Tristram said, “There was something on the stairs, I thought.”
Embarrassed, both of them, like a line had been crossed.
Izzy said, “There might have been, I couldn’t swear.”
From the darkened room they looked out through the window and down the length of the cul-de-sac, past a couple of parked cars and across the small square of derelict front garden and at a door with misted glass and behind that door a hall light burned.
“What shall we do, Izzy?”
“Nothing,” she answered him. “What’s on your phone?”
“The cavalry’s coming. Aggie Burns’s crowd.”
“Can’t be too soon . . . Is this how you’re going to spend the rest of your working life?”
No answer given.
He came down the stairs, had taken them slowly, no sudden movement.
Cammy thought it would have been hard for a watcher, covert in the Hunters’, to have identified him.
Time to move on. He went into the sitting-room.
It had seemed an age since he had been in his old bedroom. He had not needed a light, sufficient had come through the window, curtains opened, from the moon . . . A little owl had shrieked from the trees around the cemetery, had seemed to warn him. He could see what had been done to the room, its contents, and could feel and touch the wreckage. He did not have to be told by his mum why the room had not been touched. She did not blame those who had wrecked the room and smashed his possessions. He assumed there would have been a gang of them, boot-faced, if not hiding a grin while they worked. There would have been nothing in the room for them to feast off. A couple of days before he had flown out, he had cleared all the paper he had printed off from the web, locations and travel ideas and the basics of the black flag movement, and had gone into the graveyard and had burned the paper in the bonfire heap that the workmen used who tidied the place. He supposed it “gratuitous”, and knew about that word because it was what they had all of them, the brotherhood, used when talking of the violence inflicted by the men from the Amn al-Dakhili who did internal security in the towns and villages that had been overrun by the fighters. They came along behind, when it was safe and when the guns were quiet, and . . . He felt a cut on the tips of two of his fingers. A bedside clock. A present given him when he had gone to the college, Mum’s present. He had touched it and realised too late that the glass on the face was broken, a shard had lanced his fingertips.
“Do you want to know anything? Where I was? What I did? Anything?”
No answer given him.
“Who my brothers were? The guys I fought alongside?”
Silence.
“Is he still locked up, my loving brother? Do you still go to see him? Does he tell you how it was, is, how it will be? Do you talk? Do you make a judgement on what he did, does, will do when the gate shuts behind his arse and he comes back here, and he’ll start selling again? That all right, is it? I don’t have any shame for what I did. Understand that . . .?”
She was hunched in a chair, did not move. He heard her breathing but she didn’t speak.
“Are you going to do food for me? Do I have to do food for myself? I can cook, I cooked for my brothers. I can boil mutton, can grill goat meat. I can clean a chicken then put it on a wood spit over an open fire. Here, do I have to do that for myself?”
His voice had risen. He was still not answered.
“And money. I need money, and . . .”
Her hand was raised. He could make out the little roll held between her fingers. The length of a fag, and the thickness. He snatched it, could see the denomination.
“Is that all I get? Came home, came to see you . . . Never a day when I was there that I did not think of you, have love for you. All that and no food and next to no money.”
He never lost his temper, abandoned self-control. Never screamed, shouted, yelled, never lashed out with his fists. Loss of control was weakness. Stayed calm. Not saints, any of the brothers, but not sinners. Could have ranted down the comms link when they were up and ready to spearhead an attack but the suiciders had not arrived to make the diversion: had been composed, ice-cold. Could have verbally thrashed Tomas when the little Estonian boy had lost the book in which the code frequencies for radio links were written, and the garbled words that would be used. The brothers had backtracked and had searched until the book was found – fallen from his pocket when he’d dropped his pants for a crap in the sand.
“Your call, Mum. I don’t argue. You choose, Mum.”
Might have had a knife stuck in his guts, and felt the pain of it around the blade, but his voice stayed steady. Would like to have thrown the money back into her lap, but needed it.
