Rat Run

Chapter Fourteen

'It's quite a read, your life, isn't it?' She gazed at him, her mouth set. The eyes behind the spectacles were big and seemed to bore into him. Malachy looked away from her.

'And that's only the digest that I've been sent. I suppose when the whole lot of it spews up it gets worse.'

'I don't look for sympathy/ he muttered.

'Wouldn't have thought, where you're coming from, there were too many barrowloads of pity. Can you talk about it? I'm not a shrink, don't know about couch therapy.'

She'd found him in a squared-off sunken area on the edge of the Japanese garden. A feeble fountain trilled a spray down into a stone-banked pool and its drops mingled with the rain. The blossom snow covered his shoulders and the cobbles round his feet, and had begun to form a covering on her hair. They were together on a bench and the wind was in the trees, but they were protected from it by the high shrubs that encircled them. He felt a sharp spasm of anger.

'I don't go scavenging for a shoulder to cry on. For a simple reason, I don't give explanations for what happened, for what I did. I don't know what happened.'

'That's a good enough line. In your boots I'd stick with it.'

'Hear me again… I don't know what happened – everybody else does, but not me.'

'They called you a coward.' She seemed to roll the word on her tongue, as if it were strange to her, not a word she had used before. Beyond her experience.

But she said it with a boldness, coward, like it was of no importance to her if he were hurt by the word. 'My boss has dug it up. Seems there were other descriptions of you, but all end up in the same locker, "coward". Were they correct in their assessment?'

'I don't know. That's not just soap and water to wash it out. It's what I'm tagged with… but I don't know. Why, Miss Wilkins, do you not just go and find something else to do?'

Her face, which had been cold, chilled further. Her voice had edge: 'I am trying to make a decision that involves you. Do I spend time with you? Do I dump you and walk away? My work is on a short fuse of opportunity and I am loath to waste the few opportunities available to me in semantic bloody sparring with you. I work at VBX and-'

Malachy said, 'I know what's at Vauxhall Bridge Cross, haven't been there but people from the place came to us.'

She flared, 'Learn, please, not to damn well interrupt me. I am wet through, tired and hungry and… I am tasked, for reasons that have sod-all to do with you, to investigate Timo Rahman, godfather, brothel-owner and people-trafficker. What do I find? I find, on hour one, a guy in dosser's gear hanging on Rahman's security fence with the dogs of hell trying to pull him off it, and the dosser is a former Brit officer whom I then learn has enough disgrace on his back to bury him. This guy is now a fox, no cover to run to, with the hounds baying and bloody horns tooting

… What's extraordinary about the fox, he's put his head over the wall and gone into the hounds' kennelyard. That is either death-wish stupidity or courage based on purpose. Are you going to help me make my decision?'

'If it were easy… '

'Don't wriggle, get honest. For God's sake, look at me.' Her arm snaked out, her wet hand snatched at his chin, her fingers caught the flesh and her nails pressed on his jawbone. She twisted his face towards hers. He blinked, but did not try to break her grip.

'Are you worth any of my time or not? Two sorts of bravery that I can think of. Physical – blokes jumping out of aeroplanes, running across open ground chucking hand grenades at pill-boxes, doing boys' games stuff. Don't know, but I'd reckon that's the easy bit.

Try the next one. Moral, standing against the flow, not crossing to the other side of the road to avoid involvement, being your own person. Going into Timo Rahman's garden is bravery, but I don't know which.

Do I stay or do I dump you? I give you my word, you'll get no sympathy from me. Tell it like it was, not all the crap about Iraq and what you were called and how far you fell, but what brought you here. Tell it straight.'

He felt the grip on his chin and jawbone slacken.

Her spectacles had misted and the blossom flakes obscured her penetrating gaze. Malachy began haltingly, as if a great shyness enveloped him, to tell a story of an old lady – widow of a London Transport bus driver – who had gone to bingo alone. 'But it was not for her, it was for me. It was to be able to stand and not back away, confront and not flinch. I'm not proud.'

