The budget ruled his life and would until the day he filed his application to join the Portcullis Society, until he joined the rest of yesterday's spooks at the Christmas reunion, reminiscing and carping about days gone by. The commitment could not be endless, and he cursed the bloody obstinate fool who had refused a most reasonable offer of help in moving on.
As if with a sudden afterthought, Fenton went back into his darkened room and dialled the home number of their duty solicitor.
"Harry here, G Section, sorry to, call you this late, Francis. Can I just run this past you? We have a man who we consider to be an assassination target. We've suggested he disappears and we've offered the means to do that. He won't take our advice, says he's staying where he is. Does the law provide us with powers to remove him forcibly from his domicile, against his will, and place him in protective custody?… I see… Assault, civil liberties, yes… Not on, eh?… It's just that these things are so bloody expensive. Thanks for your time, Francis, and regards to Alison…"
When he crossed the silent, deserted work area, Fenton saw the sheet of paper fastened to young Markham's door. DAY ONE.
There had to be a containment on the commitment or the operation would bleed his section dry. He went out into the night.
He had walked quickly along the hedgerows and into what the map called Sixteen-acre Wood and, from the safety of the trees, watched her drive away. With his back against a big trunk, Vahid Hossein used the last light of the day to study and memorize the map.
When darkness came, and he could no longer see the trellised patterns of the upper branches, he had again moved forward.
The map was in his mind. He took a length of dead branch from the ground, and used it as a blind man would. He had friends who were blinded in the marshes by mustard-gas shells, and he used the stick in the darkness as they used their white wands in daylight. The stick told him where were the desiccated lengths of wood that he could have stepped on, broken, left a trail. He walked carefully from Sixteen-acre Wood into Big Wood, then on to Common Wood. From Common Wood he skirted open fields and then he sheltered by a road, and watched and waited and listened. The caution was instinctive. He had crossed the road and passed what the map called a tumulus but did not know what the word meant, and then he slipped into Fen Covert.
It was in Fen Covert that he first smelt the salt of the sea, and that he first heard the screaming.
The smell was soft, the same as the tang off the Shatt-al-Arab waterway and at the Faw peninsula. Then the screaming had come again.
At the Shatt-al-Arab and the Faw, when the salt scent had been in his nose, he had heard the screaming of a man wounded or gassed and left behind in the retreat. It had been his duty, then, inescapable, to go back into the marshes to find a man with a shrapnel-severed leg or with the gas droplets on his skin and in his eyes. He moved towards Fen Hill, cat-like and quiet, where the scent was stronger and the screaming louder. Ahead of him, dappled by thin moonlight, was the open expanse called Southmarsh on the map.
At the slight slope of Fen Hill he angered himself. His mind had been on the scent and the screaming, and on the ribbon of lights that he estimated to be three kilometres away, when he set up a pheasant. If he had been among the marsh reeds of the Shatt-al Arab or the Faw, he would have given his enemy his position. It would have been a fatal error. He stopped, and stood motionless against a tree-trunk so that his body made no silhouette, smelling the sea and listening to the screaming.
The distant sound of a car's horn, among the ribbon of lights, carried over the Southmarsh.
He found the rabbit, its throat caught by a snare. He did not use his torch, but felt it first with his stick and then with his hand. His fingers brushed the fur of the animal's back and then came to the restraining wire. The movement of his fingers, caressing it, had quietened the terror of the rabbit. He held it by the fur at its neck and loosened the fine wire. He could not see it, could only sense it hanging supine from his grip.
Because of his mistake in disturbing the pheasant, his anger and self-criticism, he felt a need to reassure himself. He killed the rabbit with a chop from the heel of his hand against its neck, one blow. He reset the snare and covered the ground where his feet had been with loose brushwood because at first light someone would come to check the snare. He pocketed the rabbit, dead and warm, and moved on.
He came to rest in the heart of a thick tangle of bramble on the edge of Foxhole Covert. Not for hunger, but to purge himself of his mistake, he tore a leg from the rabbit carcass, pulled the skin from it, and ate it. He chewed on the raw sweet meat. It was important to him to feel no revulsion, to be strong. He chewed at the leg until his teeth scraped on the bone, then put the carcass beside him and the cleaned bone, and wiped the blood from his mouth. The act of killing and the eating gave him strength.
The sausage bag was beside him. Through the bramble branches he saw the close-set lights across the Southmarsh. He had the photograph of the house and the man. His hand, stained with the rabbit's blood, rested on the bag and sometimes found the shape of the launcher and sometimes the outline of the automatic rifle. He thought that it would be as easy for him to kill the man as it had been to chop the rabbit's neck and eat its leg.
He tried, lying on his back in the silence, to think of his wife, Barzin, and of the home that they shared, and of the rooms they had decorated and of the possessions they had gathered together, and of the shy, darkened love between them, but the bare thighs of the girl in the car intruded and disturbed him. He could not shake from his mind the white skin of the girl and the outline of her breasts. Vahid Hossein tried, but he could not.
The bell rang three times.
Meryl said she would answer it. She said coldly that she didn't want to see him cowering in the shadow of the unit hallway again when the door was opened. The detectives had said they'd use three short blasts on the bell when they wanted entry to the house.
Blake was at the door and seemed surprised that she opened it. His face fell a little when he saw her. She thought he would be one of those creatures who expected only to deal with the man of the house. Blake said, fumbling for the words, that there were more personnel down from London, uniformed, armed and static, and that they needed to look over the house. She thought him supercilious. He did not ask whether it was convenient, but stood aside for them as they came out of the darkness. They shouldered past her, as if she did not exist, and pushed the door shut behind them.
Frank stood in the living-room doorway. She heard the names they gave him, Paget and Rankin. She grimaced, a bitter little smile, because neither asked Frank if it suited him, just said that they needed to walk round the house, look it over. They went together, as if there was an umbilical cord between them.
They wore blue-black overalls and webbing belts, on which were holsters and weapons and what she thought were gas canisters, ammunition pouches and handcuffs. When they had been waiting for her to answer the bell, they must have been in the mud at the side of the road and the green, and their boots smeared it over her carpet. They seemed not to notice. They looked around the living room, at her furniture and her ornaments, as if they were all dross, and the glass cabinet where she put the china pieces she'd collected, and the pictures of the seashore, prints, by the local artist that Frank had bought. She strained to hear the murmur of their voices.
"Have to get it taped up, Joe."