"You are certain?"
"It's what I saw."
In the rear car was the heap of suitcases on the back seat, and two men at the front. In the lead car were a child looking out through the window, a woman staring straight ahead, a man with his head turned away, and more men in the front she did not recognize; she had not seen the child before but the woman had been there, weeks earlier, when she had come to photograph the house.
Farida Yasmin had been walking up the road through the village when the two cars had come back past her, the same two men in the front of each but no passengers and no suitcases on the back seat of the second car.
She had walked on in the darkness. There was a cottage with an overgrown garden and a sold sign over a for-sale board, short of the church, on the other side of the road. The curtains were loosely drawn on the windows facing the road, but at the back of the house they were not pulled across and spilled light on to the garden. The grass at the back, ringed by untended flower-beds, was long and leaf-strewn. The shirt the child wore was bright red and there was a crest on the chest of rampant leopards and the logo sign of a vehicle-insurance company, the same shirt she had seen him wearing in the car. The child kicked the football round the grass. He played on his own, the hero and the star.
As soon as she'd met him at the field gate, she'd told him what she'd seen, and now she repeated it. In the car, as she'd blistered him with the information, he had seemed no more willing to believe her than he did now.
"The cars came back without him and his wife and the child. It was done fast, to deceive you, in the darkness. They've moved him to make it easier for themselves. Can't you see it? They've made a trap and now they don't have the responsibility of protecting him when it's sprung. They want you at the house on the green they want to kill you there when they don't have the responsibility for him."
"You are sure?" The doubt creased his voice.
She told him that she was sure. She had seen the boy, the child, with the football on the lawn lit by the back windows of the cottage. The trap was the house on the green where the guns waited for him. They were beside the car, in black darkness, among the scrub of the common ground beyond the village. It hurt her that she could not convince him.
"Don't you trust me? You should. Without me, on their terms, you would walk into a trap. Trust me. We are a partnership, that's equal parts don't you see that?"
She told him that he was nothing without her, and he seemed to reel away from her. She would go back, walk through the village a last time come back and tell him what she had seen. He squatted down, holding the launcher in his hands, as if it were a child's valued toy or a believer's relic. She told him how long she would be. He had already gobbled down the sandwiches she had brought him. He stank of the mud in the marsh and the still water. Farida Yasmin walked back into the village.
There were lights on in the church, throwing multi-colours through the high windows, and she could hear the organist practising.
Over the hedge she saw the child boot the ball into the far darkness beyond the spill of the light, and leap and whoop with pleasure as if he had found freedom.
She walked the length of the green. She saw the cars outside the house and the same drawn curtains as had been there before. She could see, from the street-light, that the camera set high on the front wall of the house tracked her, then lost interest, its lens veering away.
It was enough. She was certain.
She heard the rustle of a sweet-paper.
"Hello, it's the student, yes? My friend Peggy told me about you hope I didn't startle you, just walking the dog. I'm Paul. I'm your man when you start your interviews…"
She endured his patronizing talk as they went back past the green, the darkened house and the lens, through the village. It was useful to have him beside her when she went by the lens, when she was caught in the headlights of one of the moving cars. Walking with him gave her the appearance of being a part of the community… She told the man, Paul, that she would definitely find him when she came to do her interviews, and he left her at the pub.
The child was no longer in the garden. She saw the shape of a man through the gap in the curtains.
She cut off the road, stumbled across the common ground, wove between the gorse, trees and bramble thickets, to the car.
"It's as I said it was. I'm certain."
After she had bought the sandwiches for him she had gone to a chemist's in the town, and selected a perfume. Before he had come to the field gate she had anointed her body with it.
"I deserve to be trusted," Farida Yasmin whispered.
He was still hunched down beside the wheel of the car, holding the launcher. He had not moved.
"I want to be with you…"
His eyes stayed down, locked to the launcher and the ground at his feet.
"I've done enough to deserve that. I can help, carry what you need. You've taught me. I want to be there when you fire the launcher. I want to see it happen and be a part of it."