Now, she spoke, had a gentle lilt to her voice. She said, “I remember, Cameron, a service in the cathedral about two months after you had been welcomed to the choir. A Sunday service. Was so proud of you, and used to come to hear you sing and would sit somewhere you wouldn’t notice me. There was a sermon, a dean or a bishop. I did not know the Bible before you went to the choir. Always remember the text. It was Luke fifteen, the prodigal’s return. I thought it was rubbish. A kid goes away having badgered his father into forking out an advance on his inheritance. Spends it on tarts, comes home broke, but a softy father kills the fattened calf as celebration in spite of an elder brother bitching that it’s a bad response. Dad said, ‘We had to celebrate and be glad because this brother of yours was dead and is alive again. He was lost and is found . . .’ Didn’t hold with it then, and don’t now.”
“That it, Mum?”
“Play the prodigal if you want, but there’ll be no welcome here. I want you gone.”
Jonas might have dozed but the dog shifted and the movement alerted him . . . His phone screen was still blank. In the front they were both awake.
Dominic asked him, seemed genuinely concerned, “Hope you are surviving, Mr Merrick. We’re not offering the best hospitality.”
He grimaced, “Surviving well. Perfectly comfortable.”
Babs said, wry smile, “Apologies there’s no coffee, no croissants, nothing to offer.”
“There’ll be time enough for breakfast.”
“After we’re relieved, when the big battalions move in?”
“Time enough,” Jonas said.
“When we’re surplus?”
“It’ll be a good breakfast, and we might try to find a biscuit for our friend before she goes home.” Jonas patted the animal’s head.
“If it’s not impertinent, do you know the final target, Mr Merrick?”
“I think I do, cannot promise I do . . . Unless we lose him, the target is an irrelevance. If we lose him then I’m for the high jump. I think I do . . . Tough old world, isn’t it?”
“One more question, Mr Merrick.”
“One more.”
A long time since Jonas had laughed out loud but he managed it and the dog started vigorously to scratch its ear.
Chapter 15
The dog still scratched and Jonas soothed it, might have murmured something in the velvet-soft ear about patience, and it took a while for Dominic to work out how to pose the question.
“Would he know you, Mr Merrick?”
He chuckled. “We can call him ‘he’, or can identify him as Gustave. Gustave is a very large crocodile and lives in a steamy wide river, the Ruzizi which flows into Lake Tanganyika, and it is probable that he ate – or at least killed – some three hundred farmers snatched off the river’s banks. Or we can call him Cameron Jilkes, one-time chorister with a voice like an angel’s. So, is it ‘he’, or Gustave, or is it Cameron?”
“He, Mr Merrick . . . Does ‘he’ know of you?”
“Don’t think so. Very much doubt it.”
“Would he understand the structure of your organisation?”
“Most unlikely.”
“And never heard of you?”
“They’re mounting up, these questions. Not heard of me, a lowly bottle-washer in Thames House, and not heard the nam
e of my superiors, or of the AssDepDG to whom I report. Ignorant of me, but not of the more immediate enemies who governed his life until his flight. He’ll be familiar with Russian sector commanders and I assume with UK or US Special Forces units, and he’d know about the tactical habits of an Iranian officer from the Quds force. He would know of Syrian government commanders and Hezbollah leaders . . . But all such information is now useless to him. Not knowing of me, and I offer up no conceit, is a mistake on his part. It’s the way these things happen. I don’t usually talk much but sometimes it helps me to stay awake. The way these things happen is that a mistake is made. I’m rather good at spotting areas where mistakes may occur. You do not need a university degree, first class honours and a heap of plaudits. You have to appreciate the way in which a young man of humble education will respond when his life is being pulled apart by quite unimaginable stresses. It is not a matter of intellect, just common sense. I was averse to classrooms and lecture halls, and came into the Security Service at a lowly grade, very much at the bottom of the bucket. I don’t need a string of letters after my name but I need a good nose. I return to my proposition, the need to recognise an opponent’s mistake . . . by the by, he is an ‘opponent’, not a scumbag, not an ‘enemy’, is not somone I chuck names and obscenities at. He is an opponent and my job is to observe the mistakes he – or she, and they have lively members of the fairer sex – will assuredly make. They make mistakes, all of them do. And the likelihood of the mistake comes when he is angry. An interesting cliché but valid: Revenge is best served cold. With me? Anger means the dish is piping hot. The act will not be thought through, will be hurried, his mind will be clouded, and that is the ladder to a mistake.”
