Rat Run

Chapter Sixteen

The bus parked beside the gangplank.

The dawn had come, and the rain had eased but not the gale.

The bus for which he had waited nearly two hours had brought Malachy, and three others, along a straight road behind the sea-defence dyke. Then, at the village of Nessmersiel, the bus had swung to the north, and the last stretch of the route had been on a road flanked by neat, darkened homes. The driver had broken clear of the village and brought them to the harbour where a squat ferry waited.

She stood a little step aside from the gangway, and had a packed rucksack high on her shoulders. She had two small stubs, tickets, in her hand and held them out. 'We get two for the price of one,' she said.

'I didn't ask you to come,' he said flatly.

'Our people always like it when field people go cheapskate. I didn't say you asked me. Next week, getting ready for the season, the full fare starts.'

'I don't want you with me.'

'Don't sulk – you look grim enough without that.'

'And I don't want your concern.'

Her eyes sparked. 'Well, I'm here, and you should get used to it.'

Malachy took a ticket from her and went up the gangway. He heard her heavy shoes tramp up after him. The other passengers from the bus, on boarding, bolted from the open deck and went inside a doorway that advertised a cafeteria service. Exhausted obstinacy led him to a part of the open deck where the rain slanted in hard, and the wind. He slumped down on a plastic-coated bench that puddled water. She followed him and tried to wriggle the rucksack off her back. He made no move to help her but then she gasped in frustration and he reached to take the weight of it.

'That's better. Well done. Join the human race.'

'I was fine on my own,' he said.

The rain made a film on her hair but when she twisted her head to face him and dumped the rucksack down, the wind caught and tousled it, broke the film and droplets sparkled. She sat beside him. She wore strong lace-up shoes and a long waxed coat that she hitched round her knees but, out on the deck, her ankles took the rain.

She snatched off her spectacles, blinked, then rummaged in a pocket for a handkerchief and wiped furiously at the lenses. She grinned. 'You display, Malachy, a quite staggering degree of self-importance.

I'd like to give that a kick. I'm not with you to watch your back. Get yourself thumped and see if I care.

Now, get a load of this: parallel lines run along adjacent to each other – not often, but sometimes, they move together and merge. Then, geometry or whatever pushes the lines apart again, so that they're no longer joined but are parallel. Pretty simple, eh?

Maybe everybody gets a chance to wave goodbye and maybe they don't, but for a few hours, or at most a couple of days, the lines go together, then… nothing's permanent. I brought us some kit.'

'What for?'

'Don't go sour again, Malachy. It spoils you.'

The eyes danced and the mouth quivered. He felt the ludicrousness of the sulk she'd identified. She dived her hands into the rucksack's neck.

She showed him dry socks and clean Union Jack boxer shorts, rolled up all-weather trousers and a rainproof top, a battery razor, a plastic bag with a toothbrush and paste, and a shirt crumpled by the weight on it. She laid them on his lap. As the boat's engine shuddered beneath them, a man came out, waited for them to find their ticket stubs, punched them and hurried for cover. She showed him, then put back in the rucksack, a miniature radio transmitter with earphones, a Thermos and a collapsible Primus stove, big binoculars and, last, a sleeping-bag that was rolled tightly. She dug deeper, and swore with vigour.

A pistol fell from the sleeping-bag and clattered on the deck planks.

He jerked down, fast reaction – as if the tiredness was gone – and snatched it up while it still rolled by his shoes. 'If you didn't know, they're quite dangerous things.'

'It's not my area, couldn't hit a front door at three yards.'

Astonished, confused but wary. 'Is that for me?'

'Take it. Think of it as insurance. Do you know what it is?'

He held it carefully, his finger way clear of the trigger, then sucked in a breath, looked over his shoulder and saw that the deck was clear. The boat moved away from the quay. As he had been taught, Malachy took out the magazine, cleared the breech, and depressed the safety button, then pressed on the trigger, felt its resistance and heard the click of the harmless mechanism. He gazed at it. At Brigade and Battalion, he had worn a pistol at his webbing belt. On the patrol he had carried, and had lost, an assault rifle. It came at him, the memory of running hunched with the file of soldiers, like a knife thrust.

