A Line in the Sand

Chapter Two.

Behind the cottage homes of brick and flint stone, where climber roses trailed and the honeysuckle was not yet in leaf, the ornamental trees in the gardens were shredded of colour and the sea was slate grey, with white flecks. Between the houses and through the trees, he saw it stretching away, limitless. A solitary cargo ship nudged along the horizon, maybe out of Felixstowe. The sea was like a great wall against which the village sheltered, a barrier that had no end to its width and to its depth.

"God, don't spare the horses."

It was the reason he'd been fetched out for the day. Fenton wouldn't have wanted to drive or have to face the vagaries of train timetables and a waiting taxi. Geoff Markham's function was to drive, not to play a part in what should have been a reassuring and businesslike making of arrangements for the removal van's arrival. He had the wipers going but the back window was a disaster, as if a filled bucket had been tipped on it. He reversed cautiously, couldn't see a damn thing in his mirror, then swung the wheel hard. The car surged forward. Fenton was writhing out of his dripping coat and nudged Markham's arm so that he swerved. He veered towards a woman in a plastic cape pushing her bicycle. Before he'd straightened up, the tyres sluiced the puddle over her legs. There was a shout of abuse. Fenton grinned.

"First sign of life we've seen…"

Markham should have stopped to apologize but kept going: he wanted away from the place. He knew nothing of the sea and it held no particular attraction for him. He thought it chill and threatening.

They went past a small shop with pottery and postcards in the window from which faces peered. They would have heard the woman's protest. There was a tearoom beside the shop, shuttered for the winter. They swept past the village hall, a low-set building with an old Morris outside. Then there was a pub with an empty car-park.

"Thank the Lord, the open road beckons. Could you live here, Geoff, in this dead end?"

They'd both seen it. The estate agents' for-sale sign was propped in an untrimmed hedge beside a crazily hanging gate with the faded name on it, Rose Cottage. Beyond was a small overgrown garden, then a darkened cottage with the curtains drawn, no lights showing. The rainwater cascaded from the blocked gutters, and tiles were missing from the roof. It would be 'three bedrooms, bathroom, two reception, kitchen, in need of modernization'. And it would also be, down here on the Suffolk coast, ninety thousand pounds before the builders went in. But all that was irrelevant to Markham. He was wondering how Perry was facing up the devastation they'd left behind them.

Sort of place, Geoff. where the major entertainment off-season would be screwing your sister or your daughter or your niece. Eh?"

Not since he had come back from Ireland and gone to work on the Mid East (Islamic) Desk, had he heard his superior utter anything as crude. He was shocked, wouldn't have believed Fenton capable of such vulgarity. The bitter little confrontation with Perry had rattled him.

They went up a long, straight road, first flanked by terraced houses, then, as he accelerated, by larger houses oozing prosperity, set back in gardens with tarpaulin-covered yachts in the driveways. The church was on their right. Geoff Markham was good on churches, liked to walk around them, and this one, through his side window, looked to be worth a quarter of an hour, a fine tower, solid as a fortress, a wide nave, safe as a refuge. Beyond it was a stark facade of flint ruins, the clerestory windows open to the concrete grey of the cloud. He turned his head to see the ruins better. There was a chuckle beside him.

About as dead as the rest of the wretched place."

Fenton, he knew, lived in Beaconsfield, not on his own salary but on family money; couldn't have managed Beaconsfield, the restaurants, the delicatessens and the bijou clothes shops where his wife went on a desk head's wage. Money was seldom far from Geoff Markham's thoughts, nagging like a dripping tap. Vicky and his future were about money. He was driving faster.

It was strange, but he hadn't seemed to register the village when they came into it, less than an hour before. It had not seemed a part of the present and the future. The village was history, to be left behind once the removal van had arrived. But no removal van was coming, and the village its lay-out, entry and exit route, topography, community was as important as any of those isolated white-walled farmhouses in South Armagh, Fermanagh and East Tyrone.

Fenton was again massaging his moustache and showed no interest in what was around him. Through the trees was the shimmer of silver grey from stretching inland water. The road in front was straight and empty, he had no need to concentrate. Markham's mind was on the landscape, as it would have been if he had been driving in Ireland.

They reached the crossroads, and the main road for Ipswich, Colchester and London. He paused for traffic with the right of way, and the smile brightened on Fenton's face. He checked the distance they had come since leaving the house.

