by R. Jay
With a grim nod he bent and picked up a heavy, canvas tool bag that clanked metallically; sled hammer against crow-bar. There wasn't a door into that mosque that could resist his storming trespass that night, with rags, petrol and hatred. The red flames before his eyes burned as brightly as they had done the night his parents had been slaughtered by reckless disregard; now his friend Sydique Sahni had been butchered with callous evil. He would do what had to be done.
Yanking the door open he stepped outside onto the gravelled car park, steely determination propelling him onward to the Landrover. Two things happened simultaneously. Blinding white light obliterated the world about him, drilling into his startled eyes with insistent intensity. A cacophony of sirens and screamed commands to, 'Lay down, don't move!' shook the very air, as blue revolving lights flashed with intermittent beat on the half a dozen police vehicles that had crept into the darkest corners of the parking lot, waiting with sly patience for their quarry to show. And he had duly obliged.
His immediate reaction had been to fight, charge the banks of white halogen lights swinging the crow-bar in his hands, fully expecting to encounter the poisonous ranks of the UA-F behind them.
To his right, heavy footfalls thundered from around the side of the club-house. Before he could react to this unseen threat a thin metal baton hammered down viciously across the crown of his head. He went down fast, sprawling flat onto the cold stones as another blow slashed across the back of his knees. Vaguely he was aware of a uniformed troupe of police officers pouring across the open space, vigorously battling to push his friends back into the bar who had erupted outside lashing out with fist and boot against his attackers to reach him. But they were not wearing full riot gear with helmets, shields and batons. It was an uneven contest.
An amplified voice crackled in the crisp air. "Get back inside or you will all be arrested and charged with affray!"
Slowly but inevitably, the EFL were beaten, literally, back inside the room behind, bloodied, injured, maddened with rage and pain. Eager hands grabbed at Chris's shoulders and arms, one entwined in his hair, pulling him roughly to his feet as blood coursed from a split scalp down his face and neck. A dimly remembered police Inspector pushed through to him, the snarl on his face grotesque in pulsing blue light, words were spat at him.
"Christopher Phillip Carter, I am arresting you for the suspected murder of an as yet unidentified Asian male sometime in the early hours of yesterday morning. You have the right to remain silent, but … "
***
During his younger life continually exposed to life or death situations, Henry Carter had barely ever pondered his own mortality. A strange anomaly that a young man with his whole life at stake would merely shrug off the prospect with blasé fatalism; but at the end of days with at best a small fraction of ones allotted span left to savour, that morsel of life was so precious. Laying in that hospital bed plumbed into a myriad of life support systems, he had come to acknowledge that insight.
Returning home now in the passenger seat of Doug Easton's little car, Henry felt a much humbler man, not so certain now that his do or die bravado had really been so sound. Was any extraneous, imposed responsibility worth sacrificing up your own young life. Except for family of course, and country yes.
Doug had been characteristically tactful as they neared Mafeking Road. "They've arrested that grandson of yours again. For a different murder this time. Buggers are determined to put him away for ever ain't they?"
A sour grunt of acknowledgement was all Henry was prepared to give up. The news had not come as a great shock, more a relief that Chris's failure to show up at the hospital to bring him home himself was not down to lack of desire. Deep down he had always known that Christopher was not destined for a life of happiness, or even fairness. Some people were born that way, singled out for a life of hard knocks.
Moodily conscious that he had not been overly diplomatic, Doug lapsed into awkward, disjointed conversation; small talk about the weather; how many pills a day Henry was meant to pop, eyeing the pharmacy bag, bigger than the average workman's lunchbox, balanced on his friend's knees.
The elephant in the car hovered over them, ignored, but the question was there regarding Chris Carter. To kill once is unfortunate, but to kill twice is a nasty habit? A return to delicate matters was inevitable, as Doug braked gently into the kerb outside Henry's house. He cleared his throat staring through the windscreen at a skinny dog scouting through bags of household refuse for food, left out on the pavement for collection day.
