A Line in the Sand

by Gerald Seymour

  "The idea of sending policemen into those marshes, that sort of terrain, against a dangerous fanatic, is preposterous."

  "Another way, there has to be."

  "No. My men have to go in for him."

  The politician rocked and reached out to his table to steady himself. Perhaps, Fenton thought, he saw an image of camouflaged soldiers dragging a body from the water of those hideous marshes that bordered the road going away from the godawful place.

  Perhaps he saw an image of young Muslims barricading streets in old mill towns of central and northern England. Perhaps he saw an image of a British diplomat being pulled from his car by the mob in Tehran or Karachi, Khartoum or Amman. Every politician, every minister of government he had ever known, was traumatized when the men came from the dark crevices at the edge of his fiefdom, did not confide, demanded free-range action, and dumped on the desk a sack-load of responsibility. The colonel had his finger up, wagged it at the secretary of state as if he prepared to go in for the kill..... there is no other way.

  It was Fenton's moment. He enjoyed, always, a trifle of mischief. He looked at Cox, and Cox nodded encouragement.

  Fenton smiled warmly.

  "I think I can help. I think I can suggest an alternative procedure..."

  He had been there through the night and all of the day before. The necessary stillness and silence were as second nature to him.

  In that time he had eaten two cold sausages given him by his mother and not needed more.

  He sat motionless, sheltered by a rock from the worst of the wind. He was a thousand feet above the small quarry beside the road where the police waited, two hundred feet above the escarpment of raw stones and weathered tree sprigs where the eyrie was. He had his telescope and the binoculars but he did not use them; he could see all that he needed to see without them. There was only the wind's light whistle to break the silence rippling around him; it was an hour since he had last whispered into the radio the police had given him, and the birds at the eyrie were quieter now.

  When the egg thieves came to the mountains the police always called him because, as they told him, he was the best.

  The anger burned slowly in the young man's mind.. . When he had climbed to his vantage-point, using dead ground, never breaking the skyline or making a silhouette, the birds had been frantic at the eyrie, wheeling and crying. It was impossible for the young man to comprehend that a collector would hire people to come to the eagles' eyrie to take eggs, and harder than impossible for him to understand that those same eggs, a pair of them, would be valued by the collector at a figure in excess of a thousand pounds. The notion that the collector would hide the dead, smooth eggs away from sight and keep them only for a personal gratification was impossible for him to believe... He loved the birds. He knew every one of the nine pairs that flew, soared, hunted, within twenty miles of where he now sat.

  The previous afternoon he had seen the decoy come down the mountain. It was intended that the movement should be seen. There was a routine and he had learned it. The eyrie would be hit in darkness. A pair of men would climb to it with the aid of passive infrared goggles, and would lift the eggs. They would move them down a few hundred metres and hide them. They would be clean when they reached the road and their car. A decoy would go on to the mountain the next day and appear to make a pick-up, would search in the heather or among boulders, would seem to lift something, and would then come down. Were he stopped and arrested, the decoy, too, would be clean, the surveillance would be blown and the eggs abandoned. If the decoy were not stopped then a man would come for the pick-up the following day. The pick-up man had gone close in the misty dawn light to a group of hinds, had been within thirty yards of them and not disturbed them, had been good. But, he had disturbed a solitary ptarmigan, and that had been enough for the young man at his vantage-point. He had followed the pick-up, his eyes needling on him. He had seen him lift the eggs from a hiding-place and start, with great care, to come down from the mountain. He had told the police over the radio where he would reach the road.

  The mountains of this distant corner of north-west Scotland, their eyries and the vantage-points, were the young man's kingdom.

  He was Andy Chalmers, twenty-four years old, employed to shoot hinds in the forestry plantations for ten months of the year, and to stalk stags for the guests of the owner of his estate Mr. Gabriel Fenton to shoot during the remaining two months of the year. He was the junior by twenty years of the other stalkers of the neighbouring estates, and in that small, close-knit world he was a minor legend.

