The Walking Dead

Chapter 16

An hour before, Mr Justice Herbert had closed his foolscap notepad with finality, pushed it away across his desk, leaned forward, let his elbows take the weight and said, with practised earnestness, 'It is time now for us, ladies and gentlemen, to adjourn for the weekend. You will be taken back to the location where you have, so very patiently, stayed these last several nights. I am assured that recreation and outings have been arranged for you. There are many places, I imagine, that you would prefer to be but I want to put on record that your maturity and dedication have been noted, and I am confident that you will understand the necessity for the privations that you are required to suffer. We will resume at ten o'clock on Monday morning and then you will deliberate on your verdict. I wish you well for a quiet and pleasant weekend. Thank you.'

'All rise,' the clerk had shouted, in an unnecessarily full voice. Banks had stood, had seen the judge dive for his side door, had seen the impotence and anger writ large on the brothers' faces, had noted the sullen, helpless expressions creased on the jury's — all except his Principal's, had filed out of court eighteen to oversee the loading of the coach.

Wally had said, 'Quite envy you, Banksy. Me, I've a kid's birthday party to organize. Want to swap? Eighteen kids, twelve-year-olds, at Legoland. It'll be bloody chaos. You're a lucky sod, and don't forget it, tucked up with those deadbeats for, like the man said, "a quiet and pleasant weekend".'

He had stood in the yard, as the soft rain dribbled on his shoulders, and had watched the brothers led to the Be]marsh van, hemmed in with prison guards and the uniformed guns. When they had been loaded, and their convoy had pulled out through the opened gates, he had gone to round up and move his jurors.

Settled at the back of the coach, alone, he had closed his eyes, had started to think of being free.

'Mind if I sit here?'

A Protection Officer did not gripe — should not have scowled, but probably Banks did. He moved his coat off the seat beside him. He said curtly, the minimum of politeness, 'How can I be of help, Mr Wright.'

'It's just that I have a problem.'

Banks saw the smile and the shrug. His reply was brisk: 'Where we can, we try to sort them out — where's this one on the scale?'

The juror was beside him and Banks looked into his face. Wright's eyes did not meet his. The tongue skipped over the lips. He said, 'The problem's the weekend.'

'Everyone has a problem with the weekend.'

'I can't stay there, shut in, not this weekend.'

Banks was formal, distant: 'The instructions of the judge were pretty clear. You stay under guard together.'

'I am afraid that's not possible.' Wright had his arms folded tight across his chest, like that was a defence posture. 'It's my problem.'

'I'm sorry, but there's nothing I can do about it.'

'You see, Mr Banks,' the voice wheedled, 'it's about my parents. They're old and they're not well, and I have a routine of visiting each weekend. It's something that's really important to them.'

'You go out on Monday, do your bit in the jury room. From what I've heard in court, it shouldn't take too long — not that I'm suggesting how your decision on the case will go — and then you can visit your parents.'

'You're not hearing me, Mr Banks. I go each weekend to see my parents because they're old and ill.'

He'd attended a course when he was in CID, before going over to firearms, that dealt with interview techniques. There had been a whole morning's lecture on the recognition of evasion, the telling of lies and half-truths. Because it had been interesting, the lecture's lessons had stayed with him. Looking up to the right, not the left, was an indication that a lie was told. More compelling than the eyes was the mouth; a tongue smearing the lips was a giveaway of an untruth. Having arms close on the body and folded was the sure sign of evasion…Little things, all part of the body language, trifling but telling Banks that his Principal was playing games with him. Then Wright twisted away and presented his shoulder to Banks, which was confirmation: the lecturer had called it a 'liar's posture'. It was eleven years since he had been on that course, and everything that had been told him then was crystal sharp.

'I sympathize with your situation, Mr Wright, but cannot do anything about it.' He thought he had closed the matter, leaned back and faced the window, the newspaper covering it.

'So the consequences will be on your head.'

'What consequences, Mr Wright?'

'Pretty simple — the collapse of the trial.'

'What — what are you saying?'

'Arithmetic, Mr Banks. We are ten. Ten jurors make the minimum quorum. Nine, and the trial collapses. That's the consequence.'

'The judge — if you didn't know it — has very comprehensive powers to level against anyone, forgive me, who flicks with his court.'

