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  Chameleon's Shadow

  Minette Walters

  MINETTE WALTERS

  The Chameleon’s

  Shadow

  By the same author

  THE ICE HOUSE THE SCULPTRESS THE SCOLD’S BRIDLE THE DARK ROOM THE ECHO THE BREAKER THE SHAPE OF SNAKES ACID ROW FOX EVIL DISORDERED MINDS THE DEVIL’S FEATHER

  and

  THE TINDER BOX

  CHICKENFEED (Winner of the Quick Reads Readers’ Choice)

  First published in Australia in 2007

  Copyright © Minette Walters 2007

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act.

  Allen & Unwin 83 Alexander Street Crows Nest NSW 2065 Australia

  National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry:

  Walters, Minette. The chameleon’s shadow.

  ISBN 978 1 74175 229 8 (pbk.). ISBN 978 1 74175 350 9 (hbk).

  I. Title.

  823.914

  Typeset by SetSystems Ltd, Essex, United Kingdom. Printed by Griffi n Press, South Australia. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  For Marie and Sarah

  Shadow – In the theory of C. G. Jung (1875–1961) the dark aspect of personality formed by those fears and unpleasant emotions which, being rejected by the self or persona of which an individual is conscious, exist in the personal unconscious.

  -Oxford English Dictionary

  Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) – Some common disabilities include problems with . . . behaviour and mental health (depression, anxiety, personality changes, aggression, acting out and social inappropriateness).

  -Wikipedia

  Southwark Echo, Friday, 29 September 2006

  Murder victim ‘beaten to death’

  THE BODY OF A MAN, discovered year. Det Supt Jones said Mr Britton two days ago when police were may have known his attacker. called to a house in south London, ‘There was no sign of forced entry,’ has been identified as that of Martin he added. Britton, a 71-yr-old retired civil ser-The Superintendent refused to vant who worked for the Ministry of confirm whether this murder is Defence. Friends and neighbours being linked to the death of Harry said Mr Britton hadn’t been seen for Peel, a 57-yr-old taxi driver who several days. The decision to enter died from extensive head injuries the house was taken after police two weeks ago. Mr Peel lived less used a ladder to check the bedroom than two miles from Greenham windows. Road and was found in his bedroom

  A post-mortem examination car-by his estranged wife after she ried out yesterday revealed that became concerned that he wasn’t Martin Britton died from head injur-answering his mobile. ies. ‘He was beaten to death in a The police have enlisted the help violent attack,’ said Det Supt Brian of the gay community in the search Jones, who is leading the inquiry. for Harry Peel’s killer. A one-time ‘We believe it happened on Satur-soldier in an armoured regiment, he day, 23 September, and we are ask-worked for several years in the ing for anyone who was in docks before becoming a cab driver Greenham Road on that date to seven years ago. He was a regular come forward.’ visitor to the bars and clubs in his

  Neighbours describe Martin Brit-area. ton as a ‘charming and courteous’ Searches by scenes of crime offiman who became ‘something of a cers are continuing at the Greenham recluse’ after his partner died last Road house.

  Eight weeks later

  THE CONVOY OF armoured trucks, led by a Scimitar reconnaissance vehicle, had been visible for some time to the four Iraqis who crouched in what remained of the upper storey of an abandoned roadside building. The road – part of the highway that linked Basra to Baghdad – cut a straight path across the flat desert landscape, and the group’s elevated position and long-range binoculars had allowed them to track the convoy from the moment the lead vehicle breasted the distant horizon.

  The heat was intense. Shimmering mirages produced trompe-l’oeil reflections in the tarmac, and one of the insurgents captured the effect on a DVD camera before zooming in on the turret of the Scimitar. He could make out the helmeted heads of the two soldiers on either side of the 30mm cannon, and of the driver below it, but the vehicle was still too far away to identify their faces. Another insurgent pointed to a telegraph pole in the long line that marched beside the road and said there would be two good minutes between the Scimitar passing the pole and the explosion. Time enough to capture British soldiers on film before the home-made culvert bombs on either side of the highway obliterated them forever.

