A Line in the Sand

by Gerald Seymour

  she wanted the memory of it. What would happen to her then, afterwards?

  No one had ever told her that she was loved.

  Not her father, the bastard, and not her mother, the bitch. Not the kids at school or at college or at any time afterwards. Love was the black hole, without a bottom, without light, in her life. From the bench she saw the villagers coming on foot and by bicycle and in cars, as the afternoon faded, to the hall. Ordinary people, and they didn't seem to notice her sitting on the bench with the opened guidebook, ordinary people who ignored her. She stood, stretched, wiped the rainwater off her forehead and shook it from her shoulders. The lights of the pub were on, the first cars were scraping the gravel, and there was the first laughter. She wondered how long it would be before the ordinary people, gathering in the pub and the hall, knew her name and her importance.

  She went away from the house. She thought she'd seen his shadow pass the window, and she determined that she would be there to witness it when the rocket was fired. She drifted slowly up the road towards the side lane near the church where her car was parked.

  "I've said all I want to say about her, and that's too much. She's never coming back here again. If she showed up at the door, I'd slam it in her face too right I would..."

  Cathy Parker watched him. She leaned against the kitchen door as Bill Jones stamped out into the narrow hall for his coat and his train driver's satchel. He was a big man, two stones overweight, and she thought it was the blood pressure that reddened his face when he spoke of his daughter. The last thing he did, before glowering at her and barging out of the front door, was to hook a football scarf round his neck. He went out to drive a train from Derby to Newcastle, and back. Cathy Parker's own parents had wanted her to be a pretty and feminine girl, and she'd fought hard against it; Bill Jones would have wanted his daughter to be a boy, with him at home matches, sitting alongside him in the workingmen's club, following him into train driving.

  "What's she done with her life? She's screwed it, and now she's screwing us."

  Annie Jones was a small woman, grimly thin in face and body,

  with prematurely greying hair. She hadn't spoken while her husband had badmouthed their daughter, and Cathy didn't think she'd have spoken when the detectives had come to the house to search through the few personal things that Gladys Eva Jones had left there before the links were cut. Cathy made a pot of tea while the mother sat at the kitchen table. She had no difficulty in drawing the woman out: it was a skill that went with her job.

  "We tried to love her but, God knows, it wasn't easy. She didn't want for anything we haven't money, but we gave her what we could. It didn't satisfy her. You see, Miss Parker, we were never good enough for her, and nor was anyone else round here. She went to the university Bill won't admit it, but he was proud. She was the only kid in the street that had got to university. I thought if she hadn't friends here she'd find them there. Perhaps the people she met there weren't good enough either. The few times she came back, the first year away, I could see how lonely she was. There's not much here, but you don't have to be lonely, not if you'll muck in. Gladys wouldn't do that, nor at the university neither. I think she was always pushing for more control of people, but it was so obvious that they didn't want to know her. It's not nice to say this about your daughter, but she's a stuck-up bitch. Bill can't talk to her, but it's the same for me. I tried but she never came near to half-way to meet me. Then she went into that religious thing. She came back once after she'd joined them. Don't get me wrong, I've nothing against foreigners having their own religion, but it wasn't right for her. She came back in her robes, her face half covered, and some of the kids in the street gave her some lip. She's not been back since. Do you know where she is now? Do you know what she's doing? She's in real trouble now, isn't she? Or you wouldn't have been here and the detectives wouldn't have come. She wants to belong somewhere special, wants control, wants people to talk about her. Is she going to get hurt? Please, Miss Parker, try to see she doesn't get hurt."

  Cathy left her sitting at the kitchen table, staring out of the window above the sink at the song-birds wheeling around the hanging sack of nuts.

  Once, on a course with the German GSG9 anti-terrorist unit, she'd heard an instructor bark at the recruits about to practise a storm entry to a building, "Shoot the women first."

  She drove away from the mean little street, headed for the motorway and London. The instructor had said that the women were always more dangerous than the men, more likely to reach for a weapon in the last critical seconds of their lives when there was no hope of survival.

  She was wondering whether Farida Yasmin was a help to the Iranian, or a liability.

  Cathy thought of the girl, confused and willing, blundering forward with the man. Farida Yasmin craved a little spot where the sun shone on her, but Cathy didn't think she'd find it. A talent of Cathy's was to make instant assessments of the people she investigated: Farida Yasmin was unimportant and she would write only the briefest of reports on her visit; the girl was a loser. But there was nothing she could do to prevent her being hurt, and she felt quite sad.

  She knew about loneliness.

  "If we don't make it it will be the fault of all these wretched boxes. But thank you for the thought. Luisa and I have always been interested in wildlife."

  Simon Blackmore went back to his wife in the kitchen. They had been washing the plates, cups, mugs, saucers that had been wrapped in newspaper by the packers. The man at the door had said his name was Paul, that he was on the parish council, that he was the man to fix any little difficulties confronting them, was always pleased to smooth the way for new arrivals. He'd told them there was a meeting in the hall that evening of the Wildlife Group, with a talk on migration from a warden of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds. Then, he'd asked whether Luisa typed, and had explained how the group had lost its typist: "The most selfish people I've ever known here, and I was born in the village. The worst sort of in comers The sort of people who don't give a damn for the safety of those they live among." Simon Blackmore had seen the way that the man had looked at his wife's wrists, at the slash scars across the veins.

