The Walking Dead

by The Walking Dead (epub)

  Another bloody day beckoned tomorrow. Another bloody day of his own worthlessness, and he thought respect was irretrievable.

  Chapter16

  Friday, Day 16

  An hour before, Mr Justice Herbert had closed his foolscap notepad with finality, pushed it away across his desk, leaned forward, let his elbows take the weight and said, with practised earnestness, 'It is time now for us, ladies and gentlemen, to adjourn for the weekend. You will be taken back to the location where you have, so very patiently, stayed these last several nights. I am assured that recreation and outings have been arranged for you. There are many places, I imagine, that you would prefer to be but I want to put on record that your maturity and dedication have been noted, and I am confident that you will understand the necessity for the privations that you are required to suffer. We will resume at ten o'clock on Monday morning and then you will deliberate on your verdict. I wish you well for a quiet and pleasant weekend. Thank you.'

  'All rise,' the clerk had shouted, in an unnecessarily full voice. Banks had stood, had seen the judge dive for his side door, had seen the impotence and anger writ large on the brothers' faces, had noted the sullen, helpless expressions creased on the jury's–all except his Principal's, had filed out of court eighteen to oversee the loading of the coach.

  Wally had said, 'Quite envy you, Banksy. Me, I've a kid's birthday party to organize. Want to swap? Eighteen kids, twelve-year-olds, at Legoland. It'll be bloody chaos. You're a lucky sod, and don't forget it, tucked up with those deadbeats for, like the man said, "a quiet and pleasant weekend".'

  He had stood in the yard, as the soft rain dribbled on his shoulders, and had watched the brothers led to the Be]marsh van, hemmed in with prison guards and the uniformed guns. When they had been loaded, and their convoy had pulled out through the opened gates, he had gone to round up and move his jurors.

  Settled at the back of the coach, alone, he had closed his eyes, had started to think of being free.

  'Mind if I sit here?'

  A Protection Officer did not gripe–should not have scowled, but probably Banks did. He moved his coat off the seat beside him. He said curtly, the minimum of politeness, 'How can I be of help, Mr Wright.'

  'It's just that I have a problem.'

  Banks saw the smile and the shrug. His reply was brisk: 'Where we can, we try to sort them out–where's this one on the scale?'

  The juror was beside him and Banks looked into his face. Wright's eyes did not meet his. The tongue skipped over the lips. He said, 'The problem's the weekend.'

  'Everyone has a problem with the weekend.'

  'I can't stay there, shut in, not this weekend.'

  Banks was formal, distant: 'The instructions of the judge were pretty clear. You stay under guard together.'

  'I am afraid that's not possible.' Wright had his arms folded tight across his chest, like that was a defence posture. 'It's my problem.'

  'I'm sorry, but there's nothing I can do about it.'

  'You see, Mr Banks,' the voice wheedled, 'it's about my parents. They're old and they're not well, and I have a routine of visiting each weekend. It's something that's really important to them.'

  'You go out on Monday, do your bit in the jury room. From what I've heard in court, it shouldn't take too long–not that I'm suggesting how your decision on the case will go–and then you can visit your parents.'

  'You're not hearing me, Mr Banks. I go each weekend to see my parents because they're old and ill.'

  He'd attended a course when he was in CID, before going over to firearms, that dealt with interview techniques. There had been a whole morning's lecture on the recognition of evasion, the telling of lies and half-truths. Because it had been interesting, the lecture's lessons had stayed with him. Looking up to the right, not the left, was an indication that a lie was told. More compelling than the eyes was the mouth; a tongue smearing the lips was a giveaway of an untruth. Having arms close on the body and folded was the sure sign of evasion…Little things, all part of the body language, trifling but telling Banks that his Principal was playing games with him. Then Wright twisted away and presented his shoulder to Banks, which was confirmation: the lecturer had called it a 'liar's posture'. It was eleven years since he had been on that course, and everything that had been told him then was crystal sharp.

  'I sympathize with your situation, Mr Wright, but cannot do anything about it.' He thought he had closed the matter, leaned back and faced the window, the newspaper covering it.

