Backstory Page 14

  They’d taken the desks out of the classroom. There were old mattresses on the floor, no sheets, no blankets. It was very hot. Sometimes the men, the soldiers, came to us. They’d spent fifteen days in the mountains, fighting. Then they came back to rest and have some fun. Some nights there were five, six, seven of them. They took turns. They had us, one after the other. I knew some of these men, we’d been in the same school together, sometimes the same classroom, but to them we were just animals. They’d stand around, watching their friends taking their turn. They’d laugh and cheer and say they were making good little Serb soldiers. Soon, they said, there’d be no more Turks in the valley. After a while you feel nothing.

  Many of the other girls got pregnant, not just me, but most of them gave their babies away. Some of them went to the orphanage in Sarajevo, on Bjelave Hill, but I didn’t want that. She was going to be my baby, mine. If it was a girl I was going to call her after my mother. If it was a boy, he’d be called Zahid.

  In March, when it was still winter, we were taken in a coach to Turbe. Turbe was in the front line where the Serbs were facing the Croats and the Muslims. There was no fighting that day but many coaches came and many many people. I was big. I felt very heavy. I knew the baby would come soon. The Serbs made us get out of the buses and walk across to where the UN soldiers were. It was very cold, very snowy. The soldiers were British and they made us walk in other peoples’ footsteps in the snow because of all the mines. The Serbs were laughing at us again. “So long!” they shouted. “Next time you die!”

  From Turbe we walked to a refugee camp at Travnik. There were no men with us to help and it was worst for the old women. They were so weak they could barely walk. Many of them were crying. The British soldiers were kind. They took the old women in their trucks and carried their things. One soldier saw I was pregnant and gave me a lift. I remember how warm it was once I’d closed the door.

  There were thousands of us in the camp in Travnik. No one knew what would happen next and everyone was afraid that the Serbs would come again. One of the British soldiers was often in the camp and I knew some English and we began to talk. His name was Rob. He was an engineer trying to fix up the water pipes, stop them freezing, and I started to help him with translation when he needed things. It turned out he’d been in the army a long time but now he was leaving. He’d been in Bosnia for six months, since October. He said he’d never seen such things, the refugees, so many people suffering. He sounded so shocked, so angry. He wanted to do more than be a soldier. He wanted to help us.

  Fida was born in April. I was still in the camp. She was a wonderful little baby. Rob had gone by this time and I didn’t really think I’d ever see him again but early in the summer he came back. He said he’d left the army and gone back to England and bought an old truck. He’d raised money and bought food and blankets and clothing and then come back to Bosnia. When he found me in the camp at Travnik he asked me what I wanted to do when the war was over. I said I didn’t know. I couldn’t go back to my village, see those men again, those faces, and there was nowhere else in Bosnia I really knew. And so when Rob said that maybe Fida and me could go to England with him I said yes.

  He took us first to Split in the truck. There was no problem with the checkpoints. Who wants a Muslim girl with a half-Serb baby? For a Muslim woman it is a terrible thing to be raped. That’s why most of the girls gave their babies away. They didn’t want people to talk, to know. Me? I just wanted my Fida. She was all I had in the world and all I needed but I’d sworn that she must never known what had happened, who her father might be. That’s why going to England was so good for us.

  From Split we drove to France. Rob knew all the crossing points, all the little back ways into Europe, so there was no problem. On the boat crossing to Portsmouth, Fida and I had to hide in the back of the lorry. From Portsmouth we took another boat to the Isle of Wight where Rob’s mother had the home for old people. That’s where we’ve stayed ever since.

  To begin with, Rob went back to Bosnia, many journeys in his old truck. When the war was over the journeys stopped. By that time his mother was sick and he had to take over the home. His mother had cancer. I nursed her until she died.

  Rob has never wanted anything from me, not in that way, ever. He knows what happened to me in the war and he knows that war can change you. It changed him, too. I know that because friends of his tell me. Rob is a good man, a kind man, strong too, but still very angry. I trust him with Fida which means I trust him with my life.

