Dangerous Games (20 page)

‘Search the house? Go through all our personal things – through the life we've had together? What good could that possibly do?'

‘We might find some clue as to where he's gone,' Rutter explained.

‘Have you got a search warrant?' Mrs Bygraves demanded.

‘No, I haven't,' Rutter admitted. ‘I didn't think I'd need one. I thought you'd want to help.'

‘Of course I
want
to help,' Mrs Bygraves said, close to tears. ‘But don't you think that if there was something here, I'd already have found it?'

‘With the greatest respect, madam, you don't have a policeman's trained eye,' Rutter said.

‘No, but I
do
know my husband. And I know there's nothing in the house that will tell you where he went – because when he left, he didn't know where he was going himself.'

‘Well, I can't force you to let me in, if you don't want to,' Rutter told her. ‘We'll let you know if your husband turns up. Good morning, madam.'

He turned towards the garden gate.

‘Wait!' Mrs Bygraves said.

‘Yes?'

‘Do you really think you might find a clue of some sort?'

‘I can't promise
anything
, madam.'

Mrs Bygraves brushed a tear from her cheek.

‘You'd better come inside,' she said. ‘I'm sorry for the way I spoke to you just now. I really don't know what's come over me.'

‘It's perfectly understandable, madam,' Rutter said.

And it was.

First there'd been desperate hope, but that had been rapidly followed by despair, anger, defiance and eventually misery. These were the string of ever-changing emotions that people felt when they believed – and yet at the same time
refused
to believe – that they had lost their partner.

And he should know, because he had run the whole gamut himself – at least a dozen times – after Maria had been murdered.

Captain Howerd was in his mid-thirties, but already greying at the temples. He looked at Paniatowski as if she were something that the cat had dragged in.

‘We're not accustomed to the civilian police force carrying out investigations into army personnel,' he said.

‘The men I'll be investigating haven't been in the army for a number of years,' Paniatowski replied.

‘But they'll still be able to recite their whole army pay book number without a second's hesitation,' Howerd said.

‘I'm afraid I don't quite get the point,' Paniatowski admitted.

‘You wouldn't,' the captain said dismissively.

‘Though perhaps I just might, if you were to take the time to explain it to me.'

The captain sighed. ‘In a way, we are a little like the Jesuits,' he said.

‘We?' Paniatowski repeated. ‘Who's
we
?'

The captain sighed again, even more heavily this time, as if it were a real strain to have to explain
anything
to this stupid civilian.

‘
We
are the army,' he said. ‘The
professional
soldiers. The fighting force that has kept Britain safe for the last five hundred years, and will continue to keep it safe for the next five hundred.'

‘I see,' Paniatowski told him. ‘Do please carry on.'

‘We take our raw material at a young age, as the Jesuits do, and we mould it into exactly what we want it to be. And once that's done, it's ours for ever. It
belongs
to us. So from our perspective, Sergeant Paniatowski, there's no such thing as an
ex
-soldier. There are only soldiers who are no longer on active duty.'

‘You resent me being here, don't you?' Paniatowski said.

‘While you're on the Sovereign Base Areas, you'll be granted the same status as a sergeant in the military police,' the captain said, ignoring her question. ‘A billet has been made available for you in the sergeants' quarters, and Lance Corporal Blaine will be your driver. You will be issued with a military pass, which will allow you to go wherever you wish to on the island. You have my permission to speak to whoever you feel the need to, provided that, in doing so, you do not compromise the position of the army vis-à-vis the local authorities. Any questions?'

‘What kind of support can I expect?'

‘As I've already said, Lance Corporal Blaine will be your driver.'

‘No one else?'

Howerd smiled bleakly. ‘You surely wouldn't expect us to do your job
for
you, would you, Sergeant?'

‘What about access to your records?'

‘We cannot allow you to trawl through them wholesale. If there is a specific record you wish to see, you must request it
specifically
. We will then consider your application.'

‘And how long will that take?' Paniatowski wondered.

