The Walking Dead

  She said, 'Well, we all know what young people are, and the mess they leave around…Anyway, if the shower is working…'

  'Thank you, madam, for your concern.'

  'Right. I'll be on my way. I do Meals on Wheels for the elderly as a volunteer on Wednesdays…So nice to meet you.'

  'The pleasure, madam, is for me.'

  He opened the Land Rover's door for her, then closed it quietly. She reversed, did a three-pointer, and he waved as she drove off up the track. He did not tremble, or pant, but the fingers that waved her off were those that would have strangled the breath from her lungs.

  The girl understood.

  Ajaq said, watching the Land Rover labouring on the track, 'Stupid fucking interfering bitch–one step more and she was dead, but she did not take the step.'

  He left the waistcoat on the table, surrounded by the carcasses of dead flies, and checked the room a last time. Satisfied, he closed the door after him, locked it, and carried his bag down the corridor. He did not pause, or glance at the room where the boy was but went past it.

  The Engineer walked through the living room and into the hail. Two of the kids, and the girl, were in the living room but he ignored them. They were no longer of importance to him.

  His friend was at the front door. The Engineer had a choke in his voice–he told his friend that the button switch was taped over, that the device was live. From his pocket, he took one of the two ferry tickets in the envelope and passed it. They hugged, and he heard the car start up. He said, 'I am an old fool, the worst of them. I have done what I came to do, with ill grace but done it. You should be with me…' His cheeks were kissed.'…trust none of them.'

  They broke apart. He looked into the face of his friend.. 'Trust no one. Move. Set it in place, and run. There's no shame in running. Come back to me. Hurt them some more in our place, not here.' He felt his eyes watering. 'Is it that important?'

  His shoulder was cuffed. He strode to the car and did not look back.

  He was driven away. He did not think of the boy who would wear the waistcoat. He had lost count of the number of young men for whom he had made waistcoats and belts, for whom he had rigged the firing switches in cars and lorries. The building of the waistcoat, with the sticks, the debris and the wiring, was so basic to an artist such as himself that he could have fashioned it in his sleep. The car turned on to the main road and they drove by low hedges that had been cut savagely. Once there was a flash of the cottage. Already he thought of the battlefield that was his home.

  He settled back in the seat.

  He yearned to be beside his friend, lying in a ditch, hunkered down in a grove of palms, or in the upper window of a house, with a wide straight road in view, and the distant rumble of a lorry convoy or a Humvee patrol approaching. With his friend beside him, he would have in his hand a mobile .phone.whose signal could detonate a device built round a 120mm artillery shell with ten kilos of rocket propellant to give it the kick to break through the strongest armour plate reinforcing the sides of any enemy transport vehicle. He thought of the great flash, the crimson and orange flames rising, then the soaring columns of blackened smoke and falling debris. He did not see other traffic, or the homes beside the dual-carriageway, or the kids who kicked footballs, women who pushed buggies and men with small, straining dogs. His thoughts played on sacks of refuse dumped at the side of another dual-carriageway–and in one, under a mass of garbage, and holed by scavenging rats, ten or fifteen kilos of explosive were buried.

  The boy who drove him had switched on the car radio, and music blared round him, but he did not care or complain. His thoughts had moved on: a narrow, shallow trench was dug in a dirt road used by patrols at night, used by Humvees with their lights off and with night-vision goggles on the drivers' faces–local men in the villages along the dirt road had been ordered not to drive a tractor or a car on it. A soft rubber pipe was laid in the trench, filled with water and sealed at one end. At the other were the fuse wires that connected when the pipe's water, under pressure from the weight of a Humvee, forced them together–they led to the bomb–and the trench was filled in, dust swept over it.

  They hit the motorway. The biggest roads had construction work to reinforce the bridges for the enemy's main battle tanks: a factory turned out the concrete blocks that would strengthen them. Already hollowed out, blocks were brought to him from the factory and he packed the cavity spaces with high-grade explosive putty, then wired in the detonators. Labourers loyal to the struggle cemented in the blocks and routed the wires from them, and the remote firing triggers. He was starting his journey back to the world he knew. Would his friend, ever again, be beside him when the fire, the thunder and the smoke erupted?

