RAT RUN GERALD SEYMOUR

by Gerald Seymour

  If she had asked, Malachy would have said, 'Perhaps Timo Rahman'll drop them by the ferry or have them brought over in a fast craft. They'll link up with a boat offshore, use a radio for it. The size of boat that can get across the North Sea would be too large to come in close, so it'll have to launch a dinghy and come right in to the beach, somewhere along the stretch we walked. They can use a radio for the final contact with the boat but they'll have to signal an exact spot for the dinghy, and my guess is that they'd use flashing lights to guide it in. That won't be easy - of course, I'm not a seaman and don't have exact knowledge - because of the surf that the storm's knocking up. I hope to see them when they've put the light on. It'll be when their plan is most vulnerable, but they'll know with the weather that no living soul is going to be out and watching for them, which will give them confidence.

  I'm not reckoning, where we are, that we can miss the light they'll use, could be tonight or could be tomorrow night - maybe right now they're lying up.

  We'll see that light. I want to hit them when they think they're on the last leg - they're coming down from the dunes and they're out on the beach without cover . . .

  I want to screw it up for Ricky Capel. You've your own target and that's your business - mine is with Ricky Capel. I want him out there in the sand and unable to get to his dinghy - for him the whole thing is failure on a mind-blowing scale. It's only a gesture, but it's what I want... I want to hear him scream, and then I can walk away.'

  She was beside him and her sleeping-bag was

  already half buried in the sand that the wind pulled off the beach. He could hear the steady rhythm of her breathing. He sat hunched, and his eyes raked the shoreline and the upper points of the dunes as he watched for a light. The same sand that covered her was caking on his chest and shoulders, on his lips, cheeks and around his eyes. He would have liked to listen to his voice telling her that he would hit Ricky Capel, then walk away, but she slept and would not have heard him.

  Chapter Seventeen

  He sat on an upper point of the dunes, and the rain was back, and the pledge made to Malachy was broken.

  He watched and she was huddled on her side in the sleeping-bag, eyes clamped shut, sand carpeting her hair. When the drizzle had started, he had carefully lifted the bag's neck so that her mouth and nose were covered; through her misted spectacles he could see that her eyes stayed closed. The pledge, broken, had been that he would watch till two in the morning, and then she would take her turn, and he would sleep. He had not roused her.

  He glanced regularly at her, a few seconds in each two or three minutes, but his focus was on the sea, where a boat would come. More likely the boat would reach them at night, guided by lights, but he thought the weather - rain that drove up on to the dunes, mist, low cloud that shortened the horizon - gave enough cover for a dinghy to be launched. It was as if the few clustered houses by the harbour where the ferry docked were detached from the rest of the wilderness of the island. The voices he heard were those of gulls that ducked and dived in the wind. The tide was up and they had fewer acres of sand to feed from, so their hunt for shells to split open was harder and more frantic. Other sounds were from the wind's thrust in the dunes, and its singing in the low branches of the few trees behind him. He thought she would wake soon because her breathing was less regular than it had been during the night.

  The expanse of the beach was being steadily sub-merged. The tide rolled in. In the gloom, sometimes, he saw the light of a buoy, but no boats came past it.

  She woke. Sudden movement. Wriggling in the

  bag and fighting to get an arm clear, trying to see a wrist and a watch. Cursing. Head lifted. Spectacles snatched off and wiped crudely on the underside of the bag. Spectacles replaced. Looking around, eyes fastening on him.

  'Damn you.'

  It amused Malachy to see her annoyance. 'Good morning, Miss Wilkins.'

  'You promised.'

  'An earthquake wouldn't have woken you.'

  Her fingers were in her hair and sand flew clear. She shook her head violently. 'Damn you because you promised to wake me. If you didn't know it, that is insulting.'

  He turned his eyes back to the sea. What had he seen? Nothing. What could he now see? Nothing.

  Why had he not woken her?

  'There was nothing worth waking you for.'

  'We were supposed to share the watch. You half and me half.'

