Geoff Markham didn't like to drink in the middle of the day and had sipped a fruit juice. The American had washed down the pork pie with a dark pint from a wooden barrel and there had been salad with the pie. In the car, the onion was still on Littelbaum's breath.
Markham hesitated before turning at the signpost to the village. A cattle-carrier lorry swerved past him and gave him a long blast on the horn. It was all as he remembered it. Ahead of him was the high water tower, the dominating feature, and the American gazed at it with a sort of awe but didn't speak. Beside him, flanking the road, was a small car-park and a sign "Toby's Walks: Picnic Area'. Away to the right was Northmarsh, to the left were wide, flat fields covered with half-moon pig shelters. He swung the car on to the minor road. Of course it was the same. How could it be any different?
The American smiled apologetically and murmured that he needed, and badly, to relieve himself.
Markham drove into the car-park of the picnic area and saw what was different. There were two men in an unmarked car, uniformed, wearing kevlar vests and silly little baseball caps. But, there was nothing silly about the barrel of the Heckler amp; Koch aimed at him through the open side window. He braked.
Littelbaum said that he couldn't have lasted much longer, and dived for the bushes. Markham held up his ID card for the policemen to see and sauntered towards them.
He introduced himself and said the American had bladder problems. He asked them how it was. The aim of the gun was no longer on his chest. He was told that they had the registration and the make of a car to look for, and it was all right in daylight.
"What's that mean?"
The policeman grimaced.
"It's a sod of a place after dark. So quiet. Last night, before the changeover but after it got dark, we saw this shape in the bushes. Bloody near crapped myself. Seemed to be watching us. I got the gun on it, then two dogs came out. It was a woman walking her dogs, in the dark, like a bloody ghost, proper turn it gave me. It's Toby's Walks here. She asked, all straight-faced, had we seen Toby? She was serious had we seen Toby? We asked the old biddy, who was Toby? You know what? He was Black Toby, Tobias Gill no lie, it's what she said and he was a black drummer in the dragoons who got pissed up, went looking for a bit of fanny and brought her up here. He was found, Black Toby was, the next morning, drunk and incapable, and she was beside him, raped and strangled. They took him to the assizes and then carted him back here to hang him in chains. It was two hundred and fifty years ago, and the old biddy said he liked to walk round here, rattling his bloody chains. It's that sort of place. After what she'd told us, we heard every bloody bush move last night, every bloody creak of every bloody tree… She meant it. She was really surprised we hadn't seen him."
The American came out of the bushes and was pulling up his zip. Markham didn't laugh at the story. Out there a shadowy figure was moving in darkness among cover, silent, without the rattling of chains, towards a target and a place of death. He felt the cold wind coming off the sea and shuddered.
They climbed back into the car and he drove on.
Of course it was different, and for some it would never again be the same.
Markham asked the American what he wanted to see and Littelbaum's finger jutted towards the church tower. The rain had come on heavily while they'd stopped for lunch, but now had eased into a fine, persistent drizzle. He could see the first houses of the village and the church tower looming above them. He was unsettled. It wasn't only the policeman's story of the ghost of the black drummer, it was also what Littelbaum had told him of Alamut, a place of death, and a bus ride out of Bandar Abbas, a place of carnage. And he remembered what Cathy Parker had said and asked. It would be decided down here, at the village, body to body, as it always was, at close quarters, and was he tough enough?
He felt inadequate. It was no longer about people like himself, rated as intelligent, educated and thoughtful. It was about guns and nerve: this was a power play. Littelbaum pinched his arm and pointed to the parking lay-by at the side of the church.
At the near end was a fine squat tower, perhaps seventy-five feet in height, with wide walls of flint facing. Behind it were the nave and the high chancel windows and between them were stout yellowed stone buttresses. Beyond the church was a ruin, once finer and larger than its neighbour but now roofless and with the rain coming through the clerestory windows. Markham asked the American what he wanted to do, and was told he wished to go inside. He had a fascination for churches and a total respect for the quality of the architects and craftsmen who had built them, but the ruin disturbed him death so close to life. He pushed open the church door. There were a few lights in the dull dim interior, as there had been in the weekend corridors at Thames House that morning.
A clergyman came towards him, a gaunt, fleshless-faced, older man. Markham thought Littelbaum was following him. He offered his hand in friendship and lied, said that he often diverted on a journey to see a worthwhile church. He heard the aged squeak of the hinges of a small door to the side. A smile lit the clergyman's face, as if few came to see his church. The flowers were already in place for Sunday's service, the only brightness stretching towards the altar and the stained glass of the arched window behind it. On the walls were the carved plaques remembering the dead.
The clergyman said, "There was an older church, of course, but that's gone, flooded by the sea first time round then washed away. The origin of the building here is fifteenth century, and a magnificent building it would have been. But the village died. There were four altars here, now there's just the one. Once we had a bell that weighed three-quarters of a ton, but the community sold it off, in 1585, because they were dying from deprivation and hunger. It's so good to meet someone who's interested my name's Hackett."
Markham looked around him, past the old carved-stone font, and could not see Littelbaum. If he had been alone in the church he would have said a short private prayer for those who'd been in the bus.
The clergyman droned on, "Disease, poverty, fires, all decimated the population of the village I sometimes say that this is a place without a present, only a past. That's how it feels here sometimes."
He was in the bath. Meryl had made them undress at the back door, had insisted on it. Davies thought by now that Perry would have told her of the disaster in the pub, would have come up with an explanation as to why they had come back sodden, with sand caking their shoes.
