The Walking Dead

  He wrote a note of what he would say, pondered on each sentence and checked a reference to a case a year before that had gone to appeal. He rewrote a line, then slipped into his robes. In front of the mirror he adjusted his wig and tightened his sash. He put the envelope and the letter into the floor safe, swung the combination dials, locked his room's door behind him, walked the corridor and heard the shout ahead of him: 'All rise.'

  Mr Justice Herbert, with the full majesty of his office, swept into court eighteen, took his seat and read out what he had written.

  Every eye was on him. Not a cough, a shuffle or fidget disturbed him.

  He concluded:

  'Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, you have listened to me with due attention, but I will take the liberty of going again over the chief points I have made. These are matters of great importance and there should be no misunderstandings…It has been brought to my notice that a conspiracy exists to bribe one or some of you to bring in a verdict of not guilty for the accused, and that a reward of money has been offered. This is police intelligence. Because of that intelligence, it will be necessary for you to face restrictions on your movements and freedoms, which I greatly regret.

  'We have been together a long time now and I urge you with due emphasis not to consider providing a spurious excuse and abandoning the trial in its final hours. You have shown such dedication that I am confident I can depend on you and, in anticipation of your cooperation, I am sincerely grateful to you all…

  'Now, I am repeating myself because this is at the heart of the matter, you should draw no conclusions regarding this case from what I have just told you. There is no evidence that either Mr Oswald Curtis or Mr Oliver Curtis is in any way implicated in any plot to suborn you. As far as I am concerned; they are completely innocent of any such involvement. I cannot emphasize that more strongly. Ahead of us now are the closing speeches of the prosecution and the defence. Then I will offer you my guidance, and you will retire–either at the end of this week or the start of next–to deliberate on your verdict but you will not infer, from certain precautions put in place round you, that any of these allegations of bribery or intimidation reflect on the accused. They do not, and are not a part of this case, which you will decide only on the sworn evidence that has been put before you. You have to dismiss these allegations–which is all they are–from your minds. Right, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, we will now adjourn but I have to ask you for your patience. Please, you will wait in the jury room until certain arrangements are in place, and we will resume our hearing in the morning–but do not forget what I have said. You will judge this case only on the testimony you have heard in the courtroom–nothing, absolutely nothing else…'

  'The bastard, the fucking little bastard, I'll–'

  'Please, Mr Curtis, refrain from that sort of language and from shouting.'

  'He's took my money. I'll fucking have him.'

  'You're in danger, Mr Curtis, of being heard throughout the entire building.'

  'He's got my money, and the fucking Nobbler has! We're fucking screwed.'

  The barrister, Ozzie Curtis's 'brief', took the force of it and Nathaniel Wilson was thankful for a minimal mercy. He stood with his back pressed to the cell door:As if he was in a trance of disbelief, Ollie Curtis sat on the bed's vinyl-coated mattress, stared up at the barred window and had nothing to contribute, unlike his elder brother. The rant had started at the moment that the barrister and Wilson had been admitted by a poker-faced prison guard. That bastard would have been pissing himself once the door was shut and the bolt pushed across. Wilson wondered if it was the wasted money that hurt his client most or the knowledge that the jury–if it held together and stayed firm–would now, inevitably, convict.

  The barrister said wistfully, 'The problem is, Mr Curtis–and it's his skill–that our judge was at pains to exonerate you from any blame. He could not have said more. Of course, when I was in with him, I did all the stuff about a jury inevitably being prejudiced and went for a mistrial, but I was turned down and he's covered that ground. Areas of appeal, should this trial go against you, are considerably reduced…Our judge knows his stuff.'

  'And it will fucking go against us.'

  'I fear so, Mr Curtis.'

  'And that bastard took our money. What you going to fucking do, Nat?'

  'Well, what I'm not going to do, Ozzie, is rush upstairs, use my mobile and have that traced. It's a difficult situation, Ozzie, needs thinking about.'

  'I want that fucking man having good fucking grief, and you're going to fix it.'