'Stomach-ache, try that. Migraine. Twisted back, can't sit. I can think up a few others, and it's millions down the drain. Do I get to visit my parents or do I not?'

Alarm bells clamoured. Consequences battered in Banks's mind. He could hear the inquest in court eighteen. Defence submissions that the case had failed…The prisoners' smirk…What did it bloody-matter to David Banks?

'Quite honestly,' Wright said, 'you'd have to lock me in a room and stand guard outside the door, because that's where I'm going. I'm going to see my parents, and if, Mr Banks, you prevent it, I will be handing in a sick note. What do you say?'

'Where are they, your parents?'

He was told. They lived in the Bedfordshire town of Luton.

Banks seemed then to shed the culture imposed by his warrant card. When his letter, two lines of it, was written and handed in, he would lose the card and his authorization to carry a firearm. It was ludicrous that, in the last hours of his service, he should play the pompous and dutiful servant of what he was about to reject. His career was gone; was in its last throes, and it concerned him not a damn that he had been lied to.

A final vestige of that culture remained. Banks said, matter-of-fact, 'Shouldn't be a difficulty, Mr Wright. Of course, I'll have to be with you. It'll be good to meet your parents. Don't mention it to the others.'

The juror sidled back up the aisle of the coach.

In the late afternoon, as dusk fell, Muhammad Ajaq crawled out through the gap in the back door, pulling his bag after him. For a moment he knelt on the wet concrete step, beside the base of the tilted rainwater butt, and looked back. She was there. He could see faintly that anxiety creased her forehead, and he reached through the hole, took her offered hand and squeezed it hard, then replaced the shifted plank. When he stood, he kicked it hard so that it was flush to the door. He left them, slipped away into the gloom and went out on to the road.

He had said to her, whispered in her ear so that the boy did not hear, 'Keep him strong. You alone can do that. He will weaken, will depend on you. You do what is necessary. They are all frightened at the last. You are with him tonight and he will lean on you, and you give him backbone. In the morning you will walk with him, and you will give him courage. The others were idiots, incapable, but you are the one who can help him. Walk with him as far as is sensible, until he has the smile on his face — we call it the bassamat al-Farah, which is the smile of joy — until he is within sight of the target area. When he smiles he is content that he is going to Paradise. Tell him, the last thing you say, that he does not look into the faces of those who are close to him, he must not. Must not gaze at the faces of the men, women and children who are around him because that is the source of failure. Then you are gone. You go home, return to your family. I think he will walk well. It is my judgement. Forget me, forget that we met, forget my face and my voice, forget everything of me, and sleep again.'

He went fast, with a good, confident stride.

He had the cap low on his bowed head and the scarf wrapped round his lower face. He did not look up — did not search for cameras high on lamp-posts. He went, in that early evening, where they would come in the morning.

The road was filled with streams of traffic, and he had to scythe through the pedestrians on the pavements. He passed the wide-fronted, brilliantly lit windows of the stores selling bright new consumer goods. He went by the wealth of his enemy, but emptiness gripped him. He felt the loneliness and it unnerved him. He was not looked at, not noticed, by the drivers of cars, lorries and vans, by the swarms of men, women and children who hurried towards him and passed him. It was as if he had no importance in their lives, and no fear of him. He swam among them. He heard laughter, raucous, and argument, and he was ignored as if he did not exist. He wanted to be dear, to be gone. Muhammad Ajaq, following the route she had given him, came down the long bill and into the town, into its soft belly.

He stopped, hesitated. He had reached the square. Around him, the day was ending, the shutters were coming down and office workers spilled out, jostling against him. He was anonymous. In front of him, dazzlingly lit, were the windows above the steps, and the signs for the sale starting the next morning. He stared at the target. A pushchair cannoned into his legs, and an Asian woman — in a jilbab robe did not apologize but wheeled her child past him. When he stepped to the side, he was bounced by the shoulder of an Asian man whose beard was stained with the red henna dye, and again there was no apology. He went across the square and saw the sign for the bus station. When he advanced on a target in occupied Iraq — a mosque or street market of the Shi'as whom he detested, a convoy of the Crusaders whom he despised — he was satiated with commitment, and when he saw the bomb's blast he was consumed with pride. Here, he felt nothing.

