An older man, swarthy and short, was on the path and another walked on a thinly seeded space of grass to his right, but the older man made gestures to his left as if he directed more men who were under his command. Two joggers went past the older man but he seemed not to notice them. Swarthy, as if they were tanned from old exposure to the Mediterranean sun, and slight – the same complexions and the same build as the men who had carried clothes from the hotel doorway on Steindamm. She had told Malachy
Kitchen that a price was on his head.
'The supplier had this house out in the country.
Would have been worth near a million. I'm not ashamed of what I did, but I took no pleasure from it.
The family weren't there. I broke a window and spilled petrol inside… '
She saw the older man use his arm and fingers to point into the shrub bed above the small cobbled garden with the pond, where they were, where they sat on the bench, and she heard an answering cry but did not know the language.
'I slopped the carpet and curtains with the stuff, then I threw a match on to… '
Polly Wilkins, officer of the Secret Intelligence Service, a well-brought-up girl whose mother had lectured her as a teenager never 'to be easy', reached up – two hands – took his face in them, felt the roughness of unshaven cheeks and gulped. 'Kiss me.'
'… the petrol. God, it caught, half burned my face and… '
'Do it, you bloody fool,' she hissed. 'Kiss me.'
She could have laughed. On his face was shock, then bewilderment, then a sort of naked terror. He had no idea why… She pulled him closer, her lips on his face but he screwed his mouth away.
'Not for fun, idiot. Do it like you mean it.'
He softened. Maybe he had heard, now, a heavy breath spurt behind his shoulder, maybe he had heard the snap of a dead twig under a shoe. She did it like she meant it, lips on lips. She had her eyes almost closed, as if passion gripped her, and she saw a younger man hovering in the bushes and gazing down on her. She thought he was coming closer. She screwed her tongue between the teeth.
She growled at him, 'Use your bloody hands.'
He did. Like she was precious, might break, his hands came up and caught her shoulders and he pulled her nearer him. Two rainsodden bodies entwined and his mouth was opened wider and her tongue could roam more fully. God, and the taste of his mouth was foul. And his clothes stank… Polly Wilkins had not tongue-kissed a man since that pathetic creep, Dominic, had flown to Buenos Aires – had near forgotten how to. The man standing above her, with the bushes waist high around him, watched, and then there was a shout from where the main path would have been, and the rustle of his feet as he moved away. He might look back. She kept her tongue in place and let the hands hold her shoulders.
When the voices were distant, low, she broke away and gasped.
'Don't get any bloody ideas.'
The colour flooded his skin under the bristle growth on his cheeks. 'No.'
'They'd have had you,' she said, with emphasis, as if the explanation was important. She rattled on, 'Did you know how badly you stink? No, you wouldn't…
Right, where were we?'
'I fired the supplier's home, perhaps a million pounds of it.'
'You said, "but I took no pleasure from it". Right?'
'Right.'
The laughter burst in Polly. 'Didn't seem to me you took much pleasure from what's just happened.'
'I'm grateful to you.'
'Don't, please, bloody thank me. That I cannot take.'
She stiffened, touched her hair, smoothed her skirt and eased away from him. 'Where were we? Yes, we were into assault, probably grievous bodily harm, and we've just hit arson. What's next, Malachy?'
She could have bitten the tongue that had been far into his mouth. He winced. She thought she had wounded a man already hurt and down. Damage done. She did not apologize. What she knew of Malachy Kitchen had come in a terse one-page signal from Gaunt that was bald and without humanity. It would have been easier for her to sit as judge and jury on him if he had made a callow admission of guilt or had writhed behind a catalogue of mitigation. He had said: 'I don't know what happened – everybody else does, but not me.' She'd thought he spoke the truth.
She had tapped into vulnerability and she felt ashamed of her laughter.
Polly said quietly, 'You burned down the home of a supplier, but you were still short of satisfaction. What had happened to you, everything, conspired to goad you forward – as if, Malachy, you're on a treadmill.
But they always go faster, don't they, treadmills? So, who is above the supplier?'
'I had a name given me. Ricky Capel of Bevin Close, that's south-east London. He was the importer.'
'Going there, that's climbing higher,' she said bleakly. 'Higher than most would have.'
'Going there got me a kicking.'
She saw, for the first time, a smile – rueful, uncertain
– crack his cheeks, and she listened and believed she could comprehend the burden of shame that had driven him. She thought it past the time for laughter, and for goading him. He told the story of it with detachment, as if another man had been kicked in the face – and she could taste the stale scent of his mouth.
'I really appreciate this, Mr Rahman/ Ricky Capel babbled. 'I gave my word to my grandfather, to old Percy, that I'd come here. He's never been himself, but it was important to him that I came. They were his friends – could have been him if they hadn't shipped him out the squadron and sent him to Egypt. I'm grateful you've taken the time.'
There was a shrug and a wallet was produced.
Money was passed to him, and Ricky ducked his head in thanks. He chose, from the flower-seller at the gates, two bunches of red roses, each with a half-dozen blooms. In the car he sat in the back seat and water ran from the roses' stems on to his trouser leg.
He looked around him and saw the high mature trees of the cemetery and the banks of rhododendrons.
Couldn't say when it had last happened to him, and it was not a mood he liked, but he felt moved by the great quiet of the place. He had not been to a cemetery since his grandmother, Winifred, had been buried, and it had pissed with rain and his best suit had never been right afterwards – and he hadn't cared about her death because the old woman had loathed him. He thought this place lovely. The Bear stopped the car. Ricky climbed out, but Rahman waved for him to leave the flowers on the seat – which confused him, but he followed Rahman.
They walked to a wide space among the trees, where long grass made a cross, with a square, high-walled building at its heart. There were no markers here of individual graves, not like he'd seen on TV.
Each of the grassed lengths, he reckoned, was at least a hundred yards long.
'What's this, then?'
Rahman said, sarcastic, 'It is what the friends of your grandfather did, Ricky. It is where German people are. They died from the bombs when the RAF made the firestorm. The air burned. Prisoners from a concentration camp dug the pits and there are more than forty thousand souls buried here. In one week, more than forty thousand.'
'Well – Nazis, weren't they?'
'I expect some, Ricky, were children.'
He grinned. 'Well, going to be Nazis, weren't they?'
He gazed around him. Couldn't really comprehend it, not forty thousand people killed, burned up, in one week.
At the car, he was passed his roses and they walked across the aisle road and down a neat pathway. Then it was like he had seen on TV. He faced rows of white stones set in careful lines. Bloody beautiful, and clumps of flowers growing in little areas, no weeds, in front of each. He had never been to a place like it, and so quiet. He said what the names were, old Percy's friends, and he took one sector and Rahman another, and the driver a third part – and the stones were all so clean, like they'd been there since last week and not the best part of sixty years. It made him shiver, thinking of it – men in a plane and all that flak hitting it and the plane starting to dive, out of control, and not able to get out, and coming down from three and a half miles up. How long would that bloody take? Made him feel kind of weak. All of them, heroes, weren't they? Could he have hacked it? Yes