Gerald Seymour - A Line in the Sand

"And who would have looked after the boy, Mr. Perry?"

"I didn't think…"

"Then start thinking get down."

He dropped to his knees.

Ahead of him, the reeds erupted as if spitting out what before had been hidden. The young man stood. He was small and thin. The water ran from his shoulders and from his face.

He reached behind him and lifted up the launcher tube and without hesitation he threw the tube far from him, over a bank of reeds, and it splashed down in clear water. Then, he bent before reappearing. Frank Perry could see the dangled legs across his chest and the lolling head behind his shoulder, and he came slowly as if a great weight burdened him.

Frank Perry watched.

The young man carried the body of Vahid Hossein through the reed-banks and out of them.

The minder, Markham, went into the water when they were close and made to help the young man, but the weight of the carcass was not to be shared.

The young man stepped from the mud and on to the cropped grass. The water and mud cascaded off him, and off the corpse. He climbed the bank, grunting at the effort of it, and straddled the fence of rusted barbed wire. He whistled for his dogs. He went up on to the high pathway with the weight of the body on his shoulders.

Frank Perry noticed the harrier soar above, and wondered whether the bird was watching them.

They walked in file back towards the village, led by the young man with his burden.

The villagers had heard the explosion. Some pretended they had not. Some broke from the link of their conversation, listened, then talked again. Some heard it and crept away to a corner of privacy. It was not possible to escape the sound of the explosion… Davies heard it, and Blake, Paget and Rankin, and the nanny policewoman clutched the child to her in the moments after the windows had rattled at the house. The soldiers working through the Southmarsh towards the snipers' rifles heard it.

Gussie brought the news to the pub. He had run at full pace from the pig-fields overlooking Northmarsh.

"They've got him. They're bringing him in. He's dead."

At the edge of the village, Geoff Markham hurried to keep up with Chalmers, who carried the body easily, moving with a fast, loping walk. Perry was behind, and it was as if it were nothing to do with him. He saw the crowd gathered on the green across the road from the house, standing loosely, watching and waiting. When Markham caught up with him he walked beside Chalmers, and the head of the carcass lolled lifelessly against his arm.

"Why did you do it?"

There was no answer, no turn of the head, no attempt at explanation. Markham thought he understood the gesture of respect for the beast.

"How did you kill him?"

Chalmers's lips were set tight… Markham looked into the dead eyes of the corpse and saw the pallor on the face. There was a clean cut bullet-hole in the tunic and a great bloody stain discolouring the material round it. At the neck, there was the mark of a bruise, a deeper colour, just below the ear. He saw them together, very close, two filthy, soaked, wild creatures. There would have been no fear on the hunted man's eyes in those last moments, and there would have been a gentleness on the hunter's face as he had readied the heel of his hand. The same gentleness on the moor and the mountain when he came close to the wounded beast and its pain.

"Did he say anything?" No answer.

"Did he fight?" No answer.

"Did you feel anything?"

Geoff Markham thought that Andy Chalmers wouldn't be feeling sadness or remorse. It was what was owed to a wounded beast. It was not about a quarrel, it was about ending the misery of pain… He had no more questions, there was nothing more that he could think to ask… And, maybe, it was right that he should have no answers to the last moments of the life of Vahid Hossein. He thought of his commitment to the ideology he believed in, and of his untamed defiance and he thought of the death of Meryl Perry and of Gladys Eva Jones… He thought of those who had milked the access knowledge of Gavin Hughes, and those who had put the launcher in the killer's hand… He thought of those who had tied the rope to the ankle of Frank Perry, tethered him, and armed the guns, and waited for the predator to close on him… He had no answers. It seemed unimportant, at that moment, to Geoff Markham that he would never know what had happened in those last few seconds as the launcher was fired high into the sky and away from the target, never know of the confrontation between the two dripping, dirty men in the marsh.

The crowd edged back as Andy Chalmers walked across the green with his burden.

Davies was at the open door, and Blake, and Paget with Rankin, watching.

The young man came to the front gate of the house and dropped his shoulder so that the body fell easily from it. It crumpled, twisted, on to the grass.

The crowd stared down at the death mask and the bloodied uniform, as if at a creature from the darkness. The water oozed from the uniform and the last of the blood. Markham reflected that, somewhere, a woman would weep for Vahid Hossein.

The crowd stayed back, as if they were still in fear of this intrusion into their lives, who had made them make choices, as if he still might sting, might bite, as if he still possessed the power to hurt them.

The first of the soldiers to come said it, "Come on, you bastards, it's not a flicking peepshow. Show him some dignity…"

Geoff Markham said quietly, "If we went now, Andy, I think we could make the afternoon train to get you home."

He walked towards his car, unlocked it, opened the door for Chalmers and his dogs. Before he climbed in, he walked with purpose to the shop where the post-box was. He wanted to be the solitary, private man, the man who sat alone in the corner of a bar or a train carriage. He wanted to be a part of the strange, neutered, unshared life of a counter-intelligence officer. He wanted to walk into people's lives and be able to walk out again. He wanted to be lonely, like the woman with the red hair who was a legend… He took the sodden letter from his pocket and dropped it into the post-box.

As he drove away, with Chalmers sitting expressionless beside him and the smell of the marsh water filling his car, Markham saw the crowd reluctantly dispersing, and he saw Paget spreading a bedroom blanket over the carcass of the beast.

He had welcomed his guest at the restaurant's door, smiled, and held out his hand in greeting. Harry Fenton had seen the rank suspicion on the intelligence officer's face. He had led him to the corner table. Fenton had grinned before they sat and, his back to the restaurant's clients, he had quickly unbuttoned his shirt, lifted his vest, had exposed his chest, as if to convince the guest that no recording device was strapped to his body.

"I thought it was good that we should meet, because misunderstandings can so damage our mutual relations."

He had laid his mobile telephone on the tablecloth, taken the menu cards and he'd told the intelligence officer that he would order for him. He had thought the intelligence officer would have cleared the short-notice invitation with his head of section, with his ambassador, and ultimately with his Tehran control. The man had been wary but not nervous, and Fenton had thought him an experienced professional.

"There are four names that I wish to throw at you, my friend, and you should listen most carefully to what I say, because the implications of our conversation are a matter of some importance."

They ate, Fenton heavily and the intelligence officer with little enthusiasm. The mobile telephone had lain silent beside Fenton's place.

"It's a question of deals. We are into the business of negotiation.

Let us begin with the names. There is the name of Brigadier Kashef Saderi. For the mission mounted into this country, we have ample evidence of his involvement. Yusuf Khan, formerly Winston Summers, currently under armed guard in hospital. Farida Yasmin Jones, now dead, strangled… There is Vahid Hossein."