She came away feeling that they were uninteresting and unlikely to contribute to the life pulse of the village, and that her pie was wasted on them.
"Show me."
She had waited all through the night in the car, huddled in the passenger seat. As she had waited, her mind had been churned with the torment of her split identity. The quiet had been broken by the owls, and once a fox shadow had passed close. She had sat, hunched, cold, and waited. She remembered Yusuf's kindness, and the calmness of the teaching of Sheik Amir Muhammad, and the strength given her by the conversion to the Muslim faith, and she thought of the confidence that the name Farida Yasmin had brought to her. It was as if the old world, the existence of Gladys Eva Jones, demeaned and diminished her. Again and again, alone, she murmured the name that had given her strength and confidence. Without it, she was base and trivial. The old world was lustful and cheap, the new world proud and worthwhile.
"Show the wound to me."
Through the night she had listened for the crack of distant gunfire and she had heard only the owls.
As the hours had slipped away, so her anxiety for him had increased, nagging and worrying at her, until she could no longer bear the loneliness of the vigil. She had felt an increasing sense of disaster breaking. In the dawn light she had left the car and tried to trace the route he had taken her the day before. In Fen Covert,
she'd avoided fallen dead branches, stepped lightly on the leaves and not scuffed them, kept wide from the path, as he'd shown her, and she had heard the baying of big dogs. Then she had walked more quickly and her anxiety for him had been at fever point. Across the marshes, beyond Old Covert, she had been able to see right to the tower of the village church. The early sun gleamed on the river that ran from the marshes, and by the river were the dogs.
Behind the dogs, controlling them, were the handlers. Behind the handlers, guarding them, were the marksmen with the guns on which the bulging telescopic sights were mounted. They hunted for him. They had not killed him, and the knowledge of his survival brought pricking tears of happiness to Farida Yasmin's cheeks.
"You don't have to be shy but you have to show me where you are hurt so I can help."
While the sun had risen and the clouds had gathered off the sea and chased it, the dogs had tracked back on the riverbank, then searched away from it, and she'd known they'd lost the scent. When the cloud had crossed the sun, and the greyness had dulled the marsh reeds, she had seen the handlers call off the dogs. But she had taken note of where the marksmen settled, where they watched from after the dogs had gone. She had kept in the trees. She had gone into the woodland of Fen Hill.
Because of what she had endured, the anxiety, her anger snapped.
"Fine, so you won't show me where, so you don't want help well, get up, keep walking, turn your back on it, go home. Don't think about me, what I've done."
If it had not been for the bird Farida Yasmin would not have found him. It had lifted off, flapped away, cried, then circled the bramble clump into which he'd crawled. He had seemed to be sleeping, which had amazed her because his face was furrowed in pain. She had wriggled on her stomach into the back of the thicket and been within arm's reach of him when he had woken, jerked up, slashed his face on the thorn barbs, gasped, grabbed at her, recognized her and then his eyes had closed, his body had arched as if the pain ran rivers in him. He had told her of his failure, of the car, the lost rifle. The words had been whispered and his head stayed down.
She whipped him with her hissed words, "Because of you what I've done for you I've police waiting for me. I'm on the line for you. Are you staying or are you going? Are you going to let me treat your wound or not?"
The rent was at the side of his fatigue trousers. The car must have caught his hip and upper thigh, ripping the seam of his trousers at the pocket. She had seen the long distance he had come, from where the dogs had lost his scent to Fen Hill. He could not have come that far with a broken femur or fractured pelvis.
Farida Yasmin thought the failure would have hurt him the worst.
Her hands trembled as she reached for his belt, unfastened it and dragged down the zip. It was hard to pull down. The trousers were sodden wet. She crouched low above him, under the roof of bramble and thorn, then pushed her arm under the small of his back and lurched his buttocks clear of the ground. He didn't fight her as she dragged the trousers down towards his knees.
She saw the mottled purple and yellow bruising.
She saw the hair at the pit of his stomach, the limit of the bruising, and the small contracted penis. He stared up at her.