  'So the consequences will be on your head.'

  'What consequences, Mr Wright?'

  'Pretty simple–the collapse of the trial.'

  'What–what are you saying?'

  'Arithmetic, Mr Banks. We are ten. Ten jurors make the minimum quorum. Nine, and the trial collapses. That's the consequence.'

  'The judge–if you didn't know it–has very comprehensive powers to level against anyone, forgive me, who flicks with his court.'

  'Stomach-ache, try that. Migraine. Twisted back, can't sit. I can think up a few others, and it's millions down the drain. Do I get to visit my parents or do I not?'

  Alarm bells clamoured. Consequences battered in Banks's mind. He could hear the inquest in court eighteen. Defence submissions that the case had failed…The prisoners' smirk…What did it bloody-matter to David Banks?

  'Quite honestly,' Wright said, 'you'd have to lock me in a room and stand guard outside the door, because that's where I'm going. I'm going to see my parents, and if, Mr Banks, you prevent it, I will be handing in a sick note. What do you say?'

  'Where are they, your parents?'

  He was told. They lived in the Bedfordshire town of Luton.

  Banks seemed then to shed the culture imposed by his warrant card. When his letter, two lines of it, was written and handed in, he would lose the card and his authorization to carry a firearm. It was ludicrous that, in the last hours of his service, he should play the pompous and dutiful servant of what he was about to reject. His career was gone; was in its last throes, and it concerned him not a damn that he had been lied to.

  A final vestige of that culture remained. Banks said, matter-of-fact, 'Shouldn't be a difficulty, Mr Wright. Of course, I'll have to be with you. It'll be good to meet your parents. Don't mention it to the others.'

  The juror sidled back up the aisle of the coach.

  In the late afternoon, as dusk fell, Muhammad Ajaq crawled out through the gap in the back door, pulling his bag after him. For a moment he knelt on the wet concrete step, beside the base of the tilted rainwater butt, and looked back. She was there. He could see faintly that anxiety creased her forehead, and he reached through the hole, took her offered hand and squeezed it hard, then replaced the shifted plank. When he stood, he kicked it hard so that it was flush to the door. He left them, slipped away into the gloom and went out on to the road.

  He had said to her, whispered in her ear so that the boy did not hear, 'Keep him strong. You alone can do that. He will weaken, will depend on you. You do what is necessary. They are all frightened at the last. You are with him tonight and he will lean on you, and you give him backbone. In the morning you will walk with him, and you will give him courage. The others were idiots, incapable, but you are the one who can help him. Walk with him as far as is sensible, until he has the smile on his face–we call it the bassamat al-Farah, which is the smile of joy–until he is within sight of the target area. When he smiles he is content that he is going to Paradise. Tell him, the last thing you say, that he does not look into the faces of those who are close to him, he must not. Must not gaze at the faces of the men, women and children who are around him because that is the source of failure. Then you are gone. You go home, return to your family. I think he will walk well. It is my judgement. Forget me, forget that we met, forget my face and my voice, forget everything of me, and sleep again.'

  He went fast, with a good, confident stride.

  He had the cap low on his bowed head and the scarf wrapped round
his lower face. He did not look up–did not search for cameras high on lamp-posts. He went, in that early evening, where they would come in the morning.

  The road was filled with streams of traffic, and he had to scythe through the pedestrians on the pavements. He passed the wide-fronted, brilliantly lit windows of the stores selling bright new consumer goods. He went by the wealth of his enemy, but emptiness gripped him. He felt the loneliness and it unnerved him. He was not looked at, not noticed, by the drivers of cars, lorries and vans, by the swarms of men, women and children who hurried towards him and passed him. It was as if he had no importance in their lives, and no fear of him. He swam among them. He heard laughter, raucous, and argument, and he was ignored as if he did not exist. He wanted to be dear, to be gone. Muhammad Ajaq, following the route she had given him, came down the long bill and into the town, into its soft belly.

