White Crocodile (8 page)

Tess awoke with a jolt, to a juddering noise. Her first thought was:
Christ, the anti-tank mine.
She’d brought it back from the field and shoved it under her bed because that seemed as good a place as any to hide it until she decided what to do with it, who to tell.

Groggily, she sat up. It felt as if she’d only been asleep for five minutes. Her gaze found the patio doors. They were open, the white curtains billowing in the breeze, backlit with an orange-yellow glow from the rising sun. Rolling out of bed, she grabbed her mobile phone.

She took a moment to recognise the voice. ‘MacSween?’

‘I’ve just had a call. Some bairn – some baby – in a minefield.’

What was he talking about? Her mind, still sluggish, struggled to comprehend.

‘A
baby
?’

‘Aye. A baby.’

‘What’s a baby doing in a minefield?’

‘Welcome to Cambodia.’

‘But how did it get there?’

‘I have no idea.’

‘Where’s the mother?’

‘
They
had no idea.’

‘Who are they? Who called it in?’

‘Médecins Sans Frontières. They’re out there giving malaria jabs. They like to start even earlier than we do.’

‘Is it in the—?’
The White Crocodile field – again?
She didn’t need to voice it.

‘Aye. The baby is in Koh Kroneg. But don’t you start on that crap too, love. I’ve got enough superstitious idiots at MCT to fill a cathedral and then some.’

Tess bit her lip. ‘Is it near to where Johnny was injured?’

‘Near enough. It’s a small village, on the western edge of the field – Johnny was north – about five kilometres from there. Médecins Sans Frontières were out at the village last week making a list of all the babies needing jabs, and when they went back this morning one was missing. Belongs to a teenage girl who got herself knocked up. Worse than death in a country like this, even with all the prostitution that goes on. They’ve been living alone in a hut on the edge of the village. Clive from MSF said it looked like they just upped and left right before bedtime. Sleeping roll laid out, but unslept in. They’ve spotted the baby abandoned in the minefield, but there’s no sign of the girl.’

A pause. Tess remained stubbornly silent.

‘Look, love. I’m not too stupid to know that the last thing you want to do after Johnny’s accident is to face another tricky situation in that minefield, but as I already told you, I’ve given the teams a couple of days off. Jakkleson’s got the paperwork to do on Johnny, Alex has gone AWOL, and I can’t do it alone. If nothing else it’ll teach you not to answer your phone when you see my caller ID. Grab a quick coffee and a bite. I’ll see you outside the lovely Madam Chou’s in twenty.’

Standing on the balcony, the cool morning air eddying around her, Tess watched the sun rise. As she took a sip of coffee, she realised that her hands were shaking.

It had been mid-May, her father had told her years later, spring in England, the trees in bud, when her mother had walked out on them. She had an image of being trapped in her pram in a hallway, staring at a trapezoid of daylight through an open doorway as her mother stepped out of it, into the sun. Then the door swung shut, and she was alone. The recollection couldn’t be real. She hadn’t even been two. And that wasn’t the way memory worked anyway – it wasn’t a series of little films you might record on your smartphone, available to reassemble any time you wanted to view them. And yet sometimes these images were so clear she could almost reach out and touch them: feel the material of her mother’s cotton dress slipping through her fingers, the lift of the wind as the door opened, the scent of cut grass on the suburban spring air. At other times that image – the leaving – was so blurred as to be unrecognisable. Just abandonment, followed by an endless stream of faceless nannies, by long-forgotten friends’ houses at Easter and Christmas when her father was away on his tours of duty. And sometimes her mind, her memory of that phase of her life was just a blank. As if she was looking through a camera lens with the shutter still on.

Her father never said the words, but Tess could see it in his face, when she caught him standing in the hallway, looking around him as if searching for something he had misplaced. She knew that, even now, her father was waiting, stuck in limbo. Tess didn’t know how much he needed from her – what compensation he wanted from her for being the one who had driven his wife away with her baby neediness, her ceaseless demands for time and attention. Now and then, in spite of the carapace of toughness she had built around herself, she found herself almost crippled by loneliness.