  Nathaniel Wilson did not answer. The barrister rapped on the door for it to be opened. He was not involved. Wilson was in the quagmire up to his damn neck. He thought of the man who sat in the back row of the jury box, with the stubble on his face and the sandals on his feet, and wondered how he could have been so stupid as to cross his client, take Ozzie Curtis's money, then play-act at being a hero. And his mind turned, with rare longing, to a life outside the little flat that he shared with his wife over the office. Ozzie, thank the good Lord, had retreated and now leaned his forehead against a wall of the cell, spent. Later, when he had the security of fire breaks to mask his communications, he would contact Benny Edwards. He reckoned the man who had turned in the money to be as great an idiot as any he had known, with 'good fucking grief' ahead of him.

  The bolt was drawn back. The same impassive officer let him and the barrister out.

  The door had opened and there had been the pad of footsteps in the corridor. Now Ibrahim Hussein heard the toilet flush.

  The sounds broke the quiet of the cottage. Hours earlier, he had seen his leader leave by car and head away slowly up the track. Khalid had driven and the girl had been with them and Jamal. Later, Syed had wandered off along the track and would now have settled himself in the clump of trees half-way up it from where he would have a view of the cottage, and its approach, and be able to see across the fields round it. The guard, Ramzi, was slumped in an easy chair, reading a magazine featuring colour photographs of body-builders with grotesque muscles. The clock in the hallway, by the front door, ticked noisily. Time passed in the life of Ibrahim Hussein, from the town of Jizan in Asir Province, and he did not know how much would pass before he walked. He reached out for his Book and thought his hours were best occupied in learning better the printed pages. His door opened and he started. The Book fell to the carpet.

  'Please, would you come with me?' The heavy-built body of the man filled the doorway. 'Would you, please, bring that jacket–the leather one–with you?'

  He lifted it from the back of the chair and followed. He was led into the room at the far end of the passageway and had to duck his head under a blackened beam. The table was in front of him.

  On the newspaper that covered it was a waistcoat. Pouches had been sewn over its pockets, and the sticks lay in them. Flies swarmed incessantly over plastic bags tied to the pouches with fine string and their buzzing overwhelmed the clock's ticking. In the bags he could see, among filth, heaps of close-packed nails, screws and ball-bearings. Wires ran from the sticks to two batteries, and another wire came. from the batteries and was linked to a button switch. He gazed at the waistcoat, in awe of it.

  He was told briskly: 'Please, I want your arms out.'

  The waistcoat was carefully threaded over them. The weight settled on his shoulders, was a burden, and Ibrahim had to flex his upper-body muscles. Fingers were tugging at the material, straightening, raising, loosening it. He was in the tailor's shop on the Corniche; his father sat and watched with smiling pride because a sole surviving son had come of age; a tailor who was a distant cousin of his father fussed over the fall of a robe that was held together with pins and had yet to be finished to perfection, new clothing for the start of a student's first term at the medical school. Cased in plastic gloves, fingers probed and poked, then more tape was bound tight over the most protruding joins with the shiny silver detonators.

  'Is it comfortable?' The questi
on was asked with less respect than the tailor, the distant cousin of his father, would have given, but it was the same question. Then, in the flush of youth, the excitement of going away and beginning his studies, he had pirouetted and the robe had swung free at his hips and knees; his father had clapped. He did not know what he should answer, and the flies rose from the bags and flew into his eyes, nose and ears. He. was told, 'It has to be comfortable. If it is not comfortable, you will walk with discomfort and bad walking is recognized. A man who walks well is not noticed, but he must be comfortable–or he betrays himself.'

  'I am comfortable,' Ibrahim said hoarsely. 'But the flies are…'

  He was interrupted, as if his query was unimportant. 'No matter, there is a spray in the kitchen that will kill them. What concerns me–is it too tight, is it awkward? I can take out a vent at the back if you need it looser.'

  'It is not awkward.'

  The jacket was lifted off the hack of the chair and passed to him.

