Trouble In Mind

An hour passed. Two. Once Rebecca thought she heard voices and called out in their direction, but there was no reply and the voices faded away till there were just the sounds of the forest. Distant cars. An aeroplane overhead.

“I told you,” Keiron said accusingly and kicked at the ground.

“Right,” Rebecca said, making up her mind. “Put on your coats and scarves. We’re going.”

“Where? To find Daddy?”

“Yes,” Rebecca lied.

Billie fussed with her buttons and when Rebecca knelt to help her, the child pushed her away. “I can do it. I can do it myself.”

“Well, get a move on.”

“I am.” Bottom lip stuck petulantly out.

Calm down, Rebecca told herself. Calm down.

Billie pushed the last button into place.

“All right?” Rebecca said. “Come on, then. Let’s go.”

They were a hundred metres away, maybe less, heading in what Rebecca thought was the direction they’d originally come, when they saw him just a short way ahead, walking purposefully towards them.

“Come to meet me? That’s nice.”

As the children went into the tent, he pulled her back. “Try that again and I’ll kill you, so help me.”

There were only a couple of hours of daylight left. By the time they had got a decent-sized search party organised there would be even less. Best to wait until first light.

“I’ve been talking to the Royal Military police,” Resnick said. “Seems as though one sergeant going AWOL isn’t too high on their list of priorities. Too many of them, apparently, done the same. Not too keen on hurrying back to fight for someone else’s democracy. More interested in tracking down a batch of illicit guns, smuggled into the U. K. from Iraq via Germany. Bit of a burgeoning trade in exchanging them for drugs and currency. Cocaine, especially. Still, they’re sending someone up tomorrow. If we do find Anderson, they’ll want to stake their claim.”

“Till then we twiddle our thumbs.”

“Do better than that, I dare say,” Resnick said.

Tony Burns was up from London, sitting in with a local band at The Five Ways. Geoff Pearson on bass, the usual crew. Last time Resnick had heard Burns, a good few years back, he’d been playing mostly baritone, a little alto. Now it was all tenor, a sound not too many miles this side of Stan Getz. Jake McMahon joined them for the last number, a tear-up through the chords of “Cherokee.” By now the free cobs were going round, end of the evening, cheese or ham, and Kiley was having a pretty good time.

Resnick had called Ly

Resnick made coffee and, feeling expansive, cracked open a bottle of Highland Park. They sat listening to Ben Webster and Art Tatum and then Monk fingering his way through “Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea,” Kiley not without envy for what seemed, in some respects, a fuller, more comfortable life than his own.

“Well,” said Resnick, finally, levering himself up from his chair. “Early start.”

“You bet.”

The bed was made up in the spare room, a clean towel laid out and, should he need it, a new toothbrush in its plastic case. He thought he might manage a few more pages of The Man Who Liked Slow Tomatoes before dropping off, but when he woke in the morning, the book had fallen to the floor, unread.

Wherever he’d gone in those two hours, Anderson had come back with a bottle of vodka. Stolichnaya. Perhaps he’d had it with him all along. He sat there, close to the entrance to the tent, drinking steadily. Rebecca tried to get the children to eat something but to little avail. She forced herself to try some of the corned beef, though it was something she’d never liked. The children drank water, nibbled biscuits. And moped.

The rain outside increased until it began seeping under one corner of the tent.

Billie lay down, sucking her thumb, and, for once, Rebecca made no attempt to stop her. If Keiron, huddled into a blanket near her feet, was asleep or not she wasn’t sure.

The bottle was now half empty.

Anderson stared straight ahead, seeing something she couldn’t see.

“Terry?”

At the softness of her voice, he flinched.

“How long is it since you got any sleep?”

Whenever she had awoken in the early hours after they’d arrived, he had been sitting, shoulders hunched, alert and keeping guard.

“How long?”

“I don’t know. A long time.”

“What’s wrong?”

For an answer he lifted the bottle to his lips.

“Perhaps you should talk to someone? About what’s troubling you? Perhaps…”

“Stop it! Just shut the hell up!”

“Stop what?”

“Wheedling round me.” He mimicked her voice. “‘Perhaps you should talk to someone, Terry?’ As if you gave a shit.”

“I do.”

“Yeah?” He laughed. “You don’t give a shit about me and I don’t give a shit about you. Not anymore.”

“Then why are we here?”

“Because of them. Because they have to know.”

“Know what?”

He moved suddenly. “Wake them. Go on, wake them up.”

“No, look, they’re exhausted. Let them sleep.”

But Billie was already stirring and Keiron was awake.

Anderson took another long swallow from the bottle. His skin was sallow and beads of perspiration stood out on his forehead and his temples. When he started talking, his voice seemed distant, even in the confines of the tent.

“We were on patrol, just routine. There’d been a firefight a couple of days before, so we were more on our guard than usual. Against snipers but also for explosives. IEDs. We were passing this house and this woman came out, just her face showing, part of her face, the eyes, and she’s waving her arms and wailing and pointing back towards the house as if there’s something wrong, and Sean, he jumps down, even though we’re telling him not to be stupid, and the next thing we know, he’s followed her to the doorway, and the next after that he’s been shot. One gets him in the body and knocks him back, but he’s wearing his chest plate, thank Christ, so that’s all right, but the next one takes him in the neck. By now we’re returning fire and the woman’s disappeared, nowhere to be fucking seen, Sean’s leaking blood into the bloody ground, so we drag him out of there, back into the vehicle and head back to camp.”

Beside Rebecca, Keiron, wide-eyed, listened enthralled. Billie clutched her mother’s hand and flinched each time her father swore.

“He died, that’s the thing. Sean. The bullet’d torn an artery and the bleeding wouldn’t stop. By the time we reached camp, he was dead. He was our mate, a laugh. A real laugh. Always saw the fu

Rebecca shivered and hugged the children close.

“We went in under cover of darkness. There was no moon, I remember, not then. Sometimes it’d be, you know, huge, filling half the sky, but that night there was nothing. Just a few stars. Everyone inside was sleeping. Women. Men.” He paused. “Children. Soon as we got inside one of the men reached for his gun, he’d been sleeping with it, under the blankets, and that’s when we started firing. Firing at anything that moved. One of the women, she came ru