Rat Run

Chapter Eight

The train rattled across country on a slow, stopping line.

In a few days the clocks would go forward and the evenings would stay brighter. Dusk hovered over the carriages and the track, and weak pinpricks of light marked remote homes set among the grey of the fields, hedges and woodlands. It was a complicated journey for Malachy, the longest he had made since coming to London: one leg from the Amersham estate to Victoria, by bus, the next on a fast train south to Redhill and the last on the line that stopped every-where, at Marlpit Hill, Penshurst, Paddock Wood, Mardon and Headcorn. His journey was nearly complete.

The carriages were filled with schoolchildren, their bags and noise, with shop workers and shoppers, with the first of the office commuters to get away from their desks. He wore the old clothes and his shoes were caked with mud from a litter-strewn garden in the play area. He stood in the rocking space between two of the carriages – he smelt and knew it. His woollen hat was low on his head and the collar of his coat was turned up to mask his face. As passengers passed him, to board the train or get off it, they hurried by because of the smell that came from the plastic bag gripped in his fist. He never put the bag down but kept it tight against his leg. Malachy knew that at every station there were cameras, and that cameras were now routinely fitted inside train compartments. An old world returned to him: he recalled lectures from long ago. Care ruled him, and he had regained a long-lost cunning. His ticket, expensive but not wasted money, was for Folkestone, far beyond his destination; it would act as a confusion if his route was traced. The clatter of the train soothed him and the map given him and memorized, then destroyed, was loose in his mind. In a few minutes, as dusk fell, he would reach the stop they had chosen.

There had been money with the map. Without it he would not have been able to buy the ticket and fill the canister in the bag that smelt.

The train had begun to slow and a remote voice announced the approach of the next station, Pluckley.

Now the lights, set back among bare trees and behind cut hedges, shone more fiercely.

In his mind, with the map, was the quiet rasp of the voice from the darkened interior of the car, from a face he could not see.

'You've done better than I thought you would, a hell of a sight better. Nothing more is asked of you. All I can do is tell you what's at the next stage upwards of the pyramid. You hit the bottom level, the pushers, but they're just low-life scum. Above them is the dealer and you took him out and he won't be back, but he's only a vile little creature. It's your decision.

Who feeds the dealer so that he can sell to the pushers? You may say, and you've the right to, that you went far enough… Trouble is, what I'm thinking, all you've done is disrupt temporarily the trade on the Amersham, and that may not be enough to help you where you want to be. Up the ladder, right? You want to be able to look in a mirror, see your face and not cringe in disgust – am I there? Are the dealer and the pushers sufficient to get you as high up the ladder as you need to be if the mirror's showing you your face?

But, like I say, it's your decision. You can walk away, or you can ask the question and I'll answer it.'

The train jerked, slowed some more, shook as the brakes were applied, began to crawl. He pulled the wool hat lower and lifted the collar-flaps higher. Kids, shoppers and commuters gathered around him, but he turned away his face as their lips curled in disgust at the smell.

'I thought you would. You were right to ask the question – well done. It's an easy one to answer. It would put you right up the ladder, high up it, if that's where you want to be. Me, I can't do it. I work at a desk, I'm ring-fenced with regulations, I'm going through the motions – like the people round me, and the people above me. Yes, we look busy, we're good at that. We pump out the spin about the success of what we do, get it into glossy brochures, and when I go home at night I can honestly say to myself, total honesty, that I have achieved less than nothing.

They're cleverer than us, sharper and smarter. When my pension's ticking over nicely, building, why should I care? I saw Millie, got me? My aunt, my blood, and I saw her. You are on her doorstep and you are there and you are available.'

The train lurched to a stop. Others pushed past him and hurried off down the gloomy platform. With the wool hat down and the collar up, Malachy followed them. If a camera found and tracked him, he offered it little for identification.

'A dealer needs a supplier. That's the stage up the pyramid, a supplier. Way over the level of the Amersham. He's big, big, and ugly. He lives fat and well. You knock over a supplier and that will send a shockwave – not an earthquake, but a real good tremor. Shakes the room, swings the light, moves the furniture, brings the plaster down. That gets noticed

… I never met you here. People will swear on a Bible that I was never, late at night, in a parking bay, on the Amersham. We never talked. You are on your own and I will disown you, your word against mine. The word of a man labelled a coward against the word of a police officer with twenty-six years' service and not a blemish on his record. Sorry about that, but it's worth the reminder. How you do it is your business.

He's the supplier.'

Malachy came out of the station and down a street, then left the high lights and the memory of the map brought him to darkness and on to lanes hemmed in by hedges; his lustreless shoes splashed in puddles.

