Rat Run

Chapter Twenty

He saw the light. Riddled with cramp in his stomach, pain in his hips and knees, sand in his throat that he had to endure and not cough out, Malachy saw the light's blast out to sea. Not a brilliant light but one that was misted and confused by cloud and rain, but a clear enough beacon to those watching for it.

It was not aimed at the shore but was directed upwards and bounced back from the cloudbanks and rolled, cavorted, rocked as if its platform were unstable. He thought the trawler on which it was mounted was shaken by the violence of the swell. He realized, from the light on the cloud ceiling, that the boat edged towards the shore where the surf ran.

Near to him, separated from him by the blunt sand summit of a dune, he heard a little yell of excitement

– the voice of Ricky Capel. He had felt, lying twenty paces from him, the fear of the man. The fear had been on Capel's tongue, in the whine of his voice, and it had grown because he had sensed that he was watched. As the hours had passed, Malachy had felt the man's fear tighten. He had known his own fear when he had walked, without a weapon and without a helmet or flak-jacket, down a narrow street in a village with the sun low and scorching his eyes. It had been the fear of the man that had sustained him as he had lain in the sand, among the dune's grasses. He heard, now, a sharp hiss for quiet and the excitement was stifled.

The other man had shown Malachy no sign of fear.

He heard low grunts, from them both, and sensed they stood.

Far away to his left, if he raised his head, Malachy could see the scattered lights of the village, and in the near sea – if he strained and peered between the bent grasses – there were two marker buoys. In the hours he had been in place, he had learned to recognize the sequences of their flashes, one red and one green. But the light further towards the horizon, beyond the surf bursts, had greater strength. There were the lights of the village, the lights of the buoys, the light from the trawler, but the rest of the scope of Malachy's vision showed him nothing more than black darkness. He had thought the world had emptied, that only he and two men existed, and one was beyond the area of his interest.

As he watched the lights, Malachy did not recognize Polly Wilkins's big picture. Neither did he listen, any longer, to the contempt of a host of soldiers and a psychiatrist, and his wife, and a man who ran a business for buying and selling houses… He involved no one, was owned by no one. He flexed his muscles and readied himself. When they moved, he would follow.

He heard, above the wind, the whine, 'Don't we get moving? I knew he'd come. He's a good boy, my Harry is. Shouldn't we shift down there?'

He heard, over the rain's beat, the response: 'Not yet, too early.'

'They won't hang about for us, you know.'

'It is too soon.'

Malachy realized the authority of the second man. He was Polly Wilkins's target. The second man governed the big picture. Malachy heard the authority, spoken softly. Men, he knew it, who had authority rarely found it necessary to raise a voice, never shouted, did not whine. He thought the man, joined at the hip to Ricky Capel, was burdened.

He watched the light, its beam on the clouds, approach the beach.

He was silent, did not dare to speak. Ricky stood in the force of the wind and saw the light come closer…

Then he shuddered, shook. He was Ricky Capel. He ran a part of south-east London. He was the big man and guys backed off from him. He was above grief, too big a man to be given disrespect. He did not snivel, did not cower.

'Yes, I hear you, Dean, and I'm saying it as well – it's not yet, it's too early to move, too soon.'

Watching the light, he shed from his mind the source of the fear that had nagged, eaten at him all the hours they had waited. A man stalked him. A man followed him. Straining into the darkness and seeing the roll of the light up and against the cloud, the thought of the man was wiped from his mind.

Squinting, he saw the light beyond the dim beach expanse, and the cresting lines of the surf… He'd be wading into it, into the force of the waves – that was what Harry had said – into that bloody sea, in bloody darkness… but he was Ricky Capel, and he was a big man. The wind hammered against him and would have pitched him back if he had not held, tight, to the arm beside him.

'Should stay patient – I don't reckon we should move too soon, that's my opinion.'

The light shone out ahead of her, and was away to her right, and she made her calculation on the point of the beach it approached.

Methodically, Polly rolled the sleeping-bag and the sand in it, filled the rucksack and wriggled its straps over her shoulders.

Then she hit the combination of buttons on her mobile for a secure call, and dialled. She heard it ring out twice before an automated voice – not Freddie Gaunt's – informed her that she was being diverted. It was answered. Crisply, without preamble, she was asked to speak.