Her fingers, so gently, touched the bruise and she felt him wince. She tried to soothe his pain. She told him of the dogs and where the marksmen were. She told him what she would do and how she would help him. Her fingers played on the bruising and caught the hairs and she saw him stiffen. It was where her fingers had never been before. His breathing came more slowly, as if the pain lightened. It was what the girls had talked about in the schoolyard, and in the coffee shop at the university, and in the canteen at work, and then she, the virgin, had thought their talk disgusting. Her fingers caressed the bruising as his fingers had stroked the neck of the bird.
The voices were soft, atmospheric, metallic, coming over the monitor.
"I don't know whether she can take it, not much more."
"I have to assure you, Mr. Perry, that your security is constantly under review."
"If I'd known, realized, what I said to you and that jerk who came with you, what it meant, Geoff what it would do to me, and, more important, what it would do to her..."
"There are now two more ARVs sorry, that's armed-response vehicles in the village, four in total, and eight highly trained men. That's in addition to Mr. Davies and Mr. Blake, and the men in the shed. You should see it, Mr. Perry, as a ring of steel dedicated to you and your family's safety."
In the hut, the speaker was turned down low. Paget was eating sandwiches, Rankin watched the screen and flicked between the image of the rear garden and the front door, while they listened to the two men talk.
"You've bloody changed your tune. Why?"
"There are questions I cannot answer."
"That's convenient."
"You have to believe, Mr. Perry, that everything that should be done is being done. Look, take last night, a professional and expert defence-' "Are you serious? It was fucking chaos."
After the han dover and the debrief, Joe Paget and Dave Rankin had been up into the small hours going through, in exact and minute detail, every moment of the alert. Had the camera given them a target? Why was the next garden not covered by the beams? Why had they not moved the cold frame from the side of the house? They had been close to, bloody disaster, Rankin had said, maybe a few seconds off it, and Paget hadn't disagreed.
"That's not the way Mr. Davies reported it."
"What the hell do you expect him to say? Grow up. Get real! She can't take the punishment, not much longer."
"We've made our commitment, Mr. Perry."
"When I told you and that jerk we were staying, it was because I believed we were among friends. That's the worst."
"Don't you read newspapers? It's how people behave when they're afraid each week it's in your newspapers. A family have a child recovered from meningitis and they're about to fly back from a sunshine holiday, but the other passengers won't travel with them for fear of infection. They're bumped off the flight, no charity. How many examples do you want? It doesn't matter where you are. An American Navy ship shoots down an Iranian passenger aircraft, and it's a mistake, but the Iranians don't accept apologies and bomb the car driven by the captain's wife on some smart street in San Diego. The detonator was incorrectly wired. She lives, but she's chucked out of her job, she's a pariah and might endanger others. I can reel them off. It's a herd mentality. The fear makes them vicious, dictates they turn on the victim. It's human nature, Mr. Perry..."
There was the squeak of the planks at the door of the hut. R
ankin swung, Paget gulped on the last of his sandwich. Meryl Perry was in the doorway.
On the speaker was Markham's metallic voice. '... I suppose it's because so few people, these days, ever get really tested that they're so scared of the unpredictable."
Her tone was dead, flat, like her eyes and the pallor of her cheeks.
"I hope I'm not disturbing you, I came for Stephen's tractor."
Paget remembered her screams over the detective's radio, and Rankin had heard them as he had tried to get round the house and fouled up in the cold frame. Paget scrambled to kill the speaker. Rankin groped under his chair and found the boy's tractor.
"Do you always listen to us? Is everything we say, Frank and I, listened to?"
Chapter Thirteen.
At that moment, Meryl hated them.
"Do you hear everything? What I say to Frank, what he says to me, are you listening? Is that how you spend your days?"
She could hear the rising pitch of her own voice. Paget wiped old crumbs from his mouth and looked away from her. Rankin passed her Stephen's tractor. She snatched it. To her, they were huge, dark shapes in the baggy boiler suits with the big vests over their chests. They were older than her, older than Frank, and they seemed not to care. Standing at the door before they'd known she was there, she'd seen one of them grin at the smooth reassurance being dished out to Frank.