He stepped out. Occasionally cars swept by him, accelerating and spraying him as if he had no right to be there. The plastic bag, weighed down by the canister, thumped against his thigh. He remembered everything said to him, of him and overheard – what it had done to him, and what had been taken from him. He saw in front of him, clearer than the trees, hedges and homes up long, curving gravel drives, the ladder and the steps on it. He walked for nearly an hour before the twinkling lights of a remote building, set back from the lane, confirmed the map and showed him the supplier's home.

'Come on, girls. Hurry up, for God's sake. You're beautiful enough already. Move it, please.'

Laughter rang through the panelled hall and spilled from two of the bedrooms up the wide sweep of the stairs.

He needed laughter, had been short of it that day.

George Wright needed laughter and a good party to get him past the aggravation of the morning. The scumbag, Penney, off the Amersham up in south-east London, was a broken stick – taken out, humiliated on his patch and now in a police cell. The scumbag had just taken delivery and not paid up. Should have paid up that morning, with fifteen thousand in used notes.

All about cash-flow. The cash-flow of a dozen dealers, after George Wright had taken his cut, was needed to pay the importer. It was all tight – money in and money out – and when the money coming in was short there'd be a problem with the money o u t… and that was what was owed to the little bastard with the baby face, Ricky Capel.

He had a good coat, Armani, hitched on his shoulder, and the tie of Friends of Kent County Cricket Club loose at his throat, and he was waiting for his 'girls'.

The party was at Fortescue's place. There would be people there from all the villages between Hothfield and Bethersden. Fortescue always threw the best parties

– live music, caterers in from Royal Tunbridge Wells, and a cabaret turn down from London – and the cream came from the villages, commerce and the professions.

It was the mark of George Wright's acceptance into the community as a respected and admired businessman that he always received the embossed invitation to Fortescue's spring thrash, and the autumn one.

He had a reputation for success. Fortescue, and the others who sent invitations to the Wright family, believed he dealt in quality cars. Bread and butter, so they believed, was in the Mercedes top-of-the-range models or BMWs, and also in Ferraris, Lamborghinis, and Morgans with no waiting time for delivery. The private-clinic consultants, legal senior partners, farmers with a thousand acres of prime land, the chief executive officers and their wives would have gone puce and needed resuscitation if they had known that their neighbour, friend and sometimes guest dealt in the class-A drugs they whinged about at parties. His trade and the source of his wealth were well hidden, tucked away under the floorboards of his office off the living room.

God, would they never come? 'Hurry up, girls, do me a favour, shift it.'

George Wright sweated. Not on the delayed appearance of his 'girls', but on the problem of cash-flow if a dealer defaulted. He took no exercise, was plump to the border of obesity. Sweat pooled at the back of his neck and on his balding forehead. He needed the party, needed it bad. The thought of Ricky Capel made him sweat, even if the shortfall was only fifteen thousand, less his own cut. Last year a dealer in Croydon had done a runner after taking delivery, and not paid up. George Wright had gone to his bank in the centre of Ashford, drawn the necessary cash out of his deposit account and used it to make up what he owed. He'd told Ricky Capel of his problem. 'Glad you did that, Georgie,' Ricky had said, grinning, snake eyes flashing. 'Wouldn't want you, whatever the reason, to see me short, wouldn't want that. Who was it turned you over?' A week later he had read in the evening paper – and found it hard to hold the page steady – that the dealer's body had been located in Ashdown Forest; the police were quoted as saying he had been tortured, then garotted with cheese wire. He hadn't seen Ricky Capel since: communication was by mobile phone, pay as you go, with number changes every two weeks, and drop-offs and pickups. Wouldn't want you, whatever the reason, to see me short… Hadn't forgotten that.

They came down the stairs. Melanie in a little black dress and Hannah in an off-the-shoulder scarlet number, both a picture.

Melanie knew what he did – knew but did not ask details. Hannah was wrapped up in her pony and her gymkhana rosettes, didn't know, and thought money grew on the orchard's trees.

He was on a treadmill from which there was no exit point. Everything he owned came from supplying class-A narcotics. The house, a mock-Tudor pile with mock-Tudor panelling – worth a million at least, maybe one point two, and no mortgage on it – was from heroin and cocaine. The landscaped gardens, the paddock and the stable block for the pony were from heroin and cocaine. The friendship of the neighbours and party hosts was from a social position based on heroin and cocaine. Without it he had nothing, would be back to door-to-door insurance-selling, where he had been before brown powder and white powder had intruded into his life and he'd snatched at it.

'You're both a bloody treat. Fantastic.'

There was no sharp step off the treadmill – he knew too much about too many. If he grassed he had the certainty that no gaol was safe for him. And no safety for Melanie and Hannah… He helped his wife and daughter into their coats, shrugged into his jacket and paused in front of the mirror to lift his tie. He collected his keys.

His own vehicle was a scarlet-bodied vintage Jaguar. His 'girls' followed him out to it and closed the door, mock old timbers, behind them.

