The Devil's Feather - Minette Walters [8]
We looked for a follow-up to see if Bashar Zaki had been arrested, but the story had been overtaken by the events at Abu Ghraib jail and there were no further references to it. Nor did the murder of Fateha Kassim feature again. It was difficult to know what to do after that. There was no mileage in the women from an international point of view, so I didn’t mention them or my suspicions of MacKenzie to Dan Fry, the Reuters bureau chief in Baghdad. We were snowed under with more immediate disasters, and shortly afterwards Salima, the only other person interested, was sent south to Basra with another correspondent.
More out of frustration than with any real expectation of a response, I unearthed my two pieces from Sierra Leone and had them delivered, along with Salima’s translations of the articles on the Baghdad murders and a covering letter, to Alastair Surtees at the Baycombe Group. I also emailed them to Alan Collins via the Greater Manchester Police website. Surtees’s only reply was a printed compliments slip, acknowledging receipt of the documents. Alan’s, a week later, was rather more encouraging.
“My best suggestion,” he wrote in his email, “is to contact DI Bill Fraser or DS Dan Williams in Basra. They’re doing a similar training job to the one I was doing in Freetown. I’ve forwarded your email and attachments to Bill Fraser to bring him up to speed, and will add his e-address at the bottom. No guarantees, I’m afraid. If the coalition sectors are acting independently, it will be difficult for Bill to intervene in Baghdad, but he should be able to give you some useful names higher up the chain of command. Meanwhile, be a little wary who you talk to. MacKenzie’s inside the loop if he is/has been working with the police, so he’ll have no trouble finding out who’s accusing him. And even if your suspicions are wrong, you already know he reacts violently when he’s crossed.”
His advice came too late. By the time I received it, I’d changed my hotel twice and my bedroom three times in as many days. It’s hard to explain how the constant invasion of your space can destroy your equilibrium…but it does and it did. The door was always locked when I returned, and nothing was stolen, but the deliberate rearrangement of my possessions frightened me. On one occasion I found my laptop open with my letter to Alastair Surtees on-screen.
I had no proof it was MacKenzie—although I never doubted it—but I couldn’t persuade the hotels to take me seriously. It was impossible for a non-resident to enter guests’ bedrooms, they said. And what was I complaining about, anyway, when no thefts had occurred? It was simply the chambermaid doing her job. My colleagues merely shrugged their shoulders and quoted the “thief of Baghdad” at me. What else could I expect in this god-awful city?
The only person who might have taken my fears seriously was my boss, Dan Fry, but he’d chosen that week to go on R&R in Kuwait. I thought about phoning him and asking if I could transfer to his flat, but I was afraid I’d be even more isolated there than in a hotel full of journalists. There was no point in going to the police. Obsessed with suicide bombers and hostage-takers, they wouldn’t have given me the time of day. And in any case, I thought Alan Collins was right. The police were the last people to talk to.
I didn’t sleep. Instead I lay awake, clutching a pair of scissors, and watching the door with burgeoning paranoia. After four nights of it I was so exhausted that, when I returned to my room after a press conference to find my knickers with the crotches cut out, my nerve snapped completely and I applied for immediate sick leave on the grounds of