She was crouched close to him and her fingers touched the smooth, oiled surface of the launcher's barrel.
"I can do it, help you.
She saw his head move decisively, side to side. He denied her.
Her eyes tightened in confusion.
"Haven't you thought about me? Haven't you considered what I want? What about the risks I've taken? Where's my future? Because of you, because of the people who sent you, I've lost everything. I'm hunted. You'll go, be picked up on the beach so, who's thought about me? I'll be caught, interrogated, locked up is that what you want?"
He never looked at her. She caught his hand and held it tight in her fist. There was no response.
"Are you going to take me back with you? That's best, isn't it, that I go back with you to the beach and on to the ship? There'd be a life there, for us, back where you come from, wouldn't there?"
It was her dream. They were together on the great deck of the tanker. It was night and the stars were above them, and they ploughed through the endless water, and they were alone. And the same perfume that she wore now would be on her neck then. She would be introduced to high functionaries and her part in the death of an enemy would be explained, and grave men would bob their heads in re sped and thank her for what she had done. She could see the startled faces of her parents, and the astonished, dull faces of the girls at work, when they learned the truth of what Farida Yasmin had achieved.
"I'm finished here. So, you don't take me with you tonight, I understand… But I go on to the ship with you, don't I?"
In the darkness, he began to clean the firing mechanism of the launcher.
By torchlight, he had been shown the tyre marks.
Geoff Markham had been marched through the wood, had blundered after the light-footed shadow of Andy Chalmers in front, tried to keep up with him and his dogs, and had then been pushed without ceremony down on to his knees as the torch was shone into the cavity at the back of the bramble thicket.
He had queried it again, rejecting what he didn't want to hear.
He had been dragged up, pulled towards the water. He capitulated and said it was all right, yes, he accepted Chalmers's conclusion. If he had queried again he would have been pulled in his city clothes into the water and he'd have been propelled towards a tree-trunk and a submerged oil drum.
There was a crunched sound under his feet. The torch beam pointed out the stripped rabbit bones he stood on.
"I just want reassurance there is no other explanation?"
"He's gone.~
He had been lost. He had driven round a web of lanes. He had finally found Chalmers sitting with his dogs by the gate of a field. He. had expressed his first doubts at the grunted report of the tracker, then been hijacked and taken off into the woods. He didn't want to believe what he was told because of the catastrophic implications of Chalmers's assessment.
"Could he merely have moved deeper into the marshland?"
"No."
He said, bitterly, "But we don't know where he's gone."
"Gone in the car."
"Could he be returning?"
"No gear left hide's empty. He's cleared out."
They walked back to his car. It was the worst situation. He would be on the secure line to Fenton from the crisis centre to report that they had lost their man. There'd be the hissed slip of Fenton's breath, and he would repeat that they had lost their man, and then a volley of oaths would bleat in his ear. He was familiar with analysis and intellectual storm sessions and with the computer spewing answers. What he had been shown was a short length of tyre marks in the dirt at the side of a lane and, by torchlight, a hollowed place in the depth of a bramble thicket. He took on trust the description of the hiding-place. The torch had been switched off. They came through the dense woodland and the low branches all seemed to whip his face and not Chalmers's, and where there was a soft pit in the ground his feet found it and not Chalmers's. With his scratched face and sodden feet, he followed the smell and could not see the man ahead of him until they reached the car.
The stench of the man and the filth of the dogs filled the small interior. The water dripped off Chalmers and the mud on the dogs was smeared across the seats.
"I want to go home."
"Too right," Markham snapped.
"Home you will go, but not much of the journey in my bloody car."
He drove at savage speed down the lanes towards the main road and the town, and the crisis centre. They had lost him. It would end at the house on the green, where the bloody goat bleated at the end of its bloody tether. He hit the brakes, swung the car through the lanes' bends, pounded the accelerator. Beside him, Chalmers, stinking and dripping, slept.
"Do you like to talk about it?"
"No, Mrs. Perry, I don't like to."
"I don't want to pry.
