Rat Run

Chapter Seventeen

He sat on an upper point of the dunes, and the rain was back, and the pledge made to Malachy was broken.

He watched and she was huddled on her side in the sleeping-bag, eyes clamped shut, sand carpeting her hair. When the drizzle had started, he had carefully lifted the bag's neck so that her mouth and nose were covered; through her misted spectacles he could see that her eyes stayed closed. The pledge, broken, had been that he would watch till two in the morning, and then she would take her turn, and he would sleep. He had not roused her.

He glanced regularly at her, a few seconds in each two or three minutes, but his focus was on the sea, where a boat would come. More likely the boat would reach them at night, guided by lights, but he thought the weather – rain that drove up on to the dunes, mist, low cloud that shortened the horizon – gave enough cover for a dinghy to be launched. It was as if the few clustered houses by the harbour where the ferry docked were detached from the rest of the wilderness of the island. The voices he heard were those of gulls that ducked and dived in the wind. The tide was up and they had fewer acres of sand to feed from, so their hunt for shells to split open was harder and more frantic. Other sounds were from the wind's thrust in the dunes, and its singing in the low branches of the few trees behind him. He thought she would wake soon because her breathing was less regular than it had been during the night.

The expanse of the beach was being steadily sub-merged. The tide rolled in. In the gloom, sometimes, he saw the light of a buoy, but no boats came past it.

She woke. Sudden movement. Wriggling in the bag and fighting to get an arm clear, trying to see a wrist and a watch. Cursing. Head lifted. Spectacles snatched off and wiped crudely on the underside of the bag. Spectacles replaced. Looking around, eyes fastening on him.

'Damn you.'

It amused Malachy to see her annoyance. 'Good morning, Miss Wilkins.'

'You promised.'

'An earthquake wouldn't have woken you.'

Her fingers were in her hair and sand flew clear. She shook her head violently. 'Damn you because you promised to wake me. If you didn't know it, that is insulting.'

He turned his eyes back to the sea. What had he seen? Nothing. What could he now see? Nothing.

Why had he not woken her?

'There was nothing worth waking you for.'

'We were supposed to share the watch. You half and me half.'

'I thought you needed the sleep,' he said vaguely.

'That is what's insulting. I need the sleep and you don't? That's a cheap shot.'

He remembered Roz, remembered manufactured arguments, remembered vicious, spiky arguments coming out of a clear blue sky, remembered her ability to rouse a dispute from a half-thought-through remark. He watched the surf where the gulls danced, and saw the buoy's light.

'Right… You've seen nothing, so what was so important for you that you could let me sleep?'

'The chance to think.'

'Thinking about today, or thinking about your bloody past?'

Malachy felt himself stiffen, as if there was a catch in his throat. The past, his, was never gone from him.

Worse at night when he slept, but he would not field that to Polly Wilkins as an excuse for not waking her.

Bad in the day because it was the small pain that came and came again. Then he was free of it, then it was back.

She would have seen his mouth stiffen. She was close to him and was kicking out of the sleeping-bag. She had a gimlet gaze on him. He did not know whether she'd intended it, but memories flooded his mind.

She said, spat, 'Your problem, you're in denial.

You're hiding. My people fed me the stuff. I'm not ignorant, I know what the accusation against you is, Malachy. It's a pretty bloody one… I don't know of anything that beats it, what you were called. So, what's your answer? It's pathetic: I don't know what happened. Being in denial isn't good enough and hiding from it means you'll never clear it. All of this stuff, thrashing around and trying to play hero, won't clear the stigma. You have to face facts, kick some dirt in your own eyes.'

'Have you finished?'

'God – it's just that denial isn't a cure.'

'Can we move on?'

'I'm trying to help.'

'Please, don't.'

Her voice rattled in his ear above the wind and the rumble of the surf. 'Can't you understand anything?

Malachy, I'm not looking to humble you – I'm not in the bloody queue that was whacking you. Denial doesn't help you. Just repeating I don't know what happened won't lift you. It's shit.'

She sagged back.

'Thank you. I'll do my own suffering,' he said grimly.

Her lips pursed, head down, she started to dig in the rucksack. She found what she searched for. The size of an ironed and folded handkerchief, it was layers of silver baking foil. She said quietly, as if it were important to prove herself, that she was trained and could keep her head down when she squatted and knew about burying the stuff and tinfoil masked smells, and she said she had food. She was on her hands and knees and near to him.

She touched his arm. Her hand was on his wrist.