  'You will wear this? It is a good length. It is heavy enough not to show a bulge on your chest. Try with the jacket, but gently because the connections are not yet finally fastened. Do it.'

  He smelt the leather, felt its strength, put his arms into the sleeves and let it settle on him.

  'Button it, but not roughly.'

  He did as he was told. The fingers were back at his chest and pulled at the jacket's front. He saw a flitting, coarse smile of satisfaction.

  'Much room, enough, not too tight…You can take them off, but carefully.'

  He dropped the jacket on to the floor, then worked the waistcoat off his shoulders, and felt freedom when he had shed its weight. It was taken from him and laid again on the table, but the flies were still in his face.

  'What do I do now?'

  'If you have a complaint about the waistcoat, you tell me. If you have no complaint, you go back to your room. Do not misunderstand me, young man. I am not a coffee-house talker. I am not a recruiter who persuades young men to rush towards Heaven. Others talk and others persuade, but I am an expert in ordnance. I am a fighter and I use what weapons are available to me. It was your choice to volunteer and your motivation is not my concern. Do you have a complaint?'

  'No.'

  'Then go back to your room.'

  Ibrahim turned, bent and picked up the jacket that was his prized possession. He told himself, harsh words in silence, that he was not afraid, that he did not need to be comforted. He let himself out of the room and did not look back at the table and the waistcoat.

  'If it is a problem, drop your trousers and piss on it.'

  Tariq, now the Engineer, had learned the value of the suicide attack, of martyrs to God, as a junior lieutenant aged eighteen, serving in the front line of the Fao peninsula.

  The problem was the overheated barrel of a PKMB 7.62mm Russian-built light machine-gun.

  What the platoon sergeant had told him, Tariq had done. He had exposed himself, his head and shoulders above the parapet of sandbags. He had crouched over the barrel, loosened his belt, lowered his trousers and urinated on the barrel; steam in a vapour cloud had hissed off the metal. Then he had loaded another belt of ammunition, fired again–and they had kept coming.

  The machine-gun position nearest him, thirty paces to his right, was abandoned. In the one to his left, fifty paces from him, the gunner had collapsed over the stock of his weapon and the corporal shook with convulsive sobbing. It was hard to kill kids. One man had run from the children's advance and another had collapsed, but Tariq had continued to shoot with bursts of six to nine bullets each time his finger locked on the trigger.

  He knew that their ayatollah had said: 'The more people die for our cause, the stronger we become.'

  The assault across open ground, beyond the swamp reeds, towards the machine-gun nests was codenamed Karbala 3 by the enemy. As they ran, the kids shouted in shrill wailing cries, 'Ya Karballah, ya Hussein, ya Khomeini.' They came in dense swarms. Tariq knew, because the Ba'ath officials had dinned it into every soldier on the forward positions, that children were used in the van of an attack so that their drumming feet would detonate the anti-personnel mines laid in front of the wire that protected the sandbag nests. By using children, the regular troops of the enemy and the Revolutionary Guard would not have to advance through minefields. In the opening year of the war, his sergeant had told him that the enemy's commanders had tried to use donkeys to clear the mines but when one had lost its legs in an explosion the rest had proved too obstinate to go on, even when gunfire was put down behind them; and in Iran there were more children than donkeys. He could barely see over the wall of the children's bodies in front of the wire. He fired, changed the belt, fired again. The gunner to his right had fled because his replacement barrel was now worn smooth and useless, as was the first. The gunner to his right had collapsed, traumatized at the killing of so many children.

  Above the wall of bodies he saw myriad little heads, on which were bright scarlet bandannas, and faces that were smooth and young but contorted with hatred. He swept his sights over them. At fifty paces' range, the PKMB machine-gun–in the hands of a good, calm gunner–was said in the manual to have a 97 per cent chance of hitting a man-sized target. Harder to achieve that strike rate now because they were so small, but they compensated by bunching into groups, like kids running in a school playground. Some were caught on the wire and blood drenched their T-shirts, on which was printed the message 'Imam Khomeini has given me Permission to enter Heaven'. They screamed then for their mothers, not for their ayatollah, and he could see, over the V sight and the needle sight, the little plastic trinkets hanging on string from their necks.