His phone beeped.
He read Tristram’s message.
He might have lulled them in the front and they might not have realised that he’d stopped speaking because his small screen had lit up with text.
Babs said, “You did not finish, Mr Merrick. All about a mistake. What was . . .?”
“Be quiet, can’t you. Quiet.”
He had just received the words to activate him. She flinched. He saw Dominic’s face harden . . . and cared not a damn.
He spoke to them in the front room of the house overlooking the end of the cul-de-sac, found it difficult to get a coherent description out of them. Thought their response was poor. He told them what they should do. Jonas heard Tristram’s voice in the background: “For fuck’s sake, do we have to do that?” Repeated the instruction, not loudly but with an edge in his voice. Izzy sounded subdued, frightened even. He rang off. He gave Dominic’s shoulder a nudge, said what he wanted on the screen . . . their position, the estate, the clear ground of the cemetery, the road running down the hill. Said what speed they should go, and all lights killed. She drove.
Jonas said, “I never apologise and I never explain, which is why I am quite generally disliked. You were asking what was the mistake? Obvious . . . along with the heat of anger goes loneliness on an intense scale. The mistake? Came to see his mother. Has been fighting someone else’s war. A mercenary where he and the rest of gang of misfits were the useful idiots. Gets angry because of failure and offers up a promise, which is a hostage to fortune, and it will kill him, he hopes. To get over that hurdle he needs some loving support. Instead he’ll find his mother was a snitch. Going to see his mother was the mistake.”
The car was turning in the dimly lit road.
Babs said, “A mistake that will kill him?”
“I hope not, sincerely I do.”
They edged down the hill towards the Margate road and loitered in the shadows, out of the light thrown down from the street lamps.
She did it a second time.
A confirmation from Sadie Jilkes that she was happy to betray her son. No love left for him. She pressed the switch by the front door, and the patch of garden in front of her house bathed in thin light.
She left the light on, counted through a half-minute, then switched if off. Street lamps down the cul-de-sac were sparse. But there was a security light under the eaves of the Hunters’ house which came on when there was movement on their front path. Within seconds of her switching on her own light the Hunters’ door had burst open and a young man and a young woman had run out, each carrying a coat and going too fast to shrug into it. Sadie had turned on the light within half a minute of Cameron leaving by the back door. He’d opened the fridge but could only have taken sliced bread and might have swigged from the milk carton. She had seen his shadow move over the grass that had needed a run with the mower, pass the rose bush that she loved, and launch at the fence, the divide between her property and the hedge ringing the cemetery. He had called from the kitchen door, “You’ll miss me . . . You’ll curse yourself for not caring about me . . . Can’t wind back the clock but you’ll wish you could . . . You’ll read about me, then wish you’d loved me.” She had not responded, and a gust of cool air had come into the sitting-room from the open door, and he’d been gone. The shadow cleared the fence and would have pitched down into the bramble and scrub in the cemetery.
They’d left the Hunters’ front door open. They’d cut across the neck of the cul-de-sac and the woman had slipped on the kerb and almost fallen and Sadie had heard her swear, before they both disappeared.
Sadie thought she would sit a little longer, then would go back upstairs. Well after midnight now and she would be off out of her home in four hours. Go back up to her bedroom and take off her clothes and lie on her bed, best to get under the duvet, and make sure that the alarm was set. She hoped she would sleep. It was hard to do the early cleaning work if she did not sleep. She hoped that he had left sufficient bread in the fridge for her to make some toast before she went off to catch the bus into the city, the early one where each passenger looked half-dead. And hoped there would be enough milk for her to have a mug of tea. Wondered whether the state of his room, the shrine she had left to the collateral of what he had inflicted on her, had marked him. Did not really matter. What is done is done and cannot be undone, and she thought someone famous had said those words, but did not know who . . .
