The Walking Dead

Chapter 5

He left his room, checked that the door's lock had fastened, and slipped soft-footed down the corridor. In his recent life, that of the Scorpion, Muhammad Ajaq had slept some nights in the homes of wealthy merchants or professional men, some nights in the compounds of the leaders of minor tribes, some nights in the sheds used by herdsmen under the palms by the banks of the Euphrates river, some nights in the cover of dried-out irrigation ditches, some nights on the sand with a blanket round him and the stars for company. But, he had never slept in a hotel.

Ajaq knew nothing of hotels.

Going down the corridor, he was refreshed by sleep. It was his ability to rest where he could find it, and dreams did not disturb him. He had not used the bed in the room — in compound guest wings, in a shed, a ditch or in the open air he lay on the floor or on a carpet or on fodder or in the dirt. It was his belief that on a floor or on the ground his reactions would be faster: he would wake more quickly if a threat gathered round him. The room was on the first floor of the building, at the back and overlooking a walled yard, and he had kept the window up, and would have gone out through it if danger had come close. From his sleep, he felt strong, alert.

His tread was light, but the boards under the carpet squealed as he went.

He paused at the door, stiffened, as if he had no taste for what he must now do…Then he tapped on the wood panel where paint had flaked off.

'It is your friend. Please, let me inside.'

A footfall came to the door, then stopped. He imagined the boy's fear, but did not know for how many hours he had been in the room without contact. He watched the door's edge, heard the click of the lock and saw the door open, but a chain held it. The room was darkened, no light on. Then the boy was staring back at him. Relief flooded the face. The chain was unhooked.

The bed was rumpled where the boy had lain on it and a copy of the Koran was on the pillow. The leather jacket was discarded on the thin, shoe-worn carpet. Ajaq could smell the fast food, and could make out the stains at the boy's mouth. He went inside and closed the door behind him, threaded his steps over the carpet and round the bed, then drew back the curtains. Light from a street-lamp beyond the yard wall seeped inside.

Ajaq sat on the floor. Its hardness, through the carpet, pinched his buttocks, and he waved for the boy to come and take a place beside him. He pushed aside the little tray in which the food sauces still lay, the paper bag and some clothing. The boy lowered himself, nervously, and their bodies were close.

'You travelled well?'

'I did, my leader, and always there were people who helped me.'

'You remember when we met?'

'I remember.'

'What did I say to you?'

'You asked me who I was and where I was from and what I did — was I strong?'

'And you told me?'

'I hoped to be strong. You said I was chosen. You said that you looked for a man who walked well and that I did.'

'And before you left me, to begin your journey, I said?'

'You told me that I was chosen for a mission of exceptional value, for which I would be honoured and respected. Without my dedication and obedience the mission would fail and that would make a great victory for our enemies…I told you of the martyrdom of my brothers, and I said that I would seek to 'equal their dedication and be worthy…'

'You remember it well.'

Ajaq knew that it was necessary to keep those in love with death, the volunteers, in the company of others who shared their certainty so that the will for martyrdom was not permitted to dribble away. With others around him, it was harder for a man to trip away from the boasts he had made, or the promises…But the boy, Ibrahim, had seen eleven others bounce away in the back of two pickups and had now been effectively alone for seven full days, seven nights. Did the strength to continue still exist? He had to know. Perhaps his own life, certainly his freedom, depended on the answer. In Iraq, where he had fought and where a price of many thousands of American dollars rested on his head, others would have decided whether strength had gone. Himself, he cared as little for the individuality of a martyr as for a shell loaded into a breach or a mortar missile into a tube or a bullets' belt into a machine-gun…but here there was no other man to make that decision for him. Ajaq was not in Iraq but in a first-floor room of a cheap, rundown hotel to be found in a network of side-streets close to the Paddington terminus in London. He forced himself, and it was an effort, to play-act sincerity.

'Are you strong, Ibrahim?'

'I promise it.'

He took the hands of the boy, his long, sensitive fingers, and held them locked in his own fists, which were calloused and rough, those of a fighting man.

