Gerald Seymour - A Line in the Sand

"You've bloody changed your tune. Why?"

"There are questions I cannot answer."

"That's convenient."

"You have to believe, Mr. Perry, that everything that should be done is being done. Look, take last night, a professional and expert defence-' "Are you serious? It was fucking chaos."

After the han dover and the debrief, Joe Paget and Dave Rankin had been up into the small hours going through, in exact and minute detail, every moment of the alert. Had the camera given them a target? Why was the next garden not covered by the beams? Why had they not moved the cold frame from the side of the house? They had been close to, bloody disaster, Rankin had said, maybe a few seconds off it, and Paget hadn't disagreed.

"That's not the way Mr. Davies reported it."

"What the hell do you expect him to say? Grow up. Get real! She can't take the punishment, not much longer."

"We've made our commitment, Mr. Perry."

"When I told you and that jerk we were staying, it was because I believed we were among friends. That's the worst."

"Don't you read newspapers? It's how people behave when they're afraid each week it's in your newspapers. A family have a child recovered from meningitis and they're about to fly back from a sunshine holiday, but the other passengers won't travel with them for fear of infection. They're bumped off the flight, no charity. How many examples do you want? It doesn't matter where you are. An American Navy ship shoots down an Iranian passenger aircraft, and it's a mistake, but the Iranians don't accept apologies and bomb the car driven by the captain's wife on some smart street in San Diego. The detonator was incorrectly wired. She lives, but she's chucked out of her job, she's a pariah and might endanger others. I can reel them off. It's a herd mentality. The fear makes them vicious, dictates they turn on the victim. It's human nature, Mr. Perry…"

There was the squeak of the planks at the door of the hut. Rankin swung, Paget gulped on the last of his sandwich. Meryl Perry was in the doorway.

On the speaker was Markham's metallic voice. '… I suppose it's because so few people, these days, ever get really tested that they're so scared of the unpredictable."

Her tone was dead, flat, like her eyes and the pallor of her cheeks.

"I hope I'm not disturbing you, I came for Stephen's tractor."

Paget remembered her screams over the detective's radio, and Rankin had heard them as he had tried to get round the house and fouled up in the cold frame. Paget scrambled to kill the speaker. Rankin groped under his chair and found the boy's tractor.

"Do you always listen to us? Is everything we say, Frank and I, listened to?"

At that moment, Meryl hated them.

"Do you hear everything? What I say to Frank, what he says to me, are you listening? Is that how you spend your days?"

She could hear the rising pitch of her own voice. Paget wiped old crumbs from his mouth and looked away from her. Rankin passed her Stephen's tractor. She snatched it. To her, they were huge, dark shapes in the baggy boiler suits with the big vests over their chests. They were older than her, older than Frank, and they seemed not to care. Standing at the door before they'd known she was there, she'd seen one of them grin at the smooth reassurance being dished out to Frank.

"You get a big laugh out of what we say. Do you snigger when you hear us in bed? Not much noise when we're in bed, is there?"

Her control was gone. Meryl was over the edge. They would think her hysterical, stupid, or just a woman. They would wonder why she didn't just shut up, start the ironing, do the dusting, make the beds. She squeezed the tractor in her hand, tighter, hurting herself. Nobody told her anything. The wheels fell off the tractor. When any of them talked to Frank, and she came close, they stopped, and Frank cut short what they'd said. She was not included, not need-to-know, just a woman who was a nuisance.

"How long are you here? For ever? Is that my life, for ever, having you listening?"

The short one, Paget, said quietly, "We're here, Mrs. Perry, till Wednesday night. That's the end of our shift."

The tall one, Rankin, said gently, "Thursday morning's a lieu day, Mrs. Perry, then we start our long weekend."

"Actually, Mrs. Perry, we'll have clocked up twenty-eight hours overtime in the week, so they won't mess with our long weekend."

"Then we're on the range for a day not an assessment, just practice."

"After that, we might come back and we might not. We're always the last to be told where we're going…"

Rankin took the tractor from her then crouched to pick up the wheels. The tears were filling her eyes. She thought they were indifferent as to whether they came back to this hut, this house, her life, or were assigned to another location. Rankin had the tractor wheels back under the toy's body and Paget passed him a small pair of pliers. She was just a makeweight woman who had lost control. She turned and leaned against the wall of the hut, her eyes closed to pinch out the tears. When she opened her eyes, the picture was in front of her three or four inches from her face. It was hazy, a grey-white image of the bottom fence of her garden, the apple tree and the sand pit Frank had built for Stephen. The shape of the man they sought stood out and the silhouette of the rifle.

Her voice was brittle, fractured.

"What'll you do when you drive away from us for your long weekend?"

"We were thinking of going fishing, Mrs. Perry, off the south coast."

"You get a good rate on a boat this time of year, Mrs. Perry."

Paget smiled. Rankin gave her back the repaired tractor.

She smeared the tears off her face.

"Will you stand in front of us, before you go fishing, in front of Frank and Stephen and me?"

Rankin said, "I won't lie to you, Mrs. Perry. We're not bullet-catchers. I don't expect to get killed on the say-so of a fat-cat bureaucrat sitting in a safe London office. If the opposition, him…" He gestured harshly towards the picture Sellotaped to the wall. '… if he wants to die for his country then I'll willingly help him along, but I don't aim to go with him. If he wants to end up a martyr, famous for five minutes, that's his choice. I'm here to do the best that's possible, and Joe is, and that's as far as it goes. If you don't like it then you should get your suitcase down off the top of the wardrobe… That's the truth, Mrs. Perry, and I'm sorry no one told it you before."

"Thank you."

She turned for the door. The cloud had covered the sun and her home; what was precious to her seemed both drearily mundane and terrifyingly dangerous. She held the door-handle for a moment to steady herself.

It was Joe Paget who called to her.

"I'd like to say something, Mrs. Perry. We didn't do well last night, but we learn. It won't be like that again. We'll kill him if he comes back, and that's not just talk." He paused.

"You should get back in the house and make yourself a fine pot of tea. I don't know him, or anything about him, but I'll shoot him, or Dave will. You can depend on that, we'll kill him."

The husband stared belligerently at the sofa as Cathy Parker wrote briskly in her notebook.

His wife spoke: "I wouldn't know anything about her, except that when my aunt died I had the job of sorting through her papers. My uncle had passed on three years earlier. It was a sort of surprise to find any reference to my cousin, but she'd written two or three times a year to her mother, my aunt. I say it was a surprise because my uncle never spoke of Edith, it was like she didn't exist. My uncle was an engineer with the Anglo-Iranian Oil Corporation, based in Abadan. I think they lived pretty well, servants, a good villa, all that. He just couldn't accept that his nineteen-year-old daughter should fall for and want to marry a local. Ali Hossein was a medical student in his early twenties. My uncle did all he could to break the relationship and couldn't, and gave up on Edith. He didn't go to the wedding and forbade my aunt to go. He just cut her off, pretended there had never been a daughter, an only child. I don't think he ever knew that my aunt kept in touch with her…"