He said, 'It's a nine-millimetre PMM self-loading pistol, updated from the Makarov, twelve-round magazine, around four hundred and twenty metres per second muzzle velocity. It's-'

'Don't wave it around, just put the bloody thing in your pocket.'

He did. He thought it weighed, in his pocket, two or three times more than the plastic toy he had carried in the Amersham. He gazed at her and she seemed amused. She let the tip of her tongue jut between her teeth, and he thought she brought danger with her.

'What is the need for insurance?'

'Not the place to start. You've done the Secrets Act stuff? Believe in it?'

'I have, I think I do… in spite of.'

'Forget the mawkish bit. That's history. We'll start with the convergence of parallel lines. It's not original, did it at university. The right-wing Christian Democrats and the left-wing Italian Communists were edging towards a coalition government – it's nearly forty years ago. Two parallel lines of political opinion, but coming together and ultimately merging.

The originator was Aldo Moro, a CD bigwig. Didn't do him much good, because extremists, from the Brigate Rosse, kidnapped and shot him. You and I, Malachy, are parallel lines but for convenience we've linked up. What I like about you, you don't interrupt.

Perhaps you're too bloody cold to bother.'

She told him, sketchily, about a man who had sent his wife a gold chain to mark his love, about a co-ordinator who had been bought time in an apartment under the roofs, about a Czech furniture factory and the link to Timo Rahman who ran organized crime in Hamburg, and she told him about an idiot who had broken into the grounds of the home of Timo Rahman and eavesdropped the name of an island – and she said they would, together, observe and possibly disrupt what her boss called a 'rat run'… and then she told him that only a serious idiot would sit in the rain in soaked clothes without protection from the wind. He took into the toilets the clothing given him.

When he returned, warmer, drier and with insurance heavy in his pocket, she was leaning against the rail at the back of the ferry, and gulls flew prettily above her. She took the clothes that Ivanhoe Manners had bought for him in a charity shop, long ago, and didn't dump them in the rubbish bin near to her but chucked them up and high, so that for a moment socks, pants and a shirt soared with the birds, then dropped into the ferry's wake.

'At least now,' she said, 'you won't stink. You did, worse than a pheasant hung too long.'

'For your consideration, Miss Wilkins, thank you,' he said evenly.

'Polly'll do… Too much formality might screw up the convergence of parallel lines.'

When the mainland had slipped away into the mist, while the shaking boat went slow up a channel marked by dead wood poles, they left the back, went to the side and leaned out. The wind ripped at their hair, and he stood close enough for her to feel the weight of the pistol in his pocket. They saw a sandbank high above the surf with seals on it, then the island's shoreline.

'Don't think I need you,' he said.

'Believe what you want to.'

Oskar Netzer snarled at the man, his neighbour,

'You'll take it with you. We don't want it here.'

He had opened his front door, pushed it wide enough against the wind's force to slip through it and it had slammed behind him. Across the sagged wire fence that divided their properties, the chemist from the mainland was putting out plastic bags by the little wicket gate at the end of his front garden path; bottle necks peeped from one. Already, with the day hardly started, he had heard the clatter of the pushed mower on the aprons of grass flanking the path and down the side of their house.

The man stood up slowly, as if that made for a more defiant pose, and gazed back at him. Oskar had a canvas bag slung on his shoulder, heavy with the tools he would need for his day's work, but he held his ground and allowed the wind to whip his face. On a point of principle he burned his own rubbish, everything he could, in a brazier at the back, letting the elements take the smoke and scatter the ashes. There was a rubbish collection each week in Westdorf and the disposal of it was a constant burden on the permanent residents and was paid for by their taxes, but Oskar Netzer, self-appointed guardian of Baltrum's purity, was considered too impoverished to pay dues to the island's council.

The woman, the chemist's wife, had come to the door of their house and stared back at Oskar. He saw her annoyance, and also that her husband's chin shook at the effort to suppress his anger. He went down his own path, where weeds grew in the spaces between flagstones, and past his own beds, where more weeds flourished: he would clear those beds only when flowers came up in the summer. Then he would cut them and take them to the cemetery in Ostdorf.

He glanced down at the neatly stacked plastic bags.

'Is that all you do, make rubbish for us to clear? You should take it with you, back where you came from.'

He walked away, almost cheerfully, up the street.

He heard only a hiss of breath from the chemist.

