Death in Kabul, page 8
Where God comes to cry.
She knew where she could get a gun.
Chapter 9
Sunday, 7 December 2003
If Davie Marshall had been getting his hands dirty, the most likely people to know about it were his closest colleagues. Holder had filled Mac in on Marshall’s job – he headed up one of the three troops that made up Souter’s logistics squadron, and Mac had a list of Marshall’s troop in front of him as he, Jananga and Holder sat at a large square table in Holder’s office.
The captain, seeming to have become resigned to his role as their chaperone for the investigation, was being more accommodating – tea and information forthcoming, including a photo of Marshall and a copy of his service record. The picture was of the whole troop and was a little blurred, but apparently it was the only one Holder had to hand. He’d even told them to call him Noddy, his nickname in honour of the lead singer of the band Slade, Noddy Holder. Jananga, having declined a brew, was copying the names into his notebook.
Mac made a mental note to refuse any more glasses of the bitter green slops that masqueraded as tea in Jananga’s office. He’d always felt obliged to drink it when it was offered, but he’d obviously been far too polite.
‘Who do you need to see first?’ said Holder, pushing the list back along the table to Mac.
‘Marshall’s sergeant – Neil Dixon.’
Holder went over to the phone on his desk and instructed someone at the other end to bring Sergeant Dixon to his office.
While they waited, Mac questioned Jananga. ‘Catch me up, Major – did you get anything out of that kid we picked up at the tank graveyard?’
Jananga shrugged and let out a sigh before he spoke. ‘It was nothing. He was a male prostitute, brought up there by one of his customers. It’s a place known for…’ He shrugged again.
‘Cruising,’ supplied Mac. It didn’t surprise him.
‘Cruising,’ said Jananga. Another new word for his English vocabulary.
A minute later, there was a knock at the door and a tall, dark-haired man stepped into Holder’s office. He was wearing desert camouflage trousers, army-issue boots and a dark blue sweatshirt with the regimental badge on the chest. He stood to attention in front of Holder.
‘Sergeant Dixon, sir. I understand you wanted to see me?’
‘Yes, thanks for coming in, Sergeant. Take a seat.’
Dixon sat down along the fourth side of the table, giving Jananga a questioning look. Without a uniform, as far as Dixon was concerned, he could have been an interpreter or one of the various other local workers employed on the base.
‘Dixon, this is Major Jananga of the Kabul police, and DI MacKenzie,’ said Holder.
Mac saw a wave of tension pass up Dixon’s spine. He wondered why.
‘You’ll know, of course, by now that Davie Marshall was found dead yesterday morning,’ the captain continued.
‘Major Tomlinson informed the troop last night, sir.’
Tomlinson had agreed to give out as few details as possible at this stage. As far as the men were concerned, Marshall had been found dead in Kabul and that was it. They didn’t know where he was found or what had happened to him. But they would quickly draw their own conclusions based on the fact that they were being questioned by an Afghan police major.
‘How long have you worked under Captain Marshall?’ said Mac.
‘Since just before we were deployed out here in the spring. Prior to that, Captain Harvey was our troop commander.’
‘Any reason for the change?’
‘Not my place to ask questions.’ The words didn’t sound convincing. The sergeant knew something he wasn’t letting on. Was this down to his own reticence, or had the soldiers been briefed by their commanding officer to hold back?
Jananga leant forward with his elbows on the table.
‘You worked closely with Captain Marshall? You knew him well?’
Dixon flashed a glance at Holder, and Holder nodded. The sergeant returned his gaze to Jananga.
‘I worked with him every day. We got on.’
‘You were friends?’
‘Not friends, no. He was a Rupert.’
Jananga’s eyebrows went up. ‘I don’t know that word,’ he said to Mac.
‘Slang,’ said Holder. ‘Marshall was a commissioned officer – a Rupert. Sergeant Dixon doesn’t hold a commission.’
Jananga looked none the wiser, but he scribbled furiously in his book.
Mac took the chance to jump in.
