Why are we here, sir?’ shouted a voice from the back.
It was ignored. ‘Remember to keep your helmets on at all times,’ he continued, ‘so that those of you with brains,’ he looked towards the back of the room with a wolfish smile, ‘keep them.’
Archie stood up and switched on his phone. If the guy wasn’t local then he would be going out of range in thirty minutes, leaving the city. It would be back to the drawing board. He would have to invest in a GPS system. He had ten minutes to kill before there was any point in accessing the app. The newsfeed on his screen was all about the NSA tapping the German chancellor’s phone. If Angela Merkel wasn’t immune, then no one was. Her spokesman, Jan Albrecht of the European Committee of Civil Liberties, had travelled to Washington to tell Obama that snooping wasn’t a nice thing to do to friends. Now he was asking David Cameron to explain the fibre-glass listening station on top of the British Embassy in Berlin, asking questions about his Five Eyes eavesdropping coalition with the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Was it news that there were spies and monitoring, Archie wondered. Was Edward Snowden in his Russian refuge wise to have told the world what it already suspected, but didn’t want to hear – that they were all suspects, and international bonhomie wasn’t much more than the froth on a social media promise of coffee. Now everyone was tweeting in a confessional frenzy of squeaky clean while the real terrorists hid as avatars in virtual worlds.
Archie looked along the street and wondered if the police had other suspects in Petal’s disappearance. And then it occurred to him, had their visit been about something else? Perhaps something had happened to his wife or son? He hadn’t thought of it before. A tight feeling grew in his chest. His neck constricted and a pulse began to beat a ‘Hey, Stupid’ tattoo in his forehead. He stood up, swung his arms and stretched them above his head. He rolled his shoulders. They were stiff and cold. He couldn’t catch his breath. He began to cough, fighting for air on his hands and knees, his eyes watering. Is this how it would end? Choking on anxiety in a derelict shop doorway? The coughing fit subsided, his throat gulping. He sat back on his heels and tapped the tracking app on his phone. The tracker highlighted a spot on the map not ten minutes away. He should have accessed it sooner. Archie turned up his collar and set off. The dot was static and he switched off his phone to avoid being located. He would turn it back on when he got to the location if the car wasn’t in sight. Then he would check on Hannah and Daniel.
* * *
The street was dark. The tenements had given way to high metal gates and long walls with hoardings advertising building companies and hauliers. He came to a wire fence and stopped. He switched the phone back on. The car was here, but not on the street. There was an unlocked gate to his right. He pushed it open. In the glow from a light in a portacabin, he saw rows and rows of cars. ‘Daily hire at mates rates,’ proclaimed a banner. There was no sign of life. A car engine ticked as it cooled in the night air. He walked over and laid his hand flat on the bonnet. There was almost no heat left in it. He bent down and retrieved his tracker from the bumper, glancing round to check that he wasn’t being watched. He wished he had night-vision goggles and a pistol in his belt, a Sig Sauer. He was a sitting duck. There was a slither of gravel nearby and he threw himself flat. He held his breath. The sound grew closer and he risked a glance under the car, turning his head millimetre by millimetre. An urban fox stopped in mid-track, turned his amber eyes on him, their mirrored surface flashing an unearthly silver in the light from the hut, and trotted off. Archie rested his head on his folded arms. The parking lot was quiet, the man he was hunting either long gone or laughing at him from the shadows.
He got to his feet, brushed the gravel from his front. On impulse he shouted, ‘If you’re still here, I just want to talk. I’m looking for a woman called Petal.’ His voice carried a long way in the night air. There was no reply. He looked round a last time and began to walk towards his old home. ‘They’ll be alright,’ he said to himself, over and over again, pushing the images from his mind of families lying dead in their homes covered with their furnishings; curtains and spreads of flowery fabric, sewn on happy days, now shrouds.