'Just get on with it,' she said.

He told her about a pyramid, where the vagrants were at the base, and about the High Fly Boys who were the next stratum up.

A manhunt fanned out across streets, parks, hotels, churches, clubs and pavement cafes to search for the owner of a brown fleck overcoat.

The target area was the city where a fortress had been built in the ninth century on the instructions of Ludwig the Pious, son of Charlemagne, at the junction of the Alster, Bille and Elbe rivers.

An army of men was mobilized, all of ethnic

Albanian origin, and had the common factor of loyalty to the fis, the clan, headed by the absolute authority of Timo Rahman. Ignorant of history, driven by obedience to Timo Rahman, men were briefed by the kryetar, the under-bosses, and were directed to smaller squares on the city map where they should seek a prey. In charge of each crew, of not more than ten men, was a chef. That morning, the codes and disciplines of distant Albanian villages settled on the streets of Hamburg. Word passed to the smallest groups that a cheap hotel on the Steindamm had yielded up the remnants of the fugitive's clothes, and a description – taken from a terrified Tunisian at his reception desk – was given them.

The Hauptbahnhof was watched and the passengers leaving on Inter City Express trains were checked. Men stood idly by the ticket machines at U-Bahn and S-Bahn stations. They were at the checkin counters of the airport, and at the terminus for long-distance buses. It was as if a foreign virus spread in the veins of a great city.

Among the hunting packs, spread out across the length and breadth of Hamburg – from Poppenbuttel in the north and to Maschen in the south, from Eidelstadt in the west and Mummelmannsberg in the east – there was desperate enthusiasm for success, to win the praise of the pate, Timo Rahman, and his gratitude.

A kryetar directed a chef to work his crew along the length of the park, the Planten und Blumen. That crew, five of them, who were all from a remote village close to the Macedonian border, made a line across the gardens, with their chef on the central path. They were house thieves, skilled pickpockets and pimps, and they made slow, careful progress from the park's St Pauli end. They knew nothing of the heritage or history of the city around them. Prosperity, wealth, opportunity made a flame that attracted moths. They were from the immigrant masses that had surged inside the city. Welcomed at first because they provided the menial labour force, they had later become detested when they changed the nature and culture of Hamburg.

Only Timo Rahman, the power and the untouch able, had the authority to stage a search of such magnitude, to cast a net of that width… None knew why a man had so crossed the pate that hundreds hunted him. The crew with their chef, all dreaming of the reward of success, moved through the park, passed the great justice building where thieves, pickpockets and pimps were sentenced, and the walls of the remand gaol where they were held before conviction – none looked at the court or the prison. As the rain poured down on them, they hunted a man.

'You are joking, Ricky? Is this some sort of wind-up?'

He swung his legs over the side and dropped down on to the pontoon.

'I tell you where I am, Ricky… I am inside a damn great harbour with a damn great sea wall protecting it, and we are still being blown half out of the bloody water. What you're saying, Ricky, it's not a starter.'

He held the mobile to his face and used his other hand to steady himself against the boat's side. The pontoon shuddered under his boots. The rest of them on the boat were inside the old wheel-house, scraping seventy-year-old wood to make it ready for the first coat of varnish. Harry Rogers, alone on the pontoon where only an idiot would be, shouted into the phone:

'I'm down in the west. There's no possibility of putting to sea because there's a depression settled in, and going to be there for a week. I'm working with mates on a restoration. There's storms forecast all week, not just down here. The North Sea's as bad, maybe worse. It's out of the question – sorry and all that.'

The wind bent in arcs the rigging his friends had already replaced on the beam trawler whose hull had been laid down in a yard across the harbour – now gone and replaced by holiday apartments – in 1931. He had not bought into the syndicate owning the boat because it was fully subscribed, and his ambition was bigger. One day he would have his own.

Across the harbour, spray burst over the sea wall.

Against the pontoon, the ropes holding the boat groaned in the swell.

