The Walking Dead

Chapter 11

Fine rain fell on Ramzi. He was sitting on a bench. Before him, while he buried his head in his hands, was the city that was his home, laid out below him, the lights of its streets blazing through the mist. Far to the east, above the lights and beyond them, was the first smear of a softer grey. Soon the day would come.

When the others had slept, he had made his preparations for flight. He had disguised his bed. He had opened the window with great care because the hinges creaked from the rust on them. He had dressed and pulled on his trainers. After each movement he had paused to allow the quiet of the night to settle around him again. Once, Syed had called out, but had not woken. He had stood on the bed and lifted his left leg out through the window. He had been astride the sill, half in, half out, his knee dose to a little china bowl that was a decoration there, when Jamal's cough had exploded, but none of the sleepers had been roused. He had worked his right leg through the gap, settled for a moment on the outer sill, then lowered himself into the flower-bed below and had felt the earth clog on his trainers. He had tried to close the window, fasten it, but that had not been possible so he had abandoned it. Ramzi had run and heard the flap of the curtains behind him, the swing of the window.

The strengthening wind had been on his face. He had run as if his life had depended on it, had charged across the lawn, because he had believed himself to be condemned.

He had gone through the hedge, missing the gap where the thorn was sparsest and the wire was down to knee height. He had struggled to free himself from the wire's barbs, the thorns, tearing his trousers and lacerating his hands. When he had slipped in the field, mud had smeared his face, hands and clothing. He had blundered to an open gate and there had gasped for breath, looked back and seen the dark outline of the building — but no lights were snapping on and no shouts carried on the wind, only the rain. He had skirted the far side of the wood that was near to the track leading to the building. The muscles he had built in the gym, with rings of weights, were in his shoulders and in his arms — they could be seen and gave him the stature he craved — not in his stomach and thighs. At a shambling trot, he had staggered towards the village.

He had come into it past the closed and blacked-out pub, past the shop, which had only a dim security light, and had crossed the street. For Ramzi, the countryside, its quiet and isolation, was an alien, unfamiliar place: he was used to concrete, paving, noise and the dense terraces of closely packed homes. He no longer had the will to run but he stumbled forward, going north, along the pavement. When he came under a high light, he had seen the mud from the ploughed field on his top and trousers round the tears. When he had cleared the village, gone past the last set-back houses, a car had swept past and he had waved — too late — at the driver. When the village was far behind him, and there was no pavement, and he meandered in exhaustion on the road, there was the scream of a horn as a van swerved by. His waved arms — frantic — were ignored. An hour later, when Ramzi could run no more, barely trot, only walk — and he was two or three miles from the village — he had heard the grinding approach of a heavy lorry. He had turned and stood with his arms spread, at the side of the road, and had heard the brakes wail. It had come to a stop fifty yards ahead. He had summoned his strength and run to the high cab door that had been opened.

He would have called the lorry driver a Crusader. He would have thought of him as an enemy. He had planned to kill, and the Crusader, the enemy — or his family — might have been close to the explosion, near enough not to have been able to duck away from the flying shrapnel of ball-bearings, nails and screws: it was what he had hoped to achieve. An arm had reached down, caught his fist and heaved him up into the warmth of the cab, where music played. 'Christ, you look a proper mess. What you done? Not my business, eh? Well, I like a bit of company — where you trying to get to?' He had named the city that was his home. 'Can't do that. Tamworth's the best I can manage, but you'll get a train out of Tamworth for Derby — yeah, I like a bit of company on a night run.' He had seen the driver when the cab light was on: he wore a sleeveless shirt and his arm was tattooed with a picture of a naked girl.

They had driven at speed through the night along deserted roads. 'Just so as we understand each other, if you're in trouble with the law — trouble with anything — I don't want to know. It's just good to have someone up here. Pity you're not a pretty bird…'

Ramzi had never before been so close, shoulder to shoulder, with a Crusader, an enemy. The family had no friends outside their own community. At his schools, the kids had all been Muslim and dominated by lessons on the Faith. At college, before he had dropped out of the computer-studies course — eight months into a two-year curriculum — the other students' families had originated from Pakistan and Bangladesh. The benefit office he used was staffed from the ghetto. The shops he, his mother and his sisters went to were inside the ghetto. Where he worshipped, where he had been recruited, the evils of the morally corrupt society of the Crusaders had been drilled into his mind. The television he watched came on the satellite, and the websites he visited trumpeted the successes of martyrs in the fight against the enemy.

