The Hopeless Life of Charlie Summers Page 6

  ‘Do you really think it would be a good idea to have a dog?’ said Mrs Bently in a brighter tone, changing to a more cheerful topic.

  ‘I don’t know anyone who has ever regretted it,’ said Charlie. ‘And I meet a lot of dog owners in my business, you know.’

  ‘What sort of dog would you recommend for someone like me?’ asked Mrs Bently.

  ‘Ah, well . . .’ said Charlie. He tried to remember what sorts of dogs there were. He had come across so many in the last few weeks. Big ones, small ones; brown ones, black ones; all had tails that wagged, or else they had barked at him. But what kinds of dogs they had been he could not for the life of him remember, apart from the Labradors.

  ‘I don’t think I’d like a very big dog,’ said Mrs Bently.

  ‘No,’ said Charlie with authority. ‘I’m quite sure a big dog wouldn’t do.’

  ‘A terrier, do you think? A sweet little Jack Russell? Or a chihuahua?’

  Mrs Bently smiled at Charlie as she said this; the smile suggested they might become friends, if Charlie could help to find her a dog.

  ‘I tell you what I’ll do,’ he said. ‘I’ll keep my eyes open. Something might just turn up.’

  ‘Oh, would you?’

  Charlie thought that Mrs Bently would be very grateful if he found her a dog; very grateful indeed.

  Four

  The dream was always the same.

  It is late at night, in the hour before dawn. The place is a dry, shallow wadi in south-eastern Afghanistan, in the hills above Gholam Khot, where a mule trail winds its way south towards the border with Pakistan. I am lying up among some rocks with two other soldiers. We are regular soldiers, seconded to work with an American special operations unit. None of us is meant to be here. It is the millennium and we are not at war with Afghanistan or the Taleban, at least not officially. But here we are anyway, cold, uncomfortable and a little frightened.

  Nick Davies, whom I have known since I joined up, is operating the laser designator.

  In the army, as in other walks of life, one meets plenty of people who talk the talk: men who try to project themselves as hard bitten, afraid of nothing, ruthless in their disposition. Nick was one of those rare people who didn’t pretend to be anything: he was born with the constitution and, as far as I could tell, the emotional register of a slab of granite. He never worried; he was cautious but unafraid in circumstances that had me shaking like a leaf. He was easy enough to talk to, but despite all the years I knew Nick, when I last saw him I still didn’t know much more about him than on the first occasion we had met.

  The other man, whom I never saw again after that night and who was later killed by an IED outside Basra, is watching Nick’s back, and in general trying to make sure that none of us is seen and killed. We have been waiting in this place for several hours, and the temperature is minus nine degrees Centigrade. I am so cold I can scarcely think: forty-eight hours ago I was on the base at Thumrayt in the Oman, perspiring in the hot wind blown in from the Empty Quarter.

  Despite the low temperatures, there are no fires in the encampment across the valley, nothing that would attract attention. With night vision we can see the huddles of men sleeping, a few makeshift tents, three Toyota pick-ups parked beside some rocks and partially covered with tarpaulins. This is a group of Taleban - the reason we are here, in this strange and dangerous country, on a clandestine operation. Without the night vision, they would be invisible: just grey shapes on a hillside littered with grey rocks and larger outcrops of grey stone. We wait in silence, as we are trained to wait.

  The air is so cold and clear I feel I could reach out and touch the ridges of the low line of hills that define the far edge of the wadi.

  The AC-130 Spectre gunship pops up over the range of hills to the south just as the first tints of rose are appearing along the stone ridges. Our laser shines on the target, which is picked up by the gunship’s systems: within a few moments the 20mm Gatlings on the front end of the plane open up, firing six thousand rounds per minute at the men on the hillside. As the plane passes over the encampment, the rear-mounted 105mm howitzer starts dumping ordnance. The noise is horrendous:, the howling of the aircraft as it flies overhead, very low; the burping of its guns; the secondary sounds of impact on rock and stone and perhaps flesh.

