Gerald Seymour - A Line in the Sand

It was as if Davies had slapped him. He understood. The slap on the face was to control the hysteria. He nodded, and was silent. Paget came in through the front, followed by Rankin who had his arm round Stephen's shoulder. The child was white-faced, his mouth gaping. The child sleep-walked across the hall slowly, and Rankin loosed his supporting arm and let him collapse against

Perry. He held the boy hard against him, and thought about consequences. He saw the stern faces around him, and there was no criticism, there was nothing. If the child had cried or kicked or fought against him it would have been easier, but Stephen was limp in his arms.

He heard Rankin say, "I thought I had him, don't understand, thought I saw him go down."

He heard Paget say, "He's like a dripping tap. He missed, and the daft tart can't accept that he missed with a double tap."

The woman screamed.

They were on the ground in front of her, in the epic entre of her torch beam She shrieked for her dogs, and ran.

She walked her dogs each evening before going to bed, summer and winter, moonlight or rain.

Policemen from an unmarked car ran towards the screams. It was several minutes before they could get a coherent statement from the panting, shouting woman of what she had seen.

"Black Toby… his ghost, his woman… Black Toby with her, what he did to be hanged… It's where they hanged him, hanged Black Toby…"

They went forward with the spot-lamps, her trailing behind them, and her dogs skipping ahead in the darkness.

e was hunched forward, peering into the misted windscreen. Chalmers was beside him with the dogs under his legs they didn't speak.

Geoff Markham wrenched the car round the bends in the lanes, back towards the village and the sea.

Once more he had listened to Fenton on the telephone and been too drained of emotion to take offence at the rambling, cursing diatribe thrown at him. He'd just finished at the borrowed typewriter, had just sealed the envelope, when the first news of disaster had broken, and he'd been in the crisis centre trying to make sense from the confusion of the reports when the second package of news had come over the radio. He'd collected Chalmers from the canteen. The envelope with the letter in it was jammed in his pocket, like a reproach.

Dear Sirs, I am in receipt of your letter setting out your proposals for terms of employment. I have changed my mind, and am no longer seeking work away from the Security Service. I apologize for wasting your time and am grateful for the courtesies shown me. Obligations, commitments, duty fold-fashioned words used by wririlded fartsl seem to have overwhelmed me. I'm sorry if you find this difficult to understand.

Sincerely,

He felt sick, small.

"I want to go home… Markham's eyes never left the road. After two catastrophic news reports, and after the battering from Fenton, he needed a butt for his anger, and a chance to purge the guilt welling in him. Chalmers was available. Markham snarled, "When the work's finished you go home not a day or an hour or a minute before… We made a mistake. We could have made the same mistake if the target had been in a tower block of a housing estate, in a good suburb, anywhere, but we did it in a village like this at the back end of bloody nowhere. We made a mistake by thinking it was the right thing to move his wife out, get rid of her, to clear the arcs of fire. We lost her. Losing her is damn near the same, to me, as losing him. It was convenient to ship her out, so we took that road. It's crashing down around us, it's disaster. Listen hard, if you say that it's not your quarrel then you're just like them. You are an imitation of those people in that village. They are moral dwarfs. It was not their quarrel so they turned their backs and walked away, crossed over to the other side of the bloody street. You aren't original, it's what we've heard for the last week. So, find another tune. You're staying till I say you can go. I thought better of you, but I must have been wrong."

"I've no quarrel with him."

Geoff Markham mimicked, "No quarrel, want to go home" forget it. Let me tell you, I considered taking you down to the hospital morgue. I could have walked you in there, filthy little creature that you are, with those bloody dogs, and I could have told the attendant to pull the tray out of the refrigerated cupboard, and I could have shown her to you, but I couldn't have shown you her face. You aren't going to the morgue because I cannot show you Meryl Perry's face it doesn't exist. That's why we aren't going there."

Down the lanes, towards the village… "We all want to cross over the road and look the other way. Don't worry about it, you're not alone. I understand you because, and I'm ashamed, I've said it myself. I went after different work, outside what I do now.

"Crossing the road", for me, was sneaking out of the office in the lunch-hour and going for a job interview.

"Looking the other way" was listening to my fiance and hunting for a cash increase. I'm ashamed of myself. I wrote a letter tonight, Mr. Chalmers, and the price of the letter is my fiancee. And what I've learned since I came here is that I, and you, cannot walk away from what has to be done."

As they approached the village, the clock on the church tower was striking midnight, its chimes muffled in the rainstorm. To the left were the pig-sheds in the field, to the right was the common ground of scrub and gorse, and in front of them was a policeman waving them down. Markham showed his card and a rain soaked arm pointed to a pool of arc-lights. The dogs ran free and they walked towards it. The wind brought the rain into their faces.

"Why can't you believe you have a quarrel with this man?"

"He's done me no harm."

"There's a woman, damn you, with no head."

"He saved the bird."

"What bloody bird?"

"He's done the bird good."

He thought Chalmers struggled to articulate a deep feeling, but Markham hadn't the patience to understand him.

"You're talking complete crap.~ The blow came, without warning, out of the darkness. A short-arm punch, closed fist, caught Markham on the side of the face. He staggered. He was slipping, going down into the mud. A second stabbed punch caught the point of his chin. The pain smarted in his face. He saw men hustle forward, the rain peeling off their bodies. They were grotesque shadows, trapping Chalmers, swarming around him, as his dogs fought at their an ides their boots, and were kicked away.

"Show him show him what the bastard did. He doesn't think it's his business, so show him."

They dragged Chalmers forward. Markham heard a squeal of pain, thought Chalmers had bitten one of them, and he saw the swing of a truncheon.

There was a tent of plastic sheeting. Inside it, the light was brilliant and relentless.

He saw her.

"Get him up close, get him to see what the bastard did."

She was on her back. Geoff Markham had to force himself to look. Her jeans were dragged down, dirtied and wet, to her knees and her legs had been forced wide apart. Her coat was ripped open. A sweater had been pushed up and a blouse was torn aside. He could see the dark shape of her hair, but little of the whiteness of her stomach above it. The skin was blood-smeared, bloodstained, blood-spattered. Her mouth gaped open and her eyes were big, frozen, in fear. He knew her. There was the old photograph of her in the files of Rainbow Gold: the eyes had been small and the mouth had been closed; she had held her privacy and worn the clothes of her Faith. Looking past the policemen and over Andy Chalmers's shoulders, he stared down at the body. He had seen the bodies of men in Ireland and they'd had the gaping mouths and the open eyes, and the fear that remained after death. He had never before seen the body of a raped, violated woman. Before they had built the plastic tent the rain had made streams of blood on the skin. Except for Cathy Parker, and her report relayed to him that morning, they had all lost sight of Gladys Eva Jones, the loser, and now he saw her. Except for Cathy Parker, and then it had been too late, they had all ignored her because they had rated this young woman from a small provincial city as irrelevant in matters of importance, not worthy of consideration. He saw in his mind the photograph of the face of Vahid Hossein and the cold certainty that it held.