Rat Run

Chapter One

Malachy Kitchen lived behind the locked and bolted door.

The autumn days had come and gone from the

Amersham. The winter weeks had visited the estate, freezing the rainwater pools on the level three walkway, with chilled winds funnelled up the stairs, and round the flaking concrete corners of the blocks.

Spring beckoned and in the window-boxes of a few ground-floor units daffodils bloomed, and where there had once been gardens, now used as short-cut paths, there were a few battered crocuses. The seasons had changed but the torment in his mind had not calmed.

For all the hours, days, weeks and months he could, Malachy stayed inside the cell that was flat thirteen on level three in block nine. The doctors from his past, and the psychiatrist, had had trite names for his condition and explanations; they had not allayed his feeling of disgust for himself and the shame that had come with his actions – all a long way back. Inside the flat, behind the locked door and with the bolt pushed home, he felt secure. Everything that had gone before

– childhood in married quarters, boarding-school, the teenage home in a Devon village, the inevitability of following his father's career – was erased from his thoughts in waking hours, but came stabbing at him during the night so that he would wake and find the perspiration dripping from him and not know whether, in the last moments of sleep, he had screamed at the darkened walls.

He existed. Through the autumn his salvation had been the heavy, thudded knock of the big West Indian's fist on his door. Less often in the winter. Now he never came, as if Ivanhoe Manners's life had gone on, as if he had found new destitutes to throw his time at. Through Manners he had learned of the estate's pulsebeat. He could stand now at the back window of the unit and look down on the square below, where the kids' playground apparatus was broken, where the grass was worn away, where many windows had plywood hammered over them, where graffiti were spray-painted on the walls, and watch the rule of the youth gangs. Some days he would unlock the door, draw down the bolt and go out on to the walkway to stare across the estate's inner roads, but only when he knew the door behind him was open and there for fast retreat, the key in the door for turning.

In the early days of life on the Amersham, Manners had come, thrown the charity-shop overcoat at him and made him walk, had bullied him as if that were the therapy he required.

So, Malachy knew where the crack-houses were on the estate; ground-floor units with heavy bars on the windows and steel plates on the inside of the doors where rocks of cocaine were sold and consumed.

'Fortresses, man. They seem to know when the police are coming and can spot the surveillance. They have a nose for the raid that's on its way, and nothing's ever found.'

He knew where the vagrants lived, in which dis-used garages they slept. He recognized some from the pitches where they begged in the underpass at the Elephant and Castle.

'You'll know this yourself, Malachy. You're in the underpass and we'll say that four hundred people pass you in an hour, four thousand in a ten-hour begging shift, and fifty people drop a pound coin in your cap in the ten hours and think it's for dog food, or for your cup of tea. Fifty pounds in a day, that's good work, and good people have massaged their consciences as they hurry by. And you'll know that dossers empty the cap so often because it's bad for trade if people see what's actually given them. It's all for drugs, and the dog goes hungry.'

Ivanhoe Manners had walked him round the worst dark corners of the estate, where he was safe only because he had the massive prize-fighter build of the social worker with him, where the ceiling lights of the inner tunnels were smashed, where the one-time shopping arcades were wrecked, scorched – where the vagrants hunted.

'They need wraps of "brown". They have to jack up at least every twenty-four hours. You know that, you've seen it when you were under the cardboard.

They're scum when they're on heroin. The brown destroys them. They'll steal from their only friend to get the hit, think nothing of stealing from family. They inject, and they chuck the syringes away even when there's a council-provided needle exchange – and kids find them. They got hepatitis A or B or C. They got tuberculosis, they're going to get thrombosis. They thieve – anything they can sell on, but best is a purse or a wallet. The cops all wear stab-proof vests because a used needle is a weapon for the vagrants. They are dangerous, and don't ever forget it, and you go carefully when it's dark on the Amersham.'

Back in the autumn, Ivanhoe Manners had walked him by the shoebox-shaped flat-roofed public toilets.

'They had to close them, the council did. A pensioner, male, goes inside, and a girl follows him.

She's offering a blow for fifty pence. He's in the cubicle, panting, gasping, she's doing it. What else is she doing? Doesn't need her hands for a blow, her hands are on his wallet, inside his coat. She's got it, she's off and running, and his trousers and his pants are down round his ankles. He's too embarrassed, poor sod, to come charging out and chase her – if he could. The council closed the toilets.'

And after they'd done their walking, Ivanhoe Manners would come back with him to flat thirteen on level three and they'd use the chess set that the social worker had given him. And with the chess games came the monologues that Malachy seldom interrupted.

'This is where the real war is, a war worth fighting.

I never been to Afghanistan and I'm not going to Iraq.