'I think I've realized it, the truth. You really don't know what happened. Each time you say it, it's honest. You don't know, it's the truth… I'm batting on – like some bloody shrink – about denial, but you actually don't know what happened. I can see that now. What I'm saying, Malachy, for going on like a pig, I'm sincerely sorry.'

He saw the regret on her face. He took her hand, small and cold, lifted it, brushed his lips against it and dropped it. He watched her crawl away, then disappear down into a gully, go clear of the wind, and resumed his watch on the sea, the waves and the surf.

She was, he realized, the first person who believed him – and no other bastard had. Except her, they had all rushed to judgement, vindictive or ignorant.

27 April 2004

He was led by the client from the hallway and into the living room, and young Kitchen was following him.

'Oh, that's a fine room, excellent dimensions, right for a family,' Horace Wield enthused. He owned his high-street business outright, did not have the clutter of partners. He liked to believe that, as an estate agent, he provided a better service than the chains that competed with him. It was all about reputation and building confidence with clients, whether they were buyers or sellers. This was a seller, and his first estimate was of an asking price of?449,000, and a bottom limit if the going was tough of?419,000. 'So much you can do with a room like this – have a bridge party, friends in for a football game on the telly, a kids' session, relatives round at Christmas… I'm confident that a house with a room of this size will, absolutely, not hang around, and it's very nicely decorated. People like that – spend an arm and a leg on the house and want to enjoy it, not have to rip the wallpaper straight off. Very tasteful. .. Thinking of going somewhere smaller, are we?'

They were. Their son was on the move, but they had a daughter up north and wanted to be closer. A mass of silver-framed photographs stood on the mantelpiece over the gas fire

– small children, the daughter and her husband, and a young man standing proudly in profile, wearing mess uniform.

'The carpets and curtains look best quality. Do I assume they'll be staying, available to a buyer? Always good if they can be left… Mr Kitchen will note that.'

Well, he'd taken a chance on that young man, and Horace Wield had built a flourishing, trusted business on following the instinct of his nose. When he had advertised in the local free sheet for a trainee assistant agent he had been bombarded by youths with earrings and bulky women in trouser suits with shoulder pads, and there had been young Kitchen, who was ten years too old to be a trainee assistant, but had a bearing about him, and damn fine shined shoes.

Had something of sadness and something remote, distant, a presence and a good voice, had come out of the army, wanted civilian life. Horace Wield had gone with his nose, and it was a Friday that marked the end of young Kitchen's first week. Of course, the money was rubbish for a man of his age, but he'd drilled the magic word 'prospects' into him

– come Monday when he had Rotary, or Tuesday when he had golf, he would seriously consider letting young Kitchen out on his own, if the property was at the market's lower end. Truth was, he liked him, and thought a bit of polish walked with him.

When they reached the kitchen, and when they were taken up the stairs to see three bedrooms and a bathroom with walk-in shower, he had found the same cleansed perfection of the living room and the garden. A door off the hall was opened. This was a different room, an untidy space… a shrine.

He waffled, 'Ah, a little place where a chap can shut himself away. I suppose, a bit of a refuge. Sort of room every man should have. You're getting the details, Mr Kitchen?'

Why a shrine? There must have been four more pictures of the son in uniform, but not best dress. Helmeted and in a flak-jacket; unshaven and in fatigues; with an arm round a colleague, crouched in front of a small tank; turning to the camera and grinning and wearing full combat kit with a mosque dome and minaret tower as background – and in every picture a rifle was held in obvious readiness for use.

Two of the pictures were held with drawing-pins to the shelves of books, one was on the window-ledge, another was adhesive-taped to the side of the screen. Normally, Horace Wield would not have talked so fully at a first meeting with a client. He did it for the benefit of young Kitchen, to give him a feel for the patter.

'Don't tell me-your boy's out in Iraq. That's a hell-hole.'

The boy was in the Military Police. Had done Kosovo, then been posted to Al-Amara.

T sympathize. It must be a considerable anxiety to you both having him in that awful country.'

His wife refused to look at pictures of their son in Iraq, which was why they were in his den.

'Very brave young fellows, and a scandalous lack of support for them from too many back home. We should be right behind them. I think every last one of them is a hero – yes, a hero. We ought all to be grateful for their sense of duty and courage… Anyway, this is a very useful space for any member of a family and of any age – don't you think so, Mr Kitchen?'

He looked round, and the doorway was empty. When they went into the hall, Horace Wield assumed that his trainee assistant was in the kitchen and measuring, or in the con-servatory, noting details. A frown twitched at his forehead: against the coatstand was the clipboard that young Kitchen had carried. A chill draught came through the front door, which had been left ajar.