"There's a funeral to arrange for next week, for that lad Sydique. You know, Chris's mate? Apparently he died all of a sudden at that military hospital up in Birmingham." He shook his head sadly. "Looked to be coping quite well on Remembrance Day. Goes to show you can never tell. Anyhow, as the poor little sod appears bereft of any close family, the Legion has been asked to do the business, see he gets a good send off." He glanced with sudden concern at his mate alongside him. "You okay Henry?"
Henry nodded slowly, didn't mention that was another piece of news that had passed him by laying in that hospital bed.
"Yes Doug. Thanks for the lift, you've been really kind."
"Whoa there mate, can't let you go tottering off on your own. I'll come in with you, put the kettle on, settle you back home for a couple of hours."
Henry responded a little too quickly. "You've done enough Doug. But if you don't mind, you can get that suitcase out of the back for me and just pop it inside the front door. I'm bushed to tell the truth, think I'll go straight up to bed for the rest of the day."
Doug looked uneasy, a bit hurt even. "I can still hang around a bit while you sleep. Make certain you are going to be alright?"
"No Doug, just the case thanks."
The short walk to his front door with short, uncertain steps, was the longest he had made in his life, even with his friend's arm to hang on to. Then still protesting, Doug had driven off as Henry shut the door after him, leaning against the hallway wall a moment to let his head stop spinning. He frowned at the unaccustomed smell of paint in the air, seemingly wafting down the stairs to greet him. With determined effort born of concern and curiosity, Henry pulled himself up the stairs, hand over hand on the balustrade.
He stopped short in his bedroom doorway, breath coming in rasping bursts, as he stared into the room a little dismayed at the transformation. All clean fresh surfaces, old memories swept away. That wallpaper had been chosen by his long gone wife Doris, ten shillings and sixpence a roll from Woolworths in the High Street. Those intertwining roses and stems, though faded and yellowing, had been a fleeting contact with her memory when he opened his eyes first thing every morning. Now gone.
That ceiling was so white and unblemished, he was certain to succumb to snow-blindness staring up at it. Even his family photos had been re-housed into new, brushed stainless steel frames, out of their homely, dark wood affairs. The bed was also new, deep mattress, thick duvet thingy, and what was that shiny electric convector heater doing there, hanging on the wall below bright new curtains?
Somehow he didn't feel like sleeping in this unfamiliar room, that was as alien to him as that hospital ward he had just left. Deciding that a hot cup of tea would be best, he regretted sending Doug away in a haste bordering on rudeness. Just when had he become a curmudgeonly old man?
It was soon apparent that Chris's modernisation spree had extended into Henry's old kitchen too. A shiny enamelled cooker had replaced the decrepit old gas appliance that had long been a risk to life and half of the street; a futuristic looking white plastic kettle sat on a new granite effect worktop butting up to the trendy, coloured sink. It was all enough to hurt tired old eyes.
He spied a cardboard box on the floor in a corner, packaging for the new now containing the old, awaiting for a trip to the council tip. Rummaging through it he recovered his old blackened kettle and chipped mug. Filling the tin kettle he placed it on top of the electric cooker, no need to burrow through drawers for mat
ches, then loaded the mug with an unhealthy dose of sugar and tea-bag from a fancy set of ceramic containers, lined up in a neat row like Sandhurst Officer Cadets.
Waiting for the kettle to boil he brooded on how his old home life had gone for good, those familiar little way-markers of domestic history. Chris had acted with the best of intentions, he knew that without a doubt. Yet his well meant efforts at improving his grandpa's environment was perhaps a subconscious declaration of the old man's failures and shortcomings as a homebuilder. This little house judged not fit for purpose. Maybe Chris was right in that assessment? Henry had been married first and foremost to the army, Doris his 'mistress', whom he bestowed with one small son and an occasional holiday in Cromer when the army no longer had any use for a man of a certain age.
Carrying his tea over to the kitchen table, which had thankfully survived the make-over from hell, Henry noticed the crisp, white envelope with his name and address in bold print, propped up on the mantelpiece. Sitting down he opened it, pulling stiff paper from inside. The grand crest and letter-heading of the County Constabulary darkened his mood in a heartbeat before he had even read the contents.