  The mood, melancholy, ached in him.

  He was driven south and the rain slashed against the windscreen, cascading from the wipers. He imagined the reunion, him sweating from the heat, and his friend. A soft footfall, the creak of a door, the shadow coming into a room, the growl of the voice…and he thought that when, if, they met again he would weep, not contain his tears as he had done before getting into the car–and he cursed.

  He and his friend, they should never have come…and he did not know where a trap was set and how it would be sprung.

  The handler and his dog quartered the Rose Hill park.

  He didn't do the discipline bit on these early-morning or late-afternoon exercise sessions. He let Midge run. The discipline would come in the day's work. Then he'd be obliged to have her on a short or long leash and under firm control. She was biddable when they were on duty and would not pull. For now, she ran and covered the grassland at pace. The rain mattered not a damn to her, but there was a heavy towel in the van and he would rub her down before he drove into the city.

  She'd done business, and he'd used a plastic bag to clear up after her. The handler's mind was far away. He saw her, careering off to his left, but did not bother to call her back to him. She, and he, had another ten minutes of freedom before he turned his back on Rose Hill…He was thinking of how much he would have to spend on a reliable mountain bike for his daughter on her twelfth birthday, and how long it would be before she grew too tall for it to be of further use.

  Abstracted, he followed the line his dog took. He saw the boy on the bench…Pink was his daughter's favourite colour…An Asian boy, his head hidden in his hands…Who'd ever heard of a kid having a pink bicycle?…There was an Asian community in the Normanton district's warren of terraced homes, a century and more old, but he seldom saw their kids here…If she couldn't have a pink bicycle, perhaps green or blue would be more suitable…His dog ran to the boy…More suitable and more easily bought, but was colour important? His dog sniffed at the boy's legs, and the handler focused on him. He thought the boy looked half drowned, as if he'd been hours out in the rain, maybe half the night, and the shoulders of his clothing clung to his big torso…Damn right, colour was important to. a girl on her twelfth birthday…and his spaniel had stretched up on her hind legs, had her front paws on the boy's knees, and her nose was at the hands that held the drooped head…Colour was critical to…The tail wagged with increasing energy, and the nostrils were in the hands.

  He forgot the bicycle, and watched.

  The dog should not have climbed half over a boy sitting and minding his own business on a bench, and probably the boy had pawmarks over the thighs of his jeans now. He tugged at the string round his neck that held the high-pitched whistle, but the dog was now off the boy, sitting in front of him and barking furiously. Extraordinary that a little creature, his spaniel, could make that cacophony of noise.

  For a moment, the handler had the whistle at his lips but he did not blow. The dog's barking would have raised the dead in a cemetery. The rain had come on harder, and he would need the few extra minutes left to him to towel down her coat. The handler thought the spaniel was behaving as if she was out on a training exercise.

  On exercise, under supervision that required about half a telephone directory of
completed forms, live explosives were brought to the site by the army's people and little caches were hidden under stones, or in plastic bags, which were buried under rubble in the corner of a derelict building, or wrapped with tinfoil and pocketed by a stooge suspect. Then the dog, on the long leash or running free, was urged to locate the caches. She always did, and she'd sniff, find, rock back on to her haunches lift her head and bloody bark for his attention…as she had been taught, as she was doing right now in front of the Asian boy on the bench.

  But this was not an exercise and his time, and hers, was up. He whistled hard.

  The dog, Midge, did not respond.

  He cursed, then strode forward.

  'Come to heel, Midge. Come. To heel.' He yelled it, full voice.

  0n exercise, when she located the ounce or so of TNT, Semtex–whatever had been hidden for her to find–the reward was a biscuit and loving words. The bag of biscuits was in the van…The spaniel came half of the way back to him, but looking behind her every two, three yards. He was about to grab her.