  'I thought you needed the sleep,' he said vaguely.

  'That is what's insulting. I need the sleep and you don't? That's a cheap shot.'

  He remembered Roz, remembered manufactured

  arguments, remembered vicious, spiky arguments coming out of a clear blue sky, remembered her ability to rouse a dispute from a half-thought-through remark. He watched the surf where the gulls danced, and saw the buoy's light.

  'Right . . . You've seen nothing, so what was so important for you that you could let me sleep?'

  'The chance to think.'

  'Thinking about today, or thinking about your bloody past?'

  Malachy felt himself stiffen, as if there was a catch in his throat. The past, his, was never gone from him.

  Worse at night when he slept, but he would not field that to Polly Wilkins as an excuse for not waking her.

  Bad in the day because it was the small pain that came and came again. Then he was free of it, then it was back.

  She would have seen his mouth stiffen. She was close to him and was kicking out of the sleeping-bag. She had a gimlet gaze on him. He did not know whether she'd intended it, but memories flooded his mind.

  She said, spat, 'Your problem, you're in denial.

  You're hiding. My people fed me the stuff. I'm not ignorant, I know what the accusation against you is, Malachy. It's a pretty bloody one . . . I don't know of anything that beats it, what you were called. So, what's your answer? It's pathetic: I don't know what happened. Being in denial isn't good enough and hiding from it means you'll never clear it. All of this stuff, thrashing around and trying to play hero, won't clear the stigma. You have to face facts, kick some dirt in your own eyes.'

  'Have you finished?'

  'God - it's just that denial isn't a cure.'

  'Can we move on?'

  'I'm trying to help.'

  'Please, don't.'

  Her voice rattled in his ear above the wind and the rumble of the surf. 'Can't you understand anything?

  Malachy, I'm not looking to humble you - I'm not in the bloody queue that was whacking you. Denial doesn't help you. Just repeating I don't know what happened won't lift you. It's shit.'

  She sagged back.

  'Thank you. I'll do my own suffering,' he said grimly.

  Her lips pursed, head down, she started to dig in the rucksack. She found what she searched for. The size of an ironed and folded handkerchief, it was layers of silver baking foil. She said quietly, as if it were important to prove herself, that she was trained and could keep her head down when she squatted and knew about burying the stuff and tinfoil masked smells, and she said she had food. She was on her hands and knees and near to him.

  She touched his arm. Her hand was on his wrist.

  'I think I've realized it, the truth. You really don't know what happened. Each time you say it, it's honest. You don't know, it's the truth . . . I'm batting on - like some bloody shrink - about denial, but you actually don't know what happened. I can see that now. What I'm saying, Malachy, for going on like a pig, I'm sincerely sorry.'

  He saw the regret on her face. He took her hand, small and cold, lifted it, brushed his lips against it and dropped it. He watched her crawl away, then

  disappear down into a gully, go clear of the wind, and resumed his watch on the sea, the waves and the surf.

  She was, he realized, the first person who believed him - and no other bastard had. Except her, they had all rushed to judgement, vindictive or ignorant.

  27 April 2004

  He was led by the client from the hallway and into the l
iving room, and young Kitchen was following him.

  'Oh, that's a fine room, excellent dimensions, right for a family,' Horace Wield enthused. He owned his high-street business outright, did not have the clutter of partners. He liked to believe that, as an estate agent, he provided a better service than the chains that competed with him. It was all about reputation and building confidence with clients, whether they were buyers or sellers. This was a seller, and his first estimate was of an asking price of £449,000, and a bottom limit if the going was tough of £419,000. 'So much you can do with a room like this - have a bridge party, friends in for a football game on the telly, a kids' session, relatives round at Christmas ... I'm confident that a house with a room of this size will, absolutely, not hang around, and it's very nicely decorated. People like that - spend an arm and a leg on the house and want to enjoy it, not have to rip the wallpaper straight off. Very tasteful. .. Thinking of going somewhere smaller, are we?'