But they don't seem to me as places that matter, not to me. Maybe, just possible, we can win a war in Afghanistan or in Iraq, but sure as hell we're losing the war at our doorstep. You go up to the top of block nine and look all around you. From that roof, you'll see wealth and power and Parliament, you'll see where all the big people make their money. You'll see the City – banks and insurance, you'll see the ministries, fat cats running your life – but if you look down by your feet, you'll see where the war is. The Amersham is a dump ground for dysfunctionals. You shouldn't be here, Malachy. No, you shouldn't.'

It was seven weeks now since Ivanhoe Manners had last called by.

Days slipped away in which Malachy went nowhere, spoke to no one. What drove him from flat thirteen most often was that the fridge was empty – no bread, no milk, no coffee, no meals for one. But every fourteen days, regular, the first and third Thursday of each month, he was invited next door for tea.

That Thursday morning, Malachy Kitchen dressed in the best of the clothes bought for him at the charity shop seven months earlier, kicked off the trainers and wiped the brogues with a cloth so that their old brightness returned. He would while away the hours, lost in thoughts and pitying himself, till he heard the faint knock on the common wall. He had little else to live for.

He washed himself. In the shower, piping-hot water cascaded down on him. Ricky Capel always had the lever turned high in the hot sector when he sluiced his body, always washed well, and the suds of liquid soap rolled from his face and chest and down his groin. His short dark hair plastered his scalp. Joanne never had the shower water turned that high: it scalded his skin, reddened it, but he had no fear of pain. Each time he took a shower, it was as if he needed to test his ability to withstand pain… That morning he had seen pain, another man's, and it mattered little to him. Above the shower's hiss, he heard Joanne's shout: when was he going to be ready? He did not answer. He would be ready when he cared to be ready.

The overalls he had worn that morning, and

Davey's, had gone into the petrol drum at the back of the warehouse, where the fire was lit so that no trace of his visit to the cavernous, derelict unit remained.

But he always washed afterwards, and so thoroughly, because he knew of the skills of the forensic experts.

With a towel loose round him and water dripping down, he stood in front of the full-length mirror beside the cubicle. He glowed and that brought a smirk to his rounded, child-like face. No one, not any of them in his circle, would have dared to suggest it was a baby's face, but it was untouched by lines of worry, anxiety, stress. Self-respect was everything to Ricky Capel, and respect was what he demanded. He had burned his overalls because a man had denied him respect. The man who had made that mistake was now on the road south of the capital and heading for the coast.

He was thirty-four years old, though his complexion put him younger. He had married Joanne in 1996, and had the one child – Wayne. One of the few decisions he had allowed her was to give him that name. The boy was now seven and an overfed lump, without his father's sleek stomach line. The man who'd denied him respect was the eighth to have died under the supervision of Ricky Capel. At that young age, he controlled an area of the capital running from Bermondsey and Woolwich in the north, Eltham in the east, Catford in the south and Lambeth in the west.

Inside that box he had authority over all matters of business he chased after. But, on Benji's advice, he had gone into the City of London at the start of the year.

Across the river big money was to be made from the kids who worked in front of the banks' computers, who traded the high numbers and who snorted

'white' to keep themselves alive, alert and awake.

The man who was now bumping in the back of a van and going south towards the cliffs had done the trade in the City, had taken the white, and had pleaded a cash-flow crisis. He had promised that last week an outstanding payment would be made. The promise was not kept. Cocaine to a street value of five hundred and sixty thousand pounds had been given over on trust, and had not been paid for. That was a denial of respect for Ricky Capel. Go soft on one, and word would spread, like the smell of old shit.

Every last trace of the warehouse was gone by the time he was dressed, and little memory of it remained in his mind. The man had been blindfolded when he was brought to the warehouse, still in his pyjamas, and he'd been alternately blustering protests at this

'fucking liberty' and whimpering certainties of finding what was owed by that night, 'on my mum's life, I swear it'. Too late, friend, too bloody late. The bluster and the whimper had gone on right through the moments that the man had been tied down on to a chair, with wide sheets of plastic under it.

'Right, boys, get on with it,' Ricky had said. He needn't have spoken, needn't have declared he was there and, lounging against a rusted pillar, need not have identified his presence. He had spoken so that the man would know who had had him brought to the warehouse, and his voice would have been recognized. In those seconds the man would have realized he was condemned. Suddenly, there was a stain on the pyjamas and the stink of him, because he knew he was dead. Ricky's life was all about sending messages. It would go clear through the rumour mill that a big boss had been cheated, and the message of the penalty for that would run crystal sharp to others who did business with him.

