Gerald Seymour - A Line in the Sand

He wandered across the open work area towards the new cluster of desks and screens. He went by the woman with the red hair. She seemed tired and uninvolved, was flicking the pages of a newspaper maybe nobody had told her, maybe they'd told her and she didn't think it mattered. Fenton's laugh was louder.

Fenton said, "Morning, Geoff, just hearing about last night -damn good."

He said it grimly, "What we did was illegal."

"Bollocks."

Fenton strode away.

The American sidled over to him.

"Sleep OK, Mr. Markham? Not so well? If I could say to you, it's a rough world and rougher when the stakes go high. You get to play hard if you want to win. Remember Alamut and then you can judge your enemy. Do it by the rules and your enemy will walk over you. They came out from Alamut, two of them in 1192. Their target was Conrad of Montferrat who was the king-elect of Jerusalem. They caught up with him finally in the city of Tyre, present-day south Lebanon, but they'd stalked him nearly a half of a year. He was guarded close, had the best security of the day, and they beat it. They were dressed as Christian monks, the clothes of their enemy. They went right through the security and knifed their man to death. The way they did it, they condemned themselves, but they reached their target. Go legal if you want to if you do, you won't win against cunning, patience, ruthlessness, dedication… Is there anywhere you can get a decent coffee round here?"

She'd been up early to take the pictures off the bedroom walls, and had stacked them, glass down, behind the dressing-tabl2. Everything off the top surface of her dressing-table had gone into the drawers. Then she'd crisscrossed the mirror with heavy adhesive tape. Frank had watched her from the bed.

She'd snatched breakfast, and dumped a plate of cereal down in front of Stephen. She was already late for the school bell.

They'd been changing the shift at home when she had left -nothing to say to her, nor to Frank, but the uncles had time to chat with Stephen about his lorries. She'd had to drag him away from them. On their shoulders they'd had machine-guns on webbing straps. She'd thrust Stephen into the car and Frank had stayed inside.

Emma Carstairs had once told Meryl that she had best-friend status. They'd been to dinner there three months before. Emma Carstairs would have said to Barry, she thought, that Frank and Meryl Perry were the right sort of people for the village. Barry had put work Frank's way and joked about keeping things close, in a little Mafia. The loss of the friendship hurt badly.

Meryl hadn't faced up to telling Stephen why they didn't have Sam in the car now, had made instead a poor excuse about a grown-ups' squabble. She'd have to tell him properly, but later. Probably there would be things said at school, but she couldn't yet cope with telling him the complicated truth. A van was parked beside the road, and she saw a man reaching up to hammer a sold sign across the middle of the for-sale board outside Rose Cottage.

She wondered who'd bought it and what they'd be like.

She drove fast to the school and had to brake fiercely to avoid a car pulling away from the kerb. Most of the kids were already in.

She frowned. Barry Carstairs drove a sporty Audi, provided by his building-suppliers company. It was parked outside the school gate, three vehicles ahead of her. Barry never did the school-run. She kissed Stephen, and pushed open his door. The child ran through the playground gate towards the door of the main building, where he was stopped by Mr. Archer, the deputy head. He had one hand on the child's shoulder, and with the other he was waving her to come to him.

Several of those who didn't have jobs with regular hours helped with the painting, the reading and the lunches of the nursery class. She knew Mr. Archer, a little ferret of a man, and the talk was that he was slyly bitter at being ignored for the headship. She saw Stephen try to pull away from him, as the bell went inside. Archer's fist, clenched in the material of Stephen's anorak, restrained him. She stamped across the playground.

He didn't look her in the face.

"Mrs. Kemp would like to see you, Mrs. Perry."

"Why are you holding Stephen like that?"

He looked at the ground, then at the sky.

"If you could go, please, to Mrs. Kemp's office."

"Why are you preventing Stephen from joining his class?"

"It will all be explained, Mrs. Perry. They're waiting for you."

"You're making Stephen late for class."

"He'll be in the common room I'll be with him."

Kids knew. They always knew first. Stephen's face was blank. At home last night, he'd worked really hard at his writing, was proud of it, before he'd pulled out his lorries and the men had come to his room. His exercise was in his satchel with his lunch. She told him, ignored the ferret, that she'd sort it out, and fast. She stormed down the corridor, didn't knock, pushed her way into Mrs. Kemp's office.

From the door, her eyes roved over the faces. There was Mrs. Kemp, trim and grey-haired, the head-teacher; Bellamy, overweight and everybody's friend, the self-appointed organizer of the PTA; Barry Carstairs, the smart-suited businessman who was going places, the chairman of the governors; and a woman with fiercely bobbed hair and a severe black trouser-suit. The men were either side of the women, and they were all huddled close against the legs of the desk.

The head-teacher's voice piped at her, "Thank you for coming in, Mrs. Perry. Please sit down."

"Why am I here?"

"Just sit down, Mrs. Perry, please. You'll know everyone here, except Miss Smythe from the county's education department."

She remained standing.

"What's going on?"

The head-teacher fixed her with a glance.

"I am afraid I have something difficult to tell you."

"What?"

Bellamy grunted, "It's pretty obvious, Mrs. Perry, after yesterday afternoon."

"What's obvious?"

Carstairs tried to look sombre.

"There was a very disturbing ii vident affecting the school yesterday, Meryl, which cannot be ignored."

Her child, with the ferret's hand on his anorak, knew. Stephen was in the common room, and would be scared half out of his wits. She stood her ground, and glowered.

"So, which of you's queuing to use the knife?"

"That's not called-for. We have a responsibility-' "It's a responsibility we're not ignoring."

Barry Carstairs didn't look at her. He was playing with a pencil and he'd scribbled words on a pad, as if he didn't trust himself without notes.

"This isn't easy for us. As chairman of the governors, after consultations with our head-teacher and bearing in mind the feelings of the parents' representative, I have taken a most serious decision. Yesterday, your husband came to the school to collect Stephen. He was, we now know, accompanied by an armed bodyguard. It was not his intention that the presence of the bodyguard should be known, and that was an act of deceit. The bodyguard, after a grossly irresponsible incident with his pistol an incident that could have led to the gun firing in a crowded playground in the head-teacher's hearing, spoke to the local police after she, quite rightly, had called them. I~ his explanation to the local police, he spoke of a threat to your husband that necessitates his constant protection from terrorist attack. We feel, after very careful consideration, that a threat to your husband represents, also, a threat against your husband's family-' "You're blathering, Barry. Why don't you say what you mean?"

Carstairs pushed aside his notes. There was a curl of anger at his lips.

"I was trying to do it the decent way. What Frank's done, what's in his sordid past, I don't know and I don't care. What matters is that his family is exposed to bombs and guns, in our school. The children and staff here are all threatened by terrorists. Their safety is paramount. Stephen, as much as his stepfather or his mother, could be a target. If he is a target, then everyone at this school is a target. He's out, he's no longer welcome here."