She came into the bathroom.
Davies had hitched his wristwatch to the cold tap, and was allowing himself five minutes' defrost time. The holster and the Glock were within reach on the floor, with the radio. She had brought two of Perry's dressing-gowns to the back door.
There was no knock, and no hesitation or apology. He sat upright and hunched forward to obscure his waist, hips and groin from her. Meryl carried a heap of folded clothes. Her face was expressionless, like those of the nurses had been while he couldn't wash himself, sponging his privates after he'd broken his ankle falling from a ladder when trying to get through a back window to plant a bug. There was a towel on top of the clothes. They could have been left outside the door, and she could have shouted to him that they were there.
She laid the towel and the clothes on the chair beside his head. Davies stared straight ahead, and wondered how close she was to the edge of her sanity. It wasn't his job to prop up the morale of his principal, let alone that of his principal's wife. He felt himself to be the crutch on which she leaned. It was nothing to do with his personality, his warmth or his wit. It was because he had a Glock 9mm pistol in a holster lying on the bright pink fluffy mat beside the bath. She came into the bathroom, where he was naked, for comfort from him and from his gun.
The wristwatch showed that his time was up. He had not the heart to tell her that he could not be her friend. He reached for the towel, hid himself clumsily, stood up in the bath and began to dry himself.
He thanked her for bringing him the clothes. She went out of the bathroom and closed the door after her. She had not said a single word.
Duane Littelbaum paused, took his handkerchief and mopped the sweat off his forehead. He swayed, clung to the rail, and climbed again. He had a horror of heights, but beyond the horror was a cruel sense of obligation. He had to climb the tower. He went up the narrow, worn, spiralled steps; if he had slipped he would have plunged. The door at the top was bolted and the bolt rusted. He couldn't move it. He balanced on a smooth, worn step, then heaved his shoulder into the door. It gave, pitching him forward, through the doorway, on to the small square floor of the tower's top.
The wind snatched at him. His coat was lifted and his tie was torn from his waistcoat. The drizzle made his eyes smart.
He looked around him and clung, with both hands, to the low, crenellated wall.
From the vantage-point, he gazed down over the village.
His hair was ripped to a tangle. He could see the road that was the one point of entry into the village and the lanes off it, the clusters of homes, and the patchwork shape of the green. He saw the house, and the roof of the small wood hut behind it. He saw the endless, disappearing seascape.
The house, its position, was of small interest to Duane Littelbaum. He sank to his hands and knees and crabbed around the square floor space, never dared to look vertically down.
There were the marshlands.
Dull, yellowed, reeds and dark-water channels between them, the marshlands were to the south of the village behind the sea wall, and to the north-west. Reached by the one road, the village was an island surrounded by the old reeds, the dark water and the sea. He estimated that each of the great marshes was a full three thousand metres long and a minimum of a thousand wide. He saw the thick cover of trees around the fringes of the marshlands, the tracks between the marshlands and the village.
In spite of his fear, without thinking, he straightened his back, lifted his head and his nostrils flared. He snorted the air into them.
He was satisfied.
He had posed the questions and had answered them.
He crawled back towards the flapping door. He took a last look at the marshes and saw the gulls, white specks, meandering above them. He wedged the door shut after him, and came down the spiral steps with his eyes closed.
He heard the clergyman's voice.
"Everything went, the bells, the lead, the best-cut stones. Sad, but inevitable. They have a history, the native people of this community, of great suffering. It makes for a cruelty and a self-sufficiency. The original church was lost because survival took precedence over principle."
Littelbaum walked out into the rain and the wind. Markham came after him.
"What do you want to do now?"
"Go back to London."
"You don't want to see the house, at least drive past it?"
"No."
"You don't want to meet the protection officer?"
"Thank you, he'd be a busy man- well, he should be, he wouldn't want "tourists". No."
"Actually, you hitched a lift with me. I had a day planned down here. I needed to see for myself."
The interruption brooked no argument.
"Are you a marksman? I don't think so. Are you expert at drawing defensive perimeter lines? I doubt it. There's nothing for you here. Don't sulk, Mr. Markham. You're a good driver always do what you do well."
Markham unlocked the car, held the door open for him. Littelbaum felt aged, tired, cold. The tone of Markham's voice was resentful, the teeth of a saw on a buried nail.
"So, back to London. I hope it's been a worthwhile exercise for you, Mr. Littelbaum -above and beyond lunch."
"It was worthwhile. Can we have the heater on full, please? He's there, Mr. Markham. I saw where he is. It was like I could smell him."
The bird ate the minced meat, stabbing down with its beak in quick, urgent strokes.
Vahid Hossein had led her to the small clearing among the bramble and thorn, at the edge of the marsh, where the grass was short from the rabbits' feeding. Farida Yasmin did not know whether he had brought her there out of a sense of boastfulness, or whether he wished to share with her.
His fingers were long, gentle and sensitive. She was behind him, within reach of him. He had sat her down, told her not to move and whistled into the late-afternoon light. The bird had come from close by, had materialized over the dead reed fronds, with a laboured flight. Now he stroked its head feathers with his fingers, and he used her handkerchief to clean the wound. The bird permitted it. She hoped it was not a boast but the demonstration of his wish to share with her a moment so precious. His fingers moved on the feathers, soothing the bird, and pried into the wound, and she saw the peace on his face.
It was as if, that day, she had slipped from the mind-set of Farida Yasmin Jones. The identity of her Faith was discarded, as a snake's skin was shed. That day she had she knew it and it did not trouble her reverted to the world of Gladys Eva Jones.
