A Line in the Sand

by Gerald Seymour

  "The best thing for now is a fresh pot of tea," he said.

  She had taken a position beside the lavatories near the hall. From there she had a view of the gable end of the house and a small part of the green. The light was going. Hours ago, Farida Yasmin had learned the patrol pattern of the unmarked cars, and each time they came by she was behind the toilets and beyond their view. She had hung on there because she had found out nothing that would help him. She stretched her body.

  "Hello, my dear, still here, then?"

  The woman had come behind her, on the path that led to the beach.

  "I was just going."

  "I can't remember what you said, why you were here."

  The woman would not have remembered because she had not been told.

  Farida Yasmin explained pleasantly, "It's a college project on the modern pressures affecting rural life. It seemed an interesting place to come to. I'm getting the feel of it, then I'll be looking to interview people."

  "I don't know what you'll learn about us from our toilets."

  She had her back to the green and the house. She hadn't seen the cars come. They swept past her. She saw the child and a woman in the back seats of the lead car, and a man who had his head turned away sat in the front. There were cases in the second car, piled high, clearly visible in the rear window. Their headlights speared away into the early dusk.

  The woman coughed deep in her throat, drew up the spittle, spat it out through her gaudy lips. She murmured, "They've gone. Damn good riddance."

  Farida Yasmin shook. The shock swept through her. She watched the tail-lights disappear around the corner, at speed. Now she had learned something, but it was nothing that would help him. She began to walk briskly from the toilets, past the front of the hall.

  The woman called after her, "Come and see me, when you start your interviews."

  She had been cheated.

  The bird hovered in the last of the afternoon's watery sunshine, then dived.

  Beating its wings, it strutted close to him. He saw the wound. There was a tiny scrap of grease proof paper, the sort used to wrap the meat his mother brought home from the butcher in Lochinver, and he found soaked, muddied mince, buried in grass, where the bird had walked and pecked. As if it had been tamed, the bird came close to him. The head keeper had a peregrine falcon in a cage behind the house and near to his caravan: it had no fear of him because it had been fed by him since the day he'd found the abandoned fledgling, wounded by ravens. Andy Chalmers had come out of the marsh, stinking of it. The bird trusted him. Other than the head keeper, he knew of no man who would nurse an injured bird and win its trust. The head keeper was one of the very few men that the taciturn and sullen Andy Chalmers had respect for.

  The dogs picked up the scent. They meandered either side of the path and crisscrossed over it. Without water to go into, it was hard even for a skilled man not to leave a scent for dogs.

  He let them lead through the wood.

  He felt a sense of burgeoning regret.

  The dogs burst from the wood and tracked at the side of a grazing field. A car's lights illuminated the top of the hedgerows, receding. He went around the perimeter of the field.

  He saw the tyre marks. He could smell the man and the marsh. The tyre marks were at the gate of a field, on the verge of the lane.

  He wanted to go home. He had no hatred of a man who had nursed and fed a bird. He wanted to be back with his mountains. He called on the radio for Markham to come and collect him, and gave no explanation.

  In the far distance, silhouetted against the darkening sky, was the shape of the church, and the shimmer of the village lights. It was not his place and not his quarrel, he had no business there.

  Chapter Seventeen.

  "You are certain?"

  "It's what I saw."

  In the rear car was the heap of suitcases on the back seat, and two men at the front. In the lead car were a child looking out through the window, a woman staring straight ahead, a man with his head turned away, and more men in the front she did not recognize; she had not seen the child before but the woman had been there, weeks earlier, when she had come to photograph the house.

  Farida Yasmin had been walking up the road through the village when the two cars had come back past her, the same two men in the front of each but no passengers and no suitcases on the back seat of the second car.

  She had walked on in the darkness. There was a cottage with an overgrown garden and a sold sign over a for-sale board, short of the church, on the other side of the road. The curtains were loosely drawn on the windows facing the road, but at the back of the house they were not pulled across and spilled light on to the garden. The grass at the back, ringed by untended flower-beds, was long and leaf-strewn. The shirt the child wore was bright red and there was a crest on the chest of rampant leopards and the logo sign of a vehicle-insurance company, the same shirt she had seen him wearing in the car. The child kicked the football round the grass. He played on his own, the hero and the star.

  As soon as she'd met him at the field gate, she'd told him what she'd seen, and now she repeated it. In the car, as she'd blistered him with the information, he had seemed no more willing to believe her than he did now.

  "The cars came back without him and his wife and the child. It was done fast, to deceive you, in the darkness. They've moved him to make it easier for themselves. Can't you see it? They've made a trap and now they don't have the responsibility of protecting him when it's sprung. They want you at the house on the green they want to kill you there when they don't have the responsibility for him."

  "You are sure?" The doubt creased his voice.

  She told him that she was sure. She had seen the boy, the child, with the football on the lawn lit by the back windows of the cottage. The trap was the house on the green where the guns waited for him. They were beside the car, in black darkness, among the scrub of the common ground beyond the village. It hurt her that she could not convince him.