"About bloody time. You never said could you live there? Damn sure I couldn't."

It wasn't for Markham to pick a pointless argument with his superior.

"I couldn't, but it's right for him."

"Come again?"

"He chose well, Perry did."

"Don't give me riddles."

Markham pulled out into the main road and slashed his way through the gears for speed.

"He wants to make a stand, he won't run… It's good ground for him. One road in and the same road out. The sea is behind and it can be monitored. Natural barriers of flooded marshland to the north and the south with no vehicle access. If you were in a city street or a town's suburban road, you couldn't get protection like that. He chose well, if he's really staying."

They would be back in London, on Millbank, in three hours. Then the bells would start clamouring and the calls would go out for the meeting.

He went, like a sleep-walker, around the ground floor of his house, and seemed not to recognize the possessions they had collected over four years. Frank Perry felt a stranger in his house. He had made himself three cups of instant coffee, sat with them, drunk them, then paced again.

Of course he knew the reality of the threat. Whatever had been done with the information he'd given in the briefings at the house behind Pall Mall, he would have made a lasting enemy of the authorities in Iran. He'd assumed that the information had been used to block sales of equipment and chemicals from the factories of the old Eastern bloc and from Western Europe, from the works of his old company in Newbury. There would have been expulsions of Iranian trade attach, the loss of their precious foreign-exchange resources, and the programme would have been delayed. Of course the threat was real, and he'd known it.

However hard he had tried to put the past behind him, it had stayed with him. Sometimes it was a light zephyr wind on his face; sometimes it was a gale beating against his back. For four years, it had always been there. He had never been able, and God he'd tried, to escape the past.

Through those years, Frank Perry had been waiting for them. He couldn't have put features to their faces, but he'd known they'd come in suits, with polished shoes, with a briefcase that wouldn't be opened, with knowledge that would be only partially shared. They'd be so recognizable and predictable. From the moment he'd seen them run from the car to his front door he'd known who they were and what they would tell him. He had rehearsed, more times than he could count, what he would say to them, and had finally said it.

He stopped pacing. He stared out of the window across the green. His fists were clenched. Everything he could see, the homes of his friends, the shop, the hall and the pub at the end of the road, were as normal and unremarkable as they had been before the men from London had come. It was hard for Frank Perry to believe that anything had changed, but it had and he knew it.

His fingernails pressed hard into the palms of his hands. He would fight to hold everything that was precious to him.

Meryl Perry held the umbrella over the child's head and sheltered him all the way from the car, through the gate, up the path to the front door. The child shivered as they waited for the door to be opened. The Carstairs lived in a fine house on the main street, the only road through the village. They both worked and had good positions; she would only just have reached home, and he wouldn't be back for an hour. The child bolted through the open door.

"You're a saint, Meryl. Thanks ever so."

"Don't worry about it, Emma, wouldn't let him get soaked."

"You wouldn't, others might. Look, you're drenched. You're a sweetheart."

"I'm doing tomorrow, and you're doing the rest of the week, right?"

"Actually, Meryl, I was going to ask you can you do all this week? It's a real bash at work, and Barry's in too early to take them. I'll make it up the week after."

"No problem, what friends are for."

"You're brilliant don't know what I'd do without you."

The door closed on her. Her ankles were sodden, her stockings clammy. She liked Emma Carstairs, and Frank was Barry's best friend. They had good times together. The school-run to Halesworth had been their first touch point She hadn't had friends, not like Emma and Barry, before she had moved to the village. She hurried back to the car, the rain lashing her while she furled the umbrella. Off again, taking Donna home. She turned by the village hall, then went back past the church and up the lane to the council houses. She dropped Donna at her front gate.

"Thanks so much, Mrs. Perry."

"You'd have drowned at the bus stop."

"Vince didn't stop, nor that stuck-up Mary Wroughton."

"Leave off, Donna probably they didn't see you."

"I'd have ruined my hair, you're really kind."

"And I'll see you next week, when Frank and I are out."