Should either have sworn at him, if their annoyance had exploded, it would have made perfect the beginning of the day. But Oskar had had enough from them to be almost happy, and he strode off. He would soon be out of the abomination of close-set houses and away in the freedom of the west of the island where his ducks were, and the viewing platform he would repair. It was a relief that the rain had been blown away and he expected to be able to work a full day without interruption and alone. By the time he was at the end of his street, he had forgotten them, and their rubbish.

Billy had the wheel. Harry had the chart spread on the table behind his son's back. Paul, his grandson, clung to a holding rail as if his life depended on it. The i trawler crawled forward erratically, and the course set by Harry would take the Anneliese Royal away from the east coast of England, out through offshore gas rigs, north of the Bruine Bank. A pencil line on the chart ended south of the German Bight at an island shore. She had a maximum speed of twelve knots, but they did a mere half of that. The horizon swung between white-grey cloud and green-grey sea. It was worse because Harry's course dictated that the waves' swell came from the south-west and battered against the trawler's stern, and the pinnacle of each wave drove them, aft first, into the unyielding mass of the wave ahead. They always said, skippers with experience, that a sea coming against a boat from the stern made for hell on water. The boy had already been sick and some of his vomit had missed the bucket lashed by its handle to the back of the wheel-house.

Harry had had the course, the destination in German waters, from the radio – a frequency on the extreme of the UHF band that was rarely used and therefore was unlikely to be listened to, and Ricky had given him the co-ordinates. 'What I need to know, Harry, when are you going to be there?' He'd yelled back the answer that he didn't effing know. 'That's not co-operation, Harry, that doesn't make my life easy – you going to be there tonight?' He'd heard the distorted whine in the voice, then said he'd be there when he was there, and not an effing hour before or after. He'd smiled then, grimly, to himself and had reflected that if this weather held there would be no German craft, Customs or coastguard, out of harbour and that the sea conditions would obscure the shore radar signature of the Anneliese Royal. Small bloody mercy He'd finished by cutting across Ricky's bleat to tell him that he was switching off the radio and would use it again when he was an hour or two from the rendezvous point. The sea tossed, shook and battered the trawler while his son gripped the wheel, his grandson the rail and Harry held fast to the chart table

– and Ricky had said it was all to bring back to England just one man.

'So good of you to come, Mr Capel, and at such short notice. All of us on this team, we're very grateful. We sincerely appreciate your co-operation. May I call you Percy? I'd like to.'

He was a gentleman, Percy Capel knew. Hadn't met many, but there'd been enough for him to know one. He would have said that a judge at the Old Bailey was a gentleman, sent him down for five years when it could have been ten with hard labour, and there had been a whisper of a smile on his face as he'd heard the testimony of how Percy had done the entry bit. And, of course, the best gentleman had been Major Anstruther.

This one, no doubt about it, was a proper gentleman.

'What we've realized, Percy, is that our records on Albania are quite pathetically thin. Files of stuff about Yugoslavia and Greece, but some very good things were done in Albania and we don't have an adequate picture of them. Time goes on, and if we don't shift ourselves the eyewitnesses, the participants, will be beyond reach. We want to talk to you about Albania and your work alongside the group led by Mehmet Rahman. Would you be up for that, Percy?'

He nodded, muttered that he'd be happy to, then saw the smile of appreciation on the gentleman's face.

It had all happened fast. Him still in bed, with a cup of tea, Sharon in her housecoat doing breakfast, Mikey I shaving – and the phone had rung. Sharon had screamed up the stairs that the Imperial War Museum was on the phone, and wanted Percy for his experiences – and apologies and apologies and more apologies than he could count for the lack of notice, and the liberty taken of having sent a car for him in the hope that he wasn't too busy. No, Percy Capel had not been too busy. He had been driven by a respectful chauffeur across south-east London and at the museum – beside those damn great naval guns – the gentleman had been waiting for him.

'It's what we try to do, fill holes in knowledge, and nowhere better than from the people who were on the ground. I expect you'd like some coffee, and I think we can rustle up some biscuits.'

The gentleman, all old-world courtesy, wore a three-piece suit and a puffed-out tie that was immaculate at his collar. He had a handkerchief spilling from a breast pocket, and shoes you could have seen your face in. Percy was glad he'd kept the chauffeur waiting those extra minutes while he'd rummaged for a clean white shirt and Sharon had used the stiff brush to get the dandruff off his blazer with the British Legion shield on its breast pocket.

