A Dying Breed, page 11
The line went dead. Now Patrick really wanted to be at the pub. He loved watching Rebecca play. She was terrible, but she played the most unintentionally sexy game of pub pool he’d ever seen.
Patrick leant as far as he could out of the window and took a few gulps of fresh air. He was about to switch the phone off when it vibrated in his hand. A message, sender unknown: Don’t do it! Patrick turned and saw Anna McCarthy standing in the doorway staring at him. She had taken Rob’s request to wear a little black dress extremely seriously and Patrick tried not to stare and then not to blush but didn’t do too well at either.
He pointed at his phone. ‘Hey, Anna. I didn’t know you had my number.’
‘Oh yeah, I have your number.’ She smiled.
‘Right. Who’s looking after the reception table?’ he asked stupidly. Anna let the unintended insult pass. As a broadcast assistant, she was on the very lowest rung of the ladder – a glorified secretary, used to being underestimated, patronised.
‘I’ve left Hilary in charge.’
‘I’m sure Rob would prefer it if you were front of house,’ he said, trying lamely to flatter.
‘He’ll forgive me.’
This was undoubtedly true. Anna reached into a clutch bag and pulled out a tin box. ‘Although maybe he won’t. He doesn’t like the dress, says there’s not enough décolletage.’
‘How much décolletage does a man need!’
Anna smiled. This was better. ‘Your tie is a right mess. Allow me.’ She loosened, straightened and tightened the knot of Patrick’s tie while he stared fixedly over her head. Her hair was dark brown, a mess of corkscrew curls, and he could smell her shampoo. She stood back and nodded. ‘Better. Almost presentable.’ She took some makings out of her tin box and within seconds had constructed a neat roll-up; she lit it and took a few draws before holding it out for Patrick to share. ‘Want some?’
He eyed the half-smoked cigarette warily.
‘Always so suspicious, Patrick. It’s just tobacco.’
Patrick shook his head and Anna finished the fag and flicked the roach out of the window in the direction of the newspapermen. ‘Come on. Rob wants to see you.’
‘Why?’
‘How would I know? Maybe he doesn’t like your décolletage either?’
They walked downstairs and pushed back into the party. The noise now was immense. Patrick found several of his colleagues bunched together and was being drawn into a conversation when Rob caught sight of him and waved him over. He made his apologies and joined his boss at the back of the room.
‘You’re supposed to be mingling, you stupid fucker, not talking to those idiots. You can see them any day of the week.’
Patrick apologised and Rob poured an inch of the good champagne into his empty glass. ‘Plus you stink of dope.’
Patrick flushed with embarrassment, unsure of how to respond. As it turned out, no response was expected. ‘Okay, so here’s where it starts. You see Carver?’ Rob nodded towards the other side of the hall. ‘Over there, talking to the second ugliest man in the room.’ Patrick followed Rob’s glare and there indeed was William, perched uncomfortably on the edge of a high-backed designer chair, leaning forward and concentrating his attention on a bearded man in a cord jacket. The bearded man was waving a bandaged hand at him and talking with some urgency.
Patrick recognised him. ‘That bloke’s called Berry. Dr Berry, I think he said. He’s something or other at the FCO.’
Mariscal looked vaguely impressed. ‘How d’you know that?’
‘He wasn’t on the guest list. I helped him blag his way in. He said it was important.’
Mariscal led Patrick closer to the two men but the volume of noise in the Florence Hall made it impossible to hear anything of their conversation, and even William was having to lean in.
‘This is a ridiculous place to meet, Mr Carver.’
William gave a shrug. ‘You asked to see me, you’re seeing me.’
‘Yes. But why here?’
Carver looked around the room. ‘What could be less suspicious than a hack and a Whitehall mandarin shooting the breeze at the Today programme summer party? I believe they call it hiding in plain sight.’
‘I’m hardly a mandarin, Mr Carver, I’m a middle-ranking civil servant, my boss gets invited to these sorts of occasions, I don’t.’
‘You managed to get in okay though, didn’t you?’
‘One of your colleagues was kind enough to help.’
‘So here we are.’
