e was hunched forward, peering into the misted windscreen. Chalmers was beside him with the dogs under his legs they didn't speak.
Geoff Markham wrenched the car round the bends in the lanes, back towards the village and the sea.
Once more he had listened to Fenton on the telephone and been too drained of emotion to take offence at the rambling, cursing diatribe thrown at him. He'd just finished at the borrowed typewriter, had just sealed the envelope, when the first news of disaster had broken, and he'd been in the crisis centre trying to make sense from the confusion of the reports when the second package of news had come over the radio. He'd collected Chalmers from the canteen. The envelope with the letter in it was jammed in his pocket, like a reproach.
Dear Sirs, I am in receipt of your letter setting out your proposals for terms of employment. I have changed my mind, and am no longer seeking work away from the Security Service. I apologize for wasting your time and am grateful for the courtesies shown me. Obligations, commitments, duty fold-fashioned words used by wririlded fartsl seem to have overwhelmed me. I'm sorry if you find this difficult to understand.
Sincerely,
He felt sick, small.
"I want to go home… Markham's eyes never left the road. After two catastrophic news reports, and after the battering from Fenton, he needed a butt for his anger, and a chance to purge the guilt welling in him. Chalmers was available. Markham snarled, "When the work's finished you go home not a day or an hour or a minute before… We made a mistake. We could have made the same mistake if the target had been in a tower block of a housing estate, in a good suburb, anywhere, but we did it in a village like this at the back end of bloody nowhere. We made a mistake by thinking it was the right thing to move his wife out, get rid of her, to clear the arcs of fire. We lost her. Losing her is damn near the same, to me, as losing him. It was convenient to ship her out, so we took that road. It's crashing down around us, it's disaster. Listen hard, if you say that it's not your quarrel then you're just like them. You are an imitation of those people in that village. They are moral dwarfs. It was not their quarrel so they turned their backs and walked away, crossed over to the other side of the bloody street. You aren't original, it's what we've heard for the last week. So, find another tune. You're staying till I say you can go. I thought better of you, but I must have been wrong."
"I've no quarrel with him."
Geoff Markham mimicked, "No quarrel, want to go home" forget it. Let me tell you, I considered taking you down to the hospital morgue. I could have walked you in there, filthy little creature that you are, with those bloody dogs, and I could have told the attendant to pull the tray out of the refrigerated cupboard, and I could have shown her to you, but I couldn't have shown you her face. You aren't going to the morgue because I cannot show you Meryl Perry's face it doesn't exist. That's why we aren't going there."
Down the lanes, towards the village… "We all want to cross over the road and look the other way. Don't worry about it, you're not alone. I understand you because, and I'm ashamed, I've said it myself. I went after different work, outside what I do now.
"Crossing the road", for me, was sneaking out of the office in the lunch-hour and going for a job interview.
"Looking the other way" was listening to my fiance and hunting for a cash increase. I'm ashamed of myself. I wrote a letter tonight, Mr. Chalmers, and the price of the letter is my fiancee. And what I've learned since I came here is that I, and you, cannot walk away from what has to be done."
As they approached the village, the clock on the church tower was striking midnight, its chimes muffled in the rainstorm. To the left were the pig-sheds in the field, to the right was the common ground of scrub and gorse, and in front of them was a policeman waving them down. Markham showed his card and a rain soaked arm pointed to a pool of arc-lights. The dogs ran free and they walked towards it. The wind brought the rain into their faces.
"Why can't you believe you have a quarrel with this man?"
"He's done me no harm."
"There's a woman, damn you, with no head."
"He saved the bird."
"What bloody bird?"
"He's done the bird good."
He thought Chalmers struggled to articulate a deep feeling, but Markham hadn't the patience to understand him.