  If he had not been exceptional, he would never have been allowed near Mr. Gabriel Fenton's guests. Were it not for his remarkable skills at covering ground in covert stealth, he would have been relegated to renewing boundary posts and hammering in staples to fasten the fencing wire. He was surly with the guests, had no conversation, treated wealthy men with undisguised contempt, made them crawl on their stomachs in water-filled gullies till they shook with exhaustion, snarled at them if they coughed or spat phlegm, and took them closer to the target stags than any of the other stalkers would have dared. The guests adored his rudeness, and insisted on him accompanying them when they returned in subsequent years.

  He watched the distressed wheel of the birds above their thieved eyrie. Many times the pick-up, from cover, searched the ground above and below him for evidence that he was identified, and failed to find it. There was little satisfaction for Chalmers in the knowledge that the police waited in the small quarry beside the road. The life warmth of the eggs was gone and the embryos already dead. The pick-up disappeared into the tree-line that hid the quarry and the road.

  The radio called him.

  The wind blustered against him and rain was shafting the far end of the glen.

  He looked a last time at the birds and felt a sense of shame that he could not help them.

  He took the direct route down, using a small stream bed. The cascading icy water was over his ankles, in his boots, and he felt nothing but the shame.

  He came to the quarry. They were big men, the police out from Fort William, and they towered over him, but they treated this slight, spare, filthy young man with a rare respect. They thanked him, and then led him into the trees and pointed to the yellowed yolk of two eggs and the smashed shells. The pick-ups always tried to destroy evidence in the moments before they were arrested. He looked at the debris and thought of the fledglings they would have made, and of the sad, aimless flight over the eyrie of the adult birds. He started towards the police car where the shaven-headed pickup sat handcuffed on the back seat, but the policemen held his arms to prevent him reaching the door.

  He was told there was a message for him, at the factor's office.

  * * *

  Peggy was a cog in the wheel of the village's life. She thought of herself as a large cog but to others in the community she was of small importance. She didn't care to acknowledge that reality. Her husband, dead nine years from thrombosis, had been a district engineer with the water authority, and within a week of burying him she had joined every committee that gave her access. Her loneliness was stifled by a workhorse dedication to activity. Nothing was too much trouble for her: she hustled through the hours of the day, out with her bicycle and her weathered bag, on her duties with the Women's Institute and the Wildlife Group and the committee for the Red Cross. She had a checklist of visits to be made each week to the young mothers and the sick and the elderly. Dressed in clothes of violently bright colours, she believed herself popular and integral. What she was asked to do, she did. She was happily unaware that, to most of her fellow villagers, she was a figure of ridicule. She had no malice. She had a loyalty. On that Sunday morning she was tasked by the Wildlife Group to perform a duty which would also feed the curiosity, inquisitiveness, on which she lived.

  Frank Perry could see, side on, the slight wry grin on Davies's face, and his hand sliding away from under his jacket. It wasn't anything Perry had seen before: Peggy's coat was a tec
hnicolour patchwork of colour, and her garish lipstick matched none of the coat's hues.

  "Hello, Peggy, keeping well? Yes?"

  Peggy stared past him, a sort of disappointment clouding her features.

  "Not too bad, thank you," she said severely.

  Peggy's disappointment, he thought, was that she hadn't spied out an armoured personnel carrier in the hall, nor a platoon of crouched paratroops. She was on her toes to see better into the unlit hall. Perry wondered if she'd noticed the new tree and the new post, the tyre marks; she probably had because she missed little.

  "How can I help?"

  "It's Meryl I came to see Wildlife Group business."

  "Sorry, you'll have to make do with me. Meryl's still upstairs."

  The unmarked car cruised behind her and Davies gave it a small wave as if to indicate that the woman in the dream coat was not a threat. There were two more cars in the village that morning. Perry was unshaven, half dressed, and he had left Meryl upstairs in bed. She had been crying through half the night, and only now had slipped into a beaten, exhausted sleep.