The Merks, that was what Benji called the guys with the pickaxe handles. They were small, muscled, swarthy, had the faces of gypsies, and were hard little bastards. They'd brought cheap sports bags with them so that afterwards they'd have clean clothes to change into. They wore plastic gloves, like a butcher would use, and stockings over their faces so that the drops of blood couldn't mark them. The man had kicked with his tied feet and the chair had toppled. He'd tried to heave himself away, frantic, his bare feet slithering on the plastic sheets, and then he'd screamed. The first blow from a pickaxe handle had battered across his lower face. Blood and teeth had spewed out. The blows broke his legs, arms and ribs, then fractured his skull. He was hit until he died and then some more.

Afterwards, while Ricky watched the man's body trussed up in the plastic sheeting, Davey lit the fire for the clothing. Charlie checked the floor, went down on his hands and knees to be certain that nothing remained.

Ricky Capel liked to keep business inside the family. He had three cousins: Davey was the enforcer and did security, Benji did thinking and what he liked to call 'strategy', and Charlie had the books, the organized mind and knew how to move money. He'd have trusted each of them with his life. The Merks were no problem, good as gold, reliable as the watch on Ricky's wrist. Charlie drove him back from the warehouse to Bevin Close and dropped him off for his shower. It had all gone well, and he would not be late lor lunch.

He put on a clean white shirt, well ironed by Joanne, and a sober lie. It was right to dress smart for a birthday celebration.

While he dressed, and selected well-polished shoes, the body was in a plain white van, driven by Davey who had Benji with him. They'd get near to the coast, park up till it was. dark, then drive on to Beachy Head.

From the cliffs there, which fell 530 feet to the seashore, they would tip the body over. The tide, Benji had said, would carry it out to sea, but in a couple of days or a week, the plastic-wrapped bundle would be washed up on the rocks, as intended, the police would be called, statements made, and then the rumours would eddy round the pubs and clubs that a man who supplied cocaine in the City had been mercilessly, brutally, viciously put to death. It would be assumed he had failed to make a payment and that this was retribution. The name of Ricky Capel might figure in the rumours – loud enough to make certain that no other bastard was late with payments.

Scented with talc and aftershave, Ricky led Joanne and Wayne, who carried the present, next door to celebrate his grandfather's birthday, the eighty-second.

Bevin Close was where he had spent his whole life.

In early 1945, a V2 flying bomb had destroyed the lower end of a Lewisham street, between Loampit Vale and Ladywell Road. After the war, the gap had been filled with a cul-de-sac of council-built houses.

Grandfather Percy lived with his son and daughter-in-law, Mikey and Sharon, in number eight, while Ricky, Joanne and Wayne were next door in number nine.

Eighteen years back, Mikey had bought his council house, freehold, and been able – after a choice day's work with a wages delivery truck – to buy the property alongside it. Ricky liked Bevin Close. He could have bought the whole cul-de-sac, or a penthouse overlooking the river, or a bloody manor house down in Kent, but Bevin Close suited him. Only what Ricky called the 'fucking idiots' went for penthouses and manor houses. Everything about him was discreet.

Rumour would spread, but rumour was not evidence.

He breezed in next door. Wayne ran past him with Grandfather Percy's present.

He called, 'Happy birthday, Granddad… How you doing, Dad? Hi, Mum, what we got?'

The voice came from the kitchen: 'Your favourite, what else? Lamb and three veg, and then the lemon gateau… Oh, Harry's missus rang – he can't make it.'

'Expect he's out pulling cod up – what a way to earn a living. Poor old Harry.'

He would never let on to his mum, Sharon, that her brother was important to him. Uncle Harry was integral to his network of power and wealth.

They were making good time, more than eight knots.

Against them was a gathering south-westerly, but they would be in an hour after dusk and before the swell came up.

March always brought unpredictable weather and poor fishing, but on board the Annaliese Royal was a good catch, as good as it ever was.

Harry Rogers was in the wheelhouse of the beam trawler, and about as far from his mind as it could get, wiped to extinction, was the thought that he had missed the birthday lunch of his sister's father-in-law.

The family that Sharon had married into was, in his opinion – and he would never have said it to her – a snake's nest… but they owned him. Ricky Capel had him by the balls: any moment he wanted, Ricky Capel could squeeze and twist, and Harry would dance.

Ahead, the cloud line settled on a darker seam, the division between sky and sea. The deeper grey strip was the Norfolk coast, and the town of Lowestoft where the Ness marked Britain's most easterly point in the North Sea. The Annaliese Royal was listed as coming from Dartmouth, on the south Devon coast, but she worked the North Sea. She could have fished in the Western Approaches of the Channel or in the Irish Sea or around Rockall off Ulster's coast, and had the navigation equipment to go up off Scandinavia or towards Scotland's waters, or the Faroe Islands – but the catches for which he was a prisoner were in the north, off the German port of Cuxhaven and the island of Helgoland. He had no choice.