  "Don't you trust me? You should. Without me, on their terms, you would walk into a trap. Trust me. We are a partnership, that's equal parts don't you see that?"

  She told him that he was nothing without her, and he seemed to reel away from her. She would go back, walk through the village a last time come back and tell him what she had seen. He squatted down, holding the launcher in his hands, as if it were a child's valued toy or a believer's relic. She told him how long she would be. He had already gobbled down the sandwiches she had brought him. He stank of the mud in the marsh and the still water. Farida Yasmin walked back into the village.

  There were lights on in the church, throwing multi-colours through the high windows, and she could hear the organist practising.

  Over the hedge she saw the child boot the ball into the far darkness beyond the spill of the light, and leap and whoop with pleasure as if he had found freedom.

  She walked the length of the green. She saw the cars outside the house and the same drawn curtains as had been there before. She could see, from the street-light, that the camera set high on the front wall of the house tracked her, then lost interest, its lens veering away.

  It was enough. She was certain.

  She heard the rustle of a sweet-paper.

  "Hello, it's the student, yes? My friend Peggy told me about you hope I didn't startle you, just walking the dog. I'm Paul. I'm your man when you start your interviews..."

  She endured his patronizing talk as they went back past the green, the darkened house and the lens, through the village. It was useful to have him beside her when she went by the lens, when she was caught in the headlights of one of the moving cars. Walking with him gave her the appearance of being a part of the community.. . She told the man, Paul, that she would definitely find him when she came to do her interviews, and he left her at the pub.

  The child was no longer in the garden. She saw the shape of a man through the gap in the curtains.

  She cut off the road, stumbled across the com
mon ground, wove between the gorse, trees and bramble thickets, to the car.

  "It's as I said it was. I'm certain."

  After she had bought the sandwiches for him she had gone to a chemist's in the town, and selected a perfume. Before he had come to the field gate she had anointed her body with it.

  "I deserve to be trusted," Farida Yasmin whispered.

  He was still hunched down beside the wheel of the car, holding the launcher. He had not moved.

  "I want to be with you..."

  His eyes stayed down, locked to the launcher and the ground at his feet.

  "I've done enough to deserve that. I can help, carry what you need. You've taught me. I want to be there when you fire the launcher. I want to see it happen and be a part of it."

  She was crouched close to him and her fingers touched the smooth, oiled surface of the launcher's barrel.

  "I can do it, help you.

  She saw his head move decisively, side to side. He denied her.

  Her eyes tightened in confusion.

  "Haven't you thought about me? Haven't you considered what I want? What about the risks I've taken? Where's my future? Because of you, because of the people who sent you, I've lost everything. I'm hunted. You'll go, be picked up on the beach so, who's thought about me? I'll be caught, interrogated, locked up is that what you want?"

  He never looked at her. She caught his hand and held it tight in her fist. There was no response.

  "Are you going to take me back with you? That's best, isn't it, that I go back with you to the beach and on to the ship? There'd be a life there, for us, back where you come from, wouldn't there?"

  It was her dream. They were together on the great deck of the tanker. It was night and the stars were above them, and they ploughed through the endless water, and they were alone. And the same perfume that she wore now would be on her neck then. She would be introduced to high functionaries and her part in the death of an enemy would be explained, and grave men would bob their heads in re sped and thank her for what she had done. She could see the startled faces of her parents, and the astonished, dull faces of the girls at work, when they learned the truth of what Farida Yasmin had achieved.

  "I'm finished here. So, you don't take me with you tonight, I understand... But I go on to the ship with you, don't I?"

  In the darkness, he began to clean the firing mechanism of the launcher.

  By torchlight, he had been shown the tyre marks.

  Geoff Markham had been marched through the wood, had blundered after the light-footed shadow of Andy Chalmers in front, tried to keep up with him and his dogs, and had then been pushed without ceremony down on to his knees as the torch was shone into the cavity at the back of the bramble thicket.

  He had queried it again, rejecting what he didn't want to hear.

  He had been dragged up, pulled towards the water. He capitulated and said it was all right, yes, he accepted Chalmers's conclusion. If he had queried again he would have been pulled in his city clothes into the water and he'd have been propelled towards a tree-trunk and a submerged oil drum.

  There was a crunched sound under his feet. The torch beam pointed out the stripped rabbit bones he stood on.

  "I just want reassurance there is no other explanation?"

  "He's gone.~

  He had been lost. He had driven round a web of lanes. He had finally found Chalmers sitting with his dogs by the gate of a field. He. had expressed his first doubts at the grunted report of the tracker, then been hijacked and taken off into the woods. He didn't want to believe what he was told because of the catastrophic implications of Chalmers's assessment.

  "Could he merely have moved deeper into the marshland?"

  "No."

  He said, bitterly, "But we don't know where he's gone."

  "Gone in the car."

  "Could he be returning?"

  "No gear left hide's empty. He's cleared out."