'You know of the haughtiness of Britons?'

'I do.'

'And you know of the aggression of the Crusaders, who are British?'

'I do. I have been told it by the imam at our mosque in Jizan.'

'Because you have been chosen from many, you are privileged. Ibrahim, you walk at the front of our struggle, God's struggle. The British are a people of corrupt unbelievers and you will teach them a lesson that will be long spoken of among the faithful followers of God. For what you will do, you will be taken to the table of God. Already there are the men who were your brothers on earth, with whom you were before I chose you. They are at the table, they keep a place for you and their welcome awaits you. You will have their respect for what you will have done and where you will have been. And I believe that young women of great beauty, in the gardens of Paradise, also await your coming. There you will be honoured — and you will be honoured on earth, wherever the Faith exists. Your name will be sung, your photograph will be shown, and your name and your photograph will fortify the courage of so many…Ibrahim, to sit at God's table and to lie in the gardens of Paradise is only for the strongest. Are you among them?'

'I hope to be.' Emotion, sincerity, played on the boy's face.

The agenda of revenge of Muhammad Ajaq had little to do with a table set with fruits and a fable of women who fucked endlessly behind shrubs in gardens. Because of the blood in his veins, and the lightness of his skin's texture, he had answered the call and had journeyed to the heartland of an enemy. He was the product of the seed of his father, that blood and that skin pallor. His father — he knew it now but had not known it for the many years of his childhood — was William Jennings, from Yorkshire in northern England, an engineer who had worked on the building of modern sewage plants in Jordan thirty years before. His father, the bastard Jennings, had seduced his mother, who was a secretary at the ministry in Amman that oversaw the modernization of Jordan's infrastructure. His father, Jennings, had been repatriated before his mother could no longer hide her pregnancy. She had gone back to her home — in the north of Jordan, near to the town of Irbid — with her disgrace and her shame, had borne the boy-child and suckled him, had left him in her room and gone. On a winter's morning, his mother had walked out into the desert sands, had stripped off her clothes and lain down naked so that hypothermia would claim her life quickly. She had died there and her skeleton — stripped of flesh by scavenging foxes — had not been found until the spring came. He had been brought up through childhood by his grandparents, his mother's family. On his nineteenth birthday, in the hour before he left home in Irbid by bus for the paratroops' training depot in the south, he had been told of his father's flight and his mother's death…and at that moment his character had been fashioned. Hatred ruled him, not God and not Faith.

'You have to stay strong, Ibrahim, to justify the trust placed in you., 'I will.'

He believed him. He did not think it would be necessary to use the hoax, with honeyed words, of a 'delayed time switch'. Some of the volunteers, so others told him, would buckle as they approached the day when they would walk or drive to their target. Those who showed weakness were given the he by the Engineer that they should reach the target, then dump a bag or park a car, and press the switch: they had a minute, or five minutes, to run before the explosion. There was, of course, no 'delayed time switch', and it was an unsatisfactory procedure. He believed the boy sought martyrdom and, without deception, would achieve it.

He ran his fingers through the boy's hair, left him and returned quietly to his room.

Left alone, Ibrahim listened to the stirring sounds of the building beyond the door, the street beyond the window and the yard's walls. He still sat on the floor.

A harsh noise, new, filled his ears and eddied in the darkness around him.

Ibrahim fought the noise, tried to rid himself of it. He held the palms of his hands over his ears. He thought of the table and his brothers, of the empty chair and the place set for him, but he could not lose the noise.

It disgusted him.

It was above him.

Bedsprings squealed with growing intensity and a faster beat. What he knew about sex, about the physical matter of copulation, had been learned from textbooks in the library of the School of Medicine. He had never talked of it with his father, or — of course not — with his sisters: his parents' bedroom, when his mother was alive, had been at the far end of the villa from his own room and solid walls would have blocked out the sounds of lovemaking. Above him, over the now swaying lightshade, there was a thin layer of plasterboard, then planking, a similarly worn carpet, a bed with springs that sank and rose and howled. He had the image, and it had been hard in his mind since the imam had talked of it, of the young women who waited for a martyr in the gardens of Paradise, and their nakedness, but — in his mind — when he advanced on them and bent to touch them, there was always a distraction that snatched them away. He had never touched a woman. Boys who had been with him at the university, or at school in Jizan, had talked endlessly of women, even told stories of prostitutes they had paid in the cities, but Ibrahim had thought they lied.