  ‘Wake-up call,’ says Nick.

  A few seconds behind the AC-130 are two Apache helicopters and a Chinook. They too pop up over the brightening range and each of the Apaches fires a Hellfire missile into the hillside, followed by short bursts from 30mm cannon. After two more sweeps across the hillside, the Chinook settles on the ground, dust swirling all around it. The other two helicopters circle overhead, providing top cover in case they’ve missed anyone, or in case anyone else tries to crash the party. The AC-130 has either gone home or is off to disturb some other group of travellers. Six men in desert camouflage and body armour jump out from the Chinook to check the scene and do a headcount. After a few minutes one of them fires a shot in the air.

  ‘Time to go home,’ I say to the other two soldiers with me. The Chinook is our ride out.

  We break cover and move as quickly as we can across the rock-strewn hillside towards the attack site. It is still not too late for someone to take a shot at us, but no one does. The area around the helicopter is carnage. I can see at least eight human corpses, mostly with their clothes blown off by the force of the explosions. It is hard to tell what colour their turbans might once have been: the Taleban wear black. There is no doubt that these people are all dead. There are no signs of any weapons. A young camel, which had been tethered in the back of one of the pick-ups, has miraculously escaped all the gunfire and is now hobbling about on the slopes above us, looking worried, as well it might.

  I wonder if we have identified anyone special: as usual, we haven’t been told who we are after, and as usual, there’s a rumour it is Mullah Dadullah.

  We climb on board the Chinook and the American soldiers climb in with us. A combined operation; they don’t always work. As the helicopter lifts off I give an interrogative thumbs-up to the American officer who now sits in the jump seat next to me. He shouts something above the sound of the rotors.

  ‘What?’ I say, cupping my hand over my ear to show I can’t hear. He leans in and I can smell a minty gum fragrance over the sour breath of someone who hasn’t been near a toothbrush for a while.

  ‘The wrong target,’ he shouts.

  ‘What!’

  ‘Eight guys we don’t know, can’t ID any of them.’

  ‘We’ve killed eight people and we don’t know why?’ I yelled, above the rising note of the engines as the Chinook rose, tilted, and flew low and fast towards the south.

  ‘Just some guys in the wrong place at the wrong time: bad intel. Ragheads, anyway,’ he shouts. ‘What does it matter - they’re dead now.’

  I look at Nick, to see whether he has heard this exchange. He has. He shrugs.

  *

  Not long after that operation, I came back to the UK. There had been a debriefing back at the base we shared with the Americans at Thumrayt. I was never clear why we had been given wrong intelligence, or whether it was us, or the Americans, who had screwed up. No one seemed to be very interested in eight dead Pashtuns. Maybe they were innocent tribesmen, maybe they weren’t. They might have been going somewhere to buy and sell camels or goats. They might have been on their way to a terrorist training camp near Quetta. Who could say? The good thing about it, as Bilbo observed when I told him the story later, was that we hadn’t shot up eight of our own side, which happened more often than one might think.

  You don’t work for the army without running the risk of seeing a few dead bodies. You might even be in a few fire-fights yourself. That goes with the job. But the fact was that I had been - at least in part - responsible for the deaths of eight human beings who were probably quite undeserving of the rain of bullets and missiles I had brought down on them. That, and a general feeling that my luck had run out, was what m
ade me decide to leave the army. I left, and the dream came with me.

  Except it isn’t really a dream. It is a slow-motion flashback that comes to me as I lie somewhere between sleep and waking. Once it starts, there doesn’t seem to be a ‘Stop’ button I can hit. I have to let it loop around and around in my head, while I lie awake, shaking. This happened to me quite a lot in the weeks after the event. Since then I have still had the dream, although less frequently than before, thank God.

  I had joined the army for all sorts of reasons, none of them particularly well defined. My father had been in the army all his life, retiring as colonel; his cousin, Harriet's father, had reached the rank of brigadier general. The family view, mine included, was that it was a straightforward enough answer to the awkward question of what to do after leaving school. Beyond that, I will admit to feeling that I might do something worthwhile; serve my Queen and Country; make the world a better place. Of course, one never puts it quite like that, but that is what I believed at the time.

