Confusion, because he did not know whether Polly Wilkins had blundered on something of importance or was distracted by an irrelevance.
And no way of telling, not till dawn, not before the banks of government computers in the outposts of the ministries across the Thames sprang to life. God, was he not too old for all of it? He saw them sometimes, rarely more than often, the men and women who had taken the retirement carriage clock or the decanter and glasses set, and had handed in their swipe-card IDs for entry to the main doors of Vauxhall Bridge Cross.
All had gone out, at the end of a Friday afternoon, last day of the month, bowed with tiredness and clutching their gift of appreciation. Every one of those whom he met, on a pavement or by chance in a restaurant, seemed reborn. They were like those come-lately Christians, oozing confidence and brimming health.
'You know the best-kept secret inside that bloody place, Freddie? There's a life outside. Never knew it till I got there – outside. Haven't ever felt better. Don't mind me, Freddie, but you look a bit washed through.
When are you chucking it in, Freddie? My only regret, should have done it years back.' It frightened him, alone on the bed with the quiet of the building hugging him, that he should be gone from the place, yesterday's man, with work unfinished. 'That bloody place' was Freddie Gaunt's home… He was drifting towards a fitful sleep.. . And the enemies he hunted were his life-blood – but he could not guess where they were, could not identify them because they wore no damned uniform.
He did not know where his name was written down, what alias was used, and how many had access to it.
He travelled to work each day in his uncle's transit van, with his uncle's logo on the side, sitting with his tools and his uncle's sons. He was far from his immediate family: his parents, brothers and sisters lived in the port city of Karachi where his father and brothers broke up the steel hulls of unwanted ships for scrap metal. He had wanted more and his ambitions had led him to join his mother's brother in London. Ambition had not been fulfilled. At the age of twenty-three, he was not a laboratory scientist, not an engineer, not a scholar, but a plumber's mate. The resentment had flourished sufficiently to take him to a mosque in south London where an imam talked at Friday prayers about injustice. There was the injustice that permitted white society to walk over the aspirations of Muslim youth in his new homeland, the injustice shown to worshippers of Islam in Saudi, Afghanistan, Chechnya and Palestine. He no longer harboured resentment. Two years ago, less a month, he had been asked to stay behind as the faithful had slipped away from the prayers, and the imam had spoken to him in a hushed tone. Would he serve?
Would he wait until he was called? Did he have the strength of his faith? Was patience a virtue of his? He went now to a new mosque, in the west of the city, where an imam preached religion but did not speak of the war zones where Muslim brothers fought for the privilege of martyrdom.
He was brighter at work, did not complain about rising and dressing before the dawn's light lifted over the capital. Each morning and each evening he crossed the City of London on his way to and from work. Some days the crowded Transit van was stopped by the armed police officers at their road-blocks, but their route was always the same and they had become known. More often now they were waved through and drove away from the men with protective vests and machine-guns without being quizzed and the van's contents searched. The same applied at his place of work, where he wore an identification tag hung from a neck chain, and there also the security guards were familiar to them.
Five days a week, the van was parked in a designated bay deep in the basement of the great tower that was Canary Wharf. In those two years he had learned by heart the hidden ducts that carried the air-conditioning systems, water supplies and sewage outlets in the building that dominated the skyline and could be seen from many miles away. He thought it a symbol of the power that had denied him the opportunity to fulfil his ambitions. Each working day, he saw the surge in and out of the many thousands who had blocked him, and did not know of him. One day, he had been told, a man would seek him out, would speak to him: 'God will say, "How many days did you stay on the earth?" 'He would answer, and the words were always in his mind: 'They will say, "We stayed a day or part of a day." 'It no longer troubled him that his response, from the Book, 23:112-113, gave him the answer of the unbelievers on the Day of Judgement.
He had been promised that one day the man would come, and he believed the promise.
His primary job was to drive the forklift vehicle that moved the flat-packs of self-assembly furniture from the lorries that came from the factory at Ostrava in the Czech Republic. His secondary job was to be first at the warehouse to unlock the side gates of the yard and the main building where the offices were, flush on the street, and in the evening he was the last to leave, and fastened and checked the doors, windows and main gate.
The forklift driver walked along the street, briskly because he was late on his schedule, and saw a man on the step outside the offices' door, hunched, low and in the shadow. Few matters concerning the warehouse surprised the driver. He worked for a company owned by Timo Rahman, and knew a little of the complexities of his employer's business. He understood that, in the affairs of Timo Rahman, men came without warning and without introduction to the warehouse, and that questions were not asked and explanations were not offered. He passed the man and, because the head was bowed, did not see the face. He went on to the corner, turned into the narrow driveway that separated the warehouse and offices from the next premises. He loosed the padlock on the yard gates.
Cursorily he checked the vans, then opened, with the keys entrusted to him, the back door of the offices.