'I tell you this, Ricky, for nothing. No one's out, not even the fish. Not here, not in the Approaches, not in Irish waters, absolutely not in the North Sea. Try listening to the forecast. Don't take my word – listen to the bloody shipping forecast. Where are you? Don't you have a radio there?… Oh, you're in Germany, oh.

It'll be no different there, not on their North Sea coast

– could be bloody worse, frankly.'

The rain spattered on his face. It ran from his slicked hair and down his cheeks. Because he had been inside the wheel-house when the phone had rung, he had not had his waterproofs on – but it was Ricky on the phone and he'd come running from the earshot of the other men.

'I'm not being difficult, Ricky – never have been and won't start now. I'm telling it like it is… Steady. Of course I know what you've done for me. Steady on, Ricky. Listen, I deal in facts… Well, what you want and what's on the weather forecast just happen to be two different things… I'm not being difficult. When was I ever?'

He had blustered his protests, in the wind and in the rain, out on the pontoon that lifted and fell under him. Harry Rogers had known that in the end, push coming to shove, he would buckle. He would bend as the rigging did in the wind.

'You're not telling me what's so important? No, of course not.. . Best I can do, Ricky, is to get up there tonight, load up, sail on the night tide… You'll give me the co-ordinates on the VHF?… Have to be good enough, won't it?… I don't know how long it'll be.

No, I am not giving you shit, Ricky. You're looking at two-fifty nautical miles and there'll be waves over the top of us. We'll make what speed we can… No, I'm not saying you're shouting, Ricky… Been good to talk, as it always is… Yes, and you too, you look after yourself.'

He heard the call cut, the purr in his ear, and put the phone into his pocket. He slid back on to the old trawler's deck, went into the wheel-house and lied about 'something' having come up that required his attention at home. On the quay, as he walked into the force of the weather, he rang his son and found him in a supermarket – endured the disbelief – then called his grandson.

'If you obstruct me and refuse permission for the cameras – which you are entitled to do, citing a violation of human-rights legislation – then I make a promise to you. The affairs of your company – a travel agency, yes? – will undergo a most detailed inspection from the Revenue. It would be the type of inspection that you would find both time consuming and expensive in your accountant's fees, and it is from my experience inevitable that irregularities in your financial affairs will be exposed. Or you can choose not to obstruct me but to welcome my technicians to your home and allow them to fit cameras.'

Johan Konig sat in the back office of the travel agency's flagship premises. Back in Berlin, he had learned that the kaisers of the industrial and commercial world had a fear only of excessive attention from fiscal investigators. Nothing fazed them but the nightmare of tax people rooting in their affairs.

'I am sure you are aware that the Revenue are often clumsy in their dealings with businessmen to whom a reputation of probity is important. Carrying out computers and files when the front hall of a workplace is crowded with customers, attracting inevitable attention on the pavement, with the damage that creates, is often their way.. . I would much regret us going up that route.'

He eyed the man sitting across the desk from him and playing with a pencil. Konig would sleep that night, as he had for the previous week, in a police hostel for single men. In a month, perhaps, if time had permitted it, he would hope to find two furnished rooms in a street well back from the lake in St Georg.

The man spiralling his pencil over the desk lived in a mansion in Blankenese, and probably banked in a week what a policeman of Konig's rank earned in a year. He despised such men.

'A warning. Ingratiating yourself with your neighbour might be tempting, but it would not be wise. If you were foolish enough to provide information to him concerning cameras and directional microphones that we put in place, then – and this is my second promise – you will face imprisonment for, probably, seven years. Seven years in Fuhlsbuttel gaol is a long time to reflect on a warning ignored. You tell your family what you care to but the responsibility for secrecy is yours – seven years.'

