Sitting with the damp of the ground seeping into the backside of his trousers and with the warmth of his dogs under his jackknifed legs, in his vantage-point, Andy Chalmers listened to the night sounds.
There was no moon, no break in the rain cloud
He was behind thick cover: if there had been light he would not have been able to see the reed-beds and the water channels. It was possible that the man had an image intensifier, night-vision equipment; he would not give him the chance to identify his position. Chalmers did not need to see the land around him. Instead he listened.
There was the quiet, the rumble of the sea on the shore, the call of a distant fox. A policeman two hundred metres away stifled a cough and another one four hundred metres away stood to urinate. He was still, he was silent. When the fox called, his fingers felt the hackles rise on the necks of his dogs and he soothed them where they lay.
If the man was there, Chalmers knew he would hear him.
The wind that came from the west had turned, which pleased Chalmers. It scudded off the distant trees and fields, and came across the marshland riffling the leaves and branches behind which he sat. He could control sight and sound, but not the body odour of smell. Sight, sound and smell all carried great distances over open ground at night but, in the high mountains where he worked, he regarded smell as the worst of the stalker's enemies.
He had left the keys to his caravan, where he lived at the back of the senior keeper's cottage, with Mr. Gabriel Fenton; the few coins from his pocket had been abandoned on the train; he carried nothing of metal in his pockets. It was his routine to make the owner's guests discard everything that could clink, rattle, rub together, before he started the stalk. His dogs were as still and silent as himself. There would be no sound for his prey to hear and no noise to disturb the birds in the reed mass.
The wind was as he would have wanted it and would carry his smell away from the man, if he was there. An American, a guest of his owner, had once brought foul pungent creams with him on a stalk and believed they would block the man-smell that a stag might scent. Chalmers had made him strip and douse himself in a stream to wash the stuff off him; a French guest had rolled in sheep droppings, and that also was useless. The only possibility of hiding man-smell from a target stag was to keep the wind in the stalkers' faces. He had not yet smelt the man, if he was there.
He sat and wrapped himself in his patience, let the night hours drift, and he listened.
He could sit still, silent, but he did not doze, did not allow himself to edge towards sleep.
If he had dozed, slept, then he would not have heard.
In the cold, the rain and the quiet, Chalmers set himself games to play with his memory so that his senses were never less than alert.
Memories of stalks with guests of the owner, and clients who paid for a day what he earned in two weeks… The guest from Holland who had failed at the start of the week, in the disused quarry, to put six bullets out of six, with a telescopic sight, into a four-inch target at a hundred metres he had refused to take him out. Mr. Gabriel had backed him, and the guest had been sent to thrash a river for salmon. The guest front the City of London, with new clothing and a new rifle, good on the target-shooting in the quarry, who had been led for five hours towards an eight-year-old stag with a crown of antlers, been brought to within eighty yards for a side shot. He'd given the guest the loaded rifle, the Browning. 270 calibre, cocked it. He'd been on the telescope, on the beast, and the bullet had struck its lower belly. It had fled, wounded. He had told the guest he was a 'bloody butcher', and had been out half the night and all of the next morning with his dogs to find the beast and limit its misery.
Chalmers was encouraged by the quiet of the reed-banks: there should have been movement and spats over nesting territory and the cries of the birds.
The client from Germany who had demanded to shoot the stag with the greatest crown spread of antlers but that beast was only six years old and in the prime of its breeding life. The client had hissed the sum he was paying and what he needed as a trophy. Chalmers had told him that if he 'showed no respect for the beasts' he could go back down to the glen with his rifle unused. The man had crumpled then, whined about the money, and had been led forward to shoot an old beast at the end of its life. They'd passed within thirty yards of the younger stag as they'd moved towards the target beast, and at the end the client had thanked him for the best stalk of his shooting days. Chalmers had walked away from him because he acknowledged neither gratitude nor praise.
He thought the quiet was because the man was good, was among the birds in the reeds and on the water, and was still.
The guest, panting and unfit, had been in dead ground and had pulled a packet of cigarettes from his pocket. Chalmers had snatched the cigarette from the guest's mouth. He'd made the stalk last ten hours, two of them crawling against the rush of a stream-filled gully. Finally, when the beast was seventy yards from them, he'd told the guest, 'you're not fit to shoot, you're a bloody ruin," and hadn't given him the rifle.
The memories kept the cutting edge to his senses. The birds were too quiet. He knew that the man was good and that the man was there, in the marsh.
He waited, patient. He felt a respect, brother to brother, for the man out there, in the water, the same respect that he felt for the big beasts he stalked and tracked.
"We've lasted through Monday."
