Rat Run

Chapter Thirteen

'My name is Malachy David Kitchen, and my date of birth is-'

'We know your date of birth.'

'-and my date of birth is the twenty-fifth of May, 1973.'

'And your blood group is O positive, and your religion is Church of England. I think we have covered that ground.'

They had taken his wristwatch, shoe laces and belt.

The German swung the dog tags in circles. He sat hunched on the mattress, rubber sheeting around thin foam, on the concrete bench that was the cell's bed.

The German was propped against the concrete slab, the table, beside the lavatory, and the woman leaned against the closed door and held the passport lifted from his hip pocket.

'My name is Malachy David Kitchen, and my date of birth is the twenty-fifth of May 1973.'

She said, 'And your passport lists your occupation as government service.'

The German said, 'Your military number is 525 329.

It is late, I want my bed, and you should tell me why you were at the house of Timo Rahman.'

She yawned. 'What government service requires a man with British military identification to be at the home of Timo Rahman?'

'My name is Malachy David Kitchen and my DOB is the twenty-fifth of May, '73.'

The tags swung faster, their shapes blurred in front of him. His passport was now closed, held behind her back. His scratches from the barbed wire were not cleaned and they made little stabs of pain on his palms and thighs.

He did not know their names because he had not been told them but he could assume the man was senior. They had taken him fast out of the car and had dragged him up the steps of a monstrous glass and concrete building. Police had hurried out of the protected reception area and had shown acute deference to the man, but had been waved away. He had been taken down two flights of stairs, along a corridor, then pitched headlong into a cell. They had followed him inside and the man had kicked the door shut behind him. He had half fallen to the bed, then had settled on the mattress. The storm of questions had begun. Over and over again, a repeated litany. When had he come to Germany? What was his business in Hamburg?

Why had he broken into the grounds of the residence of Timo Rahman? He had taken as his focus point the barred ceiling light.

'It's a simple enough question, Malachy.' She could not suppress another yawn. 'Come on, don't mess with us, not at a quarter past three. Why were you there?'

The German had come close to him, knelt in front of him and swung the tags. 'What "government service" brings a British citizen to the home of the pate of organized crime in Hamburg, when that citizen has military identification but is dressed like a derelict and stinks of sleeping on the streets? What?'

'My name is Malachy Kitchen, my-'

'Oh, for Christ's sake! Don't you know how to help yourself?' Her shoes thudded on the cell floor in theatrical exasperation.

'-date of birth is the twenty-fifth of May, 1973.'

'You are in debt to us,' the German grated. 'If we had not been there to help you, they would have killed you. Killed you and dumped you where your body would never be found.'

'Who sent you, Malachy?'

'Who put you against Timo Rahman?'

At the light on the ceiling, a fly came close to the bulb. For minutes it had circled the brightness, and he had watched it. His mentor at Chicksands, Brian Arnold, used to talk – if an audience could be found – on resistance to interrogation, and the stories were of time spent at Gough Barracks, County Armagh, and the experts he spoke of were not the relays of questioners from Special Branch but the men from the

'bandit country' of Crossmaglen, Forkhill and Newtown Hamilton. The best of the prisoners took a point on the ceiling, a wall or the tiled cell floor, and locked their eyes on it. Sometimes a hundred questions and not one answer. He'd learned well over coffee in Brian Arnold's room.

'My name is Malachy Kitchen…'

She said she was dead on her feet.

'… and my date of birth is the twenty-fifth of May, 1973.'

The German pushed himself up off the cell floor, strode to the door, swung it back and allowed the woman through. It was heaved shut and the lock fastened.

Why was he there? Why had he levered himself on to the top of the fence and jumped down clear of the wire at the home of Timo Rahman? Why had he climbed, in desperation, higher on the ladder? Images surged into his mind, like a nightmare. Worse than the insults had been the cloying kindness, the bloody syrup stuff, the understanding.

16 January 2004

'You've been very helpful, Mal, most co-operative, and I don't want you to think that your silence at most of the questions I've put to you in any way jeopardizes your position in the army. Your inability to answer is quite predictable and you show the well-known symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. We are not in the Stone Age, so we don't give elbow room to expressions such as

"cowardice", or to "lack of moral fibre". We accept – it's taken us psychiatrists long enough to get there, and we've walked a hard road – that PTSD is a medical condition.