Gaunt climbed the stairs.

As a precaution, he had emptied his wallet of all credit cards and identification documents, and had left only enough money for the taxi ride to this feral place and a taxi back, assuming the impossible – that he could find one.

The driver who had brought him from the gates of Vauxhall Bridge Cross and had dropped him in the heart of the estate had leered at him as he took the money and said, 'You sure this is where you want to be, sir? Sorry and all that, but we don't do waits here.'

'Quite sure, thank you.' He had seen youths loitering at a corner where the graffiti was thick. They had hoods over their heads and scarves across their faces, and he had seen a man with two German shepherds, studded collars on short leashes standing impatiently while they peed in turn on mud beside a pavement.

He had lifted his tie knot, pulled a little more of his handkerchief from the breast pocket, swung his furled umbrella forward and stepped out for the block's entrance. He had looked at flat roofs and wondered from which three youths had been suspended, and at lamp posts and wondered at which a man had been trussed.

He avoided human excreta on the stairs, and at the second level he used his umbrella tip to ease a syringe into a corner. He came out on to the walkway. The taxi driver had said, 'I wouldn't have any of mine live here. They'd be better off in Bosnia… Good luck, sir, and watch your back.' He went by the doorways with the locked barricades, went past a door behind which a child howled and saw the number – where the man, Kitchen, with the cross on his shoulder, had lived. He had spoken half an hour earlier, before leaving the safety of VBX, to Polly and… Another door, another barricade. He rang the bell.

'Mrs Johnson? A very good morning to you, Mrs Johnson. Tony sent me.'

%

He made tea.

He smelt age and wondered if he, alone in the dotage of his retirement, would smell the same.

He was told in which cupboard he would find the biscuit tin.

He carried in the tray, poured through a strainer and was instructed on how much milk she took. He used old-world charm to relax her, complimented her on the decoration of her home, the choice of pictures and the decent simplicity of her crockery.

He said, as she held her cup and saucer, that his business was Malachy Kitchen, and saw defiance settle on her face. He hurried to assure her that he intended no harm to her former neighbour but had come to learn.

Of course, he had an image of a vigilante: a swollen beer belly and shaven head, a vocabulary of obscenities and a muscular arm chucking broken bricks at the windows of a suspected pervert's home.

With reedy determination in her voice, the sparrow-sized woman contradicted the image.

She said, 'No one else ever did what he done.

Nobody ever stood up to them the way he did. I thought it was because of me. I was attacked for my bag, I was put in hospital – yes, I'm rid of the sling, but the arm's not right, not yet – and what he did was after that. Not that he told me it was because of what had happened to me, one old lady who is forgotten and's lived too long. There was no boast in him, wasn't trophies he went after… I know it was him. When you live too long you get that sense – and there wasn't any one else on the Amersham who'd have done it. I told him to his face that I had not given myself such importance, and I asked him to kiss me, and he did. Then he was gone. I'm alone too much, and alone I think. Cheeky of me, really, to believe it was for me. There was what happened here, and then my friend

– that's Dawn – saw something in the paper about the house of a big drug man being burned. The last time Malachy came, when he kissed me, he had scars on him like he'd been beaten. Only after he'd gone did I know it wasn't for me. I had that conceit, but I've ditched i t

… It was about the past. Something hideous happened to him in his past, and I haven't an idea what.

His past gave him strength, so much of it, and more guts than any other man on the Amersham… Are you going to tell me what he's done now, where he is?'

Gravely, Freddie Gaunt shook his head. He did not think she expected an answer. Her cup was as full as when he had poured it. Pieces had fallen into place; confirmations had been given.

She said, 'Each thing he did was harder than the last. Down at our Pensioners' Association they have gym machines, and there's that gear you walk on and you can make it go faster. You with me? It's like each time he did something he made the machine go quicker… You've come to see me, which tells me he's not given up on it, and so I'm thinking he must be running now… '

Running rather fast, Gaunt thought, but did not tell her.

'If you ever see him, you give him my love. Give him Millie Johnson's love, please. Don't let it go too fast, that machine.'

He heard a hiss of passion in her voice, but it subsided.

'I get tired. I'm sorry.'

He took the cups, saucers and plates back into the kitchen, returned the biscuits to the tin and washed up

– as her one-time neighbour would have – leaving the crockery to dry on the draining-board. When he left, her eyes were closed and she might have been asleep.

