The Walking Dead

Chapter 20

The square opened out to their left. Nothing was said between them, and his Principal led, Banks following. Every eye that passed him, men and women who bustled forward as if delay were a crime, was fixed on the steps and the great monolith that was the shopping centre; rock music played loudly. He studied each front display window — used the reflections off them to check his rear — and each business doorway and each alleyway between them, because that was his training.

He reckoned his training protected him. It was not his business how one stranger ended a relationship with another. Should worry about himself, not about others, should lock himself in a cocoon of selfishness. He noticed, because he was trained to, each front window and each narrow cut where rubbish bins were stored, where there were the bottles, shit and cardboard sheets of vagrants.

The music, beating down from the centre's loudspeakers, grew in intensity. He took in faces, but none was important to him…He felt cold. Realized he was in shadow thrown down by the tower of the town hall. Shivered. Quickened his stride. In shadow, sensed a threat. Came to his Principal's shoulder, then burst back into the sunshine. But it stayed with him, lingered on the skin of his face, and his hand had flipped, without reason, to the weighted pocket of his jacket — no cause — . and his fingers had dropped to the hardness held in the pancake holster. Could not have explained it.

But David Banks had been told he was useless, had told himself he had no future.

He snapped, 'Are we nearly bloody there?'

Wright stopped, turned, gazed at him, a grin on his face. 'You seeing ghosts again, Mr Banks?'

'I just want to know if we're nearly there.'

'You're white as a damn sheet. Breakfast's what you need. Yes, we're nearly there.'

He could not have explained, to a stranger or to himself, the chill that had come to him when he had walked through the shadow cast on the pavement.

They were 'nearly there': He should have seen it, but hadn't. There was an alley with a big wheeled rubbish bin half across its entrance, then the A-shaped hoarding outside the newsagent's door and window that announced the grand opening of the bonanza sale in the town, as if it was the biggest, most vital and critical matter in the whole wide world. Now, breaking the training, his glance came off his Principal and flitted to the crowds on his left, dense and close, with the murmur of excitement given off like hot breath.

'Patience, Mr Banks, patience…We're there.' Then the mocking laugh. 'Did you really see a ghost?'

Banks snarled, couldn't help himself, 'Just bloody get on with it.'

The bell rang as his Principal opened the door. He saw that the shop was full, that it would be an age before Wright was served. The door closed after his man and Banks turned away from it, looked back up the street where they had come, and waited.

Now she spoke, said what she had rehearsed. 'There, in front of you, is the crowd. You go close to it, into it. Push hard among it. But look at nobody.'

They had come down the hill and had walked past places she had known all of her life. Had left the big stores far behind. And the turning into the road where the mosque dominated — she had prayed there before moving to the smaller mosque where she had seen the videos and been recruited — and they had gone along a road with stalls, on which were laid out the fruit and vegetables, from which she shopped. The scent of spices had billowed at her from the open doors of the edge of the ghetto where her society lived, and soft silks for clothing had danced in the sunlight from racks. She had brought him to the square. As they had walked, there had been silence between them. What had happened at the top of the hill, the attack, was gone, irrelevant; all that remained of it was the knife in her bag. The square was wide in front of her. She could not fathom his mind, but the smile on his face — spread and open — ,was childlike. She thought him at peace, but did not believe she could be certain of it, not when he walked the last steps.

'There are women there, and children, and men of our Faith — many others. Do not see their faces. Look at them and you will, want it or not want it, identify with them and hesitate. Do not join your eyes to theirs. Promise me.'

No answer was given her. He had been in step with her, had matched her stride. If she stopped, he had stopped. If she had gone quicker, so had he. She realized her power over him, his dependence on her. She-checked her step, and he slowed.

'You do not look at them…You think, when you are with them, when you have the button in your hand, of God and of your Faith — of where you will go and who you will be with, and of the pride of your family. Hear, as God welcomes you, the praise of your family, and of all those who love you.'

She did not know if it was enough, but had nothing more to say.