Now, and this is very important to your peace of mind, there is only a remote possibility that you could face a court-martial and a charge of desertion or dereliction of duty. A slight and remote possibility but I'll do my damnedest to see it doesn't happen. My report will say this is as clear a case of PTSD as I have come across. Is there anything you'd like to ask me?'

In civilian life, the psychiatrist worked for a health trust on the south coast of England, but for more than thirty years he had been a member of the Territorial Army. God alone knew now how his regular patients, back home, were surviving his six-month absence. In the medical unit attached to the division's headquarters outside Basra, he had the rank of colonel and headed the Battleshock Recovery Team, a small empire of a lieutenant, who was less than half his age, and two orderlies who typed and doubled as nurses.

In the sprawling hospital in the seaside town, his caseload was overwhelming; in Iraq it was minimal. When a general or a brigadier came to inspect the BRT he'd sometimes joke that he felt like travelling round the combat units and touting for trade, but patients came infrequently.

'Nothing to ask me? Well, that's not unusual. You've had a hard time and probably suffered some pretty cruel cuts but that's because of soldiers' ignorance of mental disturbance.

It's all behind you. My promise is that we're going to get you right, get you back on track. You're not the first, and you won't be the last, but we're going to deal with it. You are not abnormal. Most importantly, Mal, you're not a failure. I emphasize it. Not an outcast or a pariah. You've had an horrendous experience but with time and care, and with the love of your family, you're going to come through it… I'm going to ask you to wait outside a few minutes while I draw up some papers that need your signature, and when that's done I'll call you back in. I urge you to remember very clearly what I've said – not a pariah or an outcast, but a patient with post-traumatic stress syndrome, not a failure.'

He watched the captain stand and go, a stilted step, towards the door… Fascinating. In the last month he'd had an RAF corporal who had been spooked by night guard duty on the airstrip perimeter, and a lance-corporal chef from the Catering Corps who had been pressed into service for patrol and had frozen; two months before him there had been a clerk from Logistics who had sat on a Portakabin roof and refused to come down claiming that local cleaners, heavily vetted, intended to kill him… This fellow was the real thing, what the textbooks described.

'Right, let's get some notes down, Donald.'

His duty orderly settled at the computer, and the psychiatrist dictated a skeleton analysis.

' "From field reports, the patient seems to have suffered initially from convertive collapse, with consequent loss of limb movement. Brackets, I do not believe we are dealing with a malingerer or a faker of symptoms, close brackets.

This became dissociative collapse, loss of contact with his environment and inability to relate to it." Take a paragraph.

Donald, what did you make of him?'

'I'd be going with what they said at Bravo, Colonel.

Sounds to me like he just flipped his bottle.'

'Hardly a medical statement. No, he's most interesting because he's a classic case. Could even be a paper in it, might get to be a lecture subject – no names, of course. Next paragraph. "From outside the family of the regiment he was serving with, so beyond the 'buddy' network. Probably, worth checking, poorly trained for being alongside an active-service unit. Asked whether his home domestic relationship was satisfactory, patient flushed and made no reply – all three make PTSD a top starter." I'm actually quite excited. People back home would kill to get their hands on him. We're rather lucky.'

'Boot him out, won't they? Don't mind me saying it, Colonel, but where's he going to go? Who'll have him, with this lot in his knapsack? You soft-soaped him, sir, but he's on the outside, long-term.'

'Getting science into your skull, Donald, is a labour of Sisyphus.'

'Beg pardon?'

'He had to roll a stone up a hill – Homeric legend, father of Odysseus – and each time he reached the top it rolled back down and he had to start again. Next paragraph. "Patient's silence during consultation is compatible with a current state of dissociative fugue. Brackets. Only basic self-care maintained, but refusal to acknowledge familiar locations and life structures. Close brackets." What you have to understand, Donald, is that cowardice is no longer a word in our lexicon. In the modern environment, PTSD explains everything.'

'The guys with him won't buy that, Colonel. You dressing it up won't change it, with respect. To them, he's just a coward. No escape from that reputation, being called a coward.'