"Always enjoy babysitting at yours, Mrs. Perry. Thanks again." The girl was out of the car and running for her front door. Her Stephen was scowling beside her, but he was eight and any child of that age objected to babysitters. She poked him, he put his tongue out at her, and they both laughed. He'd had behavioural problems in the city, but not since they had moved to the village; the best thing she could have done for Stephen was bring him here. She drove back into the village. There were no cars in front of Mrs. Fairbrother's, no guests checked in. Past the Martindales' pub, too early to be open. Vince's van was outside his terraced house, strange that he hadn't seen Donna at the bus stop. Dominic Evans, he was always nice to her, was running back into his shop with the ice-cream sign, probably going to shut up early, he was always helpful, and Euan. She parked as close as possible to their front gate and Stephen scampered for the door. Peggy's bicycle was askew against the Wroughtons' garage door. Meryl was locking her car, umbrella perched over her head, as Peggy came down the Wroughtons' path.

"Meryl, hold on."

"Yes, Peggy."

"I've that typing for you you said you would?"

"Of course I did."

"For the Red Cross and the Wildlife."

"No problem."

"Can't thank you enough, don't know what I did before you came. Oh, Meryl, you couldn't manage the Institute's minutes? Fanny's got an awful cold I think there's a lot of it about."

"Thanks, Meryl."

"You should get on home, Peggy. You look like a hose has been turned on you."

"I tell you, Meryl, those people seeing Frank when you were out they drove right through a puddle, could have avoided it. I used the F-word and all. Quite made my day, using the F-word."

Stephen had left the door open and the rain was driving on to the hall tiles. She took off her coat and shook it hard outside. She called, "Frank, we're home."

"I'm in the kitchen."

There was no light on downstairs. Stephen would have gone straight to his room, for his books and his toys. She went into the kitchen. He sat at the kitchen table, but it was too dark for her to see his face.

"You all right, love?"

"Fine."

"Had a busy day?"

"No."

"Visitors?"

"No, no visitors."

It was the first time in the four years she had known him that she could have proved he had lied. She said she would make a pot of tea, and switched on the light.

Kicking a cat would have been too easy, and beating his balding head against a wall would have been poor satisfaction. Littelbaum wondered if they knew in Audobon, west Iowa, the good, solidly ignorant folk, as they scratched a living and paid taxes, where their sweat money went. Did they know in California or South Carolina where it ended? In Texas? In Montana? If it were not for the tax money, Saddam Hussein might have been in Dhahran and the ayatollahs might have made it to Riyadh. And they treated him, the representative of those tax-payers, like a dog's turd, but he kept smiling. All day he had waited at the guarded headquarters of General Intelligence, and been shuffled between various air-conditioned offices. They offered him fruit juice and cake, polite talk, and he had achieved nothing.

The prisoner for Littelbaum he was a number, 87/41 had most probably been below him all through that day, in the basement holding cells. It was the fifth time he had tried to win access to the prisoner, without success. The man would be in the cells, and maybe his mother would not recognize him. Maybe he was without fingernails. Maybe a fine cord had been knotted tightly round his penis while water was poured down his throat.

Littelbaum did not have the name of the man he hunted, nor the face. He had footprints. The prisoner might have told him the name, described the face.

His driver took him back to the embassy. He could demand time of the ambassador and shout a bit, and the ambassador would shrug and mouth sympathy. He could send another protest signal to the Hoover building, and it would be filed along with the rest.

Later, he would be in his windowless office behind the bombproof door guarded by the young Marine, and he would stand in front of the big wall map of the region, with his herringbone jacket loose on his shoulders, and look at the footprints, at the bright-headed pins. It took two weeks, from the event, for Littelbaum to be able to put another pin in the map, to mark another footprint. From the pins hung little paper flags, carrying a date. For two and a half years he had followed the footprints, and they made a pattern for him.

There was a digital mobile telephone that made scrambled, voice-protected calls from and to an office in Tehran of the Ministry of Information and Security. The computers could not break through the scrambled conversations but they could locate and identify the position from which the call had originated or been answered. His pins, with their carefully dated flags, were scattered over the map surface of Iran and Saudi Arabia. It was two and a half years since the explosion at the National Guard barracks in Riyadh in which five of his countrymen had died; the pin was there and dated the day before it happened. Two years since the lorry bomb at the Khobar Tower airforce base outside Dhahran had killed nineteen Americans, and that date pin was there, the day before the massacre. Each atrocity enabled him to track a man without a name and without a face.

It took two weeks for the computer to log the locations. There was a pin in the Empty Quarter, dated forty-three days back, and he had bypassed every bureaucratic instruction, ignored every standing order, worked the contact game, won the one-time favour, tasked the Marine Corps helicopters and the Saudi National Guardsmen, and still been too damned late. And there was a pin in international waters along the trade route between Abu Dhabi and the Iranian port of Bandar Abbas.