Because he had been delayed that morning by the police cordon and was behind with his routine, he hurried to the toilets – men's and women's. His first task of each day was to wash them, clean the hand basins and sluice the floors. Then, he should have- The bell at the office door pealed. He left the toilets, his mop and bucket, and hurried past the unlit offices of Administration, Sales and Accounts, and unbolted – top and bottom – the street door. The man glanced over his shoulder, scanned the street, then pushed past him.
'I'm late, I'm sorry.'
The man who had waited on the doorstep shrugged.
The forklift driver babbled, 'I was delayed this morning…'
It was many months since he had been late opening the yard and offices. He thought the man had not slept that night – his eyes were baggy and lines cut his face at the side of them. The man leaned against the corridor wall and his shoulder was against a photograph of a dining-room table and chairs set after they had been assembled from a flat-pack.
'… I could not leave home. You know Hamburg, I suppose. Yes? I live at Wilhelmsburg. Police, so many police, there. I have to prove my residence to the police before I can leave, show my papers, but there is a long queue ahead of me. Not in my block, but the one next to it, a woman was killed.'
The head turned and tired eyes raked his face. As an Albanian he was trusted, and sometimes Timo
Rahman – when he came to the warehouse – would drop a hand on his shoulder and tighten it there. Then he glowed with pride. He thought, for what he did, he was well paid, but the wage given him allowed him to live only in a Wilhelmsburg tower block. The reaction of the man encouraged the forklift driver to go further with his explanation of lateness.
'My wife knows everything. She says the woman was murdered in her apartment by strangulation. It is not her husband – he was at work. It is not a thief. The people of the towers in Wilhelmsburg, they have nothing to steal. My wife made coffee for the police when they came yesterday. They said what they think.
She was killed, most probably, by a boyfriend she entertained in secrecy. They will go back in her history because always there is a trace of a friend, they told her. They are confident that, very soon, they will have the identity of the friend. It is good. A man who kills a woman close to her baby, he is a beast. He is con-temptible.' He a
pologized again for his lateness, and asked what he could do.
Did he have a number for the residence of Timo Rahman?
'I have, but I am instructed to call it only on matters of great importance.'
He should ring the number.
'What am I to say?' He felt a tremor of nervousness at the thought of ringing the residence of Timo Rahman before dawn. 'Would you not wait till the manager comes, in less than two hours?'
He should ring the number now. He should say that a Traveller has come.
'A Traveller, yes.' The man's eyes were locked on him. 'I will say to Timo Rahman that a Traveller has come.'
'Who is he?'
His wife, Alicia, mother of his children, stared back dumbly at him.
'What is his name?'
The children, the girls, had come to the bedroom door, had huddled there and had shaken in fear, and he had dismissed them.
'Does he come often?'
Timo Rahman did not believe that Ricky Capel, the mouseboy, would have dared lie to him. Nobody lied to him. If Ricky Capel said he did not know the man who had broken into their garden, then he was believed. It was inconceivable that Ricky Capel – in his power – should lie to him.
'You were in the summer-house. You give me no explanation why, in the darkness, you were in the summer-house. When he is seen, the man is on the wire behind the summer-house. Why was he there?'
His wife, Alicia, was on the bed, curled, shrivelled, against the pillows. She had pulled her knees close up to her chest, and he could see her shins and thighs.
Anger swarmed through him.
'Is my wife, to whom I have given everything she could want, a whore?'
Her arms were round her head and her body shook with her tears.
'Does my wife go to the summer-house in the evening to be fucked? Do you lie on the cushions and open your legs wide to take him? Is that what my wife does?'
She seemed to wait for him to strike her.
'You are in the summer-house, and he is there. What else should I think?'
She flinched, was back against the cushions, could not escape further from him.
'Do you not understand the shame you have brought on me, on my children?'
There was a light knock on the door.
'I will clean you. The dirt on your skin will be taken off, where his body was against your body. I promise it – I will clean you.'
He left her. Outside the door, Timo Rahman turned the key in the lock. The Bear was impassive, as if he knew of no crisis gripping the family. He had made his promise: he would clean her. He was told of the telephone message sent from the warehouse of his company that sold self-assembly furniture, and as he strode away from the bedroom door, he showed no sign of the hurt that wounded him – deeper than a knife had, more painfully than a bullet had.
He believed that his wife, his children's mother, was a whore.
Malachy saw the dawn come up.
She'd said, 'I am reliably told you are a man with a price on your head. So, to keep that pretty head on your shoulders, you keep it down. What you've seen already is good enough for me and should be for you.
Play the silent wallflower in the corner, if you want to, but understand that, right now, computers are spilling out your life story. When I come back, with your biography, I want you here, no more silly buggers, with explanations.'