When the coffee was in front of him – 'Two lumps, please' – and he'd had his second biscuit, he started.

At his elbow, a tape-recorder turned. He didn't think they wanted crap so he told it like it was – for history and their archives – and scratched in memories that he'd long ago discarded.

He told of the old squadron, Lancasters, and how he'd been volunteered out to the Middle East so had missed the raid four weeks afterwards to Hamburg.

His new unit, flying Halifax Bill MZ971s, went up the Adriatic from the strip outside Alexandria, then turned to starboard and over the Balkans – his had had a girl in a swimsuit on the port side of the nose, with long legs, and she was shouting, 'I'm easy,' in white paint on the camouflage.

The job of the aircraft and crews was to drop agents and weapons into occupied territory.

That night, the weather people said there would be cloud cover to blank out a full moon over the target drop zone, and they'd carried a special-operations major and his sergeant, and a mountain of gear in tin cases, and he'd been in his usual place at the rear gun turret.

Never trust the bloody weather people. Clear moonlight bathed the Halifax on the approach run, not a bloody cloud for love or money, and the flak bursting, and the fire first in port outer, then in starboard inner, and the pilot had ordered them to bail out. He'd followed the gear, the major and his sergeant, but he'd been the last to go clear out through the port-side hatch in the fuselage, and then 'I'm Easy' had corkscrewed and he'd been halfway down on his parachute when she'd gone in. Bloody great bang and bloody great fire.

The major's sergeant had fallen like a stone, poor beggar, because his canopy hadn't opened.

In the days and weeks that followed, Major

Anstruther had made him batman, pack-mule, explosives expert, radio-operator and killer.

They had met up with Mehmet Rahman and a gang of thugs and lived in caves. His toes still hurt from the first dose of frostbite, but it wasn't bad enough to stop him helping the major to blow a rail bridge and, later, to sabotage the shaft and winding shed of a chrome mine. .. And there was the ambush of a convoy of the 21st Mountain Corps in a valley up north of Shkodra, and his Sten gun had jammed and, beside him, the major had used up the last of his loaded magazines and thrown the last of his grenades and – if it had not been for Mehmet Rahman – they were both dead meat.

Mehmet Rahman had saved his life, and Major

Anstruther's.

'They were good troops, the Mountain Corps, crack guys. Soon as we hit, they came up off the road and at us. We'd put down some of them, all yelling and hollering and shrieking. Then the major had nothing more to chuck at them and my Sten gun's jammed – bloody useless things, always getting blockages. They were all round us, coming after us, close enough to see them – damn soon and it would have been close enough to touch them. Mehmet Rahman came. Didn't have to. He was on his feet and running to us, all exposed, and his God must have watched for him, and there was bullets all round him but he didn't take a scratch. He had covering fire from his guys but he cleared a way through to us – shooting from the hip.

The Germans backed off. Must have been chaos for them, the ambush and all, and they went down to what trucks and armoured stuff was still able to move and quit. Probably their priority was to get the convoy through. I reckon that's why they left their wounded, just wasn't the place to do a count. They'd have gone for two or three miles, then realized how many they'd left. We were high up, well gone, but we saw them come back. They didn't need to have bothered because there were no wounded left, only the dead.'

He was telling it like it was, and he'd never told it before. He gulped at the coffee in the bone-china cup, but a biscuit was left half eaten on the plate. The gentleman gazed into his eyes, like he knew what was to come, and the tape turned.

'Up there, we couldn't take prisoners, certainly not wounded prisoners. We couldn't – honest, believe me

– do anything for the wounded. Anstruther shouted to me that I was to come away. He tried to get me behind some rocks but – shock, I suppose – I didn't move.

Mehmet Rahman went among the wounded. Those that were bad, unconscious, he shot. But he had a knife. The knife was for those who were hit in the legs or the shoulders or had holes in their guts, but their eyes were open. He took the eyes out first, like the knife was taking a stone out of a plumb, then he slit their throats. I still hear the screaming of some of them, those he hadn't reached. Not mercy killing, butchering them for pleasure. He did all of them, till it was all quiet. I caught the major's knee and I pointed to what Mehmet Rahman did, but the major shook his head. The major said, soft, that it was a bad war and that pretending otherwise wouldn't make it a better war. Mehmet Rahman was like a fucking – excuse me, sir – animal because he scooped those men's eyes out and cut off their heads, sawed through their pipes and their neck bones, did it so that the next in line could see what was coming to him, and did it for pleasure.

