Whispers in the Hearts of Men concerns Richard Chambers’ ordeal as a victim of kidnap in the Middle-East and his reactions to the hopeless and desperate situation. The book also explores the motivation of the kidnappers, who are responding to desperate and desolate conditions of their own. The situation’s resolution has its roots in a shameful event Richard perpetrated over 30 years previously. The event has unforeseen consequences and serves to remind him that however much he might want to forget it, the past matters. If you want to read more, please follow this link or click on the book title above.
PROLOGUE
“Nice to be with you again, dad,” the boy said. “I thought we’d go up this way and we can have a chat. Is that OK with you?”
Picking up the walking stick, he took off across the fields to Rydal House, up to Nab Scar and over the fells towards Fairfield. He paused on the summit and, with a wind tugging at his rucksack, he ate his sandwiches.
“Yes, dad, I thought you’d like it up here. You must’ve thought about this place so often when you were out there. I’ve often wondered what you were thinking when the end came. What were you thinking, dad? Yes, I can imagine, ‘Look, you’re making a mistake. I’m an innocent man.’ And you were innocent, weren’t you? So, tell me, dad, do you hate them now – those Arabs and Israelis? Do you hate them all after what they put you through? Perhaps you don’t hate them all. Perhaps you hate some of them though, don’t you, dad? What about those men who took you to the city? Should I hate them after what they did? Should I, dad? Please tell me. Should I hate them too?”
CHAPTER 1
Richard was about to slip the key into the lock and close the door to his room when he felt a tremor. It was delicate at first, the flutter of a butterfly’s wings shivering up his legs to his belly. By the time it reached his hands, the flutter had become a tremor and it was strong enough to make him miss the keyhole.
“Oh, damn. Not now, please, no…”
The tremor had found his voice, hovered in his breathing before dropping to his belly again. Bending from the waist, Richard rested his forehead on the door while his hands stroked his tummy. He was taking deep and healing breaths when the words he might use to explain his non-appearance at the conference appeared unheralded in his head. The British Council staff would understand the misery of funny tummy or Montezuma’s revenge. But no sooner had these words appeared than the discomfort melted away on a sigh of relief.
“Stage fright,” he muttered. With a flicker of a frown, he added, “And at my age too.” Decisively, he turned the key in the lock.
He dropped the key into his trouser pocket, felt it cold against the skin of his thigh. Wiping the palms of his hands on his jacket, he reflected on his nervousness, knew it was right and proper before an important plenary. He might be a respected academic, but that was no excuse for complacency. His lectures still needed the edge that anxiety could bring. He shrugged his shoulders and lifted his elbows to allow the air to dry his armpits. The trick was to turn that anxiety into a positive energy that you could throw back at a delighted audience. Hearing their applause in his head, he strode down the corridor and opened his arms to capture the predicted love and appreciation. He was still smiling and nodding his thanks to the imaginary audience when the butterfly wings fluttered up his legs again. Suspecting CCTV cameras, he glanced upwards. He saw one on the ceiling near the staircase. Its lens was winking at him, was pointing right in his direction. Passing underneath it, Richard waved a salutatory hand at person or persons unknown. It was a childish gesture, but in that foreign land, he felt the need to express his cultural heritage with its strong individuality and its contempt for authority.
Approaching the top of the stairs, Richard returned his mind to his presentation, mentally rehearsing the opening lines. In the 1990s, the countries and peoples in the Middle East faced two major problems. One of these problems was economic and social. The other problem might be described as political and social…
He had spent some of the afternoon learning the first part of his lecture by rote. The words of his presentation came easily - too easily to prevent the language of his thoughts from assessing and reflecting on his emotional response to his surroundings. The little wave into the camera was a consequence of his uneasiness. Gestures like that were manifestations of a humour that the English adopted to deal with difficult or uncomfortable situations.
Richard allowed his stride to falter. He had passed the CCTV camera but there was still tightness in his bowels, and he was conscious of every breath he was taking. As a lecturer, being on stage and absorbing the thrill of eyes settling on him was a familiar sensation, but he had never before experienced that excitement in the empty corridor of a hotel. When he adjusted the rhythm of his feet, prepared them for the flight of stairs, the weight of self-consciousness descended, and he knew he was the object of someone’s attention.