It was a soft voice, a Birmingham accent. 'You want a sandwich? Sorry, sorry…I'm a daft bugger, they're ham. But there's rock cakes my missus made, and the flask's coffee.' He had wolfed three cakes, and drunk from the mug on top of the Thermos, and he had learned of the life of the driver, and his family's life, and their home in the Smethwick suburb of Birmingham, and the holiday he was looking forward to—'Can't come bloody fast enough, know what I mean?'—in a caravan park on the Yorkshire coast, and the job he did delivering shelf supplies to supermarkets. He had been driven into Tamworth, and a sign for the rail station had been pointed out.

'You'll be all right now, but better when you've had a wash and brush-up. Been good knowing you.'

He had stepped down from the cab. He had seen the smile above him, and the little wave. Should he have said it? Should he have told the kind Crusader, the generous enemy, not to go with his family next Saturday morning into the centre of Birmingham? It had been in his mind, deep in his throat…But the lorry had pulled away, and the warning was left unspoken.

The first train of the morning service out of Tamworth had brought Ramzi home. He had fled because he was condemned. Not in words…Where I fight, a cell must be secure or it will fail, and failure comes when respect inside the cell is lost. Trust was placed in you. Should I doubt that trust? The hand had been gentle on his shoulder, and a smile had been at the mouth. The words had been honeyed, not the eyes. The eyes had told him he was condemned — perhaps not that day, perhaps the day after, because Ramzi had lost respect, and trust in him was doubted, and the eyes had pierced him and had spelt out their contempt. He was dead if he stayed so he had run. If he walked slowly, he would reach his home within fifteen minutes, and he would hit the door with his fist and a sister or his mother would unlock it, and the story of his failure would be prised from him. They would learn of his disgrace, his shame, his humiliation. His old boasts replaced by a stuttered confession. Their old pride in him gone.

He sat on the bench and the cold sank into his body.

The handler was always the first in his home to rise, shower, shave and dress. A biscuit for the grand old lady, retired, in her basket. Then the kettle on, a pot of tea made, a mug taken, up to his wife, a bang on the doors of his kids' rooms and protest groans as a reward. It was still dark. He heard the six o'clock news on the radio every morning unless he was on early turn and already at work. He ate toast and listened to the news, then climbed into his waterproofs. On his pager, he read a bald text of an increased security alert down south in the capital, but the spin-off was that he was tasked to show the flag and let his spaniel sniff round the city's railway station and the bus terminus. It had been a regular routine since Seven-Seven, since the bombers had taken an early train into the heart of London with explosives in rucksacks on their backs. The radio told him that the Dow was down overnight, that big redundancies were forecast in the north-west, there had been a homophobic attack in the south-west, a junior minister was entangled in scandal, two suicide bombs in Iraq…The handler barely took in the litany of gloom. He savoured the tea, the toast and the quiet. By being dressed in time for the six o'clock news he was able to enjoy the peace of the house, and he would have said, if asked, that it was the time of day he enjoyed most, particularly in autumn, winter and spring when it was still dark outside, and he could think and reflect.

What he thought of most often, reflected on most frequently, was that he fitted no stereotype as a police officer in the city of Derby. Wouldn't have been in the force if he hadn't been a dog-handler. He had few ambitions and had never shown an interest in sitting the sergeants' examination; there were plenty who did and were fast-tracked towards it. In fact, nothing that was memorable or worth a commendation had ever intruded on his career. Most certainly, if he had not been a dog-handler, he would have resigned rather than face the bloody binge-drunk rioters in the city centre every weekend but he had been spared that since he had taken on Smack and now Midge. Wasn't in a hurry that morning, and after the news and the weather forecast, bloody awful, he caught up with last night's Evening Telegraph and the Ram's predicted line-up for the coming Saturday's match. Then he poured some more well-stewed tea.

