Bill Davies had clung to the pillow in the bed. In his dream mind Meryl had been with him through the night.
The pillow was the principal's wife. He had held her close against him in the doorway of the cupboard under the stairs when her body had shaken with the sobbing, and he had held the pillow against his chest. The pillow had been soft, vulnerable, needing protection.
He had slipped out of the house before Mrs. Fairbrother was downstairs, an hour before his wake-up call. He had driven away from the village, out past the church, to the woodland by the car-park and the picnic site. He had pulled up an oak sapling from the ground, wrenched it up from the sandy soil, and had found a pile of posts for fencing that had been left by the foresters, and taken one. He had thrown the sapling and a post into the boot of the car.
He waved grimly to the men in the unmarked car. They'd be the same shift as had been on last night, and the beggars had played by the rule book and said they weren't permitted to leave their station. He'd have them. Later in the morning he'd burn them when he could get his guvnor on the telephone. It would have been shades of hell for that family, but the unmarked car had followed the rule book, and the family could have died because of it. He shook his head sharply, as if to block the memory, and started up his car.
He pulled on to the road, and had to brake sharply. He'd damn near run into the back of the van. At snail's pace it was going towards the village. He was about to hit the horn, when he realized the implication of the painted words on the back of the van.
"Danny's Removals. Nothing too large or too small. Go anywhere, anytime." And there was a London telephone number.
The removals van was lost and trying to find an address in the village. Why hadn't Blake radioed him, or his guvnor telephoned him? He wondered whether they'd already gone, with their suitcases, and whether the van was just to pick up their furniture and possessions. They could have bloody told him, after everything he'd done for them. He beat his fist in frustration against the steering-wheel. He'd been in charge of the security, and it had so damn near gone wrong. Was he responsible for the family running? Momentarily he shut his eyes, lost sight of the big back doors of the van. He'd thought Perry had the balls to stick it out, even if the wife hadn't. A van meant that Perry was going, or had gone… He felt limp, washed through. He thought that he had failed. He couldn't blame them for going, not after last night. He thought the bastards had won. The bastards were not a man with an assault rifle, but the men in the pub, the neighbour, the people at the school. The bastards, the friends, had won the day.
A man ran out from a hedge ahead, looked like a lunatic on the loose, and waved frantically to the dawdling van. He was wearing a raincoat, under which the hem of a nightshirt showed and bedroom slippers. The brake lights flashed.
Davies saw the for-sale sign on to which the sold board had been nailed. The man was pointing to the narrow driveway of the cottage.
He stopped, and breathed hard. He thought it was his tiredness that had made him react so fast and so stupidly. He waited while the van manoeuvred into the driveway of Rose Cottage, then powered away down the empty road. He realized, then, how much the family meant to him.
In the half-light of the Sunday morning, Bill Davies used the short-handled spade from the boot to hack out the broken tree on the green and the snapped-off post that had held it.
The broken tree, an ornamental cherry, was in bud and would soon have been in flower. Last night, the wheels of Blake's car and its chassis had miraculously cleared the small plaque commemorating the planting of the tree by the parish council as a mark of respect for the dead princess. He dug a deeper pit and planted the oak sapling in the cherry tree's place, then used the back of the spade to hammer down the stolen post. He tossed the broken tree and the snapped stake behind the water-butt at the side of Perry's house.
Where there had been a cherry tree there was now an oak sapling; where there had been a stake there was now a post. He used the point of the spade to scuff up the grass and cover the tracks of Blake's tyres. He folded away the spade.
A teenage boy was working down the far side of the green with a bicycle-load of newspapers.
Two cars went down the road at the side of the green and plumed exhaust fumes behind them.
He shivered in the chill of the morning and wondered if she had slept or had clung to her husband, his principal. And Bill Davies was satisfied… The evidence of the night action was erased. He had told them, in London, in his interim report, of the highly professional defence of his principal and his principal's family. He had written in a stuttering hand, then controlled his voice to hide its quaver as he'd dictated a brisk litany of lies. They might just believe it in London. He looked across the green and the roofs of the houses towards the watery low light growing on the sea's horizon line. He looked at the house and the drawn curtains on the bedroom window, and he wondered how they would be… He was walking to the front door when the neighbour spilled out from the next-door house.