"I will say one thing to you only, and then, please, it is a closed book… It was over. Molotovs don't win against tanks. We went back to our homes, which was stupid. I was denounced by people who lived in my street. When the soldiers came, I and others tried to flee over the roofs from my parents' apartment. We were identified by the people in our street. When we were on the roofs they pointed the soldiers towards us. They were the same people I had lived with, played with as a child. They were my friends and my parents' friends, and they showed us to the soldiers… We saw what happened last night. We heard what Mr. Perry said."
"Thank you, Luisa, thank you from the depths of my heart."
"What I like to talk about is old furniture, and gardening."
"It's a good time to get cuttings in," Meryl said.
"I'd like to help you with that."
Blake was long gone, back to the house. Bill Davies had dozed on his bed. The room was in chaos, Blake always left it that way, clothes on the floor, towels on the bed. Davies was reminded, and it hurt, of the room his boys shared. He still hadn't rung home, couldn't face it… He climbed off the bed and sluiced some of the tiredness out of his eyes at the basin. He'd call by at the house to collect his car, then search for another dreary little pub to eat in… He reflected that the home where Meryl had been taken in was oft-limits, but he'd have preferred to have gone there, talked to her. She'd kissed him when she'd thanked him, and had cried as he'd held her awkwardly. She'd been so bloody soft and vulnerable. Too long since it had been like that with Lily… He changed his shirt. Couldn't go back to the house in a shirt with Meryl's lipstick on the collar.
He went down the stairs. The door to their living room was half open.
He realized she had been waiting for him, listening for his descent. She came with a quick, scurrying step out of her living room and he could see her husband in his chair by the fire, and the poor bastard had some shame in his eyes. She held the sheet of paper in her fingers. He understood.
She handed him the account.
He didn't argue, and didn't say that he had seen her standing in the shadows behind the mob. He took the banknotes from his pocket and paid her for his bed and for Blake's. He went back up the stairs and packed their bags.
She was waiting by the door.
She said, "It's not my fault, I'm not to blame. We need the money. We wouldn't be doing anything like bed-and-breakfast unless we had to. It was Lloyds that took us down, we were Names, you know. What my husband had set aside for retirement went to Lloyds. We can't exist without the money. I've nothing against those people, the Perrys, but we have to live… It'll be remembered, long after you've gone, that we put a roof over your head. It won't be forgotten. I'm only trying to limit the damage to our business. A man like you, an educated man, I'm sure you understand."
The door closed behind him.
He carried the bags down the carefully raked gravel drive. He stopped in the road, saw the light peeping from the curtains where she was, then turned and walked towards the village and the green. He was called on the radio and was told the stalker's report: the man had moved, was lost. He started to run.
He pounded down the road towards the house.
There was the slight scent of damp in the air as Meryl unpacked in the small bedroom.
She took from the suitcase only what she would need for that night, and what Stephen needed.
Simon Blackmore came up quietly behind her.
"She was tortured. What they did to her was unspeakable. Amnesty International members from all over the world bombarded the dictatorship with letters demanding her freedom, but above all it was her own courage that saved her life, and her determination to come back to me.~ "You make me feel small, and my own problems minuscule. Inevitable, I suppose, but already I regret leaving Frank."
"I don't think it appropriate that we start a seminar on man's inhumanity, but it's necessary that you understand us. We all have our own opinions and thank God our own consciences to drive us. Enough of that. Now, Meryl, smile, please."
She did, her first in six days.
"I'm going to talk to Luisa about antiques and gardening there's places round here where you can still get a good old table or a chest at a real knock-down price.
"And I'll talk about wine, and downstairs there is a bottle open and waiting."
"So, you've lost him."
Cox was hurrying, and for once ignored his habits: didn't go to his office first to shed his coat, smooth his hair and straighten his tie. Straight to the central desk in the work area. He had been called from dinner.
"Bloody marvelous. What else have you got?"
He was the man in charge, and he threw the responsibility of failure at his subordinates.