"You get a big laugh out of what we say. Do you snigger when you hear us in bed? Not much noise when we're in bed, is there?"
Her control was gone. Meryl was over the edge. They would think her hysterical, stupid, or just a woman. They would wonder why she didn't just shut up, start the ironing, do the dusting, make the beds. She squeezed the tractor in her hand, tighter, hurting herself. Nobody told her anything. The wheels fell off the tractor. When any of them talked to Frank, and she came close, they stopped, and Frank cut short what they'd said. She was not included, not need-to-know, just a woman who was a nuisance.
"How long are you here? For ever? Is that my life, for ever, having you listening?"
The short one, Paget, said quietly, "We're here, Mrs. Perry, till Wednesday night. That's the end of our shift."
The tall one, Rankin, said gently, "Thursday morning's a lieu day, Mrs. Perry, then we start our long weekend."
"Actually, Mrs. Perry, we'll have clocked up twenty-eight hours overtime in the week, so they won't mess with our long weekend."
"Then we're on the range for a day not an assessment, just practice."
"After that, we might come back and we might not. We're always the last to be told where we're going..."
Rankin took the tractor from her then crouched to pick up the wheels. The tears were filling her eyes. She thought they were indifferent as to whether they came back to this hut, this house, her life, or were assigned to another location. Rankin had the tractor wheels back under the toy's body and Paget passed him a small pair of pliers. She was just a makeweight woman who had lost control. She turned and leaned against the wall of the hut, her eyes closed to pinch out the tears. When she opened her eyes, the picture was in front of her three or four inches from her face. It was hazy, a grey-white image of the bottom fence of her garden, the apple tree and the sand pit Frank had built for Stephen. The shape of the man they sought stood out and the silhouette of the rifle.
Her voice was brittle, fractured.
"What'll you do when you drive away from us for your long weekend?"
"We were thinking of going fishing, Mrs. Perry, off the south coast."
"You get a good rate on a boat this time of year, Mrs. Perry."
Paget smiled. Rankin gave her back the repaired tractor.
She smeared the tears off her face.
"Will you stand in front of us, before you go fishing, in front of Frank and Stephen and me?"
Rankin said, "I won't lie to you, Mrs. Perry. We're not bullet-catchers. I don't expect to get killed on the say-so of a fat-cat bureaucrat sitting in a safe London office. If the opposition, him..." He gestured harshly towards the picture Sellotaped to the wall. '... if he wants to die for his country then I'll willingly help him along, but I don't aim to go with him. If he wants to end up a martyr, famous for five minutes, that's his choice. I'm here to do the best that's possible, and Joe is, and that's as far as it goes. If you don't like it then you should get your suitcase down off the top of the wardrobe... That's the truth, Mrs. Perry, and I'm sorry no one told it you before."
"Thank you."
She turned for the door. The cloud had covered the sun and her home; what was precious to her seemed both drearily mundane and terrifyingly dangerous. She held the door-handle for a moment to steady herself.
It was Joe Paget who called to her.
"I'd like to say something, Mrs. Perry. We didn't do well last night, but we learn. It won't be like that again. We'll kill him if he comes back, and that's not just talk." He paused.
"You should get back in the house and make yourself a fine pot of tea. I don't know him, or anything about him, but I'll shoot him, or Dave will. You can depend on that, we'll kill him."
The husband stared belligerently at the sofa as Cathy Parker wrote briskly in her notebook.
His wife spoke: "I wouldn't know anything about her, except that when my aunt died I had the job of sorting through her papers. My uncle had passed on three years earlier. It was a sort of surprise to find any reference to my cousin, but she'd written two or three times a year to her mother, my aunt. I say it was a surprise because my uncle never spoke of Edith, it was like she didn't exist. My uncle was an engineer with the Anglo-Iranian Oil Corporation, based in Abadan. I think they lived pretty well, servants, a good villa, all that. He just couldn't accept that his nineteen-year-old daughter should fall for and want to marry a local. Ali Hossein was a medical student in his early twenties. My uncle did all he could to break the relationship and couldn't, and gave up on Edith. He didn't go to the wedding and forbade my aunt to go. He just cut her off, pretended there had never been a daughter, an only child. I don't think he ever knew that my aunt kept in touch with her..."
