Gerald Seymour: Rat Run

Always a dog wolf led.

There had been a year when the high snows had lasted into spring and beyond the time that the kids and lambs were born, and starvation had been the enemy of the wolf pack. The pack leader had not been driven back by fire. His father had shot it, as it prepared to launch at the fence, with his Gewehr 98

Mauser rifle, and it had fallen dead with a head wound. The goats and ewes, the kids and lambs had stampeded and screamed with fear. His father had gripped his arm, had pointed to the downed pack-leader, face alive with excitement. Father and son they had watched. First the wolves had fled to the darkness, then had been emboldened, had circled in the shadows and scurried forward – many targets, but his father had not fired. The wolves had torn apart th( carcass of their pack leader, had fought to eat, rip swallow, savage it. Timo, the boy, had watched power gone and when nothing was left on the ground beyond the fence – not a bone or a meat scrap, no fur not a morsel of skin – the wolves had retreated to the night's safety.

He had never forgotten the sight and sounds of the destruction of a fallen pack leader.

That evening they would be circling. Wolves would be abroad, would be coming near to a mansion in the Blankenese suburb, would be edging closer to casinoe and shops, bars and brothels in the Reeperbahn would be marching on more casinos and more shops more bars and more brothels in the Steindamm. He had done it himself. He, a leader of a wolf pack, had buried Germans and put Russians into the trunks of cars. Word would have spread. If it were tax evasion or the corruption of local officials, living from the rewards of vice or sex-trade trafficking, or involvement with an Islamic group for which he was investigated, then his lawyer would have fought, tooth and claw, to win his freedom. But he was investigated for the peeling of live skin from his wife's body. Who would stand by him? Who would believe he could return to a pre-eminence of power? He saw wolves. Wolves were on a cell-block landing when he returned from exercise in the yard. Wolves moved into casinos and shops, bars and brothels. He seemed to feel the heat of wolves' breath and the smell of it – because he had believed a lie. And they edged nearer and their teeth were bared.

Timo Rahman screamed.

He was not heard. The cell's walls closed around him.

A Europol advisory landed on Tony Johnson's desk.

He had his coat on and was preparing himself for the evening struggle on a commuter train when the clerk brought it to him. It already had a half-dozen sets of initials on it but – what else to expect in this perfect bloody world? – it would end with him and he was to field it… His eyes scanned the single page, and he gasped, shook, and flicked it into his in-tray for the next morning's attention. Then he punched the air.

For a detective sergeant with a reputation, deserved, for carrying equally weighted chips on each of his shoulders and for spreading contagious gloomy defeatism wherever he walked, his stride down the corridor was emphatic with cheerful energy. That morning he had repeated his refrain at the weekly meeting of colleagues to hack at current problems that drugs and organized crime, and their effect on the great mass of the capital city's punters, were on the back-burner, ignored and victim to the swollen resources pushed at the War on Terror. At the ground-floor lobby, swiping his card, he blew a kiss at the lady on Reception, and saw the shock wobble on the face of the duty guard beside her.

He went out through the swing doors and on to the street, imagined he heard the guard's question, 'God, what's the matter with that miserable beggar?' and imagined he heard the lady's answer, 'Must be that he's got hot flushes, or he's on a bloody good promise, or it's the lottery.' What he could have told them was that a Europol advisory had reached his desk and stated that police in Hamburg had arrested the Albanian national, Timo Rahman, on charges of grievous bodily harm and wounding, and that officers on the case urgently requested co-operation from European colleagues on all links between Rahman and criminal organizations for immediate investigation while Rahman was in custody, and vulnerable

… What he could also have told them, on the reception desk, was that he had contributed – damned if he knew the detail of how – to the life of an untouchable going into the gutter.

On the pavement he turned heads as he laughed to himself like a maniac. 'You done us proud, Malachy. I hope you've a drink in your hand because that's what you deserve. You've done us proper proud – I hope it's a damn great drink and then another.'

Malachy had rainwater in his eyes, ears, nose, had it weighing down the clothes on his back and his legs.

He quartered ground, was inland from the highest dunes. He moved, alternately slow and fast. When he went slowly it was to listen, because he could see so little, and then he shook his head hard. His fingers went into his ears to gouge out the wet, but he heard only the wind's bluster and the pattering of the rain.

When he went fast, he held to what he believed was the line towards the source of the gunfire and often he thought he had lost it and that his instinct failed him.

Going fast, on a track, his shoes, with their worn tread, slid from under him.

He fell, went down. The breath squeezed out of his chest and his hands flailed. When they hit the mud it was not tackiness they found, but something slicked, wet, but not like mud. Malachy felt the surface of the path, realized its smoothness – as if mud had been pressed flat by a solid weight and then the slick had been left. He could not see more than the outline of his hands but there was darkness on his palms. He believed that it was blood and that the mud had been smoothed by a man's body. He thought, where he was, a wounded man had rested, then crawled forward. But Malachy did not follow the trail, and he tried again to find his line.

He came to the pond. A little of the reflection of the water shone back at him through the reeds. He saw, as a silhouette, the shape of the viewing platform where he had put his shoulder against a support post… In a crash of noise, and he froze, ducks fled – splashed, beat their wings, screamed – and he could smell the body of the old man, as he had done at the platform.

Malachy had warned her that it was a crime to involve others and risk hurting them. She had involved the old man, had picked at his isolation with honey words and pleading eyes, and he had been shot and crawled towards a refuge. She had rounded on him – what did he think she had done with him, if not involve him? He had said: I'll pick up my own pieces. He would. She – sweet girl, warm girl with a taste of sadness – did not own him; nor did those who controlled her.

In his mind, he adjusted the line.

He came to a hollow. He found a plastic bag caught on thorns and near it a Cellophane packet that would have held a shop-bought sandwich. Maybe it was because the cloud weakened in its density and a trickle of the moon's light came through, but small shapes gleamed and then their brightness died. He picked up three discarded cartridge cases. On his hands, on his knees, feeling with his fingers, he found the trail they had used and the indents in the mud.

Later, Malachy came to the first marker: a strip of cloth tied to a branch.

He wanted to stand bare-faced in front of a mirror with brilliant light shining on his skin and coming back from his eyes. He wanted, as he had not done for a year and a half, to examine that face and those eyes, to search for a truth and know himself again. He would not know himself until he had hounded down Ricky Capel on the beach ahead where the sea stampeded the waves… Then, not before, he would learn if he was a coward, and the word beat in his head as he went forward and looked for the next marker.