The Magdalena Curse by F.G. Cottam Page A

full-strength companies of infantry support to have won the fight. In Washington and London and in Ottawa, the main aim now was to keep the whole matter out of public scrutiny. In a curious way, Baxter said, its failure had cemented the success of the mission. Intelligence was being pooled on cult activity on a global basis, something the Americans had been pushing for since their own embarrassing failure with the Branch Davidian in Texas.
    ‘It’s something they’ve actually been lobbying for since the
Jonestown Massacre twenty-odd years ago,’ Baxter said, ‘so they’re pleased about that. And it’s precisely this sort of cooperation involved in covering up mistakes like the one just made in Bolivia that makes the special relationship seem so very special. You’ve been through an ordeal, Captain. But if it’s any consolation to you, it was worth the end result.’
    Irony might have been beyond the British Army. But Hunter discovered it was an organisation capable of tact and compassion. At some level, there was an unspoken appreciation of the trauma he had suffered. He was given a month’s leave. Then he was given a six-month secondment to a training establishment on the North Devon coast only a forty-minute commute by car from where he and Lillian had set up home. Human beings are resilient creatures and Mark Hunter was a particularly resilient example of the breed. He began to recover from what had happened to him. Denial was never a part of his strategy for coping. But gradually, because the events had been so removed from his normality, he began to perceive them almost as experiences that had been undergone by somebody else. This diminished them in his mind. The events themselves became vague and dreamlike. He could recall them only through an effort of will he was either unable, or profoundly unwilling, to indulge. And that pretty much amounted to the same thing.
    He told Lillian of course. He told her in their sitting room, in front of their pine-scented fire, on the evening of the day he returned home to her. He told her everything. She listened in silence, wearing the by now familiar expression he could never read. When he had finished, she stroked his cheek and glanced towards the shelf where he kept his favourite books. ‘Quests to slay monsters are best left to mythology, Mark,’ she said. She hugged his head to her chest and stroked his hair. And she never made mention of the Bolivian incursion again as long as she lived.
    Peterson’s suicide jolted him. He was ambushed by the obituary, glancing through a newspaper in the staff room at the college where he taught. It was five months after the mission. It was late November and a sunset flushing the room through its picture window had turned the pages of newsprint pink in his hands. Hunter rose and closed the blinds to rid the room of its hue. He switched on a reading lamp and sat back down again. Details of Daniel Patrick Peterson’s distinguished military career were necessarily vague. The obituary devoted far more space to his qualities as a painter. He had exhibited and sold as Daniel Patrick and had been a watercolourist of great critical regard and commercial success. Hunter himself had heard of Patrick. But he had never made the connection. One of his paintings was reproduced alongside the obituary. It showed the ice-bound St Lawrence River, filigrees of frost and icicles delicately rendered in the rigging of trapped sailing boats, their canvas sagging, weighted with ice. Even on newsprint, the quality of the brushwork was obvious. But Peterson had been a man habitually modest about his accomplishments. Hunter had come to appreciate that even in the brief time he had known him. He had been thirty-four when he took his own life.
    The morbid detail came to him via military gossip a few weeks after. But it was gossip experience had given him reason to trust. Peterson had hanged himself at home in his study. He had taken the decision so suddenly