Gerald Seymour: Rat Run

He heard her clear her throat, a brief cough, to demand his attention.

'Did you mean that?'

He said peevishly, turning to face her, 'If I said it, Gloria, I expect that I meant it.'

Her face was wreathed in bewilderment. She stuttered, 'It's coming to an end… It's the last hours…

It's what you've worked for.'

'And it is not, my dear, in my hands.'

'You owe it to Polly to be here.'

'I owe very little, not even pocket change, to anyone.'

Lines creased her forehead and mouth. 'But the threat… What about the threat?'

He stared into the confusion of her eyes. 'Someone else's problem now. Polly's problem, a crisis committee's problem, but I fancy not mine… I have, Gloria, carried the problem of the bloody threat too damn long – it's been a lifetime of carrying it. Cold War threat, Irish threat, Iraq threat, al-Qaeda. threat.

You name i t… Don't you understand that the threat has buckled me? Every day, every night, the threat is on my shoulders. Well, not any more.'

'I never thought I'd hear it, not from you.'

He grimaced, then shrugged. He saw her turn on her low heels and she clattered out. The door was slammed, which would not have been accidental. He went to the wardrobe against the wall, slipped off his jacket, unbuttoned his waistcoat and loosened his tie.

The man, Malachy Kitchen, was without corporate baggage and was not answerable to a crisis committee, or to the 'party line' peddled by Polly

'Wilco' Wilkins. Gaunt dragged his laces undone and kicked off his shoes, dropped his waistcoat on to them, unhooked the braces and let his trousers fall. He opened the wardrobe's doors and took out a hanger – which carried the name of a Singapore hotel from where he had appropriated it a dozen years before – and put his suit on it. He took another hanger, from the Inter-Continental in Helsinki, for his shirt. He remembered what the old lady had said, as he had taken tea with her, of a man who did not boast and did not go after trophies, who faced challenges, each of them harder than the last, to claw back his self-respect, and she had said, If you ever see him, you give him my love, and he remembered what Bill, who had the rippled muscles of Special Forces training and who arrogantly wore a shapeless cabled sweater, had demanded of Wilco: And tell her to keep old White Feather clear – not that he sounds like a hero – right out of it. He realized he rooted more for the man, the free spirit, than for the big picture – and it was better he was gone, and soon. From an old rucksack on the wardrobe floor, he took a shirt, trousers and sweater – all caked in dried mud – boots and a rainproof coat that had over-trousers folded into an inner pocket.

He dressed, hitched the rucksack on to his shoulder and went out through the darkened outer office, past Gloria's cleared desk – and past the phones from which Polly Wilkins's next message would be routed to the crisis folk. Gaunt had the look of a jobbing gardener on his way to an allotment plot as he made his way to the lift, and he imagined the pleasure ahead of him and did not know, or care, of chaos left behind him.

Oskar left behind him the ducks, his true friends, safe in the darkness from predators.

He crawled on the track. He had set himself a target that he must reach and the pain that had overcome the shock of numbness was alive in the three wounds on his body, but he welcomed it. If there had been no pain, only exhaustion and weakness, he would have felt a clinging urge to settle in the mud and reeds beside the pond and sleep, and if he slept he would not achieve his target… First he had lain in the scrub and had heard voices and crashing movement around him but a thin torchlight had not pierced the depths of the thorn bushes that had been his immediate refuge.

They had gone. They had blundered away, and then he had moved. Sometimes he had been on his stomach, but a few times he had been able to stand, sway, stagger, and he had known that when he was on his feet he lost more blood, and with each step the pain was more acute.

He thought the pain was his penance. He thought the blood he lost was contaminated by an old atrocity.

He thought he deserved the pain for the evil done by a man whose blood he shared. He thought he had cleansed himself by breaking the light set in place by the strangers who had come and threatened paradise.

Oskar had no clarity of thought because the pain destroyed it.

He had told the ducks, in a reedy, bubbling whisper, that he would not be back.

Now he did not have the strength to stand, to walk.

He might have the strength, if God were with him, to crawl part of the way to his target on his knees and elbows, but first he would wriggle on his stomach and lever himself forward. He prayed that the strength, little of it left, would last him.

Above him the wind sighed and the rain spattered down and he writhed on the path, made slow, agonizing progress, and left behind a trail of poisoned blood.

Ahead was a distant light, his target if his strength lasted.

He sat on the bench in the cell. His belt and shoe laces had been taken from Timo Rahman. He sat because if he had stood and paced the cell he would have had to hold up his trousers or let them slump to his ankles. A light, protected by wire mesh, beamed down at him from the ceiling.

The cell stank of old faeces, urine and vomit. It was cold, bitterly so, because the high, barred window was open to the wind and rain dripped from its aperture on to the prisoner on the bench bed.

He was offered no respect, no deference.

His lawyer had sat beside him in the interview room. He had been shown a preliminary report from a police doctor that listed his wife's injuries on half of a single sheet of paper. The lawyer, German, gross and expensive, had read the report first and Timo had seen him wince. He had known then that the man – on his payroll for nine years – would have little stomach for a fight in his defence, and had not challenged the right of Konig to put his questions… only three of them. Had Timo Rahman, himself, attacked his wife?

If he had not, himself, attacked her, had he authorized the scraping-off of skin from her body? If he had not, himself, authorized the attack, did he know who was responsible for the assault? He had been told that his housekeeper and chauffeur were in custody and would subsequently be interviewed, and that their statements would be matched with his. He had not answered any of the three questions. If they had given him the respect that was due, he would have expected Johan Konig and the woman officer with him to demonstrate frustration, but the coldness he had seen at his home was still alive in their faces, and the contempt. His lawyer had fled the interview room after leaving him little hope of bail.

Isolation settled on him. Timo Rahman did not think of the island, or of the man he had been paid to ship across the water, or of Ricky Capel who, he now realized, had lied to him, a lie he had taken in, a lie that would destroy him. He thought of wolves.

In his mind were the wolves that came down, long ago, from the mountains. Emaciated, foul-breathed, bare to the skin at the haunches and tail from mange, and they circled a failing fire. Corralled inside the fence were goats with kids and ewes with lambs. He sat with his father beside the fire and darkness masked the high ground above the village near Shkodra. Across his knee, held tight, was a loaded single-barrel shotgun, and his father had an old German rifle, and they could hear the wolves and smell them. When the wolves were closest and the smell was bad, when they were boldest from the hunger pangs of winter, the wolves came right up against the fence and then his father would hurl at them the branch from the fire that burned brightest and they would scatter, but they would return.