He left the bus-station sign, the square, the steps and the sale posters behind him. He had said it so many times: he should never have come. He had yearned for it so often: he craved to be back where he believed he belonged.

Muhammad Ajaq stood in the queue — where she had told him to — and made a picture in his mind of the old men, in caves or in the compound of a tribal leader, and thought they crowded close to a battery-powered radio, and waited. He believed his name was on their lips.

The bus came. He boarded it and found a seat.

Muhammad Ajaq left behind him the target for a martyr bomb. He sat beside a young man who chewed gum incessantly. The bus drove away.

Naylor stood in the doorway, had not spoken but was noticed.

He was offered cake, compressed and fruit-filled, from a tinfoil sachet, then a mug of tea. To have regained control he should have refused both.

He ate and drank His hand trembled and the mug dripped tea on to the crumbs at his feet. Control had passed, and he knew it.

He had lost control by introducing the American to the equation. The American sat easily in the chair given him. The notebook, pencil and tape-recorder were laid on his lap, and he ate heartily and drank, as if the circumstances were neither peculiar nor particular.

With his mouth still full, Naylor mumbled his question. So bloody anodyne, all the intensity of a chemist's pain-killer. 'So, how are we doing, boys? Where are we at?'

They did not answer. Both men glanced at each other, then — as if it were synchronized — gestured towards Hegner, their spokesman. The American took his time, cleared his throat and said softly, 'We're doing good. Getting there.'

'Where, specifically, are we getting?'

Droll: 'We're on to the subject of a ticket.'

The prisoner lay in deep shadow against the back wall. He had no shape, might have been a mass of half-filled, discarded sacks. Seemed not to move, was silent but for occasional wheezing groans. Naylor stared hard into the darkness and finally made out the hood and the shoulders, the feet that had no trainers on them or socks. Close to the feet a tangle of cables with bulldog clips lay loose, and he followed them to where they attached to the terminals of the floor plug.

It must have been four hours since Naylor had last evacuated himself from his car in the Nissen in answer to a fainter scream from the brick building. The last time he had come, like an intruder, Naylor had seen the prisoner suspended from the ceiling hook, his bound wrists over it, the wires clipped to his toes, and he had asked that same question: 'Where are we at?' The answers had been shrugs, and he had turned away. Not now. He searched for resurrected authority. 'The use of electricity was not sanctioned by me and — '

The easy drawl: 'Don't want to embarrass you, Dickie. Don't want to bring you down off your high horse.'

'- and I should be told how far forward we have come.'

'What I said was, we have a ticket. This is one obstinate man.'

'A ticket for whom, from where and where to?'

'Try making patience a virtue, Dickie. The man, right now, is more frightened of God's damnation, which comes with betrayal, than he is of us. He fancies that damnation will hurt him more than we can. We have to change his viewpoint, and that's where we're working.'

'Whose ticket?'

There had been something clinical, in the past, about the work of Boniface and Clydesdale…clinical and fast. A beaten Adeni Arab, from Sheikh Othman, with a split lip and bruised eye sockets, had been quick to tell where a safe-house was. An Irishman from Newtown Hamilton or Forkhill, without fingernails and pissing blood, was fast to spill where a fifty-calibre machine-gun was buried, and could then be released and would never reveal the pain inflicted for fear of his treachery becoming known. The face of a Bosnian Serb could be battered as a punchball — his testicles and kidneys too — and he would give up the secret of where an aid-worker was held in a makeshift gaol, a cellar…So why was this flicking man so bloody obstinate? He remembered the cockiness the prisoner had shown in the Paddington Green interview room…He had not believed that the confidence would translate to raw courage — hadn't another damn word for it, courage—in the face of the pain transmitted through the bulldog clips.

'Dickie, when I have something you can act on, I'll tell you about it.'

'That is hardly an acceptable reply. I need to know where we are.'

'You are getting in the way now. If you don't want to be here, you should get yourself somewhere else.'

Naylor snorted. 'Too damn right.'

He should have been in the front bedroom, with the curtains drawn, blocking out the late-afternoon early-evening view of the cherry trees coming into blossom. That was somewhere else. Should have been dressing in a new shirt and a best tie with the Service's discreet shield and motto embroidered on it, and the suit that was back from the dry-cleaner's. Should have been giving his shoes a last buff over the toecaps and round the heels. Should have been going bloody gracefully. It was his final day, and the last hours were being eked out, and the drawers of his desk were not emptied, or his safe, and the cubicle was not cleared for Mary bloody Reakes on Monday morning. But Dickie Naylor was not somewhere else — he was in the door of a shitty little building set among fields of growing pea-pods, and the chalice he sought that would make his career remembered was still denied him.