'It's out there, the light. I can't be exact, it's dark as hell, and I don't know the sea, but I estimate it about a mile offshore. Damn, damn, they've killed the light

… It was there, was coming in. I suppose it was on long enough to alert the target group, b u t… '

There was criticism. She should not 'estimate' or

'suppose'. Facts were required of her. She swore under her breath, soundless. She could not estimate why Gaunt had done it to her, could not suppose why he had quit on her.

'There was a light offshore, on for eight minutes. At the moment it was switched off, the light was one nautical mile from the tideline.'

They wanted bullshit, they would get it. She did not know whether the light had been visible for six minutes or nine minutes; neither did she know the length of a nautical mile nor see the tideline. She imagined them round a table crowded with phones, consoles and screens, with maps dominating their room's walls, and… She was asked for the location of Kitchen.

'Don't know, and that is neither an estimate nor a supposition. I have not the faintest idea where he is.

So as you understand, it is pitch bloody black out here, and it is peeing with rain and blowing a gale. He could be a mile away or ten yards away, and that is a fact. It is also a fact that I have not been issued with night-vision equipment.'

The cold cut through Polly, but they would not have been interested in that. She was asked what were Kitchen's intentions when he left her.

'Can't estimate and can't suppose – not a clue. I will call you on further developments. Out.'

A career gone down the drain? Perhaps. Her teeth rattled as she shivered. Perhaps… Did she give a damn if a career was lost? Maybe… She pocketed the phone. Polly wondered if she now had the status of being a flagged pin on a wall map. She scrambled down off the dune and tumbled to the start of the loose sand that the sea never reached. She was perplexed that she had not seen an answering light from away to her right on a point of high ground, did not understand that, could not reckon how the trawler would be guided in – or the men to be picked up would be floundering in water, would be battered by the surf – and was confused. She went, slowly and carefully, below the dunes and above the beach, stopped to listen, then went on, stopped again… It hurt so bloody much that Freddie Gaunt had quit on her.

'Makes you think, doesn't it? The last chap here – his feet where we are. Wagons out at the front with everything he and his family own, and he's looking around at all that's familiar, then he's going to the door, and going to nail it shut after him, and then he'll be joining his neighbours in flight. And the enemy is over the hill – not quite literally, but the barbarians are at the gates… and this is where he stood for the last time.'

It no longer rained and the wind had slackened.

Frederick Gaunt knelt in the pit and the high lights glistened the mud and he scraped with his trowel at the edge of the small patch of uncovered mosaic. He did not know the man beside him, had not dug with him before. In a few minutes they would break for tea from an urn and that would be welcome for warmth and would be respite from the monologue in his ear

… The man was young, lean-faced and lean-bodied, and scraped and talked with matching intensity.

'I suppose he knew it was coming – yes, he'd have realized that his time was up. Must have wounded him to think that civilization, all of the comforts of a building like this, was going to be tossed over, and that the day of the hordes – Goths, Visigoths, Picts, you name them – had come, and the start of a Dark Age with them. He wouldn't have known it, but I think it's a law of history that new forces will inevitably overwhelm an old order.'

The site was in Wiltshire, south of Keysley Down and to the west of Berwick St Leonard. It was approached by a rutted farm track, and was lit – at fifteen minutes to midnight – by a row of generator-powered arc-lights. Negotiations with the landowner had given the diggers a clear seven days and seven nights to work on the villa, and after that the excavated ground would be covered with thick plastic sheeting, which would in turn be covered with the moved soil and sods of the field. It was the third night

… Until that afternoon, before his meeting and his butchery at VBX, Gaunt had not thought he had the vaguest chance of joining these enthusiasts. They were mostly students, recruited from a south-coast university, but he had been allocated to the team leader, who talked.

'Inevitable that it'll all come crashing down once the decadence sets in. Our chap, who stood here in his sandals, he'd become too comfortable – had too much wealth and too much privilege – and he'd lost the hardness to fight. That's it, isn't it? His civilization, morally corrupt, could not compete with the simple brutality of the barbarian – so he ran and left his home to sixteen hundred years of ruin and pillage, then the stones of the walls were taken, soil was washed by the rain over what was left, then it was buried and eventually we pitched up. Comfort and decadence, they're killers for any society confronted by an enemy that's hungry, ruthless.'

