Renton took his time before answering.
“I’m going to have another crack at Friend, anybody want to join me?” Stephanie wearily raised her hand. The smile had returned to Friend’s improving disposition, but he still asked the same question.
“Where is Best Friend?”
“That’s what we hoped you could tell us. Can you remember anything new for us? What was the last thing he said to you?” The same reply was given.
“He wanted bread and milk. I got chocolate.” Stephanie without really thinking about it pressed the right button.
“Had you done something special to earn the chocolate?”
“Yes, I helped with treatment for new friend.” Renton wanted to follow this up but Stephanie prevailed.
“Did you know this new friend?”
“No, he was special friend of Best Friend so we had to help him.”
“How did you help him?”
“He needed treatment. Nobody likes treatment but they need it.”
“Was this new special friend still there when you went for your chocolate?”
“Yes.”
“Why do you think they were gone when you came back?”
“It was a very long walk to the village and I didn’t meet them, so I was confused again.”
Renton winked at Stephanie and they both said it simultaneously. “The arithmetic wasn’t wrong.” It took them a while to leap to the possibility that Cranston had probably assumed a new identity. They alerted all checkpoints to this but had no idea of what that identity could be.
*
Stephanie received a call from Blackburn to say that Gerry Walton had passed away and she broke down in tears. He’d bought a new packet of biscuits for their next meeting. When she’d pulled herself together her thoughts wandered to this link with the armed forces. Beginning with Gerry, then Alex Blake, and recently Brett Driscoll, she had a flash of inspiration, and persuaded Renton to accompany her to speak with Friend once more.
“I know you are very sad and must be tired of speaking with us.” He nodded as she handed him a chocolate bar. “Have you ever heard of a young man called Alex Blake?”
He threw down the chocolate and cowered in the corner just as he had in his very first meeting with Renton. “No, I must not talk about some friends.”
“We just want to tell you he is happy now and lives in a nice house.” Friend looked up sheepishly. Renton handed him the chocolate again.
“We don’t want to ask you any more questions.” He then lied. “Alex hopes you are happy.”
The smile was back and they left him in good spirits. It was a hell of a long shot but they asked the local Hampshire police to check if Alex Blake had received any visitors who matched Cranston’s description. The answer was negative, but Alex knew him well as the surgeon who had saved his life in Yemen.
*
As the days went by, the mood drifted from the original elation of finding his identity, to one of frustration and helplessness of looking for a needle in a haystack again. They weren’t even directly involved in the manhunt. The tension was deflated a week later when Renton received a letter, postmarked in France. It was opened with extreme care and the contents emotionally flattened everyone.
‘As you will gather I am no longer confined by the shores of our green and pleasant land, but don’t despair, I shall return. You have not failed, and I have not succeeded, and there will be one more opportunity for both of us. I was mistaken in my initial judgement of you, and I do have genuine regret over personal threats to your family. Such is the world, as none of us behave the way we want to all of the time. There will be a hibernation period of sorts in order to let the bones settle. The internet shows that my purpose will at least have a fair debate, as opposed to a petition, which would be metaphorically shredded without conscience. Until then, we may meet again Inspector Renton.
Frank. (I prefer this tag you gave me to my birth name, at least for now.)’
*
The weeks turned into months and then years without any new information coming to hand. Renton’s phone rang.
“It’s me Inspector, and there is no point in disguising my voice any more. I suggest you call the London police. I will send you a text with the address after this call ends. There they will find what remains of the Chief of the M.O.D. or Ministry of Defence if you prefer. My task is complete and it is over to you. When the investigation goes cold I will write to you for the last time to fill in the blanks. They will also be posted after a respectful period. Then it is up to other people. In case you were not informed, I should let you know my father passed away last month, and so did some of my energy to carry the baton. Retirement beckons.”
Renton performed this grisly duty by going through Bradstock, and it was later confirmed by a media circus that Frank’s report was accurate. What the police saw when they arrived at the Kensington apartment was another gear-shift in brutality. The murder had not been committed at that address. Like the killing on Lindisfarne, the body was not dismembered. Thomas Howarth had literally been completely wrapped in special conductive foil and microwaved. His flesh was peppered with miniature explosive craters. It was as if he’d detonated from inside, but in a slow, controlled way. The corpse would be sterilised of forensic evidence. There seemed to be nowhere to start other than to implement the same manhunt all over again.