He had been a freelance skipper, sometimes out of Brixham, more often out of Penzance, in truth out of anywhere that he could find a desperate owner with a mortgage on a boat and a regular skipper laid low with illness. He would work a deep-sea trawler heading for the Atlantic, a beam trawler in the North Sea, even a crabber off the south Devon coast. The sea was in his mind, body and heritage – but it was damn hard to get employment from it. Then had come the offer

… He'd talked often to Sharon on the phone, kept in touch even when she had married into that family, and had stayed in contact when the husband, Mikey, was 'away': she always called his time – three years, five, a maximum of eight – 'away', didn't seem able to say down the telephone that her man had been sent to gaol. It was the summer of '98, and if there had been work on a construction site in Plymouth, and his boy Billy worked on one, installing central-heating systems, then he would have chucked in the sea as a life, closed it down as a profession and learned to be a labourer. He'd poured it out to Sharon. In an hour on the phone, he had told her more about the dark moods than he would have spoken of to his own Annie, and also that the dream of his retirement was wrecked. Got it off his chest, like a man had to and could do best on a telephone. Two days later, his phone had rung.

He couldn't have said, back then, that he knew much of Sharon's son, Ricky. What little he did know made bad listening. Now, the girls were grand and they'd gone as soon as they were old enough to quit, but what he knew of Ricky was poison.

Ricky on the phone. All sweetness. 'I think I might be able to help you, Uncle Harry. Always best to keep money in the family. I've been lucky with business, and I'd like to share that luck. What I understand from Mum is that you're short of a boat. I've this cousin, Charlie – you probably don't know him because he's Dad's side of the family. Well, Charlie did some work on it – would it be a beam trawler you need? There's one for sale in Jersey. Doesn't seem a bad price, a hundred and fifty tons, eight years old, and they're looking for a cash sale. I think we can do that for you.

Don't go worrying about the finance, just get yourself over there next week and meet up with Charlie. That going to be all right, Uncle Harry?' Charlie had called him and they'd arranged to fly to the Channel Islands.

At?275,000, the boat was dirt cheap and when he'd met Charlie at the airport, the cousin had been lugging a suitcase… and he didn't need that many clothes for a twenty-four-hour stopover.

He'd named her, with Annie's input and her blushes, the Anneliese Royal, and she was best quality from a renowned Dutch yard. His dream of life after retirement was reborn: Billy, his boy, came off the building sites and with his knowledge of central-heating systems was able to learn the engineering. His grandson, Paul, left school, and had started eighteen months back to sail with them. He had a year of happiness and dumb innocence. Then. ..

'Hello, Uncle Harry, it's Ricky here. I'd like to come down and see your boat. When do you suggest? Like, tomorrow.'

One sailing in three, he would receive a short, coded note. Where, when, a GPS number, and the port he was to return to with the catch. Sometimes he had a hold full of plaice and sole to bring ashore, and sometimes the hold was bloody near empty. The big catch, from one sailing in three, was off the north German coast. He'd be guided on to a buoy by a GPS reference and, attached to the buoy's anchoring chain, the package would be wrapped in tight oilskin. This one, which he was now bringing towards the fishing harbour of Lowestoft, had weighed real heavy. Billy and he had struggled to drag it up over the gunwale on the port side. He reckoned it twenty-five kilos in weight. Harry read the papers, and could do sums. At street value, he'd read that heroin sold at sixty thousand pounds a kilo. Arithmetic told him that down below, stashed in the fish hold, he had a package valued at?1.5 million, give or take.

He was brought his mug of tea, and snapped at his grandson, who fled below.

Always a foul temper when they came into port, because that was where he'd see the police wagon or the Customs Land-Rover parked and waiting. They used five of the North Sea ports, varied it, never regular enough for the law and the harbour masters to know too much about them, never infrequent enough for them to stand out and attract suspicion. In two years he would retire, he had Ricky Capel's promise, and then he could live his dream… but not yet.

He didn't talk about it to Billy, just gave him his cut and turned away. He thought he might be destroying the life of Paul, his grandson, but there had never been a right time to jump off the treadmill.

In the middle afternoon, as the wind force grew, the shoreline came clearer.

Billy would have finished gutting, would be breaking up the package and dividing it between rubbish sacks and their own kitbags. They would take it onshore, then in his car he would reassemble the twenty-five kilos and drive it, alone, to the drop-off point. Afterwards Harry would take himself to the Long Bar in town, drink till he staggered off to the B-and-B where he had a front-door key. By midnight, Ricky's cousin would have done the collection and Harry would be snoring drunk and asleep.

He was ashamed that he had shouted at his grandson, but the tension was always bad when they were within sight of shore and had a package on board.

The trail started in the foothills of northern Afghanistan.