'Henry Edward George Carter, you are charged to appear at Cambridge Magistrates Court on December the sixth to answer a charge of Verbal Hate Crime as … "
He could not read any further. A heavy blanket of despair and anger pulled its folds over him, a suffocating wrap that caused him to fight for precious breath, threatening to squeeze the very life from him.
During his active service he had proudly fought Fascism and Communism in harsh theatres of real war. Now the establishment order of authority that he had served so loyally, had donned the tight apparel of the oppressor, wielding the whip and cudgel to beat back the liberty and natural justice that generations of men like him had wrestled from evil transgressors at great cost.
His tea tasted bitter and sour suddenly as if a witch's tit had been dipped into it. He pushed the mug away so sharply that the liquid slopped over its rim staining the corner of the letter. With a need for movement to work off his mounting agitation and gripping chest pains, Henry Carter rose unsteadily to his feet, left the kitchen and wandered in a daze into his lounge to see what changes to his cosy familiar world had been committed there.
Thankfully that appeared to have been restricted to a massive new, flat screen television and one of those DVD contraptions slotted below it, on a matching custom made silver stand. Curiously, though a little resentful, he examined the set which had no obvious buttons to flick or push, the rectangular, remote thingy on top of the DVD player seemingly the only obvious means of control.
Listlessly he slumped down into his chair, only vaguely aware of a whiff of vomit, experimenting with the contraption, pushing haphazardly at buttons until the TV screen suddenly bloomed briefly into a life of bright blue, before a jerking picture flooded across it with loud Arabic music assaulting the senses. He stared transfixed with growing comprehension, at a tableau of masked gunmen standing under the black banner of Islam, and with a spiralling dread, the familiar young man roped to a chair behind a wooden table, not unlike the one in his own kitchen.
With a dry throat and a pounding in his temples, he watched the beheading of the young lad he knew as Sergeant Sydique Sahni; the brutal slash of the broad bladed machete, gripped in manic zeal with hands that were missing several of their fingers. Hands he had witnessed with suppressed rage, threshing the summer air in Market Square, conducting sermons of hate to kneeling ranks of followers, in the shade of Holtingham's War Memorial; a calculated slight to the town's fallen.
He rubbed his broad chest as pain flickered through it like an impending electrical storm, panting with breathless stress, the bedevilment of Chris's tortured soul startlingly brought home. He sat carefully still as his body raged within itself, cursing himself for not being there for his grandson as he drifted in and out of fitful sleep.
From somewhere beyond the swirling storm clouds in his grizzled old head, a distant clarion call to arms sounded. An order had been passed on - to engage in one last patriotic charge.
***
Willard Stafford sipped his tea, took a delicate bite of a wafer thin biscuit. "These Civil Servants certainly know how to make a decent cuppa'. Must be all the practice they get."
He smirked at Roger Palmer whose attention was partially elsewhere, speed-reading a typed report that the Director General of MI5 had placed before him.
"I thought that we were all Civil Servants?" The Home Secretary responded mildly at last, glancing up with a faintly fazed look.
"Point taken Roger." Stafford placed his bone-china cup back onto its saucer, folded soft white hands into his lap. "Well?"
Palmer sat back into his chair, forefinger tapping the papers on the desk before him. "Do you consider that this was a serious attempt at the unthinkable?"
"Looks very much to have been the case, yes."
"So what happened instead do you think?"
"Like the report says, they all drowned."
"Drowned aye? Any indications of violence on the bodies?"
"Some had bruising on their upper arms and chests, possibly consistent with being held down forcibly, knelt on even. But the incoming tide can be quite ferocious. One of the blighters was severely chopped about, but we are reasonably certain he'd been caught in some ship's propeller coming into port."
"Oh are we? No weapons found it says here."
"Any weapons they may have had are presumably under the mud and sand, not to mention fifteen metres of seawater right now.
"Though there were reports of gunshots out there in the early hours of this morning, but that could just as easily have been wildfowlers decimating the bird population over the Wash. God knows what Sir Peter Scott would have had to say about that."
