The Walking Dead

  They climaxed, the second time, noisier than the first.

  Would they now, please, bloody well sleep?

  He drifted…The weekend had arrived, tugged him towards Monday morning when he would be gone, forgotten and the loss of him unmourned…What stayed with him, tossed him awkward on the settee, was the charity for an enemy: I think of him as being as far from home as I am. Banks thought the charity of Cecil Darke showed true humility and courage, was that of a man who was brave and principled.

  He knew he wouldn't sleep, would be exhausted–fit for nothing–when the new day dawned…and that was fine because he didn't have anything to be fit for.

  Chapter18

  Saturday, Day 17

  The sight was locked. The shape of the man's upper body, chest and head filled the telescopic lens. The finger was off the guard and on to the trigger bar. The squeeze started, with gentle pressure…The man had no face. At the base of the lens' view was a cardboard box. Perhaps the man paused for a moment to gather breath, perhaps had forgotten that the parapet of sandbags was lower there, that he was exposed. The sniper prepared himself for the recoil at his shoulder, and its bruising power. The man he would shoot had no face.

  His mobile rang.

  The sniper had been with him through the night. If he had slipped towards sleep, escaped from the marksman, the clock's chimes in the town had shaken him back to the image. On the settee, with the blanket nicked up and scarcely covering him, he had lived with the sniper in the darkness hours.

  Reaching down, Banks fumbled for his mobile and found it underneath his trousers and the belt that held the pancake holster. He answered.

  'Right, found you. Wally here. Banksy, where the hell are you?' He said the name of the town.

  'Banksy, what's going on? I can't sleep, got an itch in my bum. I call the location, just a check and just doing my job–not intending to wake you. The location night-duty bugger tells me all's quiet, then adds you're not there, or the top Tango…What, in God's name, are you doing off camp with no clearance from me? I gave an OK for a few hours, not an overnight. What's going on? Am I asking something unreasonable? I don't think so.'

  He lied, and it didn't seem a big deal. The lie was that the ailments of his Principal's sick mother and father had worsened. A mercy call, and really necessary to be there through the night.

  They'd started up again in the bedroom. Banks could hear them through the thin wall and the thinner door–grunts, groans, a mattress heaving–and he cupped his hand round the mouthpiece of the mobile so that his chief inspector would hear only the quiet of a house of the sick and the ill. He said lie hadn't telephoned because he hadn't wanted to distract his superior from the planning of a kid's birthday party.

  'If that's not impertinent, Banksy, I don't know what is. That's bloody cheek. If I don't know where my people are, it reflects on me. It makes me a prat, which I don't like, an inefficient prat.'

  He said that he took responsibility for his decision, and that this morning the patients seemed in better health and that he hoped the kid's birthday party would go well.

  'You have an attitude problem, Banksy. That's what I was told, that's what I've found out for myself. Here's a fact of life: you were assigned to us because you weren't wanted on serious business. There's a major bloody alert on. Every gun in the goddamn force is out on the streets, that's the word, but not you. You were not wanted because you have a problem. Don't think this won't be reported. I gave you support and my reward is that you've shat on me…Go back to your bloody beauty sleep and, when it's convenient, take your Tango back where he's supposed to be–and don't move a bloody inch without my say-so…You there, Banksy?'

  The groans of the mattress had become squeals, shrieks. He lied again, said a doctor was due to call when the working day started and would give Mr Wright an all-clear on his parents. Then he would take the Tango back to the location. Again he wished the chief inspector well for the kid's party.

  'You're a plonker, Banksy, a useless plonker and a–'

  He cut the call, dropped the mobile back on to his trousers, on to the holster. And they finished. A last gasp, a final shout, and bloody finished. He lay on his back and his thoughts returned to where they had been previously.

  He was with the sniper.