He'd had to feed the boy and himself. He'd heated the last of the precooked meat pies in the fridge, and taken the remaining tub of ice-cream from the freezer. He'd found a science programme on the television for Stephen, and they'd eaten off their laps. He'd taken the trays back into the kitchen, and gone upstairs. She was on the bed, in darkness. He sat beside her.
"They say he has a week. He can't endure more than a week. It's closing round him. We're on the fifth day. We have to hang on in there…"
"Where is he?" Fenton asked.
"I don't know." Markham's voice, distorted by the scrambler, echoed back at him.
"I only know that he's sitting out there in the bloody bog."
"Have you called him, has he sit-repped?"
"I wouldn't dare to call the ungracious little beggar, I'm only the fetcher and carrier I reckon he'd garrotte me if I disturbed him."
"Doesn't he know the importance of continuous contact?"
"He knows it if you told him it."
"Geoff, does he realize how much is riding on his back?"
"That, too, I expect you told him. I'll call you when he deigns to make contact.
"Bye, Mr. Fenton."
Fenton shivered. He was alone, but for the company of a third-year probationer who watched the telephones. It was always late at night, when an operation was running towards climax, that he shivered, not from cold but from nerves. In the day, surrounded by acolytes, the confidence boomed in him. But Parker had gone, the American with her, and the elder of the probationers, the old warhorse from B section. Cox had left early to prepare for a dinner party. It would be the end of him if the boy, Chalmers, failed. He would be a casualty, washed up, sneered at, shown the early-retirement door.
Half-way across the world was another man who would be sweating on the fear of failure. He did not know what an office high in the Ministry of Information and Security would be like, but he seemed to sense that man shivering in the same sweat as dribbled on his own back. He had talked of contftil but late at night, he reflected, there was not a vestige of control for either of them. It was always like that, never different, when the little people took charge and the power of the high and mighty was stripped from their hands… He would sleep at Thames House that night, and the next, sleep there until it was over… Because he had volunteered to take responsibility, the career of Harry Fenton lay in the grubby hands of Andy Chalmers.
"Home is where we are. Home isn't about people, isn't about things. Home is where you are, and Stephen and me. There isn't anything for us here. You said home was about friends but there aren't any, they've gone. Anywhere we are together is home. I can't take it, not any more."
She lay with her back to him. Her voice was low-pitched and flat calm. Perry thought she was beyond weeping.
It was coming to the end of a complex day for the intelligence officer. The demand for information, clarification of a situation, from Tehran led to his walking along the corridor with the flowers on his arm and the grapes in his hand, one among many visitors.
The brigadier in Tebran had insisted. The intelligence officer, nervous, wary, had left his embassy office in the middle of the day. He had not seen a tail but always assumed one followed him. He had driven to the home in west London's suburbs of a colleague from Visa Section, parked outside the front of the house, been greeted at the door and invited inside. Without stopping, he had gone out of a back door, crossed the rear garden to the gate, tracked along an alley between garages and taken his colleague's car. He had driven to the offices and yard of the car-hire company at the extreme of south London, and asked about a BMW rented out to Yusuf Khan. A shadow of hesitation crossed the young woman's face, and he had eased his wallet from his pocket. A hundred pounds, palmed across the desk, in twenty-pound notes had lightened the shadow. He was shown, hurriedly, a photograph from an insurance file of the wrecked vehicle. He was told of the hospital where the injured man was treated… Did she know about a passenger? The police had not spoken of one… It was already early evening by the time he reached the hospital. After checking for the location of Delivery/ Post-natal, he headed for the casualty ward.
He was another visitor, one of many who anxiously came to see the sick, the injured and the maimed. He had the flowers and the grapes, as if they guaranteed him admittance.
He walked slowly down the centre of the ward, through the aisle between the beds, scanning the faces of the patients.
He seemed lost and confused but none of the harassed nursing staff came forward to help him.
A corridor was ahead of him, signs for the fire escape, and to the side a trolley carrying resuscitation equipment. He took a risk because Tehran required it of him. He edged forward with the fool's smile on his face.
Only when he was beside the trolley did he see the policeman with the machine-gun on his lap.
"I am looking for my sister and her baby."
There was a door with a glass window in it. Behind it a second policeman was reading a magazine that half hid the bulk of his firearm. He saw the bed, and the bandaged head of Yusuf Khan.
"Not here, no babies here thank God."
"This not the place for babies?"
He gazed at the bandaged head, the linking tubes, the opened eyes. The head shook, the tubes wavered, the eyes blinked with recognition.
"Absolutely, pal, this is not the place for babies."
He saw the tears gathering in the eyes, and he thought he saw a trace of guilt flicker there.
"I must ask again."
He walked away. He had seen what he needed to see. He laid the flowers and the grapes on the ward sister's desk. When he left his colleague's house in west London, he sped back to central London and his office at the embassy, with the urgent report to be sent by secure coded communication to Tehran locked in his mind.