The man who owned a prosperous travel agency nodded pathetic acquiescence. He was told that a delivery van would bring the equipment and a time later in the day was fixed for it. The business was done. Konig left the premises. He could not, quite, identify the mistake made by Timo Rahman, but he believed it existed. When it had been identified it could be manipulated. Later, back at Headquarters, a surveillance request would be drafted and would go to a magistrate, and the necessary paragraph of justification would describe activities of a flasher, a potential molester of women, in a residential side-street in Blankenese, and it would go through on the nod. It surprised him, when he reached his office, that there was no message for him reporting the progress of the British intelligence officer in unravelling the fugitive's story – what he did hear, in fulsome detail, was that every crew of Albanian foot-soldiers scoured the city's streets for a quarry.

She did not interrupt. She sat close to him, no longer smelt his clothes or his body.

'I left him there. He was all trussed up on the lamp post and there was no chance of him breaking the knots, and he'd the tape – half a dozen times – round his face. He couldn't shout. I put the toy gun back into my pocket, picked up what was left of the rope and the tape, and went home. I didn't feel good.

Felt sort of flat, sort of empty… In my mind I'd this picture of a ladder, and I was two rungs up it, and that was still nothing. Didn't feel I'd done anything. Knew it wasn't enough. There was this guy – don't even think about it, because I'm not telling you and you won't learn about him from me. He knew the way the pyramid was built. Above the pushers is the dealer, up higher than the dealer is the supplier. The dealer didn't give me what I needed – thought I needed.'

She could watch the main path through the garden.

From the bench, in the sunken area, through a gap in the surrounding bushes and through the light cloud of falling blossom, she saw them.

'I was told who supplied the estate's dealer. I went after him, went with a canister of petrol. I suppose, in terms of conscience, I could square it, but not easily. I didn't think I was an avenging angel – couldn't have said that what I did was the redemption road. The supplier was a target, and I needed a bigger and better target than a dealer.'

An older man, swarthy and short, was on the path and another walked on a thinly seeded space of grass to his right, but the older man made gestures to his left as if he directed more men who were under his command. Two joggers went past the older man but he seemed not to notice them. Swarthy, as if they were tanned from old exposure to the Mediterranean sun, and slight – the same complexions and the same build as the men who had carried clothes from the hotel doorway on Steindamm. She had told Malachy

Kitchen that a price was on his head.

'The supplier had this house out in the country.

Would have been worth near a million. I'm not ashamed of what I did, but I took no pleasure from it.

The family weren't there. I broke a window and spilled petrol inside… '

She saw the older man use his arm and fingers to point into the shrub bed above the small cobbled garden with the pond, where they were, where they sat on the bench, and she heard an answering cry but did not know the language.

'I slopped the carpet and curtains with the stuff, then I threw a match on to… '

Polly Wilkins, officer of the Secret Intelligence Service, a well-brought-up girl whose mother had lectured her as a teenager never 'to be easy', reached up – two hands – took his face in them, felt the roughness of unshaven cheeks and gulped. 'Kiss me.'

'… the petrol. God, it caught, half burned my face and… '

'Do it, you bloody fool,' she hissed. 'Kiss me.'

She could have laughed. On his face was shock, then bewilderment, then a sort of naked terror. He had no idea why… She pulled him closer, her lips on his face but he screwed his mouth away.

'Not for fun, idiot. Do it like you mean it.'

He softened. Maybe he had heard, now, a heavy breath spurt behind his shoulder, maybe he had heard the snap of a dead twig under a shoe. She did it like she meant it, lips on lips. She had her eyes almost closed, as if passion gripped her, and she saw a younger man hovering in the bushes and gazing down on her. She thought he was coming closer. She screwed her tongue between the teeth.

She growled at him, 'Use your bloody hands.'

He did. Like she was precious, might break, his hands came up and caught her shoulders and he pulled her nearer him. Two rainsodden bodies entwined and his mouth was opened wider and her tongue could roam more fully. God, and the taste of his mouth was foul. And his clothes stank… Polly Wilkins had not tongue-kissed a man since that pathetic creep, Dominic, had flown to Buenos Aires – had near forgotten how to. The man standing above her, with the bushes waist high around him, watched, and then there was a shout from where the main path would have been, and the rustle of his feet as he moved away. He might look back. She kept her tongue in place and let the hands hold her shoulders.