As he walked along the back alleys and side streets, he imagined he could put his key in the door and shout, ‘Hello, darling. I’m home.’ He imagined the food on the table, his son wrapped in a towel after bath-time, smelling of shampoo and baby oil. He imagined sitting him on his knee as he ate his meal, enjoying the soft weight of him, seeing his luminous eyes as the lids fell and he dropped into sleep to wake with a startle. He missed the shared warmth of two people sitting together, holding each other, those precious moments of loving touch. What had anything else been about. Really? He paused to catch his breath, holding onto a rusty railing.
The houses in his old street were growing quiet as he passed along the back lane, rolling his foot down on each step, heel to toe, a cat’s tread. He depressed the new handle on the back gate. It didn’t give. He put his hands on the wall and heaved himself up onto the top. His wife was sitting at the kitchen table with her mother, Frances. They were talking over a bottle of wine that stood beside the baby alarm. There was the faint glow of a night light from Daniel’s room. He dropped down onto the ground and a flood-light flashed on, triggered by the movement. Margaret must have spotted him on his last visit. Security had increased. His wife looked towards the wall, and froze. Her mother picked up her phone and dialled a number. He climbed back up onto the wall and dropped into the lane, running, the alley close about him, a smell of household rubbish and cat pee. He tripped over a bin and its metal lid crashed to the ground before he could catch it. The noise stunned him. He stopped and covered his ears, then walked towards the road. Three streets later, a police car passed him, and slowed. He opened the nearest garden gate and strolled up the path, reaching into his pocket as if he was looking for a key, as if he lived there. The police car picked up speed and turned right at the end of the road towards his old home. He turned on his heel and walked back to the gate. A lone poppy, the last of the season, drooped over the path. He remembered walking through the poppy fields with his unit; their camouflage was yellow in the sea of pink, their weapons black like the centre of the flowers. At the end of the summer, he had slashed at the small, green grenades of their seed pods. Their gossamer flowers had been nothing like the wreaths laid for the fallen, those boys from yesterday and a hundred years ago – clay men cast in bronze on war memorials, eternal and indestructible. Was he one of them, the glorious dead, although still walking? He twisted off the poppy’s head and crushed it under foot. One less. Stepping over the gate, he headed for Mike’s flat, his head down.
He went in by the front door without scanning the street, too tired to care about anything; made an outcast by the flood-light at his old home, as if he was the enemy, to be identified and then eliminated. He called Mike’s name as he went in but there was no reply. He walked into his box room. It was strung with fairy lights, and a faux-fur bedspread from a pound shop safari had been added to the bed. Women’s clothes were strewn over it, the strange fronds of legs of worn tights trailing onto the floor. He reached under the bed and found his sleeping bag stuffed behind his rucksack, then he stepped over hair tongs on the floor and walked into the kitchen. The bags of food had all been unpacked into the cupboards, there was a bottle of bleach by the sink and a different microwave on the counter. Mike’s friend must have moved in. Archie was an intruder now. He put the keys on the counter with two pounds and took a loaf of bread and a packet of raisins from the cupboard. He plugged in his phone to charge and logged onto the computer in the hall to bring up his Facebook page. ‘Take a week off to consolidate your own practice, girls,’ he typed. ‘Follow the routine I have shown you, and use the verse from James 1:4 as your motivation. “Let patience have her perfect work that ye may be perfect and entire, wanting for nothing.” I’ll review your progress next week.’ He shut down the computer and set off for his den.
32
Calum looked tired when he came into Petal’s room with some tea and toast. ‘How was your date, you slimy bastard?’ she asked.
He looked up sharply and put the tray on the table with a sigh. ‘I’ve warned you about your manners before,’ he said.
She moved away from the wall on which she had been leaning to the edge of the bed. Her ankle still hurt but the pain was less now. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, ‘I’ve been too hungry to sleep. You’ve been gone a long time.’ She was determined to keep him on side. ‘How was your date?’
‘Sarcasm won’t get you anywhere,’ he replied.
‘I wasn’t being sarcy,’ she said.
‘Okay. The evening wasn’t what I expected.’
‘No?’
‘No. Let’s just say that when one arranges to meet a beautiful woman, one doesn’t expect some hairy male bastard to turn up. One who has two homes but lives in a wood pile. The interesting fruits of shadowing someone.’
