Beyond Recall

Chapter 10

A dull light burned over the entrance to the apartment block.

The back of the van was open. Two men made a meal of shifting what Gaz reckoned were half-filled cardboard boxes. The goons stood aside and allowed the men to wheeze, move at snail speed from the door to the van, then put down each box, sweat a bit, swear a bit, light a cigarette, chuck it away, then lift the box into the van… and start again. A woman came out of the door and shrilled a complaint at them but they ignored her. She was elderly, with tinted hair close to her scalp and wearing too much lipstick. She jabbed her finger at the goons having had no satisfaction from the removal men. They spoke to her, and the indication was that it was none of their business. Gaz thought her the sort of old lady who could be a friend. She walked off with an arthritic limp, carrying a plastic shopping bag, hanging loosely off her arm. The woman was as good as ideal for what he needed: there was a drumbeat in his head and anxiety reared. She went past the bus-stop and along the street, avoiding the weeds and cracks in the pavement, was on the opposite side of the road to the Fiat. Gaz eased himself up from his seat in the bus shelter, seemed to look at his watch and despair of the bus he wanted ever arriving, and a couple of other hopeful passengers shrugged with him. He headed for the Fiat.

The window was wound down. He leaned forward and spoke in Timofey’s ear.

He gave his command softly. Easy enough… The woman had left the block with her shopping bag, was probably heading for a near-by store. Had not gone far because walking was clearly painful. Why she was special to Gaz was that she had, barefaced, quizzed the two men who escorted the officer. And seemed satisfied with their answers. Timofey said it would be for Natacha to do it… In the back of the Fiat, the old man snored healthily and Natacha had one of the two bottles purchased at the bar unopened at her feet, but she had been generous with the other, a third of which had gone down the father’s throat.

He thought the business was slipping. It had seemed almost wrapped and his journey near complete and he had the documentation he would require at the port’s security gate, and the trawler would have loaded its tanks and emptied its holds, and they’d have been waiting for him. Would have been as it was in Syria when the guys came back into the Forward Operating Base and did the detailed debrief for the Sixers who were regarded as too precious to step outside the compound and get mud on their shoes. He went back to the bus-stop shelter. It was always good in the debrief when the guys came back and had done well, and there might be high fives and slapped backs. But, other times… a surveillance screwed up and a target was lost. There were times when he had not done well, and had not done badly, but the situation hadn’t played out as hoped. Nobody to be praised and nobody to be blamed. Crestfallen faces. Saw Alice’s and she’d blink and mutter that it was ‘no one’s fault’ and not believe it, and Fee would swear, and Knacker would hear it and walk away. Knacker would leave it for the girls to tidy up. Gaz would go home to the island, and would open up the bungalow and would smell the damp air, notice the grass that had needed cutting before he’d been volunteered, and he’d be back in the dark place where the black dog roamed. He would get confirmation when the elderly woman came back along the pavement, burdened with her shopping bag.

He sat in the shelter and at his feet was the detritus of fast food meals, and a couple of sodden newspapers left in the rain, till the wind had driven them into the shelter.

It was a matter of the time schedules, and what was possible and what was not… He would take a sense of the blame if the bad stuff was confirmed, not that it was deserved because Gaz was only the watcher and had done what was asked of him.

The door to his cabin was wide open.

Jasha knew he had both closed and locked it.

He left the headlights of the pick-up on full beam and aimed at the door. The night hours were minimal and the sun would not set but the high trees around his home darkened the clearing except for the cone of brightness from his vehicle. Normally, when he came back from a day in Murmansk, the dog would be barking for him and scratching at the door. He heard nothing but the movement of the wind in the high branches around his cabin He kept a torch in the glove compartment. Used to carry a game rifle in the vehicle for when he came back in the long dusk but had abandoned the habit because the FSB and police units might have found it in a random search and were dishonest bastards, would have demanded payment not to hold him up while the weapon was confiscated and the paperwork checked out… It was why he detested going into the city, why he preferred to be here, at his cabin, and alone.