First light caught the beds of flowers, with colours laid in tight-set banks, and above them were canopies of spring blossom. She had clasped her hands together, made a stirrup for his shoe, taken his weight, then heaved him up so that he could straddle the top of the fence separating the empty car park of the conference centre from the botanical garden and she had waved him off towards dense shrubs. Her questions in the car on the drive through the city had gone unanswered. He had been shaken awake in the car, a few minutes after he had given her the name and street where the hotel was. Then they had gone slowly down Steindamm and had seen men hurry out through the doors carrying the clothes he had left there and the bag. They had shouldered past two girls looking for the last trade of the night, and one had had a mobile at his face. He had not been able to answer the spray of questions because to have done so would mean reliving the pain of his disgrace. He could not, yet, confront it. The low point, down in a gutter of slime and shit, was deep-set agony – since he had taken the train to London, months before, he had not known a friendship tight enough for him to confide in. A dog did not go, after so hard a kicking, back in search of love.
She'd called after him, as he'd sloped towards deeper shadows, 'Did you hear me? I want some talk out of you, no more of wasting my bloody time.'
Hidden from the main path by the bushes, he sat on a bench and the wind flaked blossom petals down on him. They lingered on his hair, face and shoulders. He doubted he could fight her any more.
Last thing, as he'd gone for cover, she'd yelled,
'When I'm back, I'll have you stripped as bare as the day you were born, believe it. I'll be getting more than your blood group, religion and your damn number.
Try me.'
Chapter Fourteen
'It's quite a read, your life, isn't it?' She gazed at him, her mouth set. The eyes behind the spectacles were big and seemed to bore into him. Malachy looked away from her.
'And that's only the digest that I've been sent. I suppose when the whole lot of it spews up it gets worse.'
'I don't look for sympathy/ he muttered.
'Wouldn't have thought, where you're coming from, there were too many barrowloads of pity. Can you talk about it? I'm not a shrink, don't know about couch therapy.'
She'd found him in a squared-off sunken area on the edge of the Japanese garden. A feeble fountain trilled a spray down into a stone-banked pool and its drops mingled with the rain. The blossom snow covered his shoulders and the cobbles round his feet, and had begun to form a covering on her hair. They were together on a bench and the wind was in the trees, but they were protected from it by the high shrubs that encircled them. He felt a sharp spasm of anger.
'I don't go scavenging for a shoulder to cry on. For a simple reason, I don't give explanations for what happened, for what I did. I don't know what happened.'
'That's a good enough line. In your boots I'd stick with it.'
'Hear me again… I don't know what happened – everybody else does, but not me.'
'They called you a coward.' She seemed to roll the word on her tongue, as if it were strange to her, not a word she had used before. Beyond her experience.
But she said it with a boldness, coward, like it was of no importance to her if he were hurt by the word. 'My boss has dug it up. Seems there were other descriptions of you, but all end up in the same locker, "coward". Were they correct in their assessment?'
'I don't know. That's not just soap and water to wash it out. It's what I'm tagged with… but I don't know. Why, Miss Wilkins, do you not just go and find something else to do?'
Her face, which had been cold, chilled further. Her voice had edge: 'I am trying to make a decision that involves you. Do I spend time with you? Do I dump you and walk away? My work is on a short fuse of opportunity and I am loath to waste the few opportunities available to me in semantic bloody sparring with you. I work at VBX and-'
Malachy said, 'I know what's at Vauxhall Bridge Cross, haven't been there but people from the place came to us.'
She flared, 'Learn, please, not to damn well interrupt me. I am wet through, tired and hungry and… I am tasked, for reasons that have sod-all to do with you, to investigate Timo Rahman, godfather, brothel-owner and people-trafficker. What do I find? I find, on hour one, a guy in dosser's gear hanging on Rahman's security fence with the dogs of hell trying to pull him off it, and the dosser is a former Brit officer whom I then learn has enough disgrace on his back to bury him. This guy is now a fox, no cover to run to, with the hounds baying and bloody horns tooting
… What's extraordinary about the fox, he's put his head over the wall and gone
into the hounds' kennelyard. That is either death-wish stupidity or courage based on purpose. Are you going to help me make my decision?'
'If it were easy… '
'Don't wriggle, get honest. For God's sake, look at me.' Her arm snaked out, her wet hand snatched at his chin, her fingers caught the flesh and her nails pressed on his jawbone. She twisted his face towards hers. He blinked, but did not try to break her grip.
'Are you worth any of my time or not? Two sorts of bravery that I can think of. Physical – blokes jumping out of aeroplanes, running across open ground chucking hand grenades at pill-boxes, doing boys' games stuff. Don't know, but I'd reckon that's the easy bit.
Try the next one. Moral, standing against the flow, not crossing to the other side of the road to avoid involvement, being your own person. Going into Timo Rahman's garden is bravery, but I don't know which.
Do I stay or do I dump you? I give you my word, you'll get no sympathy from me. Tell it like it was, not all the crap about Iraq and what you were called and how far you fell, but what brought you here. Tell it straight.'
He felt the grip on his chin and jawbone slacken.
Her spectacles had misted and the blossom flakes obscured her penetrating gaze. Malachy began haltingly, as if a great shyness enveloped him, to tell a story of an old lady – widow of a London Transport bus driver – who had gone to bingo alone. 'But it was not for her, it was for me. It was to be able to stand and not back away, confront and not flinch. I'm not proud.'
'Just get on with it,' she said.
Rat Run Page 32