The Walking Dead

  'Not confirm and not deny, and conclusions should not be drawn.'

  'You see, Tristram, where I and colleagues stand. We stand insulted. We are all officers of the Security Service. The Service is our lives. It gobbles every waking moment available…I offer you a definition of an insult: I and colleagues are not trusted, are outside the loop. My problem is that I understand why you are content to insult us.'

  He was close to her, his body and hers separated by a few short inches. What he noticed, her chest did not heave. She was in control and she spoke without bluster.

  'Please stand aside, Mary. Please let us all get on with our busy lives.'

  'What the Service is doing is a disgrace–a shameful, dishonest and illegal disgrace.'

  'If, if, that were true, then I am sure you will be happy to shelter behind your ignorance.'

  'A prisoner is undergoing torture. True or false?'

  He could have reached out with his shirt-sleeved arm, could have caught her shoulder and shoved her away, cleared his path to the door. If he had touched her his job would have gone, and he would have had ten minutes to clear his desk–he would be history.

  'I asked you, Mary, to stand aside.'

  'A member of the Service has organized, has aided or abetted, the physical abuse of a prisoner. True or false?'

  'I have nothing more to say. Please, get out of my way.'

  'We have gone down into the gutter, have come off the high ground. True or false?'

  The stiletto she had inserted into him, the blade she had twisted, had gone deep, had hurt. Her audience clung to her words. She held the stage, had held it too long. His temper broke. 'Mary, you can play an excellent imitation of a stupid, juvenile bitch. No, shut up and listen. I was at St Paul's, at that memorial service. I stood far to the back because the best seats were reserved, rightly, for those to whom the service mattered most. They were bereaved parents, widows, children who had been robbed of their mothers or fathers and who stood with shattered grandparents. They were the living–amputees in wheelchairs, faces scarred for eternity by fire, or destroyed psychologically by what they had endured and what they had seen. And for the dead and the living, little candles burned. I vowed, within sight of that altar, that on my watch it would not happen again if anything I could do would avoid it. If you wish to continue your rant I suggest you do so after first visiting the parents, the children and the mutilated, then come to me and preach. It's Birmingham, it's Saturday–you don't need to know any more. Just get on with it.'

  She stepped back, gave him room to pass. At the door, Tristram turned and looked at the desk, saw the rows of heads poring over their screens…all except Mary Reakes's. The assistant director knew then that an enemy had been made, one as implacable as any snake with poison in its fangs…What were they supposed to fucking do? Stand on the high ground and lose? Lie in the gutter and win? He slammed the doors after him. God, his head was forfeit, would be on a pole, if Dickie Naylor and his increments did not come up with gold.

  The mobile rang. Naylor was in the doorway of the little squat brick building, could not bring himself to come inside it, to be closer.

  The screams came less frequently but were more piercing. The mobile shrilled in his pocket, and he was reaching for it. He sensed another shriek coming, and shut his eyes tightly as if that would be a defence against it. He had the mobile in his hand. In the moments after each shriek, a trifle more intelligence was gained, but the price of it wounded him. Did not appear to wound the American, who sat in his chair and had the small tape-recorder on his lap; the American seemed possessed with hearing acute enough to understand the grunted words that slipped from the prisoner's lips but Naylor, himself, needed them deciphered. The mobile was at his face. The prisoner was still suspended and the two men danced, shadow shapes, round him. They worked at his exposed genitals, and he saw the wretch writhe away from them as far as was possible; nothing of escape was possible.

  He pressed the button. 'Yes?'

  'It's me.'

  'I can't speak, Anne, it's not convenient.'

  'It wasn't convenient sitting up half the night wondering if you were coming home. You should make it convenient.'

  'What is it you want? Be quick with it.'

  'Have you forgotten it's your wife you're speaking to? Where on earth are you? Dickie? Right, I'll be quick. What time will you be home tonight?'

  'Won't be.'

  'What time in the morning will you be home?'

  'Don't know.'