No name, no face, only footprints for Duane Littelbaum to follow as if he were a shambling, slow-going bloodhound.

Mary-Ellen brought him the day's communications from the cypher section, and coffee. Sometimes she put whiskey in it, which, in this arrogant, ungrateful, corrupt country, was almost a beheading offence. She was blue chip, with a Ph. D." old money off Long Island, and she seemed to regard it as her life's work to look after a middle-aged man from poor farm stock out of Audobon in west Iowa.

It took sixteen days from the time the antennae or the dishes sucked in the streams of digital information for the computers to locate the positioning of the receiver, and transmit it to Duane Littelbaum. She passed him two pins and two dated flags. Mary-Ellen was too short to reach that far up the wall map into northern Iran. He grunted and stretched. He drove home the pins where there were two tight clusters.

He drank the coffee.

She said, and he did not need her to tell him, "It's where he always goes. He calls from Alamut, then the next day from Qasvin, then silence, then the call again, then the killing. It's what he always does…"

"That paper we got, the burned paper, what did Quantico scratch out of that?"

She shrugged, as if the Hoover building hadn't bothered to report back what the forensics at Quantico had learned.

"He's going for a killing, yes?"

"It's what the footprints say. He calls from Qasvin and the day before from Alamut, like it's his ritual. Then he moves and then he kills."

Hasan-i-Sabah had called for a volunteer to strike down a vizier. A young man without fear had stepped forward and Nizam al-Mulk was stabbed to death as he was carried in a litter to his wives' tent. Hasan-i-Sabah had inscribed, "The killing of this devil is the beginning of bliss."

The words had been written 906 years before, in the place where the man now sat. Every wall of the mountain fortress constructed by Hasan-i-Sabah was now broken. It was the eighth time he had climbed the mountain, taken the narrow path used only by the sheep, wild goats and foraging wolves over the scree slope. The drop beneath him did not frighten him, but if he had slipped on any of those climbs he would have died. He was two thousand metres above sea level, perched on a small rock high over the valley. It was where he found strength.

Among the fallen stones of the fortress, it was difficult for him to imagine it as it had been. In the valley had been the Garden of Paradise. In the fortress had been the discipline of self-sacrifice and obedience. The young men who gazed down on the garden and learned their skills in the fortress were the Fida'is. Their trade was killing. They understood their duty, and the personal sacrifice it required. They yearned for their reward, a place in the Garden of Paradise, where there were groves of sweet fruit trees, clear tumbling streams and women of great beauty. He had slept in a tent by a small fire, and at dawn had packed up and started his climb on the path over the scree. Whether in sunshine, or in the winter's mists, whether the snow had fallen and the path was treacherous, he made that pilgrimage to the destroyed fortress. He would reach it and sit for hours with the silence of the valley below him and consider the mission he had been given, the requirement for obedience and self-sacrifice, and the reward of a martyr's glory. When the sun lowered or the clouds darkened, he would make the call on the digital phone given him by the man who was like a father to him, like Hasan-i-Sabah had been to the Fida'is, and he would start the descent. He would reach the four-wheel-drive vehicle as darkness fell and drive back to the camp at Qasvin. From Qasvin, he would start on his journey as, long ago, the Fida'is had started theirs.

"What's the matter with it?"

He put down his fork noisily.

"Isn't it good enough for you?"

He pushed away the plate. Now he looked down at the table mat.

"It's not much it's what Stephen likes. A bit late to start complaining, you've had it before."

He'd cut through half a sausage and eaten it. He'd forked a few chips, and hardly any of the beans.

"What's the problem, Frank?"

Her boy had cleared his plate. He had a muted fear in his eyes, a child's loathing of adults' argument.

"All right, it's not much, but I had a long day. I did that typing… Come on, Frank, what's it about?"

He shook his head, jerked it from side to side.

"Are you ill? Do you want an aspirin?"

Again he shook his head, more slowly.

"For God's sake, Frank, what is going on?"

There was the violent scrape of Stephen's chair as the boy fled the kitchen, the clatter of his feet on the stairs. Then his bedroom door slammed.

"You know what? He did really well in his English assessment, better than he's done before. He was bubbling to tell you but he didn't have the chance, did he? Come on, Frank, you're always so good with him."

His head was sunk in his hands.

They hadn't spoken, not properly, since she had come home and had recognized the lie. She had been in the kitchen, doing the typing for Peggy before cooking supper, and he had been in the living room.

