She saw him put it in his pocket anyway.
The Junkies stood together again, swaying a little, gently kicking up the sand, lost in thoughts and memories. Kaps wrapped a long, muscular arm round Becky while Edwin let his half-smoked cigarette fall to the ground and pulled Rachel to him, stroking her back with small circular motions of his hand. Not that she could feel it. They were all firmly encased in flak jackets and helmets and wet with sweat.
‘What if we never know what happened to him?’ asked Rachel. ‘You know, sometimes they don’t even find a body.’
‘We have to stay positive.’ Edwin, still holding her, had wrapped his kafiyeh round his head to stop it burning in the sun and slapped some factor-50 over his face. There were white smears of it where he’d failed to rub it in. ‘There may not be a body. My bet is he’s a hostage somewhere, and absolutely fine.’
‘Yeah, right,’ said Kaps. ‘A five-star hotel. The Iskandariya Hilton.’
‘But they’ll kill him, won’t they?’ said Rachel, ignoring both of them. ‘When was the last time they let a hostage go?’
Camille was a few yards away, the other side of the car, scrutinising the little holes in it. She felt a wind whip up from nowhere; a summer dust storm was stirring. Grit and rubbish and clumps of vegetation started to swirl around in circles, and the palm trees bowed and bent. Camille lifted her head and saw a young shepherd approach. He looked about 16, dressed in grimy rags and disintegrating sandals; he’d been tending a small flock of sheep nearby. There was an untapped intelligence about him. On the assumption that he had come to murder rather than talk, he was being frisked at gunpoint by the soldiers but accepted the indignity. It was just how things were in the free Iraq.
One of the American officers, a major, agreed to hear what he had to say through an army translator. The shepherd boy talked for at least ten minutes, pointing and gesturing, intense, insistent. He spoke calmly but with determination: he had a story to tell. At the end of it, the major pulled out the Washington dollars he kept in a side pocket for rewards. He peeled away a couple of twenties and the boy took them without a smile. It was no more than he deserved.
‘What did that kid have to say?’ Camille asked the major.
‘That shepherd boy? Oh, nothing much.’
‘Come on, you were talking to him for ages.’
The major hesitated.
‘Okay, I’m not sure if I should be telling you this, but he says he was here when it happened, over on that hill back down the road. Kinda watched it, but only from a distance.’
‘And?’
‘Look, this may be garbage, but he says there was another car as well as Danny’s; two people inside it, he thought, one of them in a blue flak jacket—probably a Westerner. Pretty soon after the kid saw them go by, he heard gunfire from the bridge up here. He guessed they’d been shot up in some sort of ambush, except they managed to get the hell out. Drove back down the road to near where he was. Then he saw one of their tyres had been shot up.’
‘You’re kidding?’
‘That’s not all. Seems that it was after this that Mr Lowenstein came through on the same bit of road and slowed down to talk to these guys in the first car. But how about this? The kid says they didn’t try and stop him, just let him push on straight ahead—into the same damned ambush. How d’you like that? He couldn’t believe his eyes.’
‘That’s extraordinary,’ said Camille.
When Munro came over she told him the shepherd’s story.
‘Mmm. Strange,’ he said wrinkling up his face. ‘Could be useful. Not sure I’d believe everything he says, though. He’s just a peasant.’
‘That’s what I thought at first,’ said the major. ‘But he seemed pretty sure. Why would he make it up?’
Munro shrugged.
‘To collect some easy bucks? People can tell you a million different things in these villages.’
‘Maybe. Maybe not.’
‘So does he have descriptions?’ Munro asked the major.
‘He said he was too far away. He remembers the car was red and white though, some sort of saloon.’
Munro wrote it down as if he had to, but walked away again to finish off his measurements. Camille decided he was surly and unhelpful. When he’d gone, she asked the major quietly, ‘Could the boy take us back there, to where he saw the other car?’
It was only a couple of minutes away. The major drove Camille in a Humvee along with the shepherd and the interpreter.
There was nothing to see, but Camille inspected the tarmac and tried to conjure up the picture painted by the shepherd. Down the road the Junkies were still embracing each other, but an orangey-brown cloud had billowed up and was enveloping the landscape. Wearily, because they’d had enough of desert days like this, the troops put on their sand goggles while the Junkies held hankies to their mouths and noses, and half-closed their eyes so the lashes could filter out flying dirt. Soon the wreck of Mohammed’s car was coated in sand. It seemed as though Iraq would like to bury it.
‘Okay, let’s get out of here now,’ the major said. ‘We can’t see shit and I hate being blind in a place like this.’
Sarajevo, 1994
When morning arrived in Sarajevo like an unwelcome visitor, Rachel wondered where to start. She had made it here, but what now? Where to go, what to see, who to talk to? It wasn’t as easy as it had seemed back in Arlington. She thought that breakfast might be the best place to begin so she went down to the dining room, a dingy ghost of what it once had been. The waiters were like apparitions too, in their white shirts and black bow ties. Their stoical demeanour insisted that, against all the available evidence, it was business as usual. They could have been restaurant staff on the Titanic.
The guests were dressed in fleeces, Puffa jackets and parkas. Rachel sat conspicuously alone, toying with a cold omelette, convinced everyone else was studying her solitude.
From the corner of her eye, she saw Danny approaching and her heart sank. She wondered if he was going to harangue her any more. He was carrying a helmet.
‘Good morning. Thought I might find you here.’
‘Oh. Hi there,’ she pretended she hadn’t noticed him coming over.
‘A present for you. I never use it. Just let me have it back when you leave.’
‘God, that’s so…’
‘I know, you’re pathetically grateful.’
It had a strip of silver gaffer tape across it with Lowenstein, A Rh+ scrawled in marker pen.
‘Obviously you’ll want to change the name tag.’
‘Obviously,’ she laughed, but he wound up the conversation before it had begun.
‘Okay then, see you around.’
Rachel played with her omelette for a couple more minutes, and was relieved when Becky arrived. She was heading up to Pale, the Bosnian Serb headquarters. They had an interview with Karadzic—‘the crazy doctor’, as she called him—and Rachel was welcome to come along if she felt like it.
‘’Course she feels like it,’ said a deep voice just behind her. ‘What else is she going to do here, hit the beach? Hello there, I’m Edwin Garland. Daily Telegraph. And you must be the young Rachel Kelly we’ve all been hearing so much about?’
She was