"You're talking complete crap.~ The blow came, without warning, out of the darkness. A short-arm punch, closed fist, caught Markham on the side of the face. He staggered. He was slipping, going down into the mud. A second stabbed punch caught the point of his chin. The pain smarted in his face. He saw men hustle forward, the rain peeling off their bodies. They were grotesque shadows, trapping Chalmers, swarming around him, as his dogs fought at their an ides their boots, and were kicked away.
"Show him show him what the bastard did. He doesn't think it's his business, so show him."
They dragged Chalmers forward. Markham heard a squeal of pain, thought Chalmers had bitten one of them, and he saw the swing of a truncheon.
There was a tent of plastic sheeting. Inside it, the light was brilliant and relentless.
He saw her.
"Get him up close, get him to see what the bastard did."
She was on her back. Geoff Markham had to force himself to look. Her jeans were dragged down, dirtied and wet, to her knees and her legs had been forced wide apart. Her coat was ripped open. A sweater had been pushed up and a blouse was torn aside. He could see the dark shape of her hair, but little of the whiteness of her stomach above it. The skin was blood-smeared, bloodstained, blood-spattered. Her mouth gaped open and her eyes were big, frozen, in fear. He knew her. There was the old photograph of her in the files of Rainbow Gold: the eyes had been small and the mouth had been closed; she had held her privacy and worn the clothes of her Faith. Looking past the policemen and over Andy Chalmers's shoulders, he stared down at the body. He had seen the bodies of men in Ireland and they'd had the gaping mouths and the open eyes, and the fear that remained after death. He had never before seen the body of a raped, violated woman. Before they had built the plastic tent the rain had made streams of blood on the skin. Except for Cathy Parker, and her report relayed to him that morning, they had all lost sight of Gladys Eva Jones, the loser, and now he saw her. Except for Cathy Parker, and then it had been too late, they had all ignored her because they had rated this young woman from a small provincial city as irrelevant in matters of importance, not worthy of consideration. He saw in his mind the photograph of the face of Vahid Hossein and the cold certainty that it held.
Chalmers said nothing.
Markham stammered, "God, the bastard a frenzy. He must be a bloody animal to do that."
A man in a white overall suit looked up coldly from beside the body, and said clinically, "That's not a frenzy, she was strangled. The cause of death is manual asphyxiation. That's not her blood -she's not a cut on her. It's his."
"What does that mean?"
"It means that the "animal" is severely wounded, knife or gunshot. There is evidence of sexual penetration, probably simultaneous with her being strangled. During the sexual act, during the exertion of manual strangulation, he bled on her."
Markham turned away. He said, to no one, to the mass of grim-faced men behind him, "So, there's a blood trail so, the dogs V will have him."
A voice from the darkness said, "There's no blood trail and there's no scent. If you hadn't noticed, it's raining. In pissing rain there's no chance."
Markham gestured for them to loose their hold on Chalmers, and walked away. Chalmers was behind him. He groped back towards the car and the road. For the rest of his life, he would never lose the sight of Gladys Eva Jones. He stumbled and slithered in the darkness. The letter in his pocket would be soaked and the envelope sodden.
"Will you, please, Mr. Chalmers, please, go out and find him?"
"Are you going or are you staying?"
"Staying."
Frank Perry lay on the floor between the mattresses and behind the sandbags. Stephen slept against him, his head was in the crook of his stepfather's arm.
"So be it."
"Are you criticizing me?"
"I just do my job. Criticizing isn't a part of it. I've some calls to make."
Davies had towered over him.
"What happened to the people who took Meryl in?"
"Mr. and Mrs. Blackmore are unhurt. They won't leave what remains of their house and they're staying put."
Grimly he turned away and disappeared among the shadows of men whose names Frank Perry hadn't been told. Perry closed his eyes, but knew he would not sleep. He could hear Davies on the telephone. It would be easier if any of them had criticized him.
