Frank stood in the living-room doorway. She heard the names they gave him, Paget and Rankin. She grimaced, a bitter little smile, because neither asked Frank if it suited him, just said that they needed to walk round the house, look it over. They went together, as if there was an umbilical cord between them.
They wore blue-black overalls and webbing belts, on which were holsters and weapons and what she thought were gas canisters, ammunition pouches and handcuffs. When they had been waiting for her to answer the bell, they must have been in the mud at the side of the road and the green, and their boots smeared it over her carpet. They seemed not to notice. They looked around the living room, at her furniture and her ornaments, as if they were all dross, and the glass cabinet where she put the china pieces she'd collected, and the pictures of the seashore, prints, by the local artist that Frank had bought. She strained to hear the murmur of their voices.
"Have to get it taped up, Joe."
"Too right, Dave, nothing worse than glass cabinets."
"Have to get the pictures down."
"What you think of where the television is?"
"Not happy, should be back against the wall, right back."
"Shouldn't Davies have done this?"
"Should have, didn't."
"Pillock - I don't like all the stuff on the fireplace."
"Quite right. Let's do the windows."
The tall one, Rankin, went to the standard lamp and switched it off. She stood in the darkness and could sense the rising impatience of Frank beside her, could hear the sharp spurts of his breath. The curtains were pulled back. A faint glow eased into the room from the street-lights on the opposite side of the green. She heard the scrape of their fingers on the glass and the window casing, then the noise as the curtains were yanked without ceremony into place. Only then was the standard lamp switched on again.
"Thought they were supposed to have been laminated, Joe."
"They haven't got round to it the work order's in, be done by the end of the week."
"Bloody marvelous."
"I don't like that window, Dave, not without the lamination."
"Don't tell me, I've got bloody eyes. What is it, a hundred metres, to those houses? A sniper, piece of cake, or an RPG."
"What you say, Dave, piece of cake for a rocket launcher or a rifle. God, this place needs sorting out. Come on... They did the hall, the dining room and the kitchen. Frank trailed behind them and she followed. She didn't have to ask. Everything that was glass, china or pottery, everything that was heavy and unattached, would shatter, fracture and fly, maim and wound. They said they needed to see upstairs. She stiffened. Frank muttered that they should go upstairs if that was necessary, but they hadn't waited for his answer and were already on their way up. There wasn't any more mud from Rankin's boots to dirty the carpet. They looked around her bedroom.
"Don't like the mirror, Dave."
It was the big mirror on her dressing-table.
"Tape it over."
She imagined the mirror, where she made up, where she worked the delicate brushes before they went out for an evening, with packers' adhesive tape crossing it.
"Look at all that loose stuff."
On her dressing-table were the cream jars and the glass eau-de toilette bottles, the vase of dried flowers and the silver-backed hairbrushes.
"Have to get it boxed up, Joe."
She would have to rummage in a cardboard box on the floor for her eye-liner and lipstick. She imagined everything that was precious to her put away on the instructions of these men.
The pictures would have to come down, of course. The photograph frames would have to be put into the drawers, and she wondered if she would be allowed to take out the photographs and stick them to the walls, if they would permit that. In the bathroom, at the back of the house, she couldn't have said they lingered on anything that was hers. They were merely indifferent to each item that belonged and mattered to her. Better if they had lingered on them because then the items might have seemed important. They went into the spare room and discussed what should happen to the pictures, the mirror and the ornaments there. They paused on the landing outside the last door. It was as if they had kicked the fight out of her, and the resentment was flushed on Frank's cheeks, but neither of them protested. She could hear her boy's voice, making the noise of a lorry. They didn't ask her to go first, or Frank. The short one went in, the tall one behind him.
"Hello, sunshine my word, aren't they brilliant?"
"Great lorries, sunshine, proper little haulage business."
"Just call me Uncle Joe..."
and I'm your uncle Dave, that's a real good one, the Seddon Atkinson."