"A word, I want a word with you."
Wroughton, the neighbour, was in a dressing-gown and slippers. His hair wasn't combed and he hadn't yet shaved. Davies saw the wife behind him, half hiding in the hall's shadows.
"How can I be of help?"
"What happened here last night?"
"I'm not aware that anything happened."
"There was a car… "Was there really?"
"And shouting."
"Must have been a television turned up too loud."
"Are you telling me that nothing happened here last night?"
"If there's anything you need to be told, Mr. Wroughton, you'll be told it."
He stared into the neighbour's eyes, challenged him, then watched him back off and go back inside. Bill Davies could be a quality liar and a good-grade bully. He saw the woman's face at the window beside the door, smiled cheerfully at her and waved. A man with a high-velocity assault rifle had been, in the darkness, a few feet from where that woman, her husband and children had lain in their beds and listened to tyre screams and panicked shouts. There were enough complications in Bill Davies's work day without added responsibility for the neighbours. He felt the burden of it, and stamped up the path to ring the bell. The previous week, he would have sworn it couldn't happen, that he would be emotionally involved with his principal's family.
Blake told him that a dog team had arrived three hours earlier, found a trail through the gardens down the green, across rough ground and had lost the trail in the river. Apparently there was no blood on the trail. The dogs had worked the riverbank, Blake said, but had failed to regain the scent. A van had come an hour before and collected the assault rifle.
How were they, in the house? Blake shrugged, they were predictable.
What was predictable? They were on the floor.
Would they get off the floor? And again Blake shrugged, as if it wasn't his concern, but the woman had cried in the night and twice the man had come down the stairs and poured whisky, swigged it and gone back up. They'd had the kid in the bed with them.
Was Blake, ten hours later, sure he'd hit the man? Blake was sure and, to emphasize his certainty, led him to the car and showed him the sharp dent in the paintwork over the near side wheel.
A small car, a city runabout type, came towards them. Instinctively, his hand slipped inside his outer coat and rested on the Glock.
He saw a young man at the wheel, his eyes raking the ground ahead as he approached. Bill Davies thought he was looking for the evidence of what had happened in the night but there was nothing for him to see. It was like the aftermath of a road accident when the fire brigade had hosed down the tarmac, the traffic police had swept up the glass and the recovery truck had towed away the wrecked vehicles.
The car stopped. The window was lowered. The young man, stubble on his face, tie loosened, held up an ID card. Davies thought he had been up all night.
"I'm Markham, Geoff Markham, I'm the liaison from Thames House. Are you Bill Davies?"
He nodded, didn't bother to reply.
"Pleased to meet you. They're singing your praises at our place, up to the rafters. I mean, it was a quality defence of a target. We'd have expected unadulterated chaos, but what you did was brilliant. There's a big meeting this morning, up at secretary-of-state level, that's why I'm here, for liaison. There has to be an evaluation of how the target will take the pressure waste of time, really, because your report indicates exceptional calm. We'd have reckoned they'd be screaming and bawling and packing their bags. What was it like?"
Davies tried a thin smile.
"Well, it's what you're trained for, yes? We understand the dogs lost him on the way to the marshes going south… I'll talk to your principal later, when I've had a walk about the place and found somewhere to bed down. Hope I won't be in your way. There's talk of putting the Army in to flush him out, but that's for the meeting to decide…"
"I won't have it, I can't accept it." The secretary of state flexed his fingers nervously, ground the palms of his hands together.
"We should be there, we've the expertise." The colonel had driven from Hereford through the dawn hours.
"Out of the question, there has to be a different way."
"Special Forces are the answer, not policemen."
Fenton was there with Cox, at the side of the secretary of state but a step back from him. It amused Fenton to see the politician writhe in the confrontation with the stocky, barrel-bodied soldier. He understood. The Regiment's commitment to Northern Ireland was reduced: the colonel was touting for work for his people, and for justification of their budget.