  'Perhaps you'd forgotten what's happening tomorrow. Mary–she sounded particularly disagreeable–rang to say that a car will pick us up at five; bring us in and fetch us home…Have you written your speech? Daddy's, when he left, was a great success because he'd written it out and kept it short and remembered only happy times, nothing maudlin. .. I want you to promise me you won't drink, not like that Barney Weatherspoon who was pickled and made an ass of himself. Are you listening to me? Dickie, are you–?'

  The scream ripped at his ears.

  'My God, Dickie, what was that?'

  'Nothing.'

  And the scream came again, in agony.

  'What's happening? Where are you, Dickie?'

  'Nothing is happening. I'm nowhere. Can't talk. Sorry, dear.'

  'Don't speak to me like–'

  He closed the call. He strained to hear the grunts–damned if he could understand them but Hegner had his recorder switched on and scrawled. longhand on a pad. He had never before, in forty-one years of married life–some happy, some miserable, some tolerable–cut off his wife in mid-sentence.

  He heard the voices.

  'Stubborn gentleman, Donald, isn't he?'

  'Very stubborn, Xavier, a gentleman decently, dedicated to his cause. But he's coming along, slow and steady.'

  Hegner said, 'Here's where we're at, Dickie: no further down the road of a target, but the kid'll be walking, so it's not a car bomb. And we have, so far, three in the cell. No biog, brief on occupations, nothing on recruitment. Khalid is a cab driver. Syed serves up fast food. There's a girl, Faria. That's where we are. I think you should phone it in.'

  He did not recognize it as dismissal.

  Naylor gulped, said, 'Just stay with it, the cell and the target. He must know something of the target–the shopping centre, New Street station, the airport, the bus station. Damn it, that city has a population of a million souls. I must have a location in Birmingham and timing. That is the absolute priority must have them.'

  He hurried away into the night, into the rain.

  He crossed the old concrete strip where Lancaster bombers had been armed and ghosts walked. He went into the big Nissen hangar where he assumed the aircraft had been repaired after flak damage, and where more ghosts roamed, and he groped for the car door.

  Naylor shut himself inside and thought that there he would be safe from the wounds of the screams, and he rang the assistant director, told him of the little that had been extracted in the last hours: names and bare details of employment. He finished with, 'But you should know, Tristram, that I have emphasized to them both most forcefully that the priority–I called it an "absolute priority"–is the location and timing. That's it. Sorry it's not more.'

  He did not know that Joe Hegner said, 'I'd like a drink. Make it coffee, black and no saccharine. I think, guys, that it's time to change tack. I don't give a rat's ass about foot-soldiers, meet up with them too many days of my life and they hold no interest for me. I reckon there was a man with them, and I don't have a name and don't have a photograph, who made their world go round, put the tick in the clock, a facilitator. I want to hear about him–don't often get close to him, but I am now and to lose the chance would piss me off…After coffee, and whatever you guys are having, I reckon it's appropriate to plug the wires into the juice.'

  She lit the candle. Before the evening had come, and the darkness, she had worked alone at clearing a space for them in the back room of the semi-detached house. The boy had not helped her, h
ad squatted down against a wall, his eyes glazed, vacant, and he had watched her but had done nothing. She had heaved aside the crumpled, dust-coated carpet and had made thick clouds of rising dirt. She had pushed, needed all her strength, to manoeuvre the settee to the room's centre. She had found a broom in the kitchen, without a handle, and a dustpan, and she had swept and made more clouds. The man was against the other wall, opposite the boy, and she had had to drag the edge of the carpet out from under him, and sweep round his feet. From him, also, there had been no assistance. She made a cleared, cleaned space in the house of her father's friend's cousin, who would not have visited it for a year since the doors and windows had been boarded up, plywood and planks nailed on to prevent access, and would not come–most likely–for another year. By then more dust would have settled and the traces of their presence would have gone. She had worked dutifully, as she would have done at home when she cleaned for her father, her brothers and her mother, who was an invalid confined to her bed. Last, secure inside its bag, which was knotted at the neck, she had laid out the waistcoat and had been careful not to bend it; she had left it near to the door on top of the crude carpet roll. For hours then, without speaking, without moving and without food to eat and water to drink, as the darkness had thickened round them, they had sat in their silence and their thoughts, and she had not been thanked for what she had done.