"Thought there were a few things I could rely on, wrong again, thought I could rely on you not to lose him."
Fenton, who had already ladled abuse at his own subordinate, Markham, squirmed. Parker kept her head down. The others at the table, white-faced, avoided Cox's eyes, except for Duane Littelbaum, who eased his shoes off the table, and laid down his Coca-Cola can.
"His advantage is small, and temporary only," Littelbaum murmured.
"He has to come to the house. If he's moved he'll come tonight. You should relax… We all get scared when it's out of our hands, you're not unique."
Cox glanced at him savagely.
"What's he got?"
Fenton dived for the book on the table, as if it were his saviour.
"What we think, from the questioning of Yusuf Khan, it's probably an RPG-7, rocket anti-tank grenade launcher. If the indications from that bedside conversation are correct then he has a weapon with a maximum effective range of three hundred metres, particularly useful at night."
The old warhorse from B Branch snatched the book from Fenton.
"It has an internally lit optical sight for night shooting, or might have the passive starlight scope. Against tanks, even a deflection shot, it'll put a five centimetre hole through around twenty-five centimetres of armour-plate. At a hundred metres it cannot miss."
Cathy Parker leaned over the warhorse's shoulder.
"It can penetrate at least twenty centimetres of sandbags, fifty centimetres of reinforced concrete, and not that it applies well over a hundred centimetres of earth and log bunker…"
"Christ…" Cox shuddered.
Littelbaum smiled and swung his feet back on to the table.
"But it has a signature, flash and smoke discharge. It's best if he fires, then you locate him and you go get him."
"If there's anyone left alive, afterwards, to get him." Cox left them, in their silence, kicked open his office door, and threw his coat on to the floor.
"It'll be tonight, he'll come tonight."
Frank Perry looked away from Davies. He sat on the floor, his body weight against the bottom of the door. Ask a bloody stupid question and get a bloody unwanted answer.
There was a small, right-angled space, between the hall and the kitchen door, protected by interior walls. The question why had Davies gone upstairs and dragged the double mattress off the spare bed and the single mattress off Stephen's bed and wedged them on their sides against the two interior walls, and made an igloo between the hall and the kitchen door? Why? He sat and cradled a tumbler of whisky, no water. He could have asked Blake and Paget as they heaved in the sandbags they'd filled. The sand and the empty bags had come an hour earlier. There had been a sharp exchange at the front gate because the delivery driver had dumped the sand and said it wasn't on his work docket to stay and help fill the bags. Perry sat with the weight of the vest on his shoulders. Davies was inserting a chair into the igloo space, a hard chair from the dining room, pushing its seat against the kitchen door, and then he draped the ballistic blanket over its back. The sandbags were already in place at the hall end of the igloo. He drank the whisky, which burned in his throat and upper stomach, the third one that Blake had poured him. He thought, pretty soon, he should go and piss.
It was better that she had gone, with Stephen. He could sense the change in the men's mood, like they'd cleared their decks. While Davies built the igloo, Blake was checking the weapons, and he'd cleared all the rounds out of the machine-gun magazines then loaded them again. There was a box on the carpet, beside his feet, with the big red cross on it and he'd been asked again for his blood group. He'd given it to them a week ago, but they'd said they were just checking and he'd heard them talking hospitals. With Meryl and Stephen gone, what had changed, he thought, was that they no longer had the responsibility for the protection of a human being. Frank Perry was an item, he was baggage, protected because of its symbolic value. He gulped the whisky. Paget and Rankin were in the hall. They were going off duty, the new shift was in the hut. What he didn't understand was that they seemed neither pleased to be going off duty nor reluctant to leave. By the time they were at the door, Paget and Rankin were already muttering about the different brands of thermal socks.
Davies said, "He's moved. We don't know where he is or where he's coming from. Would you, please, Mr. Perry, go quickly to the lavatory, then settle into the proteded space. Because he's moved we think he'll hit tonight."
Perry downed the drink, stood and slurred his laugh.
"Bit overdoing it, yes, bit over the top, yes, for one man with a rifle?"