  He called to the boy on the bench. 'Sorry about that. She's a young'un, but not normally daft. Hope she hasn't mucked your clothes…' He bent to take the loose chain collar and had the leash catch in his hands…What struck him, there was no response from the boy: not a wave of acceptance for the apology, not a protest at the mud smeared on his jeans by the dog's paws, and the head stayed down…His dog was as agile, at that age, as a bloody rabbit, and it was gone again. The dog raced over the grass and back to the bench, but did not sniff the hands again. The dog, a yard in front of the Asian boy, barked with ever-increasing intensity.

  So, the handler had a problem. Had those long months of training been wasted? The barking rang in his ears.

  The handler was a proud man, and his pride rested securely in his belief that he had the best dog in the force. Because of his own efforts, Midge always found the minute caches of explosives on exercises, and he had never known her–at the East Midlands airport, or at Derby's main railway terminus–settle herself in front of a passenger and make that bloody noise. He was also an obstinate man and he did not care to believe that all of that training time was wasted.

  He caught his breath.

  Then, pride and obstinacy ruled him.

  The handler had few doubts, but those he harboured were sufficient for him not to call out an armed-response vehicle. He would do it himself.

  Walking with a good step, but with his heart pounding, he went to the bench. The Asian boy never looked up, didn't seem to see his approach, didn't kick the dog away. It fitted no pattern that he had learned on exercises.

  Beside him, the spaniel's tail thrashed in excitement.

  He said softly, 'I am a police officer. Please, sir, would you stand up? That's right, sir, now turn away from me and put your hands together at your back.'

  The handler was obeyed. The boy stood, huge and muscled but without an iota of fight in him, and the handler could not tell whether it was rain that ran down his cheeks or tears. He snapped on the handcuffs, then patted down the body and found nothing. His breathing eased. He told the boy why he had arrested him, quoted from a host of anti-terrorism legislation, and cautioned him.

  Then he murmured, 'I hope to God you're bloody right on this one, Midge. We're for the high jump if you're not, and it'll be a bloody high one.'

  The dog's eyes were on the cuffed hands, and still she barked.

  He called in on his radio. Gave his name and call-sign, his location point on Rose Hill as nearest to Grove Street, requested the cavalry get here and soonest–Special Branch and Forensics–and said, 'He's clean, not wearing any form of improvised explosive device. I'm just going on what my dog tells me, and the dog's telling me his hands are contaminated. Over, out.'

  The handler knew that, by lunchtime, he and his dog would either be the laughing stock of the force or front-line celebrities.

  'Won't be long, sir, then we'll have you in the warm and dry.'

  He left the taxi in the forecourt with the meter running and hurried into the hotel foyer. After trying three times to ring the room number, Dickie Naylor had diverted the taxi into Belgravia. Should have been a short run from his club–actually, not a club in the grand sense of the West End, more of a dingy hostelry for retired military officers–to Riverside Villas, but he'd embarked on this course of action and was now down fifteen pounds. It would be twenty when he was dropped, with Hegner, at the side door beside the Thames. He'd slept in central London, just too damn tired to face a night journey back to the suburbs, and he'd been on the pavement, the rain cascading off his umbrella, searching for a vacant taxi when his pager had gone.

  Nothing proven, of course. A lad picked up by an off-duty dog-handler in an East Midlands park, and the initial report was of explosives traces believed to be on the lad's hands. Naylor had reacted. Three working days left to him, and in his mind he had wiped away the hesitations and lack of confirmation as yet. Wanted to believe it; So desperately chasing the Grail, willing it to be truth and linked to this last investigation of his career. So, pompously, he had telephoned Anne, had told her that 'Events are moving, my dear, cannot say more, moving at pace, also may not be back this evening, seems we're at the vortex of the storm…' The curtain was coming down on his career, and that career had been utterly unmemorable; three working days remained to right the wrong. He prayed that a dog-handler–one hundred and twenty miles from the capital–had turned up a diamond, not a cut-glass bauble.

  He was at the hotel because the American's theme, the previous day, gave logic where there was as yet no proof. He went to the desk, and the lobby oozed understated comfort where his own club had none. When he had telephoned before he had been told that the room's occupant had ordered the switchboard to put no calls through. Face to face with the receptionist, his steely aggression won the day. The connection was made, he was handed the phone.