Far into remote mountains, in little irrigated fields, farmers grew the poppies and were the first to take the cut; it was subsistence farming, and without the poppy crop they would have starved. For the farmers, the recent American-led invasion of their country had been a gift from God: their previous rulers had reduced, on pain of death, the growing and harvesting of the poppies, but now no government writ reached them.

It was a slow-moving trail. Eighteen months from start to end. At first the journey took the poppy seeds to market for haggling and argument, then buying. As opium, the product travelled in caravans of lorries, camel trains or in pouches on mules, north out of Afghanistan. It reached the old Spice Route, half a millennium old, and in Dushanbe, Samarkand or Bokhara Customs men, warlords and politicians took more cuts. The price was beginning to ratchet.

Then, on to Turkey, the nexus point of the trade, where the laboratories waited to render opium into raw heroin. Ten kilograms of opium made one kilogram of heroin. More cuts, more profits to be taken from the farmers' labour. Turkey was only a staging point, not a place of consumption.

Europe was the target. Each year, the craving for and addiction of Europeans to heroin demanded a supply of an estimated eighty tonnes. Turkish gangs took it on. Across the Bosphorus or by ferry over the Black Sea and a landing in mainland Europe. Up into the war-ravaged Balkans and more division of the product made in Belgrade or Sarajevo, and the price kept climbing as more men took their share of the profits. When wads of dollar bills were passed, the lorries drove unsearched through international boundaries. On into the Netherlands and Germany.

The trail led to the United Kingdom, the biggest consumer of heroin inside the European Union.

Expenses soared. Wealth was being made that the humble, illiterate farmer in Afghanistan could not comprehend – but the men bringing the trail to its end had made evaluations of risk against profit. The risk was a prison sentence of twenty-five years in a maximum-security gaol, but the profit was huge.

Only a few had the skill to stay ahead of the ever more sophisticated techniques of law enforcement set against them. By ferry, tunnel, car or coach in the bags of pensioner tourists who saw no wrong in making easy money, inside the cargoes of lorries, and by boat to unsuspected landing points where vigilance had slipped, the freight landed.

A man had paid up and housed what he had bought in a warehouse or a lock-up garage. He was a baron and remote from the process of the street. He sold split portions of what he had purchased to a network of regular suppliers; he was hands-off, crucial to the process but distancing himself as far as he could from risk, while retaining as much as he could of the profit.

The supplier further diluted the purity of the heroin with flour, chalk or washing powder, made more divisions and traded with dealers, the street gangs who controlled a small area of territory in a country town, a provincial city or in the capital. The supplier took his share.

The dealers sold on the street, but only after further dilution. They were the last in line and their cash rewards were as meagre as those of the mountain farmers. The dealers had the addicts begging them for wraps – tonnage reduced down to a single gram, enough for a day's hit. No cash, no sale. Without money the addict was shut out as a customer.

Thieving, begging, mugging, stealing were the only ways the addict could feed the need.

On a housing estate in south-east London, the trail marked out for one little share of Afghanistan's poppy harvest came to an end.

Malachy knew her life story, and more. He had been led into each cranny of her existence. He sat opposite Mrs Mildred Johnson and drank tea poured through a strainer that caught most of the leaves, a present from a distant relative on her wedding day. He ate ham and cucumber sandwiches, her late husband's favourite filling for his lunch when he'd driven a double-decker bus in London.

Not expected to talk, only to listen, he occasionally nodded and tried to be attentive. He knew her life story because the same mixture of anecdote and memory was served up each fortnight, but he never showed signs of boredom or irritation at the repetition. He would be there for two hours. She had a small carriage clock with a tinkling chime – a present from her nephew, Tony – and at four o'clock on the first and third Thursday in the month the knock would come on the wall, and at six o'clock, without ceremony, and always the refusal that he should wash up the cups, saucers and plates, when the hour was struck, he would be told that it was time for her to dress to go out to bingo. He was then dismissed.

He knew she was seventy-four. She had been widowed twelve years back after thirty-nine years of marriage. Her husband, Phil, had left no money and she survived on the state's meagre generosity. Her elder brother, Graham, and her sister-in-law, Hettie, were dead. Her only living relative was her nephew, Graham and Hettie's son, Tony – something important in the police', and she'd snort.

He thought she must spend the first three hours of each day scrubbing, cleaning, dusting her one-bedroomed flat. It was spotless. If a crumb from a sandwich fell from his mouth, Malachy was always careful, immediately, to pick it off his trousers so that it should not fall to the carpet.

Her first married home, when she was a school-dinner lady, had been in a terrace that had been demolished to make way for the Amersham. She, Phil and the budgerigar had moved into the first block to be completed thirty-two years ago. After his death she had been transferred to block nine, level three, flat fourteen. However bad it became, she said each fortnight, she was not leaving the Amersham. She had stayed on, refusing to cut and run, while all her friends and long-time neighbours had either died or left.

