Winded, as if he'd been punched in the solar plexus, Banks nodded. Humiliated, he went to do the escort bit to the coach.
Chapter 15
He heard the screams, the shrieks, then the quiet.
They came from inside the Nissen hut, into the car, and Naylor flinched. Silence rang around him.
A dog-walker, a woman with two yellow Labradors, had come to within a half-mile of the hut, and the brick building. He had seen her through the steamed-up windscreen. She had paused by the pole that flew the red flag. Probably she walked there, wrapped in her waterproofs, shod in wellingtons, every day. He had thought the raised flag blocked a regular route, and she would have looked for the parked vehicles that proved live firing was expected. None of the usual Transits that brought police marksmen to the old airfield were there, but the flag had been flying and she had obeyed the disciplines it imposed.
The screams and shrieks were gone. He heard the rumble of his stomach, hunger. Darkness was coming. He grimaced, remembered what Xavier Boniface had told him when, years before — before the first pangs of rheumatism had settled into his hip — they had lain with Donald Clydesdale in a bandit-country hedge in County Armagh and had waited for a farm-boy to come out of a barn, to lift him and interrogate him…remembered: 'Mr Naylor, dogs are always a right nightmare when you're lying up. So bloody inquisitive. Best thing for them is pepper spray up the nose.'
The screams and shrieks had cut at him. Now the silence did.
He reflected: What would the woman have thought? What would have been her response if she had walked past the flag, had approached the building, and he had intercepted her? 'Of course you understand, madam, That those screams, shrieks, are from a prisoner currently undergoing procedures of extreme torture. In the interests of the greater good, to learn where a bomb will explode, we have torn up all that human-rights jargon and are inflicting extreme pain. If you'd like to, madam, you're very welcome to go in there and have a look at the wretch because — you see — it's all in your name…Your name, madam.' Would she have gone white, blanched at the gills, or fainted? Would she have shrugged, as if it was none of her concern? Would she have cared about the torture and pain suffered by a fellow citizen, or would she not? It was done in her name. And he reflected further, with the hunger pinching at his gut: it was easy enough to do torture and pain abroad, but not against an obesely muscled boy from an East Midlands comprehensive, 'home grown'. Before, there had always been a plane to get on to, and the debris left behind. But this was close, new.
He left his car, went to see what was done in the name of a woman who walked a pair of yellow Labradors. He strode through the rain, oblivious to it, and came to the building.
'That you, Dickie?'
'It's me, Joe.'
Hegner was sitting easily in a collapsible chair, picnicking. Boniface and Clydesdale were hunched on the floor, eating, but were not on their backsides because water lay in splashed puddles across its whole width and length. The prisoner was prone, still hooded and bound, with most of his weight against the back wall. Above him was a quite ghastly meat hook, and a canvas bucket was beside him. His body was soaked and his shivering was convulsive. Naylor understood the use of the bucket, had seen it often enough and knew its proven value. A man's head was forced down into a filled bucket. Water was swallowed and ran through the nostrils, and he was held down for perhaps ten seconds. Then he was dragged up, coughed, spluttered and choked, and was asked a question. No answer was given. The head went back into the bucket, perhaps fifteen seconds: no answer. The bucket was refilled, and the head was inserted again, for perhaps twenty seconds — and the coughs, splutters and chokes were worse, and it was ever harder to get the water up out of the lungs. On and on, through thirty seconds and thirty-five. That was torture and pain — and it was expressly forbidden in the police interview rooms at Paddington Green.
Boniface looked up at him. 'Just having a break, Mr Naylor, and something to eat. It's only MREs, but you're very welcome to what we have.'
Clydesdale said, 'Meals Ready to Eat, Mr Naylor. I can do you a beef curry.'
He saw the small tins in their hands, and the little plastic utensils. In Ireland or Bosnia-Herzegovina there had always been a garrison barracks to return to. He had never eaten from a Meals Ready to Eat tin, and the sight diminished his hunger. 'Don't think I will, but kind of you to offer.'
He saw that the prisoner had not been given food.
Hegner leered at him. 'We're getting there, Dickie, slowly but surely. Before we stopped for lunch, we'd gotten far enough down the line to have a location and an approximation of the time. The target, he says, is Birmingham and the timing is the coming Saturday morning. That's what he heard but was not told it directly. He does not know where in Birmingham or at what hour. He was not in Birmingham, himself, on the reconnaissance.'
A sharpness in Naylor's voice. 'Do you believe him?'
'I think I do, haven't found a reason not to.'
It had to be said. Naylor would not have admitted to being expert on the arts — bloody dark ones — of torture, but papers crossed his desk that raised the question. Psychiatrists — and God only knew where they'd been dug out from — wrote that men or women, under the extremities of agony, would blurt out anything, any damn thing, to halt the pain. He saw the twitch in the prisoner's body and could smell that the sphincter had broken. It must be asked.
'After what's been done to him…You know, after…Well, is that information to be relied upon? There are heavy consequences if it cannot be.'
There was a little chorus of mild complaint.
'Not like you to doubt us, Mr Naylor.'
'No, not after all these years.'
Hegner said, 'I'm sure you won't want to rubber-neck, Dickie, and I'm sure you will want to communicate what's been told you. I'm watching your back, but these are fine men and don't seem to need an oversight…It's best, Dickie, that you get on out and not clutter up the floor space.'
He was flustered. Their calm detachment from their work bit into him, but his eyes were on the hooded body and the tremors running through it. 'It's only a start that you've given me. I need so much more — the size of the bomb, what the bomber is likely to wear, targets that have been talked about, the safe-house, the numbers in the cell and the identities, the recruitment, the—'
'Get on out, Dickie. I'm very clear on what you need to know.'
The tins had been dropped into a plastic bag, mouths were wiped with handkerchiefs and fingers sucked clean. Hegner settled back in his chair, and the two men — not unkindly — hoisted up the prisoner and linked his hands back over the ceiling hook. And he screamed. Naylor fled into the dusk, and ghosts scrambled round him.
From his car, he made the call to Riverside Villas, and told what he had learned.
The row erupted on the coach. As with anything volcanic, it had simmered and rumbled for an hour. When they were within a half-hour of the barracks, it fractured the membrane that had hidden it. It spewed, and the catalyst was Peter. He articulated what they all knew.