Gerald Seymour - A Line in the Sand

The engine was left running.

"Bloody good, Dave."

"Had him, I dropped him."

Paget went over the wall and right, towards the church porch. Rankin covered him, heard the shout, scrambled over and circled to the left. It was what they had endlessly practised, both of them, at Lippitts Hill, until it was routine and boring: two guns, never presenting a target, and closing for a kill. One going forward the other covering, the other going forward and one covering. They closed on the gap space between the cross and the angel. There was a dark place, a little beyond where the shadows of the two stones merged, and beyond it there was clear lit ground. They stalked the space, sprinting between the stones, freezing and aiming, calling the moves to each other.

"You ready, Dave?"

"Ready, Joe."

Rankin's aim was into the shadows. He was behind the cross.

Paget reached up with his torch from behind the cover of the angel.

The torch beam wavered through the shadow, and fell on the grass.

There was no body on the grass, no corpse and no wounded man.

The beam moved over the grass and there was no weapon discarded there, no blood.

"I thought I saw him go down…"

"You thought wrong, Dave."

"After fifteen bloody years… "Sixteen years, actually, Dave you waited sixteen years and then you fucked up."

Dave Rankin knelt on the grass where there was no body, no blood, no weapon, and he shook. As a pair they were laid-back, private, superior bastards. They always did well on the range and never had to be sent for a coffee and a smoke to calm themselves before trying again to get the necessary score to pass the reappraisal. They were the best, they were the ones the instructors pointed out to the recruit marksmen. Sixteen years of practice and sixteen years of training no body, no blood, no weapon. He knelt on the damp grass and the energy seemed to drain out of him. He hung his head until Paget pulled him roughly to his feet.

"In this life, Dave, you get what you pay for. They didn't pay much."

"I would have sworn I'd hit him."

"There's no blood, Dave… They got us."

The noise of the explosion had careered around the village.

It pierced the doors and windows of the houses, the cottages, bungalows and villas, where the televisions blared the argument of the evening's dramas. It split into kitchens and dissolved desultory meal conversations. It hammered into the talk in the bar and silenced them there. It startled a man with a dog on the road, a woman who was in the back of her garden filling a coal bucket, a man who worked at a lathe on the bench in his garage, and a couple making love in the flat above a shop. The blast sounded in the houses, gardens and lanes of the village… and in the barricaded house.

It murmured its way into the safe area between the mattresses, past the filled sandbags, and Blake swore softly. Davies dropped his hand on to Frank Perry's shoulder, and there was silence. Then the radio started screaming for them… Nobody in the village moved quickly to leave the protection of their homes. There had been the noise, then the silence, then the howling of the sirens. Only after the sirens had come and the quiet had descended again, did the villagers gather their coats, wrap themselves in warmth and come out of their homes to go to look and to gawp.

The rain had come on heavily.

Eventually, they came from their corners of the village. Their shuffled steps muted, huddled under umbrellas, the first of them reached the house, lit by arc-lamps, as the ambulance pulled away.

They gathered to watch.

He came back.

She had heard the explosion and had rejoiced. He could not have done it without her. Now she would persuade him.

Vahid Hossein came as a shadow out of the darkness, to the car, to her. She tried to take him in her arms to hold him and kiss him, but he flinched away. He gripped the launcher to his chest and rocked. Then he slid down, against the wheel arch of the car. There should have been triumph, but his eyes were far away.

"What's the matter? You got him, didn't you? What happened there?"

~He never replied to her.

Farida Yasmin stormed away from him.

She blundered across the common ground towards the lights of the village. The rain sheeted down on to her.

She backed off the road as a police car came past her with its siren wailing, splashing the puddled rainwater on to her thighs and waist. She had heard the clamour of the explosion and clenched her fists and believed she was a part of it. She saw the crowd ahead of her, in front of the cottage home she had identified for him.

She joined the back of the crowd. She came behind them and watched as they stared ahead, heard their whispered voices. She was not noticed. The rain fell on her hair and her face. The crowd was held back by policemen but she could still see the blackened walls of the room through the gaping window. The arc-lights showed her the firemen picking through the room.

She listened.

"They say it's a gas explosion."

"That's daft, there's no sodding gas."

She was behind them. They were not aware of her.

"Was it the new people?"

"It was the Perry woman, not the new people."

"Was it Meryl Perry?"

"Just her."

"Where's he? Where's Perry?"

"Never came, it was just Meryl who came."

"That's rough. I mean, it wasn't anything to do with her, was it?"

"Frank was in his house with his guards, it was Meryl. The stupid bastards got the wrong place, the wrong person… She slipped away. She left as she had come, unseen. She walked back, the rain clattering on her. She felt small, weak. Emergency traffic passed her and ignored her as she cowered at the side of the road. She was little and unimportant. She had thought that night, beside the car, as the sound of the explosion had burst in her ears, that she would love him, that she would be rewarded because he could not have done it without her and he would take her with him and she would be, at last, a person of consequence. She stumbled across the ground, went between the thicket and gorse clumps, splashed in the rain puddles. She was Gladys Eva Jones. She was an insurance clerk, she was a failure. She was sobbing, as she had sobbed when her mother had carved criticism at her and her father had cursed her, as when the kids at school had ostracized her and the kids at college had turned their backs on her. She saw the outline of the car and the rain spilling from the roof on to his shoulders. He had not moved.

"It was the wrong person. He was never there. It was his woman… His hand came up and grasped at her wrist. He did not need her. His strength pulled her down. They were not a partnership and there was nothing to share. She was on the ground, in the mud. She would never know love. His hands prised at her clothes, the knee drove between her legs, and she felt the rain beat on the exposed skin of her stomach.

"I want to see her."

It was an hour since the explosion and the first scream on the radio, and for most of that hour no one had told him. They had kept him in the area inside the mattresses and the sandbags, and they'd filled his glass. A man had come in a crisp uniform, rank badges on his shoulder, and had used the soft language that they taught on courses for handling the bereaved, and then gone as soon as was half decent.

"Damn you, I want to see her, listen-' Blake's chin shook.

"Want away, but you can't."

Perry shouted, "I've the right."

Davies said calmly, "You can't see her, Mr. Perry, because there is nothing to see that you would recognize. Most of what you would recognize, Mr. Perry, is on the wallpaper or on the ceiling. It was your decision, Mr. Perry, to stay, and this is the consequence of that decision. Better you face that than keep shouting. Get a grip on yourself."