He closed the front door quietly, pulled the barricade shut and heard the click of its lock.

The boy, his grandson, screamed.

Not letting go of the wheel, Harry Rogers swung his shoulders. The plate arced up and the sandwiches flew towards the ceiling. The kid was pitched sideways and his shoulder cannoned against the rail under the windows. He saw young Paul slide down.

God… God… Only a bloody sandwich that he'd asked for, and the lashed bucket was already well filled with his vomit and his legs had been weak when he'd gone down to the galley to make them. Couldn't have asked his son, not Billy, to make him sandwiches because Billy was below, nursing the engines.

'You all right?' To be heard, even in the confines of the wheel-house, Harry had to shout. The kid moaned back at him. The noises, deafening, were of the engines' race when the bows went down in a trough and the propeller blades were tilted clear of water, and the thud of waves against the hull. When the big gusts hit and tilted them, the boat groaned as if she were either stretched or crushed. 'You all right, young 'un?'

'I'm sorry… sorry… '

'You got nothing to be sorry for.'

He saw the pain on the kid's face. The face, so pale.

If Annie ever knew the conditions out on the North Sea into which he had taken their grandson, she might just lift a kitchen knife against him, or she might pack up and quit. No choice. Had to have the third pair of hands, and no one else he could have trusted. Men enough in harbour who yearned for a good pay-day, who didn't care about weather, but they were not family.

The whimper came through the noise belting him.

'I'm sorry for your sandwiches.'

'You broke anything?'

'I don't think so.'

'Forget the goddamn sandwiches.'

'How long is it? Is it long?'

There was pleading in the kid's eyes. He was seventeen. Back in the old days, sail days, the trawlers like the one he coveted took kids to sea, fourteen and younger, in the same storms and paid them less in a month than they needed to buy a pair of sea boots.

Harry Rogers could not tell his grandson that from this sea journey, and from two more years and from the ones already done, a chest of cash was accumu-lating. The alternative to the chest was gaol – for the kid, for Billy, for him. Harry thought the truth cruel.

He shouted back, and tried to put a smile on his face:

'I reckon we're through the worst of i t… How long?

The rest of today and a bit of tonight.'

Then, and he didn't tell the kid, there would be the coming back and maybe more of the same.

The reference to Harry Rogers, brother of Sharon (nee Rogers) Capel, had been a note buried in a long-neglected file. He was described, in a report on the extended family of Mikey Capel, as a freelance skipper with a master's ticket for taking out deep-sea trawlers.

Going deeper, digging with the computer bank available to him, Tony Johnson had tapped into back numbers of Fishing Monthly and had failed to find a match for Harry Rogers, but had hit gold with the weekly Fishing News. There, two paragraphs described the purchase in the Channel Islands of a beam trawler by Rogers, and its renaming as Anneliese Royal, and its registration in the Devon port of Dartmouth.

From a phone call to the harbourmaster at

Dartmouth, the detective sergeant had learned that the Anneliese Royal was never seen in West Country waters. 'Harry lives here, and I can give you his address and number, but he works the North Sea out of the east coast… Not in bother, is he? He's a very good guy.' Oh, no, not in any bother – only has the bloody spooks sniffing at his backside.

He had checked with harbourmasters from

Immingham to Harwich. Back on his familiar workload, human-trafficking (Vice), he had revelled in the extreme secrecy, imposed by Frederick Gaunt, and had done his checks late in the evening and early that morning before the pace of the National Criminal Intelligence Service had resurfaced. A laconic answer from Lowestoft had lifted him, the last call he made before the open-plan office area filled around him.

'The Anneliese Royal was here and now is not. Hold on a second, friend, and I'll give you timings from our log… Pretty rotten weather when she sailed, and not much sign of it changing. God knows why they went because there's no way they'll have the nets down.

Rather them than me… Here we are. I can be quite exact. It's thirty-six hours, and about fifteen minutes, since she went. Don't get me wrong, beam trawlers rarely sink, but it won't be any sort of comfort cruise.'

He had waited for the coffee trolley to come round, because that was when people went out on to the front pavement for a smoke.

He left the building and walked fast, didn't use the nearest public telephones. They'd break his legs if they knew that, without sanction and authorization, he was moonlighting for the spooks. Why did he do it, risk himself? Because he had entrapped Malachy Kitchen and because Ricky Capel walked top of the shit-heap and believed himself untouchable. Two reasons, each good enough.