It fascinated him.

Before he went to the gardens, where virgins waited for him, he would never know the feeling of a woman's body. His hands' palms were tighter against his ears. He summoned the image of his father, whom he loved, and called to him shrilly in the night. From a great distance, his father seemed to smile on him. He heard his father speak of pride in his youngest, the same pride he had spoken of when the eldest and the middle sons had been reported dead in the jihad against the infidels of Russia and America. He saw his father sitting in the deep-cushioned chair in front of the wide-screen television with the cinema-standard speakers, and thought- his father blessed him for his courage.

There was a cry overhead, a groan and silence, and the swing of the lightshade slackened. He let his hands fall from his ears and rejoiced: he had his father's pride.

'It is what his father told us today.'

'Why'd he call your people?' Hegner asked softly.

'Because of love and because of fear.'

'Wouldn't he have felt proud of his boy's actions?'

'Pride perhaps in former times, at the loss of two sons, but not in the loss of a third, all that remains to him…and fear now at the consequences of silence.'

Of all the Americans, of the Bureau and the Agency, working from the Riyadh embassy, only Joe Hegner would have had that late-evening call from the head of counterintelligence in the Kingdom. Only Hegner had the status, the reputation and the friendship to have been invited to come in the darkness to the Mabatha interrogation centre, south of the capital city Only this dogged zealot from the Federal Bureau of Investigation would have had a limousine chauffeur drive him behind privacy windows out of Riyadh, past the Ministry of Interior complex and through the high gates of what staffers at his embassy called the 'Confession Factory'. He sat now in a comfortable chair beside the senior man in that section of the mabaheth, with a cocktail of fruit juices at his elbow.

'I am exceptionally grateful for this information you offer me.'

'It is natural, Joe, that it should be given you.'

'And already I have a scent on this.'

'The nose, Joe — and I say it with respect — is the best.'

He had access where for others of the Bureau and the Agency none existed. He had never concerned himself with the reasons that it was given him, because that would have been time wasted, and he thought time too precious. The trust had existed before he had gone on permanent posting to Baghdad and the insurgent war in Iraq, but had been cemented when it became known — after his injuries — that at the end of his immediate convalescence he had demanded to be posted back to the Kingdom. The trust had borne fruit. On his last visit from Washington, the director of the Bureau had spent forty-eight hours inside the embassy compound, kicking his heels, then been fobbed off with junior functionaries. A month before that, the director of the Agency — in spite of hourly telephone demands from subordinates — had not been granted an audience for three days. The door opened for Joe Hegner, and the carpet rolled out.

'I thought, Joe, you would wish to know of this matter.'. 'I do, sir, and I appreciate it.'

A. wish and an appreciation — of course. The speciality of Joe Hegner was in the collection of information on the strategies of recruitment, and the tactics employed for them, of suicide-bombers. He learned and in return he gave back a conduit route by which sensitive information from the mabaheth was funnelled back to the Bureau analysts at the Edgar Hoover Building. So different from the days before Nine-Eleven, but the muscle on those aircraft had been from the Kingdom: men from the Kingdom had carried the box-cutter knives that had terrorized cabin staff and flight-deck crews. The funnel was important to the counterintelligence officers and reduced the suffocating pressure of criticism flowing from DC. He had been told, but it mattered little to Joe Hegner, that his reports were in the Oval Office within forty-eight hours of being filed. He had small regard for praise, and only the barest interest in the stature he had achieved. His hand rested loosely on the handle of the stick that lay against his thigh.