"The Seddy's good, Dave, but the Volvo's fantastic."
"It's a great fleet, sunshine.. . No, sorry, don't touch."
"What's your name? Stephen? Well, Stephen, you mustn't touch what's on Uncle Dave's belt. It's gas, it's handcuffs and it's the Glock.. . Like what?.. . He did what? That must have been fun, sunshine. You hear that, Joe? DS Davies chucking his Glock round the playground that's nice to store away for when he gets all pompous. I expect it's time you were in bed, sunshine..."
The door was closed softly. They had come, she thought, effortlessly, into her family's life and brought with them their gas, their handcuffs and their guns. And, in the morning, her home would be prepared for defence against a sniper's attack and against the devastation of a rocket launcher's explosion. When they had gone outside, into the back garden, she went for the vacuum cleaner to remove the mud they'd left on her carpets, and before she started it up she heard Frank's voice.
"Don't ever do that again. Don't dare ever treat me and my wife like we're rubbish. We're human beings and deserve to be treated with decency and respect. This is our home, so show a bit of sensitivity when you come into it. Don't look at me in that dumb, insolent way, just don't. We live here. If that's not convenient, soft shit."
She didn't hear their reply.
When they'd finished in the garden and gone out through the front door, and it had been bolted and locked again, while she was in the living room with the vacuum cleaner, she heard Blake's voice.
"You shouldn't have done that, sir, bawled them out. They're at the end of a pretty long day. But don't worry, they won't take it personally, they're used to principals being stressed up. But you shouldn't have bawled them out, sir. One day you might depend on them to save your life, one day soon."
"This is not a zoo. You don't come here to rubber-neck. It's a working area you're causing disruption."
He'd been told but it had slipped in his mind. It could have been the fourth time the detectives had confronted the duty doctor, but it was more likely to have been the fifth.
"I will say when you can talk to my patient and it is the same answer as the last time, and the time before that. No. My patient is severely concussed, quite apart from the effect of the drugs alleviating the pain of a triple femur fracture. No."
They were at the end of the ward. Beside the door to the partitioned cubicle, Geoff Markham hovered a pace behind the two Branch detectives. The doctor was young, harassed, probably sleep-walking and on the edge of his temper.
"It is not my concern what my patient is alleged to have done, my concern is his health and welfare. I understand he has been neither cautioned nor charged. So, he is in my care, and I decide if he is to be questioned. My answer.. . No."
A policeman was sitting beside the bed on a hard chair, facing the door, his hands on the snub weapon resting on his legs, his face impassive. The second uniformed policeman sat outside the door, cradling his own gun, a wry smile flickering at his mouth.
"I tell you, it's bad enough for my patients to have guns paraded around, but right now they are trying, unsuccessfully, to get the rest they need. They are not resting, as they should be, because this ward is being treated by you like a high-street pavement. Just get out, go away.
Geoff Markham's fingers were locked together, clasped tight, flexing
hard enough to hurt. He thought Littelbaum was somewhere behind him. The American had said this was the big and lucky break, but it didn't seem as if they knew how to use it.
"Just listen to me. You are interfering with the running of this ward. I will protest most strongly in the morning to the administrators about that interference. If the condition of this patient, or any other patient in the ward, were to deteriorate because of your refusal to accept my guidance, then I will make it my personal business to see you broken. Get off my territory."
There was a dull blue sheen of light in the cubicle. Geoff Markham thought, could have sworn to it, that he saw an eye glinting from the mound of white pillows. The head of the patient, the face that Rainbow Gold had identified as Yusuf Khan, was half hidden by the left leg raised in traction. The glint was momentary, but he'd seen it.
The patient now seemed unmoving, unconscious. The detectives turned away.
Markham said, "He's fooling you."
"You're a doctor? Familiar with this case history, are you?"
Markham persisted, "He's alert, listening. He's feigning."
"You're an expert on concussion? You know about the effects of pain-depressant drugs?"