The bearded man gave William an exasperated look. ‘I understand your scepticism, Mr Carver, I know a little of your recent history, but hopefully the fact that I turned up here will show you I am sincere.’
Carver pushed his glasses higher up his nose and gave a grudging nod. As Rob and Patrick watched, the civil servant took a pen and business card from his breast pocket, scribbled something down and handed the card to William. They exchanged a few more words and then the man left. William pocketed the card.
Mariscal waited until the mysterious Dr Berry had left the room, then gave Patrick’s arm a squeeze. ‘Okay, Paddy, here we go. First day of the rest of your life. Go introduce yourself.’
‘I thought you were going to introduce me?’
‘No, it’s better you do it. Just remind him it was you in charge the night his Afghan story ran. Then you’re up and running.’
Rob had seen someone else he needed to talk to and walked off waving. Patrick worked his way across the room towards William. He told himself the nervous clench in his stomach was irrational.
‘Mr Carver? Hello. I’m Patrick Reid.’
William looked up briefly, then looked back at his notebook. ‘Do I know you?’
‘Yes, well no but we spoke the other night.’
‘Yeah?’
‘I was editing last Friday. I ran your Afghan piece, as a lead, remember?’
William glanced up again. ‘That’s your job, isn’t it? To run pieces on the radio? What do you want, a medal?’
‘No. No, I just wanted to meet you. I know you’ve just flown in and I’m sure you must be knackered, but Rob’s assigned me to work with you for a while, so I thought I’d come over and, you know, introduce myself.’
‘Work with me? Like how? Another producer?’ Patrick was swaying slightly on the balls of his feet.
‘Yeah, I mean, yes, I guess I’m your new producer. If that’s all right with you.’
‘It’s not all right with me. First that annoying young woman in Kabul, now’ – he looked at Patrick with naked contempt – ‘this? Forget it. I’m going to have this out with Rob.’
Carver stood up sharply, picked up his suitcase and pushed past Patrick.
‘I’ll see you later,’ said Patrick weakly.
‘I doubt it.’
9 The Missing Man
DATELINE: Zarnegar Hospital morgue, Kabul, June 30th
This was not Karim’s first visit to a morgue but it was the first time he’d gone alone. He and William had visited half a dozen hospital morgues when the reporter was trying to get a more accurate picture of the number of civilians being killed each day in Kabul. Most recently and more upsettingly, Karim had escorted his mother’s older sister when she was asked to come and identify a man the authorities believed to be her husband. The old man had been killed by a scrap of shrapnel during an abortive Taliban attack on the Afghan National Army. In the confusion he’d been taken to a hospital on the far side of the city. Dead on arrival, he had lain unidentified and missing for two days. It was a common story. While he was missing, there was hope, and Karim was struck by how reluctant his aunt had been to let go of this shred of optimism. He remembered her turning away when the cloth-bound cadaver was pulled smoothly from the refrigerated drawer and when the doctor folded back the shroud to reveal a face, his aunt examined it so closely, so carefully, looking, he realised later, for something which might tell her this was not the man she had known for almost fifty years. Finding no such sign she had collapsed; all the scaffolding which held her upright suddenly gone. Bending down to help her, he had felt the tears on her face and heard her whisper ‘Habibi, habibi.’ Husband, husband. Karim had had to carry her from the cold room and had been struck by how little she weighed, almost nothing, like he was carrying a bundle of clothes, not a woman, a wife and mother. She had eaten half a plate of food at the reception which followed the funeral, but only for appearances and not again afterwards. The family had buried her a few weeks later, in a child-sized coffin.