The brigadier took the call, which woke him from a light sleep on the camp-bed in his office. The voice was very faint. The brigadier shouted his questions, but the answers were vague and there was break-up on the line. In his frustration he shouted louder and his voice rippled from the office room, down the deserted corridors and into empty, darkened rooms… He heard the muffled voice of the man whom he had trusted like a son and barked out questions. Had he succeeded? Was he clear? Could he make the rendezvous point on the Channel beach? How many hours would it be before dawn? What was his location? Had he succeeded?
The call was terminated. The pad of paper, on which he would have written the answers to his questions, was blank. He played back the tape and heard the insisting shout of his questions and the indistinct answers. In the background, competing with the answers he could not understand, was the splash of water. The cold of the night was around him. He thought of a beach in the black night where the sea's waves rippled on the shingle-stone shore, where Vahid Hossein was hurt and waiting. In his mind was the death that would follow his failure. He weighed the options of survival, his own survival. The hush of the night was around him, and moths flew, distracted, at the ceiling light above him. He rang the night-duty officer at the offices of the National Iranian Tanker Corporation across the city, and he spoke the coded message. Twice, in the minutes that followed, the brigadier called the number of the mobile digital telephone and there was no response. He was alone, surrounded by darkness.
Frank Perry heard the approach of the lorry, and then its engine was cut. He heard the voices and, the clatter of iron bars being thrown down, as if dropped from the lorry's flat bed. He was thankful, a small mercy, that the child slept and did not criticize him.
The people of the village slept, with guilt and with self justification with doubts and with resentment, or stared at their dark ceilings. There were few who had not walked up the road and along the lanes and gone to look at the cottage home when it was floodlit by the generators. Most had seen the wide hole where a window had been and the torn curtains that fringed it, and some, even, the long bag of zipped black plastic carried away to the closed van, and the uncomprehending eyes of a child escorted from the building by the policemen in their vests and carrying their guns. No one believed the bland explanation of a gas explosion. None had cared to examine their part in what they had seen, heard, with their friends and their families. They had gone home when the show was over, and they had darkened the village, made it silent, switched off their house lights, crept to their beds. In a few short hours it would be the start of another day, and there were not many for whom their lives would be the same. The rain, over the village, had gone as fast as it had come, leaving the moon to pour bright white light into the homes where they lay.
"What's that? What the hell's happening?"
Frank Perry was careful not to wake Stephen. He eased himself into a half-sitting position but did not shift his arm, against which the child slept. There was the noise of sledgehammers beating against metal at the front of the house and the back.
Davies was cold, without emotion.
"You said you were staying."
"That's what I said."
"So, it's because you're staying."
"What is it? What is it that's happening?"
"We call it a blindicide screen. It's old Army talk. In Aden, thirty years back, the opposition had a Swedish-made anti-tank rocket that was used against fixed positions. It detonates the boring charge early."
"Why?"
"You should sleep. It'll keep till the morning."
"You know what? The bastard let me sleep. Joe bloody Paget let me sleep, didn't wake me to tell me. I bloody knew, but there wasn't a body and there wasn't any blood, and the bastard said I'd missed, Joe bloody Paget… You're a miserable sod, Joe you know what you are? Not just a miserable sod, a mean fucker."
Perry, half listening, dozed, with Stephen's warmth against him.
"Letting me sleep when you bloody knew I'd hit him, that's below the bloody belt. How long have you known, you bastard, that I got the shite?"
He could feel Stephen's slight spare bones. For a moment he had thought he lay against Meryl's warmth. He shuddered. The morning's light seeped into the house through drawn curtains and reached into the safe area between the mattresses and the sandbags. Rankin was cocky, bouncing. Paget was behind him with a slow grin spreading. The assembled company didn't see him. He thought he did not matter to them any more.
He heard the lorry drive away.
"I mean, telling me I'd missed when I knew I'd hit, that is a professional slur, Joe. If I say so myself, forty metres minimum and no light, a moving target, that is one hell of a shot. What is it, Joe? Come on, I want to hear you bloody well say it…"
They were all laughing. Blake and Davies had been up all night, but Paget and Rankin had dossed down on the kitchen floor to catch a few hours' sleep.