The diesel rumble of MacSween’s approaching engine cut through the dawn silence. Taking a last sip of coffee, she tossed the remainder over the balcony railing just as he hit the horn, a short businesslike blast. But her hand must have been damp because the handle of the mug slipped through her fingers and she watched it cartwheel away from her. It hit the grass below with a dull thud, cartwheeled again, once, before landing in two pieces.

Another blast of the horn. She turned from the balcony, pulling the glass doors closed behind her.

Alex’s eyes flicked open, and for a moment he couldn’t work out where he was. Groaning, he pushed himself upright. The back seat of the Land Cruiser. Last night. It was all coming back to him.

He had been drinking Johnnie Walker in a vain attempt to anaesthetise himself to sleep. Around midnight, he’d been dozing on the sofa in his living room when he had been jolted awake by a memory.

Luke, drunk, out of control. Johnny, laughing and laughing.

He’d sat up, his gaze finding the bookshelf in the corner of the room where a miscellany of objects from the course of his life mixed with the books; searching out the darkness at the back of the middle shelf and the flat piece of wood hidden there. Looking at it, he remembered Johnny’s voice:
Fuck off back to the Land Cruiser then, Alex, and try not to be such a miserable bastard in future. We’re only having a laugh.
The line of mine tape had just been visible in the darkness, stirring slightly. He had heard the rush of the evening breeze over the ruined paddy fields and through the tangled elephant grass behind, a sense of invisible distance, of being on the edge of something. Like an abyss.

Johnny was standing in front of the mine tape – on safe ground. He was jiggling from foot to foot, wired, because he loved this kind of thing.
Loved jokes.
He was holding a black sign in his hand, held away from his body because the paint on it was still wet. The ends of his fingers were tinged in black and white where he had held the paintbrushes. Luke was standing next to Johnny, his shirt off, laughing. He had a hammer and some nails in one hand and a can of beer in the other. He was drunk by then, very drunk. The only one of them who was. It had briefly occurred to Alex that Luke was acting out of character: he was usually so ordered, so controlled, like an over-wound clockwork toy. Alex had worked with him for a couple of months by then and he didn’t know him any better than the first day they’d met.

Got the cork jammed in too tight
, was what Johnny said about Luke.

Alex had turned then, and gone back to the Land Cruiser; found the second sign that they’d left on the passenger seat and shoved it in his bag, so that they would only put one up.

Luke, drunk, out of control. Johnny, laughing and laughing.

Midnight. He should have knocked it on the head then: tossed the bottle of Johnnie Walker in the bin, had a shower, tried to get a grip. But he hadn’t. Instead he’d headed straight to the Bamboo Train to grab a pizza and shoot some pool with Vannak, the restaurant’s owner and one of Battambang’s characters, who always had good stories to tell, none of them tethered in reality. The rest of the evening – morning – spent at Paradise Night Club, sinking Johnnie Walker and chatting up the bar girls, who were sweet and beautiful and tempting, and would do pretty much anything for a price, but that was one promise to himself he wasn’t breaking, irrespective of how drunk he was, and how shit he felt. He couldn’t even remember why he hadn’t just driven home, but it was probably because the hospital was only a couple of minutes on a straight road from the nightclub.

Dawn was spreading across the sky as he climbed out of the Land Cruiser: the buildings and trees in the hospital courtyard diverging in the gathering light. He lit a cigarette and leaned against the tailgate. He was apprehensive, he realised, and that realisation caused a twinge of guilt. He didn’t want Johnny to be conscious – couldn’t yet face the overwhelming devastation Johnny would feel once cognisant of his injuries – knew that he would enter that hospital building only out of a sense of obligation, rather than a desire to see his friend.

The lights from the common room behind him lit his way as he walked towards the dark hospital building. He stepped on to the veranda. Deserted. As he reached for the door, he caught movement out of the corner of his eye: someone was standing in the shadows at the far end. The figure’s head tilted to follow his movements. Unhurriedly, Alex opened the door. In the reflection from the glass, he saw a shadow flit between the posts holding up the veranda roof and approach from behind. Footsteps coming. He paused with the open door clasped in his left hand and counted slowly to three. With his right, he reached for the Browning tucked into the front of his belt. Letting go of the door, he spun around, reaching out in one smooth movement with his left hand, catching the figure by the neck, dragging him sideways, slamming him against the wall and thrusting the muzzle of the Browning into his cheek.