At the extremity of the mosaic there were stone slabs and then the first signs of the praefurnium, the stoke nole, and in the mud that he lifted on his trowel Gaunt found a small piece of compressed black material. With near reverence he placed it in the bucket by his elbow. When they took tea he would show it to the site surveyor: a piece of charcoal that could be radio-carbon-dated, that could tell them when, to the year, a fire had been lit before the arrival of the forces of that day's axis of evil. He found the man's thesis not irritating but marginally amusing.

'What I believe frightening is that corruption is at our gates now and tonight… Trust me, I'm a general practitioner – know what I mean? You should see what crosses my surgery five days a week, nine hours a day… I promise you, I'm not a doom merchant, but we're busy losing our way. Drug addiction, teenage pregnancy, child abuse and paedophilia, debt entrapment, obesity, alcoholism, benefit dependency, ignorance and illiteracy, and every symptom of yobbery.

I see it, and I practise in a little backwater, in Devizes.

It's the drugs culture that's the worst – and so few seem to care… What seems to me to be so wretchedly stupid is that we are preaching for our failing lifestyle to be adopted by Islamic states. Such conceit.'

He stiffened. The trowel slipped from his hand.

Gaunt, working at the dig site with the voices – and sometimes the laughter – of young people around him, had felt rare tranquillity. He no longer scraped for charcoal pieces or for bone scraps that had been thrown away, centuries before, on to the cut wood and open-cast coal in the praefurnium… He had believed he had escaped, and had not. What now was relevant?

As if a nerve in him was pinched, he saw himself as an old warrior too tired for combat when the barbarians swarmed at the gates. A man who spoke of a society, decadent and doomed, in the corridors of Vauxhall Bridge Cross, would – Gaunt thought – be taken to the stake and burned alive as a heretic. Did a doctor from Devizes tell a truth that none dared name? It was a mandatory-death-sentence offence, in the offices of VBX, to suggest that victory was not assured.

'I hope you don't mind me prattling on… Do you think our time's up, like this chap's was? I wonder about it. Is all this we hear of the new fundamentalist enemy just modern-speak for barbarians at the gates?

Are we now as decadent as our chap, standing here for the last time? Quite a rum thought: in sixteen hundred years, folk will be scratching at the foundations of my home and getting all excited when they've found the sewer pipe and can tell what I ate, and have a chuckle and say, "Yes, he'd have known his time was up." Sorry… sorry, talking too much, my wife says I always do… What's this?'

Bare fingers wiped mud smears off a length of bone, and the arc-lights pierced sufficiently into the hole to show the minute working of the decoration at the head of what had been a hairpin – consigned to the fire rather than be an ornament in the tresses of a barbarian's woman. Gaunt, with all the warmth he could muster, congratulated the doctor on his significant find. They were called for tea. He levered himself out of the pit and carried his bucket to the tent where the urn was and sandwiches. He had thought, in a Wiltshire field, he would find sanctuary, but his mind was trapped by thoughts of Polly, and the man she had believed in, and the bright but deep eyes in the photograph of an enemy… and the casualties of war, then and now.

It was a supreme effort to drag himself to his feet. He was so nearly there, so close to his Grail. Oskar Netzer pulled himself up, off his stomach, off his knees and elbows, and the gate rocked on his weight and his fingers clutched at the catch holding it shut. Weakness consumed him, but the pain was long gone. When the gate swung open, a little more of his feeble strength left him and he lost his hold on the ironwork. He fell forward on to the cemetery path. He staggered over the loose gravel towards the stone and his wife's grave. He saw nothing ahead of him in the blackness but knew where he must go… and he believed he had made expiation for the wrong done by his uncle.

After a few short steps, he collapsed on to the sharp stones – but he hoped to reach her resting-place and to sleep there and be with her, to tell her of his ducks, and of the men who had intruded on his paradise, and that he had loosed the evil's hold on him… He crawled off the path and over sodden grass, reached out and found the glass jar, the stems of flowers that had been stripped by the wind.

He clasped the stone and did not know what he had achieved – did not know who would bury him – and sleep took him.

A clock chimed. A car, with lights flashing, and with an escort in front and behind, brought Timo Rahman to the prison in the north of Hamburg at Fuhlsbuttel.