"We don't think it's a rifle, Mr. Perry, we think it'll be an anti-tank armour-piercing rocket launcher."
Ask a bloody stupid question… He used the cover of the stones of the churchyard, those that were beyond the throw of the coloured lights from the church itself.
Valiid Hossein had the weapon tilted against his shoulder, and the barrel with the two-kilogram projectile loaded, gouged into his flesh. From the churchyard he could watch the lights of cars on the road. It was important to him to find the pattern they made. The slow-moving patrols of security men would be the same here as outside the bases of the Americans in Riyadh or Jeddah. Patrols were always predictable it was what they did. The slow cars came by, going into the village and out of it every nine minutes, with only a few seconds' difference in each journey.
From the churchyard, he slipped over a wall and into a garden. He crossed that garden, and two more. Often, at the Abyek camp, he had practice-fired the RPG-7, and it was simple and effective. He had fired it in the Faw marshes when the Iraqis had counterattacked against the bridgehead with armoured personnel carriers and the T-62 amphibious capability tanks. He knew well what it could do… He moved across two more gardens. He would have preferred to be close, so that the target man could see the blade or the barrel. It was better when they saw it, and the fear flitted over their faces. Then he felt the excitement in his groin.
Vahid Hossein was in another garden, crouched and still. A door opened and a dog trotted out into the pool of light. It approached the edge of the light and yapped, but was frightened to move into the darkness. The rain began again. A man stood in the door and shouted for the dog, which knew he was there. Its courage grew because the man was behind it. It was a small dog and it bounced with the ferocity of its barking. If the man came close, he would kill him, a blow to the neck; if the dog came, he would throttle it. He would not be stopped. The rain pattered on him. The man strode towards the dog, towards the place where he crouched, lifted it up, smacked it, and carried it back into the house.
He moved again.
She had given him the exact description of the house on the far side of the road into which the target had been moved.
"A drink, Meryl?"
She shivered. Stephen was upstairs in the room allocated to him, and had said it was a dump. She'd pulled his lorries out of the case and scattered them on the floor for him, on the bare boards.
"That would be nice." She grimaced at the cold air. The window was ajar behind the curtains and the wind rippled them.
"Red or white. They're both from the Rhone valley, Cave de Tain l'Hermitage, it's only a little place but they've been making wine there since the days of the Romans. We're very fond of it. I think the lovely thing about the study of wine is that one is never an expert, always learning. That's a good maxim for life. Which'll it be?"
"Red, please to put some life into me."
"Shall do… I'm sorry about the window but Luisa likes windows to be open so that she feels the wind, she can't abide to be closed in you understand."
"Of course." She hadn't noticed it before, but he wore a thick jacket over a crew-necked sweater. She looked at the grate, saw old ash and clinker.
Simon Blackmore would have seen her glance at the fireplace.
"Sorry, we haven't got round to cleaning it yet, but we don't have fires. Luisa cannot abide lit fires. They burned her with cigarettes, but some of her friends were branded with a poker from a brazier."
"I'll get a sweater."
"No, no, don't." He played the gentleman, took off his jacket and draped it on her shoulders, then poured her wine.
She was quite touched. It was ridiculous but sweet. She'd ring Frank later and tell him. And if when she telephoned she could not be overheard, she'd tell him they were daft, but lovely, and they lived in a freezer. He said apologetically that he ought to be in the kitchen helping would she excuse him if he left her alone?
"Let me do that, help Luisa."
"Absolutely not. You're our guest and need a spot of pampering." There were two bookshelves in the room. She went past the window and crouched to look at the books.
He had the launcher on his shoulder and his finger on the guard.
He was down among a mass of garden shrubs. Beyond the hedge and the road was the cottage. He had seen the target's shadow against the moving curtain, then the coat of the man between the gap in the curtains, then the shadow.
He had the sights set to forty-five metres.
The car came past, dawdling, its lights brightening the hedge in front of him. He was not concerned with other cars, only with the cars that carried the guns and cruised slowly. The darkness came back to the road and he made his last checks.