  He knew what the lightweight trinkets were because the Ba'athist official had lectured them on the matter. The children wore plastic keys looped into the string. The keys would unlock the gates of Heaven for them. The official had told his unit that, earlier in the war and during the Karbala 1 campaign, they had been made of metal but there was a shortage of that now in Iran and plastic was more available and cheaper to manufacture.

  That day Tariq, who was a teenage lieutenant, had fired in excess of 5,500 rounds of 7.62mm ball ammunition at children. When dusk had come, and the wire in front of him was unbroken, he had ceased firing and the screams had died. In the silence there was only the whimpering murmur of the wounded. He had learned the value of the willing martyr when he had had to piss on a machine-gun barrel, and had not forgotten it. For days afterwards, the crows came to feast and the stench grew. Then the armour had pushed forward, driving back the Iranian enemy, and bulldozers had been deployed to excavate pits and push the children's bodies into them.

  A medal had been pinned on his chest by the President, and he had received a kiss on his cheeks, and the lesson of the martyr's awesome power had stayed with him.

  Working at the stitching of the waistcoat, he could not recall how many martyrs he had helped on their journey to Paradise. Taping more securely the batteries' terminals to the wire, the Engineer knew with certainty that he created terror in the minds of his new enemy: the Americans and their allies.

  The martyrs were merely weapons of war. They had no more significance to him than a shell, a bomb, a mortar round or a bullet. The martyrs performed the task he made for them and in return were given, perhaps, fifteen minutes of fame. Then the satellite television channel that had transmitted the video of them would move to another item.

  It was irrelevant to' him whether he liked the boy or not. What mattered to the Engineer was that the boy walked without revealing himself, and that the leather jacket hid the bulges of the sticks of explosives, the bundles of contaminated nails, screws and ball-bearings.

  He did not hurry. The gloves would have made his finger movements clumsy if he had rushed his work. His devices were manufactured to a foolproof standard…but he yearned to be away from this place. He hated it, feared it. He would be long gone before the boy walked with the waistcoat secreted under the leather jacket.

  The
farmer asked his wife, 'What do they do down there, all day every day?'

  'Don't know and don't particularly care.' She was wrestling at the kitchen table with accounts.

  He sipped his coffee. 'I'm not complaining. Their money was useful…It's just, well, what do they do?'

  'Does it matter?'

  'Don't suppose it does…The car went out this morning, I saw that. Half the bedroom curtains were still drawn, but there was washing on the line. A bit after that I was crossing the Home Field on the tractor and one of them was sat on his backside among the trees in the Old Copse, looking a right zombie, just staring at me. You reckon they're on drugs?'

  'I doubt it. The girl didn't seem the type–if I know what the type is…That's it, celebrations are called for. Thanks to them, their contribution, we're all right for this month.' She bundled the paperwork together, buried it in a file, then dumped it in the table's drawer.

  He chuckled. 'Could be magic mushrooms…What I'm thinking, maybe one of us…'

  'You mean me?'

  '…maybe you should pop down there, some time this week, just make sure they haven't…'

  'Wrecked the place? You didn't meet her and I did. She's very pleasant…It's a family gathering–none of our business what they do all day…But I will. Not today, because I've got to do the ironing, and finish that embroidery if it's to be in time for the Show…but I will. Don't expect they'll bite me. I'll call in tomorrow or the day after. Satisfied?'

  He grinned, stood, then bent and pecked her cheek. 'Just to be on the safe side, tomorrow or the day after.'

  He went out, stepped into his wellingtons and walked, in his rolling gait, to his tractor. He would resume harrowing the Twenty-Five Acre field, which was beyond the Home Field. He wondered whether the zombie was still parked on his backside in the Old Copse, and couldn't imagine what an Asian family was doing at Oakdene Cottage and why, mid-morning, half the curtains were still drawn…but she'd find out. She had a nose as good as any vixen's for probing and prying.