She had stolen a car.
Any kid from her comprehensive school knew how to steal a car. It was the talk in the canteen at lunch, and in the grounds in midmorning break, and on the bus going home. She had listened in disgust, years before, as boys, girls, had talked through the theory of how to do it, and she had remembered what she had heard. She was a thief, had broken the rule of the Faith as it had been taught her, and she did not care. In the parking area beside the small railway station where the London commuters left their cars for the day, she had felt a raw excitement and it had been so easy. The hairpin into the lock of the blue Fiat 127 because all the kids always said that the small Fiat was the simplest to take and the stripping of the covering, the marrying up of the ignition wires. She was a thief; a few seconds' work with a hairpin and she was no longer the virtuous Farida Yasmin who could recite the Pillars of the Faith, pages of the Koran, and had once been the favoured pupil of Sheik Amir Muhammad. She had not felt shame, only excitement.
She watched him, watched his fingers on the bird, watched the rifle lying half out of the sausage bag on the far side of him, and the excitement was a toxin in her bloodstream. It was now a part of her. She recognized that it had nothing to do with the Islamic faith to which she had dutifully converted.
For all her teenage and adult life, Gladys Eva Jones had craved to be noticed, to be valued. He had listened thoughtfully when she'd told him that the police had been to her workplace, and had nodded his quiet appreciation when she had described the theft of the car. She sat and watched him, the bird and the gun. She knew what he planned to do that night, had even seen the man he would kill and could remember each feature of that man's face. The excitement the knowledge engendered in her was a liberation. At last, Gladys Eva Jones was a person of importance. The sensation was as fresh as morning frost to her, compared to the dull tedium of her parents' home, and the shunned, shut-out existence at the university. Her hand hovered over the hair at the back of his head. She thought of the empty boredom of Theft Section at the insurance company, and she stroked the hair on his head with the same gentleness as he caressed the feathers of the bird.
Her hand trembled, as if she sensed the danger of what she did. The bird flapped away in heavy flight, and his eyes followed it, watching its wing-beat.
Soon he would be gone with the rifle, and she would wait at the car for him to return. He needed her, and the knowledge of it gave her the confidence to slip her hand down on to the skin and bristly hair at the back of his neck… She knew the man who would be killed that night, and the house where he would be killed, and the excitement coursed in her.
There had been an older boy in her street who had a. 22 air rifle. It was fired on wasteland where a factory had been demolished. Many times she'd gone after him to the waste ground and hung back, had never qui4e had the courage to ask him if she could fire it. She'd dreamed at night about the chance to hold the rifle, aim it, and fire it. One summer evening, the boy had shot a pellet against a passing bus, and the police had come and taken it away so she'd never had the chance. But, for the lonely, unpopular girl, the rifle had stayed in her mind as the symbol of the boy's power. On the waste ground with his friends, he swaggered when he carried it. The dream from childhood was roused. One hand still stroked the hair at the back of his neck, but her other hand moved in slow stealth behind his back until her fingers touched the weapon's barrel, which protruded from his bag. She felt its clean smoothness and the tackiness of the grease, and her fingers slid on the oiled parts. She imagined it against her shoulder, and her finger against the trigger, and she touched the sharpness of the foresight, and she thought of the sight locking on to the chest of the man in the house on the green. Her hand moved faster, but more firmly, on the nape of his neck, but her fingers glided in gentleness on the cool metal of the rifle's barrel. He could see what she did, but he could not snatch the rifle away from her because that movement would frighten the bird.
She said, very quietly, "I should be with you."
"No."
"I could help you."
His free hand had moved to hers. She felt the roughness of his hand covering it. She would be with him, following him, and sharing with him. She had, in truth, no comprehension of the thudding blow of the rifle stock against a shoulder, or the ear-splitting noise of the discharge and the soaring kick of the barrel. She only understood the power that the rifle offered. The pain was in her hand. Relentlessly he squeezed her hand down on to the sharp point of the foresight, crushed it until she struggled to remove it. His eyes never left the bird. He freed her hand and she quietly sucked the blood from the small, punctured wound. She kneaded the muscles at the back of his neck.
"I go alone," Vahid Hossein said.
"Always I am alone."
"I am here to give you anything you need," Farida Yasmin whispered.
Meryl heard the impertinent, lingering blast of the bell.
She was in the kitchen, locking the legs of the ironing board, with the heap of washed and dried clothes in a basket at her feet. She started for the door to still its insistent shrillness. It surprised her that Frank had not gone to answer it. She heard the voice of Davies, the detective, speaking into his radio in the hall. Stephen was with her, at the kitchen table, methodically writing in his school exercise book. In spite of it all he was doing the weekend work that his class teacher had set. That was her next looming problem: Monday morning, and no school. Frank shouted down from upstairs that he was on the toilet. Davies was at the door, waiting for her to come, and assuring her that the camera had picked up one of the village people. She switched off the iron.
All Frank had told her was that Martindale, the bastard, would not serve him.
Davies opened the door, and she saw Vince, smelt his beer breath.
She was behind Davies.
"It's all right, Mr. Davies, it's Vince. Hello, Vince God, don't say you've come to start on the chimney."
Vince was the most fancied builder-decorator in the village. There were others, but he was the best known. He was a great starter and a poor finisher, but those with a leak or a slipped tile or the need for a sudden repainting of a spare bedroom for a visitor knew they could rely on him. And he was a popular rogue… The Revenue had looked at him twice in the last seven years, and he'd seen them off.