He drove away, left lights blazing behind him. He went down the tarmacadam drive, past the post-and-rail fencing of the paddock, flicked the sensor that opened the outer iron gates and turned into the lane.

Their chatter was vivid around him – who would be there, what the cabaret turn would be, what they'd eat. The foreboding fled him. In his compart-mentalized life, George Wright could usually slip without effort from the world of supplying heroin and cocaine, sold to him by Ricky Capel, into that of one more successful and legitimate businessman resident in the Kent countryside.

Melanie was saying what she'd heard – it was supposed to be a secret worth taking to the grave – about the identity and the act of the cabaret from London.

Hannah shrieked: 'Watch out, Daddy!'

Hadn't seen the man. He swerved to the right side of the lane, then corrected. Only a glimpse. A man, a dosser, vagrant or tinker, stood blinded by the Jaguar's lights, pressed himself into the hedge and averted his face. He was clutching a plastic bag. They were past him. He swung his head, looked back into the darkness beyond the glow of his tail-lights, saw nothing. 'Bloody hell! Never seen him before.

Where does he think he's going? You did the alarm?'

'Of course I did,' his wife answered. 'Relax, George.

We're going to a party. Forgotten that?'

It was another half-mile down the road to the party's fairy-lights and the thud of music.

They had done an hour at the Fortescues' house of drinks, nibbles and conversations yelled to be heard above the four-man, striped-waistcoat-and-bowler-hat jazz band when his host loomed at George Wright's side. 'You see that?'

'See what?'

'Didn't you hear them?'

'Hear what?'

'God, George, are you deaf or pissed? Two fire engines going up the lane like bats out of hell. What's up past you? Only the Gutheridges' place, but that's two miles, then the Blakes' market garden, then the cottages, but if they were going to any of them I'd have thought, coming from Ashford, they'd have used the Tenterden road

… know what I mean?'

George Wright broke away, ran up the stairs, headed for the side bedroom where the Fortescues' boy, Giles, slept when he was home from school. He blundered through a room filled with books, hi-fi equipment, hockey sticks and tennis racquets and dragged aside the curtains. He pressed his face against the mullion lead and the glass – real, not mock like the windows of his home – and saw the glow in the sky and sparks climbing like they were fireworks, and fancied he could make out through the screen of trees what seemed to be the licking tongues of flames… He sank to his knees and the sweat ran to his stomach bulge and he seemed to hear laughter, like Ricky Capel's, that billowed up the stairs with the music.

'Don't mind my asking, Ricky – where's your necklace?'

'Round my throat. Where else would it be?'

'Not that one, not your mum's. The one I gave you.

Why aren't you wearing it?'

His hand went up to his throat. He felt the thin chain – Sharon's present to him for his twenty-first – and touched the crucifix that hung from it. 'Don't know,' he said. 'Don't rightly know. Somewhere.'

She was paring her fingernails, had her head down as she sat in the easy chair and the TV prattled with a game show, worked hard with the file, did it with the same intensity with which she cleaned the house.

'You said you liked it. Why've you taken it off? Cost ever so much.'

Ricky had said he liked the heavy gold chain from a Bond Street store. He had not taken it off. It had cost a little more than three thousand pounds, and that was with the discount for cash – his money. 'It's somewhere.'

'Of course it's somewhere… '

She must have been satisfied with her fingers. She kicked off her slippers and started on the toenails, scraping at them like it mattered. 'Have you lost it?

Don't tell me you've lost it. Did you?'

He had not known that he wasn't wearing it. She had bought it for him last Christmas and he had worn it every day, every night since then.

'I don't know where it is.'

'You have lost it?'

'Maybe I have, maybe I haven't.'

'You got to know whether you lost it or not. You got to know whether you didn't like it and took it off.'

'I don't.' There was a snarl in his voice but with her head bent over her toenails she would not have seen it. 'Well, have you looked for it? Yes? Where have you looked for it?'

'I didn't know it wasn't on.'

'Oh, that's great. I buy you a necklace, big money.

You say you like it. You promise me you do. You lose it and you don't even know.'

Her voice had a chisel rasp. Seemed like the beat of a dripping tap, had that rhythm and persistence.

'I'll look for it.'

'I hope you will…' Right foot done, she started on the toes of the left. 'I'd say that looking for it is the first thing you should do. That necklace, Ricky, was supposed to be important.'

'I said I'd look for it, all right?'

'Where? Where are you going to look for it?'

'I don't know. If I bloody knew it wouldn't be lost.'

'No call for you to swear at me, Ricky. I just gave it you, I didn't lose it.'

He had been so tired that evening. What he'd wanted was to be quiet at home. She'd cooked him a good spaghetti, with meat sauce, and had not burdened him with talk. He needed, that evening, to think through the implications of the instructions he'd given to the cousins. Both of them, they both come first.