  I left the army with different feelings altogether. I felt displaced and purposeless. It was impossible to talk to anyone about what I had been doing with my life for the last few years. To talk about operations was discouraged by my former employers. In any case, I don’t think anybody was particularly interested. The wars I had been involved in were of little concern to anyone but the participants, and most of my friends at home probably couldn’t even have found the places on the map. Above all, I left the army with a feeling of moral blankness: after what had happened, it was hard to see what I could do to move on.

  *

  Returning home to England was a cold dose of reality. Both my parents had died young, in their sixties. I had inherited from them a rambling stone farmhouse dignified by the name of Pikes Garth Hall, on the edge of the moors not many miles from Middleton-in-Teesdale in County Durham. It had been a romantic speculation of my father’s when he had retired from the army, at a much older age than I was when I left. I think he had a vision - never fulfilled - of becoming a gentleman farmer. The house was stone built, with slate roofs, spacious, and very cold in the winter. At the bottom of the lane that led up to the farmhouse was a cottage which was also part of the property: this was let to an elderly couple, the Pierces. The rent was paid in kind, not cash: Sam Pierce cut the grass, repaired the dry-stone walls and did other odd jobs about the place. His wife Mary did occasional housework and ironing for me, and made sure there was something in the fridge on my weekend visits. The whole property was a smallholding of about one hundred and fifty acres: too big to be easily managed, far too small to be economical, for the land was poor grazing.

  When I came back home the house had been let to tenants who had not been too fussy in the way they treated other people’s property, and it took some time and a painful proportion of my savings to put it back in order and make it more or less habitable. It was in a wonderful situation, on the edge of the green dale and at the foot of the moors. The views of the dale went on for ever. In the spring the hillside above Pikes Garth was the haunt of lapwing and curlews. In the summer it became purple as the heather flowered, and one could hear the cackle of grouse. The Pike Beck flowed almost past the door, and its stony voice lulled me to sleep at nights.

  All of this was very well, and for a while just being there and going for long tramps along the footpaths and bridleways that criss-crossed the moors was reward enough. I got back in touch with a few of my childhood friends and for a while it was as if we had never been apart. I was asked out to lunch and dinner and for a few months was feted as if I were a returning hero. But then my novelty wore off and I began to wonder what on earth I was going to do with myself. I didn’t want to farm; I had no idea what other forms of employment might be open to me. The other people who had come out around the same time all sailed into jobs. Nick Davies was recruited by a private security contractor, working on the other side of the street, as it were. Nick was always a highflyer. He was tough, very focused, not really a social animal. Whatever he did, I used to think, he would do it well. He got in touch with me from his new firm and offered me a temporary contract, which I accepted with alacrity. I would be working with people I knew, doing a job I more or less understood.

  The pay was very good, the conditions were not. I started out doing close protection work - what was known, not inaccurately, as ‘bullet-stopping’. We worked in Iraq, Kosovo, Colombia and other places where wars were being fought, some in the public eye, others more obscure. We organised security for contractors and VIPs; then I was moved on to what was known as ‘hostage resolution’. That was a lot more interesting, and a lot more complicated, and for a while I almost thought about making a permanent career of it. But then, on a job in Colombia, I had an unpleasant near-miss - about as near a miss as one ever lives to talk about - and I decided to pack in the military life for good, and come home.

  Come home to what? was the problem. Neither my training nor my inclination fitted me for the jobs on offer, and those were few: working as secretary for a local charity, or else lying up in the moors watching a hen harrier’s nest in case somebody’s gamekeeper had a go at the eggs; working for a firm doing security surveys for Lloyd’s of London. None of these appealed to me at all. So when Bilbo Mountwilliam rang, I was ready for any suggestion as to what to do with my life.

