The Corporal's Wife (2013) Read Online Free PDF Page B

clock’s hands edged across its face. He spoke. She would have said then, if challenged, that she was engaged in ‘dirty business’. Had her tutor, who was fulsome in praise of her academic success, known where she was and what she was doing with her first-class honours degree in ancient history, he would probably have cringed. Her mother had oozed pride on the cocktail-party circuit in rural Cheshire because her daughter had passed through the arduous civil-service recruitment process. Katie was of that generation, new to the Service, who believed it a waste of energy to play intelligence games without an end result; to compete without trying to win was alien to her. A ‘dirty business’, but she had signed up for it.
    Fearful, a mutter she hardly heard. The question was repeated.
    ‘What will happen to me?’
     
    Mehrak watched her. He could see the tightness at the thighs and crotch of her jeans as she eased round to face him. The movement tightened her blouse, pulled at the buttons. He could see her arms below the short sleeves, her neck, throat, mouth and hair.
    She seemed to consider his question and weigh the options of a reply.
    He knew that he smelt of sweat. It was damp on his back and his vest had absorbed it. When he drove the brigadier, Mehrak was always careful to spray the inside of the Mercedes with air-freshener, and to use a roll-on antiperspirant at his armpits and groin. Now he could smell his socks – and the scent from the whore’s body. He had a picture in his mind of the shame and retribution facing him. He had been in a brothel. He had paid for it with cash supplied to him for his travel needs. He would have brought moral disgrace on himself and on the Qods. He had betrayed the trust placed in him by Brigadier Reza Joyberi. He would have lost his marriage – faltering, but so important to him – to Farideh. He could see her face, the expressions flitting across it as the Internet showed pictures of a man from the Qods, in a Dubai brothel with a prostitute older than himself. He had shamed her.
    He asked again. ‘What will happen to me?’
    He was told. He seemed to see a newspaper in the clattering confusion of a print shop, a TV announcer on a dawn news programme and a coastguard cutter quartering the harbour beyond a section of sea wall. He was told and he slumped. He didn’t know who would mourn him.
    He closed his eyes. He prayed to his God that there might be a tear on Farideh’s cheek. The woman spoke brusquely and didn’t seem to want his opinion on what was planned.
    He asked one more question: ‘Why am I important to you?’
    The woman continued to pace, reached the wall, spun round and retraced her step. She didn’t answer.
     
    His alarm went and Zach woke. He hadn’t drawn the bedroom curtains and the orange glow from a streetlight fell on him. He yawned.
    He was alone in his bed.
    As the son of the boss, he was a misfit on the site. Zachariah Joshua Becket was twenty-seven. His father was a builder, employing a dozen men, while his mother did the books and kept the VAT records in a wooden shed at the bottom of the garden. Zach no longer lived there. His home was a back room in a house owned by a widow. He had no photographs of his parents, George and Bethany, or his sister, Lizzie, who was in her last year at sixth-form college. There were no posters from the walls of his room at home, or any of the pictures, and few of his clothes.
    He crawled out of bed, then pushed himself upright. He didn’t turn on the radio – not from consideration of those still sleeping in the house but because it was too early. He shouldn’t have had to get up before the first bird chirped.
    It had not been intended that Zach would work for his father. He should have finished at the school in London, and found some niche for his languages, but he had dropped out. He had packed in the course a few days before the end of finals, had chucked what he had brought south into a bag and walked out