks, the bitterness coming off him in waves. 'Some of the men never got over it. Foxley, for one. He worked with me after he came out of prison, but he never got over the betrayal. He committed suicide, you know.'