"What I am telling you-' "No. I do the telling on my ward, and I am telling you to get out." Markham spat, "There could be blood on your hands."
"I doubt it."
"A man could be murdered because of your refusal-' "Get out."
He had failed to exploit the break. The faces of the uniformed policemen were expressionless, as though they didn't need to tell him that he'd made a right idiot of himself. Geoff Markham turned angrily and walked up the central aisle of the ward towards the low light at the far end where the night sister sat at her table. The detectives were alongside and he could hear the soft pad of the doctor behind him. He saw the American sitting on a visitor's chair, in deep shadow, against a patient's locker. The patient was passing him a grape, and before he took it the American had his finger on his lips. Markham kept walking.
Beyond the ward's swing doors, there was a last snapped question: "How long?"
The doctor said that it might be two days and it might be three, or it might be a week, before his patient could be interrogated.
He walked on down the empty corridors. The Branch men were with him, said they were looking for a coffee machine. His footfall stamped to the stairs.
There was a fight in Casualty reception. A drunk with blood streaming from a forehead wound swung a fist at the security people. He didn't care and threaded his way past them.
He went to the parking area and his car.
He wished he smoked. He wished he had a hip flask. He wished he was warm and wet-sweaty with Vicky. He wished he worked for a fucking bank.
He sat in the car.
The wail of a siren approached, and he watched the staff gather at the door to meet it, the flurry as the stretcher was hurried inside. He waited. He was cold, tired. He had seen how the bastard had watched them, listened to them, fooled them, and the first day of the week was ten minutes off its end. And he couldn't imagine why Littelbaum had found it important to stay behind.
He was slumped in self-pity, and wondered whether the bank would turn him down by letter or by telephone. Damn sure they wouldn't accept him. He wouldn't tell Vicky what he'd said, about playing God, or tell her how her buzz phrases had been sneered at... The American eased the car door open and lowered himself into the seat.
"First, thanks for being so on the ball and giving me space. You did well. God, what depressing places hospitals are... You see, Mr. Markham, it's all about Alamut.. . the sort of places we'll all end in, not able to do a lot about it... Alamut is the key... Markham began to drive away, and had to swerve out of the path of another ambulance.
"I'd need convincing I did anything well. Right, Mr. Littelbaurn, tell me why Alamut is relevant."
"If he had known Alamut, been there, then he wouldn't have talked to me."
Markham gasped, then laughed out loud.
"Why, Mr. Littelbaum, did he talk to you?"
"The policemen were very co-operative, heard what you said, about blood and murder. One needed to piss so the other took his place in the corridor."
"Why?"
"I fancy he talked to me because I poked the tip of my pen into the middle of the three femur fractures."
"Didn't he scream?"
"He probably did, but I had my handkerchief and my fist over his mouth. He wanted to talk more than he wanted the poke of my pen if he'd been to Alamut then he wouldn't have cared about the pain."
"What did he say?"
Markham drove recklessly fast on the open road.
"Heh, Mr. Markham, would you slow down, please? I don't want to be going back to that place on my back ease it off, please. He said the guy came off a boat, and I told him we knew that. I hadn't a name, and neither had he. I hadn't a face, but he had. The face is interesting, it's pale-coloured, it's what I imagine to be the edge of Caucasian, and there's no facial hair. English, English accent, not American. Tall but not exceptional, hair not black matt, didn't get the eyes... Age would be late thirties. He crashed the car because the guy sort of frightened him."
"Weapons?"
"He started to tell me I think he was trying to talk about a launcher. Yes, he wanted to tell me the lot, I had the pen right in front of his face, but he didn't. I think he wanted to tell me, but he fainted."
"Associates?"
"The faint wasn't acted. He got another poke, but he was gone cold, like Smoky Joe had hit him and the law came back from its piss."
"So what do we have, Mr. Littelbaum?"