With a handkerchief over his mouth, giving muffled disguise, he spoke to a recording machine on the number given him and told what he knew, didn't give his name and rang off. He hoped he had done something to help one man and skewer another.

When he came to the platform in the faint first light, he had seen the mass of scattered feathers.

Anger churned in Oskar Netzer. He stood beside the upright poles, straightened and nailed, of the platform and in the growing brightness he saw the devastation of the killing site. The feathers were spread about an area of mud beside the pond. At the moment of the attack the ducks would have fled but now they had returned and stayed on the far side of the water. The bird had flown off, low and hugging the dunes' shallow contours, the moment he had reached the platform, and it would have carried a last scrap of the duck's breast in its talons.

The killing bird circled high and at a distance.

It would have been aware, with its keen eyesight, of him standing beside the posts. It wanted to feed, to take more of the flesh of its victim… Oskar saw the remaining eiders, innocent and without protection, and seemed to hear the voice of his mother as she read the letter that had been left with a lawyer by his uncle, who had driven the lorry from the camp at

Neuengamme to the school at Bullenhuser Damm. He saw the killer struggling for stable flight in the wind and he listened as his mother read the story of the children being hoisted up for the ropes to be dropped round their necks. Was it in the blood? Did it run in Oskar Netzer's veins, as it did in the harrier's – an instinct of barbarity? The demons tugged at him. His uncle Rolf had not intervened, had sat in the cab of the lorry as the atrocity was done in the school's cellars

… He would break a rule of the island's wilderness.

He would turn his back on a law of Baltrum's nature park. The harrier was the cock: it fed and savaged for two; the hen would be on the nest, eggs under her warmth. Alone, a little of the madness of old times ravaged him. He strode away.

The anger, and the demons, gripped him.

He knew, to within ten metres, the location of the marsh harriers' nest.

His uncle Rolf had done nothing to save the innocents. He would.

He would find the nest in the reeds on the land side of the island, and he would ignore the screaming of the harriers over him and he would stamp his boot down on the carefully woven bowl of fronds – and see no beauty in it – and would break the eggs and see the yolks splatter out of them. He would do it to escape the demons, and to save the eiders.

Tugged at by the wind and spat at by the rain, he was a slight, solitary figure moving among scrub and between the low trees that were crushed and stunted by the weather. He slipped into the reed bed. Beyond its expanse was the sea's inner channel, the Steinplatte, but he would not see the mainland, which was shrouded in mist and cloud. What he found was a track made by men.

Confusion smacked his mind.

The track was not clean, but blundered across the route he took to approach the nest.

He stopped. Who was the greater enemy? The harriers that killed his ducks or strangers who broke the peace of paradise? He turned away from the direction of the nest where a hen bird sat upon eggs, and felt relief swamp him that rules and laws would stay inviolate. He began to follow the track of snapped-down reeds. None of the island's residents, he knew, would have walked through the reed beds and made a track that led towards the heart of the island from the land-side shore of Baltrum.

He walked the track.

He could recognize the prints left by rabbits, different gulls, oyster-catchers, divers and ducks, and it was not hard for Oskar Netzer to follow a trail left clumsily by two men coming in darkness. New purpose came to him, and the image of demons – of children's swinging feet – was killed. He saw the tread of a pair of boots preserved in mud and the smooth sole shapes of street shoes, and he went where they had gone. Old eyes, but sharp, identified the route two men had taken when they had come out of the reed bed and on to the sand of the lower dunes and he saw the flattened grass where they had sat, then two places where they had gone in the night into the scrub thorn. At one a handkerchief had been tugged from a pocket and hung as a marker on the scrub's barbs, and at another he spotted the fibres of a coat. He imagined them cursing, trying to force a way through, twice turning back and searching for a new way. He moved now with greater care, as if he were the harrier, and tested each footstep, as if he were the hunter. The wind sang noisily around him but Oskar's movement was silent. He froze when he heard a long, hacked cough and a man spluttering phlegm from his throat, then went closer.

First he saw the shoes.

They were shoes for a city's pavements. They were sodden wet and mud-stained and had been hung on scrub branches above a small grassed hollow that was sheltered from most of the driven rain. He thought it a futile gesture to try to dry them because the wind did not come into the hollow.

A man slept there. He was on his side, his back to Oskar, hunched, knees drawn up. He thought the man had coughed in his sleep. Beside him was a plastic bag and its neck guttered in the light wind in the hollow.