Paget said, "What I always say, you get what you pay for."
Rankin said, "Fair enough what you pay for but if you want the proper gear then, by God, you've got to pay."
They were on their way back to their lodgings in the town after the end of their twelve-hour shift. Behind them, in the barricaded and guarded house, the principal was someone else's headache. For twelve hours, they were free of it.
"When we're out in the bloody boat, this weekend, I want to be warm.
"Then it's gonna cost you."
"Daylight robbery as bloody usual."
"As you said, Joe, you get what you pay- The flash of bright light exploded from behind the hedge on the far side of the road. It illuminated the dead hedge leaves, an old holly tree and the trunk of an oak. Across the road, brilliant in colour, came a line of shining gold thread, going arrow-straight in front of the car's windscreen.
The flash came, and the thread unravelled in a split moment of silence. The thread-line crossed the road, cleared the opposite low wall, and a small garden and went straight into a downstairs window. It was almost in petrifyingly slow motion.
The blast from the flash fire behind the hedge hammered into the car as Joe Paget braked, and with it was the whistle shriek of the gold thread's passing.
The thunder of the detonation pierced Dave Rankin's ears, and he froze. There was a blackness in his mind and he could feel the air stripped from his lungs. This was not Lippitts Hill, nor Hogan's Alley, nor any bloody range they'd ever been on, not any exercise. The wheels had locked when Paget had braked and his sight was gone. They were slewed across the road and Dave Rankin's ears were dead from the blast sound.
Paget gasped, "It's where she is-' Rankin bawled, "Get there, get there to it where she is-' Paget had stalled the motor. Rankin was swearing at his window, electric, the pace at which it came down. The engine was coughing back to life. Rankin had the Glock off his belt. Paget had the car swerving back on to the centre of the road.
"Fucking get there, Joe!"
Paget put the car back into gear and Rankin's head jerked forward and slapped the dash. Paget accelerated. They were coming towards the house. There was just smoke, billowing from the front window of the house, from the black hole where the window had been and curtain shreds, and silence. The reflex for Rankin was to get out of the car, help make the area secure, radio in. He had the door half open when he was thrown back in his seat as Paget hit the pedal.
"Look, for fuck's sake, Dave, look!"
Paget's free hand, off the wheel, reached out and caught Rankin's coat front, loosed it and pointed.
It was a moment before Rankin comprehended, then he saw him.
There was a high wall of old weathered brick that kept him on the road. The headlights caught him. He was running with an awkward, fast stride towards the end of the high wall and the graveyard beyond. The headlights trapped him. He was in army fatigues but the mud on them blocked out the patterns of the camouflage. As he ran he twisted his head to look behind him. The lights would have been in his eyes, blinding him, and he ran on. The car closed on him.
Rankin had his head and his shoulders, his arm, out of the passenger side window, the wrong side window. He tried to aim, but couldn't hold steady. The Glock was a close-quarters weapon. Practice on the range, with the Glock, was at never more than twenty-five metres. The Heckler amp; Koch that he'd carried all day, that he would have given his right ball for, would have done the job perfectly but was back in the Wendy hut with the relief.
"Brake, Joe, and give me some goddamn light."
The braking bloody near cut him in two. His back thudded against the door-frame.
Rankin went out through the window, fastest way, and tumbled on the tarmac. The breath was squeezed out of his body. He dragged himself up, winded and so bloody confused.
Paget spun the wheel.
The headlights hit the man as he straddled the graveyard's boundary wall.
Rankin was down low, kneeling, and saw him. The lights threw huge shadows off the stones. He was at fifteen paces and going fast, but the headlights held him. They didn't practise it at the range, but he knew what to do. Rankin's fists were locked together on the butt on the Glock, and he punched his arms out and made the isosceles. He tried to control his breathing, to hold the aim steady. His finger was on the trigger. Thirty metres, going on thirty-five. He took the big deep breath to steady himself. Forty metres, going towards the shadows thrown off the stones. He aimed at the back of the running man, into the middle of the spine, and squeezed hard on the trigger. The running man was between a cross and the shadowy form of an angel stone. He fired again. The crack belted his ears. He saw the back of the running man as it dropped. Double tap… Rankin shouted, "I got him I fucking got him, Joe."