Maybe he did not need the torch because sufficient of the headlights’ power went through the open doorway and lit the far wall where his sink was, and the stove that was powered by bottled gas, and something of the chaos inside was visible. His jaw was set and his chin jutted. Jasha was not a man easily beaten when confronted by danger. Could be life-threatening, but would not slap him down if the safety of a friend, anyone who relied on him, was at issue. He took a deep breath, steadied himself. The dog was both a comrade and a friend, and had stayed silent. He reckoned the dog would hear the approach of the vehicle from at least 300 metres and would have worked on the door, heavy scratching. He doubted that the bear, his Zhukov, was still inside the cabin. Imagined it would have forced its way in, used its great strength, its one ferocious set of claws to prise open the door, would have gone inside and the dog would have made a token gesture of resistance and been savaged. He thought that he would find his cupboards emptied and tins holed by claws used as can openers and everything wrecked. He had loved that dog. He had been a puppy, abandoned by the military checkpoint at Titovka and Jasha had rescued it. The dog was his most valued friend, his constant companion. He would bury it that night. When he approached the door, the heavy wood planks hanging crazily, he would pause, hope to God that Zhukov would power past him if still inside. If he were in its path it would kill him…

He went through the broken door, entered the cabin. Shone the torch round the walls, and over the floor, across his bed, and… The torch beam caught the dog’s eyes.

Jasha assessed, his mind a confusion of puzzles. The dog was on its sacking bed and lifted its head, faintly wagged its tail, was palpably traumatised but lived. The table was upturned and his bowl of wild berries and apples was shattered but the fruit remained. The cupboard where Jasha kept tins of food had been dragged open but the contents had not been touched. Every door was opened or broken; he searched but could not see that anything he valued had been taken. It was, Jasha thought, the calling card of a creature that simply wished to know more of him, to learn about him. Jasha understood.

He went outside, switched off the pick-up’s engine, killed the headlights and let the quiet and the stillness settle around him. He supposed himself privileged because the bear, Zhukov, tolerated him, and wondered if a madness gripped him, and tears ran fuller, faster… And more to confuse him was what he had seen in the city – the small car, three people crammed inside it, the same three who he had seen running across rough ground, subject to military permits of entry and coming from a frontier named as an enemy of his country. Mosquitoes cavorted in his face and he did not know if the bear watched him. It would have destroyed him to give up his home, but it was not asked of him.

He yelled towards the trees and into the rain clouds, “Thank you, friend. Thank you for sparing us.”

And he did not know if he was heard, but thought it likely. He nursed his confusions.

She was the amoral dealer. The troubled daughter of a man who had strangled himself with a rope. She hated a state that had tossed her into gaol. Natacha, smiling with what a priest would have described as ‘an angel’s sweetness’, intercepted an elderly woman struggling along a pavement, weighed down with her purchases. Done with gentleness, charm and sincerity. They walked together, and she cut her stride to extend the opportunity for conversation and gave no offence, no embarrassment. The woman’s answers, faced with rare kindness, flowed.

“Rude and difficult, and never a part of our community.’’

“Is that so? Not respectful of you?”

“No time of day for me. Military, believes that makes him a czar. No manners.”

“And you have worked hard all your life.”

“Of course. I was in the office of the Harbour-Master, outside in all weathers, and…”

“If he is so grand, so mighty, why is he in that block?”

“I heard it was an administrative error. He fought it, then tired of the complaint.”

“And now he is leaving?”

“Yes, on his way. I did not know about the removal team coming, but his men say he will be gone in the morning.”

She pouted, played the game well. “You’ll miss him? I expect you’ll be on the front step with flowers for him, and he’ll have chocolates for you.”

“Good riddance – not missed by me and not missed by anyone else on our staircase.”

“Gone before you have started on your work for the day. I doubt someone like yourself is ever free from work.”

“Just bits. Cleaning. Making my pension go further, what with the price increases, you have to work. Not that he would hear me complain. From the bastard Chekist group, a spy in his own country. Complain to him about anything, that he leaves mud on the staircase from his shoes, and he will denounce you. They are the secret police, the new power.”

“They are shit. Will he go early?”

“He goes at dawn. First flight of the day. He has two men with him and they take him to the airport. They fly later, and then they are finished with him. They told me.”

“Do not love him then?”

“No! They are Chekists, but juniors. They worked for his father and why his father believed he needed protection I do not know. We think that they are responsible for him, are paid even to wipe his arse…” She crumpled with laughter. “They carry guns, I have seen them. They despise him. He has no friends, no visitors. People from his work, they do not come. He lives like a hermit. No women come, not even whores. He may be important but he is alone.”