Few slept well in the cells at HMP Belmarsh. Most woke early, at the clangs of unlocking doors, the rattle of chains and the stamp of boots. Some did not sleep at all and gazed at the ceiling bulb behind its cover or the glow through the barred window of the perimeter walls' arc-lights.

Ozzie Curtis had not slept.

He burned, and hatred was a fire in him.

Didn't reckon that Ollie had missed out on sleep. The dozy bastard relied on him, leaned on him and left the worrying — and hatred — to his elder brother.

He checked his watch, did so every five minutes, and thought it was about the time it would happen.

If it wasn't for the work and the planning — the hating and burning — that Ozzie put in, Ollie would have been running a stall most likely on the Columbia Road flower market; Ozzie had always split down the middle line, fifty-fifty, but had done the worrying. To show for Ozzie's worry, Ollie had a pad in Kent of the same value as his own, the same bloody investment income and the adjacent Spanish villa.

They were going down, both of them; with the jury in protection and the judge bloody poisoned against them, they were looking at long bird. They would be bloody old and bloody decrepit when — if — they emerged from a prison's gates, and they would be without authority.

The fire burned in him because the man with a beard, and his feet in bloody sandals, had taken their money, then grassed them up.

In his mind, flames burned.

Bright flames flickered, flared, then spread.

He looked again at his watch.

At that hour, in a distant suburb of east London, most households slept. Only a minimal few had been roused by alarm clocks and the automatic switching on of radios.

The few were those who had furthest to travel, those on the earliest shifts, those who were key-holders and had to open up factories, businesses and offices…and among the few who were about their trade before dawn were the three men in an old saloon car, with substituted number-plates, who had cursed at the stench of petrol and had not dared to light the chain of cigarettes on which they would normally have survived.

The car was parked beyond the end of the road, and the driver was left with it. He did not have to be told that he should keep the engine running. First out was the Nobbler, and in a gloved fist he carried a plastic supermarket bag tightly wrapped round a half-brick; The second man held the, source of the petrol stench: a fuel-filled milk bottle with a wad of old shirt rammed into its neck. He had in his pocket a snap-open Zippo lighter.

In the world of Benny Edwards, two options of persuasion existed. They were the choice of the carrot or the less welcome alternative of the stick. The choice was gone, and with it had disappeared his client's cash and a segment of his own reputation' of success: the alternative of the stick, however, remained. It was now of great importance to him — his hard-won reputation relied on his ability to deliver hung juries or acquittals. For the stick, given the chance, he would have gone along the route of a child's face slashed and disfigured with a razor-sharp blade, or a woman's legs hit by a car's bumper as she walked along a pavement. But Wright's daughter was not there, nor his wife, and the opportunity to send a message from either of them while they lingered in Accident and Emergency was not available. Early the previous afternoon the driver of the car, ducked down in his seat had watched as the child and the woman were hustled with their bags through the front door and the gate by uniformed and plain-clothes filth, and dumped without ceremony in the back of a police wagon. When they had sped out into the traffic stream their road had been blocked by a car with a blue lamp flashing on the roof and the chance of pursuit had not been there. But a message needed sending and could still be sent. A, message was the least of Ozzie Curtis's demands on Benny Edwards. He who pays the piper calls the tune: that was obvious to the Nobbler. A message would reach the bastard Wright, and he had been told of long arms and longer memories. There was a good chance that the stick, on fire, would dictate the bastard's decision in the jury room.

It was raining. The pavement shimmered under the street-lights. The two men, walking briskly, carrying the half-brick and the milk bottle, had hoods over their heads and scarves on the lower half of their faces. The Nobbler presumed that a junior filth would have been left inside the house — there was an unmarked car by the front gate, empty — and that a camera lens would have been mounted above the front door. Better to presume everything. They went past a closed van, with the logo of a window-cleaner on its side and ladders on the roof, and the house, the target, was now less than fifty paces ahead. The Nobbler quickened his stride, and the man behind him.