  He stopped, hesitated. He had reached the square. Around him, the day was ending, the shutters were coming down and office workers spilled out, jostling against him. He was anonymous. In front of him, dazzlingly lit, were the windows above the steps, and the signs for the sale starting the next morning. He stared at the target. A pushchair cannoned into his legs, and an Asian woman–in a jilbab robe did not apologize but wheeled her child past him. When he stepped to the side, he was bounced by the shoulder of an Asian man whose beard was stained with the red henna dye, and again there was no apology. He went across the square and saw the sign for the bus station. When he advanced on a target in occupied Iraq–a mosque or street market of the Shi'as whom he detested, a convoy of the Crusaders whom he despised–he was satiated with commitment, and when he saw the bomb's blast he was consumed with pride. Here, he felt nothing.

  He left the bus-station sign, the square, the steps and the sale posters behind him. He had said it so many times: he should never have come. He had yearned for it so often: he craved to be back where he believed he belonged.

  Muhammad Ajaq stood in the queue–where she had told him to–and made a picture in his mind of the old men, in caves or in the compound of a tribal leader, and thought they crowded close to a battery-powered radio, and waited. He believed his name was on their lips.

  The bus came. He boarded it and found a seat.

  Muhammad Ajaq left behind him the target for a martyr bomb. He sat beside a young man who chewed gum incessantly. The bus drove away.

  Naylor stood in the doorway, had not spoken but was noticed.

  He was offered cake, compressed and fruit-filled, from a tinfoil sachet, then a mug of tea. To have regained control he should have refused both.

  He ate and drank His hand trembled and the mug dripped tea on to the crumbs at his feet. Control had passed, and he knew it.

  He had lost control by introducing the American to the equation. The American sat easily in the chair given him. The notebook, pencil and tape-recorder were laid on his lap, and he ate heartily and drank, as if the circumstances were neither peculiar nor particular.

  With his mouth still full, Naylor mumbled his question. So bloody anodyne, all the intensity of a chemist's pain-killer. 'So, how are we doing, boys? Where are we at?'

  They did not answer. Both men glanced at each other, then–as if it were synchronized–gestured towards Hegner, their spokesman. The American took his time, cleared his throat and said softly, 'We're doing good. Getting there.'

  'Where, specifically, are we getting?'

  Droll: 'We're on to the subject of a ticket.'

  The prisoner lay in deep shadow against the back wall. He had no shape, might have been a mass of half-filled, discarded sacks. Seemed not to move, was silent but for occasional wheezing groans. Naylor stared hard into the darkness and finally made out the hood and the shoulders, the feet that had no trainers on them or socks. Close to the feet a tangle of cables with bulldog clips lay loose, and he followed them to where they attached to the terminals of the floor plug.

  It must have been four hours since Naylor had last evacuated himself from his car in the Nissen in answer to a fainter scream from the brick building. The last time he had come, like an intruder, Naylor had seen the prisoner suspended from the ceiling hook, his bound wrists over it, the wires clipped to his toes, and he had asked that same question: 'Where are we at?' The answers had been shrugs, and he had turned away. Not now. He searched for resurrected authority. 'The use of electricity was not sanctioned by me and -'

  The easy drawl: 'Don't want to embarrass you, Dickie. Don't want to bring you down off your high horse.'

  '- and I should be told how far forward we have come.'

  'What I said was, we have a ticket. This is one obstinate man.'

  'A ticket for whom, from where and where to?'

  'Try making patience a virtue, Dickie. The man, right now, is more frightened of God's damnation, which comes with betrayal, than he is of us. He fancies that damnation will hurt him more than we can. We have to change his viewpoint, and that's where we're working.'

  'Whose ticket?'