“Not moving to a different place in Murmansk?”

“Do you listen to me? I said the first flight in the morning. He goes to Moscow, his men told me. But…”

“Yes?”

“Why do you ask? What is your interest?”

“No interest, just conversation.”

“Do you look to denounce me? I talk too much? My husband, he said I talk too much. Do you trick me?”

“No, all I do is carry your bag, and help you. If you would rather I did not…”

Natacha passed the Fiat but was still short of the bus shelter. Awkwardly, she looked at her watch and her face lit with that surprise always shown when time has flown and suddenly she was late, and she put down the bag. Had done well, carrying it half the distance from the intercept to the apartment entrance, and the van was still in place. She assumed that the men talked with the guards so as to stretch out the job, make sure they had exhausted their evening shift other than the return to their depot. She saw that the elderly woman’s face was now wreathed in concern, her eyes flitting nervously.

Natacha turned and walked away. She expected that the old woman was now staring at her back and was fearful, the bravado of her criticism of her neighbour now regretted… Too fucking late, sweetheart – and Natacha gambolled back towards the car went to tell what she had learned.

She did it without drama, like it was a conversation and not a description of a crisis. Gaz had come to Natacha. She was by the Fiat and gave her account in a mixture of high school teachers’ English and colloquial Russian, which Timofey translated.

Natacha repeated, he assumed, the exact words of the old woman: important that he believed she kept to the script because that way the wriggle room was restricted. Not ‘going in the morning’ but ‘going on the first flight in the morning’. Precious few hours left. Also leaving first thing in the morning would be the trawler. The agreement was that he would not communicate with it by phone, not even in the code they had as basic back-up, because to do so would alert the city authorities. The major’s old crowd at FSB, the vast yellow building on Prospekt, would have a forest of aerials and dishes on high ground, there to suck in the scores of electronic messages being sent to and from the city. On the boat he was supposed to sit tight, and come into Kirkenes on the ebbing tide and they would be watching for him, waiting for him. He assumed one of the girls would have a pair of binoculars slung across her chest and when the boat rounded the outer headland and started the run into the harbour the lenses would be up and focused, and they’d be looking for his face – then his expression – and would read it and would know. He carried a mobile. It had never been used, it held no information other than Knacker’s number because he had been told it was only to be used in a matter of life and death. A plane was taking off in a few hours, first of the day, and a target would be on it. Lost. Not that it was Gaz’s business to know what was planned in the aftermath of his own mission. He was the man who observed, who reported, who went in fast and came out fast, who did the job and kept it all simple, and then – as the instructor would say, or the unit sergeant – ‘got the fuck clear’.

Time to make a call.

Night coming in an Arctic summer, and street lights self-activated and hardly needed, and the words bubbled in his mind. He needed to consider the words, not sound like a panicked kid.

“I need to walk, need to think, and then…”

Timofey, now bored, as if the light had been extinguished on the mission, said that Natacha would walk ahead of him, and he should follow her, and speak to no one. He would go back to his apartment and dump his father and get more of the drink down his throat.

Natacha pulled a face, straightened her hair, and started off down the hill. The Fiat accelerated past them. He turned once and saw the two goons by their car and saw an upper window where a ceiling bulb burned. He imagined the target with a camp bed, the echo of bare floors and perhaps a small TV as company for the evening… and remembered what he had seen, what was expected of him, what had been done at the village.

Delta Alpha Sierra, the tenth hour

Might not have thought it possible. Might not have reckoned, before the dawn of that day, that it was possible to watch the enactment of an atrocity and have reached a plateau of shocked horror. Not thought it possible that an accumulation of cruelty could become boring. Boring because it was repetitive, had become routine.

He held her, would not let go of her. The rapes had started… Some women and some of the older men had been able by weight of numbers to break clear of the corral and they ran or hobbled as fast as elderly legs would take them… . Some needed to be distracted from the ritual killings of kneeling men and women and children, and they could take one of the women, sometimes young, very young, and sometimes an ugly toothless old harridan.