He stepped onto the first stair. The palm of one hand rested on the banister, its fingers drumming the cold metal. He held the other arm akimbo, the knuckle of the hand kneading his hip while beads of sweat ran from his armpits. A murmur rose from the lobby, a babble of voices swelling and hushing in the spaces around him while bursts of laughter rocketed into the air over his head. Seen from above, the hotel lobby was patterned with human connections and disconnections. Hands reached out, were clasped or released in greeting or farewell while legs danced one way and then another, circling the suitcases that waited in rows for removal. The scene was reflected in the mirrors that covered the lobby walls. Richard noted that nobody seemed to be looking in his direction.
He tried to bury his concerns in the nationality guessing game. But he soon tired of body language and communication style, of clothes and the way people wore them. That afternoon, he found the distance of the English irritating, the formality and seriousness of the Germans absurd, and the effusive and involving body language of the Italians tiring. Richard switched the power of his observation to those who might be leaving and those who might be arriving. Both were easy to spot, but the arrivals disturbed him with their anxious glances and expressions that seemed to long for some space so that they could unpack their personalities with their suitcases and claim a patch of a foreign hotel for themselves. The departures fascinated him too. There was an ease and confidence in the way they operated in their surroundings, in the way they wore their clothes and looked towards the taxi stand while frisking themselves to check for passports and money. Richard almost frisked himself in sympathy. He wished he was going with them.
He was halfway down the staircase, low enough to note his reflection in the mirrors, when he saw the man sitting under the stairwell. He was flowing and swirling robes, his feet tucked unseen beneath him, and his hands folded in his lap. Each man simultaneously caught sight of the other in the mirror. It was not the stark whiteness of the robes that made Richard flinch, and nor was it his own natural reticence that made him turn his head away as if from a jabbing hand. It was the eyes, staring out from between the folds of the man’s headdress, which intruded like a fist into Richard’s world. The eyes brought the tremor back into his breathing and racing thoughts into his head. It had to be the British Council driver, he told himself. But this man did not rise to his feet with a smile of welcome and announce himself. Richard wondered if the driver was annoyed that his pick-up was a few minutes late. Perhaps he was hungry and wanted to be at home with his family.
Two more downward steps and the hotel’s marbled shopping arcade came within the arc of his vision. It glittered and preened itself in its own wall mirrors while the chandeliers, the shop fronts and the pillars were reflected in the arcade floor and lay like an identical but separate underground world. The stream of refugees from the sandstorm was increasing, and a large knot of them had formed in the arcade. Many were looking through the glass frontage at the peculiar orange glow in the sky. The expression in their eyes suggested that what they saw was an omen, the arrival of the second coming or an imagined harbinger of doom rather than a simple sign that the sun was descending through the dust.
He looked again at the big man in the white robes. He was not imagining the scorn that burned in his eyes. What was more, the man was making no attempt to hide it. He appeared to be challenging Richard to respond, to do something. Richard bit his bottom lip and ignored the voice in his head telling him he was powerless and vulnerable. Perhaps it was a case of mistaken identity. Richard decided to confront him.
He hurried down the remaining stairs and into the shifting, swelling crowd. At ground level, the man was out of sight, and Richard pushed through the people and towards the seat under the stairwell with an urgency that bordered the unacceptable. Someone tapped him on the shoulder. The tapping hand stunned him. While life went on around him, Richard was rooted to the floor, and a cold sweat broke out on his forehead. With an irritable movement of the shoulders, he came back to life and span round, fists clenched. His eyes were angled upwards to meet those of the big man in the swirling white robes but he found himself glaring over the top of the crowd and into emptiness.
“Mr Shampers, please, Mr Shampers?”
Richard lowered his head in the manner of a man about to say grace. The obliging, obsequious hotel receptionist was standing in front of him and looking up into Richard’s face with an expression of fake concern. Cascading from his head was a splendid red and white chequered kuffieh, its many knots carefully placed to decorate the shoulders. A hand emerged from the folds of his jalabiyah and a finger was raised in a gesture that said he wanted one minute of Richard’s time.
Richard was immobile, impassive, a man in mild shock. His name, that foundation stone of his identity, was perceived, interpreted and pronounced so differently that he felt himself dislocate. The voice he wanted to hear was that of his wife, Nicole. That would ground him in something safe and sound.
“It’s Chambers,” Richard said, “Chambers - with a tsch.”
The receptionist smiled.
“Your driver is waiting outside,” he said, “in the blue BMW.”
“Thank you.”
But the man did not move. He stood and stared at Richard as though he were carrying a death sentence branded on his forehead.
“Is there anything else, Mr Shampers?”
Richard was rocked by a moment of anxiety. He wanted to shout out that he needed help. He wanted to say that there was a big man in the hotel and that the man was threatening him.