'I'll be in the car,' he said.

'Best place, Dickie. Have a seat and maybe play some music.'

'What I am concerned about — is he…' he motioned at the figure on the floor, then grimaced'…is he too weak to tell us what we have to know? You know what I mean.'

'All under control, Dickie. I'll tell you two things: he's fine, he's fighting, but he will lose. Second, this is not standard stuff. We don't have time to sit on our backsides, play mind games and hang on till next week or next month. We leave that to the Echoes. It's what we do at the Bagram cage outside Kabul. It's how it goes in Guantanamo. Maybe the Echo does six hours straight, and then he goes to the mess and eats a steak with fries, and he believes that next week, next month, his man will crack. Patience is a luxury, Dickie. My life and yours, and the boys' lives, are not luxury. I don't have next week and next month, I have the next hour. I have to learn in the next hour where a ticket will be presented. All I have is the word "ticket", but I have to have more or the time and the opportunity are wasted. So, do the decent thing, and go get yourself a seat in that cat'

Authority, once ceded, was not regained.

Naylor shuffled his feet, locked his hands and cracked the joints.

He saw mugs emptied of their dregs on to the concrete and the dirt, hands wiped on trouser thighs. Naylor saw the prisoner lifted up, inert. He saw Boniface and Clydesdale gasp, grunt, as they raised the weight to the hook, then let him sag. Naylor saw them scrabble for the ends of the cables where the clips were. He turned away, went out into the last light of his last day.

Naylor did not see Hegner screw his face in concentration as if the complexity of a mathematical formula exercised him, and did not hear his quiet voice.

'Guys, I reckon we need to up the voltage. Give the boy more juice.'

He was waiting for her in what had once been the chancel of the cathedral.

'Good to see you, Mary'

'You look well, Simon, very well.'

She might have slept with him — gone to his room or him to hers in the hail of residence — but had not. He had been a theology student and quiet with his ambition, and they had been soulmates for three years, but never more than friends.

'It's been too long.'

'Too much water under a bridge.'

She might have married him — in white in the church near to her parents' home or in a town hail — but had not. She had gone to London and fast-tracked through the graduate entry into the Security Service, craving advancement. He had taken the route to ordination.

'I think of you, Mary, often enough.'

'Thanks for that last card. Took an age to reach me, but it arrived. I appreciated it.'

It had come, courtesy of the American military's postal service in the Green Zone of the Iraqi capital, and had shown a bland view of the river: 'Dear Mary Can't say in truth that I wish you were here, but these are interesting times — and tragic times. Love, Simon.'

The card was in the privacy of her bedroom, hooked under the frame of her dressing-table mirror. All his cards were there — . from his three-times-a-year visits to Baghdad — and they made a ring round the mirror, and all showed the same view of the Tigris river. He was the only man that Mary Reakes, troubled and confused, would have thought of coming to speak with. She had left Thames House in midafternoon, having told her assistant that she could be reached on her mobile, had taken the train to Coventry and a taxi to bring her to the cathedral, had seen him waiting for her in the ruins where the chancel had been. She was a rising star in the ranks of the Security Service; he was an unknown junior priest in the cathedral's International Centre for Reconciliation. She had little belief; he lived by faith. She worked in a protected building in a supposed safe city; he travelled to Baghdad to support children's charities and a beleaguered church. She believed in the crushing of enemies; he strove to bring together adversaries in dialogue. Mary admired him, and Simon thought her beyond reach.

'Can't talk in a building — sorry and all that,' she said.

'Then we'll stand out here — I think the rain's easing. Forecast's good for tomorrow…Is it the Cross of Nails you need to touch?'

'I'll touch anything that gives me guidance.'