  The cameraman expected to see complacency, even arrogance, on the faces of the coalition oppressors, but the close-up footage of the three men showed only concentration. There was even a suggestion, in the way the commander, a twenty-six-year-old lieutenant, suddenly shouted an order, that he had spotted something amiss in the dust beside the highway. It was too late.

  The roadside bombs, a collection of anti-tank mines rigged to produce a blast that was powerful enough to rip the guts out of a Bradley tank, detonated simultaneously as the vehicle passed between them.

  The film clip of a British Scimitar rising into the air before turning over in flames received considerable airtime across the Muslim world. In the Iraq bazaars, it became a ‘must-have’ DVD for anyone whose electricity supply was intermittent or whose satellite dish had been pushed out of alignment by coalition bombing. The propaganda coup of a small Iraqi cell taking out a coalition vehicle with home-made bombs was irresistible, particularly as viewers and experts alike claimed to see fear, not concentration, on the faces of the three Western soldiers. It was taken as an indication that morale in the coalition forces was crumbling and that an end to the occupation was near.

  With a different set of ethics governing the coverage of war in Britain, news editors decided against screening the close-up footage for fear of generating complaints about insensitivity. Only one of the men had survived, albeit with disfiguring injuries, and in such circumstances even the most hardened broadcasters felt the line between reportage and exploitation was here too thin to be tested.

  MINISTRY OF DEFENCE

  BRITISH FORCES SURGICAL HOSPITAL, IRAQ

  Confidential report Subject: Lt Charles Acland 893406

  Regiment: Light Dragoon Guards – Royal Armoured Corps

  Date of injury: 24 November 2006

  Date of admission: 24 November 2006

  Date of discharge: 26 November 2006 – 19.30 hours

  Onward destination: South General Hospital, Birmingham, UK Reason for return: Reconstructive surgery Current patient status: Unconscious but stable – strapped for immobility Drug treatment: See attached chart

  To Whom It May Concern

  Lt Charles Acland sustained serious head and facial injuries during an attack on his Scimitar RV. He has fractures of the left supraorbital, zygomatic and maxilla. His wounds have been cleaned, all foreign material, dead and burnt tissue removed and superficial bleeding stopped. Pressure monitor readings of the patient’s brain and arterial flow show nothing significant, although the severity of the patient’s injuries suggest brain damage is likely. An immediate CAT scan is recommended. He has an open wound on the left side of his face – a 2cm wide, 0.5cm deep, 10cm long avulsion – caused by the splitting and cauterizing effects of hot shrapnel. Muscle and nerve damage is extensive and
his left eye is beyond repair. An antibiotic regime was introduced on admission and temporary dressings applied to the open wound to prevent infection.

  One

  WHEN CHARLES ACLAND regained consciousness, he thought he was dreaming about a visit to the dentist. Certainly, the numbness in his mouth suggested novocaine even if the rest of the fantasy was absurd. He was lying on his back, staring up at a moving ceiling, and a bell was ringing loudly behind him. An alarm? He tried to raise his head to see where it was, but a hand descended on his chest and a woman’s disembodied face loomed over him. The dentist? He watched her lips move, but couldn’t make out what she was saying over the insistent clamour of the alarm. He toyed with asking her to turn if off, but doubted that novocaine would allow his words to be understood. She wouldn’t be able to hear him anyway.

  Somewhere at the back of his mind was a lurking fear that he didn’t recognize. For no reason that he understood, the closeness of the woman worried him. He’d been in this position before – flat on his back and unable to move – and there was a strong association in his mind with pain. Fleetingly, another woman, slender, dark-haired and graceful, appeared in his line of vision. There were tears in her eyes, but Acland had no idea who she was. His instinctive reaction was dislike.