Two of the runners Gaz could not scrape from his memory. A woman had broken out, she had long legs and could manage a decent stride within her flowing clothing, and she might have been fun for the soldiers to watch and be allowed to run a few more paces before being dropped, but the first shooter missed with three or four rounds. A militiaman with a telescopic sight on his rifle brought her down and others hurried to finish her with bayonets. He watched, felt it was owed to the woman. Watched also the scurrying movement of an older woman, who could not manage speed but went forward bent low, not running towards the perimeter line of the IRGC men, but making for the football pitch, the broken crossbar. He heard, against the patter of the rain and the bluster of the wind, a chorus of laughter from the militia boys. Gaz understood. She went to where her son was, or could have been her grandson. She found him. Just a flattened heap of clothing, dead and sodden, and she gathered him in her arms. Perhaps a dozen rifles covered her as she struggled to stand upright and still carry the boy. She had found a new strength and staggered towards the commander and the officer. She carried the body to them and Gaz reckoned the officer was starting to slink back and might have been about to manoeuvre himself behind the commander. A small woman, bearing the burden of a bloody corpse, taking it to his murderers, laying it in front of them, by their boots. But, no great gesture, no ultimate act of defiance, she was shot a few paces from the commander, died with the kid in her arms.

These were the highlight moments. Many of the killings were now functionary, and without clemency. Gaz stayed in a scrape in the ground, hidden by the girl, by her dogs, by the goats, and continued to watch.

Held her tight. If she had broken and run, he would have had the Bergen strap on his shoulder and would have set out in as quick and as crabbed a zigzag run as he was capable of. He stayed, clutching his rifle. Three women had been raped. Pinned down, surrounded by standing men, one groping at his belt and pushing others aside and disappearing from Gaz’s sight. No screaming. He thought that a woman who fought would not have avoided her fate, and might just have lost some of her dignity – if any remained. Gaz was certain that the officer could have intervened, could have stood his ground and yelled at the commander that the killing should stop.

Had Gaz spoken to her, had she addressed him, had they found a common language of signs and words, had they spoken, then she might have said, ‘That was my grandmother who they killed a quarter of an hour ago, and it was my aunt who was shot a half an hour ago. The next one, who they will take out is my mother. See that one on the right of the tall woman, she is our schoolteacher. The father of our imam, he is the old man that the women hold upright because it would be lacking in grace for him to sit in the mud and filth.’

Each time that a rape was finished, there would be a moment when the watchers parted or drifted back and he would see the flash of skin, of upper legs and then would come the single shot… all done with an inevitability that had led, almost, to the boredom of witnessing a massacre.

He let go of her arm. He cocked the rifle. Left the lever on safety. Took back her arm. Gaz did not know why it was appropriate for him to make it apparent that he was arming the weapon. By now the vehicles of the Hereford mob would be near the rendezvous. They would be travelling slowly across the shifting dirt, but they would be coming. A matter of pride that the Herefords reached the meeting point if the Chinook could not get there, Arnie and Sam waiting, their lights smearing into the mist… and he had saved her.

The officer walked purposefully around the village, his pistol in his fist, and Gaz saw when a body might have been in death spasms and was rewarded with a final shot between the eyes or into the back of the skull. He could not have given a good answer as to why he had cocked his rifle… Time slipped and the light had faded, and the officer smoked a cigarette. The commander lit it for him, and the flash of flame brightened on his cheek where the blood was now caked in an erratic line.

The goats had started to bleat, fearful, and the dogs snarled and their teeth were bared. She did not fight him, stayed still, and he did not know what he could do for her other than remain as a witness.

His phone beeped.

Half undressed, Lavrenti checked the text. Did he want food? Was he going out again that evening? Leave for the airport at 06.00, agreed? Might have been Mikki and might have been Boris, both idiots and disrespectful. He wanted nothing, would stay in the emptied apartment, and agreed the departure time.

Another text. His father… What time was his flight due to land at Sheremetyevo? If possible he should accompany his father to a lunch at the past senior officers’ FSB club. Had he renewed contact with the entrepreneur who needed a roof? Another fight with his father was beyond him, he had not the strength for it. He replied with the time he’d be on the ground and requested a car meet him and take him direct to the venue – and he would, soonest, be chasing the Jew for a further meeting.

