The Devil's Feather - Minette Walters [7]
I walked to the door and flipped the handle with my elbow. “Just for the record, MacKenzie’s victim was a half-starved prostitute who weighed under six stone…and I bet she did have brittle bones, because every cow in the country had been slaughtered for food by the rebels and calcium-rich milk was a luxury. The poor kid—she was only sixteen years old—was trying to earn money to buy clothes for her baby. She was tipsy on two beers which another customer had bought her, and she jogged MacKenzie’s elbow by accident. As retribution, he dislocated hers and fractured her ulna by wrenching her arm open and snapping it backwards across his leg.” I lifted an eyebrow. “Do you have a comment on that?”
He didn’t.
“Have a nice day,” I told him.
IN THE END I never wrote the piece. I managed to get an interview with a bodyguard from a different security firm, but he’d only recently left the army and Iraq was his first freelance operation. As my original idea had been to show how demand for mercenaries far outweighed supply, with compromises being made in the vetting of recruits if numbers were to be met, a single novice didn’t make a story. Also, the public appetite for “war” stories was wearing thin. All anyone wanted was a solution to the mess, not more reminders that the coalition’s grip was slipping.
With the help of a translator, I toured Iraqi newspaper offices and went through three months of back copies, looking for stories about raped and murdered women. Salima, the translator, was sceptical from the outset. “This is Baghdad,” she told me. “The only thing anyone’s interested in is death by suicide bombing or, better still, acts of sadism on the part of the coalition. Women are raped all the time by husbands they never wanted to marry. Does that count?”
I pointed out that it would take twice as long if she conducted a running commentary all the way through.
“But you’re being naïve, Connie. Even assuming a European could get close to an Iraqi woman without being spotted—which I don’t believe—who’s going to report it? Some parts of Baghdad are so dangerous that the Iraqi journalists won’t go into them—it’s not as if the bombing and shooting have stopped—so how’s the death of a single woman going to grab anyone’s attention?”
I knew she was right, so I don’t know which of us was more surprised when we came across the first story. It was headlined “Rape on the Increase” and was a statistical account of how the rape and/or abduction of women had risen from one a month before the war to some twenty-five a month afterwards. Based on a Human Rights Watch report, it pointed to the dangers women face when the moral and ethical bases of society are shattered by war.
“It says that rape was rare under Saddam because it was a capital offence,” Salima told me, “then suggests it was the disbanding of the police force at the start of the occupation that put women’s safety in jeopardy. This will interest you.” She followed the text with her finger. “ ‘With thugs and bandits running lawless districts, women are forced to cower in their homes for fear of their lives and honour. Disgracefully, this is no protection. Fateha Kassim, a devout young widow, was found raped and murdered in her home last week. Her father, who discovered her body, said it was the work of animals. They destroyed her beauty, he said.’ ” She looked up. “Is that the kind of thing we’re looking for?”
I nodded. “It sounds like a carbon copy of the Sierra Leone killings.”
“But how could he have got at her?”
“I don’t know, but I’m sure it’s part of the excitement. If he was in the SAS, he’d have been trained to move around without attracting notice. Perhaps he goes in at night. Alan Collins said the crime scenes in Sierra Leone suggested the women had spent some time with their killer before he took the machete to them.”
The second story, the only other one we found, was from a different newspaper, dated a month later. It was buried in the middle pages under the headline