Gerald Seymour - A Line in the Sand

"I've done enough to deserve that. I can help, carry what you need. You've taught me. I want to be there when you fire the launcher. I want to see it happen and be a part of it."

She was crouched close to him and her fingers touched the smooth, oiled surface of the launcher's barrel.

"I can do it, help you.

She saw his head move decisively, side to side. He denied her.

Her eyes tightened in confusion.

"Haven't you thought about me? Haven't you considered what I want? What about the risks I've taken? Where's my future? Because of you, because of the people who sent you, I've lost everything. I'm hunted. You'll go, be picked up on the beach so, who's thought about me? I'll be caught, interrogated, locked up is that what you want?"

He never looked at her. She caught his hand and held it tight in her fist. There was no response.

"Are you going to take me back with you? That's best, isn't it, that I go back with you to the beach and on to the ship? There'd be a life there, for us, back where you come from, wouldn't there?"

It was her dream. They were together on the great deck of the tanker. It was night and the stars were above them, and they ploughed through the endless water, and they were alone. And the same perfume that she wore now would be on her neck then. She would be introduced to high functionaries and her part in the death of an enemy would be explained, and grave men would bob their heads in re sped and thank her for what she had done. She could see the startled faces of her parents, and the astonished, dull faces of the girls at work, when they learned the truth of what Farida Yasmin had achieved.

"I'm finished here. So, you don't take me with you tonight, I understand… But I go on to the ship with you, don't I?"

In the darkness, he began to clean the firing mechanism of the launcher.

By torchlight, he had been shown the tyre marks.

Geoff Markham had been marched through the wood, had blundered after the light-footed shadow of Andy Chalmers in front, tried to keep up with him and his dogs, and had then been pushed without ceremony down on to his knees as the torch was shone into the cavity at the back of the bramble thicket.

He had queried it again, rejecting what he didn't want to hear.

He had been dragged up, pulled towards the water. He capitulated and said it was all right, yes, he accepted Chalmers's conclusion. If he had queried again he would have been pulled in his city clothes into the water and he'd have been propelled towards a tree-trunk and a submerged oil drum.

There was a crunched sound under his feet. The torch beam pointed out the stripped rabbit bones he stood on.

"I just want reassurance there is no other explanation?"

"He's gone.~

He had been lost. He had driven round a web of lanes. He had finally found Chalmers sitting with his dogs by the gate of a field. He. had expressed his first doubts at the grunted report of the tracker, then been hijacked and taken off into the woods. He didn't want to believe what he was told because of the catastrophic implications of Chalmers's assessment.

"Could he merely have moved deeper into the marshland?"

"No."

He said, bitterly, "But we don't know where he's gone."

"Gone in the car."

"Could he be returning?"

"No gear left hide's empty. He's cleared out."

They walked back to his car. It was the worst situation. He would be on the secure line to Fenton from the crisis centre to report that they had lost their man. There'd be the hissed slip of Fenton's breath, and he would repeat that they had lost their man, and then a volley of oaths would bleat in his ear. He was familiar with analysis and intellectual storm sessions and with the computer spewing answers. What he had been shown was a short length of tyre marks in the dirt at the side of a lane and, by torchlight, a hollowed place in the depth of a bramble thicket. He took on trust the description of the hiding-place. The torch had been switched off. They came through the dense woodland and the low branches all seemed to whip his face and not Chalmers's, and where there was a soft pit in the ground his feet found it and not Chalmers's. With his scratched face and sodden feet, he followed the smell and could not see the man ahead of him until they reached the car.

The stench of the man and the filth of the dogs filled the small interior. The water dripped off Chalmers and the mud on the dogs was smeared across the seats.

"I want to go home."

"Too right," Markham snapped.

"Home you will go, but not much of the journey in my bloody car."

He drove at savage speed down the lanes towards the main road and the town, and the crisis centre. They had lost him. It would end at the house on the green, where the bloody goat bleated at the end of its bloody tether. He hit the brakes, swung the car through the lanes' bends, pounded the accelerator. Beside him, Chalmers, stinking and dripping, slept.

"Do you like to talk about it?"

"No, Mrs. Perry, I don't like to."

"I don't want to pry.

"I will say one thing to you only, and then, please, it is a closed book… It was over. Molotovs don't win against tanks. We went back to our homes, which was stupid. I was denounced by people who lived in my street. When the soldiers came, I and others tried to flee over the roofs from my parents' apartment. We were identified by the people in our street. When we were on the roofs they pointed the soldiers towards us. They were the same people I had lived with, played with as a child. They were my friends and my parents' friends, and they showed us to the soldiers… We saw what happened last night. We heard what Mr. Perry said."

"Thank you, Luisa, thank you from the depths of my heart."

"What I like to talk about is old furniture, and gardening."

"It's a good time to get cuttings in," Meryl said.

"I'd like to help you with that."

Blake was long gone, back to the house. Bill Davies had dozed on his bed. The room was in chaos, Blake always left it that way, clothes on the floor, towels on the bed. Davies was reminded, and it hurt, of the room his boys shared. He still hadn't rung home, couldn't face it… He climbed off the bed and sluiced some of the tiredness out of his eyes at the basin. He'd call by at the house to collect his car, then search for another dreary little pub to eat in… He reflected that the home where Meryl had been taken in was oft-limits, but he'd have preferred to have gone there, talked to her. She'd kissed him when she'd thanked him, and had cried as he'd held her awkwardly. She'd been so bloody soft and vulnerable. Too long since it had been like that with Lily… He changed his shirt. Couldn't go back to the house in a shirt with Meryl's lipstick on the collar.

He went down the stairs. The door to their living room was half open.

He realized she had been waiting for him, listening for his descent. She came with a quick, scurrying step out of her living room and he could see her husband in his chair by the fire, and the poor bastard had some shame in his eyes. She held the sheet of paper in her fingers. He understood.

She handed him the account.

He didn't argue, and didn't say that he had seen her standing in the shadows behind the mob. He took the banknotes from his pocket and paid her for his bed and for Blake's. He went back up the stairs and packed their bags.

She was waiting by the door.

She said, "It's not my fault, I'm not to blame. We need the money. We wouldn't be doing anything like bed-and-breakfast unless we had to. It was Lloyds that took us down, we were Names, you know. What my husband had set aside for retirement went to Lloyds. We can't exist without the money. I've nothing against those people, the Perrys, but we have to live… It'll be remembered, long after you've gone, that we put a roof over your head. It won't be forgotten. I'm only trying to limit the damage to our business. A man like you, an educated man, I'm sure you understand."