  They were. Their son was on the move, but they had a daughter up north and wanted to be closer. A mass of silver-framed photographs stood on the mantelpiece over the gas fire

  - small children, the daughter and her husband, and a young man standing proudly in profile, wearing mess uniform.

  'The carpets and curtains look best quality. Do I assume they'll be staying, available to a buyer? Always good if they can be left. . . Mr Kitchen will note that.'

  Well, he'd taken a chance on that young man, and Horace Wield had built a flourishing, trusted business on following the instinct of his nose. When he had advertised in the local free sheet for a trainee assistant agent he had been bombarded by youths with earrings and bulky women in trouser suits with shoulder pads, and there had been young Kitchen, who was ten years too old to be a trainee assistant, but had a bearing about him, and damn fine shined shoes.

  Had something of sadness and something remote, distant, a presence and a good voice, had come out of the army, wanted civilian life. Horace Wield had gone with his nose, and it was a Friday that marked the end of young Kitchen's first week. Of course, the money was rubbish for a man of his age, but he'd drilled the magic word 'prospects' into him

  - come Monday when he had Rotary, or Tuesday when he had golf, he would seriously consider letting young Kitchen out on his own, if the property was at the market's lower end. Truth was, he liked him, and thought a bit of polish walked with him.

  When they reached the kitchen, and when they were taken up the stairs to see three bedrooms and a bathroom with walk-in shower, he had found the same cleansed perfection of the living room and the garden. A door off the hall was opened. This was a different room, an untidy space ...

  a shrine.

  He waffled, 'Ah, a little place where a chap can shut himself away. I suppose, a bit of a refuge. Sort of room every man should have. You're getting the details, Mr Kitchen?'

  Why a shrine? There must have been four more pictures of the son in uniform, but not best dress. Helmeted and in a flak-jacket; unshaven and in fatigues; with an arm round a colleague, crouched in front of a small tank; turning to the camera and grinning and wearing full combat kit with a mosque dome and minaret tower as background - and in every picture a rifle was held in obvious readiness for use.

  Two of the pictures were held with drawing-pins to the shelves of books, one was on the window-ledge, another was adhesive-taped to the side of the screen. Normally, Horace Wield would not have talked so fully at a first meeting with a client. He did it for the benefit of young Kitchen, to give him a feel for the patter.

  'Don't tell me-your boy's out in Iraq. That's a hell-hole.'

  The boy was in the Military Police. Had done Kosovo, then been posted to Al-Amara.

  T sympathize. It must be a considerable anxiety to you both having him in that awful country.'

  His wife refused to look at pictures of their son in Iraq, which was why they were in his den.

  'Very brave young fellows, and a scandalous lack of support for them from too many back home. We should be right behind them. I think every last one of them is a hero -

  yes, a hero. We ought all to be grateful for their sense of duty and courage ... Anyway, this is a very useful space for any member of a family and of any age - don't you think so, Mr Kitchen?'

  He looked round, and the doorway was empty. When they went into the hall, Horace Wield assumed that his trainee assistant was in the kitchen and measuring, or in the con-servatory, noting details. A frown twitched at his forehead: against the coatstand was the clipboard that young Kitchen had carried. A chill draught came through the front door, which had been left ajar.

  Gaunt climbed the stairs.

  As a precaution, he had emptied his wallet of all credit cards and identification documents, and had left only enough money for the taxi ride to this feral place and a taxi back, assuming the impossible - that he could find one.

  The driver who had brought him from the gates of Vauxhall Bridge Cross and had dropped him in the heart of the estate had leered at him as he took the money and said, 'You sure this is where you want to be, sir? Sorry and all that, but we don't do waits here.'

  'Quite sure, thank you.' He had seen youths loitering at a corner where the graffiti was thick. They had hoods over their heads and scarves across their faces, and he had seen a man with two German shepherds, studded collars on short leashes standing impatiently while they peed in turn on mud beside a pavement.

  He had lifted his tie knot, pulled a little more of his handkerchief from the breast pocket, swung his furled umbrella forward and stepped out for the block's entrance. He had looked at flat roofs and wondered from which three youths had been suspended, and at lamp posts and wondered at which a man had been trussed.

