The Corporal's Wife (2013) Read Free

transfers and make covert foreign investments. He had followed that route and those who had brought him had been pleasured at a discount. She chuckled. This man had paid the full price.
    The Ukrainian girl had his pants off and, although the night was warm, he shivered, as if he were naked in the snow of the mountains above Beirut – the madam had known them as a child.
    The girl was the best. She did what she could. She rubbed her nipples against his mouth, nose and cheeks. She did all that could have been expected of her, and failed.
    She eased off him. The camera showed he was flaccid.
    The Iranian had his head in his hands and sobbed. The girl stood, then went to the chair, reached into an inside jacket pocket and found the client’s wallet. She opened it and held it up. There was money in it, and a picture behind plastic showed the ayatollah who had led the revolution; a pocket contained an identification card. She held the wallet closer to the camera, exposing the card.
    The photograph was of the man who held his hands over his face and shook with sobs. The madam could read Farsi. She had a good knowledge of the languages her clients spoke.
    The bell rang again. She cursed. The girl was replacing the wallet in the jacket.
    It was what the madam was paid for. That was why the tall Englishman had come five months earlier and put to her a proposition. He had spoken of a trap set and sprung, of confidentiality and considerable funding for her business, her holidays and what she referred to as her pension. Now she dialled the number she had been told to ring if a particular scenario was played out. On the client’s identification card she had read his name, ‘al-Qods (Jerusalem) Division’ and ‘Iran Revolutionary Guard Corps (Pasdaran-e Inqilab)’. She felt a frisson of excitement: she had played a part in a game that was almost beyond her reach.
    The bell rang again.
    The madam did not expect to speak to the Englishman himself. When the first payment had been made a young woman had been with him: she would be the contact. She glanced again at the screen. The Ukrainian played her part well, but the man beneath her was still sobbing. The call was answered. She told her contact who she had in the seventh cubicle. The young woman squealed in excitement, said she would be there and cut the call.
    It was not exceptional for a man to come to her premises, pay and freeze, but it was unusual. She left her room and went to greet the new clients, apologising for the delay and smiling. She imagined a car with diplomatic plates speeding across the city.
     
    There was a folk duo in one corner of the bar, and a widescreen TV showed a football game in the other.
    The pub was Petroc Kenning’s sanctuary. Because of his height he stood at the bar in a place where he could see both attractions and know his scalp was safe between two ceiling beams. Part of the building was four hundred years old, and it stood beside one of the old coaching routes to the West Country from London: travellers to Gloucester or Bristol would have stayed there overnight. He was PK in the Service, Pet to Polly, his wife, and Petroc to her parents – the reason he was in the Black Lion, and had been every evening of the five days he had been on home leave. He knew that Polly had already told them that her husband, little Archie’s dad, wouldn’t share with them any detail of his work as station chief, Dubai. They were awkward around him so he came to the pub. In two more days he would go from Didcot station to Vauxhall Cross for staff assessments and budget reviews, leaving early and returning late, and in nine days’ time, he, Polly and Archie would be heading back to Dubai. It was a good posting, among the best for any foot-soldier of the new generation. It put him firmly on a fault line of conflict. The folk duo’s anthem had ended and his phone buzzed: the double note of an incoming message.
    The fault line offered what he craved. He read the text.