  My Fida is eleven now. Sometimes, when it gets hard for me, she takes over. She’s like my mother. She knows where the pills are, she talks to me, she looks after me. She still knows nothing about what happened and she never will. But some nights I’m back in the school, back with the soldiers. So much blood. The smell of it. The smell of them. These things you never forget. Fida’s a good girl. She’s clever, too. She gets the best grades at school. I’m so proud of her.

  What do I feel about the soldiers? The men who raped me? I hate them. I hate them for what they did to me and also for the fact that many of them knew me and still did those things. One of them, a man called Branko, sent me a letter recently. He said he’d found out my address from Muharem’s friend, Dragan the priest. This man Branko said he wanted to come and see me, come and say sorry. He said he had money. He said the money really belonged to me. I said no, stay away. If you come, I’ll kill you. I don’t think he believed me. But I meant it.

  This is strong stuff, every detail attested by various witnesses. With its sheer weight and impact, coupled with the fact that I’d begun to believe in these people, that Pelly and Lajla were somehow real, came a sense of responsibility to see their story through to the end. No way would I ever be bothered by writer’s block. These fictions of mine, the doubles of so many Bosnians, deserved better.

  And so the book that became Blood and Honey took shape. It begins with the discovery of a headless corpse amongst the rocks beneath Tennyson Down. Joe Faraday is tasked to investigate and launches Operation Congress. Putting a name to the body, and figuring out the circumstances that led to the beheading, would be the book’s central narrative but I knew by now that I needed to leave at least one foot back in Pompey and so I plotted a separate investigation for Paul Winter.

  By now, he’d begun to attract a wide following amongst a rapidly growing readership. People loved his MO, the way he swaggered through book after book, stitching up anyone who might possibly help secure a result in court. This suggested a near-immunity to misfortune and so I decided the moment had come to put Mr Winter to the test.

  His journey through Blood and Honey starts with a bust he masterminds on a high-class brothel in Old Portsmouth. A gourmet meal ends with a toot or two of top quality Peruvian flake before the clients peel off with their favoured partner and one of the girls Winter arrests is a tall, angular, extremely dexterous ex-student with fluent French and a serious passion for the poetry of Arthur Rimbaud. This vision, by the name of Maddox, is a bit out of Winter’s league but one of her regular clients has begun to frighten her and Winter is only too pleased to offer a little protection. This situation, full of possibilities, is further complicated when Winter – already suffering from persistent headaches – is diagnosed with a brain tumour.

  That’s as far as my advance plotting took me but one of the book’s unexpected delights was the way that Maddox, with the help of Winter’s apprentice, D/C Jimmy Suttle, took charge of keeping Winter in one piece. The relationship all three had established by the end of the book, a closeness forged under the toughest of circumstances, took me completely by surprise. It also played a major role in changing aspects of Winter himself, positioning him for a major career change that would frame the books to come. I’d never lived with a character like this before, someone so forceful and alive on the page, and I owed a debt of gratitude to both Maddox and Suttle for hauling him back from the brink.

  Blood
and Honey, as planned, took Faraday away from Pompey. Operation Congress, largely conducted on the Isle of Wight, was predictably challenging, and he popped back across the Solent from time to time to try and rescue something from the car crash that was his private life, but in my own head I felt one or two previously shuttered windows beginning to creak open.

  Pompey has always been very kind to me. It’s a bottomless source of stories, as well as characters, and as a working city it was turning out to be infinitely more subtle and complex than I’d ever imagined. But with the clamour of life in a patch of land this crowded went an occasional sense of claustrophobia. Pompey, to be frank, was rarely out of your face and it was a bit of a relief to find myself – fictionally at least – to be over the water for a chapter or two.