'You'd tax the patience of a saint, Donald. More's the pity, I won't have enough time with him -going to damn well try, though. Paragraph. "Treatment of patient is handicapped by the delay in his movement from a forward area to my Battleshock Recovery Team unit. Valuable time has been lost, with consequent onset of acute stress reaction. The – capitals, PIE, close capitals – principle has been negated. Proximity, Immediacy, Expectancy cannot now apply. In a more ideal world than provided by combat in Iraq, the patient should have talked his actions through with a qualified expert at the location, within hours of it happening, and should then have been assured he would be subject to fast recovery from a 'one-off' behavioural incident." That's about it.'

'But the PIE principle didn't happen, sir, did it?'

'It did not.'

'Which is why, Colonel, he's shafted. He's labelled a coward, and big-time he'll believe what's written on that label.'

It was the moment when he realized the flimsy nature of the plywood walls and the lightweight door that divided his consulting room from the waiting area beyond. He cursed softly and felt a little moment of shame. 'Perhaps, Donald, you could get those consent forms out.

Make some coffee, then get him back in.'

Ricky had asked, 'What you got? A dozen passengers for the boat?'

Timo had said, 'One.'

'No, not the boat, one boat. What I asked was, how many passengers is it carrying? Twelve?'

'One passenger.'

They had been at the table, now cleared by the Bear, and the map was unfolded to its full size and lay spread across the mats.

Ricky had laughed in surprise. 'What? One passenger? The boat comes all that way for one body?'

'I see nothing to laugh for. The boat comes now for one passenger. The purpose of the boat's journey is not to fish. It is to carry back across the sea the one passenger.'

Because he was bent over the table, because his eyes were set on the island marked on the map, Ricky had not seen the piercing brightness of the eyes of Timo Rahman or the narrowed lips that signified his annoyance. 'You know what it costs, Mr Rahman, to put that boat to sea? A bloody fortune. It costs… '

A hand had slipped on to his shoulder and fingers had squeezed tighter into the flesh and the bones, and the voice had been silkily smooth: 'You bring the boat now, Ricky, for one passenger. Not next month or next week but now. That is very easy for you to understand, yes? And you will remember the many favours I have shown you, yes?'

'Yes, Mr Rahman.'

And the hand had loosened but had left behind it the pain of the pressure on the nerves, and there had been the first shout from the kitchen, and the chaos had followed.

Ricky Capel, far from home, had sat for close on two hours in the dining room. Had not spoken, had not moved, had not known what the fuck had happened.

He had heard the yelled commands and questions, the staccato orders given down the telephone in a language he knew not a word of. He had sat motionless with the map in front of him. Twice the Bear had come through the dining room, like Ricky wasn't there, with a Luger pistol in his hand. Now, from the kitchen, among the savagery of voices, a woman sobbed.

In the door was Timo Rahman. He hurled a heavy coat across the room – an overcoat, brown and with a fleck in the material. It hit the table and slithered half its length. The coat was in front of Ricky. 'You know that coat?'

'Not mine.' Ricky giggled, not from mischief or cheek but fear.

The voice was soft. 'I asked, Ricky, do you know that coat?'

'No – no, I don't.' The smell of the coat was under his nose, and made the fear acute. 'How could I?'

Timo Rahman's arms were folded across his chest, seemed to make him stronger, more powerful. Looming behind him was the brute of the man who had driven him to the house, who had served him at the table, who was always close, who still held the pistol. Rahman said, a gentle sing-song pitch, 'From England, Ricky, you come to my house as my guest. At my house, Ricky, you are given my hospitality. We agree?'

'Yes, I agree.'

'I say to you, Ricky, and you should believe me, that never has a thief or an intruder come to my house since my family and I moved to Blankenese. Any thief or intruder would prefer to attack the home of the police chief of Hamburg than risk my anger and retribution. You come, and my house is attacked, and this coat is left on my garden fence.'

'Never seen it before, Mr Rahman, never.'

On the coat, faint but recognizable, was the smell of petrol.

'My housekeeper had hold of his coat, but he slipped from it and went over the fence – and you have never seen it before?'

'It's what I said, Mr Rahman.'

'And the label of the coat is from Britain. I think Harris tweed is from Britain, and in the lining under a hole in the pocket, in two pieces, is a train ticket, Victoria to Folkestone, and they are in Britain. Ricky, what should I think?'

'Don't know, can't help you -1 never saw that coat before, honest.' His voice was shrill. 'That's the truth.'