  They walked back to his car. It was the worst situation. He would be on the secure line to Fenton from the crisis centre to report that they had lost their man. There'd be the hissed slip of Fenton's breath, and he would repeat that they had lost their man, and then a volley of oaths would bleat in his ear. He was familiar with analysis and intellectual storm sessions and with the computer spewing answers. What he had been shown was a short length of tyre marks in the dirt at the side of a lane and, by torchlight, a hollowed place in the depth of a bramble thicket. He took on trust the description of the hiding-place. The torch had been switched off. They came through the dense woodland and the low branches all seemed to whip his face and not Chalmers's, and where there was a soft pit in the ground his feet found it and not Chalmers's. With his scratched face and sodden feet, he followed the smell and could not see the man ahead of him until they reached the car.

  The stench of the man and the filth of the dogs filled the small interior. The water dripped off Chalmers and the mud on the dogs was smeared across the seats.

  "I want to go home."

  "Too right," Markham snapped.

  "Home you will go, but not much of the journey in my bloody car."

  He drove at savage speed down the lanes towards the main road and the town, and the crisis centre. They had lost him. It would end at the house on the green, where the bloody goat bleated at the end of its bloody tether. He hit the brakes, swung the car through the lanes' bends, pounded the accelerator. Beside him, Chalmers, stinking and dripping, slept.

  "Do you like to talk about it?"

  "No, Mrs. Perry, I don't like to."

  "I don't want to pry.

  "I will say one thing to you only, and then, please, it is a closed book... It was over. Molotovs don't win against tanks. We went back to our homes, which was stupid. I was denounced by people who lived in my street. When the soldiers came, I and others tried to flee over the roofs from my parents' apartment. We were identified by the people in our street. When we were on the roofs they pointed the soldiers towards us. They were the same people I had lived with, played with as a child. They were my friends and my parents' friends, and they showed us to the soldiers ... We saw what happened last night. We heard what Mr. Perry said."

  "Thank you, Luisa, thank you from the depths of my heart."

  "What I like to talk about is old furniture, and gardening."

  "It's a good time to get cuttings in," Meryl said.

  "I'd like to help you with that."

  Blake was long gone, back to the house. Bill Davies had dozed on his bed. The room was in chaos, Blake always left it that way, clothes on the floor, towels on the bed. Davies was reminded, and it hurt, of the room his boys shared. He still hadn't rung home, couldn't face it... He climbed off the bed and sluiced some of the tiredness out of his eyes at the basin. He'd call by at the house to collect his car, then search for another dreary little pub to eat in... He reflected that the home where Meryl had been taken in was oft-limits, but he'd have preferred to have gone there, talked to her. She'd kissed him when she'd thanked him, and had cried as he'd held her awkwardly. She'd been so bloody soft and vulnerable. Too long since it had been like that with Lily.. . He changed his shirt. Couldn't go back to the house in a shirt with Meryl's lipstick on the collar.

  He went down the stairs. The door to their living room was half open.

  He realized she had been waiting for him, listening for his descent. She came with a quick, scurrying step out of her living room and he could see her husband in his chair by the fire, and the poor bastard had some shame in his eyes. She held the sheet of paper in her fingers. He understood.

  She handed him the account.

  He didn't argue, and didn't say that he had seen her standing in the shadows behind the mob. He took the banknotes from his pocket and paid her for his bed and for Blake's. He went back up the stairs and packed their bags.

  She was waiting by the door.

  She said, "It's not my fault, I'm not to blame. We need the money. We wouldn't be doing anything like bed-and-breakfast unle
ss we had to. It was Lloyds that took us down, we were Names, you know. What my husband had set aside for retirement went to Lloyds. We can't exist without the money. I've nothing against those people, the Perrys, but we have to live... It'll be remembered, long after you've gone, that we put a roof over your head. It won't be forgotten. I'm only trying to limit the damage to our business. A man like you, an educated man, I'm sure you understand."

  The door closed behind him.

  He carried the bags down the carefully raked gravel drive. He stopped in the road, saw the light peeping from the curtains where she was, then turned and walked towards the village and the green. He was called on the radio and was told the stalker's report: the man had moved, was lost. He started to run.

  He pounded down the road towards the house.

  There was the slight scent of damp in the air as Meryl unpacked in the small bedroom.

  She took from the suitcase only what she would need for that night, and what Stephen needed.

  Simon Blackmore came up quietly behind her.

  "She was tortured. What they did to her was unspeakable. Amnesty International members from all over the world bombarded the dictatorship with letters demanding her freedom, but above all it was her own courage that saved her life, and her determination to come back to me.~ "You make me feel small, and my own problems minuscule. Inevitable, I suppose, but already I regret leaving Frank."

  "I don't think it appropriate that we start a seminar on man's inhumanity, but it's necessary that you understand us. We all have our own opinions and thank God our own consciences to drive us. Enough of that. Now, Meryl, smile, please."

  She did, her first in six days.

  "I'm going to talk to Luisa about antiques and gardening there's places round here where you can still get a good old table or a chest at a real knock-down price.