'I'm sorry to say, and I know you won't take me the wrong way, but you folks have failed to stop the flow of suicide-bombers recruited here, and failed to lock down your borders.'

'We know it, Joe.'

'You are the prime source of these kids.'

'Joe, we know it.'

'You've waited till the eleventh hour, but finally you're trying to arrest these boys.'

'We are trying, Joe, and that is the truth.'

'I've got to be honest with you, I'm not sure the "trying" is good enough.'

For such a riposte, any other man from the Bureau or the Agency would have been shown the door, booted out of the gate with a kick four-square in the ass, and would have had to trek back across the desert towards Riyadh's distant lights and illuminated towers. Joe Hegner was not 'any other man'. Hegner lived off plain-talk, always had. Folks spoke plain and simple where he came from. A man kept his conversation plain and simple, or he walked alone, in the bit of Montana that was north of the intersection at Forsyth of Route 12 and Route 94 and close to Big Porcupine Creek. The nearest town was at Ingemar where his grandfather had been the community blacksmith, and his father had run a hardware store. Hegner had lost most of his plain-talk when he'd gone, first of his family to the university in Helena — and lost some more during a marriage now also gone, during induction and subsequent postings with the Bureau…but he'd regained it while lying in inked darkness after his injury. His Saudi contacts in the mabaheth were at professorial level with obliqueness, innuendo and subtlety of language, as obscure as mirrored walls, but they listened to him.

'Your government, its policies, they are the recruiter.'

'Well, that's one on the money and I'm not going to argue.'

'A twenty-one-year-old medical student, Joe, has told his family he is visiting cousins in Sana'a, and in fact he is travelling to Europe, with a false passport and a false name on the airline's manifest…What am I telling you?'

'You are telling me to listen for one heck of a bang — a big, big bang. We will hear the bang unless — where he's travelling to — they get their act together fast. More important they get real lucky, and fast. You got a different take on it?'

'I am hearing you, Joe.'

'They're gonna need a sack of luck large enough to keep a Bedu's camel happy for a month in the Rub' al Khali. I'm going to ship this on. Right?'

'Disperse it where it should be thrown.'

'Gotcha. Hope we have the time.' At the last, Joe Hegner was fulsome in courtesy. He said gruffly, sincerely, 'I thank you, sir, for your trust in me.'

The head of counterintelligence of the mabaheth in the Kingdom kissed Hegner's cheek. His arm was taken and he was guided to the door with a sympathy that did not embarrass him. He paused there while those who would lead him back to his limousine came from an outer office.

He asked, 'What do you make of the kid's father telling you what he knew? He a patriot or…?'

'A frightened man, Joe, or a parent wanting his son to live. As yet, I do not know. We flew him here this afternoon to talk to him. To drain him, Joe. I have no interest in the father, except what he can tell me of his son. I am concerned only with his son, with Ibrahim Hussein.'

'That's good. That's real good.'

Heavily, on his stick, Joe Hegner went out into the night, and the inner walls of the Mabatha Interrogation Centre were behind him. From the darkness, the shadows in which he lived, he heard the limousine door opened. He had that bad feeling. It was the one the Shin Bet officers in Israel talked about when he visited Tel Aviv, and the tortured Americans in Baghdad. A bomber was on course for a target. A boy with a dream of Paradise stalked close to a place of martyrdom. Where'd he go? Where was the kid headed?

He was sagging but the chain that held him did not permit him to fall to his knees.

Two men, alternately, thrashed the back of Omar Hussein with an iron bar and a pliable rubber truncheon. The cell in which he was suspended had a floor space of less than three metres by less than two. He had now defecated and urinated in his underpants. He could not protect his back from the blows, and when he screamed the bar and the truncheon hit him with greater power. He could smell his own filth. He thought he had done right…He screamed at the pain, hoped only for unconsciousness, and cursed his son.

The questions came…When had he first known? Who had recruited his son? What was the target of his son? Was not the whole of Asir Province a snake's nest of dissent, a foxes' den of violence against the Kingdom? Did he support his son's belief in murder? The answer was a single croak inside the hood over his old head: he knew nothing, nothing.