  What had been with him through the night were the calculations the marksman would have made…Four years back, they'd done a course with paratroops out on the Brecon Beacons, and there had been a sergeant instructor who'd talked them through a sniper's skills. Wasn't relevant to Banks, but he'd listened. It was more for S019 gun people who might carry a rifle and be put on rooftops for a state occasion or be tasked into a siege situation. He'd thought, before he listened, that a sniper had a damn great 'scope on the barrel that did the work. He'd heard about the mathematics of 'wind deflection' and 'bullet drop', and he'd been shown the little laminated charts that listed the equations. The sergeant had talked about the need to watch a flag's motion or the bend of trees, and how an aim might be at a roof gutter when the target was lounged by a ground-floor door, or by sunshine or snow. He had learned of the experience and skills of the sniper, which overrode a pocket calculator…and a target could be hit at a thousand paces. During the night he had set himself behind the 'scope sight and had seen the last of the autumn's dead leaves blowing between the pocked shell-holes of Hill 421 across the Ebro valley, and paper scraps carried by the summer -wind. The sniper had used his skills and experiences, the same as the sergeant instructor's, to fire the bullet into the chest of Cecil Darke. He could not see his great-uncle's face. The sniper had. The sergeant instructor, men quiet around him and listening to an expert, said that the sniper–among his own–was a hated man. Shrapnel from an artillery shell, a mortar bomb's splinters or the bullets from a traversing machine-gun carried, random death. The sniper looked into the features of his target, saw the magnified eyes, saw the chest where a heart beat and where a photograph of a loved one was pocketed, made a judgement, and fired. Could he? Could he look into the face, through the 'scope, of a stranger and make him familiar and take the time to know him, then kill him?

  Play God-–could he?

  He rolled off the settee.

  The apartment was still. Beyond the thin wall and the thinner door, they were spent.

  He found, at last, a way to lose the image of the finger on the rifle's trigger bar.

  Banks took the magazine from the Glock, then the magazines that were housed in the holdall. He began, carefully and methodically, to empty them. He laid the bullets out on the back of his shirt, beside his trousers, made four little piles of them. It was a therapy, of no purpose but to clear his mind. Then he reloaded the magazines, pressed each bullet down against the spring. It was the routine of his working life, what he did each morning before going on duty. Unthinking, hands moving mechanically, Banks filled the four magazines and placed three in his holdall, and one in his pistol. He worked a bullet into the breach, checked the safety, put the Clock into the holster.

  It was worth doing. The procedure was not so that he was proof against a jam of the firing mechanism but to clear his mind. Through the curtains, not closed completely, the dawn was coming. Later he would read the last page of the notebook, but he had succeeded, had lost sight of the sniper's finger that whitened as the pressure on the trigger grew.

  The room was lighter, but Banks slept.

  Also waking that morning and preparing for the coming day…

  In the second bedroom of his mother's housing-association home, out in the Leagrave district of the town, Lee Donkin shivered as he dressed. The tremors were not from the cold: he had not injected brown into his veins last night, or the last day, not for fucking near a week. He did not pad to the bathroom, did not wash and had not run a brush across his teeth. He dragged on yesterday's sweatshirt over yesterday's vest, and yesterday's jeans over yesterday's pants, and yesterday's socks. From the floor he took his anorak with the hood and slipped into it, then prised his feet int
o his trainers. He could not control the shake and shouted an obscenity, but was not heard. He did not know where his mother was, from which pub she had been taken home by a punter. If she had been there she would have yelled back a curse from her room for waking her…She was not often there. He went to the kitchen, took bread from the bin, ignored the pale green mould on the crusts, and wolfed it down, but it had little effect on the shivering. He heard the couple who lived above them already rowing, and the baby next door was crying. He lifted up a chair from beside the kitchen table, and banged against the ceiling with its legs. Now he went to the bathroom and wrapped his hand in his anorak's sleeve. He stood on the lavatory seat and stretched himself up to the old cistern high on the wall and reached inside. He retrieved a short-bladed knife from the hiding-place in which it was taped. It went into his pocket. Later, before he left, he would rummage in the debris–clothing, fast-food plastic plates and syringes–on the floor of his room for his gloves, lightweight leather. His hands would never touch the handle of his favoured knife. He was too smart, too switched on, to give prints or DNA if he was done on the street with a stop-and-search. Just found it, hadn't he, just picked it up in the street and just going to hand it in, wasn't he? They had an operation going, the police had, and called it Failsafe, but they hadn't netted him, too smart and switched on. Because he craved the brown, Lee Donkin needed a snatch that morning–on the way to the shopping centre in the square and the sale when purses were loaded–needed it bad.

