The Walking Dead

'You should drive, not talk.'

'You know what happens to a martyr? 'I saw it on a website. If he has a vest or a belt, his head comes off. The head is taken off. It is how they knew which were the martyrs on the trains in London. They had no heads. In Tel Aviv, they found the head fifteen feet from his body, on a table, and he was still smiling. It was on the website.'

'Do you want me to tell you to stop? Shall I get out and walk?'

'It is not for me. I will help, I will drive and—'

'And you will talk — and by talking you will put all of us at risk,' Faria snarled.

'Do you think they would force one of us to do it, make it impossible to refuse? Could they do that? I support the struggle but—'

'Stop.'

The traffic flowed round them. If he had slowed, cars, vans and lorries would have swerved to overtake on the inside. He could not stop and she knew it.

'It is not just me they might ask, but you…Would you?'

'What I will tell you is this. Tell you once. The important people, when they arrive, I will tell them to dismiss you.'

'You have to think of what you would do if you were asked. There were videos from the struggle in Palestine. Women were used. In Palestine the word for them is shahida. Arafat called them his "army of roses". Women were martyrs who carried the bombs. Arafat said to them, "You are my army of roses that will crush Israeli tanks." Have you not thought of what might be asked of you?'

Her ears were closed to him. Faria could not answer; neither could she threaten again to denounce him for cowardice, for lack of faith, for talking and putting them all into a marksman's sights or a prison cell. She stared from the window and the car brought her towards the town's centre. She had thought that as a stranger to the town he might find it difficult to locate the street that was her home when he came to pick her up, so she had told him, when he had called the mobile, to meet her at the extremity of the station car park. That mobile now lay embedded in the silt of the river Lea that divided the town. Faria had thought, before he had talked through the history of his life, that he could drop her close to home…The looseness of his talk frightened her. At the next set of lights, she swung open the door and was gone. She never looked back at him.

Have you not thought what might be asked of you? Faria had. In her room, at night, she had wrestled with that thought, sweated and been unable to sleep. She had read that in Palestine the funeral of the small pieces of a woman martyr was a 'wedding with eternity'. She could picture in her mind the photograph of the calm face of the shahida Darine Abu Aisha, who had gone to the bus station at Netanya, killed three and injured sixty. A friend had said of her, 'She knew that her destiny was to become the bride of Allah in Paradise.'

She did not know what she would say if it were asked of her.

* * *

'A police officer, in sworn testimony, described you, Mr Curtis, as a "main man", and meant by that, Mr Curtis, that you were a major criminal. Was he right or wrong?'

The defence barrister, in court eighteen, used a low lectern in the front row of the lawyers' territory between the judge's bench and the dock, now occupied only by Ollie Curtis and the minders.

'I can say quite honestly, sir, that the description of me is wrong. It is a lie, a fabrication.'

It was possible for Tools Wright to watch the barrister but not to permit his eyes to waver to the left, into a field of vision that included Ozzie Curtis in the witness box.

'I want to be quite sure of this. You are telling m'lord and the members of the jury that you are not a big player in the criminal underworld?'

'What I am saying, sir, is utterly truthful. I am not a big player, not a major criminal, not a main man.'

Jools watched the barrister ask the questions and listened to the answers. He thought that Ozzie bloody Curtis wriggled like a maggot on a hook.

'You are in fact, Mr Curtis, a businessman and a legitimate trader?'

'That's right, sir, dead right.'

'I'm asking this because I think the jury will expect to hear your answer to the allegations made by the police, in evidence, that you — associate with criminals, are in fact at the heart of a web of thieving and violence.'

'Maybe I meet criminals, but not intentionally. In business, buying and selling, I meet many people. Honestly and truthfully, though, I don't go round asking guys whether they've done bird. They sell to me and I sell to them. That's about it.'

'Now — and this is most important, Mr Curtis — a Crown witness has said, again on oath, that she can positively identify you as being in the allotment nurseries, and behind a lock-up shed, as you changed from a boiler-suit into more normal clothing, then dumped the boiler-suit, rubber gloves and a face mask in a brazier that was already lit. Was that witness correct in her identification or mistaken?'

'Absolutely mistaken. She got it wrong. I wasn't anywhere there — and it's lies if people say I was.'

'Possibly a lie, Mr Curtis, but more probably a genuine mistake.'

'Whichever, I wasn't there.'

Jools could remember that witness better than, any of the Crime Squad detectives who had given evidence and better than any of the forensics experts and the one who had said the men in boiler-suits and masks caught by CCTV inside the shop had identical physiques to the accused brothers. The witness had been small in build, plain-faced and with an ugly cold sore at her mouth, not more than twenty-two years old, probably younger — and she had been so certain. Jools had believed her. He would have staked his life on her.

The defence barrister was a tall, bowed man, with a hawk nose and a casual stance — his weight was taken by the lectern on which his notes were laid out — and he was dressed in crumpled striped trousers and waistcoat, and a tatty old robe that might have been slept in. Not for a night but a month. Jools thought that the studied indifference was part of the barrister's well-practised art. Confronted by the eye-witness, he had started out with bogus sincerity in challenging her, but received no satisfaction. He'd gone through the quiet, sneering phase and still failed to shake her. Then he'd barked. Eyeball contact and courtesy slipped away, and flat statements demanding that she contradict what she had already stated. He'd not broken her. She was as strong after four hours of ruthless cross-examination as she had been when she'd started in the box. Jools had thought her so gutsy. Himself, he couldn't have turned in such a performance, and he'd gone home that evening, after she'd finished, and told Babs about the girl's courage in the face of her ordeal. All of them in the jury room had believed her.

'And where were you, Mr Curtis, at the time the jewellery shop was robbed by armed men who threatened the lives of the staff and who wore boiler-suits, rubber gloves and face masks? Could you tell the jury where you were?'

'Down at my mum's, sir. She's not well.'

'She has, I believe, a medical history of diabetes mellitus, Mr Curtis.'

'That's what they call it. I look after her, and Ollie does. I was with my mum and so was he.'

He heard a little snigger from Corenza. Ettie murmured to Baz that Curtis must have been watching too many police soaps on TV Peter grunted scornfully. Yes, it was a pretty old one — sick mum, loving and dutiful sons playing carers.

'So, we can be very clear on this. At the time that this criminal enterprise was under way, you were more than twenty miles away with your mother…and a witness who says otherwise is mistaken?'

'Right. Yes.'

The judge intoned, 'I think this a good moment to adjourn.'

After he was gone, and the Curtis brothers with their minders, Jools and the rest were led out by their bailiff. He wondered, going to the door sandwiched between Fanny and Dwayne, whether the accused men realized they were scuppered, knew they were on a conveyor-belt to a guilty verdict.