  There had been something clinical, in the past, about the work of Boniface and Clydesdale…clinical and fast. A beaten Adeni Arab, from Sheikh Othman, with a split lip and bruised eye sockets, had been quick to tell where a safe-house was. An Irishman from Newtown Hamilton or Forkhill, without fingernails and pissing blood, was fast to spill where a fifty-calibre machine-gun was buried, and could then be released and would never reveal the pain inflicted for fear of his treachery becoming known. The face of a Bosnian Serb could be battered as a punchball–his testicles and kidneys too–and he would give up the secret of where an aid-worker was held in a makeshift gaol, a cellar…So why was this flicking man so bloody obstinate? He remembered the cockiness the prisoner had shown in the Paddington Green interview room…He had not believed that the confidence would translate to raw courage–hadn't another damn word for it, courage–in the face of the pain transmitted through the bulldog clips.

  'Dickie, when I have something you can act on, I'll tell you about it.'

  'That is hardly an acceptable reply. I need to know where we are.'

  'You are getting in the way now. If you don't want to be here, you should get yourself somewhere else.'

  Naylor snorted. 'Too damn right.'

  He should have been in the front bedroom, with the curtains drawn, blocking out the late-afternoon early-evening view of the cherry trees coming into blossom. That was somewhere else. Should have been dressing in a new shirt and a best tie with the Service's discreet shield and motto embroidered on it, and the suit that was back from the dry-cleaner's. Should have been giving his shoes a last buff over the toecaps and round the heels. Should have been going bloody gracefully. It was his final day, and the last hours were being eked out, and the drawers of his desk were not emptied, or his safe, and the cubicle was not cleared for Mary bloody Reakes on Monday morning. But Dickie Naylor was not somewhere else–he was in the door of a shitty little building set among fields of growing pea-pods, and the chalice he sought that would make his career remembered was still denied him.

  'I'll be in the car,' he said.

  'Best place, Dickie. Have a seat and maybe play some music.'

  'What I am concerned about–is he…' he motioned at the figure on the floor, then grimaced'…is he too weak to tell us what we have to know? You know what I mean.'

  'All under control, Dickie. I'll tell you two things: he's fine, he's fighting, but he will lose. Second, this is not standard stuff. We don't have time to sit on our backsides, play mind games and hang on till next week or next month. We leave that to the Echoes. It's what we do at the Bagram cage outside Kabul. It's how it goes in Guantanamo. Maybe the Echo does six hours straight, and then he goes to the mess and eats a steak with fries, and he believes that next week, next month, his man will crack. Patience is a luxury, Dickie. My life and yours, and the boys' lives, are not luxury. I don't have next week and next month, I have the next hour. I have to learn in the next hour where a ticket will be presented. All I have is the
word "ticket", but I have to have more or the time and the opportunity are wasted. So, do the decent thing, and go get yourself a seat in that cat'

  Authority, once ceded, was not regained.

  Naylor shuffled his feet, locked his hands and cracked the joints.

  He saw mugs emptied of their dregs on to the concrete and the dirt, hands wiped on trouser thighs. Naylor saw the prisoner lifted up, inert. He saw Boniface and Clydesdale gasp, grunt, as they raised the weight to the hook, then let him sag. Naylor saw them scrabble for the ends of the cables where the clips were. He turned away, went out into the last light of his last day.

  Naylor did not see Hegner screw his face in concentration as if the complexity of a mathematical formula exercised him, and did not hear his quiet voice.

  'Guys, I reckon we need to up the voltage. Give the boy more juice.'

  He was waiting for her in what had once been the chancel of the cathedral.

  'Good to see you, Mary'

  'You look well, Simon, very well.'

  She might have slept with him–gone to his room or him to hers in the hail of residence–but had not. He had been a theology student and quiet with his ambition, and they had been soulmates for three years, but never more than friends.

  'It's been too long.'

  'Too much water under a bridge.'

  She might have married him–in white in the church near to her parents' home or in a town hail–but had not. She had gone to London and fast-tracked through the graduate entry into the Security Service, craving advancement. He had taken the route to ordination.

  'I think of you, Mary, often enough.'

  'Thanks for that last card. Took an age to reach me, but it arrived. I appreciated it.'

  It had come, courtesy of the American military's postal service in the Green Zone of the Iraqi capital, and had shown a bland view of the river: 'Dear Mary Can't say in truth that I wish you were here, but these are interesting times–and tragic times. Love, Simon.'