He was retired now, had 'gone early'. But a telephone call had come to the bungalow on the outskirts of Kilchoan, the chief investigation officer himself, and the request had been made that he should attend the small ceremony as the Custom House representative. A young diplomat, Hearn, had met him at the airport and had driven him to the valley. He had not been able to understand the speeches and he had wandered off. It had been his wife who had suggested he should take his walking-boots. He had sat on the riverbank and changed from his brogues to his boots then used the highest stones to cross the river. He had walked across a ploughed field, newly turned but not yet sown, and across a grazing field where his advance had scattered goats, sheep and two dry cows.
He had passed the skeletons. He did not have to be told where to go. The target that drew him forward was a waist-high cairn of stones. It was similar country and he felt comfortable, small fields, wooded slopes and distant mountains, to that which bounded the road approaching his home on the Ardnamurchan peninsula. He stood quietly by the stones and soaked the place of its images, and he'd said the same quiet prayer that he spoke in his mind each Sunday in the quiet of the chapel at Kilchoan. When the ceremony was over, a drifting procession had followed him to the cairn. The diplomat translated the words of the rugged, bluff, self-serving man who wore an old uniform greatcoat and a policeman's cap. He knew he must play the part of a sponge to their stories. There was an official report, which had been drawn up by the embassy half a year earlier, but it had carried no sense of soul in its typed pages. The retired policeman saluted him and stepped back. An old man, his cheeks nicked from the shave to mark the importance of the ceremony in the village, came forward to take Kovac's place, and beside him, hobbling with him, was a German shepherd dog with its left front leg off at the knee.
He wrote the next name: Husein Bekir (farmer).
' I came from my home and I waded over the ford, and I thought I would be swept away, and then I went up the track past Kovac's house – the old fool was whining that it was not his fault that the prisoner had escaped from him – and I followed the de-miners who had been called out. We went on a path they had made between their tape and the trees at the far side of my fields. They had big lamps with them. They worked as fast as they dared to make a corridor across the field. When they had gone half-way the light from the lamps showed him. I had been told he was called Joey a silly name. He was on the ground, on his side. He was alive then. They went faster, I think they took great risks. They found one mine, a small one like the mine that has crippled my wife, and a trip-wire but it had become disconnected from the PROM or the PMR2, and then they stopped. Why? Because of the dog. The dog was beside Joey. It guarded him.
Even where I stood in the trees behind the tape I could hear – and I have bad hearing – the growling of the dog. The men were more I l ightened of the dog than of the mines. Each metre they advanced in their corridor, before they stopped, the growl of the dog was more threatening. They said they would go no further unless the dog was shot, and one of them was sent to the village of Ljul to find a gun to kill the dog – the Serbs have many guns, they have not changed. I have worked with dogs all my life, a good dog is as important in my life as my children or my wife. I went down the corridor to where the men were with the lamps and their iron sticks. I talked to the dog. A rifle was brought from Ljut, but I gave my word that the dog would not hurt the de-miners. I saved the dog. We reached him. The dog was beside him and Joey had his arm over it, he held the coat of the dog. It is a good dog. It is of little use for work, but it is a friend… There should be a celebration tonight, because of the certificate, we should drink brandy until we can no longer stand – there will be no celebration. We are all honoured, sir, that you came.'
The farmer shook his hand, walked away with the dog, and was replaced at the queue's front.
He could not catch the name, so he wrote: Foreman (de-miner).
'He had lost most of his stomach and one of his arms and his right leg was very seriously injured.
There had been trauma and a great loss of blood. If we had been able to retrieve him quickly, within thirty minutes, then we might have saved his life, but he would still have required the amputation of his leg. I think, also, he may have been blinded but I have not seen any autopsy report… He confused me. Earlier that day I had met him and I had refused to move towards the man who was trapped in the field and had explained all of the dangers, and he had listened to everything I had said. Why did he then go into the field? Why did he wait until we had all gone, and it was dark, before he went into the field? I cannot say what drove him into the field… His life had gone when we reached him. We made this pile of stones where he was.'
At the ceremony, before he had abandoned it and had headed for the field and the cairn of stones, a certification of area cleared had been handed by the de-miner foreman to Kovac and Bekir, and the diplomat had murmured in his ear that the certification was good for ten centimetres in depth – enough for now. The couple presented themselves to him. He remembered her from the airport: 'With the kindergarten, am I?' she'd asked. Either she had aged or she did not wear the cosmetic blanket he had last seen employed, and four local policemen stood sombrely behind them.
He jotted the two names: PC Frank Williams (South Wales Constabulary), Margaret Bolton (surveillance consultant, SWC).
'We felt we had to come. We were a part of it, you see, a part of what he did here. And we found each other here, Maggie and me. We walked out on him, and we'll carry that to our graves. I said to him, at the end, that we were disgusted at what he was doing. I called him arrogant. I'm with the armed-response vehicles now. I do my shift, I check my weapons back into the armoury at the end of my duty, and I go home, but I don't take my work with me. I don't talk about winning and losing, as he did. Did he achieve anything, did he win?'
'Do you know, Mr Gough, what were his last words to Frank, when Frank ditched him? They were "Give Maggie my love"… If I'd been here, if I'd stayed, if I'd had to bloody well sit on him, I'd have stopped him walking into the field, but I didn't stay. I'm a consultant now. I lecture on surveillance practices and develop equipment, then I go home to Frank and we have a little meal and we don't talk about what happened here. But he's with us. I see those damn great stupid spectacles, and his kid's grin… What's the worst, he didn't want us to stay with him… We were just in the way. It was personal, it was between the two of them. I'm glad it was here, in a rather lovely place.'
The man who marched forward had irritation on his face as if not used to standing patiently in a queue
… He felt he was the bereaved relative at the chapel gate. He sensed that this was a mourner who had travelled from Sarajevo more because of a slack day's diary than a degree of loss. The name was rapped at him. Was he supposed to know it? He did not. He wrote: Benjamin Curwin (SIS, attached to United Nations Mission to Bosnia-Herzegovina).
' I hear they booted you out after the fiasco. Well, it was all rather childish, wasn't it? I'd have thought an organization like yours would have known how to keep its people on a tighter rein… I told him he was, quote, "a fucking nuisance here", unquote, and interfering – I told him to do his investigation someplace else because he was upsetting the cart… Serif's empire still stands and his reputation is augmented by the rumours that he possesses NATO anti-tank weapons, and a communications system we can't decrypt. His tentacles still reach into the body politic, he still owns the government, but it's harder for us to track his dealings… Not all gloom. I was in London last week and heard the latest on your old target. Very far from gloom. You're out of the loop now, so you won't be up to speed. Packer reached Sarajevo, hijacking vehicles en route at gunpoint, then holed up there for a couple of days with some UN woman, before moving on – she treated some nasty dog bites on his arm. Now, he's living like a Trappist in northern Cyprus. I would have thought the Scrubs or Wandsworth would be preferable. We monitor him there. He's in a villa up a hill between Kyrenia and Ayios Amrovisios, courtesy of the Turkish Cypriots – the word is it's cost him five million to square them and that awful hood from the mainland, Fuat Selcuk.