By the look of it, this hospital morgue had been recently refitted. It was a wide white-walled room with bright strip lighting. There was a bank of stainless steel fridges, each large enough and long enough to house one cadaver, along one wall. There was a door to a cold storage room in the far wall; it was open and frozen air billowed out between thick vertical strips of orange PVC. There were two steel tables bolted to the floor and on one of these lay a tall-looking corpse covered in a blue cloth. The only living thing in the room was a woman in white plastic scrubs, busily washing down the floor with a yellow hose. Karim watched the water sloosh around the table legs and then pool and eddy at a large steel drain in the centre of the room. The floor sloped slightly from the walls to this central point. The coarse grey concrete was stained a pale pink by regular washings of blood. She caught sight of Karim but did not acknowledge him. Instead, she finished her work, waiting until the last of the water had gurgled and gone before lifting the drain grille with a gloved hand, picking a few pieces of bone and gristle from the metal and dropping them down the dark hole. She took her time folding the hose into neat loops, hung it on the brass standing tap in the corner of the room, then removed her scrubs, thrusting them deep into a pedal bin, followed by her gloves. Only after this procedure was finished did she turn to face Karim. The woman was birdlike, tiny, with bright eyes and a sharp nose. She looked more like one of the new government ministers than a mortician. She wore a black shirt and trousers, a gold wedding band but no other jewellery. The only colour on her was in a bright flowered scarf tied loosely at her collar. Karim guessed that maybe this was intended to cover the most obvious signs of age. In a kinder light, she might have passed for late forties but here, under a tungsten glare, every line showed. Karim put her closer to sixty.
‘I assume you are the young man who has bribed my superior for information?’
Karim was taken aback by the directness of her manner. ‘Are you the chief mortician?’
‘The chief mortician, the junior mortician, the cleaner, the cook and the make-up artist.’ She walked away past the bank of steel refrigerators to a desk with a cheap-looking microwave oven on it, opened the door and took out a Tupperware bowl. The woman loosened the lid and put it back in, punching two minutes thirty into the timer. She turned back and stared questioningly at Karim. It was his turn to speak but he could think of nothing to say beyond asking for the information he had paid for. But somehow that seemed unwise.
‘I’m sure you do all those jobs very well, Mrs—Mrs—?’
‘Raveed. It’s Mrs Raveed. And you’re right, I do.’ Karim nodded.The smell of the room was changing from chemical to curry as Mrs Raveed’s lunch warmed in the microwave. The machine emitted a tired ping and she opened it. Karim watched her decant the curry from the Tupperware into a shiny, kidney-shaped silver bowl more often used for holding human offal. Mrs Raveed brought her lunch back and sat down at the reception desk by the door. She gestured that Karim should sit down opposite. In the desk drawer she found a knife and fork wrapped in a paper napkin, and began to eat. Between tiny mouthfuls she spoke.
‘I came back to Kabul soon after the Americans drove the Taliban out. I wanted to help rebuild this place, train the next generation of doctors. Instead, here I am, reassembling dead bodies all day long. Applying blusher to the faces of dead children so their parents can look at them long enough to say goodbye.’
Karim looked at the pink-hued concrete floor.
‘And as for training the next generation, there aren’t any young people to train. There is no money to pay their wages. With so much dying on the streets, why would anyone want to spend their working hours looking at dead people too? I don’t blame them.’
Karim nodded, he hoped sympathetically.
Mrs Raveed smiled. ‘That’s who I am. Now, you. You’re here to take a look at the people who were murdered at Passport Street, at the tailor’s shop, yes?’
‘In the bombing, yes.’
‘The bombing, right. And what’s your angle? You want to find out something about one of the dead, a distinctive birthmark? So you can extort money from a gullible relative? Persuade them they’re still alive?’ The woman’s tone wasn’t judgemental, just inquisitive.
Karim stuttered. ‘Wh-what? No! Not at all, Mrs Raveed. I am not a criminal. I am a translator.’
The woman gave a snort of laughter. ‘A translator? You are a translator. Okay. Then maybe there has been a mistake. You understand that most of the people I have with me here, they don’t talk much anymore.’
Karim reddened. ‘What I should say is I am a translator and as part of my job I work for a British journalist. Together we are investigating the bombing, trying to find out what happened.’
‘Are you indeed?’ The woman stared at Karim for a moment and then went back to eating.
Karim sensed that something was expected of him and reached into his pocket. ‘Your supervisor suggested that you might be able to help, to spare me a little time, Mrs Raveed. In return for a small token.’ He pushed a fifty-dollar bill across the table. The woman looked at it with interest.