Getting stuff into the gaols and into the City, two priorities to run together. Maybe Benji should run the gaols and maybe Charlie should aim himself at the City and the tossers there. Maybe he should bring in Enver Rahman and get his people to handle the distribution to a prison employee – whoever Benji could bend to carry the stuff inside – and maybe his people could sit in a sandwich bar in the City and trade stuff there. All to be worked out, all to be turned over in his mind… not the loss of a necklace.

'I'll find it.'

She turned to him. Didn't often see it, but there was a stubbornness in her eye. 'You should – what's a better time to start than now?'

'I'm thinking.'

'Thinking about where you lost it? Changed the sheets this morning, it's not there. Did you take it off and pocket it? No, you'd remember. What about the car, Davey's car? Ring him – tell him to look in the car for it.'

'No.' His mind raced.

'Why not?'

'It's too late.' He tried to recall when he had last noticed the necklace.

'Too late? It's not ten o'clock. What else has that idle ape got to do?'

'He's my cousin, and I'm not ringing him.' He thought he knew.

'I'll ring him.'

'You bloody won't.' It had bounced on his chest as he heaved himself up, into her, on the big bed in the Chelsea Harbour apartment, and her nipples had snagged the chain.

'I care about that present, even if you don't. Watch me.'

Joanne was up, going for the hall and the telephone.

He surged after her. Ricky caught her in the doorway.

For a fraction of time he felt himself threatened: she had the steel nail file still in her fist. With a short-arm punched blow, he hit the side of her face.

Had never done it before. He saw the shock in her eyes arid mouth, then the flush colouring her cheek.

He could not speak.

If she had cried out, if she had fought him and tried to slash his own face with the pointed file, he would have taken her in his arms and kissed her, told her he loved her, made excuses – pressure, problems, things he was sweating on. She did not. He saw contempt.

Quietly, as if it mattered to her that she did not wake Wayne, she went up the stairs.

The marriage had been thought by their families to forge an alliance. She lay on her back, dressed, in the spare room and stared up at the ceiling, her cheek tingling from the blow.

She had known him from school. She was taller than him then, and taller than him now. They were thrown together at school because the Smyth and the Capel breadwinners were away. Seemed natural for them to be close because their fathers were. In Brixton, the fathers shared a cell. In Wandsworth, the fathers were on the same landing. In Pentonville, the fathers had been in adjacent cells. Her father was a snatch man, his a driver. While the fathers tramped the exercise yard, together, the children were in a school playground.

Lying in the darkness, Joanne felt her cheek and her teeth. Nothing broken but there would be a bruise, big and rich, in the morning.

The first boy she had kissed had been Ricky Capel, tongues in mouths and him with smoother face skin than hers. The first boy she had had sex with had been Ricky Capel, her showing him what to do in her bed when their mothers were gone visiting. They had left school together, not a qualification between them, the only ones in their year who were not encouraged by the teachers to make something of themselves. She hadn't gone out with him when he'd been on the streets for thieving, but he'd talked about it with her and she'd told him where he was wrong and where he was right, and he'd listened. Natural that they'd be married. They were inseparable. Soulmates. His mother and her mother would have liked a church and a white dress. They'd done a register office, and then a reception down at the British Legion. 'I don't want nothing flash,' Ricky had said. 'I don't want nothing that draws attention. Just the Smyths and the Capels and the cousins.' The alliance her father had hankered after had not happened. Ricky had said her family were crap, couldn't keep their mouths shut, were losers. She had moved into Bevin Close, next door to his mum and dad and his grandfather. She was distanced now from her own clan, did not confide in them – would not tell them that he had hit her face.

No tears, only the anger. She heard him pace below.

She would not go down the stairs and tell him that the loss of a bloody necklace mattered not a damn to her, and she knew he would not come after her.

She had been told by Sharon about the cat, had been told by Mikey about the arrest and the kicking of the detectives. Nothing surprised her now. She was a woman of intuition and intelligence. Might spend her days under the eye of her mother-in-law, keeping a house clean, cooking meals and not complaining if they were wasted because Ricky was not back when he'd said he would be, looking after her child, but she knew the weakness of her husband. Her own father had explained it years back: 'He'll go away, hazard of the job. He'll be put inside. Nobody stays out, not for ever. You got to put up with it, girl, like your mum did, like his. Actually, it'll be the making of him. A man who's not done bird isn't rounded off. Terrible pressure there is on any man the longer he stays out.

Once you've done it, realized you can handle it – well, then it's a cake walk.' She had watched the swell of his irritation, like that pressure built, because he had not been inside… They didn't talk about life any more.

He didn't bounce ideas at her, tell her what he was thinking, planning. They had nothing.

