Gerald Seymour: A Line in the Sand

Chalmers said nothing.

Markham stammered, "God, the bastard a frenzy. He must be a bloody animal to do that."

A man in a white overall suit looked up coldly from beside the body, and said clinically, "That's not a frenzy, she was strangled. The cause of death is manual asphyxiation. That's not her blood -she's not a cut on her. It's his."

"What does that mean?"

"It means that the "animal" is severely wounded, knife or gunshot. There is evidence of sexual penetration, probably simultaneous with her being strangled. During the sexual act, during the exertion of manual strangulation, he bled on her."

Markham turned away. He said, to no one, to the mass of grim-faced men behind him, "So, there's a blood trail so, the dogs V will have him."

A voice from the darkness said, "There's no blood trail and there's no scent. If you hadn't noticed, it's raining. In pissing rain there's no chance."

Markham gestured for them to loose their hold on Chalmers, and walked away. Chalmers was behind him. He groped back towards the car and the road. For the rest of his life, he would never lose the sight of Gladys Eva Jones. He stumbled and slithered in the darkness. The letter in his pocket would be soaked and the envelope sodden.

"Will you, please, Mr. Chalmers, please, go out and find him?"

"Are you going or are you staying?"

"Staying."

Frank Perry lay on the floor between the mattresses and behind the sandbags. Stephen slept against him, his head was in the crook of his stepfather's arm.

"So be it."

"Are you criticizing me?"

"I just do my job. Criticizing isn't a part of it. I've some calls to make."

Davies had towered over him.

"What happened to the people who took Meryl in?"

"Mr. and Mrs. Blackmore are unhurt. They won't leave what remains of their house and they're staying put."

Grimly he turned away and disappeared among the shadows of men whose names Frank Perry hadn't been told. Perry closed his eyes, but knew he would not sleep. He could hear Davies on the telephone. It would be easier if any of them had criticized him.

The brigadier took the call, which woke him from a light sleep on the camp-bed in his office. The voice was very faint. The brigadier shouted his questions, but the answers were vague and there was break-up on the line. In his frustration he shouted louder and his voice rippled from the office room, down the deserted corridors and into empty, darkened rooms… He heard the muffled voice of the man whom he had trusted like a son and barked out questions. Had he succeeded? Was he clear? Could he make the rendezvous point on the Channel beach? How many hours would it be before dawn? What was his location? Had he succeeded?

The call was terminated. The pad of paper, on which he would have written the answers to his questions, was blank. He played back the tape and heard the insisting shout of his questions and the indistinct answers. In the background, competing with the answers he could not understand, was the splash of water. The cold of the night was around him. He thought of a beach in the black night where the sea's waves rippled on the shingle-stone shore, where Vahid Hossein was hurt and waiting. In his mind was the death that would follow his failure. He weighed the options of survival, his own survival. The hush of the night was around him, and moths flew, distracted, at the ceiling light above him. He rang the night-duty officer at the offices of the National Iranian Tanker Corporation across the city, and he spoke the coded message. Twice, in the minutes that followed, the brigadier called the number of the mobile digital telephone and there was no response. He was alone, surrounded by darkness.

Frank Perry heard the approach of the lorry, and then its engine was cut. He heard the voices and, the clatter of iron bars being thrown down, as if dropped from the lorry's flat bed. He was thankful, a small mercy, that the child slept and did not criticize him.

The people of the village slept, with guilt and with self justification with doubts and with resentment, or stared at their dark ceilings. There were few who had not walked up the road and along the lanes and gone to look at the cottage home when it was floodlit by the generators. Most had seen the wide hole where a window had been and the torn curtains that fringed it, and some, even, the long bag of zipped black plastic carried away to the closed van, and the uncomprehending eyes of a child escorted from the building by the policemen in their vests and carrying their guns. No one believed the bland explanation of a gas explosion. None had cared to examine their part in what they had seen, heard, with their friends and their families. They had gone home when the show was over, and they had darkened the village, made it silent, switched off their house lights, crept to their beds. In a few short hours it would be the start of another day, and there were not many for whom their lives would be the same. The rain, over the village, had gone as fast as it had come, leaving the moon to pour bright white light into the homes where they lay.