  Peggy blurted her message, "I was asked to come, the Wildlife Group asked me. Meryl was doing typing for us. I've come for it. I've been asked-' "Sorry, you're confusing me." But he was not confused, just wasn't going to make it easy for her.

  "Your next meeting's not till Tuesday. She'll have it done by then, she'll bring it with her."

  "I've been asked to take it from her."

  "By whom?"

  "By everybody chairman, treasurer, secretary. We want it back." He was determined to make her spell it out, word by bloody word.

  "But it's not finished."

  "We'll finish it ourselves."

  He said evenly, "She'll bring it herself to the meeting on Tuesday."

  "She's not wanted there. We don't want her at our meeting."

  The day after he, Meryl and Stephen had moved in, Peggy had brought a fresh-baked apple pie to the house. Of course, she'd wanted to look over the new arrivals, but she had brought the pie and talked about infant schools for Stephen with Meryl, the better shops and the reliable tradesmen, and introduced her to the Institute. She had made Meryl feel wanted... He didn't curse, as he wanted to. He saw that the grin had chilled off the detective's face.

  Perry said quietly, "I'll get them. Would you like to take the stuff for the Red Cross? Have they decided that Meryl is a security risk too? It'll save you two visits."

  "Yes," she said loudly.

  "That would be best."

  He went inside. Meryl called down to him to find out who was at the door. He said he would be up in a moment. He went into the kitchen. Last night's supper plates were still in the sink, with the whisky glass.

  He took the folders from the cupboard where Meryl kept her typing and flipped through them. There was the scrawled handwriting of minutes and deliberations by the group and the committee members, the chaotic mess that had been dumped on his Meryl. Her typed pages were clean, neat, because trouble was taken over them, because care was important to her. As he turned the pristine, ordered pages of her work, his resolve began to founder. Because of him, his past, his betrayal and his damned God-given obstinacy, she suffered. He turned the pages of her typing prize lists, outings, letters of thanks to guest speakers all so bloody mundane and ordinary, but they were the necessities of her life.. . Like an outcast, he felt the touch of plague.

  There was a church, St. James's, outside the next village down the coast, which had been built on the site of a lepers' hospital. Dominic had told him that when the church was built, a hundred and fifty years back, the labourers digging the foundations had found many skeletons, not laid out as in Christian burial, but in rejected disarray. When the first sore appeared, suppurating, and the first bleeding, and a man was sent to the lepers' place, had his friends still known him? Or, had they turned their backs?

  He gathered Meryl's pages back into the folders and took them to the front door, reaching past the detective to hand them to Peggy.

  She dropped the folders into her bag.

  So much he could have said, but Meryl wouldn't have wanted it said.

  "There you are, Peggy, everything you asked for."

  He knew that by not cursing, not swearing, he destroyed her. Her chin shook, and her tongue wriggled and spread the lipstick on her teeth.

  "I was sent. It wasn't my idea.

  "You're with us or you're against us," that's what they said. If I'm against them I'm shut out. Doesn't matter to you, Frank, you can move on. I've nowhere else to go. It's not my fault, I'm not to blame. If I don't bring those papers back, I'm out. I'm a victim, too. It's not personal, Frank."

  She ran to her bicycle.

  He let Davies shut the door on her, and climbed the stairs to the bedroom. There was never a good time for telling a bad story. She was wiping the sleep out of her eyes.

  "I don't want to tell you this, but I have to. Peggy came to take away your typing for the Wildlife Group and the Red Cross. She's going to do it herself. We are not wanted... I could have thrown it all at her face and made her grovel down in the road to pick it up. I didn't. I know what I'm doing to you." He paused and drew a breath.

  "They say he's still out there. He may be hurt but, if the injury isn't severe, he'll come again. They say the dogs found a scent, then lost it... Peggy's going to do the typing herself." She screamed.

  The shrill staccato burst of her scream filled the room. She convulsed in the bed.

  The scream died and her eyes stared up at him, wide and frightened.

