“He agreed to go.But I’ve just called Squeezy and asked him about it, and he claimed Jono’d been in Kenya, helping build a school.”
“Interesting.He wasn’t in Kenya.”
“Nope.Poor kid.He was on a residential, gay therapy course.But the really weird thing is, he was actually away from home for four weeks, not one.”
“So…where was he the other three weeks?”
“Exactly.”
Kate was good at what she did.By the end of the next day, she’d found fifty-seven of Dr Julian Wood’s patients had been recommended to attend the one-week residential course.Thirty-five men had apparently attended and returned home after one week, and some were still Dr Wood’s patients—to varying degrees; many had cut back the frequency of their sessions.But that left twenty-two men who’d attended the course but, as with Jonathan, had an additional unaccounted-for three weeks—no evidence of telephone calls made; no use of credit cards; no attendance at work.In itself, this was not particularly alarming, except of those twenty-two, twelve had returned home briefly and had subsequently disappeared once again, telling family and friends they were going travelling.Jobs had been resigned from, money withdrawn from bank accounts, and no contact had been made since.Of the remaining ten, six were dead—four by suicide and two by head-on car crashes, where they and the occupants of the other car involved were killed.Four men from the original twenty-two that had taken an extended stay at the therapy session were at home.She’d sent their addresses.
Interestingly, one of the four was ex-army.Ben told Nikolas they were paying him a visit.Privately, Nikolas was bored of the whole topic, but he knew if he didn’t go along with it, Ben would only continue to pursue it—most likely with Squeezy or Tim.This way, playing along, he at least got to influence the course of events and curtail some of Ben’s enthusiasms.
* * *
Andrew Weir had served sixteen years in the gunners and had left the army on early retirement as a major.He’d bought a house in Amesbury, just outside the artillery camp near Salisbury that had been his regimental home.Ben was studying his profile in the car as Nikolas, for once, drove.Nikolas glanced over.“He was a major?”
“Yeah.Probably would have made half colonel if he’d stayed in.”He looked up.“You gonna have a problem with him being an officer?”
“Me?Why should I have a problem with that?”
Ben looked askance at him.“Well, lots of soldiers don’t like officers, do they?”
There was a long silence, until Nikolas ventured with very uncharacteristic hesitation,
“What do you think I did in the army, Benjamin?”
Ben put the papers down and turned slightly in his seat.“What do you mean?You were a Special Forces soldier recruited into Zaslon.”He rolled his eyes elaborately.“Now I’ve told you, you’ll have to shred me.”
Nikolas quirked his lip but flicked him a look, his eyes off the road for a moment.“Ben, I was amajor generalwhen I left—the British equivalent would be a brigadier.What did you think?I was Sergei Primakov’sson…” The silence was even longer this time.Ben coughed lightly.
“A brigadier?”
Nikolas chuckled.“I thought you knew.My God, you thought I was a soldier?”He kept glancing at Ben, not sure whether to be amused or horrified.
“Is this going to be a problem between us?”
“Shut up, or it will be.”
“Or it will be…sir?”
Ben opened his mouth to reply, a horrified expression forming on his face, but Nikolas chided brightly, “Oh, look, you’re missing Stonehenge.Really, Benjamin, you have no appreciation for your own culture.”He pointed out the monument to Radulf, only in Russian so he could add a few comments about Ben, which he knew the dog would appreciate.
* * *
Andy Weir was very guarded at first, although Ben had called him that morning and explained he was making a documentary on gay men in the military and that he was interviewing as many ex-soldiers as would speak with him.Upon actually meeting ex-Special-Forces-expert Ben Rider, Andy Weir had no problem talking at all.He told them how it had been for him, a senior officer on the staff at the headquarters of the Adjutant General, being summoned into a conference room with two hundred other senior officers, the army’s leaders, and being told by a brigadier that contrary to the army’s previous stance that gay soldiers would adversely affect operational effectiveness, now they had to let them in.European law demanded it.
“Brigadier McConaughey stood up there in front of us all and announced, ‘I don’t like it, but we’ve been forced into it.’What sort of message was that to give?The army’s most senior officers were condoning the continuing homophobia—only now it was all covered up under the guise of welcoming our contribution.Bollocks.They were just forced into it by European law and didn’t want to be sued anymore.”
He leant forward, which immediately caused Ben and Nikolas to shift back slightly in tandem.
“I had friends who were seized from their beds in the middle of the night, dragged into interrogation rooms, had their personal things ripped apart in illegal searches—letters read, photographs poured over to see if they could find evidence of them being gay!”
Nikolas was finding it hard to be sympathetic with the huge chip this man seemed to be carrying on his shoulder.Gay soldiers in his command had been set on fire.It gave an entirely different definition to homophobia.He tuned out for a while, studying the tiny kitchen in the sad little house on the unimaginative estate.Not for the first time, he gave thanks men still wanted to go to war and that it was so incredibly profitable for those who supplied the wherewithal to maximise the misery.
He was impatient to leave and glad when Ben suddenly asked, “Okay if I use your bathroom before we go?”
Andrew Weir nodded and pointed to a door across from the kitchen.Ben got up, closing the kitchen door as he went.Andrew smiled hesitantly at Nikolas.