  'Joe? Dickie here. What you said last evening about mistakes and luck, and an ability to exploit-well, with some confidence I think we might be getting there. I'm downstairs with a taxi. Quick as you can, please.' He was about to ring off, then thought. The man was blind, might take an age to dress, could need help. 'Do you need a hand? Shall I come up?'

  He was told, and thought he heard a giggle, that a hand was not required. 'I'll be right down.'

  Naylor checked his pager, then his mobile–no messages, no texts. He picked up a complimentary newspaper. He sat deep in an, armchair and started on the crossword, then that bloody numbers puzzle and gasped. He had not achieved more than half a dozen of the clues, or more than two lines of numbers…The breath whistled through his teeth. 'Damn me, the old goat,' he muttered.

  Hegner came out of the lift and did not need his stick swaying in front of him to find obstacles. Mary Reakes had his arm and guided him. Hegner was dressed smartly: he had on a fresh laundered shirt and his tie nestled flush in the collar. Mary Reakes had on the same suit as the day before and the same blouse. He looked like a cat that had found a carton of cream; she looked as if she had been well and satisfactorily shagged. Naylor's jaw dropped. He would not have thought it possible…Those hands, badly blotched from little shrapnel shards and with the veins prominent, had been over the prim, preserved body of Mary Reakes–he knew they had; her eyes blazed defiance at him–always that way the morning after an office untouchable from Riverside Villas had been bedded overnight. Could recognize it a damn mile off. She seemed to challenge Naylor as she led the American close to him…He couldn't help himself, was wondering whether she kept spare smalls in her desk drawer, and spare– She fixed him, dared him. He crumpled. In all the years she had worked in the outer office beyond his cubicle door, he had never had a remotely personal conversation with her. He did not know what to say, so said nothing.

  Hegner, without sight but with that increased intuitive understanding of atmosphere, grinned. 'Hope I haven't abused your hospitality, Dickie. I don't think so…Overpaid, over-sexed, and over here. Guess I scored
two out of three…Shame the Bureau's salary levels don't match those of the private sector..' The grin settled to a laugh.

  They went through the swing doors and out into the rain. Naylor saw the care she employed to get him down the steps, across the forecourt and into the taxi.

  'So, what's this about? A mistake and luck?'

  Naylor saw the American's hand rest on Mary Reakes's thigh as the taxi crawled away in the early traffic. He thought himself churlishly abrupt, to the point of surliness, as he briefed quietly, a short paraphrase of what he knew.

  And Mary bloody Reakes did not remove the gnarled hand with the surgery scars on it and stared straight ahead at the back of the driver's neck.

  The American said, 'I think that was worth getting out of my pit to hear…It figures, it's what I told you. Now, I have just two observations to make. First, you do not allow anyone, that is anyone, to shut me out, because I'll tell you, I've forgotten more than you'll ever know on these matters, and you'll learn damn quick that you depend on my instincts. Second, if you allow the law-enforcement process to crawl over this son-of-a-bitch, you will have made an error of seismic proportions, like pissing into the wind ain't too clever. Got me?'

  She said, and didn't shift the hand, 'Our aim is to defend the realm, and that is by the maintenance of civilized standards, and civilized standards involve the gathering of evidence to set before a court. We don't go down into a gutter.'

  Naylor said, 'I believe the points you've made, Joe, are understood.'

  He thought that age seemed then to catch him, not as the waft of a breeze on his face but as the surge of a gale into his midriff, as if it could have felled him…and he seemed to hear the call of those gulls from far away, and the rumble of the Atlantic's waves on rocks and the whine of wind in overhead wires…and she'd moved the hand, had dumped it back in Hegner's lap. On a grey London morning, with the rain spitting on the road, Naylor appreciated his dependence on the American, and where it would take him–and he had three more working days of service. And the words clamoured in his mind: Look where ordinary people go about their daily business, where your citizens think they're safe.