He was in a constant state of dispute with the parish council because of the builders' supplies dumped in the front garden of his former council house, now his freehold property, behind the church. Anyone who could lay a hand on a Bible and say they would never have a rainwater leak or a slipped tile or the need for fast redecoration could call him a fraud, a bully, a botcher. There were not many. Small, powerful, his arms heavily tattooed, he was everybody's friend, and knew it and exploited it. What Vince believed in, above all else, was the quality of his humour. He had no doubt that his jokes made him a popular cornerstone in the village.
Meryl tittered nervously. The mortar was coming out of the brickwork on the chimney. It was just something to say.
"Surely you're not going up there?"
"Actually, I've come for my money."
"What money? Why?"
"What I'm owed."
"Frank paid you."
"He paid me two fifty down, but there was more materials I've got the bills." He was routing in his trouser pocket, dragging out small, crumpled sheets of paper.
"I'm owed nineteen pounds and forty-seven pence.~
"You said it was inclusive, for Stephen's bedroom, everything for two fifty."
"I got it wrong. You owe me."
"Then you'll get the extra when you come to do the chimney."
"If you're still here, if pigs fly, if-' "What does that mean?" He'd been in her kitchen. She made him four pots of tea each working day and gave him cake. She'd left him with the key when she'd gone out and he'd been working in the house. She'd trusted him.
"What on earth are you talking about?"
"If you haven't moonlighted going, aren't you? I'll be left, owed nineteen pounds and forty-seven pence, and you'll be gone. I've come for my money."
She choked.
"I can't believe this. Aren't you Frank's friend? We're not going anywhere."
"No? Well, you should be. You're not wanted."
She stuttered, "Go away."
"When I've got my money."
The detective moved without warning, stepping forward two, three paces. He caught at Vince's collar and had him up on to his toes. When the fist came up Davies caught it, as if he was handling a child. He twisted it hard against Vince's back, pivoted him round and marched him back down the path. She heard everything Davies said into Vince's ear.
"Listen, scumbag, don't come here to play the fucking bully. Go back to that godawful pub and tell them that these people aren't leaving. And don't ever bloody come back here."
With a jerk of his arm, the detective pushed Vince down on to his knees in the roadway, forced his face into the deepest and widest of the puddles and kept hold of him until he stopped struggling, lay still in submission. Davies released him, and stepped cleanly back to watch Vince crawl away.
She leaned against the wall beside the door. Davies came back in and closed it quietly behind him. She hadn't noticed it before but Frank's trousers were too short for him and his sweater was too tight. She put her hand on his arm.
"Thank you I don't suppose you should have done that."
"I don't suppose I should."
"Frank would have called him a friend he went up on the roof in a storm last winter."
Very gently he took her hand from the sleeve of the sweater. She didn't look into his face, didn't dare to. She looked down at his waist and the gun in the holster.
"What you have to understand, Mrs. Perry, it's all totally predictable. It's not peculiar to here, it would happen if you lived anywhere. It would be the same if you were in a suburb or a city street. It's what people do when they're frightened. Maybe you'll find someone out there who has the guts to stand in your corner, and maybe you won't. What you have to remember, they're ordinary people, people you'd find anywhere. You can't expect anything else from them."
The lavatory flushed upstairs.
"I'll get the ironing done. How long will it be till they come for Frank?"
"Thank you, the stuff's a bit tight on me.
He disappeared into the dining room. In the kitchen her Stephen was still doggedly writing in his exercise book even though he would have heard each word Vince had said to her. Outside, the night was coming and the curtains were tightly drawn against it. Vince had always been so good with Stephen, had made him laugh. Would they come that night for Frank, or the night after, or the night after that? She shook and tried to hold the iron steady.
In a vile temper, Fenton returned to Thames House from his lunch. It should have been lunch and shopping with his wife, if the wretched man had not cancelled lunch for Monday, and insisted his only opportunity was Saturday. Fenton had bartered with his wife: lunch with the academic and then shopping, with her having access to the full range of his plastic.
He came up to the third floor, was told there was nothing new of note, then went into his office to shed his coat and spill his micro tape-recorder on to the desk. The lunch had further confused him, and the expensive shopping had wounded him.
He had not used this source before, but the file said he was sound. The academic was white-haired and ginger-bearded, a professor of Islamic studies at a minor college at the university, had a face lined like a popular ski-run, from Sudan. The confusion, from the soft-voiced lecture, had fuelled Fenton's temper. He listened to the tape again.
"What distresses me is the hostility of the Western media and the Western "orientalists" towards the Islamic faith. They are servants of imperialism. They stigmatize, stereotype and categorize us, and any scholar of the Faith of Islam is labelled with the title of "fundamentalist". There's no denying it is a term used with hostility. If we judged Christianity by the excesses of the Inquisition, or if we took the Fascist elements in Zionism to reflect the faith of Judaism, you would be horrified. If we talked always about apartheid and Nazism as examples of Christian belief you would rightly criticize us but when a zealot hijacks an aircraft he is labelled an Islamic fundamentalist. If a lunatic shoots children in a school, do we call him a Christian fundamentalist? You live by a double standard. You follow slavishly the American need to have an enemy, and you plant that title, without the slightest reason, on the faithful of Islam."
They had been in the students' canteen, a dreary cavern of a building. They'd colleded salads and fruit juice from a self-service counter, not a bottle of wine in sight, and the academic had persistently questioned the woman at the till to be certain there was no alcohol in the vinegar that accompanied the salad.