‘You’re not making any sense.’
‘No,’ he agreed. ‘I’m working on it.’ He passed her a cup of tea. ‘Milk, no sugar. You see, we’re getting to know each other.’ He took a sip of his own. ‘Would anyone be looking for you?’
‘Apart from the police, you dickhead?’ she said.
‘Language, Petal. Your behaviour really is most challenging sometimes. Believe me when I say, the loser I saw was no cop. Let’s just say, he pinged my radar. I have a feeling for these things. It’s a gift.’
‘Why would you have a gift like that?’
‘We all have it, Pet. Our primitive instincts. We can feel if someone is watching us. Have you never looked up at a window on the street and seen someone looking straight at you? How did you lock onto them when there were hundreds of places you could have looked, other windows? Your inner cavewoman, your Paleo-pal, deep inside, told you they were there. It’s your animal instinct and it talks to you all the time. We just forget about it, tune it out, in this world of computers and 4G. The primitive world is all around you, Petal. It never went away, only nowadays the hunters are watching their prey from the ether, hiding in the Cloud. They’re waiting to pounce when you break cover.’
‘Calum,’ she said, ‘I’m too tired and hungry to listen to this.’
‘Hell’s empty and the devils are all here.’
He smiled and picked up the plate of toast, picked up a piece and held it to her lips. ‘Bite this, Petal,’ he said.
She leaned back. ‘No, thanks.’
‘Just one bite to keep me happy, then you can eat the rest yourself.’
‘You’re making me uncomfortable,’ she said.
‘One bite. Here comes the plane.’
She opened her mouth. He pulled the toast away as she bit down. ‘Why would I feed someone like you?’ he shouted. ‘Why should I even be interested? Eh? You tell me that? Why should I bother talking to you when you can’t be bothered to listen?’ He walked out of the room and banged the door shut.
Petal put her head in her hands and looked at the plate of cold toast before her. She picked it up and began to chew the pulpy flour. ‘He will not beat me,’ she said. ‘He is mentally ill, and I am a skilled mental health practitioner. I will not jump into his traps. I am Francine the Brave. I am Francine the Survivor. He just needs a good felt workshop.’ She laughed out loud at the thought. ‘I am positive-talking myself. I am positive-talking myself because I am so deeply in the shit.’ She swallowed the last piece of toast and began to tap her head, eye sockets, chin, collar bone, chest and fingers. ‘I will get out of this,’ she said. ‘I am a professional mental health practitioner. Emotional Freedom Technique is my friend. EFT and tapping will help me control my thoughts. I will survive.’ She tapped the message into her body. Morse code. ‘I will survive.’ Tap, tap, tap. ‘I will survive.’
33
Archie’s sleeping bag was warm and he slept till mid-morning. Sunday had disappeared in a blur of tins of beer drunk on an empty stomach. Through the branches of his home, he could see the volunteers gathering round the portacabin at the start of the week. The main man, the gardener, opened the shed full of spades and hoes. There was a bucket of gloves, fingers poking out over the edge, others reaching up into the air. He remembered the hand he had recovered after the IED went off under the Snatch Land Rover in front of him on the road to Now Zad. It had seemed fake, a Halloween prop, and he had put it into the Bergen with other body parts from the road. It was a child’s game, gathering pieces of an action doll with pop-on, pop-off limbs. The torso bulged under a tarpaulin in the back of the Land Rover and in his worst nightmares, it crawled along the road, wailing through the gaping lips of its severed neck. Archie picked up his can of water to take a sip but spilt it down his front. He rolled onto his side, pulling the wet fabric away from his chest. The air was cold, although the sun was breaking through the sea mist from the estuary. There was the clang of gates opening at the end of the drive, and three powerful black cars rolled up to the hut. A number of men and women got out laughing, then pulled on Hunter wellies and put waxed jackets over their suits. Their leader shook hands with the head gardener. There was more laughter as the group plunged their hands into the bucket of gloves and shared them out.