Mary Reakes told her friend of a suspicion. They stood, close to each other, inside the old lowering walls of the cathedral church of St Michael, which were retained as a reminder of the barbarity of war. On the night of 14 November 1940, fire bombs had rained on the city and a centuries-old building had been gutted. She told him of a plot identified, of a suicide-bomber loose on the streets, of a facilitator who had come from Iraq, of a prisoner who had been taken and brought south. A new cathedral, away to her left, had been built and dedicated to Forgiveness and Reconciliation, but she saw only the ruined walls and their stunted outline against the dusk. She told him of the release of the prisoner, of an argument with an assistant director, of the disappearance of her superior in the final and critical hours of the countdown, and of a blind American. In the days after the raid's destruction, a clergyman who was picking among the debris had found three long nails from the roofing beams and bound them together with wire to make a cross. She told him it was her belief that the prisoner was now abused, under torture…What should her posture be?

'You are, Mary at the vitals of morality.'

'I don't know what to do.'

'You can be a whistleblower, or you can turn your cheek.'

'I am comfortable on the upper ground, not in the gutter.'

'Does it matter what is at stake?'

She told him of the morning at Thames House, the start of a July day, the sun's warmth on the streets, as the news had come in torrent blurts of four bombs targeting the capital's commuters. They started to walk, pacing on the sheen of the flagstones. She told him that in every office open area, as they rooted in their files and flashed them up on screens, television sets showed the images of the dead and injured, and some had wept at what they saw.

He wore a cassock of oatmeal brown and it swung like a frock as he moved. The rain glimmered on her suit's shoulders and in her hair, and her heels echoed beside him. She told him of that evening, and all through that week, of the numbing sense of failure that strangled life from her workplace.

'The motto of our Service is "Defender of the Kingdom". Our sole job now, for three thousand of us — and all the police agencies — is to defend our kingdom against a new atrocity. Simon, does that justify torture?'

He grinned. 'You know the answer for yourself.'

'I have to be given confirmation of it — I have to know I'm not walking alone.'

'But you will, Mary you will walk alone. You will be shunned and ostracized. The career — so important to you — will wither. Brickbats and insults will be your reward. Or you can turn away and empty your mind of what you know.'

'When you were in Baghdad…'

'Morality is not a focus group — and I don't mean to mock you. The vision of morality is with the individual. Is torture ever, justified? In Baghdad, daily, there are atrocities of indescribable evil, and.many say that such evil should be confronted by measures that are extreme to the point of repugnance. If I go to the airport, where prisoners are screened, or to the Abu Ghraib gaol, and call for respect to be shown those who manufacture the bombs and plan their targeting, and talk of religion and the dignity of mankind, I will be shown the gate — probably pitched out of it on to my face. I see the problem from a different perspective. I look at the witness. If the witness keeps silent then he, or she, demeans himself, herself. That man, or woman, must live with the decision. I doubt, Mary, because you are my valued friend, that you could cross to the other side of the street, avert your eyes, erase what you have known and maintain your pride. But the sustenance of your pride will come at a price, a heavy one. You know that.'

She slipped her arm into his. Their steps had slowed and the darkness grew round them. Dulled lights lit the broken walls.

He told her of a man, implicated in the bomb plot to assassinate Hitler, called Pastor Bonhoeffer, who had been hanged in the Flossenburg concentration camp a month before the final ceasefire of the Second World War. He told her of what the man had written, in his condemned cell, and apologized for his paraphrase. 'When they took the trade unionists, I did not protest because I was not a trade unionist. When they took the Communists, I did not protest because I was not a Communist. When they took the Jews, I did not protest because I was not a Jew. When they took me, no one protested because no one was left.' He lifted her hand from his arm and kissed it. She lifted her head, reached up, and kissed his cheek.

She saw only shadows. 'I have to get back.' She turned away, walked quickly towards the exit arch, away from the place where nails had been fashioned into a cross.

He called after her, 'I'd like to say that I'm here, Mary, always. Not true. I return to Baghdad in a week, will be there maybe three months. I urge you, pay the price, don't cross the street — don't look the other way. Hold your pride.'

'Look, I'm not picking a fight, but I'm entitled to an answer. Did you or did you not telephone the police?'

It was the fourth time she had asked the question, and three times the farmer had denied his wife a reply. Last evening he had shrugged and pleaded tiredness. At breakfast he had changed the subject to the latest ministry questionnaire on harvest yields. At lunch he had told her she nagged, had bolted his food and gone back to his tractor. He picked at his dinner, ate, swallowed and answered. 'No.'