"You distrust us in your midst, even those Muslims who are British citizens. Our colleges for converts in this country are monitored by the security forces why? Because we are different, because we live by other criteria? Is it that you fear believers and the standards to which they dedicate their lives? A Muslim will not steal from you, will not seduce your wife, will not go to prostitutes, and yet the strength of our decency is regarded as a threat so we are harassed by the political police. Everything you talk about involves this threat, but it is a figment of your imagination. We are not drunk in the street and looking for violence, we are not hooligans. Would a virtuous young woman, an Islamic convert, join in a criminal conspiracy of murder? The very idea is preposterous and shows the depths of your prejudice."
Fenton had listened and toyed unhappily with his lettuce leaves, probably left over from the previous week's catering. They had a table to themselves. He had attended the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst, not university, and when his eyes wandered to the students sitting around them, he'd felt a sense of disgust.
"You have made a growth industry in the study of the Islamic faith, but the work is shallow. You seek to vilify Iran, to cast that great nation and its people in a mould of the "medieval"~ I tell you, Mr. Fenton, where there is the Sharia, the law of Islam, you would find it safe to walk in the streets. It is a code of fairness, charity and decency. Yes, there is a death sentence. Yes, there is very occasional amputation and the flogging of offenders but only after the most rigorous examination of the felon by the courts. I venture to say that there are many in the United Kingdom, so-called Christians, who yearn for the punishment of the guilty. But to suggest as you do, Mr. Fenton, that the legally elected government of Iran would seek clandestine vengeance abroad is just another example of a warped and closed mind. Let me tell you if a small incident or a trivial event occurred, if you made from it a fraudulent link with Iran, if you danced to the American tune, if you made lying public statements, then the consequences could be most grave. Do you dance to that tune, Mr. Fenton? Are you acting now as a lackey to those Islamophobic elements of the American establishment who wish to block the return of more normal relationships between Iran and the United States? A false and deceitful move would lead, Mr. Fenton, to the most desperate of consequences. Of course, I do not threaten you but I warn that your irrelevant and decadent country would be at war with a billion Muslims throughout the world. I do not think you would wish that."
So, earnestly, at the end of a meal that left him hungry, he had fled the canteen.
With a deep sigh, Fenton switched off the tape-recorder he had worn under his jacket. The two roads split ahead of him, and the directions they took were opposite and irreconcilable.
Was Islamic Iran a force for good, which he was too bigoted to appreciate, or a force for evil, which made a sewer of the streets of his country? He did not know which road led to truth. What he did know was that Abigail Fenton had punished him for her missed lunch with the price of a new handbag, a dress and a matching twin-set.
He rang Cox in the country, and hoped he was disturbing him. He told him what he had learned. Whichever way they twisted was fraught with problems. Cox said his confidence in Fenton's judgement was, as always, total. He'd always thought of Cox as a time-serving, networking fool; now he began to doubt that opinion.
He wandered towards Cathy Parker.
"I'm confused, Cathy."
"Goes with the rank, Harry."
"I don't know whether it's real can't quite bring myself to believe it the threat."
"Best, Harry, as the actress said to the bishop, just to lie back and enjoy the ride. Do you want to be told?"
"If it'll blow some clarity into a fogged old mind…"
"Bollocks, you're loving every minute of it."
He grinned. She laughed and started to map it out, what they had. A man had come in from the sea. A car had crashed, the man had moved on. An associate was missing from home but photographs had been found of a target and a location. Between each point she rapped her pen on the desk, as if to alert him, then her face lightened.
"I've found a marriage, 1957. The daughter of a British oil engineer to an Iranian doctor. There's a cousin down in Somerset…"
"What'll that give you?"
"Who knows? Might give me a face. I don't like to see you confused. Confusion is like haemorrhoids, Harry, embarrassing for you and therefore bloody unpleasant for the rest of us. I'm making it my business, by hand, to swab away your confusion."
"Do you believe in it, the threat?"
"I'd be a right idiot if I didn't."
"And the tethered goat, do you believe in that?"
She laughed into his face.
"I'm just the bottle washer it's your responsibility, Harry, not mine. You volunteered."
The blue Fiat 127 was behind a hedge, hidden from the road. Brought up in the provinces by a family without military or criminal links, she had compensated for her lack of experience in such areas by the simple application of common sense. Using basic logic she had thought through each of her moves. The car was the right colour to avoid attention; the station, with commuters not coming back from London until the middle evening, had been the right place to steal it from. Her own car was abandoned in woods: she had unscrewed the number-plates and buried them under fallen leaves. It would be days or weeks before it was found, reported. She had done each thing sensibly, and even if he had wanted to be could not have criticized what she had done.
She sat in the car, in the silence, in the dark, and her mind wafted between her two contrary worlds: Farida Yasmin or Gladys Eva. He would now be making the final checks on his rifle and would be smearing mud on his face. She shuddered, and tried to pray to his God, her God, to protect him. When she tried to pray, she was Farida Yasmin Jones. The man was guarded. Under her sweater, she was running her fingers over the skin of her stomach, as he had caressed the bird's feathers, as she had stroked his hair. The man was guarded with guns. It was the first moment that she had considered the realities of the guards, the guns. She thought of him shot, bleeding. As her fingers moved faster, pressed harder, she was Gladys Eva Jones. She thought of herself, waiting and alone. She thought of the boots on his neck where her fingers had been, and the pools of blood. Soon, he would be moving off, tracking beside the marshes towards the lights of the village.