He still hadn't put a light on. He had turned his chair away from the unit fire and the television so that he could sit and stare out of the window. Dusk had come early and he hadn't drawn the curtains. He gazed out on to the green and the street-light on the far side. He had not listened to the news bulletin, as he usually did, or opened the paper she had brought him.

Meryl had never known him lie, and she felt a desperate anxiety. When she had met Frank Perry, four years before, she had been a single mother without a name for her son's father, working in a small company in east London, pushing paper, when he had come to advise on the engineering required for the heating system in the old factory floor. He'd made her laugh, and, God, it had been a long time since anyone else had. Next week, when Donna came to babysit, they were going out to celebrate the fourth anniversary, 3 April, since she and Stephen had come to the village with their cases, all that they owned, and moved into the house that she and Frank had found. Living here, with him, she would have said, had given her and Stephen the best years of their lives.

She touched and tugged at her fair hair nervously.

"Is it about me?"

"No."

She took Stephen's plate, stacked it under hers.

"Is it about him? Has he said something done something?"

"No."

"It's about you?"

"My problem," he said. His words were muffled through his hands.

"Aren't you going to tell me?"

"When I'm ready."

She was up from the table, carrying away the plates.

"Of course, we're not husband and wife. We're only man and woman with a bastard child. Makes a difference, doesn't it?"

"Don't talk such rubbish, don't hurt yourself."

"Frank, look at me. Is it what we don't talk about? Is it that forbidden area, the past? Two men came, and you lied. Did they come out of the past?"

He pushed back his chair, took the plates from her and put them in the sink. He held her close against him and his hands were gentle on her hair. He kissed her eyes as tears welled.

"Just give me time, please… I have to have time." He gave her his handkerchief, then went upstairs to Stephen's room to ask about his English assessment.

She tipped the food from his plate into the bin, wiped the table, then went back to typing the Institute's minutes and the details of the Wildlife Field Day and the Red Cross bring-and-buy morning.

She heard him talking with her boy. Because two men had come from the past and he had lied, she thought, somewhere in the darkness outside the window there was danger.

The previous evening, four men and a woman from the Mujahiddin-e-Khalq had been brought in a closed lorry to the camp at Qasvin. Normally it was the corpses of executed criminals -rapists, drug-dealers and murderers that were dumped at the Abyek camp, but because the four men and one woman were filth and apostates they were alive. He had heard them singing in their cell in the night, low, chanting voices.

They had headed north from the training base in southern Iraq and crossed the frontier in the mountains between Saqqez and Mahabad, and been ambushed by the pasdars. Most of the raiding party had fled, but five had been captured. After interrogation, trial and sentence, they had been brought to the Abyek camp at Qasvin.

Normally the corpses were propped against bare wood chairs or low walls of sandbags but once, when an airforce officer had been found guilty of spying for the Great Satan, he had been offered as live target practice.

It was not a camp like a military compound but was constructed as a small town, on the outskirts of Qasvin. It was a miniature Babel, for the recruits spoke in many dialects, with a sprawl of concrete houses and shops, a market that sold vegetables, meat and rice, and a mosque. For many years the Abyek camp had deceived the spy satellites of the Americans, but no longer. Now there was stricter security around the perimeter and greater caution on all methods of communication. Only the best, the most determined, of the Palestinians, Lebanese, Turks, Saudis, Algerians and Egyptians were brought to the camp to finish their training.

Many came to watch, marshalled by their instructors into small groups of their own nationality. In front of them, in the sand scape that stretched to the perimeter wire and then the open country, were the low heaps of sandbags and the chairs. He wore a scarf across his face. Even the most dedicated and determined of the recruits might be captured, interrogated, might not have the resolve of those who had gone from the mountain at Alamut. He did not cock his Kalashnikov automatic rifle until the terrorists were brought out from their cell and were within hearing range of the metal scrape. They were not blindfolded.

They were led to the chairs and the sandbags. Their ankles were not tied. The airforce officer who had spied for the Great Satan had tried to run, which had made for a better shot. It would be good if some of them ran. They were between thirty metres and a hundred metres from him. They were denounced by the commander of the camp, who read from a page of text. There was a silence and the sun caught their bared faces. He shot two with a short burst and saw them spill over, dead. He fired a long burst into another, a dozen rounds, and watched as the body kicked in spasm. He used many shots on the fourth man, but his mind was clear enough to reckon when he had one bullet left. She was furthest away, the last. She stared back at him. None of the men had given him the satisfaction of running, and neither did she. He shot her in the forehead, and she fell backwards. There was applause. He cleared his weapon, and walked away.