Most days, Faria walked through that square. Most weeks she climbed those steps and entered the shopping centre. She pointed to it, had no reason to but did. Her arm, loose in the folds of the jilbab, gestured towards it. Her vision was blurred, clouded by the enormity of what she did. She did not see, misted in her eyes, the shape of the man in the old raincoat who held the clipboard and gazed round him, or the expectation and pleasure on his features. What she saw, as she directed him with her arm, were the images from the videos that had been shown to her: the statements to camera of martyrs, the movement of crowds in street markets, the passing of convoys of Humvee personnel carriers, the guns of the enemy…did not see the man in the raincoat turn, break away from the little cluster close to him and advance towards her.

'You're just in time. I had started but it doesn't matter,' Steve Vickers chattered. 'You've come for the inner town's historic tour…Well, you've found it. I've done the Roman period, but we can do that again — no one will mind. Now, if you could just follow me…'

They were rooted. Oh, people were so strange. The young woman had waved at him, clearly. Had seen him, had waved — he had explained that repeating what he'd already said did not make a difficulty for him, had asked them to follow, but they stood stock still. It would be shyness, perhaps embarrassment.

Vickers, the amateur historian, saw the smile on the young man's face. So many of them, so often — and absolutely he rejected prejudice and would have thought stereotyping beneath him — were so defensive, so withdrawn and uninterested in learning the heritage of the society they had become part of. It was a fine smile, so filled with youth, almost with happiness. The woman was different, had a chill in her eyes — and he thought he saw a gleam of anger there. It dawned on him.

'Are we at cross purposes? I'm Stephen Vickers. I take parties of interested people round the town so that they may better understand what happened here, where we are now, in the generations and centuries before. I assumed you'd seen my advertisements in the local paper and are intent on joining us. Am I wrong?'

'Yes, wrong,' the woman spat.

He saw the livid scar on her face and the blaze in her eyes, but the young man beside her merely smiled, like some sort of idiot, and seemed decent enough if detached.

'Then I'm sorry to have intruded…Of course, should you wish to join us, not having intended to, please do. It's a fascinating story, the town's. We walk where Romans did, where Saxons, Vikings and Normans made their lives and—'

'Leave us alone,' the woman hissed.

He would have said that she was on the point-of tears, but her rudeness was extraordinary. Vickers said, 'Another time, then, perhaps.'

He strode, annoyed, back to his group. Rejection came badly to him. He did not realize, could not have, the consequences of his approach to the woman and the young man, the importance of those moments lost to them. Nor what would be the result of his delaying them for not more than a minute and a half. His face was flushed from the rebuff when he again addressed his audience.

'My apologies for abandoning you. As I was saying, the Saxons from the Elbe river liked what they saw and found the alluvial valley of the river Lea a most suitable place to settle. Right here, where we are now, they made their first encampment…'

The woman was talking urgently to the young man. Steve Vickers ignored them, forgot them.

'You are ready, it is the time. The man was a fool…It is you who will make history'

She did not know whether he listened to her, understood her. She had her hand on his arm, near to his wrist, close to where his hand was hidden in the pocket of the leather jacket.

'I am with you, not beside you but close to you. We are together. I will remember you always. We are going to start to walk. One day we will meet again.'

She cursed the wetness in her eyes. Blinked to squeeze away the tears. She felt the hard shape of the waistcoat under the jacket, and could smell the perfume, and the filth from the field. The music screamed in her ears and a metallic voice shouted a welcome to the crowds. She looked back and up, saw the clock face, four minutes to the hour, and she did not consider the time lost in the spit and hiss to get rid of the fool.

'We are going to start to walk. I am with you, but never look back — and do not see the faces. You are in my prayers.'

If she had not done it, he would not have moved. She used the strength of her arm, her hand on his sleeve, and pushed him forward.

He stood outside the newsagent's. So bloody slow. A few came out and a few went in, not his damn Principal. His eyeline traversed.

He saw the centre and the crowd on the steps, the spread of the queues into the square. Saw a man doing a tour with an audience and shouting to compete against the loudspeakers and the music's clamour. Saw an Asian couple linger on the pavement, and the woman wanted to go forward, and the young man looked reluctant, but she shoved him. Saw an older guy on hospital sticks, coming behind them…and the older guy lurched round them, as if it were a difficult manoeuvre with his sticks, then stopped to gawp. Banks stamped his foot impatiently…For God's sake, even with a life history thrown in, how bloody long could it take to buy a newspaper and a packet of cigarettes? Saw the scar on the woman's face and the old guy, weight on his sticks, staring. Saw the young man respond to her shove — he had a dumb smile like he was manic — and start to move…but the old guy stood four-square in their path.