One Year Later
‘Inspector Renton,
Please forgive the impersonal method of communication for our final contact. I trust you will find some closure with the following account. The support I had hoped for did materialise despite the unpalatable way of achieving it. That alone underlines the degree to which we have all drifted in terms of everyday morality. I do not apologise. We all have to die, and I have seen more than even most soldiers have, of death being treated as statistics in the theatre of war. That is very difficult to handle when you lose the battle to save a life several times in an hour. And when you do manage to succeed, the system fails those poor souls who would rather you had let them die.
It began with my father. His leadership of men was renowned and I followed him into the service of my country. His retirement pension should have been safeguarded by the people he fought to protect – the politicians. It wasn’t, and he was financially adrift, like many others. I was serving in Yemen when I heard of his early diagnosis of Dementia. It hit me at the same time as I saved the life of Alex Blake. Since you have spoken with Alex, you will know that he is a fine young man, who was also cut adrift by the administrators at Westminster, more of that later. He was doubly affected by his mother disowning him when she saw him without legs, and therefore the means of supporting her again. He had just lost his father. His uncle came to his rescue, but that was short-lived due to monetary pressure from the Colony over Martha Blake’s debt. You know all this. The politicians knew it too, and chose not to interfere. Alex became my first friend to be avenged. I had kept in touch with him but he grew more depressed. Another person, born on the same day had to be walking about untroubled by his situation. It didn’t matter who it was – it was quite random. Reginald Powell became the first choice. I was planning for my imminent retirement from military duty. Martha would have to go, but only after I had selected my second sacrificial victim. I won’t tell you the name of the young man who was to be avenged, that wouldn’t be fair on him. Suffice it to say he has no arms and he lives with that impediment to this day, with little or no support from our elected elite, in terms of his emotional needs. Rory Davenport was born on the wrong day from his point of view. I have to admit some bias here, there were others, but he consistently and vociferously demonstrated against our returning soldiers. His language was almost as vicious as the weapons which tore my patients’ lives apart. The worst part about him was that he didn’t actually believe in what he was saying – it was a commercial stepping stone, as he had declared ambitions to be a politician. We did not need another one of those. After Martha, I had my eye on Brett Drisco
ll. His father had served with Alex’ father, and shot himself during the conflict. His two sons, who were twins, joined the forces. Like many other young boys, they found no employment and faced gang pressure, so they felt emotional escape by going to legalised war. Kelvin managed to negotiate the hurdles in front of him but Brett deserted. The shame of his father’s final act and his brother leaving this way took Kelvin into a very dark place, and he followed his father by taking his own life. I saw his body with most of his head blown off. I didn’t have to look far for the same birth date, it was right there – his twin.
The twenty year-old young woman who died was my sister. There was quite an age gap between us, my father said that is what army life is like. I always had to look after her from a young age. I begged her not to follow father and me, but she brushed my advice aside. I heard about her dying on the operating table while I was involved in saving another soldiers arm. Elaine’s death was the most difficult experience of my life. Please remember that in my work as a field surgeon I am used to wiping my brow and glancing at a pile of limbs and body-parts which I have just taken from the endless stream of young people serving the needs of the country. This daily pile doesn’t even get the attention of similar waste in an abattoir. It can’t because the situation does not allow it. Elaine was taken down while gathering intelligence for the High Command. All they could tell me was that it was someone who had defected to help us. Once again, I searched for a birth date match and found a drug addict in much the same frame of mind as Martha Blake – ‘screw everyone else, I need a fix’. She seemed as if she had wasted her life, and many people may think she had, so I made sure she had. It was made easier by the discovery that she had, like Martha, left her husband and abandoned a baby. You guessed it, the husband was an amputee who could not come to terms with civilian life again, and needed more than pompous psychiatric diagnosis. You must have wondered about the half-bodies. I will return to them. I am sad to say that when I accompanied my sister’s remains home, I kept them in the house until I could quickly replace her body with another, whose name I never knew. She is probably still on the missing persons list and you can find her in my sister’s grave. Elaine, my sister, stayed with me through the creation of the Priory corpse, which was a fitting Frankenstein image, of the whole being worse than the sum of the parts. The young woman’s torso was the centre of this horrible composition.