Benny Edwards was familiar with success. He would not have admitted to complacency, but success — and the enhancement of his reputation — came often enough. He backed his nous, his instinct, and it had been wrong, which had confused him. The money had been taken; the deal had been done; end of bloody story. What had gone wrong? When news had reached him — second-hand, via that callow shit-face of a solicitor — of the new security ring thrown round the jurors, he had gulped in astonishment, but his own people had seen the coach pull away from Snaresbrook and the windows had been covered with newspaper. Four days earlier, at home in his corner jacuzzi, soaking and relaxed, he would never have thought — not for a bloody moment — that Julian Wright, the bastard, would be the one to play the goddamn hero, take the money and piss all over a deal. The thought of it was beyond his comprehension. He had seen nothing in the man, or in the bloody demands, bank statements and credit-card sheets, that had rung warning bells. The bastard had been as pliable as a bloody wet turd. More important, he had left the Nobbler looking like an idiot and an incompetent, and that hurt.

'You ready for it?' Benny Edwards spoke from the side of his mouth.

He heard a grunt of acknowledgement behind.

He stopped. First, his eyes flitted over the darkened road. He saw nothing that aroused his suspicion. Then he twisted his head, raised the scarf — higher on his face and looked at the terraced house. His glance went over the gate that hung from one hinge, across the little flower-bed to the door where the paint had peeled. There was no glimmer of light from behind the glass pane at the top, but he fancied — was not sure — that he had identified a lens from a pinhead camera, but he was. prepared for that and his face was well covered. He checked the bay window beside the door: curtains drawn. He sucked in breath, held it in his lungs and listened…He heard nothing.

'We'll go for it.'

There was the click of the lighter behind him. The Nobbler swung back his arm, the plastic bag with the half-brick in his hand, and heaved it at the bay window. The crash of the glass — enough to wake the bloody dead — pealed in his ears. Then he was roughly pushed aside. A small flame had caught on the material in the bottle's neck. There was the slosh of liquid. He watched his man hurl, short arm, the missile through the splintered hole the brick had made and break as it landed. There was a flash, then a growing roar as the fire caught. A light upstairs, across the street, snapped on.

'Come on, leg it.'

His face, behind and above the scarf, felt the heat of the spreading blaze, and he started to run. Well, he wasn't a kid, was he? Couldn't run fast, could he? Do the best he was capable of, wouldn't he? Hadn't gone fifty paces and his stride was already shorter and he could hear his man behind him, panting like a bloody pig, and he heard the shouts and the cackle of the radios, then the pounding of bloody boots. Benny Edwards, the Nobbler with the reputation, thought his world was caving in on him.

It did, sooner than he'd reckoned possible.

He was a couple of strides from the back wheel, breath sobbing in his throat, when the door of that bloody van — the window-cleaner's — heaved open, swung on the hinge and was right out, blocking him. He tried to swerve but hadn't the control of his legs and fell. In the fraction of time before his face hit the road, he saw the big fuckers spill out of it. He was down. Two of them were on him. Hands searched his clothing, probed into his pockets, and his arms were wrenched into the small of his back. He felt the cold of the handcuffs on his wrists. He'd always thought, if it went, sour on him, that there'd be a ring at the door around five in the morning, detectives in the hall with the courtesy to let him dress decently and give the missus's cheek a peck, and a solicitor — not that fucking Nat Wilson, no way — at the police station by the time he reached there. But he was on his face with the grit of the road in his eyes and he felt suspended in the depths of humiliation… and was.

Propped up on his bed, Banks's eyes lingered on the page of the notebook, and he reread again the last line. The dawn comes quickly, too fast. There were distant shouts as the garrison camp woke, as there would have been on Mosquito Hill when the officers roused their men. He had been awake for an hour and, against all better judgements, had started on the entry written by faint candlelight so long ago…He never skipped, and he resisted the temptation to find the last page, the last words written by his great-uncle. There was not the scream of the day's first artillery shell fired from a 155mm howitzer by German gunners or the nationalists, or the first howling low-level flight over the ridge of a Messerschmitt fighter, but a high-pitched jingle of tinny music.

He reached on to the bedside table in the barely furnished room of the camp's visitors' quarters, lifted his mobile and clicked 'receive'. Sharply he gave his name, then listened.

'But they're not there. They were moved out…What's the damage?'

He was told, and some more.

'But that's brilliant, Wally, picking up the lowlife…What should I do, and when?'