'As your grandfather would have told you, Ricky, in Albania we live by a code of besa. It is the word of honour. No Albanian would dare to break it. It is the guarantee of honesty. Can you imagine what would happen to a man whose guarantee of honesty and truthfulness is found to fail?'

'I think I can,' Ricky said, breathy. 'Yes.'

'And you do not know who wore the coat?'

He seemed to see, from the doorway of his home in Bevin Close, the short-arm jab that dropped the man at Davey's feet, seemed to see the bundle of the man on the pavement made larger by the size and thickness of the brown overcoat. Seemed to hear Davey: Some bloody vagrant scum, Ricky. Seemed to feel the recoil in his shoe when he had kicked the face above the overcoat's upturned collar… seemed to hear, clear, Davey: On his coat, he had the stink of petrol.

Seemed to see George Wright's place, burned, and heard what George Wright, his leg fractured, had yelled about kids on the Amersham estate and a dealer, and a line from bottom to top: I want to be there, watch it, when it's your turn. He hadn't Davey at his back, and he hadn't Benji and Charlie at his shoulder

… Had no one to tell him what sort of crazy idiot, a mad dog, went after pushers and a dealer, a supplier and an importer, and turned up at the place of an untouchable who ran a city. If he had stood, his legs would have been weak and his knees would have shaken. Anyone knew, Ricky Capel knew, what

Albanians would do to enforce a contract. Himself, he had Merks on hire, from shit-face Enver, with baseball bats to kill a man who was late with payment, had seen them used on a man strapped to a chair.

'I swear it. I never seen that coat, not on anyone…

First thing, I'll do the boat, like you said. I'll get it over here.'

With their second bottle of Slovenian wine, their favourite, which they had carried off the ferry, the couple from Dusseldorf discussed their ill luck. Both had taken a week away from work to travel to their holiday home on the island of Baltrum.

The man, a chemist, said, 'The forecast is foul. You have to book vacation days away. Of course it is chance, but you are entitled to look for breaks in weather even before Easter. I spoke to Jurgen at the shop, and he says it is only storms that we can expect.

I tell you, the day we go home, it will change.'

She, the principal of a school for infants, said, 'You can't go on the roof, clear the gutters and check the tiles in this wind. You cannot paint the window-frames and the doors, which need it, in the rain. I cannot air the bedding and the rugs. It's hopeless.'

It had been the intention of the chemist and his teacher wife to open up their home and let the fresh air waft through it after its winter closure; each spring it was necessary to add a fresh layer of paint to the outside woodwork.

She drank, then grimaced. 'Have you seen him?'

His face, already sour from the prediction of the weather, cracked in annoyance. 'Sadly, he has survived the winter. I have not seen him, but have heard him. He came back through the rain after dark.

The door slammed. That is how I know he is there.'

They tried hard, both of them, to ignore their neighbour, who was one of the few twelve-months-a-year residents on the island. It was four years since they had bought the perfect home to escape from the pressure-cooker life of the city. The first summer there they had brought with them their grandchildren, two small, lively kids, who had kicked a football on their little patch of grass at the back and each time the ball had crossed the wire fence dividing their property from their neighbour's garden there had been increasing rudeness when the chemist had asked permission to retrieve it. The children had been reduced to tears and had not come during another summer.

He said, 'I wonder what he does all those months when we are not here, who he insults.'

She said, 'I think we are a recreation for him.'

'He is a man of misery, he takes happiness from it.'

'Death, when it finds him, will be a blessed relief – for us.'

They laughed grimly, chiming a cackle together.

The second summer they had left a note on Oskar Netzer's door inviting him to join them for a drink that evening. He had come, had filled their bijou furnished living room with the odour of a body long unwashed, and they had shown him the architect's plans drawn up in Dusseldorf for an extension of a garden room topped by a third bedroom and a shower cubicle. He had refused the drink, then had refused to endorse the plan – they had thought it commensurate with every environmental and aesthetic consideration. He had rubbished the architect's drawings.

Through the rest of that summer, the following winter and into the third summer, their neighbour had fought the plan in Baltrum's Rathaus committees: its size, its materials, its concept. Last summer they had consigned the plan to the rubbish bin, had given up on the project. Last year when they had been at their house, if he came out into his garden they went inside.

They had nothing to say to him, and he made no secret of his opinion that they were intruders and unwelcome – but his death would come, and their liberation.