"With the military and their back-up, all their paraphernalia, equipment, we escalate way beyond any acceptable level to government."
"Policemen cannot do it, Counter-revolutionary Warfare wing should be deployed," the colonel demanded.
"The military going through those marshes, like it's a pheasant-beat, a fox-hunt, ending in gunfire and a corpse. That's an admission of our failure."
"Then you take the risk on your shoulders for the life of this man, and for the lives of his family we can do it."
The colonel wore freshly laundered camouflage fatigues and his boots glowed. Fenton and Cox were, of course, in suits. The politician was of the new breed, dressed down for a Sunday morning in corduroys and a baggy sweater. At Thames House, they harboured no love for the Special Air Service Regiment. The gunning-down by plain-clothes soldiers of three unarmed Provisional IRA terrorists in daylight, in a crowded street in Gibraltar had been, in the opinion of the Security Service hierarchy, simply vulgar. Each time, the moment before he launched himself in speech, the secretary of state glanced at Fenton and Cox as if they might offer him salvation, and each time both men gazed away.
"It would smack of persecution. We have close to two million Muslims in the country, the effect of a military gun-club drive could be catastrophic for race relations in the United Kingdom."
"Do you want the job done or don't you?"
"Those relations are fragile enough. Even now we're walking a tightrope between the cultures. Deployment of the Army against what is probably a single individual, and his inevitable death, would create dangerous tensions, quite apart from the effect on international dialogue… The colonel thwacked his fist into the palm of his hand.
"The idea of sending policemen into those marshes, that sort of terrain, against a dangerous fanatic, is preposterous."
"Another way, there has to be."
"No. My men have to go in for him."
The politician rocked and reached out to his table to steady himself. Perhaps, Fenton thought, he saw an image of camouflaged soldiers dragging a body from the water of those hideous marshes that bordered the road going away from the godawful place.
Perhaps he saw an image of young Muslims barricading streets in old mill towns of central and northern England. Perhaps he saw an image of a British diplomat being pulled from his car by the mob in Tehran or Karachi, Khartoum or Amman. Every politician, every minister of government he had ever known, was traumatized when the men came from the dark crevices at the edge of his fiefdom, did not confide, demanded free-range action, and dumped on the desk a sack-load of responsibility. The colonel had his finger up, wagged it at the secretary of state as if he prepared to go in for the kill…. there is no other way.
It was Fenton's moment. He enjoyed, always, a trifle of mischief. He looked at Cox, and Cox nodded encouragement.
Fenton smiled warmly.
"I think I can help. I think I can suggest an alternative procedure…"
He had been there through the night and all of the day before. The necessary stillness and silence were as second nature to him.
In that time he had eaten two cold sausages given him by his mother and not needed more.
He sat motionless, sheltered by a rock from the worst of the wind. He was a thousand feet above the small quarry beside the road where the police waited, two hundred feet above the escarpment of raw stones and weathered tree sprigs where the eyrie was. He had his telescope and the binoculars but he did not use them; he could see all that he needed to see without them. There was only the wind's light whistle to break the silence rippling around him; it was an hour since he had last whispered into the radio the police had given him, and the birds at the eyrie were quieter now.
When the egg thieves came to the mountains the police always called him because, as they told him, he was the best.
The anger burned slowly in the young man's mind… When he had climbed to his vantage-point, using dead ground, never breaking the skyline or making a silhouette, the birds had been frantic at the eyrie, wheeling and crying. It was impossible for the young man to comprehend that a collector would hire people to come to the eagles' eyrie to take eggs, and harder than impossible for him to understand that those same eggs, a pair of them, would be valued by the collector at a figure in excess of a thousand pounds. The notion that the collector would hide the dead, smooth eggs away from sight and keep them only for a personal gratification was impossible for him to believe… He loved the birds. He knew every one of the nine pairs that flew, soared, hunted, within twenty miles of where he now sat.