Banks felt the cold again, but the sun dappled through the trees' branches, and he was far from the town hall tower's shadow.

The bounty-hunter from Afghanistan, George Marriot — he had the wounds to prove it, and shrapnel still embedded — knew what he saw and was knackered.

He was exhausted because he had walked from home into the village, then stumbled along on his sticks to the bus stop. He had stood on the bus, too proud to take woman's offer of her seat, then lumbered from the bus station into the square. The strength had dripped out of him, but not the keenness of clear thought in his mind.

George Marriot was laughed at, behind his back, when the door closed after him, by the customers in the pub where complacent arse-. holes drank. He had hunted proud and able fighters in the Tora Bora mountains. He had taken, dead or alive, the best men of the enemy. But George Marriot had stayed alive. He recognized danger.

George Marriot might not have recognized what confronted him, had he not met a German in the camp at Jalalabad. The German had been GSG9, special forces and their elite, and had talked of the unit's training. Bust into a building, hurl the stun grenades ahead, see the enemy cowering in shock, identify the women — kill them: 'No goddamn messing, Georgie, put half a magazine into them. Shoot the women first, is what we're taught. The women, Georgie, are deadly.' She had the set face and pursed lips and there was, he thought, contempt in her eyes, as she pushed the boy. The boy wore that damn smile…had cause to smile. George Marriot knew what the muftis, mullahs and imams told them, the martyrs. Absolved of sins, a seat in Paradise. No torture in the grave, and up alongside seventy-two dark-eyed women. Can take seventy relatives to Paradise, and earn the Crown of Glory. A kid had walked in Kabul and another in Herat, and both had walked, sweaty, nervous, but people near enough to see — who had survived — had said those kids were still smiling.

This one had a blown-out chest and a heavy gut under his coat, but spindle-thin legs from the outline of his trousers, and a hand deep in a pocket, which did not come out when he was shoved — it made sufficient of an equation for George Marriot.

His balance unsure on one stick, he lunged at the kid with the other, but the woman came across him. Her hand was in her bag, and then he felt pain running in torrents.

David Banks saw the old man lurch towards a couple, as a drunk did when incapable. He targeted the boy, but the woman had intervened with her body, and her robe swirled as she moved. The old man fell against her, then crumpled, went down on his stomach, was slumped flat.

A mother with a push-chair, and other parents with children, pushed past heedlessly because it was none of their business.

On training days, they drilled into Protection Officers that they were not to move off-station. A traffic pile-up — drive round it and head on. A fight in a street or a snatched bag — keep moving with the Principal and leave it to the uniforms. He stayed put, his back to the newsagent's door.

He might have thought it pathetic for an old man to be pissed-up that early in the morning…but his life was past making judgements. He looked away, made his eyeline traverse again and off the pavement where the sticks lay crazily and the old man was sprawled. Last thing he noted was the woman and the young man step over him, and start to come up the pavement. He looked behind him, through the shop-door glass, and saw that Wright was next in line to be served.

She felt no love; nothing of it remained.

Together, they had stepped over the body where the knife was. A little trickle of blood seeped from under the chest, and from the mouth.

'You should walk. I am behind you, but do not turn to find me Know that I am with you.'

For a moment, with his free hand he held hers. Then Faria pushed into his shoulder, shoved him away. She thought, at that moment and as he seemed to skip to regain his footing, that his smile had gone.

She followed him for three or four paces, no more, and saw him meander down the pavement…She was satisfied that he would not look back, would not search for her.

Everything that was asked of her, she had done.

She turned and started to walk away, back where she had come from. In front of the Tasty Fried Chicken and its steel shutters she did what she had forbidden to him, and stared after him. He went slowly, as if he walked asleep, and was near to a newsagent's and an alleyway with a rubbish bin, and beyond it he would cross the road, through the traffic, and join the queue at the base of the steps. She was not with him, was not close. She ran.

She ran until she was round the corner, close to the town hail — saw the clock that showed two minutes to the hour — then she snatched breath and walked.

It was done.

She slipped into a cut-through lane. She was alone. She heaved off the jilbab and dumped it with the headscarf, shook loose her hair and went out of the far end of the lane.