He said, 'I cannot imagine a life so detached from reality. They say that even when his wife was alive he was no different.'

She said, 'That woman, she must have suffered. It is not possible she could have been the same.'

'You never see newspapers outside the house for the rubbish, you never hear a radio. There is no television. He must know nothing of the world he inhabits.'

'Would not know about the economy, its down turn? The unemployment…'

'Would not care, isolated here.'

'Would not know about the war, in Iraq? Not know about the terrorists… '

'Ignorance – stubborn, obstinate, hate-filled ignorance. So pathetic, to be at the autumn of life and to realize, deep in your heart, that you will do nothing in your last days that is valuable, nothing that is respected.'

A memory for both of them, when they had packed up the house at the end of the last summer and loaded the trolley to wheel it to the ferry, had been the lowering and gloom-laden face of Oskar Netzer behind a grimy window. At home in Duisseldorf, each time they spoke of their neighbour, anger grew, and they had to stifle it or accept that he hurt their love of the island and their small home.

He poured the last of the wine from the second bottle into his wife's glass. 'You are right, my love. He would reject any action that made him loved, respected.'

She drank, then cackled in laughter and the drink spurted from her lips. 'Sorry, sorry… His ducks will love him. The bloody ducks will mourn him when he's dead, no one else.'

The wind hit their windows and the rain ran on them, and the curtains fluttered, and next door to them – unloved – their neighbour slept.

'You can take him. Please, get him out of here.'

'Don't know that I want him.'

'Remove him, Miss Wilkins.'

'If you say so.'

She had sent her signal, encrypted on the laptop.

Coffee had kept her awake while she'd typed. She followed Johan Konig out of the side room and back into his office.

'Squeeze it from him, why he was at the Rahman house.'

'Without your help?'

'If I hold him I have to charge him and put him before a court. It is not a road I wish to follow.'

'Understood.'

He passed her the plastic bag, then turned his back on her. For a moment she looked around the bare room, which, she had decided, displayed a man's aloneness and a life without emotion. She fastened on the one item that showed humanity – a photograph of a hippopotamus in a muddied river with a white bird on its back. In her imagination, she delved into Konig's past. Perhaps a holiday in east Africa with a wife or a partner, and that was a favourite picture.

Maybe the wife or partner had now left him or had died. She reckoned it involved a sadness. She betrayed herself, her eyes lingered too long on it.

'It is the better to understand them,' Konig said.

'What do you mean?'

'The better to understand them in Berlin, now in Hamburg.'

She said quietly, 'I assumed it was something personal.'

'God, no… The better to understand the men who control organized crime, to understand Rahman. The hippopotamus is the society in which we live, and the bird is the godfather. The egret, the bird, is not the enemy of the hippopotamus. Instead it fulfils a need of that great creature by picking off its back the parasites that will damage its skin. It is a symbiotic relationship – the hippopotamus provides sustenance for the bird, the bird returns gratitude by cleaning the hippopotamus's back. They need each other. Society wants drugs, prostitutes and sex shows, and the godfather gives it. He does not leech the blood of society, he merely provides a service that is demanded. That is why the picture is there, to remind me of reality.'

'What is the relationship between the bird, the godfather and terror cells?'

He pressed a small button on the leg of his desk.

'Again, symbiosis. The bird goes wherever there are parasites. Parasites are money. The terror cells have money, safe-houses and conduits for weapons. If there is benefit from co-operation you will find the egret there. Do not imagine, Miss Wilkins, that Timo Rahman steps back on the dictates of conscience or morality when there are parasites to feed off. The picture tells me much.'

She grimaced. 'I suppose so.'

'Take him.'

She held the plastic bag. 'Yes, I will.'

A man stood in the outer door, blinking in the bright light and she recognized him as the one who had brought the relays of coffee since they had emerged from the basement cell block.

'May I offer you advice? The power of Timo

Rahman in this city stretches far, wide. He has a network of clan leaders, who control the foot-soldiers. All of them will, by now, be out searching for an Englishman who dared to violate "sacred" territory, Rahman's home. Keep him safe, Miss Wilkins, or he will be hurt, severely, and so will you, if you are with him. I warn you, and you should listen to me.'

'That's a cheerful message to start the day.'

The night-duty man led her away along the corridor. They went down three floors in an elevator.