  Avril Harris crawled from her bed, stumbled to the bathroom. All through the night, she had festered the anger that she had been sold short, had bought a car that was already broken. She had been out the previous evening for a curry with three of the other girls from A and E, and she'd been the one who hadn't drunk a beer or three and had given two of them a lift back. Every time she'd slowed at the damn lights, the backfire had gone. A hell of a noise. Hadn't frightened the others, with beer inside them, but had made them laugh hysterically. They had laughed at her car, when it should have been her pride and joy. In the bathroom, under the shower, her anger slackened. She thought through her day ahead…Up and out and into the car, bloody thing. A drive into the town and at the multi-storey car park around nine, and into the shopping centre a few minutes after Wasn't going to hit the mad rush for the opening of the doors. Into work by eleven. If it hadn't been for the car–sluicing herself under the shower's rose–it would have been a day to look forward to.

  His alarm, old-fashioned with a clapper bell, woke Steve Vickers. His had been a good, dreamless sleep. Off to the bathroom and he ran the piping-hot water. He was content, as close to happiness other than when he had an attentive audience round him. Without his daily bath he would have been–his opinion–a lesser, unfulfilled man. Living alone, he had no queue outside the door, no one to bang it and urge him to hurry. He lay among the suds and talked to himself, aloud, of the history he would impart that morning. He believed that what he did in bringing history alive was valuable, couldn't imagine anything else he might achieve had greater value. He lingered, ran more hot water, had time enough before he met his audience in the town square.

  George Marriot's sister shook him awake. She gazed down at him and he recognized the affection that linked them. He assumed that at the pub–could not be otherwise–his life with his spinster sister was a source of sniggering amusement. She was already dressed. They would laugh in the pub, when he had gone out through the door and had started on his walk home with his sticks to aid him, that they were two lonely, misplaced souls, the flotsam rejects of ordinary life…They knew sod all…She was always up at five and she always woke him at six. He could get to the bathroom without the support of the sticks. There was a line made by his hands along his room's wallpaper, along the corridor and into the bathroom. Informer times, it was him that would have risen at five, but they were gone. He used the shower, always cold water falling on him. It took him back to the days of the camps at Kandahar and Jalalabad, when the dawn peeped up over the mountains and fighting men prepared for their day and the scars on his legs still puckered and were deep blue where the surgeons had probed for detritus. The chill of the shower invigorated him, gave scope to his memories of the best of days…One cloud, always one bloody cloud in a sky of clear blue. The petty remarks about his shirt–true, but should not have been said –had hurt, were wounds. When he had eaten his breakfast of kedgeree–egg, fish and rice, she cooked it for him every day of the week–he would go down to the village, take the bus to the town, buy three shirts in the sale and, with luck, still have change from a twenty-pound note and bring flowers for her back with him. The water ran on his skin, as it had done when it had dripped from an elevated oil drum and he'd hunted men for bounty, when his life had had purpose. The long-nurtured memories gave him comfort.

  'He'll have slept rough,' Hegner said.

  'Joe, I'm already about a light year's miles beyond any authority I once owned. I'm outside. Hours back, the card I swipe at the door of Riverside Villas will have been made invalid. If we lose this, I'm done for.' Dickie Naylor would be anyway, and he knew it.

  He heard the snort of derision. 'I've gotten the feeling you're a man who sees his glass as always half empty. Buck up, Dickie, tell me where we are.'

  His boys, the elderly Boniface and Clydesdale, were in their car and the glow of their cigarettes lit their faces, so passive and calm, as if what had gone before was past history, worthless. Not so with Naylor. He seemed to hear the screams, had heard them while he drove south and west. They were the same, piercing, as those of the gulls that had flown from the water when the first of the dawn's smear was on the horizon.