The engine was left running.
"Bloody good, Dave."
"Had him, I dropped him."
Paget went over the wall and right, towards the church porch. Rankin covered him, heard the shout, scrambled over and circled to the left. It was what they had endlessly practised, both of them, at Lippitts Hill, until it was routine and boring: two guns, never presenting a target, and closing for a kill. One going forward the other covering, the other going forward and one covering. They closed on the gap space between the cross and the angel. There was a dark place, a little beyond where the shadows of the two stones merged, and beyond it there was clear lit ground. They stalked the space, sprinting between the stones, freezing and aiming, calling the moves to each other.
"You ready, Dave?"
"Ready, Joe."
Rankin's aim was into the shadows. He was behind the cross.
Paget reached up with his torch from behind the cover of the angel.
The torch beam wavered through the shadow, and fell on the grass.
There was no body on the grass, no corpse and no wounded man.
The beam moved over the grass and there was no weapon discarded there, no blood.
"I thought I saw him go down…"
"You thought wrong, Dave."
"After fifteen bloody years… "Sixteen years, actually, Dave you waited sixteen years and then you fucked up."
Dave Rankin knelt on the grass where there was no body, no blood, no weapon, and he shook. As a pair they were laid-back, private, superior bastards. They always did well on the range and never had to be sent for a coffee and a smoke to calm themselves before trying again to get the necessary score to pass the reappraisal. They were the best, they were the ones the instructors pointed out to the recruit marksmen. Sixteen years of practice and sixteen years of training no body, no blood, no weapon. He knelt on the damp grass and the energy seemed to drain out of him. He hung his head until Paget pulled him roughly to his feet.
"In this life, Dave, you get what you pay for. They didn't pay much."
"I would have sworn I'd hit him."
"There's no blood, Dave… They got us."
The noise of the explosion had careered around the village.
It pierced the doors and windows of the houses, the cottages, bungalows and villas, where the televisions blared the argument of the evening's dramas. It split into kitchens and dissolved desultory meal conversations. It hammered into the talk in the bar and silenced them there. It startled a man with a dog on the road, a woman who was in the back of her garden filling a coal bucket, a man who worked at a lathe on the bench in his garage, and a couple making love in the flat above a shop. The blast sounded in the houses, gardens and lanes of the village… and in the barricaded house.
It murmured its way into the safe area between the mattresses, past the filled sandbags, and Blake swore softly. Davies dropped his hand on to Frank Perry's shoulder, and there was silence. Then the radio started screaming for them… Nobody in the village moved quickly to leave the protection of their homes. There had been the noise, then the silence, then the howling of the sirens. Only after the sirens had come and the quiet had descended again, did the villagers gather their coats, wrap themselves in warmth and come out of their homes to go to look and to gawp.
The rain had come on heavily.
Eventually, they came from their corners of the village. Their shuffled steps muted, huddled under umbrellas, the first of them reached the house, lit by arc-lamps, as the ambulance pulled away.
They gathered to watch.
He came back.
She had heard the explosion and had rejoiced. He could not have done it without her. Now she would persuade him.
Vahid Hossein came as a shadow out of the darkness, to the car, to her. She tried to take him in her arms to hold him and kiss him, but he flinched away. He gripped the launcher to his chest and rocked. Then he slid down, against the wheel arch of the car. There should have been triumph, but his eyes were far away.
"What's the matter? You got him, didn't you? What happened there?"
~He never replied to her.
Farida Yasmin stormed away from him.
She blundered across the common ground towards the lights of the village. The rain sheeted down on to her.
She backed off the road as a police car came past her with its siren wailing, splashing the puddled rainwater on to her thighs and waist. She had heard the clamour of the explosion and clenched her fists and believed she was a part of it. She saw the crowd ahead of her, in front of the cottage home she had identified for him.