He shaved fast, dressed, then slipped on his suit jacket so that the pocket hung down over the pancake holster on his belt. He locked his door and went down the bright-lit corridor, heading for his Principal's room. By the staircase, half-way down the corridor where a uniformed constable lounged on a plastic chair, there were windows and he saw that darkness still cloaked the parade-ground. He knocked, said his name, heard an answering grumble, went inside and switched on the ceiling light. Wright was in bed and blinked up at him. Like any other policeman, he was familiar with the work of delivering bad, sad news, and had learned it should be done briskly, without emotion. His Principal might be a hero but he was not a friend.

He said, matter-of-fact, 'Sorry and all that, but I have to tell you your home was attacked an hour ago. Of course your wife and daughter were not there and are quite safe. A window was broken and a petrol bomb was thrown into your living room. The street was staked out, across the road and down it. The guys were in there pretty fast with extinguishers and most of the damage is smoke and scorching, not structural.'

Some would have wept, others would have let free a volley of oaths, obscenities. His Principal merely grimaced.

'Because we had the stake-out and were able to move so sharp, your neighbours won't have been affected other than by the drama. The homes on either side of yours are fine. Yours is now boarded up.'I suppose, when you went to the judge and told him of the approach made to you and turned in the money, that you realized there could be retaliation. People on high are singing your praises.'

The Protection Officer expected a platitude response. Something about 'duty' and something about 'ethics'. The Principal only shrugged…Peculiar.

He bored on: 'Actually, we've had a rather good result, and my boss is well chuffed with it. We have three arrests — a driver, the jerk who threw the petrol bottle, and the one who chucked the brick and broke your window for the petrol to go through. He's Benny Edwards and it's the first time, and not without trying, that he's been nicked in flagrante. He's a specialist in nobbling, but that's as far as I can go on him.'

No reaction, nothing. Banks had anticipated something…Bizarre.

'I'm not permitted to discuss it further because of any possible conclusions you might draw in relation to the case you're sitting on, Mr Wright. What's paramount is that nothing I have said to you prejudices your opinion on the trial. That is why you have not yet been asked for a statement on the approach made to you, why you have not been sat down with a book of photographs so's you can identify the people you met, and the circumstances under which you were given that sum of cash. It's all being kept till after the verdict you and the rest will reach. Does that make sense?'

His Principal could have said bloody something. He saw the roll of his eyes.

The man seemed so calm. It was like, Banks reflected, his Principal was indifferent to having had petrol splashed into his living room and lit. Banks would have been mental with fury at such violation of his territory. He realized that he understood so little about the man. He had not managed to dig his way into the school teacher's trust — that was why he had won no normal, predictable reactions. But they called him a hero. There, perhaps, he fitted a pattern. A hero, in David Banks's world, was not a special forces' trooper — up a mountain in Afghanistan with all the high-tech gear hooked on his webbing — but the little man, ordinary as sin, who was confronted, from nowhere, with acute danger to himself and others. His hero was a man who made a bridge of his body for many to crawl over when a ferry-boat turned turtle, in darkness with panic around him. His hero, man or woman, young or old, had gone back into the smoke and toxic hell of a bombed Underground train, deep in a tunnel, to help those so badly injured they could not make their own escape. His hero was Cecil Darke, without water and with the smell of the dead round him, on the ridge of Mosquito Hill. They came in all shapes, all sizes and fitted no stereotype, and what made them so special was their lack of preparation for what they would endure. He felt, rare for him, a keen admiration. Whatever his emotions, Wright had them successfully bottled and corked. What did they say? They said, 'Don't make a drama out of a crisis.' The man was now identified by twin echelons of organized crime, had acquired the enmity of two brutal clans, would live with that weight on his shoulders — and his family's — for years to come. He had stood up and been counted against the forces of corruption and intimidation. Not bad for a bloody school teacher, but the mark of a nobody who was found to be a hero, too true. Maybe the man was in shock.

Banks said kindly, 'I can rustle up a cup of tea if you'd like one'

His Principal rolled over in the bed, away from him. 'I'd prefer it if you got lost and let me go back to sleep — switch the light off on your way out.'

He did, and shut the door quietly behind him.

Another day was starting, and Banks did not know what it would bring — if anything.

In a Belgravia hotel room, where the street below the window reverberated with a road-cleansing lorry, a couple made love. They had barely slept.