He was led from it to a desk where the details of his life, and the charges he faced, would be processed.

The gaol's landings awoke. Word had passed. Spoons beat against metal mugs. Plates rattled against doors.

His name was shouted and echoed down the block's iron staircases. He was ordered to strip for medical inspection.

He was in hurtful ignorance of the reason for the collapse of his rule, and of who was responsible.

'I can't go in any further.'

'It's bloody dangerous out there, Dad.'

'Myself, I'd do it if I could,' Harry shouted at the wheel-house door, at his son. 'I can't… What I'm promising, it's never again.'

'Just get her stern on, Dad, and keep her there.'

He should have been down on the deck to help his boy but dared not leave the wheel and the diesel engine's controls to young Paul, his grandson, who had retched again and was now too frail to hold the wheel steady and did not know the working of the engine. The door slammed behind him, but he yelled and did not know if he was heard.

'Don't hang about. You get there, you ground, you pick them up if they're there, but you don't wait. Their problem if they're not in place in the water – my conscience is clear that my word was kept.'

Harry reached up, worked the lever that manoeuvred the light on the wheel-house roof and hit the switch. In the flood of the beam, he could see his son and grandson heaving the dinghy off the bucking deck and on to the gunwale, resting it on the trawler's side, then – as a spray surge swamped them – pushing it over. On a wave, the dinghy – held by a straining rope – climbed higher than the gunwale, higher than them, then fell like the trough had no bottom to it. He had given his word to Ricky Capel, and his word was all the honour left to him. His son seemed to punch the shoulder of his grandson, as if to reassure the kid, who was destroyed by sickness, then launched himself over the side. Harry lost sight of him in the next pit, then saw him lifted in the dinghy, and the kid loosed hold of the rope.

He kept the light on the dinghy. He watched its progress, pathetically slow, and smoke fumes spat from the outboard. It rose and it fell. It was hard, one-handed, to hold the light on the dinghy and to keep the steering on the Anneliese Royal steady, to control the engine and bring the forward speed down from three knots forward to two knots. To his starboard side was the roll of the buoy light, the Accumer Ee on the chart, and to port were dulled blips of colour from the island's homes.

A prayer slipped on Harry's lips.

He held the wheel-house roof light on the dinghy and saw it shaken among the whitecaps and go towards the surf… Whatever it cost him, he swore that he would never again be Ricky Capel's slave.

He heard, 'About bloody time. You ready? We go, yes?

We don't hang about, not now.'

The world of Malachy Kitchen was now a tiny, confined space. His whole world was a dune with blown grass and soft sand, a beach, riffling surf and a light that wavered on the leaping progress of a dinghy. He felt cleansed, as if old baggage were dropped, and no one here would label him a coward. He coiled his body and made ready to run.

They were gone.

They went in a sliding chase down loose banks of sand. Little yelps of elation from Ricky Capel, like a child at play and happy, nothing from the man who led him.

The light on the boat at sea, perhaps because she was hurled up, wafted away and beyond the dinghy, and then raked over the surf and came on to the beach from which the tide ran, and Malachy saw them, saw that Capel had the box that was the radio, and that the second man carried a machine pistol that trailed loose in his hand. Malachy stood, but the light's beam did not reach him. It swung low, searched for the dinghy and found the breaking waves, then its target. They were off the loose sand, on the beach, and they ran away to his left towards a point that the dinghy headed for.

He had the tags in his hand, and he lifted the strap over his head: they were his name, his service number, his religion and his blood group, and they were his history. In his fist, fiercely clenched, Malachy held them.

Because he knew when he would hit, he waited a few long seconds more. He could not see them, only the dinghy.

He thought himself his own master, and all that was his old world were the shoes on his feet and the tags in his hand. He came off the dune and the sand plunged under his feet. He fell and pushed himself back to his feet. The wind blasted against him, the rain stung at his eyes, and he ran.

Shells crunched, broke, under the tread of his shoes.

He stretched his stride.

When the boat's light came up again, off the dinghy, it caught them – Ricky Capel behind and the second man in front of him – found them near to the surf line.

Neither looked back.

He pounded the beach. He careered through a lagoon of water. It was where he wished to be, a battleground that was perfect.