Faria, with a good stride, started for home. And she felt the emptiness, and the choke in her throat.

'God, look.'

'Can't, bloody traffic.'

'It's that girl.'

'What girl?'

The farmer's wife swivelled in her seat to look behind, out through the Land Rover's back window. 'The girl we had.'

'Had where?'

'You can be damned thick, dear. The girl we had in the cottage.'

'I'm not stopping or we'll be shunted.'

'Gone now anyway. You know what, she—'

'What?'

'Don't interrupt me, dear. She was crying her eyes out.'

'I haven't any idea where we'll get to park.'

'Listen, dear, she was sobbing, like her world had ended. Well, I think it was her. No, she was so composed, couldn't have been. It was like her.'

He saw the loop of the wire.

David Banks had seen the drunk veer against the couple, then smack at them with a stick, lurch into them, then collapse, and he had seen him ignored on the pavement. The couple had parted, the woman had scuttled away and the young man had walked on towards him…and the crowds heaved against the line of security men who were across the top of the steps.

Thoughts raced in the mind of Banks. It was a bright day, and sweat glistened on the skin of the young man's face, made a sheen there. There had been a smile, vacuous, where the sweat now dribbled — but not any longer. The smile had gone, was replaced by the tremble of lips, his eyes scattering glances ahead of him. His movement was slow. With each step, a loop of flex — three inches or so — bounced below the hem of the leather jacket. He saw a thin face, pinched at the cheeks, and a neck without flesh. One hand was deep in a pocket, but the other hung limply at his side. The legs, where the flex showed, were narrow and insubstantial, and the trainers were small…Yet the body was so large, as if it had been built with a weightlifter's pills, like layers of sweaters were under the jacket. The rest of the body did not match the size and bulk of the chest. And there was the loop of wire.

Banks remembered a zephyr of sneering laughter in a briefing room, the day before the American president's arrival on his last visit to the UK capital. A photograph pumped up on to a screen by the boss of the Rear Echelon Mother Fucker. A Secret Service guard, his arms thrown aside, gripping a machine pistol that was aimed at the heavens, waistcoat buttons bulging under strain, mouth open, as his president was collapsing, shot, on the pavement, and the caption across the screen's base was the guard's incredulous shout: Christ, it's actually happening. Yes it was, Christ, actually happening.

Clothes weren't right, were too full and too cumbersome for the upper body, too heavy in that morning's sunshine, and there was the loop of wire.

Remembered the cold on the neck, and the hackles up in the Alley where they practised. Saw the window and the cardboard figure in it. It spun and might show him the gun or a child in arms Remembered the age-long inquest after a Brazilian was shot dead in a train carriage: a guy working for a better life, not a terrorist bomber…Remembered an officer who had faced a charge of murder for killing when there was no cause to kill…Remembered a marksman who had fired with justification, and was now a stressed-out shell. The memories careered in his mind.

There was a target behind him, a moving, flowing mass, an ants' nest of activity on the steps and in the square. There was a young man with sweat on his face, a body that was not to scale, and a loop of wire that was too thick for a personal stereo's cables.

Knew it, and could not escape from it — it was actually happening.

He looked into the face of the stranger, the young man. Saw it as a sniper would have. Saw the shake of the chin and the fear in the eyes. Made a judgement, as a sniper had. Passed the sentence, condemned. He smelt, for the first time, the perfume — what a teenage girl would have worn — and the sentence was confirmed, no appeal.

Banks wondered, then, if the young man struggled to be brave — tried to summon up the principles that had sent him — but was now frightened, his brain fogged…He reverted to his training long hours in long years of it, because it was actually happening. The young man was coming level with the alleyway, crabbing sideways to avoid the rubbish bin on wheels. Banks's hand flicked against his jacket, and the weight of a notebook, loose coins and pebbles flapped it back. The hand went, one movement, to the butt of the Glock, and as it was snatched out a finger slid the safety.

The weapon came up, and his feet splayed out.

The young man had stopped dead, and stared.

Banks went to the shooting posture, Isosceles stance. Fast enough? Could not be. Aimed for the head, forehead and temples, but the head seemed to shake as if it sought to remove the reality of the moment. Couldn't, in the time that was a second's fraction, lock the aim over the needle. Gasped in the breath. Saw, the pocket, where the hand was, writhe, and knew the button was pressed and nothing…His finger squeezed, and the target backed away into the alley, and bounced off the rubbish bin. Kept the squeeze on.

