Dear Enid, I have to try to sleep. The 'Anthem for Doomed Youth' was written for me, and I am walking towards hell and am alone, and I have forgotten what cause it was that brought me to die 'while in a foreign land', here or somewhere else.
The dawn comes quickly, too fast.
Propped up on his bed, Banks's eyes lingered on the page of the notebook, and he reread again the last line. The dawn comes quickly, too fast. There were distant shouts as the garrison camp woke, as there would have been on Mosquito Hill when the officers roused their men. He had been awake for an hour and, against all better judgements, had started on the entry written by faint candlelight so long ago…He never skipped, and he resisted the temptation to find the last page, the last words written by his great-uncle. There was not the scream of the day's first artillery shell fired from a 155mm howitzer by German gunners or the nationalists, or the first howling low-level flight over the ridge of a Messerschmitt fighter, but a high-pitched jingle of tinny music.
He reached on to the bedside table in the barely furnished room of the camp's visitors' quarters, lifted his mobile and clicked 'receive'. Sharply he gave his name, then listened.
'But they're not there. They were moved out…What's the damage?'
He was told, and some more.
'But that's brilliant, Wally, picking up the lowlife…What should I do, and when?'
He shaved fast, dressed, then slipped on his suit jacket so that the pocket hung down over the pancake holster on his belt. He locked his door and went down the bright-lit corridor, heading for his Principal's room. By the staircase, half-way down the corridor where a uniformed constable lounged on a plastic chair, there were windows and he saw that darkness still cloaked the parade-ground. He knocked, said his name, heard an answering grumble, went inside and switched on the ceiling light. Wright was in bed and blinked up at him. Like any other policeman, he was familiar with the work of delivering bad, sad news, and had learned it should be done briskly, without emotion. His Principal might be a hero but he was not a friend.
He said, matter-of-fact, 'Sorry and all that, but I have to tell you your home was attacked an hour ago. Of course your wife and daughter were not there and are quite safe. A window was broken and a petrol bomb was thrown into your living room. The street was staked out, across the road and down it. The guys were in there pretty fast with extinguishers and most of the damage is smoke and scorching, not structural.'
Some would have wept, others would have let free a volley of oaths, obscenities. His Principal merely grimaced.
'Because we had the stake-out and were able to move so sharp, your neighbours won't have been affected other than by the drama. The homes on either side of yours are fine. Yours is now boarded up.'I suppose, when you went to the judge and told him of the approach made to you and turned in the money, that you realized there could be retaliation. People on high are singing your praises.'
The Protection Officer expected a platitude response. Something about 'duty' and something about 'ethics'. The Principal only shrugged…Peculiar.
He bored on: 'Actually, we've had a rather good result, and my boss is well chuffed with it. We have three arrests — a driver, the jerk who threw the petrol bottle, and the one who chucked the brick and broke your window for the petrol to go through. He's Benny Edwards and it's the first time, and not without trying, that he's been nicked in flagrante. He's a specialist in nobbling, but that's as far as I can go on him.'
No reaction, nothing. Banks had anticipated something…Bizarre.
'I'm not permitted to discuss it further because of any possible conclusions you might draw in relation to the case you're sitting on, Mr Wright. What's paramount is that nothing I have said to you prejudices your opinion on the trial. That is why you have not yet been asked for a statement on the approach made to you, why you have not been sat down with a book of photographs so's you can identify the people you met, and the circumstances under which you were given that sum of cash. It's all being kept till after the verdict you and the rest will reach. Does that make sense?'
His Principal could have said bloody something. He saw the roll of his eyes.
The man seemed so calm. It was like, Banks reflected, his Principal was indifferent to having had petrol splashed into his living room and lit. Banks would have been mental with fury at such violation of his territory. He realized that he understood so little about the man. He had not managed to dig his way into the school teacher's trust — that was why he had won no normal, predictable reactions. But they called him a hero. There, perhaps, he fitted a pattern. A hero, in David Banks's world, was not a special forces' trooper — up a mountain in Afghanistan with all the high-tech gear hooked on his webbing — but the little man, ordinary as sin, who was confronted, from nowhere, with acute danger to himself and others. His hero was a man who made a bridge of his body for many to crawl over when a ferry-boat turned turtle, in darkness with panic around him. His hero, man or woman, young or old, had gone back into the smoke and toxic hell of a bombed Underground train, deep in a tunnel, to help those so badly injured they could not make their own escape. His hero was Cecil Darke, without water and with the smell of the dead round him, on the ridge of Mosquito Hill. They came in all shapes, all sizes and fitted no stereotype, and what made them so special was their lack of preparation for what they would endure. He felt, rare for him, a keen admiration. Whatever his emotions, Wright had them successfully bottled and corked. What did they say? They said, 'Don't make a drama out of a crisis.' The man was now identified by twin echelons of organized crime, had acquired the enmity of two brutal clans, would live with that weight on his shoulders — and his family's — for years to come. He had stood up and been counted against the forces of corruption and intimidation. Not bad for a bloody school teacher, but the mark of a nobody who was found to be a hero, too true. Maybe the man was in shock.
Banks said kindly, 'I can rustle up a cup of tea if you'd like one'
His Principal rolled over in the bed, away from him. 'I'd prefer it if you got lost and let me go back to sleep — switch the light off on your way out.'
He did, and shut the door quietly behind him.
Another day was starting, and Banks did not know what it would bring — if anything.
In a Belgravia hotel room, where the street below the window reverberated with a road-cleansing lorry, a couple made love. They had barely slept.
He thought the younger woman was clumsy through inexperience but relished her passion.
She thought the older man was now almost drained of his strength and doing it from long unused memory cards but was childishly eager.
An opened champagne bottle, its contents going flat, was tilted in a silver bucket. She'd said she was teetotal and didn't need the stimulation of alcohol, and he'd followed suit but the wasted bottle would be on his bill.
She was astride him and he was on his back, and the sheets were nicked off the bed and on the carpet with their scattered clothes. He was in her, and his hands reached up for her breasts. He talked and she listened. Then, when he was flaccid, limp — between times — she talked and he listened, but mostly it was him who talked and while he did she helped him to get ready for it again. A wife, Gertrud, who had been a childhood sweetheart, and a divorce of twenty years ago that had come through, final papers, on a fax machine in a foreign city. A boyfriend at university who had only shagged her on Saturday nights when the hail of residence was heaving in unison. A secretary where he worked who cared for him but as a younger sister and didn't share a bed with him. A young man, a staffer at the Home Office, whom she'd ended up with after a Christmas party.