He thought the younger woman was clumsy through inexperience but relished her passion.

She thought the older man was now almost drained of his strength and doing it from long unused memory cards but was childishly eager.

An opened champagne bottle, its contents going flat, was tilted in a silver bucket. She'd said she was teetotal and didn't need the stimulation of alcohol, and he'd followed suit but the wasted bottle would be on his bill.

She was astride him and he was on his back, and the sheets were nicked off the bed and on the carpet with their scattered clothes. He was in her, and his hands reached up for her breasts. He talked and she listened. Then, when he was flaccid, limp — between times — she talked and he listened, but mostly it was him who talked and while he did she helped him to get ready for it again. A wife, Gertrud, who had been a childhood sweetheart, and a divorce of twenty years ago that had come through, final papers, on a fax machine in a foreign city. A boyfriend at university who had only shagged her on Saturday nights when the hail of residence was heaving in unison. A secretary where he worked who cared for him but as a younger sister and didn't share a bed with him. A young man, a staffer at the Home Office, whom she'd ended up with after a Christmas party.

For too long he hadn't done it; not often enough she hadn't.

He bounced his buttocks on the bed and heaved into her.

She thought him a cob horse who'd remembered what it was about.

He didn't know whether it was spontaneous.

She didn't know whether he'd planned it.

He felt privileged; and she felt damn, damn good.

There was no relationship for the future. They were ships that passed.

She felt him shrink and wriggled off him. She lay beside him and heard his breathing, harsh but regular, and he had nothing to say…Silence, and the road-cleansing lorry had moved on. Quiet…No one who knew her where she worked would have believed she had copulated three times in a night with a man nearly old enough to be her father and gloried in it. No one who knew him would have reckoned him capable of giving and taking acute pleasure. She was off the bed and walked naked to the side-table, her feet kicking aside a drift of sheets and clothing. She switched on the electric kettle and tore open coffee sachets. It was the first time, afterwards, that he had not spoken about his wife, his secretary, his life or work.

'You all right?'

'Just thinking.'

'What were you thinking about?' she asked.

'Oh, mistakes and good luck.'

'I don't regard this, what's happened, as a mistake, and…'

He said, distracted now, 'No, no…I was thinking that this might be the day when the mistake is made, and when we've gotten lucky.' *

'For what you paid, Miss, what did you expect? A high-performance Alfa?'

The nurse from Accident and Emergency tossed and twisted in her bed as the first light of the day seeped through her curtains. She had not slept and would be a rag doll at work that morning. As it had through the night hours, irritation swarmed in her mind, with frustration over the reception she had faced at the car-dealer's yard at the end of her shift yesterday afternoon. Knackered after another difficult day, Avril Harris had explained the problem: backfiring on deceleration, particularly on the approach to stop lights, sometimes once, sometimes twice, with a gunshot's report. Wasn't it under warranty? She had been told, slyly, that she'd never asked about warranties but if she had she would have been told that they did not apply to a car priced at under a thousand. The problem could be handled but the work would have to be paid for; the dealer had denied obligation. 'Sorry and all that, but it was bought as seen.'

What he was prepared to do, without cost to her, was explain the fault that she had described with a mounting anger. It was about the timing, about the exhaust valve opening as the piston exploded; she knew how to operate a complicated defibrillator, or any of the maze of equipment that surrounded a patient in trouble immediately after admission — but had no comprehension of the workings of the internal combustion engine under the bonnet of an old Fiesta. She was told about the crankshaft, the timing belt, the camshaft and the valves, and she was tired, flushed, and had lost him. He'd shrugged — and she'd hoped the unthinkable: that one day the bastard would be wheeled on a trolley into her care, parked in a corridor and left to sweat — and smiled showing bad teeth. 'It was tried and tested by you, Miss, and you didn't have a complaint then.'

It was like, Avril Harris had thought, the dealer had never seen the damn car before. Until they had a look under the bonnet, he didn't know whether it would be a fifty-pound job or a hundred — work and parts, but for cash there'd be no need for VAT added on top — and she could drop it off any time she wanted and they'd take that look, then tell her what the damage would cost her. She had decided that — whether it made a noise like the gun battle at the Alamo each time she came to red traffic lights — she was damned if he'd get her trade.