Down more flights of stairs. She realized then that none of the big battalions marched with her.

She had no weapon and no back-up to call on. The cell door was unlocked. He lay on the bed.

She threw the plastic bag at his head and it cannoned into his face. His eyes burst open.

'Come on/ she snapped. 'My options were shifting you out or learning more about the hygiene habits of hippopotami -1 chose you. Move yourself.'

He looked up at her, eyes glazed with bewilderment, and shook himself.

From the bag, he took the belt and slotted it into his trousers. He laced his shoes, put the watch on his wrist and hung the tags at his throat. Then she took him out into the last of the night's darkness.

His train had been delayed, a points failure on the track south of Lincoln, and the taxi queue at the station had been endless. By the time he returned to his office, the bells behind Big Ben's clock face were chiming midnight. Gaunt found the signal. Because it rambled and was strewn with typescript errors, he thought his precious Polly suffered acute exhaustion.

Most of the others of her age who had desks scattered through the building popularly known as Ceausescu Towers – but not Wilco – would have gone to their beds and then, after toast and coffee, have composed a report without errors of syntax, punctuation, spelling. She had responded, and he blessed her, to her understanding of urgency.

The signal, and he had read it four times before he unfolded the camp-bed and shook out the blankets, was a masterclass in confusion – yet there was clarity.

A clear enough link, he believed, now existed between a fugitive escaping from Prague, a co-ordinator, and a considerable player in Hamburg's community of organized crime, a high-value target.

The lights switched off, his jacket and waistcoat, shirt, tie and suit trousers over the hanger on the back of the door, his shoes neatly laid at its foot, he stretched himself out on the bed, and spread a blanket over him. God, was this not business that should be consigned to the young? Work tossed in his mind, and in his hand – gripped tight – was the sheet of paper that described a man rescued from the security fence around that HVT's property. A name, a date of birth, a six-digit service number, a blood group, an occupation of government service, a tongue that stayed silent and a British-issued passport.

Confusion, because he did not know whether Polly Wilkins had blundered on something of importance or was distracted by an irrelevance.

And no way of telling, not till dawn, not before the banks of government computers in the outposts of the ministries across the Thames sprang to life. God, was he not too old for all of it? He saw them sometimes, rarely more than often, the men and women who had taken the retirement carriage clock or the decanter and glasses set, and had handed in their swipe-card IDs for entry to the main doors of Vauxhall Bridge Cross.

All had gone out, at the end of a Friday afternoon, last day of the month, bowed with tiredness and clutching their gift of appreciation. Every one of those whom he met, on a pavement or by chance in a restaurant, seemed reborn. They were like those come-lately Christians, oozing confidence and brimming health.

'You know the best-kept secret inside that bloody place, Freddie? There's a life outside. Never knew it till I got there – outside. Haven't ever felt better. Don't mind me, Freddie, but you look a bit washed through.

When are you chucking it in, Freddie? My only regret, should have done it years back.' It frightened him, alone on the bed with the quiet of the building hugging him, that he should be gone from the place, yesterday's man, with work unfinished. 'That bloody place' was Freddie Gaunt's home… He was drifting towards a fitful sleep.. . And the enemies he hunted were his life-blood – but he could not guess where they were, could not identify them because they wore no damned uniform.

He did not know where his name was written down, what alias was used, and how many had access to it.

He travelled to work each day in his uncle's transit van, with his uncle's logo on the side, sitting with his tools and his uncle's sons. He was far from his immediate family: his parents, brothers and sisters lived in the port city of Karachi where his father and brothers broke up the steel hulls of unwanted ships for scrap metal. He had wanted more and his ambitions had led him to join his mother's brother in London. Ambition had not been fulfilled. At the age of twenty-three, he was not a laboratory scientist, not an engineer, not a scholar, but a plumber's mate. The resentment had flourished sufficiently to take him to a mosque in south London where an imam talked at Friday prayers about injustice. There was the injustice that permitted white society to walk over the aspirations of Muslim youth in his new homeland, the injustice shown to worshippers of Islam in Saudi, Afghanistan, Chechnya and Palestine. He no longer harboured resentment. Two years ago, less a month, he had been asked to stay behind as the faithful had slipped away from the prayers, and the imam had spoken to him in a hushed tone. Would he serve?