She changed down, then stamped on the brake.

The damn thing did it again. Had had to brake or would have hit the van in front. Like two shots fired, the damn car that Avril Harris had bought seemed to explode with noise. It rang in her ears. She blushed, would have gone scarlet, and a man in a car beside her — in an outer lane — leaned clear of his window, grimaced, grinned and called to her, 'You want to have that seen to, Miss. It'll be the crankshaft and timing belt that need adjusting and—'

'Thank you. I know what the sodding thing needs.'

The van in front had pulled forward and she drove on after it, past the square and the great swaying crowd. She heard the town hall's clock strike, and saw the big doors at the top of the steps open, the surge that engulfed the security men.

He dropped the Glock back into the pancake holster, pushed it down so that it was secured. His arms quivered from the recoil of the firing, and cordite stench was in his nose.

His target had been thrown back. Could not see the head or chest because they were lodged behind the rubbish bin, but the frail-built legs and feet — and the loop of wire — were visible to Banks. He felt no emotion, did not know whether he should. He looked behind him, expected to see a crowd gathering in a half-moon, but people walked on the pavement, a pensioner couple, a family, youths with their hoods up, and all hurried towards the steps to the shopping centre, and the traffic cruised by.

He went into the alleyway. The rubbish bin stank of old refuse. He thought it as good a place to die as a forward trench where rats roamed. He looked down, through the shadow light, into the face. Yes, two good shots. Yes, the best a double tap could do. The holes, wide enough for a pencil to be inserted into — or a cheap ballpoint-pen tip — were an inch or so apart and their median point was the centre of the forehead, half-way between the top of the bridge of the nose and the lowest curls of the young man's hair. They oozed blood. He didn't need to, but Banks crouched, felt for a pulse and found none.

Should not have done, but he lifted carefully the hand from the pocket, found a fist round a lamp switch, and knew the last intention of his target. He unbuttoned the jacket — the training work was done, the double tap, and he was separated from it. He knelt. He revealed the waistcoat, the careful stitching, the line of the sticks, and the pouches where nails, screws and ball-bearings were…and he saw where the taped binding had come loose, and wondered how and by whom it had been torn free. There was more tape at the end of the flex wire, and he understood why the device had not fired, why the switch had not linked with the batteries and the detonators. Banks had no training for it, but it seemed as simple to him as when he was at home at his mother's and she requested some small repair to an electrical device. Methodically, he made it safe. He unwound more tape and broke the connection between the batteries and the explosives. He stood, and behind him the entrance to the alleyway was empty and he was not watched.

On his mobile, he dialled the number of his REMF, heard it ring, heard it answered.

He said quietly, but composed, 'This is Yankee 4971, Delta 12, two shots discharged and one X-ray down. One TED made safe…' He gave his location, heard the babble of questions thrown at him and answered none. Banks finished, 'Over, out,' and rang off. He was

/ 'Yankee', code for 'a good guy', and did not feel it. The face now hidden from his view was that of an 'X-ray', who was in Delta speak 'a bad guy'—but it had been his promise that he did not make judgements. He imagined the chaos pursuing the news he had laconically telephoned in, that a suicide-bomber was dead and an improvised explosive device had been disarmed.

He went back into the alleyway a last time, and dragged the body deeper into the shadows. Then he pushed the rubbish bin, moved it so that the entry was better blocked and the corpse better hidden.

Banks stood beside it, his feet close to the waistcoat. Soft words spoken, those of a psalm. He stepped back, was on the pavement again.

His Principal said, behind him, 'God, wondered where the hell you were. Pretty little bit of totty in there, makes a good start to the day. Then they had to go out the back and bring in more papers Then the cash machine jammed. Breakfast'll be screwed. Time to leg it.'

'Yes, let's get clear of this bloody place.'

They went fast. Had to go out into the road because paramedics, on the pavement, were lifting on to a stretcher the man he'd thought to be a drunk, and he saw the bright blood smear on the pavement dirt…and Banks reflected, hurrying, that nothing was what it seemed to be.

