Gerald Seymour - The Contract

With the curtains across the French windows not drawn, the lights of the sitting room lit the outside patio. From his chair Carter watched Johnny in the towelling top they had found for him and the loose trousers, listened to the thudding beat of his boots. There was an old oak garden chair on the patio. Right foot onto the chair, left foot following. Right foot onto the concrete flags, left foot following. The steady rhythm of the boots. The pumping of Johnny's breath. The press-ups. The jogging on the lawn. Only when it was quite dark, when the night had closed on the house would Johnny come back inside, and there would be a towel round his neck, and he would tramp towards the kitchen for a pot of tea.

Awesome to Carter because he was a desk man, who had not in recent years called upon the strength in his legs, the wind in his lungs. The division between them. Carter would be at the Departures desk in the airport concourse, or on the railway platform. Johnny would be flying on, Johnny would be travelling. That was the division, and Carter could not read his book as the boots pounded from the patio to the garden chair.

No movement since the patrol jeep had passed. Nothing stirred. And the ink darkness was cut savagely by the lights that fell on the fence, clasped it in false daylight, played on the sharp mesh and the attached guns.

Relief at four. Two more boys to climb the metal rungs on the inside of the tower and come to the closed platform 40 feet above the fields. Two more boys to take the places of Ulf Becker and Heini Schalke.

Open ground in front, 300 metres of grass, scythed twice a summer by workmen who were brought close to the wire and covered by the guns of the Border Guard. Open ground all the way from the electrified fence and the trip wires on the embankment of the railway line that had once served the brick works of Weferlingen, all the way to the vehicle patrol strip and the ditch and the fence with the automatic guns. Open ground.

Ulf Becker would never run on that open ground, not with Heini Schalke high and unimpeded above him in the tower. Not with Heini Schalke pulling the hard stock of the MPiKM against his shoulder and squinting with his pig eyes down the foresight.

Not here… an impossibility here.

Cold in the shadow of the tower. Cold in the night air. Gone was the heat and the touch of Jutte. Find me that place, she had said. Find me that place, she had shouted from the platform at Schoneweide. But there was no place on the ground west of Weferlingen. If he were to come on foot to the south of the village, use the Siedlung Hagholz woods for concealment and cross the road that leads to the lime works, and stay beyond the old brick buildings of the railway yards… Then there was the tower and the night- sight binoculars, then there were the lights, then there were the fences, then there were the spring guns, and still there was Heini Schalke and a hundred more in the company.

A chill eddied in the tower, carried on the wind, bitter and penetrating because the windows must be open so as not to delay them if they must shoot and because the binoculars were less effective through glass.

Jutte, it is not possible here.

Find me that place.

Away to his left he saw the lights of the approaching jeep. The border, lethal to those who intruded on its ground, was alive only with armed and watchful men.

There was a pleasing peace in the house. Close to midnight. Smithson and Pierce away to their beds. Carter back into his book. The slow hours of the late evening. The best time of the day for Johnny, when the quiet took command.

'You know, Johnny, we haven't a name for this caper, and we're under a month.' Carter looked up. 'We have to have a name for you.'

'Not a bloody Greek god, don't give me one of them.'

'Of course, lad. I've found it here, just the number.'

Johnny was amused. Johnny wondered whether Carter's hands ever sweated, whether he shouted at his wife, threw his temper at his children, whether he panicked, whether he screamed. He had seen a rough side with the boy, but that was tactical, that showed neither strength nor weakness. Carter would be escorting Johnny to Hannover, working on the fine detail of the pick-up. He'd want to have faith in this man, Johnny would want to trust him, to the full. The one who ironed the creased details of organisation… and who was filching ideas from a guide to European birds.

'What are you going to call me?'

Carter looked over the top of his reading spectacles. 'The Latin is cinclus cinclus. There are many names, different in parts of the country — water blackbird, water crow, water pyet. These are the characteristics…

"straight, fast flight. Can swim both on the surface and under water, enters water by either wading in or diving, habitually walks submerged on the stream bed." That's what we want of our lad, creeping along the floor of the river while the Volkspolizei sit on the banks in blissful ignorance. I reckon that's rather apt. They call it most often the Dipper.

I'm going to put it to Mawby. You'll be the Dipper man, Johnny. I think it's rather good…'

Johnny had not replied. There were feet drumming down the staircase.

The crash of doors being wrenched open. George's voice angry and raised and cursing.

Carter snapped his book shut, drove his glasses into his breast pocket, started up from his chair.

The door of the living room arched towards them. George was in silhouette, the hall lights blazing behind him. Half dressed, hair dishevelled, eyes wide with anger.

'He's gone… Guttmann. I can't find the bugger anywhere.'

It was Johnny who discovered the imprint of shoes in the soft earth of the flower bed beside the rainwater pipe beneath the boy's window.

A slow May dawn, arriving at its own deliberate pace, maddening for the men at the house. They had searched the grounds as best they could with torches, had stumbled over the flower beds and through the rhododendron bushes and between the trees. They had arced their lights in the outbuildings, seeking the cover that a fugitive might use. They had seen nothing, they had heard nothing. Smithson and Pierce in separate cars had gone to drive through the lanes that skirted Holmbury Hill and its woods, roaring away down the drive in the early hours, and neither back yet. George, distraught and malevolent, still paced the grounds of the house as if believing that with the daylight a great truth might yet be found inside the perimeter fence. The nestling had taken to its wings, and George who had been given responsibility for the close supervision of Willi Guttmann had been found wanting. Perhaps that was why he lingered outside, avoiding the reproach of those who waited inside. Later he would find the boy's route over the wire, but it would be of token importance.

Johnny and Carter stayed in the living room, alternately brooding in silence and then conjuring fresh obscenities for respite. The fire had slipped to dull embers, the coffee that Mrs Ferguson had brought them was ignored.

'He's no money, the little bastard.'

'So George says.'

'He's no papers, no passport.'

'That's certain.'

'Where'll he go, Johnny?'

'He won't have thought of that. Just getting into the distance game, getting shot of us, that's all he'll be wanting.'

'He won't find any transport round here… there's pre- cious few buses in day time, none at night.'

'He can take a car…'

Carter broke his pacing, swung round on Johnny. 'Don't pile it, lad.'

'It's a fact,' Johnny said quietly. 'He's five hours' start on you.'

'After what we've done for him.' The pacing resumed. 'Bloody well nursemaided the creep.'

'We've done nothing for him,' Johnny spoke to himself, as if alone.

'We brought him over here, offered him a new life