Perry asked quietly, "If he was hit, why do we need the blindicide screen?"
He had interrupted them. They turned to look down at him and the sleeping child. They were the only friends he had and none of them cared a damn for him, they were strangers.
Davies said, "His name is Vahid Hossein. He fired a single grenade from the launcher. There's a flash at the front and a flame signature at the back. Mr. Paget and Mr. Rankin were going off their duty shift. They engaged him. He ran into the churchyard. Mr. Rankin was presented with a difficult shooting opportunity. He took it, fired twice, but with a handgun at the limit of its effective range. There was no blood and nobody. Mr. Paget assumed that Mr. Rankin had missed his target, that's phase one. Later, a woman walking her dogs on the common starts bawling about "Black Toby". God knows what she's doing out with dogs in the middle of a deluge. She says she saw a lifeless woman and a black-faced man on the ground. She's going on about some nonsense that happened two hundred years ago. Police officers went to the scene and found a young woman raped and dead, but no man. The young woman was a Muslim convert, and the eyes, ears, fetcher and carrier for Vahid Hossein. She was covered in blood but it wasn't hers. The man who raped her, while he strangled her, bled on her from his gunshot wound. Mr. Paget and Mr. Rankin use soft-nose bullets in the Glock, and that is phase two. Phase three is incomplete. He is wounded, Mr. Perry, but he is not dead. Although he'd lost considerable quantities of blood, he was strong enough to leave the murder scene. He is out there, in pain, and still in possession of the RPG-7 launcher. The rain in the night has washed away the chances of tracker dogs finding him. He did not take the convert's car. We do not believe he has tried to leave. An hour ago, an inflatable was launched from an Iranian tanker in the Channel and came to a rendezvous on a beach. He was not there to be lifted out. We had it under surveillance, but took no action. Thus we believe he's still here. The military are beginning a search for him. Now, we classify Vahid Hossein as more dangerous than at any time. You, Mr. Perry, are the cause of his pain, his suffering. If he has the strength, in our assessment, he will make a last attack on your home. That, Mr. Perry, is the reason for puffing up the screen around the house that will prematurely detonate we hope an armour-piercing grenade."
"And is that why you were laughing?"
The wind swept the cloud away, leaving the sun balanced precariously on the sea's horizon.
Geoff Markham thought the young man tolerated his presence on the bench overlooking Southmarsh.
They had dossed down in the car. He had woken at the first smear of light, but Chalmers had slept on, curled in the back seat with his dogs, a baby's peace on his face. Only when he'd woken had the sourness replaced the peace. Once it had been light enough to see the village, the expanse of the green and the high iron poles in front of the house with the close wire mesh netting hanging from them, he had eased out of the car.
Chalmers hadn't spoken, hadn't given any explanation, but had called for his dogs and emptied out the last of the biscuits from his pocket for them. He hadn't said where he was going, or what he intended, but he had walked away with the dogs scampering at his feet.
Geoff Markham, not knowing what else he could do, had heaved himself out of the seat, locked the car, had stretched, coughed, scratched, then went after him.
His shoes sloshed with water, his socks were wringing wet, and his shirt and coat had not dried out in the night. The letter was damp in his pocket. The wind was sharp off the sea, raw on his face. A coastal cargo ship nestled on the sea's horizon line. The birds were up over the beach and over the marsh. He was cold, damp, and his stomach growled for food. Where did the arrogance come from, the belief that his small efforts had changed the movement of events? He wanted to be in bed, warmed, close to Vicky, and ordinary, without responsibility, free from the consequences of his actions. If he posted the letter he would have none of the things he thought he wanted. He slogged on. It would be the supreme moment of conceit if he posted the letter, it would be the statement of his belief that he changed events.
He found Chalmers sitting, very still, on the bench, and the dogs were beside him. Chalmers, never looking at the sea, wouldn't have seen the coastal cargo ship; he was watching the Southmarsh. What disturbed Markham most about him was that the young man seemed merely to tolerate him and feel no need for his company.