‘Were you waiting for me?’

Alex’s captive tried to free himself. But he was tiny, much smaller than Alex, and after a few moments of futile squirming he gave up.

Slowly, Alex’s vision grew accustomed to the half-light. A skinny young Khmer boy stared up at him, winded and shocked. His ruined hands were clamped defensively in front of him; Alex glanced down, saw the stumps of fingers, gnarled skin, withered thumbs, and recognition dawned. He let go quickly, stepping back.

‘Ret S’Mai,’ he managed. ‘Jesus, I’m sorry.’

Ret S’Mai remained rigidly against the wall, as if still held there. He reminded Alex absurdly of one of those old-fashioned china dolls he used to see in the posh shops of Sarajevo before the town was trashed in the conflict – almost unreal.

‘I’m sorry,’ Alex repeated. ‘I didn’t know it was you. I’m just jumpy at the moment.’ Looking down, he realised his hand, still gripping the Browning, was shaking. Shoving the gun back into his belt, he pulled his shirt over it. ‘Did you want to talk to me?’

‘Yuh.’ There was a thin, shrill tone in Ret S’Mai’s voice.

Reaching out, Alex touched his shoulder. Ret S’Mai jerked his head up. Alex almost took a step back: the kid’s eyes were hot with rage.

‘What the hell—’

He broke off as Ret S’Mai’s mouth opened.

‘I seen—’

A moped in the street roared.

Alex cupped a hand to his ear. ‘What? What have you seen?’

Ret S’Mai repeated it, but Alex still couldn’t hear.

The moped passed with a high-pitched scream. Alex turned back to Ret S’Mai, gave a start as he realised that Ret S’Mai had taken a step forward, was leaning into him, barely a centimetre away.

‘I seen him. He die.’

Alex grasped his arm. ‘What the hell are you talking about?’ But in that one movement, he realised that he had lost the kid, frightened him. Wrenching himself from Alex’s grasp, Ret S’Mai bolted down the corridor.

‘Fuck.’

Alex turned towards Johnny’s closed door and stopped. He couldn’t face seeing Johnny yet, he realised. He’d come back later. When he’d had some proper sleep. When he wasn’t hungover. Stepping silently back out on to the veranda, he crossed the courtyard to his Land Cruiser.

Mist drifted in from the river. At the edge of the jungle, pale-faced villagers stood in knots, shaking their heads and whispering, as MacSween carried the baby back into safe ground, wrapped securely in his jacket. The team from Médecins Sans Frontières were there too, full of questions for the villagers about what had happened, not getting any answers.

The little boy was blue with cold, eyes dull. He must have screamed himself silent, because he didn’t make a sound; just sucked in little gulps of air, his head flopping from side to side as if it had become too heavy.

They had found him tucked into a knoll in a rotten tree fifty metres into the minefield, naked, but blanketed under a pile of leaves. But they still hadn’t answered the question of how the hell he had got there. Or where his mother was. MacSween and the team from MSF wanted to call off the search. They had scoured the village, interviewed the villagers – who professed to know nothing, and MacSween and Clive both felt they were telling the truth – checked the minefield around where the baby had been left and found no trace of her.

But Tess wouldn’t let it go. Not yet.

She walked into the trees. It was quiet. She paused and glanced around. The jungle was intensely thick and dark, the light from the midday sun swallowed up in the canopy far above her head which moved slowly, constantly, as if it were breathing. The only sound was the insect hum of the metal detector. She dropped her gaze to the coil, forced herself to keep walking, passing it softly across the ground in front of her. Being isolated from the silence by the hum of the detector should have given her a sense of security. But it was the opposite. The knowledge that she was the only source of uninterrupted noise in the jungle made her feel exposed, vulnerable.

There was only a single, narrow track and she followed it, step by careful step as it wound deeper into the jungle, the ground alternately hard then soft with leaves and damp.

Sudden movement. She stopped and held her breath, staring hard into the dimness between the trees. Something flashed past her face, so close that she felt the rush of air.