‘We understand that Captain Marshall would occasionally be off the base all night. Would that be a normal part of his duties?’
Dixon’s nostril’s flared momentarily. Mac wondered how much he was sweating inside his top.
‘We meet the planes coming into Kabul Airport and unload them, and we load planes going out. Our hours depend on the flight times.’
It didn’t answer the question.
‘Were you working on Thursday night?’ said Holder.
‘No, sir. We had a plane land in the afternoon, but it was unloaded by teatime.’
‘And there wasn’t another one? Or a plane leaving?’
‘No, sir.’
‘So Marshall wouldn’t have been going to the airport late on Thursday evening?’
‘Not that I know of, sir.’
Mac decided to try a change of tack. ‘Do you know what Captain Marshall did with his time when he was off duty?’
Dixon shrugged. ‘Wasn’t my business. I think he went out sometimes with the other officers. I saw him in the gym on and off.’
‘So you have no idea what he might have been doing out of camp on Thursday night?’
‘No. I’m sorry, I can’t help you.’
No pause for thought. No expression of regret over what had happened. Mac didn’t take to Neil Dixon for reasons he couldn’t quite fathom – and it made him wonder if the tosser knew more than he was letting on. And how much of this performance was for Holder’s benefit.
‘Okay, Sergeant Dixon. You’ve been very helpful.’ Not. ‘If you think of anything else that might be relevant, please let Captain Holder know.’
‘Yes, of course.’
After he’d gone, Holder excused himself for a minute, leaving Mac and Jananga alone.
The major shook his head. ‘He hasn’t told us something. He knows more.’
‘I don’t doubt it,’ said Mac.
‘But you let him go.’ It was more accusation than question.
‘I don’t think he wanted to talk freely in front Holder – there’s no trust between the Military Police and the regular soldiers.’
Jananga shrugged. ‘I would have dug deeper for the answers.’
Mac ignored the implications. They were questioning British soldiers on a British base – he could hardly use the type of interrogation tactics the Afghan police probably favoured. He wondered if the whole exercise was a waste of time. He was sure he’d do better if he and Ginger could talk to the men without others listening in.
Holder came back into the room.
‘Who’d you want next, Mr MacKenzie?’
* * *
Captain Dev Khatri spoke with a thick Brummy accent.
‘I can’t believe what’s happened,’ Khatri said, taking the chair vacated by Dixon a few minutes earlier. ‘Where did you find his body?’
‘Sorry, that’s need-to-know at the moment, I’m afraid,’ said Mac.
‘Foul play, in other words?’
‘We know that Captain Marshall went off the base alone on Thursday evening. Can you shed any light on what he might have been doing?’
‘Not specifically on Thursday,’ said Khatri. ‘But he was a bit of a drinker.’ Holder frowned but Khatri carried on talking. ‘He used to go into town some nights – the Jungle Bar and places like that. He liked to play poker.’ He raised one shoulder in a shrug. ‘Gambled a bit.’
This didn’t add up with what Tomlinson had said about Marshall being a family man with a wife and a baby back home. But then what went down in Kabul, stayed in Kabul.
Jananga wasn’t impressed. ‘Was that normal behaviour for a British officer?’
Khatri turned to him. ‘Sure. Life on base is restrictive. Guys need to kick back every now and again.’
‘And you?’ said Jananga. ‘Do you drink and gamble too?’
Khatri gave him a level stare, his dark eyes hard as flint. ‘This isn’t about me, Major Jananga.’
Mac stepped in. ‘Captain, do you happen to know why Captain Harvey switched troops? I understand that up until this deployment she was in charge of what’s now Marshall’s troop.’
Khatri turned back to Mac. ‘It had nothing to do with this.’
Interesting. It. This. Mac was getting a scent of something, but it was far from clear what the man was referring to.
‘What was it to do with?’
Straightaway, he saw it was a question Khatri didn’t want to answer. The captain looked down at his hands in his lap. Mac wondered if it was Jananga’s presence that was making him reluctant to talk, but then he noticed the piercing look Khatri was getting from Holder.