As the recruits blasted at the corpses it hardened them to fire at real bodies he made a call on his digital telephone. He was ready to begin his journey.

"I cannot fashion it out of nothing. I can only pass on what I've been given by the Americans, and I've done that. I've gone to the edge of my remit. If you can't shift him, that's your problem."

Penny Flowers had cycled over from Vauxhall Bridge Cross to Thames House; a rucksack and a mauve helmet sat beside her chair. It was the end of her day and she was tired, Geoff Markham thought. She wanted out and the ride home. She was older than him, and more senior. She didn't acknowledge his presence. He sat at the far end of the table and took the minutes of the meeting.

"May I just go over the ground once more. Stop me if I'm wrong. We have FBI material.." on a raid into the Saudi deserts, following an intercepted but scrambled telephone link. They miss their target but retrieve sheets of burned paper, which are sent to their laboratories for examination."

Barnaby Cox was a high-flier, and Geoff Markham had heard it said often enough that promotion had come too fast for his slender ability. He headed G Branch, with responsibility for the prevention of Islamic terrorism and subversive activity in the United Kingdom. His route to survival, as Markham had heard it, was a dogged pursuit of detail and a fierce avoidance of decision-taking. The weight of responsibility had prematurely aged his features and greyed his hair.

"Which is what I told you yesterday afternoon, Barney. Their forensics came up with the name of Frank Perry, in capitals, roman characters, a date and time, and a wharf number in the port at Abu Dhabi, in arabic. There was a secondary call the next day from a position located as mid-Gulf, between Abu Dhabi and Bandar Abbas. The Americans checked the name Frank Perry with their own computers, drew blank, tried us. We registered, it's what I told you yesterday."

It was not Harry Fenton's style to show deference to the younger man who had leapfrogged him on the advancement ladder. Fenton was back on tried and trusted home territory. He had private means and didn't care about the pension, but he had failed that day and there was an exaggerated edge to his voice. Geoff Markham doodled on his pad, waiting for something of value to note.

"Unless I'm given facts from which a threat-level assessment can be made, there's not really much point in me sitting here. Resources don't grow on trees. Franldy, it's pathetic that a man at risk cannot be persuaded to move to a safer berth." The superintendent from Special Branch spoke. He had come into the room and jerked off his jacket, ready for a fight. He was already bored. Geoff Markham knew the spat for influence between the Branch and the Services was already explosive. It amused him to watch.

"Fatal, the use of businessmen, never worth it," Cox mumbled.

"He's simply a silly little man without the wit to know when he's being offered common sense," Harry Fenton said.

"But we, dammit, are obliged to react."

"I'll need some facts, if it's to come out of my budget," the superintendent shot back.

So, pass the load to Geoff Markham. The junior would write a report, and decisions could be suspended until it was circulated. Beside his doodles of Victorian gravestones, with a couple of church steeples, he wrote down Penny Flowers's extension number at Vauxhall Bridge Cross and the policeman's number at Scotland Yard. He left them, as a whisky bottle was lifted out of the cabinet, and went back to his cubbyhole between the partitions on the outer walls of the open-plan area used by G/4.

There was a photograph, blown up by the copier, above his desk. The Ayatollah Khomeini glowered down at him, fixed him with a cold, unwavering stare. It was good to have the picture. It helped him to understand: the image on the wall was better than anything he read or was told. It was a snapshot to suspicion and hostility. He rang Vicky to tell her he couldn't make dinner. She was giving him the treatment, and he put the phone down on her, didn't bother to continue a scrap with her. He opened the file on his desk and gazed at the three useless sheets of paper that dealt with an identity change five years previously. Nothing was in the file about a life and a name before that change. They'd gone down to the country at half cock, under prepared the familiar story. He rang Vicky back, made his peace, and said at what time he would meet her.

He wrote on a sheet of paper the questions he would have to answer if he were to write a decent report. What was the history of Frank Perry? What had he done and when did he do it? What were the consequences of Frank Perry's actions? What should be the threat-level assessment? What was the source of the American information? What was the timetable for an attempt at a killing? The one thing he wouldn't write was that he'd rather liked Frank Perry.