He closed his eyes. Again the bleep… his mother. Two pictures included in her message. She had enjoyed a tea party with a longstanding friend who had moved back to Moscow after her husband’s service had concluded in St Petersburg. The pictures were of the friend’s daughters – big fucking deal – one was twenty-nine and the other was thirty-two, and both grinned at the camera, and both were on the shelf and anxious to fall off it quick, and their father was still influential in the upper tiers of FSB. He deleted the message. Lavrenti might have reflected that there was a time in his life when the best of times ahead could have been coming home in the early evening to a pretty partner and her kissing his cheek, or mouth, and him offering chocolates or flowers, and some giggling and fingers going towards belts and straps, and elastic stretched, and tongues massaging each other, and then… then… always then… and now unattainable. Might have happened before the posting to Syria, before going to the village. Would not happen now.

He flicked the light switch. The half-darkness settled round him. He turned away from the window and faced a bare wall. Against it was his rucksack with his clothes, and at the bottom of it was his service pistol. It was frowned on in FSB to take a weapon home unless the officer had a pressing need for personal protection. He did not have that, only a sense of self-preservation that competed with inescapable guilt.

Knacker said quietly into the phone, “Do it yourself then, my boy, just get on and do it.”

The voice came back with a blur of static. “Don’t understand what you are saying.”

“Words of one syllable. Get it done. Cavalry can’t get there, so it has to be you.”

“Just not possible.”

“Can’t see a problem, my boy.”

“Not in my field, not my role, not…”

“We are not in a fucking trades union, not talking restrictive practices. Needs must… Get it over with. I can’t hang about, no opportunity for a shop stewards’ sub-committee meeting. Flexible rostering, let’s call it that.”

“Not fair. Was sent to do a job. I’ve done the job. Sorry if this is not what you wanted to hear.”

“You were there, you saw it, and now you’re backing off. How many were zapped that day? Want me to tell you? The courage of that girl, her strength. God, I could give her a bloody table knife and she’d get it done, and how. Are you squeamish?”

“I did what I was supposed to do.”

“Which was a bare minimum and did not allow for moving goalposts… I can’t put the people in place that are recruited. Can’t be done, not in the schedule. Means, dear boy, that we either have you to do the nasties, or we jack it in.”

“It is not my fault – it is not what I do.”

“What you do, sorry and all that – as I understand it – is sit on your arse and only get up when someone needs the bloody grass cut, or has to have some new corrugated iron nailed on to a roof. You opted out… I pitch up and give you the chance to walk again with some pride, face your demons. I reckoned you had the character not to look away. Gaz, I thought better of you. And that girl, that Faizeh, she’d have thought better of you. All of those poor people who clamour for revenge, call to you from the dark and the cold of a mass grave, aren’t they owed something?”

He turned the screw. Not fast, but with increasing pressure, but the call was drifting and should be cut as soon as the message was delivered, rammed down the damn man’s throat. A silence greeted him, and a cough, then more silence. He pitched on, charged for the conclusion. Hesitation would have been fatal – a demand for time to chew on the problem, a promise to call back. Not Knacker’s way. He knew the answer he would get. A request – take a life – made without hope but from necessity. Turned the screw but… for once he anticipated that the famed ‘Knacker’s magic’ was not going to pull a rabbit from this hat.

“Apologies, sir, but I cannot.”

“We are rattling round, need to cut to the quick. I suppose you can push off down to the docks and get aboard your transport and sail home, and go back to your refuge, and let’s hope the fairies… Gaz, I trusted you, and a host of people have that faith in you. Find a way, always a resourceful soldier, weren’t you? Do it, take him down.”

“I don’t have the means, don’t have a weapon.”

“You were issued with one, a handgun.”

“Refused it.”

“Am I supposed to credit that?”

“I was offered a handgun and a magazine, and declined to take it.”

“Then maybe you’d better find one, a resourceful boy like you.’’ A screw that would barely move through another revolution, and he felt the matter was close to conclusion. The girls were behind him, listening, and knew that the recce trooper was a fish gradually submitting to the strength of the rod and the line.

“The supermarkets, if you didn’t know it, are closed at this hour in Murmansk, so I doubt I’ll find a handgun among the vegetables or the frozen chips.”