She joined the back of the crowd. She came behind them and watched as they stared ahead, heard their whispered voices. She was not noticed. The rain fell on her hair and her face. The crowd was held back by policemen but she could still see the blackened walls of the room through the gaping window. The arc-lights showed her the firemen picking through the room.
She listened.
"They say it's a gas explosion."
"That's daft, there's no sodding gas."
She was behind them. They were not aware of her.
"Was it the new people?"
"It was the Perry woman, not the new people."
"Was it Meryl Perry?"
"Just her."
"Where's he? Where's Perry?"
"Never came, it was just Meryl who came."
"That's rough. I mean, it wasn't anything to do with her, was it?"
"Frank was in his house with his guards, it was Meryl. The stupid bastards got the wrong place, the wrong person… She slipped away. She left as she had come, unseen. She walked back, the rain clattering on her. She felt small, weak. Emergency traffic passed her and ignored her as she cowered at the side of the road. She was little and unimportant. She had thought that night, beside the car, as the sound of the explosion had burst in her ears, that she would love him, that she would be rewarded because he could not have done it without her and he would take her with him and she would be, at last, a person of consequence. She stumbled across the ground, went between the thicket and gorse clumps, splashed in the rain puddles. She was Gladys Eva Jones. She was an insurance clerk, she was a failure. She was sobbing, as she had sobbed when her mother had carved criticism at her and her father had cursed her, as when the kids at school had ostracized her and the kids at college had turned their backs on her. She saw the outline of the car and the rain spilling from the roof on to his shoulders. He had not moved.
"It was the wrong person. He was never there. It was his woman… His hand came up and grasped at her wrist. He did not need her. His strength pulled her down. They were not a partnership and there was nothing to share. She was on the ground, in the mud. She would never know love. His hands prised at her clothes, the knee drove between her legs, and she felt the rain beat on the exposed skin of her stomach.
"I want to see her."
It was an hour since the explosion and the first scream on the radio, and for most of that hour no one had told him. They had kept him in the area inside the mattresses and the sandbags, and they'd filled his glass. A man had come in a crisp uniform, rank badges on his shoulder, and had used the soft language that they taught on courses for handling the bereaved, and then gone as soon as was half decent.
"Damn you, I want to see her, listen-' Blake's chin shook.
"Want away, but you can't."
Perry shouted, "I've the right."
Davies said calmly, "You can't see her, Mr. Perry, because there is nothing to see that you would recognize. Most of what you would recognize, Mr. Perry, is on the wallpaper or on the ceiling. It was your decision, Mr. Perry, to stay, and this is the consequence of that decision. Better you face that than keep shouting. Get a grip on yourself."
It was as if Davies had slapped him. He understood. The slap on the face was to control the hysteria. He nodded, and was silent. Paget came in through the front, followed by Rankin who had his arm round Stephen's shoulder. The child was white-faced, his mouth gaping. The child sleep-walked across the hall slowly, and Rankin loosed his supporting arm and let him collapse against
Perry. He held the boy hard against him, and thought about consequences. He saw the stern faces around him, and there was no criticism, there was nothing. If the child had cried or kicked or fought against him it would have been easier, but Stephen was limp in his arms.
He heard Rankin say, "I thought I had him, don't understand, thought I saw him go down."
He heard Paget say, "He's like a dripping tap. He missed, and the daft tart can't accept that he missed with a double tap."
The woman screamed.
They were on the ground in front of her, in the epic entre of her torch beam She shrieked for her dogs, and ran.
She walked her dogs each evening before going to bed, summer and winter, moonlight or rain.
Policemen from an unmarked car ran towards the screams. It was several minutes before they could get a coherent statement from the panting, shouting woman of what she had seen.
"Black Toby… his ghost, his woman… Black Toby with her, what he did to be hanged… It's where they hanged him, hanged Black Toby…"
They went forward with the spot-lamps, her trailing behind them, and her dogs skipping ahead in the darkness.