"Is that what you want, a van coming to the front door? All those bastards out in the road, watching. You want to give them that satisfaction? Your things, everything that's personal to you your furniture, your clothes, your pictures, your life paraded for them. They'll spit at the car as it takes us away. Is that what you want?"
His hand was on her shoulder and his fingers massaged Meryl's bones and muscles. She never looked at hiWi and she didn't speak.
The brigadier was a careful man. If his back was to be protected, it was necessary for him always to be careful. He was that rarity in the service of the Ministry of Information and Security, an intelligence officer who had made the transition from the previous regime. He had crossed sides. The majority with whom he had worked as a captain in the SAVAK were long dead, hanged, shot, butchered, for their service to the Shah. But three days before the mob the street scum from south Tebran had entered and sacked the SAVAK offices on Hafez Avenue, he had taken a suitcase of files from his workplace and made contact with his enemy. The files were his credentials. With them were his memories of names, locations and faces. In the confused days that followed he was, to the new men of Iran, a small, treasured mine of knowledge. The names of former colleagues, the locations of safe-houses and the faces of informers, all had tripped off his tongue as he bought himself survival.
The new regime, of course, was innocent in the matters of security and counter-revolution. The change coat prospered as his colleagues died. When the captured Americans from the embassy protested that they were not employees of the Agency, the change-coat could identify them. When the Mujahiddin rose in revolt against the Imam, he could put faces to names. He had been promoted to major and then colonel in the Vezarat-e-Ettelaat Va Ammyat-e Kishvar, and now held the rank, in the VEVAK, of brigadier, but he was too intelligent, too cautious a man to believe that his position would ever be secure and above suspicion. A few detested him, a few more despised him, the majority, those who knew his past, were wary of him.
The protective screens with which he surrounded himself were the zealot's commitment to the new regime, coupled with a total, ruthless efficiency. No word of criticism for the mullahs in government and influence ever crossed his lips, no mistake in his planning of operations was ever admitted. If the mildest words of criticism were ever spoken he would be denounced and pitched from his office. There were many, and he knew it, who would clamour to fire the bullet or tighten the noose around his neck.
Vahid Hossein had been like a son to him… The communication from London was on his desk. The hot, fume-filled night was around his high office. Tears and guilt meant betrayal, were evidence that a coward, Yusuf Khan, had talked. It was his hope, alone in the cigarette-smoke-filled office, that the man who had been like a son to him would be shot dead.
It would be worse if the great tanker, which was the pride of the fleet, were intercepted as it slowed in the shipping lanes to launch the inflatable, was boarded and impounded. He weighed the possibilities open to him, then wrote an instruction for the VEVAK officer who worked as an official at the building of the National Iranian Tanker Corporation. The ship was to sail in the morning. There was to be no attempt at a pick-up.
For his own survival, to avoid an inevitable fate, he cut the link to Vahid Hossein. He did not hesitate.
"I want to go shopping, I want Stephen to go to school, I want you to go to work, I want us go walking I don't want, ever again, Frank, to see a gun. I want to be happy again. There's nothing left for us here."
Downstairs the television droned on, under Davies's tuneless whistling to himself. There was a muted cackle of laughter from the hut at the back, and the revving of the engine of the car at the front to keep the heater going. Everything they listened to, all around them, was sourced by the guns.
"Please, I'm begging it of you, please…" Perry's voice quavered to his wife's silence.
"In a way it's like Khe Sanh, not that I was there."
They were so nervous, as if frightened of each other. Littelbaum would not undress her. Cathy had done it herself, stripping while he had turned his back to her to shed the old tweed suit, the crumpled shirt and the underclothes that weren't quite clean. He had gentle hands and they touched her breasts with a teenager's awe, as he lay on her, was inside her.
"Khe Sanh was staking out a goat. We put down a base, the middle of nowhere, and we invited them to come and get us. We thought the North Vietnamese Army would destroy itself when it came on to our wire."
Cathy thought it was his nerves that m'~ade him spatter out the bullshit, and she reckoned he hadn't a woman in Riyadh, was as lonely as herself. It was a long time since she had had sex. This was ship-deck romance, without commitment, and in less than forty-eight hours he would be on the flight back to where he had come from. We reckoned we had it right at Khe Sanh, had learned the French lessons from Dien Bien Phu. The French hadn't the resources we had, but they believed in the same principle, which was putting out a bait with the opportunity to smack the bad bastard when he comes sniffing…"
She was not into public-service sex. She was not available to the Germans, the Israelis and the Italians, who came to liaise for a few days at Thames House. She was not a convenient bicycle for men far from home. The American was as lonely and as diffident as herself, and hid it behind the gruff all-knowing professionalism, as she did. She had known they would end up there, on her bed, when she had suggested brusquely that she'd cook him supper. It was what she'd thought she needed after the long drive down from Derby, with the girl preying on her mind. In her car, outside the door as she'd fished in her bag for the keys, inside when she'd brought him the big whisky, in her bedroom where she'd led him by the hand, he'd looked like a scared cat in a corner. He was above her, going so slowly as if terrified of failing her, and talking.