And then his tormentors left him.

Again, muffled by the hood, he screamed the curse against his son.

He had been working late, was in no hurry to be home after the early spat with Anne and, for a break, he had slipped out of Riverside Villas and walked to the park at the back. He shared a bench with a pathetic creature, sodden with a bottle of full-strength cider and destitute, but Dickie Naylor was ignored, left alone with his thoughts and his lit pipe.

When six more working days were done, Naylor would never again sit in the evening quiet of St John's Gardens. He had learned the value of coming to the park and sitting under the high plane trees when the world, his world, collapsed around him. And here he could smoke a pipe and be free of the tobacco police.

It had been a burial ground. He fancied that he, and the vagrant, sat with phantoms long deceased. That did not bother him, was actually something of a comfort; he could cope with the past and inevitability. Three and a half centuries before that spring evening, and the ebb of his working life, the cemetery had been full and an extra yard deep of topsoil had been carted in so that new graves could be dug on top of the old. An enterprising solution to a capacity problem. He had sat here, with the same pipe stem clamped in his teeth, on the evening of Nine-Eleven.

On that September day, some had rushed round the offices and corridors of Riverside Villas, acting the parts of whirling dervishes, or clutched paper sheets, or had mobiles pressed to their ears and called for meetings, or rifled for files from the archive. Dickie Naylor had watched the frenetic action, then walked to the solitude of St John's Gardens and smoked, using the quiet to ponder. He had returned and said, 'This day will turn out to be as significant as. that of the first of September sixty-two years ago when the battleship Schleswig-Holstein fired the first shells at the Polish garrison of the Westerplatte at Danzig.' He did not flatter himself that any had listened. A month later the new section was formed to monitor for the arrival of suicide-bombers into the United Kingdom and he had been nominated as second in charge. After a year Freddie had gone, retired to golf or tomato-breeding, and Naylor had taken his place and occupied his cubicle. The tick of his own retirement clock had started.

But the new topsoil dumped on the garden had created its own problems. Solutions always bred consequences, Naylor believed. The shallow graves, not excavated deeply enough for fear of disturbing the already interred, had provided scope for body-snatchers. 'Block one hole and another appears', he would have said, if the vagrant had asked him. By 1814, what was now St John's Gardens had been patrolled by armed guards, carrying not cudgels but primed pistols, and the hospitals were denied the cadavers they needed for dissection tutorials.

He had come here, to the same bench, on the day that jargon now called Seven-Seven. That day, Riverside Villas had been stunned and quiet. 'God, it's bloody well reached us — us,' he'd heard an ashen-faced branch director murmur. The building's business was compartmentalized. An officer was supposed to know his own area of study, but not of investigations in hand adjacent to his desk. 'Need to bloody know' was the mantra of the Villas. By mid-morning on Seven-Seven that sacred rule was shredded. A verdict of failure had consumed the building. The guards on the big doors to the basement car park, the canteen cooks and the director general in a lofty suite of offices would have known it. There hadn't been a damn whisper of what was going to happen. Four guys, with clean skins, had walked through all the beavering efforts of detection with which the Service was charged. Naylor had come to the gardens that lunchtime, eaten a sandwich and thought that the illusion of all-seeing competence manufactured in the Villas was gone. He had come back in, swiped his card, taken the lift up, tramped down his corridor and an officer had asked him, 'What the hell should be our response, Dickie?'

And Naylor had said what was obvious to him: 'We should all pedal a bit harder.'

By order of Lord Palmerston, at some date in the 1850s, the burial ground had been closed, the gardens had been laid out, a fountain built in the centre and the plane trees planted. It was the best place Dickie Naylor knew…God's truth, he'd miss it.

Charity did not come often to him, but on an impulse he took the half-emptied tobacco pouch from his pocket, laid it in the vagrant's lap and smiled. He wished him a good evening, and was on his way.

He padded into the outer office. The new carpets, from last year's refurbishment, muffled his footsteps. She was at his door.