  *

  I remembered Bilbo from school. He had been three years above me: a large, silent boy, excelling neither in sports nor in the classroom. Nevertheless, he was treated with respect: caution might have been a better word. He was known to have a temper. A boy in his year broke both arms falling out of a tree on a walk with Bilbo. That was the official story. Another version, current in the lower years of the school, was that Bilbo had beaten up this boy for some affront, real or imagined. I had no special reason to follow his career with any interest after he left school, although I was aware that, like me, he had joined the army. I later heard that he had gone into the City. Then, it seemed, he had started up an investment company, based somewhere in Bloomsbury.

  Bilbo still had a reputation of being a hard man who had been fond - some said too fond - of his job in the army and as a bon viveur. Now he ran a hedge fund from which he was said to earn an enormous amount. I had not heard who the other investors were, but was told Bilbo had partners. The proceeds allowed him to maintain an expensive house in London and a large house in Yorkshire. The Mountwilliams were a well-known Northern family who had once been very wealthy: the money, originally dug out of the ground in the form of coal in the nineteenth century, had long since been spent. Before Bilbo made his fortune, the Mountwilliams had sold up most of their property. Bilbo had been able to buy back the family home a couple of years ago, and had it remodelled, redecorated and refurnished at enormous expense. He almost never went there but on his very occasional visits neighbours would be invited in to dine, to admire the house, to drink the expensive claret, and - for all I knew - eat off gold plates. News of these excesses travelled all the way to County Durham. It sounded as if Bilbo had restored the family’s former glory.

  I gathered he’d got hold of my number through a mutual acquaintance.

  When he had introduced himself and reminded me where we had last met, he said, ‘Are you ever in London? I want you to have lunch with me.’

  ‘Well, I . . .’

  ‘Don’t be shy. You probably know what I do. I want you to consider coming to work for us.’

  I wasn’t planning on being in London, but this sounded like a good enough reason for going. Any job offer, by this stage, deserved serious consideration.

  ‘I could come down any day next week,’ I said cautiously. As a matter of fact, I could have come down to London in the next twenty minutes if necessary, but I didn’t want to seem too desperate.

  ‘Good man: next Wednesday at one o’clock, then. Now, where shall we eat?’

  There was a pause while I wondered whether he was expecting me to offer a suggestion. Given the distance of my journey
and the expense involved, I thought I deserved somewhere with a reasonable number of stars and a good wine list. Claridge’s, the Ritz, the Connaught all crossed my mind. I was about to suggest one of them when Bilbo said, ‘I know. Meet me at the Pizza Parlour in Wardour Street. It will be such fun to go somewhere a bit different.’

  When I came to know Bilbo better, I realised that his choice of restaurant for that first meeting was not for reasons of economy, nor some calculated gesture aimed at moderating my expectations. He was whimsical about his likes and dislikes. At the precise moment of his telephone call, he had decided he felt like eating pizza, so that was what we would do.

  ‘They serve excellent pizzas here,’ said Bilbo when we finally met. ‘I’m sure you’re bored with expensive restaurants. I know I am.’

  Bilbo was a large man, with a bland, pale face and a small mouth. I could just discern in him the boy I had known at school. His most distinguishing feature was a pair of heavy black eyebrows, underneath which were small hazel eyes. His hair was black, tightly curled and receding. The backs of his hands and wrists, protruding from snowy-white cuffs fastened by gold cufflinks, were also covered in black hairs. He wore a dark blue suit of immaculate cut and he radiated a mixture of prosperity and menace - rather like a successful barrister.

  I had talked to one or two friends still in the army before coming down to London. One of them told me: ‘You know he used to be called “Tent Peg Mountwilliam” in the army?’ ‘Don’t tell me why - I’m sure I’d rather not know.’

  My informant told me anyway, with obvious relish: ‘He was such a bad shot he decided to specialise in close-quarter work. His weapon of choice was a sharpened tent peg. It’s the one thing the Ministry of Defence makes sure we never run out of. Body armour, ammunition, helicopters: none of them are ever there when you need them. But you can always rely on a supply of tent pegs. That’s why Bilbo liked them.’