'We agreed you were going to call the police.'

'I changed my mind. It's allowed.'

'So, there was a fire behind the Wilsons' barn. In the fire there were, scraps of burned sheet, with patterns the same as Oakdene's, and towels. Together we went to the cottage. We found it empty and all trace of our guests gone. The cottage was cleaner — I'm not ashamed to say it — than from any scrub I've given it, and every room, the bathroom and loo, the bedrooms, living room and kitchen, stinks of bleach. Is that not something that should be reported to the police?'

'They paid for a month.'

'Paid cash, don't forget, in advance.'

'It was just bedding and towels.'

She grimaced. 'Can be replaced.'

'Which didn't go through the books, and wasn't paid into the bank,' he said.

She looked away, out through the darkened window and towards the shadow silhouette of the roof of Oakdene Cottage. 'Questions asked.'

'First thing Plod asks, "How did they pay? Before they thieved your sheets and vandalized your towels, did they pay by cheque? Cash in hand?" Maybe Plod wants to get his hands on the banknotes and run them through for tests, I don't know. Questions with difficult answers.'

'Best left alone?'

'Best left where the Revenue doesn't know. Not as though the bedding was new. Can of worms if I phone the police, that's my opinion.'

She said, 'I've done a nice plum crumble, your favourite.'

'That's grand, my love,' the farmer said. 'Can I take it that's the end of the matter?'

'The end.' She cleared his plate and hers off the table. Time now was short. That evening there was a meeting of the parish council. He was chair and she was the minutes' taker. At the sink, she turned. 'Actually, they were very pleasant, the ones I met. Particularly the girl, so well-mannered — and the man, the older one, very handsome, a real charmer…'

She heard it, then flicked the curtain and saw the car. Fury burned in Anne Naylor. She tried the number again. She heard his voice. In the metallic automated tone of the damn speaking clock, he told her that he was unable to take the call and urged that a message be left after the beep.

'I'm telling you, Dickie, that your behaviour today — no contact, not a word — is absolutely unforgivable. Where are you? Still running round like it's a Scouts' jamboree and you've to be there till the last tent's been taken down, the last campfire put out? I suppose you think the people at that damn place will admire you for working right up to the eleventh hour of the eleventh day — they won't. I just thank God that Daddy's not still with us and a witness to your pathetic behaviour. I promise you that tonight — and it won't be in a quiet corner — I'll bend your ear and not care who hears me. For Heaven's sake, what do you think you've achieved by this pitiful display of childish dedication? By Monday morning they'll have forgotten you. Me, I'm not in the forgetting business. Damn you, answer your bloody phone.'

She slammed down the receiver.

Her coat for the evening was silk. Her late mother had worn it at her father's farewell party, when the Service had been based at Leconfield House. A little dated, but elegant. In front of the mirror, she touched her hair — dabbed her fingers on it…and she remembered. Her mother had said, in the minutes before they had walked into the governor's formal salon, at the Aden residence, 'You don't have to do it, my dear. Pregnancy out of wedlock isn't the end of the world. Daddy and I will stand beside you…It's not as though he's a wonderful catch. I'm sure you can do better…All right, all right. Just promise me you won't snivel…And promise me you won't regret it.' God, that evening she regretted marrying Dickie Naylor. She closed the door behind her, double-locked it and hastened down the path.

The chauffeur held open the rear door for her. He looked puzzled. 'Just you, Mrs Naylor? Not your husband as well?'

'No, just me,' she said acidly. 'I'm meeting him there, but we'll be coming home together.'

'I suppose he's working,' the chauffeur said. 'Funny that. Most of those I take for their last party wish they'd quit a year ago.'

'I expect he'll get used to, retirement, growing tomatoes in a new greenhouse.'

The chauffeur closed the door gently behind her, and drove off. God — see if she didn't — she'd bend his ear, then burn the bloody thing to a crisp.

'Give him more.'

'You sure, Mr Hegner?'

'It's what I said.'

'Never gone up that high before, Mr Hegner.'

Joe Hegner sat in his chair and asked the question in a clear voice, as if it didn't matter to him, like he was the schoolmarm talking to infants back near Big Porcupine Creek. 'The Engineer, my friend, will he be journeying with him?'