They were in the water. He saw them against the white sweep of the surf, and against the thunder of the breaking waves the voices were shouting, screaming.

'We're coming… Can't you get in bloody closer?'

'You got to come to me. I'm not bloody grounding.'

'Get in nearer.'

'Won't risk tipping her. Tip her and we're all bloody gone.'

'I can't goddamn swim.'

'If the engine goes under, we're wrecked. Come on, shift it.'

They were into the surf wall, Ricky Capel trailing.

Between the cresting waves, Ricky Capel had the water at his ankles and shins, but when the waves rolled at full height the water squirmed round his waist and seemed to drive him back. Malachy heard Ricky Capel's howl that he had lost a shoe. The man ahead never turned, never reached back with a hand to steady Ricky Capel, never tried to be of help.

Malachy splashed into the surf and the drive of his legs was blocked. He was lifting his knees, stamping for height over the surf, and was closing on Ricky Capel. He did not think why he was there, what he did, how Ricky Capel had become an enemy to be destroyed. The past was gone from his mind. He struggled against the wind's force, against the waves.

He saw that Ricky Capel had stopped and he thought exhaustion had beaten him. Malachy seemed to hear the sob of Ricky Capel's breath. The gap had opened between the two men, as if contact had been lost, and beyond both of them – riding and falling in the water, lit by the light – was the dinghy. He took the deep gulp, swallowed air into his lungs. He closed on Ricky Capel – five more strides, then three – and the water beat against his waist. A new wave came that pitched up the dinghy, ran against the other man's chest, lurched into Ricky Capel, and charged Malachy. As he braced himself, he threw back over his shoulder the two tags, and did not twist to see them fall. He had no more use for them, or for the past, and did not hear their splash. Malachy lunged. His fists snatched at space, and spray, and then his weight hit Ricky Capel.

He came without warning, and the momentum driven by the grip of his shoes collapsed Ricky Capel.

Perhaps Ricky Capel, in the two or three seconds between feeling the hammer blow against his back and being forced under the surf, tried to shout.

Underwater, in darkness, Malachy gripped the thrashing body and fingers gouged at his eyes and a bare foot kicked at his shin – and the height of a wave passed and the wind surged on their faces.

The light lit them.

He saw the shock in the eyes of Ricky Capel, as if he did not understand why, then the squirm of fear as if he remembered a man on the pavement of Bevin Close. The scream was choked, and water spat from his mouth. The next wave caught them, and the fight had gone from Ricky Capel. Hands grasped at

Malachy's coat, then his trousers, then his shoes, then loosed.

He stood. He felt the weight, pushed by the surf, against his ankles.

The man was at the dinghy, but had turned.

Malachy did not hear the weapon, but saw the flashes from it, and the man climbed easily up and into the dinghy. He felt a weakness in his legs and in his hips… and was aware of vague shouts from the dinghy, then the roar of its outboard gaining power, and felt himself sink. It did not seem important to him that the sea closed over him, then freed and lifted him, covered him, then carried him… so tired.

The surf was in his ears and the water caressed him, as she had done – and he heard her voice.

'Fight, damn you – don't bloody give up on me.'

He craved sleep.

'He can count himself lucky he was shot.'

'Myself, with my own hands, I'd have throttled him.'

'It's just a total and utter shambles and the responsibility for it, a criminal responsibility, lies with those who allowed him to be there.'

When the report had been given over the loudspeakers, when her voice had gone, they had bayed their anger – Dennis of the Security Service, Jimmy from the Norfolk police, and Bill who did liaison for the Hereford- and Poole-based teams.. and each in turn screwed his lip to outscore the derision, the hostility, of the previous intervention, and last in the line was the Special Branch officer, Trevor.

'I think, again, the essence of the issue is missed,' he said softly. 'I'm not talking of any morsel of charity owed to a man who fell far, but of the business at hand. We spoke of a rat run. What I made of the somewhat distraught communication from the officer on location, the rat run operates. She reported that he, the only individual I have interest in, boarded the dinghy and was en route to the mother boat when the light was cut. The Anneliese Royal is at sea and we are alive, have a man to track… Kitchen's fate is of no concern to me, is a mere distraction, as are the reasons for the stupidity of his actions.'