  She had brought the candle from the cupboard under the cottage's kitchen unit. She struck the match and it blazed, and she lit the wick. The flame burned upwards, brightly.

  Faria saw the boy's face, blinking as if the light was an intrusion on his peace, and then there was confusion across it, and his eyes were dull, without life. She remembered what she had seen of his face when he had crawled–prodded forward by the man–through the loosened plank at the bottom of the back door. Then, on his face, she had seen despair, and she had tried not to look at it as she had worked on the room, but she saw it now and the same misery was closed over it…And she saw the man's face. It was cold and indifferent. She tried to smile, to match the faint warmth of the candle's flame.

  The man asked quietly, 'Why did you light it?'

  'Was I wrong to?'

  'Did the dark frighten you?'

  Was he laughing at her?

  She bridled. 'No, I'm not afraid of it. Might have been when I was a child, but–'

  He interrupted and his voice was distant, as if he talked to himself, not to her. 'The darkness is a friend. Throughout each day I pray for the darkness. The enemy has night-vision glasses and infrared that identifies a body's heat, but I can move with freedom in the darkness.' He looked away, as if the exchange of words was meaningless and the breath used on them wasted.

  She had been kneeling by the candle, but she eased back and sat on the settee, its cushions, where a smell of age and damp reeked, sagged below her. She leaned on the arm and turned to the boy. Her smile was wider and making it cracked at the scar on her face. The knitted skin itched. What to say? He needed kindness, support. What was not hollow? She did not know.

  'Are you all right, Ibrahim?' It was meant as kindness but its emptiness echoed round her.

  He gazed at her and his eyes were wide open, stared at her. 'Is this where we stay, until…?'

  She glanced at the man, saw his shrug. She said softly, 'It is where we stay.'

  'Where do I wash?'

  'I'm sorry, where. ..?'

  He blurted, 'I have to wash, and to shave my body, spray on scents when it is clean and shaven. Where do I do that?'

  She looked at the man. To Faria, he seemed to roll his eyes. Did it matter? She remembered what she had read: the bombers in Lebanon and Palestine, the martyrs, washed, shaved and put on perfumes before they walked to or drove a car at a checkpoint or a shopping mall. She saw it in the man's gestures and the backward toss of his head:, in Iraq, the bombers were on a conveyor-belt and sometimes they were prepared–dressed in a belt or a waistcoat or handcuffed to the steering-wheel of a vehicle–in a grove of palm frees beside irrigated fields, and they had no opportunity to wash, shave and anoint themselves, and went to God and to Paradise dirty. They smelt of sweat when they died. The man did not care. She leaned further across the settee's arm and let her hand rest on the boy's.

  She said, 'I will help you to wash. When I go out to buy food I will bring back a razor for you, and scents. I promise I will.'

  Across the room from her, the shadows on his face, she saw the man nod–so briefly–as if he approved her answer. She thought she had played her part well, and she squirmed. If he had not been there, the man, she would have taken the boy in her arms, held him against her breast, and would have fried to give him comfort from her warmth…but he was there and watched. But she left her hand on the boy's. He was so far from his home, and so distant from what he knew, so long separated from the commitment made to his recruiters–and in. the man's bag, beside his knee, was the video that condemned Ibrahim. The boy would die in a foreign land…Faria shuddered, and she held his hand tighter.

  23 July 1938

  In three hours we advance.

  We are at the Ebro river. We have barges and rafts that have been brought up since dusk and they will take us across. We do not know if the enemy expects us or whether we will achieve surprise.