‘He suggested that you give me this?’ Karim nodded. Mrs Raveed smiled and then pushed the note back across the table. ‘He was teasing you, young man. Or testing me. You don’t have to bribe me, you just have to be patient. I haven’t finished my lunch, that’s all.’ She ate more quickly now, clearing her bowl and cutlery into one of the sinks before turning to Karim. ‘So, two of the tailor’s shop victims were what one would expect, typical bomb blast, severe and multiple injuries, burns.’
‘Charring?’
‘If you like, yes, severe charring, amongst other things. But the politician, what was his name?’
‘Jabar. Fazil Jabar.’
‘Jabar, that’s it. He is rather more unusual. Maybe it will interest you.’ Karim nodded in anticipation of some revelation but Mrs Raveed gestured towards the cold curtained room. ‘Why don’t you take a look?’ Karim shook his head. ‘Go ahead, be my guest.’
‘Couldn’t you just tell me what you have noticed, Mrs Raveed?’
‘No. I want you to see for yourself and think for yourself; let’s see if we agree. Get a gown on. The bodies are through there, all tagged and bagged. Neat and tidy.’
Karim saw that it would be useless to protest. He took a gown down from a set of pegs by the door and put it on. Mrs Raveed pulled the PVC strip curtain aside and pointed to a row of body bags at the rear of the storage room. The first body Karim came to was lying in a bag with one end left unzipped and open just sufficient to allow a clear view of the face. He moved closer and saw it was that of a young boy, eyes closed, peaceful. Karim looked down at the dead child. He had to contain a powerful urge to shake the boy, wake him and get him out of the frozen room. He stared at Jabar’s son for a while before moving on to the second corpse. There was a strip of masking tape stuck to this black bag with a name written on it. Karim recognised it as that of Jabar’s bodyguard. He glanced down at the old face, then turned quickly away: the man’s eyes were frozen open with a look of comic shock, as though death had taken him by surprise. This second body had a smaller see-through plastic bag lying alongside it, sealed with a rip tag. Inside was a foot, burnt black in places and turning blue from the cold.
The masking tape attached to the third body bag read FAZIL JABAR. Karim swallowed back a mouthful of saliva and steeled himself, preparing to look at the dead man’s face. As it turned out, there wasn’t a great deal to look at; a fair amount of the right-hand side of Jabar’s face had been burnt or blown away. Karim was beginning to feel nauseous. The interesting thing that Mrs Raveed spoke of was not obvious, and he didn’t want to investigate any further. He didn’t have the stomach for it. The tailor’s corpse didn’t seem to be with the other bodies anyway, and he’d had enough. Mrs Raveed was waiting for him just outside the cold store door.
‘So what do you think?’
‘I think I will be sick.’
‘Sniff at this.’ She handed him a handkerchief doused in peppermint, and he breathed deeply through his nostrils. ‘So, do you see now what puzzles me?’
Karim held the handkerchief hard to his nose and shook his head. Mrs Raveed seemed disappointed. A teacher let down by her newest pupil. ‘I know his face looks a mess but if you look a little closer at Jabar, there’s something odd. The papers said he was blown up, and he was, but that wasn’t his only misfortune.’
Karim removed the handkerchief. ‘What else?’
‘A shot to the head, point blank range. Just here.’ Mrs Raveed pointed to her right temple just around the hairline. Karim swore under his breath and then quickly apologised.
‘That’s terrible, incredible.’ He stared at the mortician, who shrugged.
‘Not incredible, unusual, yes.’
‘But who could have shot Jabar? How?’ Karim asked, almost of himself.
‘You’re the journalist, young man. Or the translator for the journalist. You’ll have to work that one out. If you want my opinion, the explosion didn’t do its job, someone saw that and decided to make sure.’
‘Who else knows this, Mrs Raveed? Who else have you told?’
The woman shrugged. ‘No one. I’ve told no one else. Nobody has asked. The authorities seem to have very little interest in poor Mr Jabar.’ She lowered her voice, as if the dead might hear. ‘Or maybe they know already, because someone, somewhere removed the bullet before he arrived here.’
‘Maybe the shot passed right through him?’
‘It didn’t. I may be getting old but I know an exit wound when I see one. There’s no exit wound on Jabar. By the time these three arrived, they’d been checked over and packed up. They were already in body bags.’