She was a neat, fussy woman. On her lap were old letters and a small bundle of photographs held together by a frayed elastic band.
"It was a traditional Muslim wedding. She must have felt very alone with just Ali's relations and friends. Her letters, over the years, were sent to a post office near where my uncle and aunt lived in their retirement, up north, and my aunt collected them. It was a sad little bit of subterfuge but necessary because my uncle's hostility never lessened, not till the day he died. The letters stopped coming in 1984 and my aunt, in the following months, badgered the Foreign Office to find out why. She made up excuses to be away for a whole day, and went to London and nagged the diplomats for information. Eventually they told her that Edith had been killed in a rocket attack in Tehran, and she never told my uncle. But it's their son, Edith's and Ali's boy, that you want to know about?"
Cathy Parker was quiet. It was the photographs she had come for, but it was her way never to appear eager. She let her informant talk.
"He was called Vahid. I think Edith had a sense of guilt about the way she and Ali brought him up. Ali was involved in dangerous politics, he was even arrested and beaten by the secret police, and Edith supported him to the hilt. The child, Vahid, was left to himself, and it wasn't a surprise that he became a tear away a street hooligan. He was involved in demonstrations, in fighting with the police. Myself, I'd have been horrified, but Edith wrote of her pride in the boy's determination. After the revolution, when that awful man, you know, the Ayatollah, came back and there were all the executions, public hangings and shootings, the boy went into the military and was sent away to the war with Iraq. He was at the front line when Edith and her husband were killed by the rocket."
Behind their heads Cathy Parker could see an ordered, well-tended small garden. Their bungalow was on the outskirts of a small village west of Chard in Somerset. She thought how difficult it would have been for t
his elderly woman, reading the letters, to understand the world of revolutionary Iran, but she made no show of sympathy.
"I wrote to him, after I'd gone through the letters, to tell him there were blood relations alive in England, but the only address I knew of was the house where his parents had been killed. It was pretty silly, the house would have been destroyed by the rocket, and I never had a reply. So, why have you come from London and why is the Security Service interested in Edith's boy? You're not going to tell me, are you?.. . He's a nice-looking lad well, he was a nice looking lad in the last photograph, but that was taken a long time ago. He'd be thirty-seven now. Would you like to see the photographs?"
The bundle was passed to Cathy Parker. She flipped through them, feigning indifference. They were what a daughter would have sent to her mother. It was the usual progression: a baby, a toddler, a child in school clothes, at a picnic and kicking a football, a teenager. Only the last two pictures interested her: a young man holding a Kalashnikov rifle and posing with others in ill-fitting fatigues at a roadblock, and the mature man he'd become sitting hunched and dead-eyed in the front of a small boat with water and reed-banks behind. She didn't ask, just put the last two photographs into her handbag.
"A good-looking boy, yes?"
Cathy made her excuses. She had seen the dead, aged and cold eyes of young men in Ireland, and seen the misery they could inflict. She thanked Vahid Hossein's aunt for the photographs that might help to kill him.
Andy Chalmers was driven to Fort William in Mr. Gabriel Fenton's Range Rover.
He sat, truculent and quiet, in the front seat, with the dogs behind him. The light was going down to the west of the big mountains and the sea loch as they approached the station.
"Don't take any shit from them, Andy. I've said it before and I'll say it again do it your way and the way you know. They'll be superior and they'll treat you like dirt, but don't take it. You're there at Mr. Harry's invitation, there because you're bloody good. You may be a kid but you're the best stalker and tracker between here and Lochinver, the best I've ever seen and my brother knows that. Don't let me down. There'll be plenty there who'll want you to fall on your face in the mud, and fail, and you're going to disappoint them. I thought I was useful, in the Radfan up from Aden, but I hadn't a half of the skill you're blessed with. Mr. Harry's out on a limb for you, that's his degree of trust. Take care, Andy. Find this bastard and if you bring me back his ears then I'll have them mounted and hung in the hallway that's a joke, you understand, a joke..."
A Line in the Sand Page 28