His grandfather liked to come next door, old Percy did. Old Percy was the only one in the Capel family that Joanne now had time for. Made her laugh. Used to tell his stories and she'd end up fit to bust with her sides in pain from the laughter: how he'd screwed up, how he'd cocked up. But two years back, old Percy had told a different story. No weeping, no sentiment, but told with a cold rancour that didn't sit easily on a grandfather's shoulders. Winnie had died in '93, and she'd gone to the funeral – not married yet to Ricky but regarded as family A bloody awful day, cold and wet, and a hell of a turn-out for her.

Two years back, on the anniversary, old Percy had called by. He'd have been driven that morning by Mikey to the cemetery and would have laid some flowers and had a quiet moment… Mikey had brought him back and old Percy must have made some excuse and come to see her. First he had talked about the girls who had fled abroad. Perhaps she'd encouraged him to talk, reckoned it was a therapy for him. No smiles that day, no laughter, only the story that had chilled her. He had done big bird, had done a war, and could tell a story. She had not known that a story could be so heavy with bitterness brought from a grave. 'You're the best thing that ever happened to him, love, not that he has the brain to know it. Don't know how you live with him. My Winnie couldn't stand the sight of him, reckoned the girls were right to get out – but she missed them. You heard about the cat? Yes? We were all frightened of him, what he might do… My Winnie was in hospital and sinking.

Ricky and I went to see her. Ricky was all smarms, all comforting. You could see it in her face, she loathed him. He went out to the car park for a fag – or maybe to do a deal on his mobile. She hadn't much strength left. She said to me, "We should have drowned him at birth. That's what we should have done, Percy, drowned the little bugger. Drowned…" Last thing she ever said. She turned away, she coughed, she was gone… All that hate in her when she moved on – not right, is it? To hate when you're dying. You watch him, love.' Told the story once, and she'd shut it away, had tried to obliterate i t… But Ricky had hit her.

He could yell, he could scream, but it wouldn't be her hand that reached out to save him. Lying alone in the darkness, in the quiet of Bevin Close, she wondered what, who, could drown him.

'You all right, Polly?'

'Fine, I'm OK, just fine.' She did not look up. She was bent over her desk and light cascaded down in a cone from the lamp and fell on the cheap little notepad with the wire coil binding it.

'The photographs have gone, and your prelim report. Well received. So it bloody well ought to have been. Can't the rest wait till the morning? If not, can I get you a sandwich, some coffee?'

The girls in the office, long gone home, had told her often enough that she allowed Justin Braithwaite, station chief (Prague), to load work on her as if she were a pack-mule. Because she did not confide, entertain them with the soap-opera of her life, they knew so little. After being dumped by email from Buenos Aires, work kept Polly Wilkins sane… She realized her rudeness.

'Sorry. I'm grateful you called by Nothing, thanks. I want to go on hitting it.'

'Just checking. Freddie's at the other end of the line, sleeping in. You can handle it?'

'I can handle it.' A yawn creased her face and she giggled. 'I'll pack in when it's done.'

'Goodnight, Polly.'

He was gone, closing her door softly behind him.

She glanced at her watch, and grimaced. Hadn't realized it was deep in the small hours, that the embassy had emptied and the city slept. She heard him move away through the outer office and there was the bang of the grille gate closing on the rooms used by what Consular, Trade and Political called the 'dirty raincoat crowd'. At first, responding to the email, she had joined everything. Within a week she had signed up to art-appreciation courses, walking weekends and clay-court tennis lessons. Within two weeks, nursing a bruised brain, blisters and elbow ache, she had gone into Justin Braithwaite's office, spilled out the story of her broken relationship, had brushed away his offered sympathy and pleaded for work. Work was salvation.

What she respected most about her station chief, he had not offered a homily on the effect of tiredness on the quality of performance; nor would he take personal credit for what she had achieved inside the smashed, ineptly searched cafe. How many in

London, among those who had savaged the desk, would not have claimed a medal and citation for what she had found? Precious bloody few. It was an old work technique. After dumping the passports with the blown-up photographs on Justin Braithwaite's desk, and after writing up her report for encoding and dispatch and leaving it with him, she had gone on a search of every cupboard, drawer and storage box in their offices and in the secure section of the basement they used. She had been among old cobwebs, spiders' territory, and had finally retrieved the graphite powder.

The notebook, of course, should have gone in a pouch to London. A courier should have been sent pell-mell from Heathrow to collect it, bag it, chain it to his wrist, and fly it back for the boffins to handle.

Not Polly Wilkins's way.

Freddie Gaunt would back her and Justin

Braithwaite had not overruled her.

If she had not been hurt the way she had, belted, bounced off the walls like she was a rag doll, she would not have had that streak: bloody-minded awkwardness, her signature. She yawned again and felt the ache in her shoulders. A maxim of the Service was

'Find, fix, strike, exploit'. She thought, if she could stay awake, she would have the means to exploit.

