Gerald Seymour - Condition black

They all stared at him.

He looked into the faces of old Vic and his Fran, and old Brennie, and of Billy and Zap, and Zack, and Kev and Johnny.

He saw their fear, and he saw the terror that collapsed the face of Dr Bissett who backed away to the far corner of the back bar.

The words came…

"Christ, you screwed it now."

" N o call for that."

"What you done that for?"

" W e live here, Colt… "

He stood his ground. He was the one who never panicked. He was the one who would never be taken. He stood straight and tall and the police constable was prone at his feet. He saw the shoulders of the police constable heave up as the spasm muscles tried to find breath for the lungs down the passage of the damaged windpipe. He was 200 yards from his home. Running, like he could run because he was fit, he could have gone to the front door of his home, the Manor House, in a half of a minute.

He heard the creak of the door behind him… Zap gone.

Had he come to the village for money? Had he come home to see his father the one last time, and to see his mother who was dead for the one last time? There was the movement to his right flank. Pathetic bastards. The dross of the village, gone nowhere, met nobody, seen nothing… Kev sneaking through the door.

Bissett whimpered, like a dog waiting to be kicked, he thought, in the far corner of the bar.

From Warminster they had little call to come to the village. The village was a backwater. The convoy of police cars, four of them, and nine policemen had been delayed in the yard at the back of the Warminster police station for more than 35 minutes while the numbers were made up, and while the Duty Inspector fumed at the failure of Communications to raise the local man. They came into the village. Their orders were to seal the one road running through the village at each end, and to maintain a discreet watch on the Manor House, and to do nothing if they saw the bastard because he had had a handgun at Heathrow and because the firearms unit was being helicoptered from London. They saw the police car parked beside the goalposts of the football pitch.

The lead car stopped. The Sergeant was still examining the car when there was the thud of the footfall of the two running youths.

"Heh, you, stop there. You seen Desmond?"

Kev stammered, " B e in the pub… in there… "

Oh, was he, by Christ… The Sergeant grimaced… A bloody earful coming young Master Desmond's way, using his work transport to get out on the piss, with his wile saying over the telephone that he was gone on patrol. In the pub, by Christ.

"Thank you, son."

Zap stuttered, "Don't be going in there… he's a gonner in there… Get in there he'll bloody kill you, like him… "

"All right, young 'un, who's been killed?"

" Y o u r copper," Kev said.

" W h o b y? "

" B y Colt," Zap said.

The Sergeant, middle-aged and heavy, ran for his car and his radio.

He stood above the police constable.

Again the slither of feet on the flags of the back bar and the heave of the door of the back bar. Billy and Zack gone.

He wanted to go to his father. He wanted to sit beside the bed in which he had last seen his mother. He wanted to flop on the bed in the room that had been his. The room was the shrine to his youth. His father had told him that, after the raid by the Regional Crime Squad, after the room had been searched by armed detectives, his mother had gone into the room and restored it just as it had been when they had first sent him away to the boarding school at the coast near Seaton in Dorset…

"Please, Colt, hurry…"

Bissett coming across the back bar towards him.

"… We have to go."

"Shut u p. "

" T o the ferry…"

"Shut up, damn you."

"I was just trying to say…"

Bissett's hand pulling at his arm. Colt dragged the fingers off his sleeve.

"Don't touch me, don't ever cling to m e. "

Old Brennie was on his feet, and nodding gravely towards old Vic behind the bar counter, the way he always nodded when he had supped up his beer and it was time to walk home, and he'd stop halfway down the road, like he always did, and empty his bladder into the privet hedge at the front of the comprehensive schoolteacher's garden.

There was the bleat of Bissett's voice in his ear. "Why don't we go…? "

Because going was for ever. Going now was never to return.

All the months in Oz, all the weeks on the big laden tanker, all the long days of the training in Baghdad and the long nights in the Haifa Street Housing Project were bearable only because there was the certainty that one month, one week, one day and one night he would return to the village and the love of his father and his mother. When he went this time, he was gone for ever, he was never to return.

" OK., O.K., " Colt said.

He saw that Fran squatted now on the floor and that she stared into the half-obscured face of the police constable. He would finish his drink. They would remember him in the back bar of the village pub for ever and a day because he had finished his drink and then he had gone out into the night, never to return.

He lifted the glass. Three gulps and he would finish the glass, just as he would have finished the glass in three gulps if the police constable had not walked in to warn of Zack's car and Johnny's car with the lights left on in the car park.

Colt grinned, "Cheers, Dr Bissett."

The Duty Inspector at Warminster gave his order. The pub was to be surrounded. All possible light was to be thrown from headlights and flash lamps at the front and rear and sides of the pub. The blue lamps on the roofs of the police vehicles were to be switched on.

Over the radio link, he told his Sergeant, "Just keep them bottled up there, George. The heavy crowd's close to you now.

Just keep them bottled, pray God they don't do a runner."

There was the racing of vehicle wheels across the loose gravel of the car park, the crunch of the brakes, the beam of light cutting through the thin curtains of the back bar. And the white light was mixed with the flash of the blue, penetrating.

Colt choked on the last swill of his glass.

The light was over Bissett's face, white and blue, dappled like sunshine and cloud.

His glass slammed down onto the table. He drew the Ruger from his belt and the foresight caught at the waist of his trousers and there was the rip of the material… He would never be taken… and Bissett cowered away from him.

Fran said, " Y o u shouldn't have done it, you didn't need to hurt him… "

She had her hand, rough and callused and worn and the hand that he loved, cupped under the head of the policeman. She had turned his body over as if she believed that were the way to help him to breathe.

He felt the clammy damp of a prison cell.

One more, one more for the road, and when he looked to the bar counter he saw that old Vic had gone. He had the gun in his hand and he advanced across the bar towards Bissett, and bissett shrank from him.

He saw it go. Erlich saw the first flutter beats of the ghost flight.

It was gone without sound. There was a scudding moment of moonlight, enough to catch at the wide wingspan ol the owl.

There was the silence of the flight, then the sharp warning cry of the bird, and it was gone.

He heard the movement of the cars down at the other end of the road through the village, and when he stood to his full height he could see, slashed by the winter trees, the lights that were white and blue.

He came from his hiding place. He walked across the Manor House's lawn and onto the drive to the road.

Ahead of him was the facade of the pub, bathed in warm lights.

He walked forward. This was his war. Colt was his He saw policemen crouched down behind the opened doors of their cars, and far away in the night he heaid the clatter of a helicopter.