You've got to have nerve when you get into this game, and you have to be prepared to take casualties. The young fellow -Markham he doesn't have the nerve, doesn't accept that foot-soldiers get hurt. You've got to go for broke we weren't prepared to at Khe Sanh, nor the French at Dien Bien Phu. We lost, they lost, but the principle was right."
She didn't give a tinker's toss for Khe Sanh and Dien Bien Phu. It was a relief to have the smell of a man with her, his weight on her, and the size of a man in her. She moved as slowly as he did and she dreaded the end of it. She didn't care that he talked.
"You know, Cathy, I think the worm has turned."
She squeezed him. She raked his back with her short nails that she never bothered to paint, as other women did. She laughed out loud.
"Are we off goats?"
"You are a lovely, fine woman, and I regret, I apologize, I'm not doing much good for you. We are on to worms."
"Tell me about worms."
She heaved up against him, against his bones and the wide flab of his stomach. Too long since she had known it, the pleasure seeping through her, and she thrust again, and she heard her own moan, and she was not lasting, and he was quickening and it was to her, lonely each day and each night, a little piece of pleasure that had no future.
"Worms can turn. The defence is in place. The guns are covering the goat. The predator has to come. It is not acceptable to the predator that he goes back to his lair without a kill. He can't bug out, Cathy, can't go back to Tehran with an empty gut and the odds against him are stacked higher, and the marksmen are waiting for him. It's turned, that's the feeling in my water… turned… advantage lost… what I say… Christ, Cathy…"
He gasped and cried out. She held him. She knew that she would never hear from him, nor of him, again. The flight would go. He looked down at her with devotion. She pushed him off.
"I'm hungry. Come on, let's eat."
She went naked, as if the shyness was shed, to the kitchen, and heaved open the fridge. It would be instant bloody curry out of the microwave. She heard him call, tired, with a quaver in his voice, from the bedroom.
"The worm, might have, might just have, turned…"
"Please, I'm saying it again and again. Don't go. I can't walk away. Once was one time too many. I'm nothing if you've gone. Do you think I haven't thought about it, going? Packing and running? I have to stand and face it, for what I did. It's nearly over, nearly finished… Please stay, please."
Perry held her against him. He wondered if the detective or the men in the hut were listening. He clung, in the darkness, to Meryl.
The cups and saucers for the coffee, the biscuit plates and the glasses for the fruit juice had been stacked on trays and carried away into the kitchenette area. The chairs scraped the wooden floor as the audience settled. Gratifyingly, the hail was almost filled, but the Wildlife Group always attracted the village's best response.
Peggy was busy rounding up the last of the lost crockery. Emma Carstairs was fussing with the blinds, el'~ecking they would keep out the nearest glow from the street-lamp. Barry fiddled with the beam from the slide projector and called for Jerry Wroughton to move the screen fractionally. Mary was helping to manoeuvre Mrs.
Wilson's wheelchair into a better position to see the screen. Mrs. Fairbrother sat aloof in the front row, Mr. Hackett behind her, and Dominic and his partner talked softly. There were more than fifty present, a good turnout on a bad night; the numbers of village regulars were augmented by a few who had driven from Dunwich, a carload from Blythburgh, and more from Southwold.
Paul clapped his hands for attention and the chatter died.
"First, well done for coming on a filthy night. Second, apologies that we won't be having minutes from the committee's last meeting and can't hand out the usual list of summer speakers. I reckon most of you know the problem we've had with getting things typed up -any volunteers?" No hands were raised, but there had been a growl of understanding at the mention of the problem.
"Third, my pleasure in welcoming Dr. Julian Marks from the RSPB who is going to talk to us on the subject of migration. Dr. Marks…"
To generous applause, a long-haired man, with a gangling body, his face tanned by weather, stepped forward.
Dr. Marks said loudly, "I'm taking it I can be heard. Everyone hear me at the back yes? Excellent. I want to begin with a thank-you, two, actually. Thank you for inviting me, but more important, an especial thank-you from the RSPB for your last donation, which was an extraordinary amount from a village of this size and reflects a very caring and decent community. Fund-raising on that scale marks this village as a place of warmth, a place of overwhelming generosity. Now, migration… The lights faded.
The beam of the projector caught the screen.