  Something else was happening, as well. Alongside other foreign language deals, the books were beginning to appear in France, first in hardback with Editions du Masque and – a year later – in livres de poche with Gallimard. A couple of years back, surfing the promotional wave that launched Angels Passing, Lin and I had done a three-cities tour in Canada. The trip had taken us to Banff, Vancouver and finally Toronto and had put me in fairly grand authorial company. We’d met some exceptionally nice people and had a fine time but playing the globe-trotting scribe, while great for my ego, had never felt entirely real. Was this succession of hotel suites and fabulous meals, punctuated by the odd flight, for life? Or had I just lucked in with a book that had caught Orion’s attention?

  The answer, which came as no surprise, was the latter. We’ve never been back to Canada, nor did I ever get an American deal, but the French experience was very different. With publication in France came invitations to French crime festivals. The first one, which I shared with a handful of other English crime writers, was in Paris. We had a lot of fun, drank for England, and I ended up on a panel of thirteen crime writers from every corner of Europe, each with his (or her) own interpreter. The resulting debate – in front of a cinema of French policier fans – was predictably chaotic.

  Most of the questions were exceptionally long and needlessly complicated. I learned later that this is a cultural thing, that French interviewers love a bit of philosophical showboating in front of a captive audience, but at the time it seemed a bit of a puzzle. Most of the answers died in translation before the onset of yet another marathon question and I came away determined that next time I’d drop the translator and try and get by in French.

  This proved to be a big ask. At school, in a conversation I’ve deeply resented ever since, my French master told me I was completely hopeless and would never speak the language. I scraped a poor “A” level pass, which half-proved him right, but retained a lively interest in most things French. By the time I got the second festival invite I’d started to take the language seriously. This time it was a huge book event in Brussels. It was winter and the city was cloaked in a thin, grey, freezing mist. My editor at Editions du Masque was a woman called Marie-Caroline Aubert. MCA wasn’t the kind of woman who ever took prisoners. If I wanted to do my late afternoon panel in French, then fine. Just make sure you get it right.

  By this time I’d sussed that the proper response to a long question was a long answer. I’d also calculated that a table ronde lasting – say – an hour, with four writers aboard, would offer me a maximum exposure of three answers. I therefore prepared three longish speeches about Faraday and Winter, about Pompey and about the way that my stories might cross the Channel with a fighting chance of making some impact on les lecteurs francais.

  With an hour to go before the start of my table ronde, I slipped out of the exhibition hall and into the fresh air on the street. Early commuters heading for the nearby train station would have seen a tallish guy in a grey anorak talking to himself about the challenges of writing crime fiction. Had I memorised all three speeches? Yes. Was I frightened? Yes. Might any of the questions conceivably match my pre-prepared answers? Probably not. Did that matter? Pas du tout.

  That evening, in Brussels, Marie-Caroline took a bunch of us out. We had a fine time. We all got incredibly drunk and ended up in a nightclub where I made a full confession. The French writers present thought it was the funniest thing they’d ever heard. Not because of any special deviousness on my part but because no one had even noticed the bump in the road when I ignored the question and ploughed on regardless. Politicians, of course, do this all the time. One of these guys spoke good English. “This is France,” he told me. “You don’t debate, you perform.”

  Nice one. When MCA suggested another bottle of Cotes du Rhones I thought it sounded an excellent idea.

  “Salut,” I reached for my empty glass. “Here’s to crime.”

  Next day’s hangover put most of the city beyond reach. Lin and I wandered around a nearby quartier that was rumoured to be a goldmine of art nouveau gems. The rumours turned out to be true though a couple of hours in the company of all that squirliness didn’t do much for my heaving innards.

  Later that day, tucked up on the returning Eurostar with a restorative glass of Stella, I began to think about Blood and Honey again. By now I was nearing the end of the first draft. Our over-hasty dash to get to Brussels in time for the book fair had left me on the brink of a key scene, and everything that had happened over the last twenty four hours should have wiped the Bosnian nightmare from my memory, yet deep in my subconscious the fictional millstone was still grinding away and to my surprise I had the entire scene on paper seconds before we plunged into the Channel Tunnel. I remember the moment I looked up from my A4 pad at the roaring darkness, my reflection caught in the window beside me. How come the words could still form themselves into coherent sentences? What strange chemistry pushes a story like this towards its end?