The technique, using graphite powder – fine and black – was what they taught at the Fort down on the south coast. Recruits on the induction course, computer literate, grinned and patronized the instructor when he lectured on the use of graphite powder and told stories of how it had been used by old men, long retired, from the Service or the Soviet enemy or the east Germans. She had a double page of the Prague Post spread across her desk. On it was the first blank page of the notebook, where top sheets had been torn out. Difficult for her, in exhaustion, to keep her hands steady, but she lifted the sachet of powder and tilted its neck, then let the grains cascade down. God, what a bloody mess.

She lifted the open notebook, hands shaking, shook it and let the powder run on the page, up, down and across. Then she spilled the mess on to the newspaper.

She saw the writing, could make out the faint outline of the digits.

She copied what she read in a wavering hand.

A man had died that another might be given time to flee. A man was tortured and stayed silent that another's flight might be hidden. She saw them both: charred skull, bruised and bloodied features. She had respect for them… She would undo them, make the death and pain wasted. That was her work, done better because of respect.

Polly studied the numbers, then her mind glazed and the sheet of newspaper careered up at her, and the powder was in her nose, eyes and mouth. She slept at the desk and the graphite – a weapon of the long-past war – smeared her cheeks.

A hand shook his shoulder.

Gaunt woke, startled. His arm was thrown out from the blanket and scalding tea slopped on to his chest.

His eyes opened.

Over him, trying to steady the mug, was Gloria.

'Apologies if I frightened you, Mr Gaunt.'

'God… what time is it?'

'Two minutes after six o'clock, Mr Gaunt.'

She was always so precise, what made her so valued.

He reached up, took the tea from her and gulped.

Now that he was awake, she switched on the light.

Its brightness bathed him. He had slept only in his singlet and pants. She gazed at him with rather frank interest. He couldn't see why. He was skeletally thin, his facial features were drawn tight over his bones and his legs and arms were like fencing posts, but his shoulders were strong. Perhaps her interest in his white body, on which the sun was never permitted to shine, came from the absence of a man in her life. He would not have cared to list in priority the three features of her existence. Gloria, as he knew it, had her job, her self-appointed role of caring for Frederick Gaunt, and a spaniel, with the name C hung on a disc from its collar. Gaunt might come first or last, and did not ask. The tea cleansed his mind.

He shivered. New regulations demanded money be saved – of course it should be: without money saved there would not be the resources to pay for bloody pamphlets on glossy paper, The goddam Secret Intelligence Service in 2010 – the central heating came on at seven, no longer at five. He held his spindly arms across his chest, not for modesty but for warmth.

'What's in?'

'Wilco's signal and her passports. Nothing after that.' Then the stern schoolma'am reminder:

'Everybody has to sleep, Mr Gaunt – not just you.'

He drank the last of the tea, then waved the mug towards his desk. 'I think I'd like those pictures up so as we get under the blighter's skin.'

Off the bed. He padded to the door, retrieved his suit trousers from the hanger and slipped into them.

From his desk cupboard he took clean socks, an ironed and folded shirt, a towel and his washbag.

Gloria, the blessed woman, always made sure he had a change of clothes. He collapsed the bed, the blanket inside it, and took it to the little annexe off the office.

Then he was off, his waistcoat, jacket and tie on his arm, shoes in his hand, to wash, shave and ready himself for the day with a cooked breakfast in the canteen far below.

He saw the river traffic from the window and behind the capital city's waterway were the great buildings of prestige and government – any of them could be a target if the co-ordinator came this way.

From the door Gaunt glanced back. She had already Sellotaped the blown-up picture – A3 size – from the Argentina passport to the wall and was tearing off strips to fasten up the photograph lifted from the Canada passport. Strictly forbidden to cover office walls with posters and images – interfered with the master plan of the contract interior designer. The faces, one bearded and one clean-shaven with heavy-framed spectacles, stared back at him, seeming to threaten him. Again, Gaunt shivered, but not with cold.

He traipsed off down the corridor to the solace of the shower and war drums sounded in his ears.

The light came slowly under heavy cloud, and he waited.

The man did not go to the Florenc coach station for long-distance travel, or the principal rail terminus, the Mazarykovo Nadrazi, where the international trains left from. He was at a stop for a local bus that would take him only as far as the edge of Prague. His intention was to move away from the city in short, stuttered steps, not to use the coach station or any of the rail termini that he assumed would be watched.

He had slept rough in the Mala Strana parkland, had not dared since his flight to find a bed in a hostel.

Most of each day he had sat in the shadowed pews of St Thomas Church or St Nicholas Church or the Church of Our Lady Below the Chain, but for part of each of those days he had tramped the streets to learn.

The flight had taken him up through the hatch above the apartment's kitchen, and for a moment there he had reached down and grasped the hand of Iyad, their fists locking together. He had seen into the eyes of the bodyguard and had known that time would be bought for him – an hour, half a day, a day and a night. He would not waste the time. He had crawled, slowly, over the common wall between the buildings, scraping himself into the small space between masonry and roof tiles, and gone at snail's pace over the rafters and had heard TVs, radios and voices below him… and over another building's wall, and across more rafters.