Not ever. She'd strode away. He'd called after her: 'You want to go somewhere else and get another quote, well, Miss, that's your privilege.'

She would get it fixed 'somewhere else' in Luton, but not that week. Hadn't the money until the end of the month. Would have to ask round the A and E staff for a recommendation. It had done a double backfire at the lights at the bottom end of the Dunstable road. So damned unfair, and it had kept her awake, irritated and frustrated, but until the money was in the bank she must cut her cloth and live with it.

The window slammed, and Khalid woke. He heard the water that dripped from the sill. The wind whistled through the gap and the curtain flapped.

Which fool had left the window open? Not himself. Not Syed and not Jamal, because they had both been asleep before him. Ramzi? Ramzi had been reading from the Book, with a side-light when Khalid had faced the wall, sought sleep and found it, dreamless…No, the window had been shut, fastened, when they had gone to the room, undressed, climbed on to their mattresses.

Again, the wind caught the window, seemed to seize it and pull it open, wider, and the curtain was lifted and the spatter of water was louder. Khalid did not understand how Syed, Jamal and Ramzi could sleep unaware of the open window. Could any of them have risen in the night and unlocked it because it was too warm in the room? Impossible, and the cold was against his skin. Syed and Jamal were nearest the door, but Ramzi's mattress was under the window; the noise was beside him and the water from the driving rain would be falling on him. He knew it was the day that the video would be made.

Khalid crawled off his mattress. He hoped — had prayed for it — that after the recording of the video he would be permitted to return to his home and the mini-cab office. He had not been treated with respect. He had driven to Birmingham, had endured a night in a flea-ridden hostel, had driven back and not been thanked. Not a word of gratitude. Silence in the car. No leadership, no exhortation, no inspiration…as if he had no value. He wanted to be gone, to be at home…In the gloom of the room he stretched, and his knees cracked, but none of them woke.

Syed was on his stomach, breathing noisily, and Khalid padded past him. He skirted the next mattress where Jamal lay, hugging his pillow, and he thought the kid pathetic. He was beside Ramzi's mattress, the one who was all talk and who had been tongue-lashed in front of them, and there was the dark shape of his body: the muscle man seemed to have buried his head under the blankets, to be sleeping and not moving; the covering over his head masked his breathing. The window swung again. He could make out, in the darkness of the room over which the shadows of the curtains bounced, the rainwater's brightness on those blankets. He reached forward, above the mattress and Ramzi, to catch the window.

The curtain billowed into Khalid's face and covered his eyes, blinded him. The window cannoned into his fingers: Pain arced up from them. His feet snagged on the cable of the side-light, which went taut and toppled him. He fell on to the mattress and the sleeper. He expected a convulsion of movement and to be thrown off by thrashing arms and legs, but he sank down softly.

Under the blankets, and lined up in the shape of a body, his hand — bleeding — found two pillows, a tight bundle of clothing and a closely rolled blanket.

The curtain was pushed back by the wind, and the rain ran on his face and settled on his hair. He realized the enormity of what he had found.

He pushed himself up and looked through the window. He did not feel the rain or the wind's force on his skin.

Khalid shouted, a spirit that wailed at the approach of death. He screamed. Around him, they woke.

The older men, in pants and T-shirts, were at the open door — and Faria in pyjamas. The ceiling light was snapped on.

Khalid pointed first to the open window and the sodden curtain, then to the mattress, the pillows, the bundle and the rolled blanket. He tried to hide his shiver, but it was not from cold. Fear tugged at him.

The voice snapped behind him: 'That fucking imbecile with the big mouth, how long since he was seen?'

Who would answer? Who would dare to face the fury? Khalid steeled himself, hesitated, then looked down at his wrist-watch and stammered, 'Other than him, I was the last to go to sleep. He could have been gone for seven hours. What do we do?'

'Behave, if you are capable of it, like soldiers — not brats still crying for their mother's breasts.'

The door slammed. All of them — Khalid, Syed and Jamal — trembled as they dressed in silence, and none went near the open window. Would it be aborted? Would they be sent home? By association, were they disgraced? The questions seared the mind of Khalid, but he dared not ask them.