  Our battalion has been given the target of taking Hill 421, and we have called it the Pimple. I looked across the width of the river at it this afternoon, when the sun was behind it and in my eyes, but I could see that it was well named. It is nothing: it is just a target. I cannot believe, if we take it, that the course of the war will be changed…but I have not said that, my doubt, because I no longer have friends that I would trust–to say it would be treason. Behind us are machine-guns. They will not fire at the enemy, but at us if we break and retreat, if we turn and run.

  Opposite us is the Army of Africa, the Moors. Our commissars have told us that we cannot surrender to them, even if we have no ammunition left and are surrounded. The Moors–it is what the commissars say–have orders to kill any prisoners who are volunteers of the International Brigade. They will slice off our genitals and then they will slit our throats. That is the encouragement we have from the commissars: we cannot fall back and we cannot surrender. We must fight to the death, or be victorious.

  So, we must take Hill 421, or it is over.

  I wonder, dear Enid, if this will be the last entry in my diary.

  All through this day, since we were moved forward to our start line, there has been a great quiet among our people. Are we doomed? Or damned? I believe so.

  It is a clear night. When we advance to cross the Ebro river, we are promised that a mist will be over the water that will help us. This morning there was such a mist, but it was brief. The sun burned it away within two hours of dawn. When the mist has gone, the Moors will hit us with their artillery and mortars, and the German and Italian aircraft will fly against us, and the Pimple–should we have reached it–will be an easy place for them to find us.

  I try to tell myself not to be afraid. I had no fear when Daniel and Ralph were with me. Without them, now, I have no friend to give me strength. I am not afraid of death, nor am I afraid of a wound, however awful. I am, however, afraid off fear. There were men at Brunete, on Mosquito Hill, and at Suicide Hill, above the Jarama valley, who froze in fear; some lay on the ground and cried, and some threw away their rifles and ran back. We have seen the consequence of that fear. It is a post, it is a cigarette, it is a blindfold, it is an order to aim and to shoot given to a squad of comrades–it is the most ignominious and shameful of deaths.

  The light has gone out. None of us, I believe, has heart left in this war.

  To end it against a post, with a cloth across my eyes, would be the worst.

  I am thinking of Mr Rammage and his clerks at their ledgers–and of the members of my Poetry Group who will be meeting tomorrow evening–and of you, my dear Enid. Thinking of all that was secure in my life, where there is no Hill 421…Better with them
and with you than here? I cannot say that.

  We are all destined to face challenges. Mine, after dawn, is the Pimple.

  He closed the notebook. It was his rule, however great the provocation of what he had read, never to skip forward.

  Precious few pages remained, but it was the discipline of David Banks that he had not–ever–turned to the last.

  Overwhelmed by what he had read, he lay half dressed on the bed and gazed up at the ceiling light.

  Obsession had hooked into him–the barbs of the triple hooks slung under a copper spoon that his father had tied to the line when they had gone together to find a pike in the big pool below the weir. Always that excitement when his father had made ready the tackle, always that massive sense of disappointment and shame when a fish had been dragged to the bank and was found to have taken the hooks too deep for them to be extracted, and his father had killed it with a hammer blow to the head, and the lustre had gone from the scales, and the carcass was left for the rats or for a heron's feast.

  He reflected on the twisting moods his great-uncle's war had evoked in him: hatred of Cecil Darke and admiration. Loathing and fascination. Loyalty to the man and betrayal of him. Self-examination and self-destruction…At the weekend, incarcerated, with the jurors in the barracks camp, he would read those last pages–from compulsion–and would curse again his great-uncle for what had been inflicted on him. Then he would write his letter of resignation.

  In his mind was a man who was not a conscripted soldier, was a volunteer, was far from home…who had faced his enemy, yet was most afraid of fear.

  Abruptly, Banks turned on his stomach, his head buried in the pillow. He sought to block out the images of Cecil Darke, who had no face to him, but all he saw was the river and beyond it a shallow hill on which howitzer shells fell, over which aircraft wheeled, into which bullets spattered, a killing ground…and he knew he would not sleep.