Geoff Markham had crossed the orbital motorway and was coming through the dirty sprawl of east London's streets. Littelbaum had slept on the open road but the jerking drive through the traffic had wakened him, and he talked.
"Pathetic, really, a sign of age, that I cannot climb a narrow staircase without a palpitation. I'm fine now, I'm warm, and I've had my necessary sleep. I owe you an explanation why a hundred miles driving out of London, a quick climb of the church tower, and a hundred miles drive back has not been a waste of your time."
Markham stared into the weaving mass of cars, vans and lorries, in heavy concentration.
"I am not a criminologist, or an academic, most certainly not a clinical psychologist. I detest those shrinks who charge fat fees for profiling. I am simply, Mr. Markham, an ageing soldier of the Bureau. I have been in Tehran and Saudi Arabia for the last twenty years of my working life. I said, because I know those places and those people, I could smell him. It's not vanity, it's the truth."
Markham drove past the brightly lit shop windows festooned with bargain stickers and kept his silence. He had noted that not a word of sympathy had been expressed by the American for Frank Perry and his family, as if there were no room in the job for compassion.
"My tools of trade, Mr. Markham, are intuition and experience and I value them equally. Actually, there is little that's complicated. We are told he is late thirties. He would have been eighteen or nineteen years old when the Ayatollah returned from exile. Then comes the war with Iraq. The military are not trusted, the principal fighting is given to the fanatical but untrained youth of the Revolutionary Guard Corps. They fought with a quite extraordinary and humbling innovative ness and dedication. They made up the rule books of combat as they went along. Any man, given the responsibility for a mission of this importance or the importance of the bombings in Riyadh or Dhahran, would have come through that route."
He saw the men who carried the clusters of shopping-bags and the women who pushed prams, and the voice in his ear dripped the story of a world they would not have comprehended. Markham would be joining the great uncomprehending masses because he did not believe he had the ability to affect events.
"Most of life is a linked chain. Think about it the Iranians could not match the quality of the Iraqi weaponry that had been provided by the Western powers. They had to learn to improvise and fight where that hardware was least effective. They chose the most unpromising ground. You won't have heard of these battles, Mr. Markham, but they were of primitive ferocity. Fish Lake and the Jasmin Canal, the Haur-al-Hawizeh marshes, the Shatt-al-Arab waterway and the Faw peninsula. The battleground for the best of the Revolutionary Guard Corps was water and reed-banks. By choosing to fight on such hostile and difficult territory, they nullified the sophisticated equipment of their enemy, and that's why I had to climb to the highest point, the vantage-position. I am not ashamed to say it, I was on my hands and my knees, petrified. I surveyed the battleground, and all I could see was water and marshes. It's where he would be, it is why I said it was like I could smell him… Don't waste fuel by sending up helicopters with infrared, the Iraqis did that, and don't waste people's time by commissioning aerial image-intensified photography, they did that as well. He will be hiding there and an army wouldn't find him. But he has to come out, Mr. Markham, and then, God willing, you shoot him."
One day, before the end of the week, he would tell Littelbaum, insist on it, that he was Geoff, that he was a colleague and not a stranger. He didn't know whether the formality of the American was old-world Iowa courtesy, or the patronizing talk of a veteran to a youngster. But, as the bright lights of the city reflected up into his eyes from the roadway, he listened to every word and believed them. He thought the American brought as much soul to the business as he did when he played a board game with Vicky. It was, actually, distasteful, and near to being disgusting.
"You are a polite man, Mr. Markham. You haven't interrupted my rambling and polite enough to humour me by driving slowly. But if you had been less polite you would have interrupted to ask the question that is most pertinent. What sort of man is he? Let me tell you, he is a child of the revolution. When you were chasing girls, Mr. Markham, he would have been on the barricades facing the bullets of the Shah's Army. When you were studying at college, he would have been learning to survive against heavy artillery barrages and mustard-gas bombing. When you were playing at war in Ireland, he was killing with expertise in the harsh environment of Saudi Arabia… He will be a man who has never known youth, gaiety and mischief, as you have. He will be a man without love."
Ahead of them was the Thames House building, and the light was going over the river.
"It's been a grand day. I've said all I can my part in this is about played out. Would the Tower of London be open tomorrow? My Esther would be properly upset if I didn't send her some photographs of London history. There's not a lot of history in west Iowa… I won't be going down there again, not till it's finished. I don't believe in second-guessing the experts. It's in their hands now, the people with the guns. Remember what I said, a man without love, a man who won't walk away… I'll go down again if there's a body to view. I'd like that, if it can be done inside my schedule."
Markham swung the car down into the basement car-park. He turned off the ignition and stared to the front, before turning to face Littelbaum.
"Can I ask something, no, several things?" he said briskly.
"Haven't I given you the chance? I'm sorry. Fire away."
"It may sound like an idiotic question, Mr. Littelbaum, but do you think you change anything? Do you believe you do anything that's honourable and worthwhile? Do you care about people? Have you ever considered walking away and picking up work where there's something finite at the end? Is it a decent job?"
Markham looked into the American's old eyes and saw the light flash in them.
"That tells me you're thinking of bugging out… It's not for me to offer persuasion either way, but I don't think you're the sort to drop out. I've been through the bad times when it's just filing paper and getting a cold ass in a surveillance stake-out, and there's no big picture to tell me it's worthwhile. I've done that. I hung on in there. I got a grip and I hauled myself up, and I thought whining was poor sport. I believe in what I do. I think I serve my country's interests. There's plenty of places back where I come from that have banks and real-estate offices and insurance companies where I could have gotten work and I think it would have been slow death. But I'm a selfish man and I love what I do, and I aim to keep doing it… If they threw me out tomorrow I might just go find a veterinary surgeon and ask him to put me down. I can't think, Mr. Markham, of a better thing that a man can do than to serve his country and not have it bother him that no one knows his name and no one will ever learn what he did."
