London, was that where he was now?
Through the intense pain his thoughts still struggled though he knew he was helpless.
Burma?
‘Sergeant Childers, sir!’ he heard himself mumbling. ‘All present and correct, sir! Three survivors, sir! Rest o’ the men… bought it. Sir'.’
2
‘Kath’s disappeared!’
Guy Archer had arrived home from the office late and in a foul mood, only to be greeted by his wife Dorothea’s worried statement. Before he had even put down his briefcase she had launched into a detailed rigmarole about how their eleven-year-old daughter had gone off to play after school, nothing strange about that, of course, nor in not coming back for tea — but once it began to get dark that was a different matter, wasn’t it?
Wearily he agreed that it was.
‘It isn’t like Kath. She’s always home before dark.’
‘She must be at some friend’s house, surely. Have you phoned around?’
‘Everybody. All her friends from school and her ballet class. Guy, we must do something!’
‘Kath’s level-headed. She’s sensible.’ More so than her mother, he thought.
‘Then why isn’t she home?’
‘Maybe she’s as fed up as I am!’ he snapped incautiously, his patience paper-thin that evening. The stripped woodwork was still waiting to be painted, the carpet rolled up, the floorboards bare. ‘This place isn’t exactly comfortable, is it?’
She snorted, but without replying. They’d had this argument a dozen times before. ‘Guy, you’ve got to go and look for her. Now listen, I’ll tell you where she might be.’
He had spoken more sharply than he intended, but that evening he was in one hell of a bad mood. His mouth tasted foul from too much wine at that disastrous business lunch when everything had gone wrong; his head ached at the memory of it. They had lost the big contract, of course — that went without saying — and the responsibility' was his, though the directors were being generous. He must have made every mistake in the book. Here he was, a month away from his thirty-sixth birthday, having thrown away his regular-army commission a year earlier to get his foot on the ladder in the business world before he was too old — and what had happened?
A total balls-up.
We need your sort of experience, the directors had flattered him in their headhunting interviews when he was still in uniform: A levels, B.Sc. from a trendy new-style university, then Sandhurst, service in Cyprus, Northern Ireland, Germany, the Falklands, where he’d picked up that scar across his right temple: it all added up to an impressive CV.
Impressive?
Christ, any eighteen-year old straight out of school could have put up a better performance.
Any babe in arms.
The trouble with the Army, he thought, was that it was too bloody innocent. It didn’t prepare you for human duplicity. It kept you isolated from what went on in the world.
It had been the Army which had put him through university. Straight after A-levels he’d taken a leaflet from one of their recruiting stands and filled in the coupon, not telling anybody, not even his family, until after he’d passed the medical. Financially he’d been better off than other students and his only military duties had been a few hours’ training corps drill each week plus camp in the vacations.
After three years — once he’d picked up a decent science degree — the Army increased the pressure, subjecting him to intensive square-bashing, weapon instruction, assault courses, survival exercises (two men from his batch failed this part and Guy was one of those detailed to be a pall-bearer) and lectures on tactics, until finally he found himself commissioned as a lieutenant.
He imagined he knew it all, and so — in a way — he did: how to kill with a gun, with a knife, with his bare hands, even; how to stay aiive for days on end on a storm-racked mountainside; everything except how to detect the untruths behind a smooth tongue. God, he’d been so bloody naive, it was unbelievable!
Even after his Northern Ireland stint — his descent into hell, he called it — which had brought him promotion to captain, even after the Falldands and his weeks in hospital, he still kept his innocence. The Army had no training programme for the type of jungle warfare he was now encountering in the business world. Computers, yes; technology, yes; but that was the sum of it.
What made him really sick was the realisation that his company had been deceived all along the line. In good faith they had tendered to organise the computerisation — hardware, software, the whole package — of all customer interface operations of a national retail chain, and sent their top specialists to attend the pre-planning sessions, providing all the preliminary advice demanded, only to discover too late that the final contract was to go to another company. Japs, at that.
‘Guy, are you listening to me?’ Dorothea demanded furiously, cutting across his thoughts. ‘You’re not listening!’
‘Yes I am, love.’
At that she flared up, yelling that if anything was wrong with their marriage, he was to blame, not her. God knew she’d tried hard enough! She rued the day he’d ever left the Army, throwing up a good career, because he’d been quite impossible to live with since.
All of which was probably true, but he was in no state of mind to admit it. He fetched his leather jacket, out of habit thrust a torch into his pocket, and declared he was going out to search for Kath.
‘What about the police?’ Dorothea bellowed at him, every fold quivering with anger. She had always been well-fleshed — it still attracted him — but these days she was putting on even more weight. ‘Am I to call them or not?’
‘I don’t know.’ He hesitated. ‘Why not try her friends again first, then the police if you’ve no luck? Doro-love, I’m sure she’s with one of her friends.’
A quick peck to reassure her, then he escaped.
Part of the trouble was that it was a mixed district: decaying Georgian houses, each with a flight of worn steps in front and a yard at the rear. No gardens, nowhere for the kids to play except in the street among the parked cars and builders’ skips. Cheap lets, most of the flats; though a growing number of houses were being expensively reconverted into smart family dwellings. Their own house had been Dorothea’s lucky find, and mainly her money too; in his opinion, moving here had been a mistake, but that was something she’d never admit.
He decided to try Worth Road first. It was the main shopping street, from which all other roads radiated like so many ribs, and an obvious place for kids to congregate. The yellow glare from the harsh sodium lighting lent it a spurious air of excitement, daubing the red London buses with a death-like tinge.
Outside the neon-illuminated amusement arcade a group of black-clad bikers were noisily revving their engines. As he approached they roared off through the traffic, leaving the pavement strewn with discarded fried chicken cartons and coke cans.
But Kath was not in the amusement arcade, neither among the one-armed bandits, nor playing Star Wars. He experienced a pang of disappointment, having been convinced this was where she might be. Moving on, he glanced quickly into McDonald’s, then two smaller cafes. Even into the Plough.
No sign of her.
Nor in the Asian grocer’s, which was still open; nor in the Chinese takeaway.
On the comer he stopped to think it through. Apart from computer games at which she regularly beat him, Kath’s only real passion was ballet, so might she not simply be hanging round the hall where she went for her classes? It made sense.
The ballet school had taken over an unwanted church hall in a gloomy, down-at-heel street backing on to the railway line. He found the place in darkness. The door was firmly locked but there was a bell-push, which he pressed. From the depths inside he heard the bell ringing, but no one came to answer it. With the aid of his torch he deciphered the pale lettering on the noticeboard and discovered this was the only weekday when there were no evening classes.