  Naylor said, 'We're facing the sea.'

  'I feel it on me.'

  'About two hundred yards to the right of us is the entrance to the ferry terminal. Two entrances, for vehicles and foot-passengers. Nearest to us is the foot-passengers' gate. Going on from the terminal is the commercial area, warehouses and company offices, but that's all fenced off. Then there are cliffs that go out to the big headland. We're on the esplanade, that's the walkway between the road and the beach. The road is well lit, but not the walkway. The lights are aimed away from it. There are benches and–'

  'Not a tourist brochure, Dickie, stick with the programme.' Asked, with acid, 'What time is your flight?'

  'Time enough for this to have finished–and don't you worry, Dickie, you're going to be a hero. Take me left.'

  There was a low mist on the beach, hovering at the edge of the esplanade. He described it. He could see a pier, supported by pillars against which waves broke, a haze clinging round it.

  'Am I getting on your nerves, Dickie? Don't mean to. I would have traded my right ball, right anything, in exchange for the sight of two good eyes. You're a friend to me. How far is the pier and what's beyond it?'

  Naylor softened. He realized it now: the American's hand was loose on his arm. He 'could not imagine it, the darkness that was for always, and shuddered. He peered down the esplanade, squinted–damn tired from the drive and he hadn't slept in a bed for so bloody long, and tomorrow was his sixty-fifth birthday, and then he was as washed up as the weed the waves lifted–and said that there were more benches and a shelter hut. He told of all he saw.

  Naylor's arm was held in a firmer grip. The voice rattled, as if the cold was in Hegner's throat. 'He'll have slept rough, depend on it, but stayed in sight of the sea. He has to see the boat come in, unload its people. Then he's within sight of safety. Don't reckon he's gone to the right, where you say it's commercial, because there'll be cameras there and security men and it won't be a place he can loiter. He'll want to seem like a vagrant, a drifter, and that's a bench or a shelter. Go into his mind. Right at this moment the ferry coming in is the single most important item in his life. The boat is freedom. He will be travelling alone…That kind of man, trusting damn near nobody, believes he is safest when solitary–on foot. Will see the boat come in, see it disembark its people, will come walking…Dicki
e, take my advice and I'll promise the red carpet out in front of you, except there'll be a fence round it so nobody sees you.'

  He was beyond fighting, went with the flow. He was the bureaucrat who accepted orders. Had done all his life, could not change on the eve of a birthday.

  'You don't have a photograph, don't even have a description.'

  'It'll be the way he walks. How many male foot-passengers? A dozen or twenty? How many of them in the demographic window? Five or ten? But only he, the Twentyman, will walk in a way that betrays him.'

  'Shuffling? Nervous, hesitant?'

  'You're a mile off, Dickie. He's a leader. He's a man who has come, done his business. He's a captain of war, and is going back to familiar territory. He'll think not as a fugitive but as the guy who fucked you over. He'll walk as a leader does, like a captain. We go down from here towards that pier. We sit there and we wait. Each man who comes, you tell me how he walks. That'll be good enough for me.'

  The gulls came over Naylor, and the wind freshened on his face. He searched the sea's horizon for the ferry-boat but saw only the pink of the sky on the grey of the sea. The car started up, U-turned in the road beyond the esplanade and headed off past the empty benches and the shelter hut. It stopped level with the pier. Naylor strode after them, and the beat of the waves against the pillars grew in his ears.

  The lights, when Ajaq first saw them, were blurred in the mist.

  The dawn grew bolder. A wetness from the night hours had settled on him and the damp hung on his face and hands. It was too soon for him to move, to leave the bench. He would have preferred rain and cloud low over the shoreline and the harbour because grey gloom dulled men's senses. He wanted them dulled when he reached the queue for the foot-passengers, when his passport was examined by men who yawned, fidgeted and shivered. A cleaning cart came behind him, the brushes scouring up rubbish from the gutter beside the esplanade's kerb. The first cars of the morning were on the road. A woman crossed it with a dog on a leash and took the animal down to the shingle and sand below him; he watched the dog squat close to the surf.