  Here’s part of the scene. Faraday is in the interview room with Rob Pelly. Pelly is drunk. Faraday wants to know what plans he has for the future.

  “Bosnia.” He said at once. “Land of the free.”

  “Why?”

  The question hung in the air. A smile spread across Pelly’s face. Partly disbelief, partly something close to contempt.

  “Why? Have you looked round lately? Have you blokes got eyes in your head? The state of the place? Kids bossing the streets? Crap schools? Foul-mouthed women? Tosspot politicians? Half the population pissed? The rest locked in at home watching crap TV? Is that where you want to live? Seriously?”

  “But why Bosnia?”

  “Because it’s not here. And because my wife wants to go home. She misses it, Mr Faraday. Bosnia was a bad place once. Really evil. I brought her over here to get her away from all that. And you know what? Ten years of England and she can’t wait to get back. You’re talking about a woman who was gang raped for three solid months. Who watched the Serbs beating her father up. Who lost her mother and a brother and the house she’d been born in and every other fucking thing to those goons. That leaves a scar or two, believe me, yet she can’t wait to get back. So what does that tell you about England, eh?”

  “You met her in Bosnia?”

  “Yeah.” Pelly nodded.

  “Travnik?”

  Mention of Travnik put a new expression on Pelly’s face and for a tiny moment Faraday saw the steel in the man. No matter how much he’d had to drink, there was still a sentry at his gate.

  “You know about Travnik?”

  “I know there was a refugee camp there. And I know you were at Vitez. Engineers build things, mend things.” Faraday shrugged. “You wouldn’t have been short of work.”

  “And I wasn’t, my friend. Believe me. Anyone half decent….” He shook his head, his eyes brimming. “Fucking unbelievable. The Serbs just dumped them. I saw it happen. Two feet of snow. Night coming on. These poor bloody women with nothing left in the world except their kids. And you know what those Serb bastards were saying? So long! So long! Next time you die! I can hear them now. Cunts.”

  “Was Lajla one of t
hose women?”

  “Yeah. And seven months pregnant. Came from a village up near Banja Luka. Lived there all her life. Fucking Serbs rolled them over. Took forty minutes. You ever hear of the camp at Omarska? No? Count yourself fucking lucky.” He eyed Faraday a moment, a man with a great deal of news to impart, then he made a visible effort, controlled himself, sat upright in the chair. “What is this?” he said softly. “What are you trying to get out of me?”

  “I’m trying to understand the way it was.”

  “For me? You’re wasting your time. You should be asking about her. About Lajla. And about all the other Lajlas. You know the one thing you should never be in the Balkans? A woman. Not then. Not the way it was with the Serbs.”

  When the Serbs cleared a village, he said, they started with the men and the boys. They went to the camps. Then they came back for the women. Lajla and her mother ended up in the same truck. The truck dropped Lajla at the school. She never saw her mother again.

  “And at the school?”

  “They’d cleared a classroom at the back. There were stained old fucking mattresses on the floor, no sheets, no blankets, just the mattresses. The Serb boys spent fifteen days in the mountains, then they came back, six or seven of them at a time, one after another, cheering and clapping, making good little Serb soldiers. Can you believe that? In the classroom where this poor bloody girl had learned to read? Jesus.”

  “And she got pregnant?”

  “Yeah, just a bit. But you know the worst of it? She knew these animals. Christ, she’d even been to school with some of them. And there they were, just helping themselves.”

  Faraday tried to imagine what it must have been like. For the second time in 24 hours, he knew it was beyond him. More blood than honey, he thought.

  Pelly was gazing out of the window. The anger had drained away. He looked almost sober.