Afterwards, it was a time for tangles to be unravelled, and loose ends tied, and for the lives of the living to be regained and the dead to be forgotten.

'The chief constable up there is a very good man, sound — but he's short of a knighthood. I think such a deserved award is in order, if he's cooperative.'

The assistant director sat in the comfortable chair of his director general's wide office, sipped coffee, and nodded agreement.

'You see, Tris, there's no call to trumpet this affair. By the skin of our teeth, we've avoided a catastrophe that could have brought the roof down on us, on all of us in the Service, but that's past now. What concerns me most acutely is that delicate knife edge on which racial relations exist in these days. Take that town, Luton. Ethnic prejudices bubble barely beneath the surface on a daily basis. This is the sort of business, if shouted from the rooftops, that could fracture what little harmony exists, excite the bigots and therefore drive that Muslim minority — most of whose young people are utterly decent and totally law-abiding citizens — into the welcoming arms of the fanatics and the same goes for a score of other communities the length and breadth of the land. I'll work at full stretch, and demand the same of the whole Service, to keep matters quiet, as quiet as the grave.'

'Very wise, if I might say so…Dickie Naylor's at home, getting some sleep, but he'll be taking that American to the airport later. What he did fits well with your ideas.'

'I don't think it appropriate for me to speak personally with him…I think we can just leave him to get on with, and enjoy, the start of his retirement.'

'The officer who fired the shots — reacted so fast that this murderous Saudi did not have the chance to detonate himself — is, I am told, a steady fellow and not one to make waves.'

'A first-class man, Tris, and I hope with a bright future. If those dunderheads at Great Victoria Street have a modicum of sense, he'll be tracked for fast promotion. He's saved us from acute embarrassment.'

'I'll pass the word, with discretion — nothing happened.'

'Excellent, and come and have a little wet with me tonight, a sherry or three. There's cause for quiet celebration. Oh, the Reakes woman, she won't be silly, will she?'

'A level-headed girl.'

'Thank you, Tris. We were so near to being trampled and broken reeds…A most satisfactory beginning to a day when nothing happened — make sure you come and see me at the end of it.'

A purser said to a steward, 'There's a blind gentleman in business class, American, third row back and by the port-side window. Looks pretty helpless, keep an eye out for him.'

'Sad, must blight a life being so dependent. My imagination, or are his glasses stuck together with tape? Probably walked into a door. Of course, I will.'

A detective from Special Branch, briefed and regarded as reliable, had been admitted to a terraced home in an East Midlands city.

He sat in a small living room opposite a mother and daughter, and there was a framed photograph of a son, a brother, behind them. He said, with practised sympathy, 'The problem was that Ramzi formed associations with dangerous people. We released him and sent him home and know that he reached very near to here. The rest is surmise…We believe he made contact with those people. They may have concluded that we had turned him after his arrest, then freed him so that he could inform on them. It's not true, but they may have thought it. There are, now, two possibilities: they may have murdered him, or he may have fled beyond their reach. We will be, you have my promise, working day and night to ascertain which, and I most strongly advise you to leave these matters in our capable hands. If he is still living, your own enquiries could jeopardize his safety…I think you understand, and we'll hope for the best.'

'Oswald Curtis, for this heinous and disgusting crime, you will serve twenty-two years' imprisonment. Oliver Curtis, a younger brother and undoubtedly under the influence of your elder sibling, you will serve eighteen years' imprisonment. Take them down.'

Mr Justice Wilbur Herbert, well satisfied with the trial's outcome and with the quality of his address, watched them escorted from court eighteen, their faces flushed in impotence and anger. He did not know of the chain of events begun when the brothers had employed Benny Edwards, the Nobbler — and the links of that chain that had put, with inevitability, a Protection Officer on to a pavement outside a newsagent's that fronted on to a town square.

He congratulated all of the jury on their courage, but his eye was on the bearded man who wore sandals, the school teacher.

'All rise,' his clerk shouted.

The golf team's secretary was first back at the bar, the churchyard's mud on his polished shoes, and the darts team's treasurer was at his shoulder. He ordered for them and waited for the drinks, doubles of Scotch, to be given him.

'That's something I'll never forget,' the secretary said. 'I mean, all those Americans there, Rangers and Green Berets, and that unit pennant on old GG's coffin, and that big sergeant singing the "Battle Hymn" over the grave. Don't mind admitting it, I was crying fit to bust.'

