Gerald Seymour - A Line in the Sand

She laid the towel and the clothes on the chair beside his head. Davies stared straight ahead, and wondered how close she was to the edge of her sanity. It wasn't his job to prop up the morale of his principal, let alone that of his principal's wife. He felt himself to be the crutch on which she leaned. It was nothing to do with his personality, his warmth or his wit. It was because he had a Glock 9mm pistol in a holster lying on the bright pink fluffy mat beside the bath. She came into the bathroom, where he was naked, for comfort from him and from his gun.

The wristwatch showed that his time was up. He had not the heart to tell her that he could not be her friend. He reached for the towel, hid himself clumsily, stood up in the bath and began to dry himself.

He thanked her for bringing him the clothes. She went out of the bathroom and closed the door after her. She had not said a single word.

Duane Littelbaum paused, took his handkerchief and mopped the sweat off his forehead. He swayed, clung to the rail, and climbed again. He had a horror of heights, but beyond the horror was a cruel sense of obligation. He had to climb the tower. He went up the narrow, worn, spiralled steps; if he had slipped he would have plunged. The door at the top was bolted and the bolt rusted. He couldn't move it. He balanced on a smooth, worn step, then heaved his shoulder into the door. It gave, pitching him forward, through the doorway, on to the small square floor of the tower's top.

The wind snatched at him. His coat was lifted and his tie was torn from his waistcoat. The drizzle made his eyes smart.

He looked around him and clung, with both hands, to the low, crenellated wall.

From the vantage-point, he gazed down over the village.

His hair was ripped to a tangle. He could see the road that was the one point of entry into the village and the lanes off it, the clusters of homes, and the patchwork shape of the green. He saw the house, and the roof of the small wood hut behind it. He saw the endless, disappearing seascape.

The house, its position, was of small interest to Duane Littelbaum. He sank to his hands and knees and crabbed around the square floor space, never dared to look vertically down.

There were the marshlands.

Dull, yellowed, reeds and dark-water channels between them, the marshlands were to the south of the village behind the sea wall, and to the north-west. Reached by the one road, the village was an island surrounded by the old reeds, the dark water and the sea. He estimated that each of the great marshes was a full three thousand metres long and a minimum of a thousand wide. He saw the thick cover of trees around the fringes of the marshlands, the tracks between the marshlands and the village.

In spite of his fear, without thinking, he straightened his back, lifted his head and his nostrils flared. He snorted the air into them.

He was satisfied.

He had posed the questions and had answered them.

He crawled back towards the flapping door. He took a last look at the marshes and saw the gulls, white specks, meandering above them. He wedged the door shut after him, and came down the spiral steps with his eyes closed.

He heard the clergyman's voice.

"Everything went, the bells, the lead, the best-cut stones. Sad, but inevitable. They have a history, the native people of this community, of great suffering. It makes for a cruelty and a self-sufficiency. The original church was lost because survival took precedence over principle."

Littelbaum walked out into the rain and the wind. Markham came after him.

"What do you want to do now?"

"Go back to London."

"You don't want to see the house, at least drive past it?"

"No."

"You don't want to meet the protection officer?"

"Thank you, he'd be a busy man- well, he should be, he wouldn't want "tourists". No."

"Actually, you hitched a lift with me. I had a day planned down here. I needed to see for myself."

The interruption brooked no argument.

"Are you a marksman? I don't think so. Are you expert at drawing defensive perimeter lines? I doubt it. There's nothing for you here. Don't sulk, Mr. Markham. You're a good driver always do what you do well."

Markham unlocked the car, held the door open for him. Littelbaum felt aged, tired, cold. The tone of Markham's voice was resentful, the teeth of a saw on a buried nail.

"So, back to London. I hope it's been a worthwhile exercise for you, Mr. Littelbaum -above and beyond lunch."

"It was worthwhile. Can we have the heater on full, please? He's there, Mr. Markham. I saw where he is. It was like I could smell him."

The bird ate the minced meat, stabbing down with its beak in quick, urgent strokes.

Vahid Hossein had led her to the small clearing among the bramble and thorn, at the edge of the marsh, where the grass was short from the rabbits' feeding. Farida Yasmin did not know whether he had brought her there out of a sense of boastfulness, or whether he wished to share with her.

His fingers were long, gentle and sensitive. She was behind him, within reach of him. He had sat her down, told her not to move and whistled into the late-afternoon light. The bird had come from close by, had materialized over the dead reed fronds, with a laboured flight. Now he stroked its head feathers with his fingers, and he used her handkerchief to clean the wound. The bird permitted it. She hoped it was not a boast but the demonstration of his wish to share with her a moment so precious. His fingers moved on the feathers, soothing the bird, and pried into the wound, and she saw the peace on his face.

It was as if, that day, she had slipped from the mind-set of Farida Yasmin Jones. The identity of her Faith was discarded, as a snake's skin was shed. That day she had she knew it and it did not trouble her reverted to the world of Gladys Eva Jones.

She had stolen a car.

Any kid from her comprehensive school knew how to steal a car. It was the talk in the canteen at lunch, and in the grounds in midmorning break, and on the bus going home. She had listened in disgust, years before, as boys, girls, had talked through the theory of how to do it, and she had remembered what she had heard. She was a thief, had broken the rule of the Faith as it had been taught her, and she did not care. In the parking area beside the small railway station where the London commuters left their cars for the day, she had felt a raw excitement and it had been so easy. The hairpin into the lock of the blue Fiat 127 because all the kids always said that the small Fiat was the simplest to take and the stripping of the covering, the marrying up of the ignition wires. She was a thief; a few seconds' work with a hairpin and she was no longer the virtuous Farida Yasmin who could recite the Pillars of the Faith, pages of the Koran, and had once been the favoured pupil of Sheik Amir Muhammad. She had not felt shame, only excitement.

She watched him, watched his fingers on the bird, watched the rifle lying half out of the sausage bag on the far side of him, and the excitement was a toxin in her bloodstream. It was now a part of her. She recognized that it had nothing to do with the Islamic faith to which she had dutifully converted.

For all her teenage and adult life, Gladys Eva Jones had craved to be noticed, to be valued. He had listened thoughtfully when she'd told him that the police had been to her workplace, and had nodded his quiet appreciation when she had described the theft of the car. She sat and watched him, the bird and the gun. She knew what he planned to do that night, had even seen the man he would kill and could remember each feature of that man's face. The excitement the knowledge engendered in her was a liberation. At last, Gladys Eva Jones was a person of importance. The sensation was as fresh as morning frost to her, compared to the dull tedium of her parents' home, and the shunned, shut-out existence at the university. Her hand hovered over the hair at the back of his head. She thought of the empty boredom of Theft Section at the insurance company, and she stroked the hair on his head with the same gentleness as he caressed the feathers of the bird.