Mary Reakes was not aware of him. She had, damn it; a colour chart in her hand. He could see it over her shoulder, the chart a client used to choose a decoration scheme. It showed squares of pastel shades, and he thought she'd probably end up daubing the cubicle in bloody magnolia.

'In a hurry, are we?' He tried the old acid but had never been good at it.

She didn't have the decency, he reckoned, to spin round and blush. It was as if he was sick with a plague, and the funeral people were round his bed, measuring him up.

'It's only six bloody days, can't you wait that long?'

She didn't do embarrassment. 'Thought you'd gone home, Dickie.'

'Well, I can tell you I'll be here to the last minute, last hour, last day of my employment. Then the reins will be passed and you can have your painters in, but not a minute before.'

An obsession with history dominated the life of Steve Vickers, and what delighted him most was the opportunity of sharing it with others — not a history of kings and queens, not the great cultural, political and social earthquakes of the United Kingdom's past:. history for him was the development of the town, Luton, that was his home.

'I am asking you, ladies, to look up and study the clock in the tower. Are you all with me?'

Disappointingly, only a dozen or so were, but if there' had been only three souls, he would have persisted with the tour.

'The tower above our town hail — yes, it dominates the main square, St George's Square — was built in 1935 and 1936, and opened by the Duke of Kent. I'll come to the clock in a moment but, excitingly, the building has a story of its own…'

He beamed around him. It was necessary, Steve Vickers believed, to share his enthusiasm if he was to hold an audience. The weather was cool, darkness settled over the building's roofs, but the rain had held off. Only two of his original party had slipped away. Not bad…A not ungenerous disability pension from Vauxhall cars' Research and Development Unit, after he had been invalided out with persistent migraine attacks, allowed him to devote his life to the town's historic past. Now he had with him a Women's Institute group from a dozen miles away, shivering but standing their ground.

'They had to put up a new town hail because the previous one was burned down by an angry mob. Yes, believe me, in this town a mob was sufficiently enraged to storm a police line — just where we're standing now — break down the main door and set fire to the building. Order was not restored until regular troops were brought in from Bedford…and that happened in 1919 and it was called the Peace Riot. Former soldiers, then demobbed, couldn't get work and the celebration of the armistice caused their fury. That day was probably the last on which significant violence hit the town — and long may the quiet last.'

He had heard, at his reference to the Peace Riot, a faint titter of amusement, sufficient to sustain him. The following Wednesday he was booked to escort a group from the Townswomen's Guild around Hightown, on the other side of the river, where the hat-making industry had been the country's largest a century ago. On the Saturday after that he would be back, early in the morning, with sixth-form students and any others who cared to attend, in St George's Square. Communicating raw history was a joy to him.

Through the car's passenger window, she saw a man bob his head as money was passed from purses.

Faria recognized him. With his old coat, the wool hat down on his forehead and the sheaf of papers in his fist, she had seen him often enough with his little tour groups. For a moment she thought it sad that so few accompanied him — but it was only a fleeting thought because the business in hand was shopping and on her knee was the list she had been given of items to be bought. A police car pulled out behind the car and passed them, and the policewoman, who was the passenger, eyed her. She said quietly to Jamal, 'Don't worry, they're not for us. They're for druggies and drunks. The town is bad with all levels of abuse. It's the corruption…There are no guns here. The town is not protected.' A little shiver went through her but she thought Jamal hadn't seen it. She had neatly ticked off each item on the list, and now she needed only the hardware store, which never closed before ten, to buy the soldering iron. They followed the police car, and the road took them away from the guide and his party past the steps to the shopping arcade. She knew it was the target but not when it would be hit.

Without thinking — she had dedication but not professionalism — she broke a rule. She turned to the young man beside her who was so young and had smooth skin, not her scars. She asked, 'When it's done, what will you do?'