The bench was where Geoff Markham had met Dominic Evans, the shopkeeper. It was set high enough for him to overlook the sea, the beach, the sea wall and the marshland where the reed-tips whipped in the wind. The sun, throwing low light shafts, made it pretty. His mother would have liked it there, and his father would have taken a photograph.
Eight of them materialized, in single file, along the path behind the bench where Markham and Chalmers sat in silence.
Buried under the weight of their equipment they marched past the bench and briskly down towards the trees that shielded the shore-line of the marsh from his view. It would have been settled after the death of Meryl Perry. The secretary of state would have bowed to irresistible pressures and taken the control out of poor old Fenton's hands. The military would have stepped eagerly into the void he knew the men, or at least the unit, from Ireland. He knew the kit they carried and the weapons. He had seen the troopers from the Regiment slip away at dusk from Bessbrook Mill and the fortress at Crossmaglen, seen them run towards the threshing blades of the helicopters on the pads in the barracks at Dungannon and Newtown Hamilton. They were the quiet men who seldom spoke, who waited and nursed their mugs of tea and rolled their smokes and moved when the darkness came or the helicopters started up the rotors.
Markham watched the column snake down the path towards the Southrnarsh and the black water where the wildfowl bobbed in the low sun's light. Two carried the Parker Hale sniper rifles. One had the snub 66mm anti-armour launcher, another cradled a general-purpose machine-gun and was swathed with belt ammunition across his torso, one had the radio, the stun grenades and the gas grenades. Three went easily with their Armalite rifles held loosely. They didn't look at him, nor at Chalmers and his dogs. Geoff thought it was the moment that his relevance, and Cox's and
Fenton's, ended. Their faces and hands were blacked up. Sprigs of foliage were woven into their clothes. It was as if, he thought, in bitterness, the job was taken from boys and given to men. He looked obliquely at Chalmers beside him and the very calm of his face abetted the bitterness. Control had gone to the guns of the killing team. Everything he had done was set at nothing, snatched from him by the men with guns who went down into the marshland and the reed-beds. The last one had slipped from his sight.
"That's it, we're wasting our bloody time," he said savagely.
Chalmers remained impassive, silent.
"Time we were gone. Time, if you know how to use one, for a bloody bath."
Chalmers sat on the bench and his eyes searched the clear gold blue of the skies over the marshes.
"Sending you was ridiculous, a humiliation for the Service. They should have been put in twenty-four hours ago. They're the professionals, they're the bloody killers. They'll find him." He stood up.
Chalmers squinted at a point high above the reed-beds.
"They won't find him." His head never moved, his gaze never shifted.
"Enlighten me. On what is that stunning insight based?"
"They won't find him because he isn't here." Chalmers spoke from the side of his mouth. His head was stock still, and he peered into the lightening sky.
"He isn't here?"
"Not here."
"Then, excuse me, please, tell me, what the fuck are we doing?"
"He saved the life of the bird, and I have time for that, and now he's hurt… I have respect for the beasts where I work, I have a duty to them when they're hurt. He fed the bird and treated the bird's injury. The bird is searching for him and cannot find him. If the bird cannot find him then he's not here."
Markham sagged back down on to the bench. He looked out over the reed-banks and the water. The wind came into his face and his eyes smarted.
He peered into the clearing sky. Far below where he looked were the birds of the marsh and the Regiment's troopers. He searched for it but it was a long time before he saw the speck of dark against the blue. He held it, and perhaps it turned, and he lost it. It was very high, where the winds would be fierce. Chalmers's eyes were never off it. Geoff Markham blinked and his eyes watered as they strained, again, to locate the speck. Beside him, Chalmers sat rock still and relaxed, leaning back as if to be more comfortable. His dogs scrapped at his feet. When Markham found the bird again, he could have yelled in triumph. He was trained in the analysis of covert computerized data, he was offered work at what they'd call the coalf ace of fiscal interpretation, and he could have shouted in excitement because his wet, sore eyes identified a speck moving at a thousand feet up, about a thousand yards away. He saw the bird, and it had moved, gone north, and it still searched. He could have hugged Chalmers because the keenness of this stinking youth's eyesight had given him hope, at last.