“Very witty, Gaz, glad your idea of humour is holding up… So, you had better get off down to wherever it is and link up with the transport – and you can tell the guys that it didn’t work out, and they can tell you what they risked for old times and old loyalties, and you can wave as you sail away and hope the sleepers have gone back to bed and not been compromised, that their involvement was for fuck-all. Let’s look on the bright side: you won’t have to face the girl, not confront Faizah and tell her that you couldn’t manage it, and I expect she’d be gracious and understanding but she’s already on a flight and gone back to where she’s attempting to rebuild her life. I’m not sure that I and the team will be here to meet you on the way back, but you’ll be fine, you’ll find your way home. Good luck.”

He cut the call. Knacker raised his eyebrows, as if inviting comment. A meeting would be convened for late the next morning, the Round Table gathering to induct a new member, Camilla Turnberry, tough as an old leather boot it was said, with a deft record in Ukraine. The kettle howled in the kitchen. Sorry not to be there because the gatherings seemed of increasing importance to him, the coming together of the eccentric thinkers. The girls would tell him what they thought over a cup of tea.

He passed the phone to Natacha. He made a gesture with his hands of snapping it in two.

They were on a small platform, overlooking the harbour, grey in the long dusk, and there was a statue near to him of a woman gazing far out towards the Barents Sea – a fisherman’s wife, or a sailor’s mother. Iron railings around the statue were covered with scores of cheap padlocks and Gaz knew them to be the symbol of lovers, leaving something to be a witness of permanence. He doubted if he knew the meaning of love, maybe never had, and thought that, from what he had said and what he had heard, he would not see Aggie again, tell her anything that mattered… thought himself cheapened. What Knacker had said squirmed in his mind. Above them, was a floodlit church: he thought it a place he would need.

She did not break the phone but opened it. She took the card from its innards. Then took her cigarette lighter from her jeans pocket – gave the card back to Gaz and let him hold it between his thumb and forefinger while she flashed the lighter. The flame ate at the card, let off foul fumes, and when it crumbled in his hand and the heat scorched his skin, he dropped it, stamped on it. She went to an overflowing rubbish bin and dipped her hand far down inside and that would be the last resting place, till the bin was cleared, for Knacker’s phone. Gaz wondered what a statue counted for, a woman waiting for a man to come back from danger, whether he were included.

He said what he wanted to do, pointed to the church.

“He won’t do it, Knacker,” Fee said.

“Sorry to be the pooper at the party, Knacker, but I can’t see it, not him,” Alice said.

“He’s not a Hereford boy, doesn’t have that ruthless bit.”

“Had a pretty high level breakdown, Knacker, went and hid.”

Fee poured tea into a mug for Knacker. “Those people, the reconnaissance troops, they lie on their stomachs and watch and report, and they slip away. They’re long gone when the serious stuff starts.”

Alice added milk. “He’ll be on the boat. I guarantee it, nothing on their local news, and him on the boat.”

“Just didn’t work out.”

“Have to get the hitters on to a flight, send them home. God, they’ll bloody grumble.”

“It was a good idea, Knacker,” Fee said. “Just didn’t get to take off. He wasn’t the man for that job, a bit too ordinary.”

He would have disappointed both of them. Did not rise to what they told him, but paced the kitchen of their safe house, and jangled money in his pocket and could feel his coin of 1800 years before, and considered how it would have been for that Roman military intelligence officer who would have had speculators out in those empty misted wildernesses. Considered also how it would have been for the woad-painted chap, who he identified with, who would also have had covert agents prowling near the forts on the Wall and maybe farther behind the lines and beyond help. He did not rise, nor did he deny them.

Fee said, “What you always say, Knacker, if it were easy…”

Alice said, “… then everybody would be doing it. They’re not, it’s not easy. A fucking nightmare.”

He let his fingers linger on the coin’s surface. A good legacy for him. Was always tough to do the waiting time.

Gaz sat on the wall beyond the forecourt of the church. The quiet had been around him, broken only by drunks’ shouts and occasional tyre screams and a distant siren. Before he had taken a place opposite the front doors of the church he had been able to look down on to the harbour far below. Arc lights lit the bulk of the aircraft carrier and he saw two destroyers of Soviet times now ready for scrap. Saw the tangle of masts and rigging and ropes and nets where the fishing fleet was docked. The boat that had brought him across the North Sea, from Unst in the Shetlands to a landfall on the Norwegian coast, was there, waiting for him.