The previous afternoon he had seen the decoy come down the mountain. It was intended that the movement should be seen. There was a routine and he had learned it. The eyrie would be hit in darkness. A pair of men would climb to it with the aid of passive infrared goggles, and would lift the eggs. They would move them down a few hundred metres and hide them. They would be clean when they reached the road and their car. A decoy would go on to the mountain the next day and appear to make a pick-up, would search in the heather or among boulders, would seem to lift something, and would then come down. Were he stopped and arrested, the decoy, too, would be clean, the surveillance would be blown and the eggs abandoned. If the decoy were not stopped then a man would come for the pick-up the following day. The pick-up man had gone close in the misty dawn light to a group of hinds, had been within thirty yards of them and not disturbed them, had been good. But, he had disturbed a solitary ptarmigan, and that had been enough for the young man at his vantage-point. He had followed the pick-up, his eyes needling on him. He had seen him lift the eggs from a hiding-place and start, with great care, to come down from the mountain. He had told the police over the radio where he would reach the road.
The mountains of this distant corner of north-west Scotland, their eyries and the vantage-points, were the young man's kingdom.
He was Andy Chalmers, twenty-four years old, employed to shoot hinds in the forestry plantations for ten months of the year, and to stalk stags for the guests of the owner of his estate Mr. Gabriel Fenton to shoot during the remaining two months of the year. He was the junior by twenty years of the other stalkers of the neighbouring estates, and in that small, close-knit world he was a minor legend.
If he had not been exceptional, he would never have been allowed near Mr. Gabriel Fenton's guests. Were it not for his remarkable skills at covering ground in covert stealth, he would have been relegated to renewing boundary posts and hammering in staples to fasten the fencing wire. He was surly with the guests, had no conversation, treated wealthy men with undisguised contempt, made them crawl on their stomachs in water-filled gullies till they shook with exhaustion, snarled at them if they coughed or spat phlegm, and took them closer to the target stags than any of the other stalkers would have dared. The guests adored his rudeness, and insisted on him accompanying them when they returned in subsequent years.
He watched the distressed wheel of the birds above their thieved eyrie. Many times the pick-up, from cover, searched the ground above and below him for evidence that he was identified, and failed to find it. There was little satisfaction for Chalmers in the knowledge that the police waited in the small quarry beside the road. The life warmth of the eggs was gone and the embryos already dead. The pick-up disappeared into the tree-line that hid the quarry and the road.
The radio called him.
The wind blustered against him and rain was shafting the far end of the glen.
He looked a last time at the birds and felt a sense of shame that he could not help them.
He took the direct route down, using a small stream bed. The cascading icy water was over his ankles, in his boots, and he felt nothing but the shame.
He came to the quarry. They were big men, the police out from Fort William, and they towered over him, but they treated this slight, spare, filthy young man with a rare respect. They thanked him, and then led him into the trees and pointed to the yellowed yolk of two eggs and the smashed shells. The pick-ups always tried to destroy evidence in the moments before they were arrested. He looked at the debris and thought of the fledglings they would have made, and of the sad, aimless flight over the eyrie of the adult birds. He started towards the police car where the shaven-headed pickup sat handcuffed on the back seat, but the policemen held his arms to prevent him reaching the door.
He was told there was a message for him, at the factor's office.
Peggy was a cog in the wheel of the village's life. She thought of herself as a large cog but to others in the community she was of small importance. She didn't care to acknowledge that reality. Her husband, dead nine years from thrombosis, had been a district engineer with the water authority, and within a week of burying him she had joined every committee that gave her access. Her loneliness was stifled by a workhorse dedication to activity. Nothing was too much trouble for her: she hustled through the hours of the day, out with her bicycle and her weathered bag, on her duties with the Women's Institute and the Wildlife Group and the committee for the Red Cross. She had a checklist of visits to be made each week to the young mothers and the sick and the elderly. Dressed in clothes of violently bright colours, she believed herself popular and integral. What she was asked to do, she did. She was happily unaware that, to most of her fellow villagers, she was a figure of ridicule. She had no malice. She had a loyalty. On that Sunday morning she was tasked by the Wildlife Group to perform a duty which would also feed the curiosity, inquisitiveness, on which she lived.
Frank Perry could see, side on, the slight wry grin on Davies's face, and his hand sliding away from under his jacket. It wasn't anything Perry had seen before: Peggy's coat was a technicolour patchwork of colour, and her garish lipstick matched none of the coat's hues.