He saw the firearm, a loaded machine pistol, and a metal box… On his way home, he had stopped at the cemetery at the edge of Ostdorf, and he had sat by the grave. He had told Gertrud of the young woman who had helped him rebuild the viewing platform, of her kindness, her interest in him and her sweetness – so different from the many who abused and sneered. He saw one of two strangers, and a machine pistol, and his eyes showed him the path taken by the second man, who had the heavy tread of strong boots.

He lost the sense of time.

He would not have known, or cared, whether he followed the boots' tread for an hour or for two hours.

He had seen the weapon and moved with considered caution. It did not cross his mind that he should turn on his heel, tramp back to Westdorf and go to the little brick building where the island's policeman lived. He did not have a friend in authority on the island, did not have a friend in the world – except Gertrud. He crossed the dunes, a wraith, and every few paces he would stop, listen, then go forward with his head low and his eyes searching for the tread marks.

If he had not, for a short moment, been upright, Oskar would not have seen him.

The man was briefly visible at the top of the dunes; below him would have been the soft sand that fell away to the beach and the sea. The man bent again, as if to satisfy himself a last time, then – abruptly – began to retrace his steps. On his stomach, Oskar Netzer, nine days short of his seventieth birthday, ducked and crawled into the last of the scrub. A dozen metres from him, seen through a tangle of branches, the man stopped, took a cloth from his pocket, ripped a strip from it, and tied the strip to a branch, as if for a marker. Then he was gone. Oskar saw his face as he passed, sallow and stubble-covered: the face of a stranger who threatened paradise.

When he came out from the cover and gazed back, he saw a second cloth marker knotted to a scrub bush.

He went forward, where the man had been.

At the top of the dune, where it looked over the sand, the beach and the sea, a triangular support had been made from a length of driftwood and two dead but solid branches. The pieces of wood had been driven into the ground and lashed together with string to form a cradle. In it was as large a flashlight as Oskar had ever seen, facing the beach and the surf. He believed he had found a light that would be used after darkness to signal to the sea. He believed that the two men would come in the black of the night, using markers left to guide them, unencumbered by the weight of the light. Why? He had no idea, no interest.

With clinical ferocity, he tore apart the string that held the light in place, kicked in the glass face and the bulb, then used his hands to scoop out a hole in the sand. He dug and dug, then he buried the broken light, and the glass shards, and felt some small pleasure at having safeguarded paradise.

After they had gone, the professor went out on to the veranda and dropped heavily, exhausted from the emotion of the encounter, into his favourite chair of woven rushes. He had been shown the photographs, magnified almost to life-size, of his son, and had been told they were taken from illegal travel documents.

He had been asked if he could identify them. He believed that, in their search for information, the political police had visited many scores of homes – any family where a son had shown an early trace of opposition to the regime, then disappeared. He had not been able to hide his recognition and he had seen the boredom of many denials flee the two men's faces; his nostrils had scented their excitement. He had dumbly nodded his agreement. Any father would know a photograph of his son, even when he had not seen or heard of him for a decade. Was he alive? He had not been told. Where was he? A second refusal.

What had he done? Their backs to him, they had headed for the door. Now he sat in his chair and thought of his son, Anwar, who was betrayed by his own father. He had heard their car speed away, and knew they would be going fast to the police headquarters in Alexandria on Sharia Yousef. He wept and thought that his own flesh and blood had destroyed him.

As he shrugged out of his overcoat and hitched his umbrella handle on the hook, Gloria gave him the signal received, via the Cairo station, from Alexandria. He read the name, then said it out loud as if that reinforced its weight: 'Anwar Maghroub…

Well, Mr Maghroub, I think I hear the clink of handcuffs on you/

Gaunt listened and she played him the tape from the answer-machine, then passed him the transcript she had typed.

'All tightening nicely. Please, what's in my diary this afternoon?'

'You are seeing the nurse, the annual health review, blood pressure, et cetera – I did tell you.'

'Be so kind, cancel it.'

She mimicked horror. 'The AHR is set in granite, about as compulsory as anything gets.'

He grinned, acted sheepish. 'Cancel it, thank you, with abject apologies, and plead an appointment with God,'

He began to smack his console's keys furiously. For fifteen minutes, in a document he entitled 'Rat Run', which was littered with typographical errors, he wrote the report, some material sourced from provenance and some not. He spilled down through the paragraphs: what had been told him by a pensioner widow; the story of an unpaid debt; the heresies of an expert in Islamic studies; the nightmares of a Thames House colleague at Belmarsh magistrates' court; the detail given by a harbourmaster; where Polly Wilkins was, and the hired hand she had recruited…

After he had finished, Gloria tidied and printed it.