Howerd shrugged. ‘Could take days. Perhaps even longer.'

‘I imagine it could,' Paniatowski said. ‘I imagine it could take until I'd already left the island.'

‘That's a possibility,' Howerd admitted. ‘I should also mention that you do not need to report your activities to anyone in the military chain of command. In fact, we'd much rather
not
know what you're doing. Any more questions?'

‘No, that just about covers it,' Paniatowski said.

‘In that case, I will detain you no longer,' the captain told her.

It was as Paniatowski was walking to the door that Howerd added, ‘There is
one
more thing, Sergeant Paniatowski.'

‘Yes?'

‘We've been ordered to pull out all the stops for you, and I think you'll agree that we have.'

‘In some respects, yes.'

‘I can't ever remember having to do that before, not for a mere
civilian
. You must have friends in very high places.'

‘It's not so much that I've got friends in high places myself as that I know a man who knows a man who has,' Paniatowski said.

Captain Howerd nodded, as if, understanding the way the world worked, that was just the answer he'd expected her to give.

W
hen Paniatowski emerged from Captain Howerd's office, it was to find that Lance Corporal Blaine was just where she had left him, sitting behind the wheel of his Land Rover and basking in the sunshine.

When he saw Paniatowski approaching, he smiled.

‘Did Captain Howerd give you a right proper bollocking, Sarge?' he asked.

‘Now why should you ever think that?' Paniatowski wondered.

‘He never bothers to see anybody personally unless a bollocking's on the cards,' Blaine said, with a total lack of guile that Paniatowski found remarkably refreshing.

‘I think he did
try
to bollock me, but it just didn't take,' Paniatowski told him.

Blaine's smile transformed itself into a very wide grin. ‘Good for you!' he said. ‘So where are we off to now, Sarge?'

A good question, Paniatowski thought.

‘Do you have any idea of how many of the soldiers on this base would have been here seven years ago?' she asked.

‘Are we talkin' about the infantry, or the technical staff?'

‘The infantry.'

Blaine grinned again. ‘Then that's an easy question to answer, Sarge. None of them.'

‘None at all?'

‘Not a one.'

‘Wonderful,' Paniatowski said, dejectedly.

‘The longest anybody serves here is two years. I've only got a few months to go myself. Must say, I'll miss the place. A lot of the other lads will, as well. After living in the sunshine, by the sea, it'll be a bit of a wrench to have to return to wet old Blighty.'

‘Yes, I can understand that,' Paniatowski said absently. Her mind had already moved on, searching for new lines of inquiry, and deciding that there were depressingly few open to her.

‘Of course, if you want to talk to somebody who
was
here at the time, you could always pay a call on the Real McCoy.'

‘The real
who
?'

‘Sergeant Ted McCoy. He'd been in the army for donkey's years, but he said that of all the places he'd been, Cyprus was the absolute best. So when the time came for him to be demobbed, he married a local girl and stayed on. Bought himself a little taverna in Larnaca, he did, and called it the Real McCoy. It's a bit of a play on words, you see.'

‘Yes,' Paniatowski agreed. ‘I do see.'

‘The place is a great favourite with the lads, when they're off duty. Some nights you can hardly get through the door.'

‘When
exactly
did this Sergeant McCoy of yours leave the army?' Paniatowski asked.

‘Let me see now,' Blaine said, scratching the top of his head. ‘From what McCoy said to me the last time I was in his pub, I think it would have to have been around six years ago.'

Paniatowski climbed into the passenger seat of the Land Rover. ‘Take me to the Real McCoy,' she said.

The inside of the Bygraves' house produced no surprises for Bob Rutter. It was, as it should have been, the aspiring middle-class home of an aspiring middle-class family. It was tidy and cared-for, and where corners had been cut, a valiant attempt had been made to disguise the fact.

There was nothing in Tom Bygraves' personal papers to suggest where he had gone – nothing to even hint that he had somewhere he
could have
gone – and after an hour, Rutter was prepared to admit defeat.