"Hello, Peggy, keeping well? Yes?"
Peggy stared past him, a sort of disappointment clouding her features.
"Not too bad, thank you," she said severely.
Peggy's disappointment, he thought, was that she hadn't spied out an armoured personnel carrier in the hall, nor a platoon of crouched paratroops. She was on her toes to see better into the unlit hall. Perry wondered if she'd noticed the new tree and the new post, the tyre marks; she probably had because she missed little.
"How can I help?"
"It's Meryl I came to see Wildlife Group business."
"Sorry, you'll have to make do with me. Meryl's still upstairs."
The unmarked car cruised behind her and Davies gave it a small wave as if to indicate that the woman in the dream coat was not a threat. There were two more cars in the village that morning. Perry was unshaven, half dressed, and he had left Meryl upstairs in bed. She had been crying through half the night, and only now had slipped into a beaten, exhausted sleep.
Peggy blurted her message, "I was asked to come, the Wildlife Group asked me. Meryl was doing typing for us. I've come for it. I've been asked-' "Sorry, you're confusing me." But he was not confused, just wasn't going to make it easy for her.
"Your next meeting's not till Tuesday. She'll have it done by then, she'll bring it with her."
"I've been asked to take it from her."
"By whom?"
"By everybody chairman, treasurer, secretary. We want it back." He was determined to make her spell it out, word by bloody word.
"But it's not finished."
"We'll finish it ourselves."
He said evenly, "She'll bring it herself to the meeting on Tuesday."
"She's not wanted there. We don't want her at our meeting."
The day after he, Meryl and Stephen had moved in, Peggy had brought a fresh-baked apple pie to the house. Of course, she'd wanted to look over the new arrivals, but she had brought the pie and talked about infant schools for Stephen with Meryl, the better shops and the reliable tradesmen, and introduced her to the Institute. She had made Meryl feel wanted… He didn't curse, as he wanted to. He saw that the grin had chilled off the detective's face.
Perry said quietly, "I'll get them. Would you like to take the stuff for the Red Cross? Have they decided that Meryl is a security risk too? It'll save you two visits."
"Yes," she said loudly.
"That would be best."
He went inside. Meryl called down to him to find out who was at the door. He said he would be up in a moment. He went into the kitchen. Last night's supper plates were still in the sink, with the whisky glass.
He took the folders from the cupboard where Meryl kept her typing and flipped through them. There was the scrawled handwriting of minutes and deliberations by the group and the committee members, the chaotic mess that had been dumped on his Meryl. Her typed pages were clean, neat, because trouble was taken over them, because care was important to her. As he turned the pristine, ordered pages of her work, his resolve began to founder. Because of him, his past, his betrayal and his damned God-given obstinacy, she suffered. He turned the pages of her typing prize lists, outings, letters of thanks to guest speakers all so bloody mundane and ordinary, but they were the necessities of her life… Like an outcast, he felt the touch of plague.
There was a church, St. James's, outside the next village down the coast, which had been built on the site of a lepers' hospital. Dominic had told him that when the church was built, a hundred and fifty years back, the labourers digging the foundations had found many skeletons, not laid out as in Christian burial, but in rejected disarray. When the first sore appeared, suppurating, and the first bleeding, and a man was sent to the lepers' place, had his friends still known him? Or, had they turned their backs?
He gathered Meryl's pages back into the folders and took them to the front door, reaching past the detective to hand them to Peggy.
She dropped the folders into her bag.
So much he could have said, but Meryl wouldn't have wanted it said.
"There you are, Peggy, everything you asked for."
He knew that by not cursing, not swearing, he destroyed her. Her chin shook, and her tongue wriggled and spread the lipstick on her teeth.
"I was sent. It wasn't my idea.
"You're with us or you're against us," that's what they said. If I'm against them I'm shut out. Doesn't matter to you, Frank, you can move on. I've nowhere else to go. It's not my fault, I'm not to blame. If I don't bring those papers back, I'm out. I'm a victim, too. It's not personal, Frank."