Carrying his report, Gaunt went to heaven by the elevator, briefed the assistant deputy director, and requested that a meeting should be called for early afternoon.

Back in his room, he lowered his blind and shut out that perfect, privileged view of the river. He loosed his laces, kicked off his shoes, swung his heels on to his desk, tilted back his chair – and reflected that a chaotic, confused investigation was now close to satisfaction, cursed himself for presumption – then cat-napped.

'Come on, what have you seen?' She knew he held back but could not fathom why.

She was cold, chilled to her bones by the wind, and the old man kept a distance from her. She had been up on the platform when he had come back. He had not joined her but had squatted down against the pole she had helped to strengthen. She had come down the rickety ladder and had sat beside him, but then he had stood and moved away from her. She had closed the distance between them, and again he had moved.

Had he walked the shoreline? He had nodded, non-committal.

Had he seen anything of interest? He had pointed down to the little patch of spread feathers, then pointed up and away into the distance, and she had identified the harrier above a reed bed.

Had he watched people out in the wilderness? He had shrugged, as if the movement of people was of no matter to him. Had he noted the presence of strangers on this part of the island? He had snorted, then looked away.

She shivered, and the motion made the words in her throat croak.

'I think, Oskar, that tonight my business in your paradise will be finished. After it is finished, I will never return… I am here to find strangers who have come to Baltrum… Oskar, I need your help in finding them.' She spoke softly, tried to find gentleness.

'Please, if you have seen strangers, where was it?'

But he showed her his back and gazed down on the ducks. She had heard of, but never met before this week, men who lived their lives as hermits, cocooned in isolation. They found a refuge beyond the need of others. She reflected. This man, living with the stink of old sweat and old dirt and old damp, ran from reality – as did Malachy Kitchen. God save her – two recluses, the one trapped on this nowhere island, and the other trapped on an inner-city sink estate. Just her bloody luck to get two of them, and need them, in a single week. She sought to honey her voice.

'Oskar, you are running. You can tell me – what from?'

He faced her, and smiled at her, as if he believed himself sane and her an idiot, and he said, 'I run from the sight of the dancing bare feet of children.'

As he walked away, he took a piece of bread from his pocket and she saw the green of mould on it. He gestured with his hand that she should not follow him and he went down the slope below the viewing platform. He was breaking the bread and throwing it forward towards the cluster of ducks. Bloody mad – or worse? The dancing, bare feet of children… What did that add up to? A paedophile? The dancing, bare feet of children. A man who hung around playgrounds in a city, with a bag of sweets in a pocket? She saw, damn right, a reason for running, as great a reason as hiding in a sink estate from cowardice.

Her temper snapped. She had played gentle and it had taken her to bloody nowhere.

In her fluent and best German, she barked against the wind: 'You hide, then, see if it matters to me – or bloody keep running and see if I'm bothered. Not that it would interest you, with your problem, but I am attempting to save lives. That's the lives of ordinary, totally innocent people, but you wouldn't care, would you? So bloody absorbed in your own foul little world, voyeuring kids… Watching the dancing, bare feet of children and, no doubt, imagining what's under their skirts and shorts. You make me, with your selfishness, sick. Hear me? Sick… '

He did not turn. At her attack, his shoulders seemed to crumple.

His voice was frail, uncertain: 'My uncle drove a lorry from the KZ at Neuengamme that took children to a school's cellar. Medical experiments had been performed on them and they were killed so they could not testify against the doctors. The feet that danced were those of the children who were hanged in the cellar of the school… Leave me alone. Go away.'

She rocked, reeled.

She had nothing to say.

The cold engulfed her. She went, dismissed, and shame blistered her.

He had heard the sluicing of the water and the screams.

Now Timo Rahman heard the whimpers of his wife and the stamp down the stairs of Alicia's aunt. It could not have been otherwise.

The last night he had slept in the guest room, which was never used because no guests were invited to stay at their home. The Bear had driven the girls to school and they had gone, sullen and frightened, aware of but not understanding the crisis afflicting their parents. They would never challenge their father and neither had dared to ask why their mother was locked, a prisoner, in her bedroom.

He sat in the living room, his head and body statue still, the coat with the Harris tweed label clutched in his fists on his lap, and he waited for her aunt to come off the stairs and cross the hall, which he could see.

The Bear, who loved Alicia to the point of devotion, was in the garden and away from sight through the window. He raked leaves and perhaps wept – but it could not have been otherwise.