The finger, toe, and hand were the closest I could choose, from my deep freeze, to match my sister’s appendages, just as the two bodies were accorded appropriate care in fusing them in a post-death embrace. You will have noted they mirror one another in some ways and not others. My sister had a heart big enough in character for two people whereas the other had no heart. They both had images of bullet marks to the chest, as that is how Elaine died, from close range by a trusted ally. It seemed appropriate that the other was terminated in the same way. There would have been more gifts for you but for your discovery of my identity. They were a mixture of those who were deserving of such care and those who did not matter. All of these bodies and parts relate to my list of young people whose lives I saved, yet they could not be saved from the sentence imposed upon them when returning to our ‘civilised’ society.
This brings me to Radcliffe and Howarth. It is necessary to go back some way. The overt pride which the politicians demonstrate toward our soldiers is overwhelmingly hypocritical. There are many of the population who are fooled by their rhetoric. The welfare is most critical when they return home from action. Even those who aren’t physically scarred often find difficulty in re-integration. We seem to live in a society which rewards failure, celebrity, feigned ruined lives by offended individuals, self-inflicted conditions, and those who break the law. This is bad enough, but when we also reward illegal immigrants from the countries we are in conflict with, the fabric of tolerance begins to tear. I am told they all have human rights. However this seems to break down when we come to compensating someone who has given their limbs in service of the government’s ill-thought out meddling, in countries where there is something other than morality at stake, such as oil. Soldiers are treated as if they are simply raw materials, and have no human rights, so this is what I mean by hypocrisy – those who are characterised by self-discipline and bravery are not rewarded precisely because they form a part of the silent majority. It has to stop.
Radcliffe was our Culture Guru. Let me list a few definitions from the dictionary.
Philosophy, nation, ethos, values, principles, beliefs, and discernment are but examples.
Howarth was the man knowingly ‘protecting’ our boys and girls with utterly sub-standard equipment. Another type of Culture is found in the world of the diminutive. Again I offer a selection of definitions.
Multiplying, microbial, and ‘organisation by allowing reproduction in predetermined media’ are typical.
Our Ministry of defence is staffed by accountants who would have followed Chamberlain, the pied piper, to Berlin. It is a Culture of the second kind – microbial. It is an infected body which now dreams of electronic warfare so that we don’t have to get involved with those brave soldiers anymore, because we can conduct the campaign by computers, which don’t have ‘baggage’ when it is over! In the meantime they come to praise them not to betray them. One such disgraceful declaration comes to mind. There is no such thing as Gulf War Syndrome – so prove it!
We have to realise that the armed forces, to politicians, are just part of overall demographics, and that is what dictates deeds, while the rhetoric can remain unchanged.
You have been patient if you have arrived at this point. I will never try to justify warfare; that is why I became a field surgeon. I didn’t reflect my father’s ideals entirely. However, when we send the youth of our country to fight for causes with which troops find difficulty in absorbing, the least we can do is to provide the best possible equipment, and support for this group of volunteers, whose life expectancy is statistically the shortest of any comparable career sector in the land. It seems fair to ask those in power to explain the seductive advertising they sanction to get the youth of our nation into their cause, and then wash their hands of them, in a way which would not be tolerated by the rest of us. I am also emotionally scarred by my time in service, and therefore do not find difficulty in conceding that I am mentally ill, but I am afraid that in itself does not get the politicians off the hook. So endeth my sermon.
Philip Cranston.’
Postscript
Life had to go on. The message was duly posted and it was Frank’s last. The internet wouldn’t feel quite the same for some people, but it was really up to them to decide if there was any substance to his cause. The contradiction of his chosen path to save lives, and then protest by taking innocent lives, to raise awareness of his concern, was unacceptable to many and yet curiously supported by about the same number. How long would it take for some dogsbody to classify this as just another take on demographics for the ruling elite to digest?
It was the weekend again and Renton invited the team for a ‘closure’ drink. Stephanie said, “I’ll have Bollinger, oh shit, that’s just for Angela isn’t it.”
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