The empty stool was beside them.

'Sort of humbling,' the treasurer said. 'How wrong can you get? Thought he was just a sad old beggar who lived with his fantasies, and it was all real and we took the piss. You just never know a man, do you? God, we'll miss Gorgeous George…'

They raised their glasses and toasted the vacant stool.

Longer afterwards, the tangles were tidied and the ends knotted.

From behind a desk, Mary Reakes worked with driven energy for the cathedral's International Centre for Reconciliation.

Other ladies with whom she shared office space in the building beside the new cathedral had considered, lightly, opening a sweepstake — with a prize of a tin of chocolates — to be won by the first who saw the incomer smile. They did not know where she had come from, or why — each day her face was set with an undisguised chill — and her cubicle had no decoration except old and new postcards from the Iraqi capital, Baghdad. She did not share.

The head teacher of a secondary school said to her deputy, 'I think Julian's settled in well. Don't understand him. Can't imagine why a man with his qualifications wants to make his life here, the back end of Adelaide — must have been something of an earthquake that dropped him down on us.'

'And you don't get anything of explanation from him, or from his partner.'

'She's nice. Vicky's a bit scatterbrain, but the heart's there — she's doing good things in year five's craft class. I hope they stay.'

'I think they will. Most of the new migrants who've had — what did you call it, an earthquake? — some damn great upheaval, they don't have anywhere further to run. Mr Wright and his lady are here to stay.'

Faria looked after her invalid mother and never went further from home than the Khans' corner shop.

Khalid drove a mini-cab in west London, Syed worked in the family's fast-food take-away, and Jamal had started the second year of his business-studies course.

None of them would again be sleepers, or willing to be woken.

Two elderly men, one a retired power-company engineer, the other a retired quantity surveyor studied the stands on which the Horticultural Society's show entries were displayed, and eyed where the judges had laid the prize-winning rosettes.

The engineer said, 'That man, Anne's husband, he's never been seen here before — never put anything in before — and first time up he's taken the gold with his tomatoes.

'I've the impression that he's lived with them since they were two-inch plants, cosseted them and fussed over them, probably slept with them each night. It takes an utter obsession to produce tomatoes of that quality totally life-consuming.'

'What did he do before taking his pension?'

'She's never said, Anne hasn't. Some dreary job in Whitehall, I suppose — and exchanged it for a greenhouse. He's so damned aloof…has the manner of someone who used to think himself important, but it was probably only pushing paper…Maybe I'm wrong, maybe it was life-and-death stuff, but the knife came down and it's exchanged for tomatoes.'

'And that's your Englishman?'

'That's him.'

'Your stranger?'

'Less of a stranger now. He came to us in the spring, now it's the autumn.'

It was only once a year that the bishop visited the village and its priest. It was near the end of the day and a cool wind came from the north, chilled by the high points of the Pyrenees. Leaves fluttered down around them. After the heat of summer, a cruel winter was usual at this lonely, unlovely cluster of homes and its church, which lay between the larger communities of Calacete and Maella.

'And he spends his days here?'

'And his evenings writing letters — which is why you are visiting and can see him for yourself.'

The bishop's body threw a long shadow and the chill wind blustered the cloak he wore. He stared across a slight ravine over bare, fallen rocks and past a long cattle barn that was now broken into disrepair. Beyond it there was a flat space of dull sun-scorched earth where weeds grew high. There the man sat, his back to them. If their voices carried to him he showed no sign of caring that they intruded on the privacy of his space.

'The hospital was in that barn?'

'It was.'

'And the dead were buried where the weeds grow?'

'They were…but it is difficult to be exact about where the graves lie. There are no witnesses in the village. Everyone had been evacuated before the battle for the Ebro began. They were forcibly removed or fled. The village was a shell. When people came back, they had too many bitter memories and they did not believe it correct to relive those dark days…They had chosen the wrong side, they had supported the losers. It is natural that the dead of the defeated should not be honoured.'

'They were difficult times.'

The bishop saw a man, lit by the last of the day's sun, sitting motionless on the hard ground. The man, he thought, was well built in an athletic way and had none of the flab of middle age. His hair was tousled in the wind. Too young a man to be so captured by the dead: a man of an age at which life still stretched ahead and where ambition for the future should not be denied. In the files at his office, the bishop had seven translated letters from this man, all signed 'Respectfully, David Banks', and all written in a clear, strong hand.