'Go home as soon as I am released to my father's shop in Dudley. After the end of the holiday, I will go to London and my college, at London University I am nineteen, I am doing first-year business studies. I was identified at the mosque in Dudley because I spoke up for the three boys from Tipton, which is close to where I live, who were barbarically imprisoned by the Americans at the concentration camp of Guantanamo, and tortured. The government did nothing to help them. The government is the lackey of the Americans. I tell you, Faria, I am disappointed I was not chosen. I would have done it, worn the belt or the waistcoat. They told me I was more valuable alive, but that is confusing to me. How can doing reconnaissance be more important than dying as a martyr? But I am obedient. I will go to London and hope that I have proved my value and will be called again…Is this the shop?'

'I apologize for asking the question. Please, forgive me. This one, yes.'

He braked and pulled the car close to the kerb.

She went with her list towards the shop's open door. Behind her, in the car, she left the youth with the pretty face, the small stunted body, the heavy spectacles and the first fluff of a moustache: she wondered if the girls at the college, white-skinned or Asian failed to notice him, if the story of the virgins in the gardens of Paradise stirred him. She could not kill it — a small, fast excitement ran in her at the thought of virgins. In the shop, Faria asked for a soldering iron and knew to what purpose it would be put.

The table had barely been cleared. Kathy had gone, charging up the stairs to her room, homework and music. The mats were still on the table, and the water glasses, but the silence of the meal was over. The envelopes were dumped in front of Jools, where the crumbs from the pudding had not been wiped away.

He stared at them. Babs had thrown them down, then retreated to the sink and was running water into the bowl.

Some of the envelopes were three months old, some had come that week. One must have come today. Babs had taken his plate off the mat, gone to the drawer where brown envelopes festered and flipped them so that the oldest were at the top.

Bills, final demands and threats.

The household finances of Jools Wright were a disaster. Bank accounts overdrawn, credit cards leaking interest charges, gas, electricity and water all unpaid. There was an abuse-laden handwritten note from the man who had repaired the chimney flashing.

No point going to the drawer where the envelopes accumulated and getting out the cheque book, his or hers, because any cheque he wrote would bounce high. Even the damned piggy bank, only for two-pound coins and the summer holiday, was empty because it had been rifled for last week's supermarket run: he had counted out a pocketful of coins while the woman had stared bleakly at him and the queue building behind him had fidgeted in irritation.

The house was the trouble. Her parents had put down the deposit for them, and the mortgage had been based on Babs going back to work when Kathy started school. But Babs didn't work any more, citing stress. The mortgage ate what he earned. He was blamed for her stress. Couldn't argue with it. Didn't argue with it. He'd not made head of department, wasn't on a high-achiever bonus, and above-inflation salary increments were a thing of the past. He looked down at the bills, shuffled and restacked them, then laid them out across the table.

'Well, I don't know what to bloody do with them, short of robbing a bank.'

'Which you'd probably cock up,' came the whiplash from behind him.

'In fact, where I am, I'm hearing of some very professional people and they screwed up clearing out a jewellery shop. They had guns and I don't — so robbing a bank isn't exactly a starter. And since we never have a sane, civilized conversation—'

'That would be a start. I'm stuck here. I've that drawer shouting at me each time I pass it. I daren't open it. I suppose you want me to go to Mum and Dad, tell them how useless you are and beg on my bended knee for them to go and draw what we owe from their building society. Well, I won't. Will not.'

'I'm a bit short, my love,' Jools liked irony, big doses of it, 'of ideas.'

'It's all right for you, sitting in that bloody court. Precious little or nothing to think about. I'm here when they come through the letterbox.'

'I know exactly what I'll do.'

He took the top envelope, contents printed in red, from the gas company.

He held it up in what he thought was a dramatic gesture.

He ripped it into four pieces and dropped them on to the table.

Then the electricity, then the water. He heard the squeal of shock from the sink. Then the builder's note. He went to work at his task with intense enthusiasm, as if it was sex with Hannah and the squeals hers. Then the credit-card notices of- accrued interest. Then the bank's letters that referred him to amounts outstanding and the likely punitive outcome of that situation. The torn pages flaked on to the table.