The nephew, Tony – and she did a good imitation of the whip of his voice – had alternately nagged and pleaded with her to quit, even to come and live with his family. She had refused… She liked to tell that story. Tony had paid for the grille gate: three hundred pounds, even though the fire people at the council had warned that a locked grille gate made a potential death-trap for the elderly. She was staying on.

To entertain Malachy to tea, and he reckoned it one of the reasons he was asked on those two Thursdays a month, she wore every item of jewellery she possessed. Her fingers were ablaze with rings, her wrists with bracelets, her throat with chains and a Christian cross, and he thought that if she had been able to plug into the lobes more than a single pair of earrings she would have. He assumed they were kept in a box under her bed for just these occasions. She would not have worn them outside because she was street-wise. She had told him: she never took money with her that she did not need to spend when she went to the outdoor market stalls. She only went to the bingo on a Thursday night with Dawn, from flat fifteen. She read the weekly paper, and sometimes over tea with Malachy she would recite the reporting on the most violent crime on the Amersham. He had been listening again to the story of the last coach outing of the Pensioners' Association to Brighton, four months ago, when she changed her tack abruptly:

'You want to know what Tony says you are?'

'I don't think it's important/ He shrugged but he could feel the cold at his back and his hand shook. The last tepid tea slopped on to his lap.

'Tony says you're a loser. He's cruel, Tony is. What Tony says is that you're a loser, Malachy, and a failure.'

'I expect in his job he has to make evaluations – probably the right judgement most of the time,'

Malachy said quietly, simply He had not spoken to Tony, the nephew, since the first day. He had kept his distance, had stayed behind his locked door.

'What happened in your life to bring you down here? Must have been something awful. You don't belong with us. Something awful, worse, an earthquake.' She seemed to struggle for the words, and the abrasive independence that was her hallmark wavered. 'Tony says you're a waste of space and I'm not to spend time with you… Was it something I couldn't understand, like a catastrophe?'

He said, 'It's nobody's business but mine. I… '

The clock chimed. He did not wait for the final stroke of six. He was up, out of his chair, and scurrying for the door. He didn't thank her for the tea or the sandwiches. He thought he would be dissected with Dawn that evening at the bingo – and when the next knock came on the common wall, on a Thursday, he would ignore it. He closed her front door behind him, fastened the gate and ran next door to his own refuge.

With the lock turned, the chain across and the bolt up, he sat on the floor and the darkness blanketed him. He did not know that, outside on the walkways and in the alleys, shadows gathered and searched for the price of a wrap of brown to feed a needle.

'I can't come, Millie. I got the flu, pain where I didn't know pain was. I'm sorry.'

Dawn was tall, would once have been beautiful. She had the ebony skin of wet coal, was from Nigeria, and cleaned Whitehall offices. Perhaps her generosity was used, or perhaps Mildred Johnson truly regarded her as a friend – but never as an equal. Her one son was in the merchant marine, a deck-hand for a Panamanian-registered company, and he never came home. Dawn minded her neighbour, and was occasionally thanked for it.

She was in her dressing gown. 'I tell you, just to come from my bed, get myself to the door and your door, that was agony. I mean it.'

They went to the Tenants' Association evenings and on the Pensioners' Association outings and sat beside each other at the Senior Citizens' Christmas Lunch.

They were together on shopping trips and at the East Street stall market. She was with Millie on one Sunday a month when they went on the bus to the cemetery where Phil's ashes were buried. Together, once a week at the Cypriot cafe, they splashed out on pie and chips and milky tea. Dawn was always there if Millie was ill and cared for her. She had been told that everything in the box under Millie's bed was left in the will to her, not the nephew's stuck-up woman. She saw annoyance spread on the slight face below her own.

'Well, that's it, then.'

Dawn croaked, 'I'm sorry, Millie, but I'm really sick.

I'm going back to bed. I can't help it.'

'I didn't say you could.'

'Get the man, him…' Dawn gestured feebly to the next door on the level three walkway. 'Get him to walk you – or don't go.'

The door was closed on her, and the grille gate. She staggered back into flat fifteen, slumped back on to her bed and the pains surged.

12 January 2004

The sign on the lightweight door said: knock – then Wait to be admitted. But every room in Battalion Headquarters was part of the fiefdom of Fergal. As adjutant he had free run. He pushed open the door. There was no electricity from the main supply that day because 'bad guys' had dropped a pylon, and the stand-by generators were barely able to match HQ's requirements. No air-conditioning was permitted and the wall of heat hit him.

Inside, he could detect the scent used sparingly by the sergeant, pretty little plump Cherie, and, stronger, the body smell of the new man.

