'First thing Plod asks, "How did they pay? Before they thieved your sheets and vandalized your towels, did they pay by cheque? Cash in hand?" Maybe Plod wants to get his hands on the banknotes and run them through for tests, I don't know. Questions with difficult answers.'
'Best left alone?'
'Best left where the Revenue doesn't know. Not as though the bedding was new. Can of worms if I phone the police, that's my opinion.'
She said, 'I've done a nice plum crumble, your favourite.'
'That's grand, my love,' the farmer said. 'Can I take it that's the end of the matter?'
'The end.' She cleared his plate and hers off the table. Time now was short. That evening there was a meeting of the parish council. He was chair and she was the minutes' taker. At the sink, she turned. 'Actually, they were very pleasant, the ones I met. Particularly the girl, so well-mannered — and the man, the older one, very handsome, a real charmer…'
She heard it, then flicked the curtain and saw the car. Fury burned in Anne Naylor. She tried the number again. She heard his voice. In the metallic automated tone of the damn speaking clock, he told her that he was unable to take the call and urged that a message be left after the beep.
'I'm telling you, Dickie, that your behaviour today — no contact, not a word — is absolutely unforgivable. Where are you? Still running round like it's a Scouts' jamboree and you've to be there till the last tent's been taken down, the last campfire put out? I suppose you think the people at that damn place will admire you for working right up to the eleventh hour of the eleventh day — they won't. I just thank God that Daddy's not still with us and a witness to your pathetic behaviour. I promise you that tonight — and it won't be in a quiet corner — I'll bend your ear and not care who hears me. For Heaven's sake, what do you think you've achieved by this pitiful display of childish dedication? By Monday morning they'll have forgotten you. Me, I'm not in the forgetting business. Damn you, answer your bloody phone.'
She slammed down the receiver.
Her coat for the evening was silk. Her late mother had worn it at her father's farewell party, when the Service had been based at Leconfield House. A little dated, but elegant. In front of the mirror, she touched her hair — dabbed her fingers on it…and she remembered. Her mother had said, in the minutes before they had walked into the governor's formal salon, at the Aden residence, 'You don't have to do it, my dear. Pregnancy out of wedlock isn't the end of the world. Daddy and I will stand beside you…It's not as though he's a wonderful catch. I'm sure you can do better…All right, all right. Just promise me you won't snivel…And promise me you won't regret it.' God, that evening she regretted marrying Dickie Naylor. She closed the door behind her, double-locked it and hastened down the path.
The chauffeur held open the rear door for her. He looked puzzled. 'Just you, Mrs Naylor? Not your husband as well?'
'No, just me,' she said acidly. 'I'm meeting him there, but we'll be coming home together.'
'I suppose he's working,' the chauffeur said. 'Funny that. Most of those I take for their last party wish they'd quit a year ago.'
'I expect he'll get used to, retirement, growing tomatoes in a new greenhouse.'
The chauffeur closed the door gently behind her, and drove off. God — see if she didn't — she'd bend his ear, then burn the bloody thing to a crisp.
'Give him more.'
'You sure, Mr Hegner?'
'It's what I said.'
'Never gone up that high before, Mr Hegner.'
Joe Hegner sat in his chair and asked the question in a clear voice, as if it didn't matter to him, like he was the schoolmarm talking to infants back near Big Porcupine Creek. 'The Engineer, my friend, will he be journeying with him?'
The prisoner hung from the hook, and his body had the look of an animal carcass that his grandfather had slaughtered and left to bleed. He could not see it, but was able to imagine it…The trousers were down to the ankles, crumpled and lodged there, along with the fouled underpants; The wires' clips were dug into the folds of the prisoner's lower stomach, near to the testicles but not on them. The bare feet swivelled. He expected the prisoner, when the question was put, to stiffen and writhe, try to summon resistance, but his body turned slowly half-way to the right and then half-way to the left — and Hegner knew it because of the creak of the weight on the hook. He strained to hear an answer, but there was nothing.
'Do it, guys.'
There was the gasp and the grunt, then more silence.
'Do it again, give him more.'
He heard the scream, shrill inside the walls and under the ceiling, and the strain on the hook whined.
'Every man has a breakpoint, eventually reaches the end of tolerance. Reckon we're near to it. What we have is good, but can get better. Hadn't thought he'd be so stubborn. He's stubborn, obstinate — but so am I. For me, it's all down to that moment of darkness. I'm in the mess hall, surrounded by good men. I'm queueing for food. I see this man — young, Arab, in big, bulky army fatigues, and he's a hand in a pouch pocket — standing by a table not twenty paces from me. I see him smile. I know then that he belongs to the Twentyman, have that sense of it. The shout's in my throat, and then the light's in my eyes. So bright, so vivid. I see men falling. I close my eyes — like closing them will protect them. And the blast of the scorched air knocks me down. I lie there, and there's men on top of me. I have pain so I know I'm alive and there's men shouting. I open my eyes. First, I think I can't see because of the men on me, but I push them off. My eyes are wide. That's the moment I realize why there's darkness. I blink, rub, scratch my damn face, where my eyes are, and there is only darkness. The Twentyman did it to me. I made the promise then, in that darkness and with other men's blood on me, the wetness of their guts, hearing them scream and moan, that I would get him or regard my life as a failure. What you've done, guys, is put me close to him and for that I am sincerely thankful. Do it again, up the juice.'
'Don't think there's any point, Mr Hegner.'
'There's not a pulse, Mr Hegner, no trace.'
'Do you know, Mr Hegner, it's the first time Xavier and I have ever lost a prisoner?'
'You're right there, Donald. He's gone, Mr Hegner.'
Behind him, deep in the darkness, feet on cracked glass. He heard the wheeze, air expelled between tight-set teeth, then, 'God, that is a bloody disaster.'
Hegner swung round sharply. 'Wrong, Dickie, wrong…We have a ticket, to and from and at what time. That is no disaster.'
The hoarse voice was raised to a shout. 'My remit — if you've damn well forgotten it, which I have not is a bomb, a street, casualties spread across pavements. Where are we?'
'Go with the flow, Dickie, and they'll love you.' Joe Hegner laughed. 'All your people, who think you're yesterday's man, they'll be tossing garlands at you. Dickie, enjoy the ride. You're stressing on one bomb but I'm going to show you the big picture.'
She stood behind him. At her feet was the bucket, shiny and galvanized. In the bucket was the water she had taken from the rain butt, clouded with dirt. She used the soap to clean his body.
Faria believed that, without her, he could not have washed himself — could not even have undressed. He stood naked and trembled. She had not before seen the bare skin of a man's buttocks and the flatness of a man's belly. A lone candle lit them. She had started at the nape of his neck, from there to the bristle of his beard on his cheeks and jaw, and then her hands had gone down, slipping and sliding across his shoulders, and into his armpits, and on towards the small of his back and the shallow width of his hips. She washed him in the cavity of his buttocks, and she stretched her arms round to reach his groin…then down his legs. The shivers convulsing the body were not from the cold. She felt the hairs on his legs, finer and softer than those at the base of his stomach. He did not wriggle to be clear of her hands. She knew all of his body, had washed its secret places and had sensed the beat of his heart.