The prisoner hung from the hook, and his body had the look of an animal carcass that his grandfather had slaughtered and left to bleed. He could not see it, but was able to imagine it…The trousers were down to the ankles, crumpled and lodged there, along with the fouled underpants; The wires' clips were dug into the folds of the prisoner's lower stomach, near to the testicles but not on them. The bare feet swivelled. He expected the prisoner, when the question was put, to stiffen and writhe, try to summon resistance, but his body turned slowly half-way to the right and then half-way to the left — and Hegner knew it because of the creak of the weight on the hook. He strained to hear an answer, but there was nothing.

'Do it, guys.'

There was the gasp and the grunt, then more silence.

'Do it again, give him more.'

He heard the scream, shrill inside the walls and under the ceiling, and the strain on the hook whined.

'Every man has a breakpoint, eventually reaches the end of tolerance. Reckon we're near to it. What we have is good, but can get better. Hadn't thought he'd be so stubborn. He's stubborn, obstinate — but so am I. For me, it's all down to that moment of darkness. I'm in the mess hall, surrounded by good men. I'm queueing for food. I see this man — young, Arab, in big, bulky army fatigues, and he's a hand in a pouch pocket — standing by a table not twenty paces from me. I see him smile. I know then that he belongs to the Twentyman, have that sense of it. The shout's in my throat, and then the light's in my eyes. So bright, so vivid. I see men falling. I close my eyes — like closing them will protect them. And the blast of the scorched air knocks me down. I lie there, and there's men on top of me. I have pain so I know I'm alive and there's men shouting. I open my eyes. First, I think I can't see because of the men on me, but I push them off. My eyes are wide. That's the moment I realize why there's darkness. I blink, rub, scratch my damn face, where my eyes are, and there is only darkness. The Twentyman did it to me. I made the promise then, in that darkness and with other men's blood on me, the wetness of their guts, hearing them scream and moan, that I would get him or regard my life as a failure. What you've done, guys, is put me close to him and for that I am sincerely thankful. Do it again, up the juice.'

'Don't think there's any point, Mr Hegner.'

'There's not a pulse, Mr Hegner, no trace.'

'Do you know, Mr Hegner, it's the first time Xavier and I have ever lost a prisoner?'

'You're right there, Donald. He's gone, Mr Hegner.'

Behind him, deep in the darkness, feet on cracked glass. He heard the wheeze, air expelled between tight-set teeth, then, 'God, that is a bloody disaster.'

Hegner swung round sharply. 'Wrong, Dickie, wrong…We have a ticket, to and from and at what time. That is no disaster.'

The hoarse voice was raised to a shout. 'My remit — if you've damn well forgotten it, which I have not is a bomb, a street, casualties spread across pavements. Where are we?'

'Go with the flow, Dickie, and they'll love you.' Joe Hegner laughed. 'All your people, who think you're yesterday's man, they'll be tossing garlands at you. Dickie, enjoy the ride. You're stressing on one bomb but I'm going to show you the big picture.'

She stood behind him. At her feet was the bucket, shiny and galvanized. In the bucket was the water she had taken from the rain butt, clouded with dirt. She used the soap to clean his body.

Faria believed that, without her, he could not have washed himself — could not even have undressed. He stood naked and trembled. She had not before seen the bare skin of a man's buttocks and the flatness of a man's belly. A lone candle lit them. She had started at the nape of his neck, from there to the bristle of his beard on his cheeks and jaw, and then her hands had gone down, slipping and sliding across his shoulders, and into his armpits, and on towards the small of his back and the shallow width of his hips. She washed him in the cavity of his buttocks, and she stretched her arms round to reach his groin…then down his legs. The shivers convulsing the body were not from the cold. She felt the hairs on his legs, finer and softer than those at the base of his stomach. He did not wriggle to be clear of her hands. She knew all of his body, had washed its secret places and had sensed the beat of his heart.

As the candle flickered, she left the bubbles on his skin, and bent down to pick up the cheap plastic razor. She lifted his right arm and ran the blade across the hair, then his left arm. She rinsed the razor in the bucket, and used her fingers to feel growth on his face, and he allowed it. Faria scraped the hair from his chest. She must have made a nick as blood stained her nails. But she dabbed the minute wound with water, from the bucket and staunched it. She thought of the blood that would pour from him when the waistcoat tore him apart. By touch, she shaved away the matted hair low on his stomach, and held him so that she would not again cut him. Felt him stiffen, held him with gentleness, and made the skin smooth. She knelt and ran the razor's blade down his legs, on his thighs and shins.