A dawn had gone, and the last of the storm slipped inland. A final shower of rain plastered the beach and was blown on over the German mainland and towards the heathland of Luneburg and the Baltic coast beyond. The sun broke through, caught the tail of the shower and threw down a rainbow. One end of the rainbow was on the island's endless flat sands and on the slackening surf as the gale died. It's colours danced on the body of a drowned man that was heaved backwards and forwards by the disapearing tide. A woman walking her dog found it, and thought, from a distance, that the cadaver was a dead seal, but when she came close she saw the eyes of a man, wide in terror, and the rainbow went on.

A man – long decamped to the mainland town of Norden – brought his wife and three teenage children to the island's cemetery at Ostdorf to lay flowers on the grave of his parents. For the adults it would be a solemn few minutes of contemplation while the children rambled among the stones. He was recovering memories of a stern disciplinarian merchant mariner, and a mother who had survived Baltrum's elements into old age, when his vigil was broken by the shriek of his younger daughter. He hurried to the girl, his mood of respect fractured. He found, wrapped against this stone, the body of a man wizened with age and the sunlight fell on darkened bloodstains.

Murmuring, so that she would not be heard by her son or by the girls, his wife said, 'You know who that is? It's old Netzer, it is Oskar Netzer. Never had a good word for a living soul, never had a friend since she died, never did a day's work… Never did anything useful to others. The end of a wasted life. What could have happened to him to make all that blood?'

Polly crouched in front of the washing-machine. She had emptied into it everything from the rucksack that could be soaped, rinsed, tumbled, and the sleeping-bag. Dried sand caked the linoleum. She heard the door of the apartment open and it was then kicked shut.

She called out, 'I'm back – in the kitchen.'

She stood and started to strip.

She was aware that Ronnie was in the doorway.

She peeled off layers of clothing and bent to stuff them into the machine.

A trilling voice was behind her: 'Oh, brilliant, good to see you. Had a good time? Christ, that's a serious mess, bloody hell. You been sleeping on a beach?

Doesn't your lot run to hotels? Don't tell me, you didn't get any shopping done. God, Polly, what's that on your hands? Is that blood, old blood, on you? Are you all right?'

She was naked, and she had to heave against the washing-machine's door to fasten it, then hit the button.

'I'm fine. Thanks for asking, but I'm fine… Yes, it's blood. Not to worry, not mine.'

She watched the machine churning suds through the window in the door.

'You know what I'm going to ask.' She heard the giggle. 'Whatever it was you did – don't mind me – did you win?'

She felt the cold on her skin, not the warmth of him.

She felt the salt in her throat, not the taste of him.

'Some people won and some people lost. But they're history, the winners and losers.'

She walked past Ronnie, across the hall and into the bathroom, and lost herself behind the shower curtain.

Under a cascade of hot water, near to scalding, she scrubbed herself clean. Sand from her hair welled at the plughole and she washed the last of his old blood from her hands.

She yelled, and did not know if she was heard, 'You never really learn it, do you? Who are the winners and who are the losers?'

Harry Rogers brought the trawler into harbour – and did not know that a crisis committee had monitored his progress across the North Sea and that a pilotless drone flying from Boscombe Down had been overhead and tracking the Anneliese Royal with a state-of-the-art lens, and that a submarine's periscope had scanned him from close quarters as he approached the East Anglian shore.

They tied up.

They reported to the harbourmaster that a winding-gear malfunction had prevented them fishing when the storm had blown out, that they had no catch to land.

His boy, Billy, took his grandson, Paul, to a doctor's surgery in the town for a check-up on his arm and to assess the damage from continuous seasickness.

Harry stayed on board.

With a hose, a brush and a mop, he sluiced through the wheel-house and the galley, and if he lifted his head he saw the rest of the town's fleet put to sea in breezy sunshine.

For more than three hours, he was alone on the trawler with memories of a storm blowing off a German island that were alive, and dreams of owning an historic sailboat that were dead.

He locked the wheel-house, hitched his bag on to his shoulder and walked the deck to the point where the old encrusted ladder would take him up on to the quay. He swung his legs over the side and on to a slippery rung, and saw two men above him.

No bullshit, no protestations of innocence… Too exhausted for it, too much of his life hacked from him.

