'Mau Mau. You're talking about the bloody Mau Mau, not a real army,' Summerby said.
'Sir, I'm only recapping what's in here,' Murray answered, beginning to sound exasperated. 'If you go to the last chapter called State Lies, you'll see that the jungle fighters never called themselves Mau Mau. No such word exists in the Kikuyu language. According to this, Mau Mau was a propaganda myth created by government press handouts devised in London. They depicted the insurgents as anti-European and anti-Christian, saying they were determined to seize power in Kenya. Mau Mau was meant to play on Western prejudices about witchdoctors, mumbo jumbo and jungle savages. Read it for yourself.' He turned to the last pages. 'Press releases talked about, “the bestial wave of Mau Mau”, murders were committed by “terrorists insatiable for blood”. The British press fell in line with the Government's stance, using words such as dark, satanic, fanatical, merciless, evil and primitive to describe them.'
McCloughlin shook his head. 'I think we're wasting valuable time with this… this version of history.'
Jon stirred in his seat. Time to shut you the fuck up. 'Actually, James Field's adoptive parents described how he flew back to Nairobi to meet members of his estranged family. That was in March two thousand and one, a year before he went back to his old teacher to write this project. We don't know much about his natural family, but his mum's surname was Gathambo. She was from the Kikuyu tribe. Somehow she ended up in this country, brought up by a white British couple called the Sullivans.'
Summerby's head went up and he shouted over to the office manager. 'Where's Adlon with the stuff from the social services? We need to know who the blazes James Field's real mother was.' The manager held up a hand. 'He just rang in. They're down in the archives now. The records are being dug out as we speak.' Jon sat back, glancing to his side as Rick let his copy of Field's project fall open at a page of images. 'Jesus Christ.'
'What?' said Jon, looking down. At the top were a couple of crude looking firearms, toy-like in their clumsy simplicity. The caption below read, 'KLFA weapons, from a display at the Imperial War Museum where they're referred to as Mau Mau rifles.'
Next was a photo of a black man lying on a blanket. The caption read, 'Field Marshal Dedan Kimathi, leader of the KLFA. Executed, February 19th 1957.'
Alongside was a photo of the side of a plane, a line of little men with spears drawn on the fuselage. 'RAF decals during the war.'
Below that was an illustration of a naked man leaping through the air, deep shadow tactfully concealing his groin. Covering the top of his head and flapping outwards from his back was the pelt of a black panther. The animal's gaping mouth framed the man's face which, in turn, was midway through a fearsome looking shriek. Clutched in each hand was a terrible claw-like weapon.
'No act of savagery is beneath the bestial Mau Mau.' In the very corner of the picture was a grouping of five letters. H.M.G.P.O.
'What is it?' Summerby demanded.
Rick's shoulders shivered momentarily. 'The weapons he's holding. They're identical to the ones James Field made.'
'Which weapons?'
'The ones from the garage he worked in. We radio'd for a car to bring over the plans he'd drawn before we drove down to Bollington.'
McCloughlin stood up. 'What's the name of the exhibits officer?'
'Sergeant Sheehan,' someone murmured.
'Sheehan, you fucking half wit. Anything interesting you'd like to share with us?'
An officer with tight wiry hair turned to a stack of evidence bags on his desk. 'Sir? I'm getting buried here, can you be more specific?' His cockney accent sounded out of place in the room.
'A big piece of paper. Like the ones you'll be doodling on down at the job centre.'
He shuffled through the pile, eventually pulling a bag out.
'This?'
Jon stepped over to the desk. 'Don't mind the arsehole,' he whispered, taking it from the other man. 'And we'll need that one with the book in too.'
After placing the two bags in the centre of the table, Jon sat back down. 'James Field, or Jammer as he was known to his associates, has recreated the weapons in this illustration of a Mau Mau terrorist. It's all about revenge. We also found this book about SAS camouflage and ambush techniques. He's probably dressing himself up in combat clothing, then jumping out on his victims and ripping them apart the same way Mau Mau terrorists ripped open theirs. After that, he's planting hairs from the panther at Buxton Zoo on the bodies.'
There was silence for a couple of seconds. Summerby turned to Murray. 'You'd better tell us what's in those other chapters.' Gardiner held up her hand. 'Sir, I went through the last parts while DC Murray was driving us back here. Chapter Two, Shoot to Kill, goes on about the colonial government's policy of opening fire on any person seen in prohibited areas. Militia groups formed by the white settlers started using it as an excuse to try and wipe the Kikuyu, or Kukes, out. Those living on isolated farms with no phones brought in bounty hunters who were paid twenty shillings for every suspect they killed. British Army units set up scoreboards, officers paid a bounty for each company's first kill, usually five pounds. The soldiers would cut off the hands of any suspect they shot and carry them back to the camp to prove someone had been killed. The RAF took to decorating their planes with silhouettes of an African holding a spear for each kill they made.'
Several people's eyes were still on the page of images, including the photo of the plane with its line of little men drawn on the side. Jon couldn't quite believe what he was hearing. They really just opened fire on anyone they saw?
'Next chapter is called Breaking Resistance. This describes how, to stop the supply of food, ammunition and medical supplies to the KLFA, the British started rounding up the Kikuyu and placing them in what were officially called protected villages. Surrounded by barbed wire, watch towers, armed guards and dogs, these prison camps lacked sanitation and were horribly overcrowded.'
'Why? How many people did they put in them?' someone asked.
Gardiner leafed through her copy of the project. 'It says somewhere. Ah, here it is. “By nineteen fifty-three over one hundred thousand Kikuyu had been evicted from their homes. In Operation Anvil, in nineteen fifty-four, soldiers rounded up the entire Kikuyu population of Nairobi. Twenty thousand were interned without trial. By the end of nineteen fifty-four tens of thousands were behind barbed wire.” '
McCloughlin's head was down. 'I still don't see where this is going.'
Gardiner shot the thinning hair on top of his head a withering look. 'Murder Camps describes the process of dealing with Mau Mau suspects. Anyone arrested by the security forces — men, women or children — was screened to see if they'd taken the oath of Mau Mau allegiance. Screening was another word for interrogation. It involved beating and-' Her eyes flicked downwards in embarrassment '-other forms of torture. The aim was to get a person to break their oath by confessing to have taken it. Then their rehabilitation through increasingly less secure camps — or the Pipeline as it was called — could begin. However, typhoid outbreaks started to occur.' Again she started reading from the page. ' “Interned people slept in the same rooms as their toilet buckets. Bed bugs and lice infested them, rats were killed for food.” '
'Maybe we have dwelt on this long enough. How did it all end?' Summerby asked quietly, eyes on the table.
'News of the atrocities started leaking out back in Britain. Questions were asked in Parliament, though the government of the day did its best to deny everything. Also the Mau Mau had been bombed out of existence by the late fifties; the RAF dropped over fifty thousand tons of ordnance into the jungles during the conflict. Keeping the Kikuyu in prison camps started to become an expensive political liability. By nineteen fifty-seven, two thousand prisoners were being released back on to the reserves every month. When a cover-up of an inmate massacre at the Hola detention camp was exposed in nineteen fifty-nine, it was the final nail in the coffin for the Pipeline. The British withdrew and the country was independent a few years later.'