When the voices were distant, low, she broke away and gasped.

'Don't get any bloody ideas.'

The colour flooded his skin under the bristle growth on his cheeks. 'No.'

'They'd have had you,' she said, with emphasis, as if the explanation was important. She rattled on, 'Did you know how badly you stink? No, you wouldn't…

Right, where were we?'

'I fired the supplier's home, perhaps a million pounds of it.'

'You said, "but I took no pleasure from it". Right?'

'Right.'

The laughter burst in Polly. 'Didn't seem to me you took much pleasure from what's just happened.'

'I'm grateful to you.'

'Don't, please, bloody thank me. That I cannot take.'

She stiffened, touched her hair, smoothed her skirt and eased away from him. 'Where were we? Yes, we were into assault, probably grievous bodily harm, and we've just hit arson. What's next, Malachy?'

She could have bitten the tongue that had been far into his mouth. He winced. She thought she had wounded a man already hurt and down. Damage done. She did not apologize. What she knew of Malachy Kitchen had come in a terse one-page signal from Gaunt that was bald and without humanity. It would have been easier for her to sit as judge and jury on him if he had made a callow admission of guilt or had writhed behind a catalogue of mitigation. He had said: 'I don't know what happened – everybody else does, but not me.' She'd thought he spoke the truth.

She had tapped into vulnerability and she felt ashamed of her laughter.

Polly said quietly, 'You burned down the home of a supplier, but you were still short of satisfaction. What had happened to you, everything, conspired to goad you forward – as if, Malachy, you're on a treadmill.

But they always go faster, don't they, treadmills? So, who is above the supplier?'

'I had a name given me. Ricky Capel of Bevin Close, that's south-east London. He was the importer.'

'Going there, that's climbing higher,' she said bleakly. 'Higher than most would have.'

'Going there got me a kicking.'

She saw, for the first time, a smile – rueful, uncertain

– crack his cheeks, and she listened and believed she could comprehend the burden of shame that had driven him. She thought it past the time for laughter, and for goading him. He told the story of it with detachment, as if another man had been kicked in the face – and she could taste the stale scent of his mouth.

'I really appreciate this, Mr Rahman/ Ricky Capel babbled. 'I gave my word to my grandfather, to old Percy, that I'd come here. He's never been himself, but it was important to him that I came. They were his friends – could have been him if they hadn't shipped him out the squadron and sent him to Egypt. I'm grateful you've taken the time.'

There was a shrug and a wallet was produced.

Money was passed to him, and Ricky ducked his head in thanks. He chose, from the flower-seller at the gates, two bunches of red roses, each with a half-dozen blooms. In the car he sat in the back seat and water ran from the roses' stems on to his trouser leg.

He looked around him and saw the high mature trees of the cemetery and the banks of rhododendrons.

Couldn't say when it had last happened to him, and it was not a mood he liked, but he felt moved by the great quiet of the place. He had not been to a cemetery since his grandmother, Winifred, had been buried, and it had pissed with rain and his best suit had never been right afterwards – and he hadn't cared about her death because the old woman had loathed him. He thought this place lovely. The Bear stopped the car. Ricky climbed out, but Rahman waved for him to leave the flowers on the seat – which confused him, but he followed Rahman.

They walked to a wide space among the trees, where long grass made a cross, with a square, high-walled building at its heart. There were no markers here of individual graves, not like he'd seen on TV.

Each of the grassed lengths, he reckoned, was at least a hundred yards long.

'What's this, then?'

Rahman said, sarcastic, 'It is what the friends of your grandfather did, Ricky. It is where German people are. They died from the bombs when the RAF made the firestorm. The air burned. Prisoners from a concentration camp dug the pits and there are more than forty thousand souls buried here. In one week, more than forty thousand.'

'Well – Nazis, weren't they?'

'I expect some, Ricky, were children.'

He grinned. 'Well, going to be Nazis, weren't they?'