'Morning, Cherie – and morning to you, Mal. How's things in Spooksville?' Fergal had a drawl to his voice, knew it made him sound as if he was perpetually taking the piss – and didn't care, because an adjutant cared damn all for anything other than the welfare of his colonel, codeword Sunray. 'Not too bombarded, I hope, with this GFH's problems. Sorry, Mai, I was forgetting you were new with us – GFH, God Forsaken Hole.'

He leered at the sergeant. In the officers' mess, there was a sweepstake on when she would first get herself shagged; it was held by a lieutenant who ran the battalion's transport and he'd decreed that her probably outsize knickers, as a minimum, would be required as proof- the prize now stood at thirty-nine pounds sterling. The way she looked, with the glow on her cheeks and the sweat stains on her tunic blouse, Fergal didn't think it would be long before there was a claimant… A girl always looked good with a damn great Browning 9mm hanging in a holster on her hips. But his business was with the captain, her companion, who was not that new – had been with them for four months.

'Yes, Mai, Sunray would like you up at Bravo.'

'If you didn't know it, I've actually a fair bit to be getting on with right here.'

'Are you not hearing me too well?' He heard Cherie's snigger. 'I said that Sunray wanted you up at Bravo. It's not for discussion, it's what he'd like.'

The battalion in which Fergal was adjutant recruited other ranks from the tenements of Glasgow and the housing estates of Cumbernauld. The fathers or uncles of many had served two decades earlier. The officers, those with good prospects of advancement, came from the landed estates of the west Highlands. They were a family, a brotherhood. The feeling of being part of a clan, with a regimental history of skirmishes, bloody defences, heroic advances and battles, stretched back for three centuries. Their museum was packed with trophies from the campaigns of Marlborough, the epic of Waterloo, colonial garrisoning, the foothills between Jalalabad and Peshawar on the North West Frontier, the kops of South Africa, the fields of Passchendaele and the hedgerows of Normandy, then Palestine, Malaya, Kenya, the Aden Protectorate, and endless dreary little towns in Northern Ireland. Soon, when the booty had been crated up, museum space would have to be found for souvenirs of the Iraqi desert. The battalion had heritage and tradition, and its family strength recognized the danger of allowing strangers to infiltrate its ranks.

Outsiders were not wanted.

'If you're not too busy, Mal…' the sneer was rich in Fergal's voice '… Sunray would like you up at Bravo tomorrow.'

Alongside the battalion's headquarters building, separated by its sandbag blast walls and its coils of razor wire, was the Portakabin occupied by the Intelligence Corps personnel assigned to them – the sergeant, Cherie, and the captain, Mai, as he was called in the mess. Put bluntly, and it was Fergal's right as adjutant to be direct, the Intelligence Corps captain was a cuckoo. He didn't fit, was not part of the family or a member of the brotherhood. The battalion had its own intelligence officer, Rory, a good man. They did not need the stranger, who knew nothing of the history, tradition, heritage that would see them through – if God was kind – the six-month posting to Iraq. The man didn't mix well, didn't share their culture.

'We've a resupply convoy going up at oh-six hundred hours local tomorrow. You can go with them. What have you got on your plate at the moment?'

The answer was crisply put, as if the captain, Mal, accepted the unconcealed hostility shown to an intruder.

There was a rattle of information on pipeline sabotage, clusters of incidents where the crude-oil supply from the wells was disrupted on routes through the battalion's area of responsibility, profiles of suspected 'bad guys', and the man never looked up from his screen as he spoke.

'What does that add up to?'

'That we don't have the resources to guard the pipes, that they can be blown up virtually at will, that the oil supply is persistently vulnerable, that we're charging around and getting nowhere. I have to have more time because I haven't yet sorted a pattern of attacks – who's doing it? Identities, safe-houses. Whether they're Iraqis or from over the Iran border, I don't know… That's what's on my plate. My opinion, at the moment, we're wasting our time.'

Two nights before, in Sunray's office, the same statement had been made, and not appreciated. After the captain, Mai, had gone, Sunray had told his adjutant, 'I won't have that defeatist crap. Christ, I'm under enough pressure from Brigade on these damn pipes… I want answers from him, not just excuses for ignorance. Aren't answers what we have the right to expect from the Intelligence Corps? If he can't do better then perhaps we should get him doing something useful, away from that wretched little screen. Work on it, Fergal.' He had: something useful was at Bravo Company, eighty miles up the road, and Sunray had concurred. What the battalion could do without, when Brigade was breathing hard on them, was to be told they were wasting their time. It was probably true, but it shouldn't have been said by an interloper.

'Up at Bravo, an elder was murdered, drive-by shooting.'

'I know.'

'He was a good friend of ours and-'

'Shot because he was a good friend. We like to peddle this hearts-and-minds stuff, delude ourselves the majority love us and are grateful for liberation, that the opposition is only a minority and mostly from over the border. He was killed because of his association with us – that's a death sentence.'