Would he wait until he was called? Did he have the strength of his faith? Was patience a virtue of his? He went now to a new mosque, in the west of the city, where an imam preached religion but did not speak of the war zones where Muslim brothers fought for the privilege of martyrdom.

He was brighter at work, did not complain about rising and dressing before the dawn's light lifted over the capital. Each morning and each evening he crossed the City of London on his way to and from work. Some days the crowded Transit van was stopped by the armed police officers at their road-blocks, but their route was always the same and they had become known. More often now they were waved through and drove away from the men with protective vests and machine-guns without being quizzed and the van's contents searched. The same applied at his place of work, where he wore an identification tag hung from a neck chain, and there also the security guards were familiar to them.

Five days a week, the van was parked in a designated bay deep in the basement of the great tower that was Canary Wharf. In those two years he had learned by heart the hidden ducts that carried the air-conditioning systems, water supplies and sewage outlets in the building that dominated the skyline and could be seen from many miles away. He thought it a symbol of the power that had denied him the opportunity to fulfil his ambitions. Each working day, he saw the surge in and out of the many thousands who had blocked him, and did not know of him. One day, he had been told, a man would seek him out, would speak to him: 'God will say, "How many days did you stay on the earth?" 'He would answer, and the words were always in his mind: 'They will say, "We stayed a day or part of a day." 'It no longer troubled him that his response, from the Book, 23:112-113, gave him the answer of the unbelievers on the Day of Judgement.

He had been promised that one day the man would come, and he believed the promise.

His primary job was to drive the forklift vehicle that moved the flat-packs of self-assembly furniture from the lorries that came from the factory at Ostrava in the Czech Republic. His secondary job was to be first at the warehouse to unlock the side gates of the yard and the main building where the offices were, flush on the street, and in the evening he was the last to leave, and fastened and checked the doors, windows and main gate.

The forklift driver walked along the street, briskly because he was late on his schedule, and saw a man on the step outside the offices' door, hunched, low and in the shadow. Few matters concerning the warehouse surprised the driver. He worked for a company owned by Timo Rahman, and knew a little of the complexities of his employer's business. He understood that, in the affairs of Timo Rahman, men came without warning and without introduction to the warehouse, and that questions were not asked and explanations were not offered. He passed the man and, because the head was bowed, did not see the face. He went on to the corner, turned into the narrow driveway that separated the warehouse and offices from the next premises. He loosed the padlock on the yard gates.

Cursorily he checked the vans, then opened, with the keys entrusted to him, the back door of the offices.

Because he had been delayed that morning by the police cordon and was behind with his routine, he hurried to the toilets – men's and women's. His first task of each day was to wash them, clean the hand basins and sluice the floors. Then, he should have- The bell at the office door pealed. He left the toilets, his mop and bucket, and hurried past the unlit offices of Administration, Sales and Accounts, and unbolted – top and bottom – the street door. The man glanced over his shoulder, scanned the street, then pushed past him.

'I'm late, I'm sorry.'

The man who had waited on the doorstep shrugged.

The forklift driver babbled, 'I was delayed this morning…'

It was many months since he had been late opening the yard and offices. He thought the man had not slept that night – his eyes were baggy and lines cut his face at the side of them. The man leaned against the corridor wall and his shoulder was against a photograph of a dining-room table and chairs set after they had been assembled from a flat-pack.

'… I could not leave home. You know Hamburg, I suppose. Yes? I live at Wilhelmsburg. Police, so many police, there. I have to prove my residence to the police before I can leave, show my papers, but there is a long queue ahead of me. Not in my block, but the one next to it, a woman was killed.'

The head turned and tired eyes raked his face. As an Albanian he was trusted, and sometimes Timo

Rahman – when he came to the warehouse – would drop a hand on his shoulder and tighten it there. Then he glowed with pride. He thought, for what he did, he was well paid, but the wage given him allowed him to live only in a Wilhelmsburg tower block. The reaction of the man encouraged the forklift driver to go further with his explanation of lateness.

'My wife knows everything. She says the woman was murdered in her apartment by strangulation. It is not her husband – he was at work. It is not a thief. The people of the towers in Wilhelmsburg, they have nothing to steal. My wife made coffee for the police when they came yesterday. They said what they think.