  He avoided human excreta on the stairs, and at the second level he used his umbrella tip to ease a syringe into a corner. He came out on to the walkway. The taxi driver had said, 'I wouldn't have any of mine live here. They'd be better off in Bosnia . . . Good luck, sir, and watch your back.' He went by the doorways with the locked barricades, went past a door behind which a child howled and saw the number - where the man, Kitchen, with the cross on his shoulder, had lived. He had spoken half an hour earlier, before leaving the safety of VBX, to Polly and . . . Another door, another barricade. He rang the bell.

  'Mrs Johnson? A very good morning to you, Mrs Johnson. Tony sent me.'

  %

  He made tea.

  He smelt age and wondered if he, alone in the dotage of his retirement, would smell the same.

  He was told in which cupboard he would find the biscuit tin.

  He carried in the tray, poured through a strainer and was instructed on how much milk she took. He used old-world charm to relax her, complimented her on the decoration of her home, the choice of pictures and the decent simplicity of her crockery.

  He said, as she held her cup and saucer, that his business was Malachy Kitchen, and saw defiance settle on her face. He hurried to assure her that he intended no harm to her former neighbour but had come to learn.

  Of course, he had an image of a vigilante: a swollen beer belly and shaven head, a vocabulary of

  obscenities and a muscular arm chucking broken bricks at the windows of a suspected pervert's home.

  With reedy determination in her voice, the sparrow-sized woman contradicted the image.

  She said, 'No one else ever did what he done.

  Nobody ever stood up to them the way he did. I thought it was because of me. I was attacked for my bag, I was put in hospital - yes, I'm rid of the sling, but the arm's not right, not yet - and what he did was after that. Not that he told me it was because of what had happened to me, one old lady who is forgotten and's lived too long. There was no boast in him, wasn't trophies he went after . . . I know it was him. When you live too long you get that sense - and there wasn't any one else on the Amersham who'd have done it. I told him to his face that I had not given myself such importance, and I asked him to kiss me, and he did. Then he was gone. I'm alone too much, and alo
ne I think. Cheeky of me, really, to believe it was for me. There was what happened here, and then my friend

  - that's Dawn - saw something in the paper about the house of a big drug man being burned. The last time Malachy came, when he kissed me, he had scars on him like he'd been beaten. Only after he'd gone did I know it wasn't for me. I had that conceit, but I've ditched i t . . . It was about the past. Something hideous happened to him in his past, and I haven't an idea what.

  His past gave him strength, so much of it, and more guts than any other man on the Amersham... Are you going to tell me what he's done now, where he is?'

  Gravely, Freddie Gaunt shook his head. He did not think she expected an answer. Her cup was as full as when he had poured it. Pieces had fallen into place; confirmations had been given.

  She said, 'Each thing he did was harder than the last. Down at our Pensioners' Association they have gym machines, and there's that gear you walk on and you can make it go faster. You with me? It's like each time he did something he made the machine go quicker... You've come to see me, which tells me he's not given up on it, and so I'm thinking he must be running now . . . '

  Running rather fast, Gaunt thought, but did not tell her.

  'If you ever see him, you give him my love. Give him Millie Johnson's love, please. Don't let it go too fast, that machine.'

  He heard a hiss of passion in her voice, but it subsided.

  'I get tired. I'm sorry.'

  He took the cups, saucers and plates back into the kitchen, returned the biscuits to the tin and washed up

  - as her one-time neighbour would have - leaving the crockery to dry on the draining-board. When he left, her eyes were closed and she might have been asleep.

  He closed the front door quietly, pulled the barricade shut and heard the click of its lock.

  The boy, his grandson, screamed.

  Not letting go of the wheel, Harry Rogers swung his shoulders. The plate arced up and the sandwiches flew towards the ceiling. The kid was pitched sideways and his shoulder cannoned against the rail under the windows. He saw young Paul slide down.