'And he has been to other battlefields before coming and staying in your village?'

'He went to the old barracks at Albacete, then to Madrid. He has walked in the Jarama valley and at Brunete, and he has been down to the Ebro river…He did all of that before he came to us and took a lodging in the village. He has lived here very simply. He does not take alcohol and he is polite in all his dealings with us. Each day he leaves the village and walks up — past where we are now — to the barn where the wounded were treated, and where some died, and then he goes to the place where it is said the graves were dug. He has been there when the sun was fierce on him, without shade, and when the rain has tipped on him, without shelter…and he has written those letters to you.'

'And I, alone, have the power to free him?'

'I believe so.'

'Then it has to be done…'

The bishop grimaced, then hitched up the hem of his robe and strode away. The priest hurried after him. Helping each other, they scrambled down the loose stones and the dried dirt of the ravine. In its pit were old and rusted tins that might have held rations issued to combatants. There were three aged shell cases with lichen surviving on them. On their hands and knees they scaled the far edge of the ravine. They came to the barn where the walls of stone — still bore the pockmarks of bullets. The bishop paused there, at a doorway that had no door, gazed inside, and his eyes peeled away the interior's darkness. He imagined he looked into the hell of an abattoir, and he murmured a prayer for those who had died there close to seven decades before. He seemed to hear the moaning of the wounded and the cries of those who were past saving. On the flat ground, the priest hung back, but the bishop tramped on, crushing weeds under his feet. He came to the man, walked round him, then lowered himself, placed his weight on a rock and was in front of him.

'You are David Banks?'

'I am.' He was answered in halting Spanish.

'You have written many letters to me.'

'I have.'

'And you carry a diary of old times.'

'I do.'

He saw a youthfulness but it had no peace. He sensed the restlessness of a troubled mind, perhaps tortured. The letters had been blunt, to the point, and the bishop had no stomach for excuses, or procrastination. He thought it time to free a spirit.

'There is little appetite in our modern society to relive the harsh scars of days gone by. The lessons of history, as I have learned them, are that ancient wounds can be healed by time…Atrocities and savagery are passing things, and quickly forgotten. My grandfather was bayoneted to death by the Communists, but I have forgiven them and their heirs…I cannot enter the minds of those who did it, the hatred they harboured. I seek now only the passing of black days. You have asked that a stone be put here, that a name should be carved on it, that a prayer — a psalm — should be said here. That recognition should be given to those who died for a cause they believed in, for which they volunteered their lives, that they should have dignity in death. I promise, it will be done.'

'Thank you.'

He believed he took a burden from the shoulders, gave them back their strength. A wad of banknotes from David Banks's hip pocket was given him. He was told it was to pay for the stone and it was requested that a mason should carve on it the silhouette outline of a bird, a swan, with the name of Cecil Darke and the dates of his life. He put the notes into his wallet. And he was also asked if some several items could be buried in the earth under the stone when it was laid down: an old book, with a frayed leather cover was handed to him — almost with reluctance — and then from a pocket two small pebbles, each with seams of quartz running through them, and last a few coins of a currency he did not recognize, but they had weight.

'As you have asked it, so it will happen. Will it help you? Does that free you?'

'I will stay here for the night, and in the morning I will be gone.'

'Where to?'

'I don't know, it doesn't matter…'

The bishop backed away. He walked fast, the priest at his side, and the barn and the ravine were behind him. He was anxious to be on the road for Barcelona before the darkness came. He looked once over his shoulder and saw faintly, a last time, the man who was squatted low among the weeds, bathed in the brilliance of late sunshine, and believed he had brought peace to a troubled soul. He held the old notebook tightly, and the pebbles rattled with the coins in his pocket…He did not understand what was asked of him, or why, and thought few would have.

The bishop shook the hand of his priest and drove hurriedly away from a place where, he thought, old scars had lain open and untreated wounds had festered, but he trusted his promise would have healed the scars and cleaned the wounds. On his journey, ghosts danced in his mind. They were those of the dead in their lost graves, and of the living man who had watched over them and who — he hoped — was now freed, and at liberty.