Strangled Silence (2 page)

Amina gave her boss another smile. The story
wouldn't be quite as dramatic as a riot, but it was a
definite step up from hedgehogs. She looked down
at the name: Ivor McMorris.

'Thanks, Joel! I really appreciate this.'

'Thank me by turning in a good story. On
time
.
Now get your big silly grin out of my office.'

Amina stared down the street before her and
looked back at the address on the notepaper:
143 Winston Street. This was definitely it. Ivor
McMorris lived in flat number five. She blew
out her cheeks and continued walking. The
Underground station had been grotty enough, but
this area was a dump. That didn't put her off. She
regarded places like this as hives of social issues such
as poverty, drug abuse and domestic violence,
buzzing with great stories. She expected to see
much worse than this as her career progressed.

The block of flats was a relatively small, damp-looking
concrete-cast building on the corner of the
street. It wasn't a complete slum – the window
panes had obviously been cleaned recently and the
bars on the windows were freshly painted in a pale
mauve.

Checking her reflection in the stainless steel
speaker panel, she straightened her navy suit jacket
and flicked back the hair feathered over her forehead.
Then she pressed the buzzer for number five.

'Yes?'

'Mr McMorris? I'm Amina Mir, from the
Chronicle
.'

She still got a thrill from saying that.

'Hi. Come on up – second floor.'

The door's lock clicked and she entered,
making her way through a utilitarian lobby and up
the stairs. McMorris was waiting at the door of his
flat. He had only opened it a crack.

'You on your own? Can I see some ID?' he
asked.

Amina blinked for a moment, but then
fumbled around in her handbag for her wallet. She
showed him her citizen's identity card.

'You're just a kid,' he said, the lack of
enthusiasm evident in his voice.

'This is . . . I'm at university,' she said haltingly.
'I'm with the paper on—'

'Work experience.' He sniffed. 'Nice to know
Goldbloom's taking me seriously.'

He opened the door and reluctantly let her in.
McMorris was a few centimetres taller than her,
with a square face and curly brown hair. He'd look
good enough in a photograph; a little on the thin
side, but with wide shoulders that saved him from
being skinny. There was a certain rough style in the
way he wore his faded jeans and green T-shirt. She
always liked to take a few shots of her subjects with
her compact camera, just in case she could get one
printed.

The skin around McMorris's right eye was
marred by a spray of triangular and diamond-shaped
scars. Amina made a mental note of them.
Hours spent poring over her father's books of battle
injuries had taught her to recognize shrapnel
wounds when she saw them. That meant that his
disability was most likely a missing eye.

He wasn't much older than her – probably in
his early twenties – but there was far more experience
written on his face. She had seen that look on
the face of her father and his mates, one that said
they had seen just a little too much.

Behind the door was a basket full of opened
envelopes.

'Begging letters, mostly,' he told her. 'People
with sick relatives. I get a lot of offers too: "oncein-a-lifetime"
chances to invest in start-up businesses.
You win the lottery and all of a sudden people
start offering you "opportunities" to get rich . . .
well, richer.'

The one-bedroomed flat was comfortable, if a
little cramped. There were piles of books on shelves
and stacked around the edges of the floor. One
bookcase was filled with graphic novels, another
with films and CDs. The walls were painted in the
kind of creamy yellow popular in rented places, but
the framed expressionist paintings that hung on
them looked like originals – possibly his own.

McMorris's home spoke of a man with a lot of
time on his hands.

'Have a seat,' he said. 'You want coffee or tea?'

'Just water if you have it . . . I mean,
mineral
water
. If you only have tap water—'

'Don't worry,' he reassured her with a smile, as
he opened the fridge in the little kitchenette. 'I
don't drink the free stuff any more either. Ever
looked up inside a tap? I mean, I'm sure it's safe
enough, but . . .'

He had a wide smile with a hint of sadness
about it. Amina imagined him to be one of those
guys who was more popular with the girls than he
realized. She had to remind herself that she was the
one in control of this interview.

'Do you mind if I record this?' she asked, taking
her recorder from her bag.

He shook his head as he poured two glasses of
water from a bottle in the fridge. She sat on the
chair that looked towards the television, shunting it
round until it faced the couch across the low coffee
table. Switching on the recorder, she placed it on
the table between them. He handed her a glass and
sat down on the couch.

'Now, Mr McMorris—' she began.

'Ivor.'

'Sorry, Ivor. How would you like to do this?
Do you want to just tell it your way, or would you
like me to get things started with a few questions?'

He took a sip of his water and leaned forward,
staring intently at her. Amina was reminded that he
was a virtual recluse, and she was probably the only
young woman he had seen up close in some time.
Her mother had prepared her for times like these.
'Men like talking to pretty young women,' Helena
had once said. 'Don't be afraid to use that. Work
your advantages. If they want to lose themselves
in your eyes or ogle your legs, let them. You know
they won't get anywhere with it, and it'll help
loosen their tongues.'

It was the main reason Amina wore skirts to
interviews.

'Why don't I do the talking?' Ivor said to her.

She nodded and sat up straight, crossing her
legs.

'You want to know why I'm afraid to spend the
lottery money,' he began. 'But I can't explain that
without giving you some background. I wanted to
do journalism at university, but the idea of a student
loan freaked me out – and besides, I was looking for
something more. I thought the army sounded like a
good option. Plenty of adventure, sports, travelling,
and they had a scheme where they'd put you
through university, so I'd get an education without
spending the next ten years paying off debts.

'Sinnostan was just heating up. It wasn't a war
back then – they were still calling it a "security
operation". I didn't think I'd get sent there, but it
turned out I had a gift for storytelling and they
needed writers. The moment I finished basic training
they rushed me through a crash course in
journalism and shipped me off to the Media
Operations Unit in Kurjong.