Few in the hall's audience saw Simon and Luisa Blackmore slide soundlessly into empty seats in the back row; none present would have known of her fear of crowded, bright-lit rooms.
"You know, living as you do alongside those wonderful empty marshlands, the most beautiful of the migratory birds, the marsh harrier…"
"You're protected, and Stephen, and me."
"He was at the door, he was only trying to break down the fucking door. With a gun to kill us, in our home-' "It can't happen again, I promise it's what they've told me. You can't move for men here, everywhere, protecting us.
Meryl twisted on the bed to face him. Her arms were around his neck. She had his promise and clung to it.
Gussie, in the summer months, dug gardens in the village when he had finished at the piggery, then went home for his tea, then to the pub. In the darker winter months, when he couldn't use the evenings to turn over the vegetable patches at the Carstairs' and the Wroughtons', and at Perry's house, he went straight home from the pig farm for his tea, then to the pub. After the pub, his mother, his younger brothers and sisters already gone to bed, he sat in the chair, master of the house, and read the magazines he bought in Norwich, stories about combat and survival, and he dreamed. He sent away for mail-order books and reckoned himself expert in counter-terrorism, low-intensity warfare, and the world of the military; he should have been listened to in the pub. His father was gone, living the last four years with some tart in Ipswich, and he was the breadwinner for the family. He had his tea when he wanted it. Home revolved around him, and his earning power. He believed, as the wage-earner, that he was the equal of any man he met in the pub. But he never found, quite, the popularity he thought he deserved. His life, with the other workers in the pig-fields, with the people in the cul-de-sac where he lived, or in the pub where he propped up the bar each evening, was a constant search for that elusive popularity. Stories never heard through to the end, jokes never quite laughed at, his opinion rarely asked… He was big, well muscled, could throw around the straw bales on which the pigs slept with ease, and because of his size he had never known fear.
He had not told her that the option was withdrawn, no longer existed. Perry said it again in her ear as he held her.
"It cannot happen again."
"Because if anything else happened…"
"It won't, it can't."
"Anything… Gussie was the loudest. Gussie was the one drinking fastest, talking the biggest talk.
More pints of strong beer were passed across the bar by
Martindale. Two hours they'd been going, and the talk was in the drink. His wife, the timid Dorothy Martindale, had called him back from the bar, into the doorway. Why did he allow the swearing, cursing, drink-talk? Because without these people they'd be at the wall, tramping to the bankruptcy hearing, that was why. She'd gone back upstairs to the flat over the bar.
The till rang again. They were the only customers he'd have in that night: everyone else was in the hall.
Vince said, "What I'm reckoning, if the bastard's still here when summer comes, the season starts, we can kiss goodbye to visitors."
Gussie capped him.
"No bloody visitors. No money. Need the visitors."
Donna said, "Something's got to be done, some bugger's got to have the balls to do something."
It was all the custom he had, and all he was likely to have if the visitors stayed away because armed police were combing the village. Who'd let kids run round? Who'd sit on the green with a picnic or go walking on the beach? Most important, who'd sit on the bench outside the pub with a warm pint and crisps for the kids? Who'd be there if the village, when the season came, was a gun camp? He'd be finished if there were no visitors, and the others with him.
Gussie shouted, "They got to know they're not wanted, got to know it straight and they're going to."
Vince wanted a plate of chips.
Martindale left the bar and went upstairs to ask his wife to make a plate of chips. He could charge a pound for a plate of chips. He apologized to her, but they needed each pound going into the till. He'd told her, when they'd started in the pub, that it would be a money trail, and now he was grateful for the money earned by a plate of chips. He went back down to the bar and Gussie wasn't there. He thought Gussie had gone to piss, and his glass, half full, was on the bar counter. He seemed not to hear the complaining whine across the bar. The bank's letter was in his mind, and the letter from the brewery that stated he was under-performing.
Martindale saw Gussie through the front window, crossing the car-park and weaving. He was carrying a light plank, one of those the builders had left when he'd said he couldn't afford for them to complete the work on the outside lavatories. Martindale watched him lurching away into the darkness, beyond the reach of the lights, the plank on his shoulder.
He held her. Meryl had his promise, and the tension of her muscles ebbed. She lay soft against him. He heard the brief triple ring of the bell, then Blake's voice and Davies's wishing him a good night. Davies said, Frank heard it, that the 'bloody place was quiet as a grave'. He heard Blake settle in the dining room, and check the machine-gun they shared. If he hadn't given his promise, she would have taken down the suitcase from the top of the wardrobe, and left.
He had been stifled in the house. Ahead of him was a meal alone in a pub, then the suffocation of the room in the bed-and-breakfast.