  "What you're being offered, Geoff, sweetheart, is 63 per cent more than you're getting now. It's fantastic. On top of that there's the inhouse bonus scheme, the private medical thing, there's guaranteed three-star minimum accommodation when you're working out of London, business-class flights into Europe. You'll be on at least double the pittance you're getting now at the end of the day. Your pay at the moment is actually insulting, they don't deserve people like you. The sooner you're gone, the better. Get your letter in straight away. Write it tonight. I stopped off in the travel agent's on the way from your place. They said Mauritius or the Seychelles are great I'm talking honeymoons, sweetheart. As soon as you're back from that dump tomorrow, day after tomorrow? let's get tramping round some property. Call me. Love you."

  Geoff Markham heard her blow kisses down the telephone, and cut the call. His mind was too distracted to make the calculation of a 63 per cent increment on his existing salary. He was thinking of the young man out at the rim of the reed-beds, and of the firm certainty of his gaze, watching the marshlands.

  "And him, too." Frank Perry stood by the telephone in the kitchen.

  "Gutless bastard." He stood by the telephone and read the lengthening list of scratched-out names.

  Bill Davies shrugged.

  "I suppose I shouldn't have done that, cut him off your list sorry."

  "I don't go to church, can't bear listening to his dreary sermons."

  "I just thought, given the circumstances I thought it would help if he showed support."

  Perry turned to the detective. He was beaten down, grey-faced. The hand resting on Davies's shoulder shook as it grasped at the jacket, held tight to it.

  "Was I out of order last night?"

  "Not for me to comment."

  "I can just take it. Meryl can't. She's drowning. One more thi
ng, one more, another bit of chaos, she'll go under. How long?"

  "I'm not supposed to talk tactics or strategy."

  "Bill, please."

  The detective thought his principal was close to defeat and that was not the policy. He'd done them all: he had stood with the Glock on his hip beside cabinet big-shots and foreign leaders and turned IRA informers, and he had never felt any sense of involvement. He thought that whatever he said would go back to Meryl Perry.

  "There's a fair bit going on, don't ask me what. We're beefed up, most of which you won't see. It was said at the beginning that our

  Tango couldn't last hostile ground, lack of resources, your location more than a week."

  "What day are we?"

  "We're at Day Five."

  A tired nervy smile played at Perry's mouth. What's the Al Haig story?"

  Davies laughed out loud, as if the tension were lifted.

  "Monday, right? Getting to the end of bloody Monday. It's appropriate... United States Army General Al Haig was in Belgium on a NATO visit. The sort of trip where there are convoys of limousines about a half a mile long. A security nightmare. The convoy's hammering along a main route of course, the search teams have worked over it. But they missed a culvert. In the culvert was a bomb; handiwork of a leftist anti-American faction. The detonation was a fraction late and, anyway, it malfunctioned. The car, armour-plated, didn't take the full force, kept on going, and the escorts. In the culvert had been enough explosive to bounce Haig's car right off the road and make a crater fish could have lived in. Al Haig said, "I guess that if we can get through Monday then we can survive the rest of the week." It's about hanging on in there. We've about got through Monday, Mr. Perry."

  "I can hold her for two more days if nothing else breaks her first."

  It was the end of the day, and the quiet was all around him. The bird sky danced displaying for him its regained flying skills.

  But there was the quiet.

  He no longer watched the bird, no longer took pleasure from the extravagance of its flight. He watched the geese and the swans, the ducks and the wheeling gulls, and he looked for a sign, the quiet playing in his ears.

  They did not stampede, they did not skim the water with flailed wings to take off in panic, they did not shriek as they would when disturbed. They were quiet, as if they were warned.

  Vahid Hossein could see the positions of the policemen on the far side of the marsh, on the higher ground. He had no fear of them. He knew where they were. They would have thought they were still unnoticed, but he saw each movement of their bodies as their legs, backs, hips, shoulders stiffened and they shifted their bodies for relief... There had been an Iraqi sniper on the Jasmin Canal who used the SVD Dragunov 7.62-calibre rifle with an effective range of 1,300 metres. He was never seen, and he had shot eighteen men in three weeks. A prisoner had said afterwards that a mortar's shrapnel had hit him as he went to his firing position on the banks of the canal in the early morning. It was luck that a random shell had killed him. The birds on the Jasmin Canal were always quiet in the hours before the sniper fired. He sensed the presence of a watcher. He felt a new atmosphere. He believed himself now and he had only the evidence of the quiet to be challenged. A slight frown of apprehension had settled on his forehead. At the fall of the day, as the wind quickened and trembled the reed-heads, he made his plan to go into the water, away from the bank, towards the place he had seen yesterday deep in the beds of old gold reeds and near to the central water channel.

  He could not see the watcher, could only sense the new quiet that had settled around him.

  Chapter Fifteen.