"I am sorry what I said was out of order. I apologize. Did you think of telling them, the military, that he wasn't here?"
"No."
He wanted only to be alone.
A woman police officer, a cheerful, pleasant girl with a blonde pony-tail of hair and a crisp clean uniform, knelt awkwardly because of her belt, which carried handcuffs, gas canisters and a stick, on the hall carpet to help Stephen with a colouring book and crayons.
To be alone and to think of her.
Blake, dressed but with his shoes kicked off, slept on the settee in the living room. While his eyes were closed and his breathing regular, his hand rested on the butt of his gun in the holster of his chest harness, his radio burping staccato messages from his jacket pocket.
To remember her.
Davies, in shirtsleeves because he had two bars of the electric fire on, was at the familiar slot of the dining-room table with the newspaper spread out, reading the market and the financial comment. He coordinated the radio link to the crisis centre and the locations of the mobile patrols.
And to mourn.
He was not allowed, by Davies, to go upstairs to their bedroom.
"Not protected there, Mr. Perry, I'm sure you understand."
He was not allowed, by Paget, to go out through the kitchen door into his sunlit garden.
"Rather you didn't, Mr. Perry, wouldn't be sensible."
They denied him the space that he yearned for.
Perry sat on the floor between the mattresses and behind the sandbags.
Chalmers moved.
It was a full half-hour since Geoff Markham had given up on the search for the speck. The sky was clearer, brightening blue with pale cirrus corrugated lines of cloud, and it hurt more to look for the bird. He was thinking of the future of his career, whether he would be positioned back with Rainbow Gold, whether, he would be assigned to a university town where there were faculties of nuclear physics and microbiology growing botulisms at which Iranian students were enrolled, or whether he would be dumped into the new team working on illegal immigration, or the old Irish unit or narcotics.." when Chalmers moved.
Chalmers was already twisted round, his eye-line no longer on the skies above the marsh. The Regiment men would be down in the reed-banks and the water now, and there was nothing to show their presence. Chalmers stood, his back turned to them, and moved.
There was no discussion, no conversation, no explanation.
Chalmers whistled softly for the dogs to come to his heel, then started to track back up the path towards the village.
He walked with his head craning upwards, as if the sight of the bird, the speck, was too precious to be lost, and Markham was left to trail behind.
The path brought them back to the village between the hall and the pub. Chalmers strode surely, briskly, never looked down to see where his feet trod, and puddles splashed on to his trouser-legs.
Cars scuttled past them, and a van with a builder's ladder lashed to the roof, but that was the only motion of life in the village. It was a bright, sunny morning with cheerful light and a bracing wind, but no one walked and took pleasure in it. He thought the fear and the shame were all around, in the houses, the road and on the lanes as if a plague had come and the inevitability of disaster was upon them.
A fierce rapping, knuckle and glass, and a protest shout, startled him. He saw a woman at a window, her face contorted in fury. The woman pointed at her cut front lawn. One of the dogs had crapped on it, the second lifted a stumpy rear leg against the Venus statue that was a bird-bath. Chalmers didn't call off his dogs, didn't look at her or seem to hear her, just walked on and all the time he studied the skies. Markham stared pointedly at the far side of the road.
They went by the house on the green, the sun making silver patterns on the new wire of the screen.
Chalmers never glanced at the house, as if it held no interest for him.
They went through the village.