Littelbaum had reached for the door-handle.
Markham said, "Thank you.
"I've met your principal. I was at the meetings that evaluated the information he gave. He's a tough, proud, able man. Don't make a judgement on me because I'm not modern and emotionally incontinent. I hope, sincerely, he makes it through this. But, I'm honest with you, my country's interests are paramount to me. You can't go soft on this. I have to tell you, I have very little respect for quitters."
Only later were they able to put together the sequence of events.
They were all trained men, but their memories were hazy and fuddled. On one thing, they were all agreed, Dave Paget, Joe Rankin, Leo Blake and Bill Davies, the speed with which it happened, so fucking fast.
Dave Paget and Joe Rankin sat in the Wendy house, the door shut tight against the cold. It was fifteen minutes to the end of the twelve-hour shift. They were both, wouldn't have admitted it, knackered. When they cared to look at it, the television screen alternated between the view of the back garden and the view of the front approach to the house; on the console, the lights indicating the state of the sensor beams were steady on green. Joe Paget was finishing the last of the sandwiches, and muttering about where they would go to eat, where they'd find a new pub because last night's meal had been a bloody disaster. Dave Rankin flipped the pages of two magazines simultaneously, survival kit and holidays, talking to himself about thermal socks and about which month had the best weather in Bournemouth and Eastbourne, was engaged in a mindless interior dialogue. A red light on the console bleeped, indicating that a sensor beam was broken at the bottom end of the garden. Joe Paget said it was that bloody fox again, and Dave Rankin said that Bournemouth was as good as Eastbourne if it was out of season. Something moved, on the screen, at the far end of the garden… Leo Blake tried to slip quietly past the sitting-room door of the B and B but was ambushed by Mrs. Fairbrother. How long were they intending to stay? They were not the sort of trade she was used to. Did he realize how inconvenient it was to have him sleeping in their house through the day? She had a shrill, moneyed voice, and the bark hadn't been lost with the change in fortunes. He said that he didn't know, ducked past her and hurried out to his car… Bill Davies was reading his newspaper in the dining room, the radio and the Heckler amp; Koch resting on the blanket covering the table. He was warm, had an electric fire on two bars, and clean. Meryl had ironed his shirt, his underwear and his socks, and had attempted to press the creases out of his suit. Only his shoes were still damp and they were filled with the sports section of his newspaper. He had his feet up on the table. The television was on next door, in the living room, and they were all there. He glanced down at his watch; Blake would be relieving him in five or six minutes. His radio crackled to life, jolting him from the newspaper… Dave Paget and Joe Rankin were both numbed into silence. The first call out to the house was the warning, now they stared at the screen and were checking for the confirmation. Paget was very pale, Rankin was sweating. Their machine-guns were hooked over their necks and shoulders. Red lights began to replace green lights on the console. Twice the camera caught a movement, and twice lost it somewhere down at the bottom of the garden, where the shrubs were and the greenhouse. It wasn't like Hogan's Alley and it had fuck-all, sweet fucking nothing, to do with the shooting range. What the hell should they do? Quit the Wendy house? Crab towards the end of the garden where the beams were broken and the movement showed? Shout? Activate the bloody floodlights? Run for the house? There was no flicking instructor to tell them what to do. They saw him on the screen. He was coming up the side of the garden, a blurred white figure. They saw the rifle, outlined against a grey furred background, then it was gone. Paget swore, and Rankin gave the confirmation into the radio.
It might have been the rain, and the maintenance on the pool cars was worse than last year when it had been worse than the year before, but it took Leo Blake an age to start the damned engine. He sat in his car and revved, long enough for the curtain behind him to part, and he saw Mrs. Fairbrother scowling at him. Bloody car, and he'd have some bloody words for the maintenance people… Bill Davies burst the door open into the living room. The advertisements were playing between the soaps. The machine-gun dangled free on its strap and thudded against his body. He was shouting. They sat frozen. Perry was in his chair holding his coffee mug, Meryl had her needlework on her lap, Stephen was on the floor with his computer game. He was shouting, and they did not respond, and he was shouting louder. He grabbed his principal and hauled him up from the chair and the coffee flew in the air and down to the carpet. He was dragging his principal, helpless, like a sack of sand, out into the hall. The radio was blasting in his earpiece, and she hadn't come and neither had the kid. He snatched open the door of the cupboard under the staircase and pitched his principal inside. Perry cannoned against the vacuum cleaner, the brooms, the boots, the kid's old push chair and the junk. He went back, shouldn't have done, for her and the kid, broke the drill they practised. The principal should have been his only priority. He caught her arm and the kid's wrist she was screaming, and the kid and he threw them in the cupboard against his principal. He crouched by the door. God, if they would just stop screaming… Joe Paget stayed at the console and watched the screen. Dave Rankin ducked out of the Wendy house, launched himself on to the lawn, rolled, then crawled towards the kitchen door and the cover of the water-butt. Each had the selector off safety, had gone to single-shot, each had one in the breach, each had the finger on the trigger guard. Joe Paget told Dave Rankin, face microphone to earpiece, that the Tango was out of the beams, off camera. Where was the bastard? Where the fuck was he?