He wrestled with his dilemma. Betty and Bobby Riley would say, ‘If it’s right, then you do it, son, and if it’s not right, then you don’t do it. Don’t hold with pragmatics, and no justification in doing something because you’ve been told to. In your belly you know what is right and what is wrong. Can’t escape from the gut feeling.’ And a school teacher had said, ‘You are your own man, it’s not an excuse to say that you were told to do that.’ And a chaplain had said, ‘At a fork in the road, you make your own map. Go against your better judgements and take the wrong way and you will forever regret it.’ And Aggie had said, their fingers entwined and both of them braced against a gale, while they had walked on the cliffs at Noup Head, ‘What’s done is done, cannot be undone, good saying and true, utterly true… you have to live with yourself and your actions. Think how you want to be remembered, and respect yourself.’

The words of Knacker, the man who could manipulate him, purred in his mind. They might, down at the boat, have already eased their legs over the side and on to the quay and begun to amble towards the security check at the gate, and gone outside it and started to linger in the shadows, and they would lurk out of sight except for the glow of their cigarettes and would wait for a taxi to pull up and disgorge him, or a private car to drop him off and then spin fast through a turn and drive away, or they might be waiting for the soft tread of his feet. He’d said, like it was a joke: ‘Suppose I get an extra hour in the little whore-house, Murmansk’s finest, and miss the sailing time, promise you’ll wait for me.’ Raucous laughter, from men who harked back to the comradeship of war and a bus route through grim seas, and then solemn faces below the carpets of stubble and weathered skin, and a promise of what they would do. Accepting little was possible if the schedule was not met; one had said they’d not hang about long past sailing time, not invite suspicion, had to be gone, had to… He thought of them, and thought of the pilot who had flown him, and the jaunty south London girl who had escorted him, and of the briefer for the fence crossing and the trouble taken there, and of the girl from the village who deserved more than was given her… too many to think of. Heard voices and vehicles, and the scrape of a key in the heavy lock of the church door. All wishing him to succeed. Could not tell them, stand there and yell ‘It’s not my fault. I did what was asked of me. Just bad luck, and I’m not to blame.’ Could not shout that, but could not erase what Knacker had said, ‘Do it, take him down.’

Natacha came fast towards him. She had left him to his thoughts, had stayed back, now was like a protective terrier and coming close. Her hand went into his arm. The church door was opened wide. A hearse came and bearers lifted out a simple wood coffin. A widow wore black; children stood awkwardly with her, mourners forming her escort. A priest came from inside… Gaz assumed that at this hour, on the edge of midnight, the coffin would stay in the church for what remained of the night, that the funeral service would be in the morning but a vigil would start now. He thought this was where he wanted to be. They went inside, Natacha’s arm tucked in his. He entered a world of brightness and unreal beauty. The walls were covered in the icon pictures of that version of Faith, Christ images and those of the Virgin, all decorated in the highest quality of colour and gold leaf, and carved dark wood surrounds: a place of majesty, and of calm. The priest engaged him, a look of sympathy and support. Gaz accepted that he had gatecrashed, was a felon in the night to these people, but he used the location, as he had when outside, to assemble his thoughts… they were taught in the unit to think on their feet, to back their instincts. His experience, when he had been in hedgerows and ditches and in camouflaged scrapes in the ground, was that a man when isolated must make his own decisions and not bleat for company or help. Listening to the murmur of voices around him, and with Natacha holding his arm, Gaz felt the stress of the day was starting to float away. Knew what he would do, and calmness came; not what was expected of him, but what action he would take.

Gaz eased a path through the mourners, left the family and the coffin behind him. Stole a last glimpse at the magnificence of the icons and went out into the grey gloom of the night; he looked to see if the boat were still visible but could not find it and the mist was thicker and the rain had started again. Only the pallbearers were outside. A clock was striking in the distance, the chimes muffled. Too much time had passed. He turned to her… bloody girl thought he was going to smooch her and her face lit up with anticipation, but he put a finger across her lips.

“Something I want you to get me?”

“Get?” Wide-eyed, watching him, like it was a game.

“Get me a gun.”

“What do you want? You want a howitzer? A bazooka? Even a tank? Which?”

“Just a handgun, a pistol.”

She was laughing, and the pallbearers glared at her, and they’d have heard her inside. She tugged Gaz’s hand, and they started to run. Still laughing, chirping, ‘Just a handgun, a pistol.’