A few times, Markham looked for the bird and could not find it. He thought of it, high in the upper winds, soaring and circling and searching, and he thought of the power of the bird's eyesight and he thought of the man, Vahid Hossein, in pain and in hiding. Andy Chalmers had talked of respect and of duty to a beast that was hurt. He didn't think they would understand at Thames House, and it was pretty damned hard for him to comprehend why respect was due to a wounded killer and what duty was owed him. Chalmers walked remorselessly through the village, and out of it.
Beyond the village was a river-mouth, then more wave-whipped beaches; at their furthest point were the distant bright colours of a holiday community nestling in the sunlight.
A path ran alongside the river on top of an old flood-defence wall. In the fields between the village and the path, cattle grazed on grassy islands among the pools of the winter floods. Chalmers was ahead of him, high above the river and the fields, and all the time he gazed upwards.
Hungry, thirsty, the foul taste in his mouth, his shoes sodden, his feet cold, his back stiff, Geoff Markham followed blindly, thinking of food, coffee, a shower, dry socks, a clean shirt and dry shoes, and… he careered into Chalmers's back, jolted against it. Chalmers didn't seem to notice him. Beyond the fields, going away from the village, and the banks of the river and the raised pathway, was Northmarsh. The sunlight gently rippled the water.
The sun caught the flight of the bird, now lower in the sky, but still high above the swaying old reed-heads of the Northmarsh.
The bird had come down from the upper winds and now it quartered over the marshlands. It was as he had seen it over the Southmarsh. The bird searched.
Chalmers walked to where the path cut back towards the village then stepped over a fence of sagging, rusted wire and settled himself down on the small space of rabbit-chewed grass beside the water and the reed-beds. His dogs began to fight over a length of rotten wood. There was peace, quiet and serenity, until Markham heard the bird's call.
"Do you want help? Do you want the guns here?"
"No."
He watched the bird search, and listened for its shrill, insistent call.
"Man'? It's Joel, I'm doing night duty. Sorry to disturb you yeah, I know what the time is… Duane's been on. He's very perky. They have the jerk winged and holed up. Duane says it's close to over. I need your say-so for getting the wheels moving y'know, camera, microphones, lights, action. I guarantee you that the mullahs are about to have a very bad day. They are going to squirm like never before. Duane says it won't fit the Brit picture, going public -Duane says to go quiet till there's a prisoner or a corpse, then hit the mullahs, and hard. Can I start to move the wheels, Man'?.
That's all I need, thanks. Oh, the jerk got the target's wife last night they're so fucking incompetent it's not true but the game's still running…"
How many sausages for Stephen? How many for the nanny policewoman? Did Davies like his eggs turned over? Should Blake be woken? Rankin had found one of Meryl's aprons and wore it tied to his lower stomach so that his waist holster cleared it.
And Perry hadn't been asked how many sausages he wanted, nor about the raid on the refrigerator. There would be a plate for him in the kitchen with sausages, bacon and eggs, whether he wanted it or not. He wasn't consulted because he was only the bloody principal. He felt a sickness in his stomach. He ached for Meryl. Paget came past him, carrying two loaded plates, heading for the dining room, the french windows and the outside hut, where the new team were on duty.
He had to be with her and alone, to kneel and cry for her forgiveness.
The policewoman shepherded Stephen into the kitchen. Davies followed with his newspaper, and Blake in his stockinged feet.
He was an afterthought. The life of the house went on, they were all sitting at his kitchen table.
Paget called out, "And you, Mr. Perry got to keep body and soul together."
They did it for Stephen, forced their cheer down his throat.
"Just going to the toilet start without me."
The window in the lavatory had an anti-thief lock, and the key was in the small wall cupboard. He bolted the door behind him. They were his only friends and the mark of their regard for him was that they tried to clear the mind of her boy from what he had seen, heard, the night before. They tried hard, had to, because what he had seen would have been so hideous, brain-scarring. He heard the banter and the laughter round the table as he unlocked the window. He crawled out through it, took the one fast step across the narrow concrete path, climbed Jerry and Mary Wroughton's fence and dropped into their garden. He had to be alone.