He gazed around him. Couldn't really comprehend it, not forty thousand people killed, burned up, in one week.

At the car, he was passed his roses and they walked across the aisle road and down a neat pathway. Then it was like he had seen on TV. He faced rows of white stones set in careful lines. Bloody beautiful, and clumps of flowers growing in little areas, no weeds, in front of each. He had never been to a place like it, and so quiet. He said what the names were, old Percy's friends, and he took one sector and Rahman another, and the driver a third part – and the stones were all so clean, like they'd been there since last week and not the best part of sixty years. It made him shiver, thinking of it – men in a plane and all that flak hitting it and the plane starting to dive, out of control, and not able to get out, and coming down from three and a half miles up. How long would that bloody take? Made him feel kind of weak. All of them, heroes, weren't they? Could he have hacked it? Yes

… sure.. – certain

… He was Ricky Capel. But, the shiver and the weakness had come on bad and he was swaying on his feet.

The shout came. Rahman had found them, the only ones of the crew who had been intact enough for identification. Two stones side by side. A wireless-operator's grave and a bomb-aimer's grave, and they'd both been friends of his grandfather. He never did photographs and had never owned a camera: cameras and pictures, to Ricky, were the Crime Squad and the Criminal Intelligence Service. If he went, and it was rare, to a wedding, he'd spend half the reception making bloody certain he was not in a photograph, that no camera was aimed at him

Would have been nice to have a picture to take back to old Percy, though. One of them had been twenty years old and one was nineteen, and there were pansies and daffodils in front of the two stones. He stood in front of them, pulled in his stomach and straightened his spine, and the rain fell on him -

Rahman was on the phone, which didn't help the dignity of it. The uppers of his shoes were wet from the grass and his trousers clung to him. A full minute he stood there, and Rahman came off one call, then took another. Then, doing it for his grandfather, he laid the roses in front of each stone in remembrance of a wireless-operator and a bomb-aimer, dead in the first week of August 1943, stepped away and felt good for what he'd done.

As they walked back to the car, Ricky said, 'I expect, Mr Rahman, you're proud to be Albanian, and I'm proud to be British. You'll love your country, Mr Rahman, as I love mine. Mad, isn't it? You come to a place like this and you're proud. Daft, isn't it, how a place like this gets to you? Don't mind saying it, I love my country…'

No one, in twenty-six months, had come to seek her out.

She lived in south-east central England in a town best known for its budget-cost airport and motor-manufacturing industry: Luton, with a population of 160,000. Her home was with her parents, who had come two decades before to Britain to escape the brutal ravages of political oppression in the Libyan city of Benghazi. That she had been born a healthy, vigorous baby had been by chance, her father had often told her. Her mother had been two months pregnant with her when the thugs of the regime's secret police had come to their home and beaten each of her parents in turn, on suspicion of handing out leaflets of protest at the godless rule of Gaddafi; blows from boots and batons had been used against her mother's belly. Her father, once a teacher of philosophy at the University of Benghazi, worked in Luton on a production line, manufacturing windscreen wipers for vans and lorries.

Through childhood and her teenage years she had harboured hate for any who rejected the true faith of Islam. She had been chosen at a mosque in the town: her fervour had been recognized. A video had been shown, in a back room to a selected few, of what the imam called the declaration of a martyr widow. A Chechen woman, clothed in black and veiled, had worn the belt holding the explosives, the wiring and the trigger button, and had made a statement to the camera of her happiness at gaining the chance to strike against the Russian enemy who had murdered her young husband. She had spoken – not in a language understood in the mosque's back room

– in a voice of calm, love and resolve. The film had continued with a distant street shot. A slight, small figure in black had approached a checkpoint of soldiers and when she reached them there had been the detonation, fire, smoke and chaos. At that moment, the woman in Luton had stood before the video ended, and cheered in exultation, in admiration at the blessing of martyrdom.

Now she never watched such videos and was never invited to the back room of the mosque. She worked in a creche with children too young for school, while their mothers stood in lines and manufactured