It was beyond the limits of her experience and she did not know how to respond.
They had been in the kitchen and Faria was at the sink, washing plates and bowls, when the sound of the car came labouring towards the cottage. None of them — Khalid the driver, Syed the watcher or Jamal the recce man — had helped her, or offered to dry what she rinsed. The washing-machine had been churning with their clothes when the first murmur of the car had been heard. She had put her own underwear and tight T-shirts in with their jeans, socks, sweatshirts and boxers. Later she would carry the damp load into the garden and hang it out. The strength of the sun and the breeze would dry it, and she did not care whether the men were offended by the sight of her flimsy white garments against theirs.
He seemed so small and vulnerable.
They had been in the kitchen, the quiet settled on them, since the lashing they had been given in the living room — and through the shut door came the gentle snore of a man at peace. The man who had built the bomb was in his room and there had been the sound of the door locking from the inside. What had made the lashing more terrifying was that the voice had never been raised. The intimidation, threats, had been spoken calmly and each of them, while they were battered, had cringed forward to hear him better. Faria understood it: they were in his control, doll figures held in the rough palm of his hand, and all could be crushed if he closed his fist.
He seemed to look round him, and across their faces, to measure their mood, then gave a smile of deep, genuine warmth.
On hearing the car, they had spilled out of the kitchen. The noise from the opening and shutting of doors, the slamming of the car's, had woken the man in the chair and he had started up with violence in his movement. His hand had snatched at the air above his lap — as if a weapon should have been there while he slept. Faria had seen, then, a flicker of annoyance on the man's features — as if he had betrayed himself. It was gone and the calm of authority bathed him.
Ramzi, the thug, was behind the boy. All of them, from the kitchen, had formed a crescent in front of him, but the boy looked past them to the chair, and the face there had softened and was unrecognizable from that of the beast an hour before. The face lit and the smile spread.
She heard a key turn in a lock and a draught hit the back of her neck. She smelt the breath of the man and heard the wheeze in his throat, then the door was locked again, but she could remember what she had seen: wires, sticks and the slim little detonators; the batteries, the soldering iron she had bought in the late-night hardware shop, the needle and thread and the waistcoat…and all for this young man. He seemed so frail. She fidgeted, as did the others in the crescent. She was not alone. Khalid, Syed and Jamal all shifted their weight and did not know whether to go forward to welcome him or hang back. The smile spread brighter, wider. When he half turned and faced the chair, his coat was thrown open and she saw. clearly the motif of the bird on his chest and thought it tried to make a show of protecting itself — but she knew that if a wing was broken it was helpless and would die. In her mind, she seemed to see the images from the videos, from Chechnya; Afghanistan and Iraq, of explosions and mutilations. Faria shivered. He had no fear. She saw none. He went to the chair, bent, kissed the cheeks offered to him.
She heard, 'I rejoice, my leader, that I have found you.'
'I welcome you, Ibrahim. You have my respect and you are honoured.'
What was she? What were Khalid and Syed, Jamal and Ramzi? They, she, were of lesser importance than grains of sand used to wipe a bottom after defecation, but he — Ibrahim, so slight and so threatened, walking with death — was respected. Love, she thought, shone in him. He went from the chair, from the sheikh, to the end of the crescent's line. As if he performed a ritual, Ibrahim took the hand of Khalid, held it and kissed the driver's cheeks. Khalid was rooted and could not respond. Then Syed, whose eyes blinked with uncertainty. Then Jamal…
He was — condemned. He had come to them, and his love for them was blazoned, and he smiled into their eyes, and their work was to help him successfully to destroy his body. When he was a pace from her, she closed her eyes and vomit rose in her throat. He bobbed his head at her, and edged past. She sensed it. The hand was taken, the fingers linked. The hand, the fingers, had come from the table where the bomb had been constructed. They handled the sticks and the detonators, they might have had on them the stains of the soldered fluids, now dry, that fastened the wires to the terminals. She heard, too, the gentleness of the kiss on the face of the man whose eyes pored over the intricacies of the device. The vomit climbed from her throat to her mouth.
Faria ran.
She went down the corridor, flung open the bathroom door and knelt over the bowl. It came from her stomach and her body shook. Which of them, if asked, would have done it? Would Khalid or Syed, Ramzi or Jamal — would she — have worn the waistcoat that was being made, with its load, in the locked room behind her? She was in the bathroom until her gut had emptied.
She — and Faria swore it as she retched — would not return the love that was given. Not ever.
He was stood down as were the others, divided from him, of the Delta team.
Time to kill. David Banks was on the far side of the canteen from them. Weekends in the police station had the character and life of a morgue, an empty, soulless place and so quiet. The mass of civilian staff was absent and a wedge of polished, cleaned tables separated him from his team. All would have known that he had been offered a route back to acceptance — a fulsome apology — and that he had thrown it back in the inspector's face. He sat in a distant corner, beyond the fruit machines, the chocolate and soft-drink dispensers, and was in shadow.
He was on overtime rates, double time. They should have been doing the escort of a Principal — a former home secretary, responsible for contentious legislation in the earlier days of the War on Terror — but at the last minute the man had pleaded a bout of influenza and cancelled his speech. The team was booked for the day, the overtime sheets had been issued, and the monies would be paid whether they were inside a draughty hail in Bethnal Green or idling in the canteen. In the rest of the Delta team, they were as decent men as was Banks;
as tolerant as was Banks; as bloody-mindedly stubborn as was Banks. He did not move towards them, they did not move towards him. If the team had been on the road, or in the hail and listening to the Principal's speech, there would have been professional linkage between him and them; the job would have been done. But they were in the canteen and there the relationship had collapsed. Of course Banks had thought about it…Push his chair back, get to his feet, cross the chasm of the canteen and spout the necessary. A place at the table would have been found for him, a magazine would have been heaved at him and he would have been told, 'Good shout, Banksy. It never happened. What do you reckon on those long-johns? They say your bollocks'll never freeze in them, but they're forty-eight quid a pair and…' But he didn't, couldn't, was never even close to pushing back the chair and starting the walk. For Christ's sake, one of them could have done the trot over the canteen floor, and none had.
He had read late into the night after getting back to his bedsit, had had to read slowly because the handwriting was steady in its deterioration, and what was to come — he sensed it — would be agony.
If he had not been on double time, weekend duty, he would have been tramping the streets, not reading the diary of Cecil Darke but getting himself over to Wandsworth and a little cul-de-sac where a developer had squeezed in a block of modern terraces. He would have been heading for Mandy's home. Pathetic, but still she dominated him. The divorce had gone through years back, but Mandy obsessed him, her and the money. If he had reached there, had turned into the cul-de-sac, he might have stood on the corner and looked along the street to where she lived, or he might have hit the door with his fist and started the futile inquest again; the source of the acrimony was always the money — the worth of the wedding presents, his maintenance payments, the sale of the old house, his cut and hers. The escape from it was overtime and maybe, now, the leather-covered notebook in his jacket pocket.