  Still in his pyjamas. Stephen was in the doorway, holding a toy lorry and gazing at him.

  He told Stephen that his mother was unwell. He tried to hold him but the boy recoiled. He left the bedroom, where there were no lights, no pictures, where the glass of the mirror on the dressing-table was scarred with adhesive tape. He walked slowly down the dark stairs, as if descending into the lower reaches of the bunker.

  He stopped at the dining-room door.

  "How much worse does it have to get?"

  "Does what "have to get", Mr. Perry?"

  "How much worse does it have to get before I'm told the Al Haig story?"

  "A bit worse, Mr. Perry."

  He hung his head.

  "And how much worse does it have to get before I say I'm at the end of the road, before I'm ready to run, quit?"

  The detective, sitting at the table, the machine-gun beside his hand, looked up keenly.

  "That door was open once, but not any more. I think it was on offer a bit ago, but it's not an option, Mr. Perry, not now."

  Cathy Parker had used one of the sleeping hutches at the top of the building to catch four hours' rest. She came down to the floor. Fenton was there with Cox. She riffled through her papers for the address in Somerset. It would be a good drive; she'd enjoy the blessing of being clear of Thames House.

  She might have time to call in for tea or a sherry with her parents afterwards. Fenton was talking, convincing.

  "You worry too much, Barney, you'll go to your grave worrying. You heard what the American told young Geoff, this man is essentially a civilian. He is not military, doesn't have the mindset of manuals. He will think like a civilian and move like one. You don't put the military in against him, you put another civilian there. If it had been the military then you've lost control and that's some thing to worry about. God, the day I side with a politician is a day to remember."

  She walked past the grinning Fenton, and Cox whose face was an enigmatic mask, and paused at the closed, locked door. She took a pen from her handbag and made a decisive line through the writing on the sheet of paper fastened there. She wrote boldly, DAY FOUR, and moved off down the dull-lit corridor.

  The Iranian crude was offloaded. The tanker was buoyed up, monstrously high above the waves rippling against its hull, riding to its anchor. The radio message had still not been received.

  Perplexed, the master called the terminal authority, reported a turbine probl
em and requested that a barge come alongside to take his crew ashore. He did not understand why the order to make the rendezvous had not reached him.

  All day Peggy had anticipated the opportunity to call on the new people who had moved into the cottage on the opposite side of the road to the church. It was a dingy little place, only three bedrooms. Old Mrs. Wilson, now in a nursing home, had always said the damp in the walls of Rose Cottage had wrecked her hips. The ride home had settled her after the confrontation with Frank Perry, and she'd collected the pie, wrapped it in tinfoil and balanced it under the clip on the rack over the back wheel of her bicycle.

  She had hoped to be invited inside, but she had had to hand over her welcoming gift on the step. A man had answered her sharp rap at the door, wispy-haired, slight, raggedly and dully dressed, and seemed to be astonished that a complete stranger brought an apple and blackberry pie to him.

  He said his name was Blackmore. There were half-emptied packing cases in the hall behind him. He told her no more about himself other than his name. A woman came down the stairs, picked her way between the rolled carpets and the boxes, but the man did not introduce her and awkwardly held the pie he had been given.

  Peggy chattered.. . Her name, where she lived, the societies and groups in the village... The woman had a sallow skin, a foreigner, perhaps from the Mediterranean.. . The bus timetable, the early closing day in the town, the best builder in the village, the walks,

  the milk delivery... Neither the man nor the woman responded... The lay-out of the village, the pub, the hall, the shop, the green -and they should not go near the green because of the disgraceful attitude of the people who lived there, endangered the whole community, protected by guns, showed no respect for the safety of the village... The man shrugged limply as if to indicate that he had work to be getting on with, and passed the pie to the woman behind him.

  When she reached out her hands to take it, Peggy saw, very clearly that the woman had no nails on the tips of her fingers and thumbs. Peggy's nails were painted sharp red to match her lipstick, but where the woman's nails should have been there was only dried, wrinkled skin.