What would happen to him? She assumed that armed police would shoot him. What he deserved? Probably and . . . and would she be happy to have helped the armed police kill her son?
Which was the implication of what she had done when she had switched on her front light, given the signal as had been asked of her by the man who had approached her. A pleasant-spoken man, and with a kindness in his voice, but she had not seen his eyes. Could not forget her child as a chorister. Scrubbed and clean-faced, with tidy hair and in laundered robes, and singing to the great heights of the cathedral roof, and people all around her in raptures when he sang solo. She had seen his face in the gloom of the unlit sitting-room, had noted the sunken eyes and the gaunt cheeks and the thin lips and the blotches on his skin, and his tousled hair . . . Could erase that memory, not the choirboy.
She saw that the cul-de-sac was deserted, quiet, and the Hunters’ front door had been closed . . . Perhaps nothing had happened and no one had visited. She went up the stairs and hoped to grab some sleep before the alarm claimed her.
Tristram led and Izzy kept up a volley of obscenity, complaint and interjected squeals of pain. Had gone across one set of back gardens, and she had tripped on a watering-can – “Who leaves a fucking watering-can in the middle of a fucking path . . .?” He had a good stride and wore lace-up shoes. She had struggled with a short cross-country run in the early stages of induction but had ticked enough boxes for the financially deprived background quota to cancel any failings. They were using the torches on their mobile phones.
He hissed back over his shoulder, “For God’s sake, Izzy, shut up.”
She snapped back at him, “I’m trying! Bloody shoes are a bloody nightmare.”
The phones gave a bouncing light around their feet, they blundered forward. They saw a sign for a cemetery but the gate was along a feeder lane and they had to cross more fe
nces and more back gardens. Tristram hit a poly-tunnel, might have had prize strawberries growing in there, or a first crop of protected lettuces, but was – thank the good Lord – plastic and not glass. He knew she was close behind because he heard her wheezing . . . thought her a great girl, a top girl, and thought . . . They were on the next street down from the cul-de-sac, and he had fucking nearly impaled himself on a kid’s scooter and he had a view of a road in front, the main drag. Paused for that moment, then looked up. Saw him.
Tristram reached back, caught Izzy’s arm and pointed.
“Him, the Tango, see him.”
“Got him. Tommy Tango. I’ll buy that.”
They were 150 yards from the main road. Had seen him because a lorry had come around a corner, monster lights on the front, and would have surprised him. He’d paused on the pavement and had let it pass, then had loped across the width of the road and it had been harder to see him except for the street light further up the hill. There seemed to be an alley between two small terraces of houses, might have led to lock-ups or to back gardens . . . No one, at that time of the morning, the small hours when doctors said old people died, opened a door and looked around, wary. He ran bent head and shoulders, and disappeared. Right height, right build but perhaps thinner, right hair colour but might have been blonder which was what prolonged exposure to the sun did.
Tristram called Jonas. Said where they were and what he had seen . . . had no thanks given him, was told to stay in touch. No fucking appreciation, like praise would have stuck in the old bastard’s throat.
She said, a gasp for breath, “That was just brilliant, to see the shite, bloody brilliant.”
Cammy ran.
The path was a familiar one. Used as the cut into the city when he had no money for a bus, or the way home when the last of the public transport had gone. It would take him down to the river, the minor one that had a separate channel to the Stour, and there was – as he remembered it – a track alongside. It would be slippery, and there was a fair drop into the water, but it would be nothing that taxed him after where he had been – drainage and irrigation ditches, paths that might have been strewn with anti-personnel mines sown by the Russians. He ran well, and had eaten two of the slices of bread that he had stuffed into his pocket.
The Crocodile Hunter Page 33