Palmer nodded agreeably. So far so good. "This fishing boat found drifting about in the Great Ouse River, what do we know about that? Any connection?"
"Apart from it being a potential hazard to other sea traffic at about the same time our buddies here were going down for the third time you mean?"
"I do?" The Home Secretary was sounding a little insistent now, not so good.
"A Whitby boat, which coincidently is not a million miles from where all the fun was going down on the moors. It was very recently sold off by its previous owner when he retired from playing footsy with EU fishing quotas. Sold his licence separately to Spanish trawlermen who are not so particular on abiding by Brussels' directives. Reckons he'll make a better living running a Bram Stoker Museum and selling Goth clothing, back of the harbour there. Probably right."
"And he sold it to whom." Palmer was showing signs of exasperation at pulling hens teeth in his search for immediate enlightenment.
"Oh a rather familiar sounding character whom he described as having wandered in off of the North West Frontier. Gave a name our vendor couldn't pronounce and can't remember now he claims.
"Mmm. Whoever, he was the dream buyer. Didn't have a clue as to what the merchandise was really worth and paid in cash. A few days later he returned with a motley crew of dusky landlubbers and hired our wily old Yorkshireman to give a couple of them rudimentary sailing lessons. Barely adequate to get them out of the harbour onto the open sea. Foolhardy or what?
"Couple of nights later, Wednesday actually, that is exactly what they did well before high tide, must have had a tight schedule. Harbour Master reckons they must have been scraping their bottom on the cockle beds out in the estuary. That was the last time anyone saw or heard from them."
"These 'landlubbers', is it feasible that they were our flotsam and jetsam washed up on the Norfolk coast thirty six hours later? Or am I being a tad fanciful here?"
"Political Correctness would have me say only that they had English accents but it's most unlikely that their parents had."
"For fuck's sake Willard, were they of Asian origin or not? As were the men you were hunting on land, everywhere between Yorkshire and Cambridgeshire?"
"It certainly looks that way, yes."
"So probably the same bunch of desperadoes you assured me could not escape your comprehensive, widespread net; road-blocks, rail and airport surveillance?" The Home Secretary's eyebrows had arched sternly.
Willard Stafford looked longingly at the fancy tea-pot on its silver tray, balanced on the corner of the desk. His throat had gone rather dry.
"Didn't reckon on the cheeky buggers buying themselves a beautiful pea-green boat and going out to sea. We've become rather dependent on nabbing these armchair mujahideen on the motorways with a boot full of 'exhibit ones'."
"So one for the text books of the future don't you agree? A cruise down to Norfolk, beat the traffic jams at the road blocks."
Stafford nodded miserably. "The tide table they apparently bought was for Hunstanton. A little way down the coast is the ideal landing point for the Sandringham Estate; a quick trot across the fields and Pussy-Cat, Pussy-Cat don't need to go all the way to London to see the Queen. Or her grandsons at any rate."
"Can we just cut out the nursery rhymes and concentrate on hard facts?" The Home Secretary's private nightmare over what was increasingly looking like a near disaster was butting through. "Willard, do you agree that what we have here is the proverbial 'only lucky once' scenario. A fucking great loop-hole in the Royalty protection programme in which a few fanatics have only need to yomp across a couple of fields to turn our little world upside down?"
"Of course. Weak links are continually exposed in our operations and we have to respond to them forthwith, grateful that the worst has yet to happen. Expand the possibilities across the whole of the country to every man, woman and child we are pledged to protect and the blood runs cold."
Roger Palmer closed his eyes for a moment as a tremor passed through him at the possibility of such a catastrophic act happening on his watch.
"So the target, not the Queen but her grandsons and eventual heir to the throne?"
"No, she is not due there for a few weeks for the Christmas family get-together. We whisked the brothers away double quick when we had an inkling of what may have been intended. Daddy wasn't there after, still down in Cornwall talking to the flora." Stafford pursed his lips speculatively. "In their communiqué' they did threaten to commit something spectacular."