‘I don’t really know a lot about it,’ said Khatri finally. ‘There was some talk of inappropriate fraternisation.’
Jananga looked blank – this was beyond the scope of his English.
‘Between Harvey and one of her men?’
‘Like I said, I really don’t know. It wasn’t connected with David Marshall.’
‘You mean the woman captain was having relations with a subordinate?’ said Jananga. ‘With a man who is now in Marshall’s troop?’
Khatri nodded.
‘His name, Captain?’ said Jananga.
Mac thought the major was barking up the wrong tree. What could Harvey’s transfer, or even an illicit affair, have to do with Marshall’s murder?
Khatri cleared his throat.
‘Sergeant Dixon.’
Chapter 10
Sunday, 7 December 2003
After that Khatri had clammed up, and Mac had decided they were wasting their time trying to get anything meaningful out of the soldiers under Holder’s watchful eye.
‘It’s time to dump our army friend,’ he said as he and Jananga swept out of Souter in Jananga’s Surf. ‘Do some investigating on our own.’
‘How?’ said Jananga. ‘Anyone who knows anything is inside the base – and surely we need to talk to the woman.’
Mac stared out of the window as they sped back along the Jalalabad Road towards Police HQ. There was no reason to think this affair had anything to do with Marshall’s death, so why should Jananga want to question Captain Harvey?
‘You don’t agree with me?’
‘I doubt she’ll have anything for us,’ said Mac, putting a note of finality into his voice. ‘I’m more interested in what Marshall’s vehicle might be able to tell us. It hasn’t been recovered yet, so I think it’s time for a trip to the tank graveyard to see if we can find it.’
Marshall had been driving an unmarked Toyota Surf when he’d left the camp. If he’d driven up there on his own, it was presumably still somewhere in the vicinity. However, if he’d gone up there with someone else – his killer, possibly – then who knew where it might be now? Mac had yet to admit he’d taken the car keys from Marshall’s trouser pocket, and he wasn’t going to say anything now. That could wait, depending on whether or not they found the car.
‘Yes, good plan,’ said Jananga, then issued instructions to his driver in Dari.
With a screech of brakes, the driver executed a U-turn, pushing his way into the traffic travelling in the opposite direction, eliciting a blast on the horn from the driver now behind them. Mac gripped the edge of his seat, and tried to push down the horrific memories that always surfaced when he was in a swerving car. He took a deep breath and wondered whether Jananga’s driver had passed a driving test or simply bought his licence.
Once his heart rate had returned to normal, he called Ginger. ‘Take Pamir and the Land Cruiser,’ he said, ‘and meet us up at the entrance to the tank graveyard.’
It didn’t take them long to reach their destination. The main road ran dead straight, flanked on either side by row upon row of grimy-walled residential compounds, interspersed with warehouses and small industrial units. It was less than three miles from Souter to the tank graveyard and as they weren’t going anywhere near the centre of town, they avoided most of the usual traffic snarl-ups.
The sky was a flat grey, the dull light deadening the landscape. Mac stared out of the window without taking in what he saw, his mind whirring. What the hell had Marshall been doing out at the tank graveyard? Who had he gone there with, or to meet?
He was determined to find the answers.
Jananga offered him a stick of Juicy Fruit gum.
‘Thanks, but no,’ he said. ‘From the Chelsea Supermarket?’
Jananga nodded and smiled as he chewed the gum into submission. ‘The best place to go to feed our dirty western habits.’
‘Have you always lived in Kabul?’
Jananga’s expression became grave. ‘I grew up here, but it’s the most dangerous city in a dangerous country. The Taliban beheaded my father in 1996, so I took my mother and my brothers back to Charikar, where her family lives.’
‘I’m sorry for what happened to your father.’ He didn’t dare ask why the Taliban had executed him. ‘Where’s Charikar?’