  Sitting with the damp of the ground seeping into the backside of his trousers and with the warmth of his dogs under his jackknifed legs, in his vantage-point, Andy Chalmers listened to the night sounds.

  There was no moon, no break in the rain cloud

  He was behind thick cover: if there had been light he would not have been able to see the reed-beds and the water channels. It was possible that the man had an image intensifier, night-vision equipment; he would not give him the chance to identify his position. Chalmers did not need to see the land around him. Instead he listened.

  There was the quiet, the rumble of the sea on the shore, the call of a distant fox. A policeman two hundred metres away stifled a cough and another one four hundred metres away stood to urinate. He was still, he was silent. When the fox called, his fingers felt the hackles rise on the necks of his dogs and he soothed them where they lay.

  If the man was there, Chalmers knew he would hear him.

  The wind that came from the west had turned, which pleased Chalmers. It scudded off the distant trees and fields, and came across the marshland riffling the leaves and branches behind which he sat. He could control sight and sound, but not the body odour of smell. Sight, sound and smell all carried great distances over open ground at night but, in the high mountains where he worked, he regarded smell as the worst of the stalker's enemies.

  He had left the keys to his caravan, where he lived at the back of the senior keeper's cottage, with Mr. Gabriel Fenton; the few coins from his pocket had been abandoned on the train; he carried nothing of metal in his pockets. It was his routine to make the owner's guests discard everything that could clink, rattle, rub together, before he started the stalk. His dogs were as still and silent as himself. There would be no sound for his prey to hear and no noise to disturb the birds in the reed mass.

  The wind was as he would have wanted it and would carry his smell away from the man, if he was there. An American, a guest of his owner, had once brought foul pungent creams with him on a stalk and believed they would block the man-smell that a stag might scent. Chalmers had made him strip and douse himself in a stream to wash the stuff off him; a French guest had rolled in sheep droppings, and that also was useless. The only possibility of hiding man-smell from a target stag was to keep the wind in the stalkers' faces. He had not yet smelt the man, if he was there.

  He sat and wrapped himself in his patience, let the night hours drift, and he listened.

  He could sit still, silent, but he did not doze, did not allow himself to edge towards sleep.

  If he had dozed, slept, then he would not have heard.

  In the cold, the rain and the quiet, Chalmers set himself games to play with his memory so that his senses were never less than alert.

  Memories of stalks with guests of the owner, and clients who paid for a day what he earned in two weeks... The guest from Holland who had failed at the start of the week, in the disused quarry, to put six bullets out of six, with a telescopic sight, into a four-inch target at a hundred metres he had refused to take him out. Mr. Gabriel had backed him, and the guest had been sent to thrash a river for salmon. The guest front the City of London, with new clothing and a new rifle, good on the target-shooting in the quarry, who had been led for five hours towards an eight-year-old stag with a crown of antlers, been brought to within eighty yards for a side shot. He'd given the guest the loaded rifle, the Browning .270 calibre, cocked it. He'd been on the telescope, on the beast, and the bullet had struck its lower belly. It had fled, wounded. He had told the guest he was a 'bloody butcher', and had been out half the night and all of the next morning with his dogs to find the beast and limit its misery.

  Chalmers was encouraged by the quiet of the reed-banks: there should have been movement and spats over nesting territory and the cries of the birds.

  The client from Germany who had demanded to shoot the stag with the greatest crown spread of antlers but that beast was only six years old and in the prime of its breeding life. The client had hissed the sum he was paying and what he needed as a trophy. Chalmers had told him that if he 'showed no respect for the beasts' he could go back down to the glen with his rifle unused. The man had crumpled then, whined about the money, and had been led forward to shoot an old beast at the end of its life. They'd passed within thirty yards of the younger stag as they'd moved towards the target beast, and a
t the end the client had thanked him for the best stalk of his shooting days. Chalmers had walked away from him because he acknowledged neither gratitude nor praise.

  He thought the quiet was because the man was good, was among the birds in the reeds and on the water, and was still.

  The guest, panting and unfit, had been in dead ground and had pulled a packet of cigarettes from his pocket. Chalmers had snatched the cigarette from the guest's mouth. He'd made the stalk last ten hours, two of them crawling against the rush of a stream-filled gully. Finally, when the beast was seventy yards from them, he'd told the guest, 'you're not fit to shoot, you're a bloody ruin," and hadn't given him the rifle.

  The memories kept the cutting edge to his senses. The birds were too quiet. He knew that the man was good and that the man was there, in the marsh.

  He waited, patient. He felt a respect, brother to brother, for the man out there, in the water, the same respect that he felt for the big beasts he stalked and tracked.

  "We've lasted through Monday."

  He'd had to feed the boy and himself. He'd heated the last of the precooked meat pies in the fridge, and taken the remaining tub of ice-cream from the freezer. He'd found a science programme on the television for Stephen, and they'd eaten off their laps. He'd taken the trays back into the kitchen, and gone upstairs. She was on the bed, in darkness. He sat beside her.

  "They say he has a week. He can't endure more than a week. It's closing round him. We're on the fifth day. We have to hang on in there..."