She ran to her bicycle.
He let Davies shut the door on her, and climbed the stairs to the bedroom. There was never a good time for telling a bad story. She was wiping the sleep out of her eyes.
"I don't want to tell you this, but I have to. Peggy came to take away your typing for the Wildlife Group and the Red Cross. She's going to do it herself. We are not wanted… I could have thrown it all at her face and made her grovel down in the road to pick it up. I didn't. I know what I'm doing to you." He paused and drew a breath.
"They say he's still out there. He may be hurt but, if the injury isn't severe, he'll come again. They say the dogs found a scent, then lost it… Peggy's going to do the typing herself." She screamed.
The shrill staccato burst of her scream filled the room. She convulsed in the bed.
The scream died and her eyes stared up at him, wide and frightened.
Still in his pyjamas. Stephen was in the doorway, holding a toy lorry and gazing at him.
He told Stephen that his mother was unwell. He tried to hold him but the boy recoiled. He left the bedroom, where there were no lights, no pictures, where the glass of the mirror on the dressing-table was scarred with adhesive tape. He walked slowly down the dark stairs, as if descending into the lower reaches of the bunker.
He stopped at the dining-room door.
"How much worse does it have to get?"
"Does what "have to get", Mr. Perry?"
"How much worse does it have to get before I'm told the Al Haig story?"
"A bit worse, Mr. Perry."
He hung his head.
"And how much worse does it have to get before I say I'm at the end of the road, before I'm ready to run, quit?"
The detective, sitting at the table, the machine-gun beside his hand, looked up keenly.
"That door was open once, but not any more. I think it was on offer a bit ago, but it's not an option, Mr. Perry, not now."
Cathy Parker had used one of the sleeping hutches at the top of the building to catch four hours' rest. She came down to the floor. Fenton was there with Cox. She riffled through her papers for the address in Somerset. It would be a good drive; she'd enjoy the blessing of being clear of Thames House.
She might have time to call in for tea or a sherry with her parents afterwards. Fenton was talking, convincing.
"You worry too much, Barney, you'll go to your grave worrying. You heard what the American told young Geoff, this man is essentially a civilian. He is not military, doesn't have the mindset of manuals. He will think like a civilian and move like one. You don't put the military in against him, you put another civilian there. If it had been the military then you've lost control and that's some thing to worry about. God, the day I side with a politician is a day to remember."
She walked past the grinning Fenton, and Cox whose face was an enigmatic mask, and paused at the closed, locked door. She took a pen from her handbag and made a decisive line through the writing on the sheet of paper fastened there. She wrote boldly, DAY FOUR, and moved off down the dull-lit corridor.
The Iranian crude was offloaded. The tanker was buoyed up, monstrously high above the waves rippling against its hull, riding to its anchor. The radio message had still not been received.
Perplexed, the master called the terminal authority, reported a turbine problem and requested that a barge come alongside to take his crew ashore. He did not understand why the order to make the rendezvous had not reached him.
All day Peggy had anticipated the opportunity to call on the new people who had moved into the cottage on the opposite side of the road to the church. It was a dingy little place, only three bedrooms. Old Mrs. Wilson, now in a nursing home, had always said the damp in the walls of Rose Cottage had wrecked her hips. The ride home had settled her after the confrontation with Frank Perry, and she'd collected the pie, wrapped it in tinfoil and balanced it under the clip on the rack over the back wheel of her bicycle.
She had hoped to be invited inside, but she had had to hand over her welcoming gift on the step. A man had answered her sharp rap at the door, wispy-haired, slight, raggedly and dully dressed, and seemed to be astonished that a complete stranger brought an apple and blackberry pie to him.
He said his name was Blackmore. There were half-emptied packing cases in the hall behind him. He told her no more about himself other than his name. A woman came down the stairs, picked her way between the rolled carpets and the boxes, but the man did not introduce her and awkwardly held the pie he had been given.