Bill Davies walked past his car. He had to think, had to be alone. There was no escape from the need to call home. There were enough of them gossiping in his section for him to know the talk of a marriage going down. Some said that, actually, they felt the better for it when it was over. A few said, in a bar with drink, that when it was over the loneliest time in their lives began. He had to steel himself to talk with Lily in the hope that she would let him chat to Donald and Brian. It would probably be like the last time, silences and refusal, then the challenge as to when he was coming home, to which he had no answer, then the purr of the cut call. He had to think, had to walk, had to know what he would say.
The rain lashed down.
The road in front of him, towards the hall's lights and the pub's bright windows, was empty.
There was a shadow of movement at the side of the road, beyond the throw of the lights from the hail and he thought it would be one of the old idiots who took their dogs out, sunshine or rain, and was sheltering against a tree or a hedge.
He wrapped his heavy coat closer round him. His shoes and the trousers at his ankles were already soaked.
He would say, "I love you. I love my boy's, our boys. I want to be with you. I want to share my life with you… I am a policeman, I carry a Glock pistol, I protect people who are under threat… I cannot change. I can't go back to chasing thieves, seeing kids across roads. I have to live with it, you have to live with it. Living with it, Lily, is better for both of us than splitting. Splitting is death. Death for me, death for you, death for Donald and Brian. Anything is better than us meeting on the doorstep on Saturday mornings, if I'm not working, and you looking at me like I'm dirt, and letting the kids out with me for four hours, a football match and a McDonald's. Give it another chance…"
The words jangled in his mind, and he was so tired. He had been sitting for twelve hours in the dining room of the house with his flask of coffee and his sandwiches, with his Glock and his machine-gun, with his newspaper, and listening to them. He was trying to put Lily forefront in his mind, and his boys and they were second best to Meryl Perry. Lily wouldn't understand about Meryl Perry, wouldn't… The shot blasted out.
He froze. There was no pain, no numbness and he was standing. The shot had missed.
He spun but they didn't do pitch-darkness practice at Lippitts Hill. They did daytime firing or were under the arc-lights in the shooting gallery.
He was reaching under the heavy coat, under his jacket, for the Glock. He had it out of the holster. He was turning, aiming into the blackness in front of him.
He was screaming for control, for dominance.
"Armed police! Throw your weapon down! Show yourself!"
But he was in the light, and the rain was in his eyes, and couldn't see a target. If there had been anything to aim at he would have fired, not shouted. Finger on the trigger guard, like they taught -where was the bastard?
"Get forward, to me, crawl, or I shoot I fucking shoot. Weapon first, then you! Move."
Bill Davies had never had his gun out before, never drawn it for real. Now he saw the movement… His finger slipped from the guard to the trigger. Not simunition in Hogan's Alley, not on the range. His finger locked on the trigger, and he began to squeeze. He blinked, tried to focus on the aim into the darkness.
A plank fell towards him, bounced twice, and came to rest at his feet. There was a whimpering in front of him, and an identifiable movement. He had the aim on it, and his finger was tightening.
"Come out! Come out or I shoot!" Davies bellowed at the blackness.
The shadow came, with it a whining cry. The young man crawled on his knees and elbows towards the light.
Davies knew it was over. He had been so shit scared and it made him angry. He saw the slack mouth of the young man and the terror in his eyes. He had seen him in the pub. They used planks in Ireland kids and women used to stand in darkness, put their weight on a plank end, wait for a patrol to pass then heave up the other end of it to let it smash down on tarmac or paving, its sound the replica of a bullet firing. They did it to wind up the soldiers. It was sport. He had been at the edge of firing… It was unnecessary but he caught the collar of the young man and dragged him across the road, out into the street-light. He threw him flat on his stomach, drove the barrel of the Glock into his neck, put a knee into the small of his back and, one-handed, frisked him. He could smell old beer and new piss. He had been at the edge of killing a drunk who'd played a game. He stood high over him and used his foot to turn him over. He saw the big stain where the young man had wet himself and the scratches on his face from being dragged over the road surface. The man made little noises of terror, and Davies realized he still covered him with the gun.
He shouldn't have, but he kicked the young man hard in the wall of the stomach.
"Go on, get back to your mammy. Tell your mammy why you pissed your trousers. Ever try it again, you're dead."
The young man scrambled to his knees, then to his feet, then lurched away sobbing. Davies watched him as he ran towards the hall and the pub's lit windows.
He walked back to his car outside the house and slumped in the seat. He didn't know why he hadn't made the final squeeze on the trigger that would have killed the kid, and his whole body shook. He knew he would make no phone call that night.
'… wildlife is a jewel we are fortunate to see. The brightest of the jewels, making the incredible journey to a~d from west Africa each year, coming back to us, to our place, each spring, is the marsh harrier. We are a privileged people. Thank you."