In the village, in the mountains where Timo

Rahman had been raised, she would have been beaten to death at his own hand, then buried in a shallow, unmarked grave, and would never again have been spoken of.

Her aunt passed the door. She did not stop to show her long arms and the skin on them wet from the bath, soiled with blood. She did not hold up the brush of steel bristles that had last been used by the Bear to scrape rust from an old bucket. She went by the door, but he had seen the blood and the brush.

He knew that his wife had met a man in the summer-house of their garden – knew it because Ricky Capel would not have dared to lie to him and had denied the man was at the house because of him

– and knew that, for her betrayal of him, she was now cleaned.

He could hear each sound she made through the bedroom's locked door and down the stairs and across the hall and into the living room – and knew her body was now cleaned by a brush of steel bristles, the dirt scoured away so that the skin bled, It could not have been otherwise.

The man, Dean – or whatever he was supposed to call him – cleaned the gun.

Ricky said, 'I'm alive… Why am I alive?…

Because I lied. I lied to Timo Rahman. If I hadn't lied, I'd be dead. He'd have strangled me or broken my head open with a hammer, if I hadn't lied. For giving him the truth, he wouldn't have shot me because that would be too quick and he'd have wanted to hurt me.'

His body shook in spasms and he watched as each part of the weapon was laid out on a coat and meticulously wiped. He rambled.

'A man came after me where I live – I don't know who he is and I don't know what his problem is. A guy I do business with, his home was burned down with petrol. This man came to where I live and his coat stunk of petrol – the coat was distinctive, sort you see once and not again, but you don't forget it from the once… and I'm at Rahman's. All bloody hell breaks out, alarms and things, and there's a man legging it over the fence at the back of the garden, but his coat catches on the wire, and they'd have had him if he hadn't slipped off the coat. The coat came in the house, brought in by that bloody gorilla, and it was the same coat and it had the same stink, petrol. He asked me straight, Rahman, did I know the coat?

Basically, what he's asking me, was a man in his garden because of me? Simple question. I lied, said I didn't know nothing about it. I'd have been dead if I hadn't lied. I'm thinking now – the man whose coat was lost, Rahman'll believe he'd come to meet his wife. Poor cow, but not my problem. You look after yourself, in this world, first and second and third.'

The cold ached in every joint of his body but he had lost feeling in his feet however hard he rubbed them.

He did not hear his own voice.

'What's just amazing, he swallowed it. I hadn't the lie off my lips before I'd reckoned it out. Nobody lies to him, don't dare to. Get caught in a lie to him and he'd take a week to kill you. Sort of making a judgement, isn't it? Get killed in an hour or two for telling the truth… get killed in a week because you lied and got caught out – matter of judgement. I'm telling you because I like you, because I trust you.'

The weapon was reassembled. Ricky could not have stripped it, cleaned it, put back the parts.

'We get on that boat, get across the water, and we drop you off, then you're gone. It's like you never existed. My secret and your secret, carried to your grave and mine. I don't hear of you ever again and you don't ever meet up with me. What you do, I thought it was my concern, thought it mattered to me.

Isn't – doesn't. I'm telling you, honest, when I realized what you did then I told Rahman I wasn't taking you and he twisted my bloody arm, like it was right out the socket… Then he showed you the picture of that girl, bawled you out for what you done to her. Me, I don't have an opinion, not any more. You see, Dean, we're friends – I like you – friends with trust. That's good, us as friends.'

The weapon was loaded, cocked and laid down.

Hands slipped to Ricky's feet, peeled off the socks, squeezed the last moisture from them and started to massage his skin, the soles and the insteps, and he felt the first flicker of heat. There was wet at his eyes.

'Brilliant, Dean. That's just bloody brilliant.'

'What have I done? Something brutal. What are the consequences of it? Nothing. What am I saying, Malachy? I'm saying this bloody awful place has brought out the bitch in me.'

He lifted his arm, swung it, hooked it round her shoulder. In front of them was the beach and the surf and the horizon where the sea met the clouds.

'Don't think, Malachy, that anyone from my crowd will ever thank you. They don't do that. All except one, they're as awful as here is. I'm saying that you have to stand tall for yourself. Got me?'

She wriggled. She worked her body closer to his and he tightened his grip on her shoulder. Her hair was against his chin.

'It's what you deserve, to stand tall – whatever it was that happened. You get to a time when you've paid your dues, owe nobody anything.'

He felt the warmth of her.

'I want to be there and I want to see it – you standing tall, Malachy.'