She was killed, most probably, by a boyfriend she entertained in secrecy. They will go back in her history because always there is a trace of a friend, they told her. They are confident that, very soon, they will have the identity of the friend. It is good. A man who kills a woman close to her baby, he is a beast. He is con-temptible.' He apologized again for his lateness, and asked what he could do.

Did he have a number for the residence of Timo Rahman?

'I have, but I am instructed to call it only on matters of great importance.'

He should ring the number.

'What am I to say?' He felt a tremor of nervousness at the thought of ringing the residence of Timo Rahman before dawn. 'Would you not wait till the manager comes, in less than two hours?'

He should ring the number now. He should say that a Traveller has come.

'A Traveller, yes.' The man's eyes were locked on him. 'I will say to Timo Rahman that a Traveller has come.'

'Who is he?'

His wife, Alicia, mother of his children, stared back dumbly at him.

'What is his name?'

The children, the girls, had come to the bedroom door, had huddled there and had shaken in fear, and he had dismissed them.

'Does he come often?'

Timo Rahman did not believe that Ricky Capel, the mouseboy, would have dared lie to him. Nobody lied to him. If Ricky Capel said he did not know the man who had broken into their garden, then he was believed. It was inconceivable that Ricky Capel – in his power – should lie to him.

'You were in the summer-house. You give me no explanation why, in the darkness, you were in the summer-house. When he is seen, the man is on the wire behind the summer-house. Why was he there?'

His wife, Alicia, was on the bed, curled, shrivelled, against the pillows. She had pulled her knees close up to her chest, and he could see her shins and thighs.

Anger swarmed through him.

'Is my wife, to whom I have given everything she could want, a whore?'

Her arms were round her head and her body shook with her tears.

'Does my wife go to the summer-house in the evening to be fucked? Do you lie on the cushions and open your legs wide to take him? Is that what my wife does?'

She seemed to wait for him to strike her.

'You are in the summer-house, and he is there. What else should I think?'

She flinched, was back against the cushions, could not escape further from him.

'Do you not understand the shame you have brought on me, on my children?'

There was a light knock on the door.

'I will clean you. The dirt on your skin will be taken off, where his body was against your body. I promise it – I will clean you.'

He left her. Outside the door, Timo Rahman turned the key in the lock. The Bear was impassive, as if he knew of no crisis gripping the family. He had made his promise: he would clean her. He was told of the telephone message sent from the warehouse of his company that sold self-assembly furniture, and as he strode away from the bedroom door, he showed no sign of the hurt that wounded him – deeper than a knife had, more painfully than a bullet had.

He believed that his wife, his children's mother, was a whore.

Malachy saw the dawn come up.

She'd said, 'I am reliably told you are a man with a price on your head. So, to keep that pretty head on your shoulders, you keep it down. What you've seen already is good enough for me and should be for you.

Play the silent wallflower in the corner, if you want to, but understand that, right now, computers are spilling out your life story. When I come back, with your biography, I want you here, no more silly buggers, with explanations.'

First light caught the beds of flowers, with colours laid in tight-set banks, and above them were canopies of spring blossom. She had clasped her hands together, made a stirrup for his shoe, taken his weight, then heaved him up so that he could straddle the top of the fence separating the empty car park of the conference centre from the botanical garden and she had waved him off towards dense shrubs. Her questions in the car on the drive through the city had gone unanswered. He had been shaken awake in the car, a few minutes after he had given her the name and street where the hotel was. Then they had gone slowly down Steindamm and had seen men hurry out through the doors carrying the clothes he had left there and the bag. They had shouldered past two girls looking for the last trade of the night, and one had had a mobile at his face. He had not been able to answer the spray of questions because to have done so would mean reliving the pain of his disgrace. He could not, yet, confront it. The low point, down in a gutter of slime and shit, was deep-set agony – since he had taken the train to London, months before, he had not known a friendship tight enough for him to confide in. A dog did not go, after so hard a kicking, back in search of love.

She'd called after him, as he'd sloped towards deeper shadows, 'Did you hear me? I want some talk out of you, no more of wasting my bloody time.'

Hidden from the main path by the bushes, he sat on a bench and the wind flaked blossom petals down on him. They lingered on his hair, face and shoulders. He doubted he could fight her any more.

Last thing, as he'd gone for cover, she'd yelled,

'When I'm back, I'll have you stripped as bare as the day you were born, believe it. I'll be getting more than your blood group, religion and your damn number.

Try me.'