The applause burst around Dr. Julian Marks. The lights came on.
They had all heard the shouting in the road, had all turned in the half-light under the projector's beam, looked at the door and seen Paul slip busily out. Barry Carstairs, attention elsewhere, led the applause. He was about to offer their thanks to the speaker when the swing doors burst back open.
The silence fell, Paul shouted, "It's Gussie, the police nearly shot him. It was the detective at the Perrys' he had his gun on him, and then he kicked him to shit. I thought he was going to shoot him. Christ, we all know Gussie, he's hardly Brain of Britain, but he was damn near killed!"
There was a stampede to the door. The crowd surged past Simon and Luisa Blackmore and out into the night. Many were in time to see Gussie staggering across the brightly lit forecourt of the pub.
Jerry Wroughton said, the rain running on his face, "This nonsense has gone far enough."
Forgetting her reservations of the previous morning, Emma Carstairs said, "It's time somebody did something."
Martindale saw him first and dropped the glass he was drying. Vince turned on his stool.
Gussie stood in the doorway, gasping for breath. His hair was plastered down on his forehead and his eyes showed stark terror, his face laced with bloody scratches. They could all see the dark patch at the crotch of his jeans, and the rips at the knees. None of them laughed.
Gussie stammered, "He was going to kill me the man at the Perrys', the cop, he had his gun on me. I was only joking him, but he was going to shoot me. I thought I was dead, and he kicked me. I wasn't doing anything, it was a bloody joke."
Vince stood his full height. The drink gave him the stature and the courage.
"Don't know about you lot but I don't think those bastards have got the message. Myself, I'm going to see they get it. It's time the shits were gone…"
When the first rock hit the window, Meryl woke. Half conscious, she heard the cheer. She groped for Frank in the darkness beside her, but he wasn't there.
There was another crack of breaking glass and another cheer. She pushed herself off the bed, and heard Frank's voice, frantic, calling for Stephen, and the rush of feet through the kitchen below her, and into the hall. He'd promised her, she'd had Frank's promise.
She went to the top of the stairs. The bell rang, three bleats. Blake had a vest on, the gun drawn. Paget was in front of him. Paget did the door and Blake covered him. As it was opened, she heard the shouting, the obscenities, heard her name and Frank's, clearly. Davies squeezed through the half-opened door, and Paget slammed it behind him. More rocks, maybe half-bricks, and perhaps an empty metal dustbin, clattered against the door.
She was at the top of the stairs and they had not seen her.
Blake yelled, "What the fuck is going on here?"
Davies was leaning against the hall wall and the water dribbled from his coat on to the paper.
"It's about a bloody moron."
"What's half the flicking village got to do with a bloody moron?"
"I was walking. The bloody moron did me with a plank I thought it was a shot. I bloody near fired. Christ, I had him in my sights. He was just drunk. I roughed him. If it's not happened to you then you wouldn't know what it's like. Bloody hell."
Bill Davies looked up the stairs and saw her. It was as if the panic cleared off his face, and the tiredness; his expression was a mask. He said calmly, as if she'd heard nothing, "Everything's under control, Mrs. Perry. There's been an incident, but it'll be over in a moment. Please stay upstairs, Mrs. Perry."
"Where's Stephen?"
"Stephen's with Juliet Seven sorry, with Mr. Perry. Stephen's fine… Please, stay upstairs."
They didn't want to know about her. As far as they were concerned, she was just a woman. She heard the murmur of the voices of Davies, Blake and Paget, and she caught the name Juliet Seven, and the words 'safe area', and mention of 'sector two' and 'sector four'; her man, her home and her garden. There was a window at the front of the landing at the top of the stairs, beside the airing-cupboard door. She peeped past the curtain. A little tableau was laid out below her. For a moment there was quiet, as if they regrouped, reconsidered, as if the fainter hearts ruled. They were all there. On the green, the village~ ids were at the front and behind them were Vince and Gussie and Paul, and others she recognized who worked on the farms or had no work or took the small fishing-boats with visitors and sea-anglerS. Further back, half hugging the shadows, were Barry and Emma Carstairs, Jerry and Mary Wroughton, and Mrs. Fairbrother. Deeper into the shadows, but she could still see them, were Dominic and his partner, and the vicar. She knew them all.
Paul came from the blackness, holding out the bottom edge of his coat to make a basket. When he loosed it, stones fell to the road.
The kids scrambled for the stones, snatched them up and hurled them against the walls of the house, and the windows and the door, and the cars parked at the front.
She saw hatred.
She had seen such mobs on television flickering, contorted faces from Africa and Asia, and from the corners of eastern Europe, but theirs was an anonymous madness. These faces she knew, and the faces of those who stood back in the shadows and watched.