… Leo Blake was going down the drive when he switched on the radio. He heard the chaos on the net, and the gravel spewed out from under his… Bill Davies had his principal buried deep in the cupboard and the kid was in there behind him. But the woman was still screaming. He held her, he had to. With one hand he aimed his machine-gun at the front door, with the other hand he clutched her to him. He held her against his chest to stifle the screaming, and she sobbed hopelessly… Joe Paget said that the Tango had gone up the side of the house, would be on the neighbour's patch, and the front was not covered. Dave Rankin swore, said he'd try to cover the front. His breath was heaving and, to Joe Paget, he was damn bloody close to going incoherent. Coming across him and Dave Rankin was Bill Davies crying out for cover at the front, and the woman's sobs were across everything. And the unmarked car at the main road was playing bolshie and saying they weren't supposed to move off station, and the unmarked car that was cruising was more than two minutes… Leo Blake came round the corner by the village hall and, with the green ahead of him, had to swerve to miss an old man with a terrier. Bill Davies heard the shoulder hammer into the front door where there was a new lock and an old bolt, and held his hand over her mouth and tried to muffle the sobbing that would pinpoint for the Tango where they were. The door sagged… (.. Dave Rankin fell into the cold frame at the side of the house, crashed through the glass, sprawled and lost the momentum of his charge… Leo Blake drove straight across the grass of the green, wheels spinning, skidding, hit a young tree and flattened it with its post. He swung his wheel and had the front of the house in his full lights, and saw him… Bill Davies heard the door splintering… For a flickering moment, Joe Paget saw him again, white against grey, then lost him as the car's lights blacked out his screen… Leo Blake had the Tango in his lights. He could see the man's camouflage combat gear, his mud-smeared face, and the assault rifle. The man, as if it was his final desperate effort, threw his weight against the door. Blake shared the Heckler amp; Koch with Davies, and now only had the Glock in a shoulder holster. He'd forgotten it, its presence there was clean out of his mind. He dazzled the Tango with his lights. The Tango had the rifle up, aiming towards the car, but couldn't see through the lights. Blake knew the rifle, had fired the same weapon on the range, knew its killing power. He thought his last best chance was to charge the man with the lights on full beam. The Tango thrust an arm over his blinded eyes, then ran. The man sprinted, full stride, along the track in front of the houses. There was a moment when the back of the Tango was in front of the car, and then the man tried to sidestep towards the cover of a hedge. Clutching the wheel, Leo Blake felt the jolt as he clipped the Tango, and he was past him. The car surged on, spun, turned the full circle. Leo Blake saw, lying on the grass, the Kalashnikov. He switched off the engine. He tried to be calm, to report what he had done, what he had seen..
(.. Bill Davies held the woman, his hand still over her mouth. The sound of bitter argument on the soap played from the living room through the hall and into the cupboard. He said it was all right, he said it was over, and he realized that he had no shoes on… Joe Paget sat motionless in front of his console and watched the green lights of the unbroken beams… Far away, Dave Rankin heard the splinter crack of a fence breaking, as if it were rotten and gave under the weight of a man. He walked out of the front garden and across the grass to the Kalashnikov, cleared it and made it safe… Leo Blake sat in his car and tried to slow the beating of his heart. He put the window down, for air, and the stench came to him, from the hedge, of old stagnant mud… (.. Bill Davies took his hand from Meryl Perry's mouth… Dear Geoffrey, It was good to see you in person and hear you at first hand -if we had any doubts about your suitability or your readiness to take responsibility then you most decisively struck them out.
My colleague and I are, therefore, very pleased to be able to offer you employment with the bank. You would start in our Pensions/ Investment section where we would monitor your progress before deciding where in our operations you would sit most comfortably. Our Human Resources section is currently drafting a letter setting out a proposed salary structure along with bonus emoluments, which you will receive on Monday. If they are acceptable please let me know when you can start with us the sooner the better as far as we are concerned. We would wish you to resign from your present employment at the earliest opportunity.
Sincerely,
The letter was under her buttocks.
It was Vicky's reward.
It was creased and crumpled, and her thighs gripped his waist and her ankles locked against the small of his back.
The drink made her noisy.
She had cooked for the two of them, something Mexican. His absence at lunch with her mother was forgiven, and she'd drunk most of the bottle he'd brought round. Shyly he had shown her the letter that had lain unopened all day in his briefcase. She had left the plates, the empty glasses and the finished bottle on the table, and taken him and his letter to her bed.
Wasn't he clever, wasn't he brilliant? Wasn't the future opening for them?
He was too tired to enjoy it, but he pretended. She grunted and squealed and kept him inside her long after he was finished.
When would he resign? When would he be shot of the bloody place?
It was as if Vicky had given him a present… His pager bleeped on his belt. His belt was in his trousers, on the floor by the door, where she'd pulled them off him.
He prised open her thighs and fell off her.
All he wanted to do was to sleep, and to forget the one-road village, the prey and the predator, the high church tower that overlooked the marshlands. He crawled to his trousers and read the pager's message. MARK HAM C. IRE JULIET 7FARED HIT GET BACK SOONEST. FEN TON He started to dress. She lay on the bed, limp, her legs apart. He pulled on his underpants, his trousers, shirt, and his socks. The letter still peeped from under her buttocks. He pulled on his shoes and knotted the laces. He went to the bed and tried to kiss her mouth but she turned her head away and his lips brushed her cheek.
"It's the last time you do this to me, the last bloody time. You're not running back to them again, like they're your bloody mother."