The last had been the hardest. There he had had to scratch out the mortar, centuries old, that held the wall's stones, remove them silently, pray to his God that he did not make a disturbance. He had lifted a hatch, had found himself above a staircase, had dropped down, replaced the hatch, gone down the steps and out into the night air. A policeman had shouted at him: language not understood, gestures clear. The alley was evacuated. Residents should be gone. Why was he so late? His God had walked with him. A woman came behind him and held a pet, a lapdog, in her arms, and the policeman was distracted. The man thought she had slipped back in to retrieve her dog. He had drifted into the darkness.

An artisan, with his work bag on his shoulder, and his head protected against the rain by a cap, broke open a chocolate bar, ate two squares and gave one to the man. They smiled at each other. They were the only two persons waiting for the first suburban bus.

He had gone to the cafe near the coach station. He had seen the vans parked, had stood among the watching crowd and heard the smashing destruction of the search. He had seen the cafe owner led away, cowed and handcuffed. The crowds stayed to witness the show, but the man had sidled away. He had been alone in a strange city with only a tourist street map, a passport and the name of the contact he must reach.

He had thought the vigilance, once the apartment had been stormed and once Iyad's defence was ended, would be greatest in the first hours. He did not know if they had his face or the identity of the passport against his chest.

The chocolate made his stomach growl with hunger, but the bus came in the early thin light and the man travelled on through empty streets, past concrete tower blocks and by old factories, resumed his journey to the north and the coast.

When the torments came worst, when he could not sleep, Oskar Netzer would give up the fight. He sat on the sandbank, the first beat of the low sun on his back, and watched the strand across the channel between Baltrum and the greater island of Norderney.

For the dawning of those days when he was persecuted by memories, he dressed in the gloom of his house, kicked his feet into his boots, and searched for salvation. The torments that afflicted him had killed her, his Gertrud, as surely as if he had bent over her while she slept and smothered her with a pillow.

She was dead, buried in the cemetery at Ostdorf, because of him, as if by his hand.

The water in the channel rippled and dazzled and sunbeams danced on the waves. On the strand beyond, uncovered and wide because the tide was out, lay an old wreck whose hull was rusty dark and had sunk into the windblown sand. Near it were the seals, bulls and cows, who had not yet produced pups. After his love of the eider ducks, Oskar revered most the seals, Phoca vitulina, great gentle creatures.

The island still slept and the visitors had not yet come, and watching the seals at dawn gave him slight respite from the agonies of the past. The words written on the sheet of paper by his uncle, Rolf, stayed with him, as clear as they had been on the day he had heard them read in the lawyer's office – and the pain he had run from, had not escaped.

The Deposition of Rolf Hegner – the story of my guilt for which I expect to burn in hell. Those who have given me undeserved love should know the truth of me.

In 1941 joined the Schutzstaffel. Because of the problem of fallen arches in my feet I was not sent to a combat unit, but was posted to the concentration camp at Neuengamme. I worked there as a driver. I took prisoners, many of them foreign resistance fighters from France, Holland and Scandinavia, to work on building projects outside the camp and to dig from the clay pits for the lining of canals. After the firestorm raids of the British and Americans on Hamburg, I drove prisoners to the city for clearance and for the excavation of the mass graves for citizens at Ohlsdorf cemetery.

At Neuengamme, medical experiments were carried out on Russian prisoners and on Jewish children who were inoculated with live tubercle bacilli.

On 20 April 1945, when the British military forces were near to Neuengamme, I received orders to prepare two lorries to drive to Hamburg.

That day was the Fuhrer's birthday. Late at night, the twenty children, with two Dutch persons who cared for them and two French doctors who knew of the experiments and twenty-four Russians, were brought out of their quarters and loaded on the lorries. Pedersen drove the lorry with the children, Dreimann brought the ropes, Speck guarded the children. I drove the lorry that transported the Russians. We went in convoy, with high camp officials in cars, to the school at Bullenhuser Damm in the Rothenburgsort district. The Jewish children were taken inside, then down into the cellars where there was a hook embedded in the ceiling.

While the Russians, the Dutch and the French doctors were kept in the yard, the children were hanged one at a time in the cellar after being given injections of morphine while they waited their turn in an outer corridor. Trzebinski, the camp medical chief, supervised the executions. The noose was put round the children's necks by Frahm who then pulled on their legs.

After all the children were dead, their bodies were brought back to the lorries, but the Russians, Dutch and French were taken inside and hanged or shot. Before morning, all the bodies had been cremated at Neuengamme.

We were the only witnesses who lived.

After they had made investigations, the British authorities tried Trzebinski, and Thurman who had commanded the prisoner compound and

Pauly who had been commandant at

Neuengamme. They were executed by hanging at Hameln. Many others, myself among them, were not prosecuted but were left free to follow our lives in the aftermath of war.