They came down the ladder, gingerly, in their city shoes and suits, and he led them back to the wheelhouse. He made them coffee, but that did not soften the coldness on their faces.

He had no one on board. They could search if they wanted to. He had brought back no passenger.

Harry said, 'You make a mistake in your life, and each day that follows it's harder to extricate yourself from that mistake. My mistake was Ricky Capel. I have no excuses and I look for no sympathy, and the mistake is mine. You want to know about the man with Ricky Capel on the beach, and I'll tell you what you want to know. Billy went out in the dinghy, in a hell of a sea, and part of what I'm saying is from him, but most of it is from what I saw with the light. They were in the water, big swell and surf, and coming slow towards the dinghy. I saw this guy come off the beach, and he ran into the surf, and Ricky Capel and his man never saw him. Ricky was behind. The guy smacked into Ricky Capel and he put him down. They went together, under, then just the guy came up. The man, Ricky's man, turned, would have seen the guy, fired at him. I saw the flashes and I heard the gun, and the guy went down, and I killed the light. The man got on board Billy's dinghy. Billy brought him back to us. I was turning hard. Billy came on board first, and then he had hold of the rope, took it from young Paul, and the man was going to follow him. I left the wheel, left it spinning, and I went on deck, and I got the rope off Billy, and I chucked it. He lifted the gun and I was flat in his sights. He'd have blasted me but it didn't fire, must have been too much water in it, and then there was the gap between him and us… I went back in the wheel-house and took the engine to power. We left him. He had the dinghy, he had an outboard with a full tank, he had the reserve, but he didn't have us. I never saw him again, God's truth, and Billy didn't, nor Paul. We took her back to sea. I can't say what happened to him, but it was foul conditions for an open dinghy. Can't say whether he drowned, made a landfall, whether he survived and is still out there, can't.'

He had been summoned to the heavenly heights of Vauxhall Bridge Cross. He had knocked and there was the answering call for him to enter, but then he was kept standing for those few seconds, while the assistant deputy director studied desk papers, that confirmed celestial authority.

'Ah – sorry, good to see you, Freddie. Your leave went well?'

'Thank you, Gilbert, yes. It was excellent.' Frederick Gaunt was damned if he would show annoyance at the casual insult, or speak of the raging cold he had acquired in a Wiltshire field. 'We had a first-class dig.'

'Glad to hear it. I'll get you up to speed. Your target, Anwar Maghroub is lost, presumed drowned, but there is, sadly, no confirmation of that and no body. To be very frank, Freddie, some have spoken of your role in this, and that of Miss Wilkins, and of the "hired hand" as adding up to a shambles, the destruction of an operation that should have brought great rewards

– and would have done if that bloody Kitchen, and the reasons for his actions remain a mystery, had not interfered. I, of course, and you would have the right to expect it, have fought your corner with vigour but against considerable opposition. I think we are at a time when we require new brooms and fresh per-spectives, almost a cleaning of Augean stables. You know – washing out the stables of the king of Elis, a labour of Hercules.'

'I am familiar with Greek mythology.'

'Good – different minds bringing different thinking to ongoing problems. We don't want to lose you, Freddie. We'd hate a man of your talents to throw in the towel and make an overhasty decision on early retirement, though the packages on the table are generous to a fault and offer many opportunities for the pursuit of valuable hobbies. We'd hate you to walk away. What's vacant, because of Wilson's diagnosis of diabetes, is Uruguay. It's a bit of a backwater, but that's where we are. What do you say to Montevideo, three years and perhaps an extension to four?'

If he gulped, he did not show it. If he felt a frisson of anger, he hid it.

Gaunt said, 'I'd like that very much.'

They wanted his neck on the block, wanted him gone. He would deny them the satisfaction. He saw the face across the desk flex in the irritation caused by his acceptance.

'I'd say Uruguay for three years, or four, would be most challenging… worthwhile.'

Gulls wheeled, screamed and dived on the bright-coloured intruder that was marooned at the base of the red stone cliffs.

An ornithologist saw it and reported to the coastguard station on the North Sea island of Helgoland that an upturned dinghy had been washed ashore. He was able to return in time to the cliffs and watch men come by cutter and retrieve it, but he was on a day's visit and did not have time to learn what the) had found. He telephoned from the mainland the next morning and heard the dinghy carried the name of a British registered trawler, and heard also that the cliffs and beaches of Helgoland had been searched, but without further result.