"Enough to think on. May I, first, educate you on Alamut? With education, you get to understand the Anvil, what he'll do, the sense of sacrifice, the danger he poses, the dedication to his orders. In the year 1152, Mr. Markham, two of the fida'is were sent from Alamut to kill Raymond the Second of Tripoli, that's the port city in present-day northern Lebanon. Raymond the Second was the Christian crusader king. They chose the most public place in his city to kill him, where he would be surrounded by the maximum security. The place they chose was the main gate of the city. Imagine it, crowds, traders, travellers, guards, the greatest audience in front of which to demonstrate their power and their commitment. They stabbed Raymond the Second to death at the gate of his own city, and they would have known that within moments they would be chopped into small pieces by his guards. That's Alamut for you, Mr. Markham, that's what you're up against."
He pretended to sleep and made a pattern of his breathing.
Her breasts and stomach were against his back and his buttocks. They were naked in the bed, but for comfort's sake not for loving. Sometimes he heard the engine of the car parked beside the house, as if Blake boosted the heater. Sometimes he heard a car coming slowly by and stopping; then there were quiet voices and chuckled laughter. Sometimes there was the empty whistling of the wind, and the distant ripple surge of the sea on the beach.
If he pretended to sleep and his breathing was regular then he hoped it would be easier for her to sleep.
He lay on his side with her warmth against him and he played the television's quiz game in his mind. The grinning show host asked the questions, and bright-eyed Frankie answered them.
Where was Iran?
"Iran, with a territory of 1.68 million square kilometres and a population estimated in excess of sixty million, is at a pivotal geopolitical position between the Middle East and the Asian subcontinent where it cannot be ignored and is unlikely to be humoured."
What was the government of Iran?
"Iran is ruled by Islamic clerics categorized as fundamentalist and conservative in the extreme, but the government has loose relationships with the organizations of the Revolutionary Guard Corps and the autonomous private armies of clerics boasting vengeful actions against Western cultures."
What was WMD?
"Weapons of Mass Destruction, chemical and microbiological and nuclear, are all
the subject of urgent research programmes in Iran."
What was the requirement for mixing machines?
"The manufacture of the chemical air droplets to be included in the warhead, and for the lining material of the interior of the missile body that must withstand extreme temperature, require dual-purpose mixing machines sold on fraudulently prepared export dockets."
What was the fate of a spy in Iran? What did they do with a spy in Iran?
"A spy in Iran is either hanged in secret on the gallows at the Evin gaol, or hanged in public from a crane in a Tehran square and hoisted so high that the crowd can better see his death dance."
A final question. Had to answer correctly to win the holiday for two in Barbados and the new fitted kitchen, the food liquidizer and the wide screen television. He squirmed in the bed.
What were the consequences in Iran of the spy's report on a military factory at Bandar Abbas?
"Don't know, can't answer, was never told, don't want to know, better not knowing."
To black, to the darkness of the room, and no prizes to carry away.
He took a point on the shadowed wall, stared at it. She was asleep. If he slept he would dream of the crane. She didn't know of the crane, and she slept. There was a small gale of laughter, from the side of the house, and a car drove away. He was drifting... He had always rather fancied Emma Carstairs, and always thought she rather fancied him.. . drifting, but not sleeping. If he thought of Emma Carstairs, her bold smile and her wriggling her hips to work off her knickers, her hands taking his to the buttons of her blouse, then he wouldn't sleep, and if he didn't sleep then he wouldn't see the crane. He stared at the bare wall.
Chapter Eight.
In the last minutes of the night he moved like a wraith.
He came off Fen Hill and kept inside the tree-line, skirting the end of the marshland. The high winter tides, blown by storms, and the heavy winter rainfall, had made the ground he covered into a swampy bog. The water was always above his ankles and sometimes above his knees but he left no visible track of his advance, and he was hidden by the tree-line. He left behind him the carefully concealed sausage bag and the weapons because, at this time, he had no need of them.
A Line in the Sand Page 16