Icily: 'If you don't mind allowing me to finish, Mal…

Thank you. We're going to show the flag up there, have an arrest sweep. We have to react. You're a local-language speaker so you'll do the initial screening and interrogation, see who should be passed down the line.'

'Be happy to – if your Jocks haven't beaten them all half insensible.'

'That is fucking outrageous, an insult.'

'Please yourself.'

The adjutant was at the door. He knew the answer to what he'd say, knew what training the Intelligence Corps people had – pretty little plump Cherie couldn't hit a main battle tank at twenty-five yards with her Browning 9mm, and the quartermaster who took her on shooting practice wedged his knee between her thighs to keep her steady and held her arms out rigid, but she still missed the biggest target they could knock up. He put the question: 'You're trained on combat weapons and patrol procedures? You should be if you're going up to Buffalo Bill territory, Bravo's ground… Of course you are.'

He knew she was not back yet, and it made him fidget. Malachy was aware of all of the night sounds of the Amersham, every noise from the plaza at the back. He should first have heard the clatter of Dawn's flat shoes and the shuffle of Mildred Johnson's feet, then the screech of the grille gate, the front door opening and shutting, the blast of the TV through the common wall.

She had disrupted what little peace he owned. He could not have told her how much he appreciated the two sessions a month of tea and sandwiches and listening to her talk, and now he sensed the relationship was broken, past repair. He still sat on the floor, wrapped by the darkness that was barely reached by the plaza's lights. Her prying had brought back the pain of memory, not to be escaped from.

He could see it: a child lost in his imagination, succouring fantasies, playing solitary games around the married quarters at Tidworth, Catterick, Larkhall or Colchester… Father was the Northern Ireland expert and always there; mother, a deserter from a nursing career, full-time unpaid organizer of other ranks' wives clubs and counsellor of teenage brides on credit-card debt and trying to keep together a hopeless partnership. Walter and Araminta Kitchen had been too consumed with the job and the good deeds to notice that their lone child was isolated. He remembered coming into the kitchen with homework, arithmetic that he couldn't do, unaware that his father had learned that afternoon he was not sailing with the Task Force to the South Atlantic, and getting a volley of abuse over a gin glass for thinking homework counted in the scale of things, and running. Sent to boarding-school in Somerset. Short visits from his mother, and an aloof one from his father to see the school play. Worst day ever at school was his father's visit a year after his retirement as brigadier, with full dress and medals, to inspect the Combined Cadet Force. Not an unhappy childhood, compared to what some at the school put up with, but remote from love.

Of course he would join the army: his small act of rebellion, and it had taken bottle, was to decide – himself – when and where. And then the puce-faced, spluttering reaction of his father when he announced that he'd enlisted, that afternoon, and been passed through by a Birmingham recruitment office, to be a private soldier and bottom of the heap. 'Silly little bugger,' Walter had called him, and Araminta had said quietly to her husband, 'Not to worry, darling. It never lasts when middle-class boys go slumming it.'

All the sounds, that evening, of the estate had wafted up to his room: music and screams, the wail of the sirens, then the intermittent flashes of blue emergency lights.

The memories came round as if in a loop, as they always did. He was in childhood, father away and mother out. Too awake to sleep. No escape possible.

He heard the stampede of feet, the thud of them, then the hammering on his door.

Malachy felt the fear catch his body He crawled away across the floor towards the far wall. The beating on the door was ever more insistent, and there was the cry of Dawn's voice.

It came in a torrent when he finally opened the door. If he had interrupted, it would not have halted her. She was in her night clothes. No slippers on her feet. Incoherent and with tears welling.

'It's Millie… What happened to Millie? Do you not know? The bingo. She went. I got flu. I can't go to the bingo. I tell her. I say to get you to walk her, or not go.

Did she get you? She went on her own. I told her not to. Nobody ever goes to bingo alone and comes back alone. She did. They got her, the vagrants got her.

She's mugged. You know what she has in her bag? She never has more than five pounds, that is before the bingo starts. They went for her bag. After the bingo and a cup of tea there would be two pounds only. She didn't give it. She hung on to it for two pounds. They dragged her. She fell. She is an old lady. She hit her head, and then they took her bag.'

He rocked, felt himself cringe. He did not say what her nephew's opinion of him was: a loser and a failure. Malachy could not tell her that Mildred Johnson would not have asked him to walk her to and from bingo because he had said that a story of a catastrophe was nobody's business but his, that he was the last man from whom the proud, obstinate little lady would have begged a favour.

'She's in the hospital. The police had found her bag, without two pounds. In the bag is my name and my flat number. In my bag is her name and her number. I cried when the police told me… Why, Mr Malachy, did she not call you to take her and to bring her back?

Why? You were her friend. Why did she not ask you?'