Peggy chattered… Her name, where she lived, the societies and groups in the village… The woman had a sallow skin, a foreigner, perhaps from the Mediterranean… The bus timetable, the early closing day in the town, the best builder in the village, the walks, the milk delivery… Neither the man nor the woman responded… The lay-out of the village, the pub, the hall, the shop, the green -and they should not go near the green because of the disgraceful attitude of the people who lived there, endangered the whole community, protected by guns, showed no respect for the safety of the village… The man shrugged limply as if to indicate that he had work to be getting on with, and passed the pie to the woman behind him.
When she reached out her hands to take it, Peggy saw, very clearly that the woman had no nails on the tips of her fingers and thumbs. Peggy's nails were painted sharp red to match her lipstick, but where the woman's nails should have been there was only dried, wrinkled skin.
She came away feeling that they were uninteresting and unlikely to contribute to the life pulse of the village, and that her pie was wasted on them.
"Show me."
She had waited all through the night in the car, huddled in the passenger seat. As she had waited, her mind had been churned with the torment of her split identity. The quiet had been broken by the owls, and once a fox shadow had passed close. She had sat, hunched, cold, and waited. She remembered Yusuf's kindness, and the calmness of the teaching of Sheik Amir Muhammad, and the strength given her by the conversion to the Muslim faith, and she thought of the confidence that the name Farida Yasmin had brought to her. It was as if the old world, the existence of Gladys Eva Jones, demeaned and diminished her. Again and again, alone, she murmured the name that had given her strength and confidence. Without it, she was base and trivial. The old world was lustful and cheap, the new world proud and worthwhile.
"Show the wound to me."
Through the night she had listened for the crack of distant gunfire and she had heard only the owls.
As the hours had slipped away, so her anxiety for him had increased, nagging and worrying at her, until she could no longer bear the loneliness of the vigil. She had felt an increasing sense of disaster breaking. In the dawn light she had left the car and tried to trace the route he had taken her the day before. In Fen Covert, she'd avoided fallen dead branches, stepped lightly on the leaves and not scuffed them, kept wide from the path, as he'd shown her, and she had heard the baying of big dogs. Then she had walked more quickly and her anxiety for him had been at fever point. Across the marshes, beyond Old Covert, she had been able to see right to the tower of the village church. The early sun gleamed on the river that ran from the marshes, and by the river were the dogs.
Behind the dogs, controlling them, were the handlers. Behind the handlers, guarding them, were the marksmen with the guns on which the bulging telescopic sights were mounted. They hunted for him. They had not killed him, and the knowledge of his survival brought pricking tears of happiness to Farida Yasmin's cheeks.
"You don't have to be shy but you have to show me where you are hurt so I can help."
While the sun had risen and the clouds had gathered off the sea and chased it, the dogs had tracked back on the riverbank, then searched away from it, and she'd known they'd lost the scent. When the cloud had crossed the sun, and the greyness had dulled the marsh reeds, she had seen the handlers call off the dogs. But she had taken note of where the marksmen settled, where they watched from after the dogs had gone. She had kept in the trees. She had gone into the woodland of Fen Hill.
Because of what she had endured, the anxiety, her anger snapped.
"Fine, so you won't show me where, so you don't want help well, get up, keep walking, turn your back on it, go home. Don't think about me, what I've done."
If it had not been for the bird Farida Yasmin would not have found him. It had lifted off, flapped away, cried, then circled the bramble clump into which he'd crawled. He had seemed to be sleeping, which had amazed her because his face was furrowed in pain. She had wriggled on her stomach into the back of the thicket and been within arm's reach of him when he had woken, jerked up, slashed his face on the thorn barbs, gasped, grabbed at her, recognized her and then his eyes had closed, his body had arched as if the pain ran rivers in him. He had told her of his failure, of the car, the lost rifle. The words had been whispered and his head stayed down.
She whipped him with her hissed words, "Because of you what I've done for you I've police waiting for me. I'm on the line for you. Are you staying or are you going? Are you going to let me treat your wound or not?"
The rent was at the side of his fatigue trousers. The car must have caught his hip and upper thigh, ripping the seam of his trousers at the pocket. She had seen the long distance he had come, from where the dogs had lost his scent to Fen Hill. He could not have come that far with a broken femur or fractured pelvis.