Drama complete. Curtain down on theatricals. Methodically Jools picked up each piece of paper from the letters, statements and envelopes and clasped them in both hands. He went to the front door, opened it awkwardly, because he had no intention of leaving a paper trail behind him, and strode down the few feet of the front path.

At the wheelie-bin, he used his elbow to lift the lid and, into its mouth, he dropped what he thought of as junk mail, then let the lid fall back. He remembered what he had read, graffiti, on a London wall long ago: There is no problem so big or complicated that it can't be run away from.

He left Babs in the kitchen and Kathy with her music, and went to bed. His daughter was at the back of the house, deafened, his wife was in the kitchen, crying, and he would soon be asleep and past caring. End of problem. So simple.

'Go for it,' the voice murmured. 'Get it before they bring the kitchen stuff out — don't want it all covered with bloody food.'

The door of a darkened car opened quietly. Soft shoes scurried forward. A shadow skirted the light pool from a street-lamp. A wheelie-bin's lid was lifted and a hand groped down. Paper rustled as it was snatched up. The lid was eased back into place. A car door was opened and torn sheets of printed paper and pieces of brown envelope were dropped into a plastic bag. A vehicle drove out of the street. A pencil torch shone into the bag.

'Benny'll be well chuffed with this lot. Looks like we got his Crown Jewels.'

'You have a moment, Banksy? In my office? Please.'

Banks turned, gazed at the inspector's smiling face. 'Of course. Be right up.'

He waited for the footsteps' retreat, then rolled his eyes and asked the armourer, 'What's he doing still here?'

'Been on the prowl, finding something to do. Look, he even did the ammunition dockets, checked them through. Must be a mid-life crisis…OK, sign here.'

He did, and heaved his bulletproof vest, his ballistics blanket, magazines and the Glock on to the counter. The armourer checked them and lifted them on to the racks behind. A line of men from Delta's team was behind him, but he might as well not have been there. If he had looked for signals in their faces as to why an inspector had hung around late into the evening, then asked for him, he would have failed to find them. It had been another session in the close art of ostracism, as if he was no longer a part of them. He'd done his job, made damn certain there could be no criticism of his work, but he had not been spoken to. He had sat in the back of the second escort vehicle and had read the diary while their Principal and his wife had had their Covent Garden evening. He'd thought it the most miserable bloody Christmas he'd ever heard of, and worse than anything Dickens had described. His own Christmases, since Mandy had gone, had been back at home with his mother and he'd never told her that he was at the top of the volunteers' list for working Christmas Eve and Boxing Day; but he had driven down to his mother for lunch and left when it was barely decent, enjoyed the empty roads, and had a packet of new handkerchiefs and a new shirt to show for it. He saw that the isolation clinging to him had been noted by his friend, the armourer, and there was anxiety, but no one could help him and, right now, after what had been said, he wanted no help. He would fight his own bloody wars.

He eased past the line of Delta men and no eye met his.

Banks went in search of the inspector in his office. Why — in US Marine Corps Vietnam-speak — would a Rear Echelon Mother Fucker have stayed late, then called him in? What did the REMF want of him? He knocked lightly.

'Ah, Banksy, good of you. Bit difficult this.'

'How can I help?'

'Is everything all right? I mean, I've eyes in my head. Are there, problems in Delta?'

'Not that I know of.'

'Are you sure, Banksy, nothing you want to tell me of?'

'Can't think of anything.'

'What about the atmosphere in Delta, you and colleagues?'

'It's fine…If you don't believe me, ask around and see what answers you get. Will that be all?'

'I will. Don't want any niggles in a good team. Thanks, Banksy, and safe home.'

He went out into the night. He was an intelligent man but too racked with exhaustion to recognize that deflecting the enquiries of the REMF, his inspector, was not clever. He walked briskly towards the station and the late train home to his bedsit where all the company he would have would be in the lined pages of a notebook, scrawled with pencil writing, each entry harder to read than the last. It was not clever because he had put himself on to a track and did not know where it would take him.