'I joined the hearts 'n' minds campaign . . .
y'know, putting together news stories to convince
the Sinnostanis that we were occupying their
country for their own good . . . showing them what
great guys we were. Putting a good spin on the
whole thing.

'It was exciting stuff, getting to see heavy
armour storming up mountain roads, watching
fighter-bombers shoot past overhead, riding in
choppers and talking to soldiers who were revved
up and eager for action.'

Amina found herself nodding. She hated
reporters who nodded while they listened. But she
had discovered recently that it helped. It showed she
was listening – that he had her full attention,
without her having to respond to what he was saying.
It kept him talking. But she still thought that
sitting there nodding all the time looked stupid.

'I wasn't too cynical about it all then,' he went
on. 'I had a job to do and I enjoyed doing it. I was
getting to cover some thrilling stories. I thought I
might even get a book out of it in the end. I didn't
spend a lot of time worrying about telling the
truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth –
I had officers to keep happy. But on the whole, I
suppose I figured we were doing our bit for the
cause.

'It seemed like a pretty good gig until my crew
went to cover the operations in this tiny village
called Tarpan; me, my cameraman and our guide,
who acted as translator. Like most of the places in
Sinnostan, it's a pretty run-down dump stuck up
in a lonely spot in the mountains. Mostly clay-brick
buildings, forty-year-old cars made from spare
parts, a few rickshaws and a drained bunch of
people with those wide-cheeked, wind-burnt,
oriental faces who looked like they'd never seen
a foreigner before. The winter cold was setting
in, and there's a dry wind up there that would cut
you to the bone.

'We were sent to the scene of a car bomb in a
marketplace in the middle of the village. It was
gruesome; the injured had already been rushed to
hospital, but there were still a few charred corpses
in the burnt-out cars around the site of the
explosion. Men with hoses were washing the blood
off the road and into the drains. We started filming,
even though we knew the insurgents – or the
resistance, whatever you want to call the bastards –
had a nasty habit of launching follow-up attacks on
the people and the soldiers who gathered around
these bombsites.'

His hand went up unconsciously to touch his
right eye. Amina leaned forward slightly, wanting to
urge him on but knowing it was better to let him
do it in his own time. Ivor took a sip of his water
and leaned back on the couch.

'That's when things got weird,' he said at last.
'This . . . this is what I remember: we were in the
middle of filming when the second bomb went off.
A suicide bomber on a bloody bicycle, believe it or
not. We were caught in the blast and I was thrown
against the side of an APC . . . sorry, that's an
armoured personnel carrier—'

Amina nodded. 'I speak the language, my
father's a major in the Royal Marines.'

'Oh, right,' Ivor said, looking slightly uncomfortable.'
Well . . . anyway, I was knocked out. I
didn't come to until I was on a chopper taking us
to the hospital. I had a concussion, as well as shrapnel
wounds in my face, arm and leg. And I had a
punctured eyeball. They had to keep my head very
still for the whole flight. There was a chance they
could save the eye, so the medics strapped my head
to the stretcher so that I couldn't move my head.
They covered both eyes too, to stop me looking
around and making the injury worse, so all I could
do was lie as still as I could and listen to what was
going on. The morphine took care of the pain and
it helped with the fear too.

'Everything that followed was what you'd
expect: the deafening roar of the chopper's engines,
status reports shouted into radios, my hand being
squeezed as friendly voices offered reassurances, a
dramatic rush to the operating theatre as soon as we
landed. And all through it, I couldn't see anything –
just blackness with those bursts of light you get
when you squeeze your eyes closed. In the clear,
painful moments when the drugs started to wear
off, I can't tell you how terrified I was that I was
going to lose my eye. I could taste and smell blood;
I could feel it on my face, along with the fluid from
the eye itself. But they told me there was hope. And
I believed them . . . God, I wanted to believe them
so much.

'But it turned out the surgeons couldn't save
the eye after all. That made things simpler for them.
Once you take out what's left of it and remove the
shrapnel that's lodged in there, recovery is much
faster. My other wounds were minor enough, so
they just pumped me full of painkillers and
antibiotics and a few days later, they shipped me
home.'

Ivor paused again, and for a minute he sat there
saying nothing at all.

'It must have been absolutely horrible,' Amina
said with a sympathetic expression. 'I . . . I've heard
stories like this before – from soldiers, I mean. You
never really get the same sense of the horror of
being wounded from the news. I can't imagine
what it must be like.' She hesitated, praying
that what she said next wouldn't be too insensitive.
'I hope you don't mind me asking, but—'

'What has this got to do with me not spending
my lottery money?' Ivor chuckled. 'After all, that's
why you're here, isn't it? Not because I was
wounded in Sinnostan.'

'Well, that's not how I was going to put it,
but . . . yes.'

He leaned forward again, looking more intense
than he had before.

'You see, I said it was weird because that's what
I remember, and I could recall it for you in much
greater detail than that if I wanted to. It's what I
remember
, but I'm convinced it's not what actually
happened
.'

Amina waited, glancing at the recorder to make
sure it was getting all this. She had a feeling that this
story was about to become more than a humaninterest
article.

'Memory is a fluid thing,' Ivor said slowly. 'It
changes over time; we forget names, get things
mixed up; confuse times, dates and places. Very few
people have perfect recall. But my memory of that
time is damn near flawless. I can remember who
was in the chopper, how long it took to get to the
hospital, how many people were in the operating
theatre . . . just about everything. I can remember
the times these things happened.'