Farida Yasmin thought the failure would have hurt him the worst.
Her hands trembled as she reached for his belt, unfastened it and dragged down the zip. It was hard to pull down. The trousers were sodden wet. She crouched low above him, under the roof of bramble and thorn, then pushed her arm under the small of his back and lurched his buttocks clear of the ground. He didn't fight her as she dragged the trousers down towards his knees.
She saw the mottled purple and yellow bruising.
She saw the hair at the pit of his stomach, the limit of the bruising, and the small contracted penis. He stared up at her.
Her fingers, so gently, touched the bruise and she felt him wince. She tried to soothe his pain. She told him of the dogs and where the marksmen were. She told him what she would do and how she would help him. Her fingers played on the bruising and caught the hairs and she saw him stiffen. It was where her fingers had never been before. His breathing came more slowly, as if the pain lightened. It was what the girls had talked about in the schoolyard, and in the coffee shop at the university, and in the canteen at work, and then she, the virgin, had thought their talk disgusting. Her fingers caressed the bruising as his fingers had stroked the neck of the bird.
The voices were soft, atmospheric, metallic, coming over the monitor.
"I don't know whether she can take it, not much more."
"I have to assure you, Mr. Perry, that your security is constantly under review."
"If I'd known, realized, what I said to you and that jerk who came with you, what it meant, Geoff what it would do to me, and, more important, what it would do to her…"
"There are now two more ARVs sorry, that's armed-response vehicles in the village, four in total, and eight highly trained men. That's in addition to Mr. Davies and Mr. Blake, and the men in the shed. You should see it, Mr. Perry, as a ring of steel dedicated to you and your family's safety."
In the hut, the speaker was turned down low. Paget was eating sandwiches, Rankin watched the screen and flicked between the image of the rear garden and the front door, while they listened to the two men talk.
"You've bloody changed your tune. Why?"
"There are questions I cannot answer."
"That's convenient."
"You have to believe, Mr. Perry, that everything that should be done is being done. Look, take last night, a professional and expert defence-' "Are you serious? It was fucking chaos."
After the han dover and the debrief, Joe Paget and Dave Rankin had been up into the small hours going through, in exact and minute detail, every moment of the alert. Had the camera given them a target? Why was the next garden not covered by the beams? Why had they not moved the cold frame from the side of the house? They had been close to, bloody disaster, Rankin had said, maybe a few seconds off it, and Paget hadn't disagreed.
"That's not the way Mr. Davies reported it."
"What the hell do you expect him to say? Grow up. Get real! She can't take the punishment, not much longer."
"We've made our commitment, Mr. Perry."
"When I told you and that jerk we were staying, it was because I believed we were among friends. That's the worst."
"Don't you read newspapers? It's how people behave when they're afraid each week it's in your newspapers. A family have a child recovered from meningitis and they're about to fly back from a sunshine holiday, but the other passengers won't travel with them for fear of infection. They're bumped off the flight, no charity. How many examples do you want? It doesn't matter where you are. An American Navy ship shoots down an Iranian passenger aircraft, and it's a mistake, but the Iranians don't accept apologies and bomb the car driven by the captain's wife on some smart street in San Diego. The detonator was incorrectly wired. She lives, but she's chucked out of her job, she's a pariah and might endanger others. I can reel them off. It's a herd mentality. The fear makes them vicious, dictates they turn on the victim. It's human nature, Mr. Perry…"
There was the squeak of the planks at the door of the hut. Rankin swung, Paget gulped on the last of his sandwich. Meryl Perry was in the doorway.
On the speaker was Markham's metallic voice. '… I suppose it's because so few people, these days, ever get really tested that they're so scared of the unpredictable."
Her tone was dead, flat, like her eyes and the pallor of her cheeks.
"I hope I'm not disturbing you, I came for Stephen's tractor."
Paget remembered her screams over the detective's radio, and Rankin had heard them as he had tried to get round the house and fouled up in the cold frame. Paget scrambled to kill the speaker. Rankin groped under his chair and found the boy's tractor.
"Do you always listen to us? Is everything we say, Frank and I, listened to?"