Gerald Seymour: Battle Sight Zero

The office was shared with Pegs. She was not a serving policewoman but a civilian enhancer. She did logistics, ran a system, kept Gough and a few others where they needed to be, which was with information pouring out of their skulls and organisation wrapped tight round them. She had a phone wedged against her head, and was belting her keyboard. He would never interrupt when her face was screwed up and the breath came hissing from between her teeth. He put down the tea in front of her and had a small cardboard plate for her portion of carrot cake and the usual plastic knife. He went to his own place and shrugged out of his coat, shook it to get some of the rain off, slung it behind the door, and sat and waited. He would be told when she was good and ready. In Gough’s experience very little that came down the phone lines, or that popped up on the screens, slotted into the ‘good news’ category. Most was right for the pigeon-hole of what he did not want to know, but would have to. He began to nibble at his cake. If it were not for Pegs running his office, and the relationship, then he might well have jacked the job and made things a little warmer with Clare and gone down to the south coast, and hit a golf ball and walked a dog.

She said, ‘It’s not Armageddon, but it’s not nice.’

They called him Tommy when they talked among themselves. Most of the CHIS people had a CHIS name. He was T for Tommy, Tommy Ahmed, and was a new recruit, and had seemed keen, and committed; some were there for the long haul and some were short-term expedient, and it would have been rare indeed for Gough to have said into which box Tommy was squashed.

‘What is not nice?’ asked Gough, eating his cake.

‘Should have been a meeting yesterday, with the locals, but didn’t show. Simple enough, then they went for the secondary process, and he didn’t show for that either. He’s skipped two schedules. No trace on his phone. That’s where we are.’

He went on with his cake, and she started hers. Could, of course, be that little Tommy had suffered a puncture, and then another, and in between had switched off his phone, and lost it, or could be something different. They both remarked that the carrot cake was good, and said nothing about an informant gone missing, and where the poor beggar might be, and the implications.

Clean jeans, and a clean shirt, and a brush run over his hair. A glance in the mirror. A grin from Andy Knight. Looked good enough.

He checked his wallet, was satisfied he had sufficient cash, not too much.

It had been a hard day, and the roof spars were all in place on the site, and he was tasked with different deliveries the next morning: pallet loads of concrete building blocks were going across to another quarter of the city. Nothing about his work was particularly varied, day in and day out, but others would have said work was hard enough to find that paid above the minimum, and he never complained or grumbled, in company, but kept the basics of cheerfulness clamped in place.

He looked around him, shrugged. The same as every day and every night since he had moved into the bedsit. It was sparsely furnished: what the landlord would have been able to flog as ‘furnished’ but without frills. It would have been expected that a tenant would bring with him the keepsakes and mementoes and pictures and ornaments that anyone collected, the debris of life. Andy had not brought such baggage with him, had come only with a sack, and a basic clock radio, and his one book had been a bound street map of the city of Manchester with environs. He had not taken the girlfriend through the front door, and up the staircase that led to the bedsit on the first floor. He had not brought her here, nor had he tried to. The room might have confused her… it represented nothing, was as anonymous as a hotel of boxrooms beside a busy rail terminal where men and women did their sleeping, cared not a fig for decoration or anything sparking homeliness. No pictures on the walls, not even a fading print of a Lake District view, or a cheap Lowry reproduction. No fruit bowl in the middle of the table that served for eating meals from or writing out reports at and doing his time sheets. He washed up in a sink that was separate from the basin and small shower cubicle in another corner, and beside the sink there was no towel that might have given a clue of a previous holiday destination. The room seemed to show a conscious effort had been made to eradicate any history of the current occupant. Nothing about the room, to Andy, was strange; all was as intended.

He sat on the bed, hitched his feet up, and stretched himself out. He triggered the alarm on the clock radio, had enough time to sleep, at least a doze. It was a part of Andy Knight’s discipline that he took rest when the chance was offered it. He was tired from a long day and had another starting at dawn the next morning. He always reckoned that when he met someone who was outside his immediate circle of confidants – as Zed was – that rest helped to steel his focus.

He had not brought her here. He’d reckoned there had been a few evenings since they had met when her control might have dipped, and she might have come. He had not invited her, had not tugged at her wrist, had not played a trick and told her there was something back in his room that he wanted to show her. He thought that if he had pushed her, gone heavy, then he might have induced her to come through the front door, and held tight on her waist as he’d steered her up the stairs, but he had not tried to.

His eyes were closed. Always he needed to rest, and always he must hold the focus…

Car headlights flashed in the darkened street.

Zeinab was sheltered by a shop window overhang. In the last half hour the rain had switched from light drizzle to blustered snowflakes. She was dutiful. She had waited, had not cursed, had controlled her impatience. Some of the snow crusted on her shoulders. The light came on inside the car as a door was opened. She gazed right, left, made certain she was not watched, then hurried with a skipping step across the pavement and into the warmth of the car.

They talked and she listened. There was no apology for having left her to wait for their arrival in the street close to the bus station. She was not expected to contribute, but it was explained to her. The passenger, who was younger, talked most, and the driver chipped in with greater detail. It was what had been decided by the group they were part of: she had been chosen for a defining role. The talk was of fire power, of a strike that would seize the attention of the whole of the country. She heard the two voices; one was wheezy from a chest cold and the other was shrill with excitement, and neither had a poet’s language or a leader’s call, but the message was clear. They drove down narrow streets, did not crawl and therefore attract attention, did not push at traffic lights. She had known that a time would come when they would want her, would value her… They had crossed the bridge over the Calder river and then up the long hill past Savile Town and at the top they had turned towards the Teaching Centre and then the old factory where blankets had been made when Dewsbury promised high employment and the immigrants had been rushed in from Pakistan and a new life had seemed rose-tinted. The factory was shut, the mines were closed, the quarries went unworked; a sullen anger had replaced the optimism, and the mood had changed. Where was the greatest anger? In the area to which this girl, Zeinab, had been recruited. It was about an attack and about a supply line… One voice was interspersed with hacked coughing and the other with brief moments of giggling as if stress were gripping him. The more they talked, the longer, and the farther, the car was driven, and she sensed a growing anxiety among them.