Then he wiped his knife on his shirt, and we went off up the mountain and left the silence. I tell you, I never heard such silence again, not in sixty years.'

There was moisture at his eyes, and Percy Capel prodded a finger behind the lenses of his spectacles and wiped them. He was asked, the gentleman's voice silken and gentle, whether he had ever talked of this.

'What? Down the Legion? Not likely. Been part of a war crime, sir, would you? I never told my Winifred – dead and buried, bless her – nor my boy, nor…

What's extraordinary, my grandson has met up with the Rahman family. He's in-' He stopped, but he had already launched so he groped for an explanation. 'In import and export. Buys and sells. He met up, just by chance, with Mehmet Rahman's grand-nephew, and that put him in contact – business, you know – with Mehmet Rahman's son, and they'd heard of our family name. Small world… My grandson asked me what I knew of Mehmet Rahman. Did I say he was a murdering swine, a bloody animal? I did not. There's truth, some of the truth, a little of the truth – that's what I chose, a little of it. I said that my family and his were joined by blood, that my life was saved by Mehmet Rahman. It's a debt, right? You can't pay off that sort of debt. It's with you all your time on earth, and with your family.'

The gentleman's face showed the vivid expression of not understanding. Percy Capel felt the obligation to explain. 'A debt like that, it owns you. Do you see that? It owns me, and my son, and my grandson. It's as much my grandson's debt as mine. They do business, my grandson and Mehmet Rahman's son, and I suppose that's like paying off the debt – but I doubt my grandson sees it that way… Anyway, you don't want to know that.'

The frown on the gentleman's forehead had gone, as if he now understood, and Percy was nudged towards further anecdotal memories.

He talked of more demolition and more sabotage, and of a Lysander that had landed to pick up the major and himself and fly them out, and then the tape was stopped. He was told how valuable his record of events would be to historians at the Imperial War Museum.

The chauffeur drove him back to Bevin Close, and he was almost home before he realized that he had never been told the gentleman's name. He wondered then if he should have talked of Timo Rahman and Ricky, and an unpaid debt.

'Worth it?' the curator asked.

As he pocketed the tape, Frederick Gaunt smiled with warmth. 'I've never done it myself, but I can imagine it. You prise open the two sides of an encrusted oyster shell, and you find inside it a perfectly formed and lustrous pearl. Very much worth it.'

A man from Krakow who hoped to be a policeman had told detectives that his wife, strangled to death, had kept at the start of their relationship a chain of Arabic worry-beads in a drawer in their bedroom, and she had sworn to him that they were the gift of a friend, a student of mechanical engineering at Harburg – the only friend in her life before the Bahn-Wacht officer.

A lecturer at the university had recalled the name of Else Borchardt's boyfriend as Sami, but not his family name.

A child, in the Turkish language and through the help of an interpreter, had told detectives of a man who had hustled into the block after the child had pressed the bell at the outer door and his mother had activated the lock.

A clerk at the warehouse, where past student records were kept, had ferreted that previous evening and found the papers – with the photograph – of that student from seven years before.

A lecturer at the university, called by detectives from his mid-evening dinner-table, had confirmed that the photograph shown him was that of Else Borchardt's student boyfriend.

A child, roused from sleep, was shown four photographs of male students and had chosen with no hesitation the picture of Else Borchardt's boyfriend and had said that that was the man who had pushed by him when his mother had let him into the block.

A subeditor, with the front page of his newspaper about to close, had taken a call on the news desk of the Hamburger Abendblatt and had been alerted to receive, from Homicide, the photograph of a suspect.

A journalist had worked at his computer to key in a full-face photograph… and the smaller picture of a victim.

A technician had pressed the button that started the print run of the newspaper's altered front page.

A driver had brought the new editions, bound with wire for delivery to wholesale distributors, from the presses of the Hamburger Abendblatt, with the suspect's photograph spread across three columns of the front page, and the victim's photograph across one.