“No, nothing,” Richard said.
He turned, pushed through the crowd towards the exit. His strained smile and muttered apologies suggested an expectation of understanding from people who had also been late for planes or meetings. He did not stop to wonder if any of them had ever felt his growing sense of danger, his need to put as much space as possible between him and the big man in the flowing white robes.
Disoriented, he emerged by the revolving glass doors. They were spinning so fast that the patterns of people behind him were reflected as a dizzy and flickering blur of light and colour. He waited for the doors to slow, hoping to catch the big man’s image, to see him talking, and convince himself the man had been waiting for someone else. The notion flashed into his consciousness that if he turned and scanned the lobby, he would be admitting to himself that something was amiss, that he was being followed and that he was afraid.
Richard pushed at the doors and reeled into a sand-laden headwind. A rush of air funnelled down the road with a rumbling sound that reminded Richard of the bed sheets flapping in a gale in his garden at home. The British Council BMW was waiting at the kerbside. Richard strode towards it and grabbed for the door handle. He glimpsed another car parked nearby. There was a man in white at the wheel and someone with a white shawl pulled around the face and tied beneath the chin. The way the face jutted from the head covering surprised him. But most unexpected was the realisation that the eyes staring into his were those of a middle-aged woman. Richard did not try to account for the feelings of relief and comfort the idea of femininity brought to him, but he refused to make eye contact with either of them, pulled open the door of his car and dived inside.
“Let’s go.” There was a long pause between his command and the sound of the engine turning. Richard leaned forward and caught a glimpse of his face in the rear-view mirror. His jaw muscles were tense, his cheeks were taut, and his eyes were wide open and staring - already communicating what he now verbalised. “Better make it quick.”
The driver pulled away and joined the traffic on Jebel Abweh’s main thoroughfare. Richard’s heart was pumping hard against his ribs as his driver put his foot down, and the BMW surged forward, its tyres crackling over the layer of sand that covered the road. Passing the guards outside the row of Embassies, Richard leaned forward, rested his hand on the passenger seat, the order to stop the car on the tip of his tongue. In a flash, the guards were behind them and the BMW was heading into no-man’s-land.
Richard found a morsel of comfort in the car’s power and its familiar Western interior but he somehow knew that the other car was behind them. He did not want to turn round and confirm it. He did not dare look at the man in white or his female companion. To do so would be to acknowledge their presence or form a relationship with them. If he did not see them, perhaps they were not there. Perhaps he had been imagining everything.
A car sped past them. Richard told himself that it was just another example of poor Middle East driving, but the car swerved to a halt across the road in front of them, the door flew open, and a man with a pistol stepped out. Another man was approaching Richard’s side of the car. There was a blur of movement. The car door flew open; a violent tug at his hair, and he was out in the street. Sand was jumping in spurts on the pavement, and the air was alive with bits of rubbish, broken plants and spiralling grit that turned and twirled before sweeping downwards to smack him in the face. There was the frightened face of a passer-by, and in a second Richard was in the other car. A man’s voice snapped out a command in Arabic, and the car roared away. Something cold and metallic was pressed hard against Richard’s forehead and forcing the back of his head onto the thigh of another man. The man’s skin exuded the sweet odour of cheap aftershave, and he was holding a rifle. Fumbling fingers were in Richard’s pockets.
“Let me go.” Breathless panic filled his voice, raised its pitch until the words cracked and broke while his heart rate soared. “Take the money and I won’t tell anybody. Please, please….” Before he had finished, someone laughed and pulled a wad of local currency from his pocket. “Please you have my word….” There was a vicious laugh, angry eyes above him and a voice screaming into his ear:
“Shut up the fuck, you fuck.”
A sensation like an electric shock hit Richard’s jaw and shot into his neck and shoulders before running back into his face. A bright white light exploded in front of his eyes. He felt his head roll and he thought he was going to vomit. In his peripheral vision he saw the fist drawing back to strike again. The woman in the front seat span round and issued a shrill but commanding order. The man with the rifle responded to it by pushing his weapon forward like a sentry standing easy and he barked a command of his own. The tone and pitch of the voice was barely out of adolescence but it and the rifle blocked the swing of the fist. The moment of severe beating passed, but cheated of the pleasure of causing pain, the man with the angry eyes let out a cry of rage and pushed the pistol harder against Richard’s forehead.
“You just shut up the fuck.”