‘Gather round everybody,’ said their leader. ‘As you know, the bank likes to give you the opportunity to actively promote team-building while giving something back to the community. David here,’ he waved at the head gardener, who smiled, ‘has kindly organised a team challenge. The first team to fill six buckets with windfall apples from the orchard will be served a vegetarian lunch by the losing team. Although it goes without saying that everyone who has turned up today is a winner. As the Governor of the Bank of England, Mark Carney, said of the miraculous growth in our economy, the glass is half full.’
There was a cheer. David stepped forward. ‘I’d like to welcome you all to the therapeutic community garden in Edinburgh’s oldest surviving orchard. The hospital here was founded by Andrew Duncan after the poet Robert Fergusson died aged twenty-three in chains in Bedlam. Duncan was so shocked by what he saw that, like Philippe Pinel, who smashed the chains of inmates at the notorious Salpêtrière in Paris, he wanted to establish a humane and therapeutic environment for those suffering from mental distress. The orchard here was part of that programme. Nature is nurture. It connects us all to a fruitful world outside our own immediate concerns.’
A mobile phone went off, and one of the group turned away, pressing it to his ear as he strolled towards the wall. David continued, ‘Nature places us as fellow creatures in a true relationship to all the other eco-, macro- and micro-systems around us. It is not a place for ego, but simply a place to be. Harmonious co-existence is essential to our survival and the larger environment. As the economist Schumacher said in 1973, “Small is beautiful.” I commend his book to you. We need to move away from the all-consuming systems of industry and downsize, literally return to our roots – please excuse the pun. If the world consumed at the same rate as Britain then we’d need three planets worth of resources to support the human race. You do the sums. I hope that today’s experience will give you a sense of proportionality.’
‘Do you mind if I light up, David?’ asked the lead banker. ‘Sorry to interrupt. You were saying?’
‘I’d finished,’ said David.
‘Great,’ said the banker and started a short round of applause, banging his gloved hand on one thigh.
Archie rolled onto his back and sighed. He could hear the group walking along the gravel path to the orchard and heard their laughter and the thump of apples as they hit the bottom of the tubs. He looked out again, wondering if he could slip out from his hiding place and stretch his legs. There was a man he hadn’t noticed before sitting in the shadow of one of the shrubs in the circle of chairs. Archie was sure he hadn’t got out of one of the cars. He was looking towards Archie’s log-pile house
. He was about the height and weight of the guy he had tried to follow on Saturday night. The man pulled a packet of cigarettes out of his pocket and put one between his lips, then, still staring at Archie’s hiding place, he pulled a lighter from his pocket. He held it up in the air and clicked it several times. A small yellow flame appeared. He lit up, and then, putting the lighter in his pocket, walked over to the shed. A can of petrol was lying at the door, ready to fill the mower. The paths were overgrown with grass. The man picked up the can of fuel and swung it to gauge how much was left in it. It was heavy. He looked back towards Archie’s den. He smiled and patted his lighter pocket. Archie wanted to bomb-blast out of his shelter and crash into him, crush him to the ground and grind his nose into his skull with his bunched fist. He held himself rigid. He began to count to ten, then twenty. He tried to breathe into his abdomen. A groan escaped from deep in his chest. ‘He is not a target,’ he said to himself. ‘I am not a target.’ He wished he had a gun. He could sort this fucker out. Watch his head pop and his brains flower red under the boiled egg-shell of his skull. He took another breath. Thirty. Thirty. Count to a hundred. Thirty-one, thirty-two, and he was back on a rocky road, driving up into the hills behind the Snatch, thirty-three, closer to the target area … thirty-four. Stop counting. Stop counting. Archie threw open the door of his hiding place and ran towards the shed. The man was gone. The shed was deserted, everything stored neatly in its place: rows of spades, forks and rakes hanging above the petrol can. He looked right and left, nothing. He stopped and turned round, fast-walking away from the inhabited part of the garden towards the deep cover of the shrubs along the wall.
The Last Tour of Archie Forbes Page 15