  His only points of reference were the alarm and the ceiling moving above his head. Neither had any meaning for him. He could have floated forever in morphine-induced detachment if increasing awareness hadn’t told him this wasn’t a dream. He started to experience sensations. A jolt as the trolley crossed a threshold. The sympathetic tightening of stretcher straps as his body shifted. A low ache at the back of his jaw. A brief stabbing pain that knifed up his neck. A puzzled realization that only one of his eyes was open.

  With a sense of dread, he knew he was awake . . . with no idea who he was, where he was or what had happened to him...

  *

  Subsequent awakenings increased his dread. He came to understand that the ringing was inside his head. It grew more bearable with each return to consciousness, but he couldn’t hear what was said by the faces that stared down at him. Their mouths opened and closed but nothing reached him. Nor did he know if his own mouth was relaying the signals his brain was sending to it. He tried to speak of his fears, but the lack of response in the faces above him persuaded him his lips weren’t moving. Time was meaningless. He couldn’t tell how often he drifted in and out of consciousness or how long his periods of sleep lasted. He convinced himself that days and weeks had passed since he’d been brought to this place, and a slow anger burned inside him as threads of insight began to knit together. Something cataclysmic had happened. He was in hospital. The talking heads were doctors. But they weren’t helping him and they couldn’t see that he was awake. He had a terrifying anxiety that he was in the hands of enemies – why? – or that he was trapped forever in a paralysed state that allowed him to think and reason, but left him unable to communicate. The dark-haired woman suffocated him. He hated the smell of her and the touch of her hand on his skin. She was always there, weeping soft, round tears down her pale cheeks, but her sadness failed to move Acland. He knew intuitively that the tears were for show, not for him, and he despised her for her lack of sincerity. He felt he should recognize her. Every time he woke and watched her through a half-closed lid, a sense of familiarity swam just below the surface. He knew his father before he knew her. Recognition of the tired-looking man who hovered at the edges of his vision came like an electric shock. In the next moment, he knew who the woman was and why her touch repulsed him. Other memories flooded back. He recalled his name. Charles Acland. His occupation. Lieutenant, British Army. His last deployment. Iraq.

  He had a clear recollection, which he played over and over in his mind because it offered an explanation, of boarding an RAF Hercules on the day he left for the Middle East. He guessed the plane must have crashed on take-off, for his last memory was of buckling himself into his seat.

  *

  ‘Charles. Wake up, Charles.’ Fingers pinched the skin on his hand. ‘There’s a good boy. Come on, now. Wake up.’ He opened his eye and looked at the middle-aged nurse who was bending over him. ‘I heard you,’ he said. The words came out as a long slur but he knew he’d said them. ‘You’ve had an operation and you’re now in recovery,’ she told him, answering the question she thought he’d asked. Where am I? ‘If all goes well, you’ll be returned to your own bed this afternoon. You’re connected to a PCA pump –’ she guided his left hand towards a control set – ‘otherwise known as patient-controlled analgesia. It allows you to be in charge of your own post-operative care. You shouldn’t need any pain relief for a while, but if you begin to feel discomfort press the white button. The morphine will help you sleep.’ He jerked his hand away immediately. ‘It’s up to you,’ she said easily, ‘but this way you can manage the pain yourself. The doses are measured and the machine overrides any attempt at self-indulgence.’ She smiled cheerfully. ‘You won’t be on it long enough to become an addict, Charles. Trust me.’ He didn’t. He had an instant understanding that he didn’t trust any woman, although he had no idea why that should be. The nurse held up a black plastic egg-shaped object. ‘I’m going to put this in your right hand. Tell me if you can feel it.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Good man.’ She placed his thumb on a button at the top. ‘Push that if you need me. I’ll be keeping a close eye on you, but in case of emergencies, holler. You’re a lucky fellow. If God hadn’t given you a skull like a rhinoceros, you wouldn’t have survived.’