I see the children today, as I write, I see them every day – I see them every night.

We did not stay to clear up the school's cellar.

Where the children had been until they were called forward, we left behind clothes, shoes, toys. A little carved wood car was on the floor.

I acknowledge that I have shamed my family by my actions on the night of 20 April 1945, and have contaminated the blood strain of my relatives.

Rolf Hegner

He watched the seals roll on the sandspit and heave their bulk towards the water. They basked, they dived, and had innocence.

He had sat beside the bed in the clinic, had held his uncle's hand and comforted him. He had believed him to be a good man. His own innocence had gone inside the lawyer's office. A week afterwards he and Gertrud had fled the city where the school was and he had set up home on the island, hoping to distance himself from the torments… His family, his blood, his guilt, which lit a fierce fury in him.

'How long have you been here?' A harsh voice rang in Alicia's ear.

It was her aunt – her housekeeper and minder.

The refuge for Timo Rahman's wife was the summer-house among the tall oaks at the back of the house.

When self-esteem fled her, when she lay on her back and he slept beside her, snoring through his open mouth, when the isolation of her life seemed to crush her, she came to the summer-house. He never did.

Everything inside the main house had been changed after he had purchased it: new kitchen, new decoration, new carpets and curtains, new furniture, all in the style that he believed was suitable. Outside, the flowerbeds had been uprooted, then turfed over: an ornamental garden would require continuous attention, would need maintenance from strangers or would become a wilderness. Only the summer-house was hers. Built of old, untreated timbers and planking, nearly waterproof, it was set against the fence and the hedge – and the security wire on stanchions, the alarm sensors – and was masked by trees from the rear windows of the house. It was hers because he had no interest in it. He never sat, relaxed. He never idled, and the clock was an enemy to him.

The dawn light was behind her aunt, silhouetting her stout peasant hips and shoulders.

'I could not sleep,' Alicia said feebly.

All areas of her life had been arranged. The marriage in the mountains of Albania had been arranged by her father and his father. The timing of her two daughters' conception had been arranged by Timo and a gynaecologist in the city. The fitting out of her home in Blankenese had been arranged by Timo and her aunt. The schools for the girls had been arranged by Timo and a lawyer who lived four streets away. Her clothes were chosen by her aunt, and the food for the family meals… Everything arranged, everything chosen. She was decorative, expected to stay attractive and keep her waist narrow, but she was not required to make any contribution to her husband's life. Beyond the hedge, the fence and the wire were the gardens of German women – smart, chic professionals – whose names she barely knew, whose lives she could hardly imagine, whose language she did not speak. Only in the summer-house could she find peace. The aunt had travelled with her from Albania, but the woman's loyalty was first to Timo Rahman.

'You could catch a chill out here.'

'I needed the air,' Alicia said limply.

'You want for nothing.'

'There is nothing I want.'

The aunt bored on: 'You have the love of your husband and your children.'

'I do.'

'You have a home to be in, and a bed.'

'Yes.'

'And a husband you should please.' The aunt leered.

What she knew of sex, how to 'please' and where her hands should go, had been taught her by the aunt, a demonstration with the woman's coarse hands guiding her fingers over the body flab – but what she had learned had been used to conceive the daughters, then to try for a son. When the boy-child had not come

– as if it were understood between them – Timo no longer pulled her over and hoisted up her nightdress.

He had no other woman, she knew that. She thought he had no more interest in fucking her, doing what dogs did in the village high up in the mountains, or goats or sheep. He had no need of her. She had love of a sort and children and a home, and emptiness.

She pushed herself up from the cushions on the bench, and followed her aunt back to the house.

The cold fanned her skin, and thin sunlight fell on her.

Malachy stepped off the train. He had walked through the night and believed he had defeated the cameras. Instead of taking a train from Pluckley or Ashford, he had gone north to Wye, hammering out the miles on country lanes. He had taken the first service of the morning, wool hat still down and collar still up, that meandered off towards Canterbury. He had walked out of the station there, as if that was his destination, had headed for a car park, had pocketed his hat and folded his coat, then kept it under his arm, unrecognizable, when he had gone back to the ticket office. The London train staggered into the city. All that told of his night's work was the faint smell of petrol on his sweater and the scorch in his trousers where the first flames had lashed back through the broken window of the living room.

He stepped out of the carriage and was carried on by the wave of the London workforce that hit the platform. He felt no elation, no excitement, no pride – but knew he climbed the ladder. If the garage had not been empty, if the house had not been silent and all windows closed, if the stable with the restless pony had not been well distanced from the house, would he still have broken the window and splashed the contents of the canister inside against curtains, down on to carpets and lit the coil of paper?

'I don't have to answer that,' Malachy murmured to himself. 'I take what I find.'