It was worth doing. The procedure was not so that he was proof against a jam of the firing mechanism but to clear his mind. Through the curtains, not closed completely, the dawn was coming. Later he would read the last page of the notebook, but he had succeeded, had lost sight of the sniper's finger that whitened as the pressure on the trigger grew.
The room was lighter, but Banks slept.
Also waking that morning and preparing for the coming day…
In the second bedroom of his mother's housing-association home, out in the Leagrave district of the town, Lee Donkin shivered as he dressed. The tremors were not from the cold: he had not injected brown into his veins last night, or the last day, not for fucking near a week. He did not pad to the bathroom, did not wash and had not run a brush across his teeth. He dragged on yesterday's sweatshirt over yesterday's vest, and yesterday's jeans over yesterday's pants, and yesterday's socks. From the floor he took his anorak with the hood and slipped into it, then prised his feet into his trainers. He could not control the shake and shouted an obscenity, but was not heard. He did not know where his mother was, from which pub she had been taken home by a punter. If she had been there she would have yelled back a curse from her room for waking her…She was not often there. He went to the kitchen, took bread from the bin, ignored the pale green mould on the crusts, and wolfed it down, but it had little effect on the shivering. He heard the couple who lived above them already rowing, and the baby next door was crying. He lifted up a chair from beside the kitchen table, and banged against the ceiling with its legs. Now he went to the bathroom and wrapped his hand in his anorak's sleeve. He stood on the lavatory seat and stretched himself up to the old cistern high on the wall and reached inside. He retrieved a short-bladed knife from the hiding-place in which it was taped. It went into his pocket. Later, before he left, he would rummage in the debris — clothing, fast-food plastic plates and syringes — on the floor of his room for his gloves, lightweight leather. His hands would never touch the handle of his favoured knife. He was too smart, too switched on, to give prints or DNA if he was done on the street with a stop-and-search. Just found it, hadn't he, just picked it up in the street and just going to hand it in, wasn't he? They had an operation going, the police had, and called it Failsafe, but they hadn't netted him, too smart and switched on. Because he craved the brown, Lee Donkin needed a snatch that morning — on the way to the shopping centre in the square and the sale when purses were loaded — needed it bad.
Avril Harris crawled from her bed, stumbled to the bathroom. All through the night, she had festered the anger that she had been sold short, had bought a car that was already broken. She had been out the previous evening for a curry with three of the other girls from A and E, and she'd been the one who hadn't drunk a beer or three and had given two of them a lift back. Every time she'd slowed at the damn lights, the backfire had gone. A hell of a noise. Hadn't frightened the others, with beer inside them, but had made them laugh hysterically. They had laughed at her car, when it should have been her pride and joy. In the bathroom, under the shower, her anger slackened. She thought through her day ahead…Up and out and into the car, bloody thing. A drive into the town and at the multi-storey car park around nine, and into the shopping centre a few minutes after Wasn't going to hit the mad rush for the opening of the doors. Into work by eleven. If it hadn't been for the car — sluicing herself under the shower's rose — it would have been a day to look forward to.
His alarm, old-fashioned with a clapper bell, woke Steve Vickers. His had been a good, dreamless sleep. Off to the bathroom and he ran the piping-hot water. He was content, as close to happiness other than when he had an attentive audience round him. Without his daily bath he would have been — his opinion — a lesser, unfulfilled man. Living alone, he had no queue outside the door, no one to bang it and urge him to hurry. He lay among the suds and talked to himself, aloud, of the history he would impart that morning. He believed that what he did in bringing history alive was valuable, couldn't imagine anything else he might achieve had greater value. He lingered, ran more hot water, had time enough before he met his audience in the town square.
George Marriot's sister shook him awake. She gazed down at him and he recognized the affection that linked them. He assumed that at the pub — could not be otherwise — his life with his spinster sister was a source of sniggering amusement. She was already dressed. They would laugh in the pub, when he had gone out through the door and had started on his walk home with his sticks to aid him, that they were two lonely, misplaced souls, the flotsam rejects of ordinary life…They knew sod all…She was always up at five and she always woke him at six. He could get to the bathroom without the support of the sticks. There was a line made by his hands along his room's wallpaper, along the corridor and into the bathroom. Informer times, it was him that would have risen at five, but they were gone. He used the shower, always cold water falling on him. It took him back to the days of the camps at Kandahar and Jalalabad, when the dawn peeped up over the mountains and fighting men prepared for their day and the scars on his legs still puckered and were deep blue where the surgeons had probed for detritus. The chill of the shower invigorated him, gave scope to his memories of the best of days…One cloud, always one bloody cloud in a sky of clear blue. The petty remarks about his shirt — true, but should not have been said — had hurt, were wounds. When he had eaten his breakfast of kedgeree — egg, fish and rice, she cooked it for him every day of the week — he would go down to the village, take the bus to the town, buy three shirts in the sale and, with luck, still have change from a twenty-pound note and bring flowers for her back with him. The water ran on his skin, as it had done when it had dripped from an elevated oil drum and he'd hunted men for bounty, when his life had had purpose. The long-nurtured memories gave him comfort.
'He'll have slept rough,' Hegner said.
'Joe, I'm already about a light year's miles beyond any authority I once owned. I'm outside. Hours back, the card I swipe at the door of Riverside Villas will have been made invalid. If we lose this, I'm done for.' Dickie Naylor would be anyway, and he knew it.
He heard the snort of derision. 'I've gotten the feeling you're a man who sees his glass as always half empty. Buck up, Dickie, tell me where we are.'
His boys, the elderly Boniface and Clydesdale, were in their car and the glow of their cigarettes lit their faces, so passive and calm, as if what had gone before was past history, worthless. Not so with Naylor. He seemed to hear the screams, had heard them while he drove south and west. They were the same, piercing, as those of the gulls that had flown from the water when the first of the dawn's smear was on the horizon.
Naylor said, 'We're facing the sea.'
'I feel it on me.'
'About two hundred yards to the right of us is the entrance to the ferry terminal. Two entrances, for vehicles and foot-passengers. Nearest to us is the foot-passengers' gate. Going on from the terminal is the commercial area, warehouses and company offices, but that's all fenced off. Then there are cliffs that go out to the big headland. We're on the esplanade, that's the walkway between the road and the beach. The road is well lit, but not the walkway. The lights are aimed away from it. There are benches and—'
'Not a tourist brochure, Dickie, stick with the programme.' Asked, with acid, 'What time is your flight?'