Richard was now awake to his predicament. Escape was impossible. There were at least three men and one woman in the car, and the rifle stood sentinel by his head. He tasted the blood in his mouth and heard the car engine roaring in his ears as they sped along the road. Through the driver’s window he could see outside. The sandstorm had reduced the world to shadows, and the edges of things were invisible and merged into a wrapping of orange paper. He saw that they were heading for the poorer part of town. He watched the sun suffocating in the dust that hung between the shadows of the high rises, the minarets and the television aerials, and its light flashed and flickered into the car and died on the unknown man’s thigh. Nobody spoke, but Richard felt the energy of the violent man’s presence. He found comfort watching the back of the woman’s head. It was angled towards the window, her interest grabbed by the outside world. She could have been travelling home on a bus after a shopping expedition in town.
The sun had disappeared by the time the car swerved off the road and skidded into a garage. A strip of rough material was pulled over Richard’s eyes and tied behind his head. Dusk descended into night, and he entered another sensory world. Callous hands fumbled for his; bodies, stale with sweat, overwhelmed him and prevented him from moving. Cold steel ringed his wrists.
They had spread-eagled him on the back seat, removed his watch and cuffed him. He felt his shoulders click when they jerked him from the car, heard his breath heaving from his lungs when they pushed him forwards. One of the men kicked open a door, and he was manhandled through. The door thumped shut. He was shoved again. His shoulders bounced off walls on either side of him, and he fell headlong to the floor, mouthing a silent cry as the cuffs rode up his forearms and bit into the flesh. A door closed on the old world behind him.
To relieve the pressure on his arms, he rolled over and raised himself to his haunches. Pushing up his blindfold, he brought his clasped hands to his jaw and moved it from side to side. Reassured that the jaw was not broken, Richard looked up. White tiles covered the walls from top to bottom and there was a plastic chair and a mattress on the floor. His eyes returned to the tiles. His stomach seized when he realised he might be sitting in an abattoir. Perhaps he had but seconds to live before they cut up his body and hosed down the walls to wash away the evidence. He heard the click of an opening door and spun round. He was expecting to see a trolley with the executioners’ tools on it: scalpels for the skin, an axe for his limbs and saws for the bones.
An ethereal figure in white filled the doorway. It could have been a manifestation of the second coming, or something that had materialised from the tiles themselves, but Richard heard reverential and whispering voices trailing through the door behind him. The man looked down at Richard before gliding across the room and settling himself on the plastic chair. Only his eyes were visible, and neither they nor his body made the slightest movement when he said:
“Dicky Chambers? We know everything about you.”
This simple statement with no explanations, apologies or introductions plunged Richard into confusion. His mouth rounded on vowels, and his lips fused to spit out consonants but not a breath emerged to express his inner turmoil. He was struggling with the residue of emotion he thought he had discarded with the nickname “Dicky” but it was calling him back to when he was very young, to his mother’s warmth, to Little Bo-peep and to Little Boy Blue. He needed that warmth now, the human contact, the knowledge that he was not alone.
“Yes,” said the Second Coming, “we know why you are here now. We know why you were here before and we know why you left here in disgrace.”
“But what do you want with me? Why have you taken me?”
The Second Coming turned his head towards the open door and raised his eyebrows as if to say, “I told you so,” to the whispering voices at the door.
“We also know that you are now a well-respected expert on Middle-East history, and a man whose opinions are sought by the British Government.”
“You know a lot about me,” Richard said. “So you must know why I have been taken from my work and my family.”
Neither his words nor his sarcastic tone appeared to find their mark. The Second Coming bulldozed his remark to one side without giving it a moment’s thought.
“You may not be killed. You may not be tortured. One day you might write a book about us. You may remove your blindfold when you are alone. When you hear a knock on the door, you must pull it on. If you don’t do this, you may be punished. Understand?” The high-pitched squeal of a telephone burst into the room and caused Richard to jump as if he had woken from a deep sleep. The Second Coming barely moved.
“How long will I be here?” Richard asked.
“No questions are allowed.”
“Why me?”
The Second Coming rose to his feet and drew himself up to his great height. He stared at Richard for several seconds before sweeping out of the room and into the whispering tones of deference. A hand reached into the room and grabbed at the door handle. The hand was followed by a woman’s head. Her gaze met Richard’s head on. An expression of concern flickered across her eyes before she pulled the door shut.
Richard stared at the closed door. Nicole had warned him of the dangers in the region but he ignored her. He groped for something to hold on to, something that might prevent the slide into the world of regret, of self-pity or self-recrimination. At that moment there was nothing to latch on to except the sound of a carpet being beaten somewhere in the city. It was an echoing and regular thumping against a background of eternity.
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