There was a flash of light in the far blackness, then the light lit the torso of a youth. She recognized him. He was from the council houses and helped carry ladders for Vince. He held a milk bottle and the cloth stuffed in the bottle's neck was lit. The crowd roared approval. There must have been fifty of them, maybe more. The youth ran forward, past Mrs. Fairbrother and Mr. Hackett, past Dominic, past Emma and Mary, Barry and Jerry, past Paul and Vince, Gussie and Donna, and his arm arched to throw the bottle.
She heard the pandemonium in the hall below, then the bolt scraping open and the key turning.
Through the window, she saw Paget go out, crouch, fumble at his belt, then throw his missile. The youth dropped the bottle and turned. It splintered and the conflagration of fire burst where he had been. The gas canister detonated. The wind took the grey-white cloud past the light of the burning petrol and into the black darkness. She heard the choking, the coughing and the screamed protests.
They had gone, all of them, to the cover of darkness.
This was not Ireland, or Nairobi, wasn't Guatemala City this was her home.
The fire guttered, the gas dispersed, shadowy figures moved in the darkness. The two mobile cars were now drawn up to make a barrier in front of the house.
The argument raged in the hall below her, Frank and Bill Davies in spitting dispute. She was not supposed to hear. Then… Frank propelled Stephen, across the hall and up the stairs, before shrugging into a vest.
Davies wrenched open the door. She held Stephen and felt the blast of the cold air. She crouched.
Frank was outside with Davies and Paget. She could not see them. She was down on the floor and clinging to Stephen, holding his head against her and pressing her palms over his ears. He would be on the step, shielded by the bodies of Davies and Paget, protected by their guns and their gas against his friends, her friends.
He had to shout. To be heard across their low front fence and the grass, heard into the deep shadow, Frank had to shout.
"It's all right, you fuckers, you can go home. You can go home and be satisfied that you've won as much as you're going to win. I promised Meryl… Do you all remember Meryl? You should remember Meryl she did enough for you lot. I promised her that nothing more would happen. I was wrong. I had forgotten you, all of you. I can't see you now, any of you, in the dark, but, please, stay and listen. Don't creep away on your stomachs. Don't pretend it didn't happen. You will remember tonight, what you did, for the rest of your lives. If you're still there, if you're listening, then you should know that you have won a little victory. You have broken my promise to Meryl. She'll be going in the morning, and taking Stephen with her. She'll be trying to find somewhere to stay. She'll have to ring round, people she hardly knows, or check into a hotel she's never been to. Everyone she reckoned was her friend is here, soit won't be easy for her to find somewhere. Not me, though, not me… The tears streamed on her cheeks and fell on the hair of her child's head.
"You're stuck with me. Before tonight, I might just have gone with her, but not now. Your victory is that you've driven out a wonderful, caring woman, and her child. You don't win with me. I'm a proper bastard, your worst fucking nightmare, an obstinate sod. What I did, why there's the threat, I provided the information that killed a busful of men. I was prepared~ to betray a busful of men so, what happens to you is low down on any relevance scale to me. I don't care what happens to you, and I'm staying. Got that? Can you hear me? When you next go to church, put money in charity boxes, when you next volunteer for good works and good causes, think of what you did tonight to Meryl. But, the cruelty doesn't work with me…"
She could not hold back the tears.
"You see, you don't frighten me. I'm not frightened of yobs with stones. Where I was, for what I did, if I'd been caught there, I'd have been hanged until dead. That's not a trap under the gallows, and quick, but a rope from an industrial crane, and it's being hoisted up, and it's kicking and strangling and slow. There's not a few drunks watching, not a few cowards, there's twenty thousand people. You understand? Being hanged from a crane frightens me, not you… She lay on the floor beside the door of the airing-cupboard, clutched her boy and squeezed her hands over his ears.
"I bought some time. I'm told I delayed a programme for the development of Weapons of Mass Destruction. The warheads would have carried chemicals or microbiological agents, might have been nerve gases and might have been something like anthrax. You, of course, wouldn't have known the people targeted by those warheads. They would have been Saudis or Kuwaitis or the Gulf people. They might have been Israeli Jews. When you're so selfish, when you live complacently in an island of your own making, you wouldn't think of the millions of other souls who exist around you. Are you happy?"
She heard the hoarseness of his voice.
"There is a man who has been sent to kill me. He is somewhere, out there, in the darkness. I know very little of him but I know about his society, his culture. He is a Muslim, a child of the Islamic faith… He would not understand you. From his faith and his culture, he would believe that my community has closed ranks around me, not isolated me. I can find more love for him, the man sent to kill me, than for you, my so-called friends."
She heard his last shout into the night.
"Are you there? Are you listening?"
The door slammed behind him. The key was turned, the bolt rammed home.