By morning, the suspect's photograph blared out at readers from Flensburg in the north, to Bremen in the south, from Lubeck in the east to Emden in the west.

Above it 'Wanted for Murder' was printed in bold type, and under it was a picture of a pretty girl who had been strangled in the sight of her baby.

Carrying a plastic bag with four sealed coffee beakers, four cling-wrapped rounds of sausage sandwiches, the nut-flavoured milk-chocolate bar that was Timo Rahman's favourite and a folded newspaper, the Bear left the shop.

He sauntered towards the Mercedes, and opened the newspaper's front page.

It hit him.

He saw the photograph and the headline, and under them was the picture of a girl who had deep eyes and a smile.

It blasted him. But it was one of the Bear's skills that he could hide the Shockwave caused by confusion, danger. No flicker of apprehension crossed his face, no twitch of anxiety. He could see them: Timo Rahman in the front passenger seat, and the Arab immediately behind him alongside the mouseboy. The newspaper was ripped by the wind and he rolled it quickly. There was a signal, long agreed, between his master and himself. In one hand he held the newspaper and the plastic bag, and he let the fist of the other drop – apparently casually – to the seam of his trousers, below the pocket. His thumb seemed, idly, to flick his first two fingers. It was the signal that risk was around them. Only a man as cautioned in risk as Timo Rahman would have watched his driver so closely that he noticed the gesture of the thumb brushing against two fingers. The front passenger door opened.

The appearance of the Bear, huge shoulders, shambling walk and a perpetual frown of confusion, was that of a man whose body was an adult's but whose brain was that of a child. The appearance deceived. He saw Timo Rahman duck his head and make some excuse to those in the back seats, then come towards him. He was trusted with every secret of his master's life – not so the accountants, lawyers and investment brokers who surrounded Timo

Rahman. Alone, the Bear had the trust.

He had been, at the end of the Hoxha regime nineteen years before, an officer of the Sigurimi, the political police of the Albanian state. Earlier than any he had worked with, he had had the intelligence to comprehend that the death of the old president would mark the start of a changed world. The morning after that death he had slipped away from his office in the town of Shkodra, had taken a bus high into the mountains and gone to the village of the Rahman fis and, with humility, had pledged his loyalty. For two years he had been tested as the fis had expanded its power in the vacuum left by Hoxha's death – by robbery, tax-collection and enforcement, the Bear had proved his worth. He had gone with Timo Rahman to Hamburg and had fought beside him as the empire was created.

They walked together, master and driver, to the back of the shop.

Out of sight of the men on the back seat of the car, he showed Timo Rahman the front page of the newspaper.

Timo Rahman scoured the page – the headline, the photograph, the picture, the report.

The Bear would not speak unless he was asked to, would not advise unless the request were made. He would have said that it was not wise for Timo Rahman, whatever the rewards, to associate with militants, but he had not been asked. He would not have agreed that Alicia, the wife of Timo Rahman, had met a lover in the garden's summer-house – but he had not been asked. He held his silence and waited, and then the paper was crushed in Timo Rahman's hands. He was told where he should drive to, and they walked back to the car. The face of Timo Rahman showed no mark of the crisis.

With the map spread across his knees and silence in the car, the Bear drove off the main road and away from the village shop. They took long, narrow side roads and saw tractors in fields, and cattle that had been released from winter barns. He could not see the sea because his horizon in the north was the long-grassed dyke where sheep grazed. He went on until, ahead of him, there was a tight plantation of pine trees and, to the north, the spire of a church. Level with the plantation a signpost gave the direction to the harbour, three kilometres away, of Nessmersiel. There, the plantation on one side of the road and the signpost on the other, he felt the light pressure of Timo Rahman's finger on his thigh. He braked and pulled on to the grass.

His master was first out of the car, and held the rolled newspaper.

He took the keys from the ignition, and followed, stood a half-pace behind Timo Rahman and towered over him.

The Bear did not know the language spoken, but understood its meaning.

'It is as far as we take you.'

The mouseboy, Ricky Capel, powered down his window and peered from it. 'What you mean? This is the middle of fuck-all.'

'From here you go alone, the two of you.'

The mouseboy's mouth hung open, disbelieving.

'Where the hell are we?'