  She started to move away but Acland used his free hand to catch at her skirt. ‘How did it crash?’

  ‘Say again.’

  He took the words back into his throat like a ventriloquist and repeated them in slow, guttural fashion. ‘Khow . . . di’ . . . i’ . . . khrash?’

  ‘How did what crash?’

  ‘The plane.’ He tried again. ‘Khe khlane. I was on a khlane.’

  ‘Don’t you remember what happened?’

  He shook his head.

  ‘OK. I’ll ask someone to explain it to you.’ She patted his hand again. ‘But don’t worry, love. You’ve got a few wires crossed, that’s all. They’ll right themselves eventually.’

  *

  Time passed and nothing happened. The nurse returned at intervals, but her complacent smiles and inane comments annoyed him. Once or twice, he attempted to remind her that he needed explanations but, out of stupidity or bloody-mindedness, she refused to understand what he was saying. A scream was circling around his head and he found himself struggling with anger in a way that he didn’t understand. Everything, from the curtained cubicle he was lying in to the sounds from outside – muted voices, footsteps, a phone ringing – conspired to ratchet up his irritation. Even the nurse had lost interest. He counted off the seconds between her visits. Three hundred. Four hundred. When the interval reached five hundred, he put his finger on the buzzer and kept it there. She bustled in with a stupid laugh and attempted to remove the plastic egg from his hand, but he wrestled it away from her and held it against his chest. ‘Fuck you.’

  She had no trouble understanding that, he thought, watching her smile disappear. ‘I can’t turn it off if you keep your finger on it,’ she said, indicating a bleeping light on a remote receiver clipped to her waistband. ‘You’ll have everyone in here if you don’t let go.’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘I’ll disconnect it,’ she warned. ‘You’re not the only patient who’s had surgery today.’ She held out her palm. ‘Come on, Charles. Give me a break, eh? I’ve made the call. It’s not my fault it’s taking so long. This is a National Health Service hospital, and there’s only one psychiatric consultant on call at the moment. He’ll be here before long. You have to trust me on that.’

  He tried to say he didn’t need a psychiatrist. There was nothing wrong with his brain. He simply wanted to know what had happened. There were other men on the plane. Had they survived? But the concentration needed
to speak the words (which were incomprehensible even to his own ears) was so intense that the woman easily deprived him of his buzzer. He swore at her again.

  She checked the PCA, saw that he hadn’t used it. ‘Is it pain that’s making you angry?’

  ‘No.’

  She didn’t believe him. ‘No one expects you to be a hero, Charles. Pain-free sleep will do you more good than staying awake and becoming frustrated.’ She shook her head. ‘You shouldn’t be this alert anyway, not after what you’ve been through.’

  *

  When the psychiatrist finally arrived, he said much the same thing. ‘You look brighter than I was expecting.’ He introduced himself as Dr Robert Willis and drew up a chair beside Acland’s recovery-room trolley. He was mid-fifties, thin and bespectacled, with a habit of staring into his patients’ eyes when he wasn’t consulting a computer printout of their notes, which he placed on his knees. He confirmed Acland’s name and rank, then asked him what his last memory was.

  ‘Khetting o’ kh’ khlane.’

  ‘In England?’

  Acland stuck a thumb in the air.

  Willis smiled. ‘Right. I think it might be better if I do the talking. We don’t want to make this painful for you ...orfor me. Give me a thumbs-up for yes and a thumbs-down for no. Let’s start with a simple question. Do you understand what I’m saying?’

  He watched the lieutenant’s thumb shoot up.

  ‘Good. Do you know what happened to you?’

  Acland jabbed repeatedly towards the floor.

  The man nodded. ‘Then we’ll take this slowly. Do you remember arriving in Iraq? No. Do you remember anything about Iraq?’ Repeated downward jabs of the thumb. ‘Nothing at all? Your base? Your command? Your squad?’