"What's that? What the hell's happening?"

Frank Perry was careful not to wake Stephen. He eased himself into a half-sitting position but did not shift his arm, against which the child slept. There was the noise of sledgehammers beating against metal at the front of the house and the back.

Davies was cold, without emotion.

"You said you were staying."

"That's what I said."

"So, it's because you're staying."

"What is it? What is it that's happening?"

"We call it a blindicide screen. It's old Army talk. In Aden, thirty years back, the opposition had a Swedish-made anti-tank rocket that was used against fixed positions. It detonates the boring charge early."

"Why?"

"You should sleep. It'll keep till the morning."

"You know what? The bastard let me sleep. Joe bloody Paget let me sleep, didn't wake me to tell me. I bloody knew, but there wasn't a body and there wasn't any blood, and the bastard said I'd missed, Joe bloody Paget… You're a miserable sod, Joe you know what you are? Not just a miserable sod, a mean fucker."

Perry, half listening, dozed, with Stephen's warmth against him.

"Letting me sleep when you bloody knew I'd hit him, that's below the bloody belt. How long have you known, you bastard, that I got the shite?"

He could feel Stephen's slight spare bones. For a moment he had thought he lay against Meryl's warmth. He shuddered. The morning's light seeped into the house through drawn curtains and reached into the safe area between the mattresses and the sandbags. Rankin was cocky, bouncing. Paget was behind him with a slow grin spreading. The assembled company didn't see him. He thought he did not matter to them any more.

He heard the lorry drive away.

"I mean, telling me I'd missed when I knew I'd hit, that is a professional slur, Joe. If I say so myself, forty metres minimum and no light, a moving target, that is one hell of a shot. What is it, Joe? Come on, I want to hear you bloody well say it…"

They were all laughing. Blake and Davies had been up all night, but Paget and Rankin had dossed down on the kitchen floor to catch a few hours' sleep.

Perry asked quietly, "If he was hit, why do we need the blindicide screen?"

He had interrupted them. They turned to look down at him and the sleeping child. They were the only friends he had and none of them cared a damn for him, they were strangers.

Davies said, "His name is Vahid Hossein. He fired a single grenade from the launcher. There's a flash at the front and a flame signature at the back. Mr. Paget and Mr. Rankin were going off their duty shift. They engaged him. He ran into the churchyard. Mr. Rankin was presented with a difficult shooting opportunity. He took it, fired twice, but with a handgun at the limit of its effective range. There was no blood and nobody. Mr. Paget assumed that Mr. Rankin had missed his target, that's phase one. Later, a woman walking her dogs on the common starts bawling about "Black Toby". God knows what she's doing out with dogs in the middle of a deluge. She says she saw a lifeless woman and a black-faced man on the ground. She's going on about some nonsense that happened two hundred years ago. Police officers went to the scene and found a young woman raped and dead, but no man. The young woman was a Muslim convert, and the eyes, ears, fetcher and carrier for Vahid Hossein. She was covered in blood but it wasn't hers. The man who raped her, while he strangled her, bled on her from his gunshot wound. Mr. Paget and Mr. Rankin use soft-nose bullets in the Glock, and that is phase two. Phase three is incomplete. He is wounded, Mr. Perry, but he is not dead. Although he'd lost considerable quantities of blood, he was strong enough to leave the murder scene. He is out there, in pain, and still in possession of the RPG-7 launcher. The rain in the night has washed away the chances of tracker dogs finding him. He did not take the convert's car. We do not believe he has tried to leave. An hour ago, an inflatable was launched from an Iranian tanker in the Channel and came to a rendezvous on a beach. He was not there to be lifted out. We had it under surveillance, but took no action. Thus we believe he's still here. The military are beginning a search for him. Now, we classify Vahid Hossein as more dangerous than at any time. You, Mr. Perry, are the cause of his pain, his suffering. If he has the strength, in our assessment, he will make a last attack on your home. That, Mr. Perry, is the reason for puffing up the screen around the house that will prematurely detonate we hope an armour-piercing grenade."