It was how it had to be done…how it was done in Palestine, and in Chechnya, and in Iraq. A man, or a woman, going to Paradise must be cleaned — purified, if he or she were to sit at God's table.

She did not speak. What she had to say would keep till the morning, would be said when they walked.

Faria could not ask it. As the video had been, were the washing and shaving a further reinforcing of the pinions on him? Was he tied to death?

She dried him with an old T-shirt, wiped away the last of the soap and water, and her hands covered the softness of his skin. She squirted perfume over him, a popular brand that was advertised on television for girls to use.

She had tightened the noose on him…and she helped him to dress again, and still he shivered, trembled, and she hoped she gave him strength — as she had been told to.

The hours of the last night yawned in front of her, and of him.

Bloody awful traffic. Friday-evening traffic, going north, nose to tail, and so damned slow.

The car was from a pool left at the barracks for police use. David Banks drove but did not talk: his Principal would, soon enough. His Principal fidgeted in the seat beside him, seemed to wriggle for courage to spit out something. Banks was not minded to help him.

Banks had the radio on. A news bulletin droned on, then a weather forecast. Good for the morning but not yet, and his wipers sluiced rain off the windscreen and the spray that was thrown up ahead. He had called the chief inspector, told Wally that he'd be off the camp for the next several hours, that Tango One — Julian Wright — had a domestic emergency with his parents and he'd egged it, that he was escorting Tango One from the secure location, that there was plenty of uniform to tuck the others up in their accommodation. He knew he'd told a lie, the domestic emergency with the parents of Tango One, and didn't care.

He came off the dual-carriageway and Luton was signed bearing left, and the turning for the airport was right off the roundabout. The lights of the town, an amber glow nestling against the cloud base, were ahead. He had never been there. Knew it had a reputation for being as crap as the car he drove. Knew it had an airport, knew it had a car factory, knew it had a railway station where the four Seven-Seven bombers had taken the train into London.

'Go into the town. Keep the railway on your right. You'll see the shopping centre on the left. Sign will be for the town hail. We're off to the right, short of that. It's Inkerman Road.'

Banks did not reply, just nodded, as if he was staff and took instructions.

The spit came harder. 'There is — I'm afraid — Mr Banks, a small and inconsequential difficulty'

Banks kept his eyes on the road in front.

'Not much point in putting it off, not sharing it…'

Banks saw the raised lights of the railway station to the right.

'I regret it, but I told you an untruth. Silly of me, but if I hadn't we wouldn't be here.'

The bulk of the shopping centre's outer wall was to his left. Banks followed the main route, and the town hall was arrowed from a sign.

'It's not my parents. They're in the pink — probably fitter, healthier, than I am…Sort of regular, you know, any weekend I can get away, I come up here and my parents are the excuse. It's where my wife thinks I am, and my kid. The sob story was a smokescreen — well, a lie. The answer? Of course, it's a woman…'

Did not answer, and saw a turn-off to the right: Inkerman Road.

'That's where we are. I told an untruth so I could get away for a weekend's shagging. And there's one more untruth, so don't be thinking shagging's due reward for a hero. I'm not. Personally, I would have taken the cash that was dumped on me. Would have done if my wife hadn't found it in the wardrobe. We're broke, in hock. We're in final-demand country, and that cash would have taken off the pressure. My wife found it. She said that if I didn't report the approach, she would — and I would have been up a creek with no paddle. My wife scuppered me, and I'm not a hero with a sense of civic duty…just so you know — but a louse, a cheat, a creep, not a hero. But, and I mean this very seriously, if you turn me round then I'm not in court on Monday. So, what's to do?'

Inkerman Road stretched away up a hill, and he saw the pub's sign, the squat block of flats below the pub and the line of houses past it. He could have told his Principal of a course for detectives that identified the body language of a liar…did not. Could have told his Principal that this Protection Officer was washed up, useless, and was putting in a resignation letter on the next working day…but didn't want to waste his breath. He changed down, eased his foot on to the brake pedal.

'Mr Wright, I really don't give a damn. Please, just tell me where to stop.'