The Perfect Soldier by Graham Hurley Read Free Book Online

square outside the cathedral. During daylight hours, this was the heart of the city, the place where the locals spread their mats and traded what few goods they possessed: green bananas, pulped roots, scraps of charity clothing, the odd jam jar half-full of cooking oil, torn paper bags spilling powdered milk, spare ends of the thick, heavy-duty blue polythene scavanged from the aid dumps. The
praça
, the market, supplied the city’s life-blood and without it Muengo would have died long ago. The
praça
kept the city going. The
praça
was what you were left with once everything else had fallen apart.
    The mortars opened up again and McFaul stumbled into an awkward run, covering the last hundred metres to the Red Cross bunker, oblivious to the pain in his leg where the stump chafed against the shaped plastic socket. Access to the bunker lay through a gaping hole in the wall whichsurrounded the Red Cross compound. After the last siege of the city, the Swiss had brought in their own engineers to do the construction work, adapting the basement of the existing house, strengthening the beams at ground level and adding a rough concrete scree to the earth floor. The result was a blast-proof underground living space, approximately twenty-feet square, offering reasonable protection against anything but a direct hit from a heavy-calibre shell. The bunker had its own electricity and water supplies and a big dipole aerial on the roof supplied a radio link to Luanda and even – atmospherics permitting – to Europe. The head of the Red Cross mission in Muengo had celebrated the bunker’s completion with a party for the local aid community and shortly afterwards drills had been organised in the event of further fighting. The bunker, at a pinch, could hold fifteen.
    McFaul found the steps to the bunker’s entrance, heavily sandbagged on both sides. Halfway down the steps, a face appeared in the darkness. The tempo of the bombardment had increased again and McFaul was in no mood for conversation.
    ‘Por favor … vamos!’
    He tried to push by but couldn’t. The other man muttered an apology in English and it took a second or two for McFaul to recognise the voice. Then he had it. Peterson. The new arrival from Luanda.
    ‘Off somewhere?’ McFaul enquired drily. ‘Out for a stroll?’ Peterson pulled a face in the gloom.
    ‘I’ve got a billet with the UN people,’ he said. ‘They’ve promised to do something about the body.’
    ‘Whose body?’
    ‘Jordan’s.’
    ‘Like what?’
    Peterson shrugged. His eyes were wide.
    ‘Organise a flight, I hope. Unless there’s some other way out.’
    McFaul looked at him a moment, then ducked as an incoming mortar shell plunged into the cathedral square, sending shrapnel and fragments of paving stone whining into the surrounding darkness. Back upright, seconds later, he tried to resume the conversation but Peterson had vanished. Bennie was at the head of the steps now, the sweat beading on his shaven head, pushing McFaul down towards the reinforced steel doors at the bottom.
    ‘Who was that?’
    ‘Peterson. The Terra Sancta bloke.’
    ‘What’s he after?’
    ‘A flight out.’
    At the foot of the steps, both men rapped urgently on the door. Bennie was laughing.
    ‘Dream on,’ he said. ‘Dumb fucker.’
    Molly Jordan was late for her appointment with the family solicitor. On the phone they’d arranged to meet in his office at eleven but she’d spent most of the morning dealing with callers from the village. News of James’s death had been headlined on the local news bulletins and since nine o’clock the kitchen had never been empty. By ten, she’d run out of vases for the flowers callers had brought and when she finally locked the door and fled, the sink was overflowing with iris and gladioli.
    Now she hurried across the road, hoping that Patrick would forgive her. Ever since she could remember, he’d occupied the same suite of offices in a solid thirties building in Frinton’s