The area was quiet, the partitioned sections either side of him empty. The face above him peered down. The eyes, long dead, preserved in the photograph, were without mercy. He rang Registry, told them what he needed. Geoff Markham lived a good safe life, and he wondered how it would be if he were alone and threatened by the enmity of those eyes.

He walked along Main Street. The rain had eased, left only a trace in the gathering wind. There were few street-lights and no cars moving. He did not know what he would tell her or when. He could recall each day and each hour, five years back, of the first month after he had left the cul-de-sac house in Newbury with his two suitcases; two days with the minders in an empty officer's quarters in the garrison camp at Warminster; four days with the minders in a furnished house at the Clifton end of Bristol; five days with the minders in a hotel on hard times outside Norwich, after which they had left. Two more days, alone, in that hotel, then three weeks in a guest-house in Bournemouth, then the start of the search for something permanent, and the absorption of the new identity, the move to a flat in south-east London. In those first days, he had felt a desperate sense of shamed loneliness, had yearned to call his wife and son, the partners at the office, the customers in his appointments diary. In those endless briefings on his new identity, for hour after hour, Penny Flowers had demanded he put the old life behind him. She had no small-talk, but emphasized coldly, and reiterated, that if he broke cover he would be found, and if he were found he would be killed. And then she'd gone with the minders, had cut him off, left him, and the night they had gone he, a grown man, had wept on his bed.

"Evening, Frank."

He spun, coiled, tense. He gazed at the shadow.

"Only me seen a ghost? Sorry, did I startle you? It's Dominic."

"Afraid you did obvious, was it?"

"Like I was going to shoot you. Just taking the dog out… I hear Peggy's lumbered Meryl with the typing for the Wildlife Field Day.

It's very good of her. I was doing the group's accounts this evening your donation was really generous, thanks. Prefer to say it myself than just send a little letter."

"Don't think about it."

"It's worth saying. It was a good day when you and Meryl came here wish all the "foreigners" slotted in as easily."

"We love it here."

"Can't beat friends, can you?"

"No, I don't think you can."

"Well, we've had our little piddle, time to be getting back, and sorry I startled you Oh, did Meryl tell you about the field day, for the Wildlife, in May? And the RSPB lecture we've got coming up? Hope you can come to both. We're doing the marsh harriers on Southmarsh for the field day any time now they're back from Africa. It's an incredible migration fierce little brutes, killers, but beautiful with it. Better be getting back. Goodnight, Frank."

The footsteps shuffled away into the night. Dominic seemed to love the dog as much as he did Euan. Perry walked on and took the path beside the course of the old river, now silted and narrow, and across the north edge of Southmarsh. He climbed, slipping and sliding, over the huge barrier of stones the sea had thrown up and went down on to the beach. His feet gouged in the sand, wet from the receding tide. From between the fast cloud that carried the last of the slashing rain moonlight pierced the darkness around him. The silence was broken only by the hissing of the sea on the shingle. He scanned for a ship's lights, but there was nothing. He did not know what he would tell her of the past, nor what she should know of the future.

He walked in the darkness, grinding his feet into the fine pebbles and the emptied shells. He turned his back to the sea. The great black holes of Southmarsh and Northmarsh were around the clustered lights of the village. He felt a sense of safety, of belonging. It was his home. He moved on, retraced his steps, and came back into the village. Brisk footsteps were hurrying towards him, a bouncing torch beam lit the pavement, then soared and found his face.

"Hello, Frank, it's Basil. Choir practice drifted on, why I'm late out, and same as you, I suppose I felt like a prisoner in the vicarage with that dreadful rain today. Got to get out, get a bit of air before bed."

"Evening, Mr. Hackett."

"Please, Frank, not the formality, not among friends even those, forgive me, whom I do not see on Sundays!"

"A deserved slap on the wrist."

"Not to worry it's what people do that matters, not where they're seen to be. If all my worshippers were as involved in the welfare of the village as you and Meryl, I'd be a happier man… You look a bit drawn, had bad news?"

"Everything's fine."

"Before I forget, I hear Meryl's visiting Mrs. Hopkins. She's very kind, a great help to that lady, awful when arthritis cripples an active woman and I've got you down for churchyard grass-cutting this summer, on my rota."

"No problem."

"Well, bed beckons.

"Night, Frank."

"Goodnight."

He walked across the wet grass of the green towards the light above the front door and his home. He still did not know what he would tell her or when.