‘To the north. It’s at the mouth of the Panjshir Valley, at the base of the Hindu Kush. The Taliban attacked the town a year later, but we were fortunately under the protection of Ahmad Shah Massoud – the Lion of the Panjshir.’ Jananga’s chest seemed to swell with pride as he spoke of Massoud. ‘He beat the Taliban back after a few months of fighting. My mother’s sister is married to a Panjshiri, so we were safe.’
‘Did the fighting get near you?’
‘My mother and younger brothers hid up in the valley. I fought for the Northern Alliance with my older brothers until the Taliban fell. Two of them were killed. I was wounded more than once. But, finally, I was able to return to Kabul and so I joined the police.’
‘You’ve only been a policeman for a couple of years?’
Mac’s incredulity must have shown on his face, because Jananga frowned.
‘In a country with no stability, we don’t have the luxury of time that you have in the west.’
A hundred questions crowded into Mac’s mind – about the war, about Jananga’s childhood, about his life as a police officer. But they were turning off the Jalalabad Road onto the narrow street they’d taken the day before to reach the tank graveyard. It led north through an area of rundown warehouses and industrial units. Under the Russians it had been the site of the main armour repair shops, which is why the tank graveyard had sprung up here in the first place. The Americans had bombed the repair works heavily, so at least half of the buildings were now burnt-out shells.
The WTP Land Cruiser was pulling into the street behind them, so Jananga instructed his driver to stop, and Jananga and Mac climbed into its back seat.
‘Find anything out this morning?’ Ginger said. He’d spent the morning going through the rest of the course work with a disgruntled O’Neil.
‘Nothing,’ said Mac. ‘I reckon Holder or Tomlinson had warned them to watch what they said. Closing ranks to protect the reputation of the dead soldier.’ Inside, he bubbled with anger and frustration. If they were ever going to get to the bottom of what had happened, they needed Marshall’s colleagues to be completely open with anything they knew.
‘We should start looking out for the Surf,’ said Jananga. ‘If he went up to the meeting point on foot, he might have parked it down here.’
All three of them scanned the area they were driving through for signs of the silver Toyota that Marshall had taken out from Souter. There were rows of vehicles parked by some of the intact industrial units, but most were shut up and deserted. Side streets led off in either direction and Mac caught glimpses of loading bays, alleyways and vacant lots where a car could easily be tucked out of sight.
‘Should we comb the whole estate?’ said Ginger.
Mac thought for a moment. ‘No, it makes more sense to carry on up into the graveyard, starting close to where the body was found and work our way out from there.’
‘Look for fresh tyre tracks between the tanks,’ said Jananga.
Here, at the outer edge of the city, there were signs of a light overnight frost – crystals of ice still glittered in the darkest patches of shade. Mac was glad he’d found an old down jacket to replace the windcheater with the WTP logo. The car lurched over the uneven ground, crunching over loose stones with a noise that roused a pair of large, grey buzzards into flight.
‘This place is becoming a nature reserve,’ said Jananga. ‘Great for our tourist industry.’
Despite his reservations about working with the man, Mac was starting to appreciate his dry sense of humour.
The place where Marshall had met his death was still cordoned off with rope, but there was no one watching over it and the flimsy barrier would hardly have kept anyone out. However, there wasn’t another human to be seen and the only sound was the sharp keening of the wind and the rattling of broken tank hatches.
‘What a godforsaken place to die.’ Mac meant the tank graveyard, but realised he could have been talking about the country as a whole.
Pamir stopped just outside the cordon. Mac got out and swung himself up onto an adjacent tank to stand on top of the turret. Ginger handed him a pair of binoculars, and he raised them to survey the entirety of the tank graveyard. A couple of square miles at least of broken and bloodied tanks, left over from a war of attrition. He could see no sign of Marshall’s silver Surf.
Jananga watched him from the ground, lighting a cigarette while he waited.
‘Can you see it?’ he said, through a billow of smoke.
Mac shook his head and jumped down.
‘Pamir,’ he said, climbing back into the car, ‘take us right along to the far edge of the graveyard and then work back up and down the rows till we reach the entrance – that way, if it’s here, we’ll have to see it.’