'No bodies have come ashore?'

None had been discovered.

'Perhaps it was taken off the deck by that storm last month.'

Perhaps it had been.

He came out of the stairwell and into the summer heat that burned off the block's concrete. A voice boomed behind him, 'How you doing, Mr Johnson? How you keeping?'

He turned, saw the big West Indian with the weightlifter's shoulders.

'Fine, Ivanhoe, just fine.'

'More important than how you're doing, keeping – how's Millie?'

'She's well, as good as to be expected, quite chirpy

… She asks after him.'

He had a handkerchief out and mopped his forehead, saw that sweat ran rivers on the social worker's face.

'She can ask but I doubt she'll see him. A new man, a changed man, and without old baggage. You, Mr Johnson, and me and her, we'd be old baggage, but he came back to the Amersham.'

'Millie heard he was here, not living on the estate but working.'

'I just seen him the once, turned up at my office door and all humble requested a job. I sent him where he wanted to go. They fixed him – a low grade because of no qualifications. I've not seen him since.'

'Where did they place him?'

The arm of Ivanhoe Manners waved expansively, generalized, in the direction of the estate facilities, buildings that had survived the warfare of vandalism, where the money of the New Deal for the Community had been swallowed, where the Pensioners'

Association played bingo and the Tenants' Association held meetings.

'Over there's where he is.'

'You got time to show me?'

A wide frown played on Ivanhoe Manners's forehead, as if the question perplexed him, as if an answer would embarrass him. Then he scratched at his ear, and seemed to wince as if the request hurt him. ..

Tony Johnson knew the basic detail of what had happened, months before, on a German beach, but what had crossed his desk had been sanitized of intelligence material. He knew the proof of it because, with half a hundred others from the Criminal Intelligence Service and the Crime Squad and the Organized Crime Unit, he had gone down to Lewisham to see the coffin of Ricky Capel – the untouchable smart kid put down in the earth. Not a wet eye to be seen; a parson clamouring through the service like he'd another one backed up; poor turnout and almost a carnival mood from those who'd showed. He was just home from holiday, two weeks on the Algarve, and Millie had told him that Malachy was back – ears like bloody surveillance antennae the lady possessed. He had come, almost, to wish he hadn't asked.

'I'll take you, but it's not for talking – just watching.'

'That'll do me.'

They went across a plaza, through a play area and across a road. The building where the facilities were, Tony Johnson thought, was like a damn great bunker

… and he reckoned it bloody needed to be. Past mums pushing brats in buggies, and kids on a block's corner – maybe it was the sunshine, but he rated the numbers of the kids as smaller than usual, but that would be the sunshine because the kids were night workers.

He heard the rumble of many voices and – God's truth – laughter in the Amersham.

They were at the bunker wall. One window set in it, covered with thick wire mesh.

'You heard me, Mr Johnson? Just watching, brief, and not talking, ever. We're the past and he don't need us.'

'I heard you… See nothing, hear nothing and know nothing, that's me.'

He peered through the wire and the sounds – yelling, shouting, laughing – belted him, and Ivanhoe Manners's mouth was close to his ear.

'It's the kids he's getting on his side. Now it's basketball, earlier it might have been football, later it'll be the pool tables. See him, he's a natural. Me, I'm too old for them, and you. He's not that much younger than me, or you, but it's like he's lost years. There's more kids now, playing basketball with him, than I ever seen. .. You know what? Like now, he's always in shorts and his T-shirt has no sleeves. Why? Look there, the little pucker marks on the right thigh and shoulder. They're top credibility with the kids, bullet scars. Two bullet-holes, hardly healed over, they win respect – I didn't hear where he got them, or how…

They don't know he was ever here, like he came out of nowhere. That enough for you?'

They walked away, left a basketball game behind a window.

Tony Johnson said, 'I'll see you around, Ivanhoe…

Like you said, best left alone, because we're the past and of no use to him. Good to see him standing, finding himself. Look after yourself.'

He went to his car.

He knew where Malachy Kitchen had been, and the hell of that place, and the price paid… and he wishec those who had put the man there could have stood with him, on tiptoe, and peered through a wire mesh. and seen a man born again.