‘I'm sorry,' he said to Mrs Bygraves, as if it were his fault that her husband had not left a paper trail.

‘You did your best,' the woman said, as if
she
thought that it was his fault, but was trying not to blame him
too
much.

He did not want to leave with nothing, and it was the vague hope that he still might rescue a little from the visit which made him say, ‘My chief inspector mentioned that one of the last things your husband did before he left was to light a small bonfire in the back garden, Mrs Bygraves.'

‘Yes?'

‘You don't happen to know what it was that he burned on it, do you?'

Mrs Bygraves shrugged, as if it were a stupid question – and Rutter silently agreed that it probably was.

‘It was garden waste,' Rosemary Bygraves said. ‘Leaves, grass cuttings, that kind of stuff.'

And suddenly, she was looking thoroughly ashamed of herself.

‘Is anything the matter?' Rutter asked.

‘We … we have this committee – the Brighter Neighbourhood Committee – and I'm one of the founder members,' Rosemary Bygraves said.

‘I see,' Rutter replied – though he didn't.

‘We drew up a set of rules which were designed to stop us from bothering the people who lived around us. One of them is that if we play the radio in the garden, we have to keep the volume very low. Another is that if we have a party, we must make sure there's no noise after eleven o'clock at night.'

‘I'm not sure I'm following you,' Rutter admitted.

‘And then there's the rule about fires,' Rosemary Bygraves said hurriedly. ‘We can have fires in the garden, but only in the autumn, when there are a lot of leaves to burn. And even then only on Saturdays.'

‘And this isn't autumn, and yesterday wasn't a Saturday,' Rutter said, catching on.

Rosemary Bygraves nodded. ‘As soon as Tom had left, I went into the back garden and doused the fire. Isn't that terrible? My husband had gone, and all I could think about was what the neighbours would say about me breaking the rules.'

‘We all do that,' Rutter said. ‘We all worry over the little problems because we can't face the big ones.'

But though the sympathy in his voice was real enough, it was all he could do to restrain himself from pushing the woman aside and rushing straight into the back garden.

The first two men, who DC Colin Beresford had already ticked off on his morning list of visits, had been of absolutely no help to him at all.

‘Yes, I remember Pugh and Lewis vaguely,' one of them had said. ‘But they had their own mates, just as I had mine.'

‘When I read in the paper that a Reg Lewis had been murdered, the name did ring a bell,' the second had told him, ‘but I never thought for a minute that it might be somebody I'd been in the army with. To tell you truth, I doubt if I could even put a face to the name, after all this time.'

The third man on Beresford's list was called Martin Murray, and he lived above his model shop on one of the quaint twisty old lanes in the centre of Whitebridge that the planners hadn't quite got around to gleefully pulling down yet.

The shop itself re-awakened the child in Beresford. Models of Second World War bomber and fighter planes, all of them beautifully painted, hung from the ceiling, as they re-fought old battles. Soldiers made of lead, and wearing uniforms from the Peninsular War, stood to attention on the numerous shelves which ran around the walls.

But it was the model railway, which took up most of the floor space between the counter and the door, that was the true marvel. There were tunnels and stations, signal boxes and level crossings. As the train made its slow graceful journey around the track, tiny figures watched it from the doorways of tiny houses, and little white sheep – no doubt frightened by the roar – seemed caught in the act of running away across painted fields.

‘It's taken me six years to make,' said Martin Murray, noticing Beresford's fascination. ‘Six long years, working way into the night, and all through the weekends.'

‘It was worth it,' Beresford said, admiringly.

Murray smiled. ‘Thank you.'

The man was probably still only in his late twenties, Beresford thought, but he looked a lot older. His face was round and pasty. His white curly hair had already started to desert his pate. His shoulders – perhaps due to spending so much time bent over his model railway – had developed a stoop. And if his eyesight had been as poor a few years ago as the thick lenses in his glasses seemed to indicate that it was now, he'd never have been accepted into the army in the first place.