Gerald Seymour - Battle Sight Zero

‘Why me, why am I chosen for this?’

She was chosen because she was a clean skin.

‘There are many who are not monitored. Why me?’

Because of who she was, what she was.

‘Who am I, what am I?’

Their breath reeking of the scent of cooking spices, both spat back the answer: she was a woman. So few in the struggle were female. They did not look for women, the detectives in the North West and North East Counter Terrorist Unit. They looked for boys. She was not listed, was not under surveillance…

‘And that is enough?’

And she had a friend, and the remark was left to hang.

A hesitation. ‘I don’t know whether he would…’

One said she should make him, and the other said that she should manipulate him. They came into the long street where her parents lived, where the small back bedroom was hers. The driver pulled over, and the two men whispered to each other. It was usual for them to contact her, and although she had been given what they called a dead letter drop address, it was to be used in extreme emergency, not as routine. To reach her they used occasional email links from internet shops, or there would be a folded piece of cigarette paper, covered in minute handwriting and fastened with an adhesive into a deep corner of a locker in the Students’ Union: two keys, one for her. Street lamps lit a part of the road but they had chosen shadow. She was told to get out. It would be a five-minute walk to her home. She stood and the snow swirled close to her and she struggled to open her umbrella. Both of them were out. One took her arm and propelled her towards the car’s rear. She sensed the change in their breathing. She was pushed. A zapper opened the boot, and a dull light came on inside.

She saw the face.

The light pierced the clear plastic that wrapped the head and it reflected back from the pallor of the skin which had no lustre to it, and the eyes stared wide open and the mouth gaped as if the final motion had been a gasp or a cry, and there were marks across the cheeks where sticky tape had been pulled off and a sparse moustache ripped away. Blood had run from the nose and the mouth and had congealed and there was bruising round the eyes. There was a stink, the same as when a dog had done its business on the pavement and she had stepped in it and it was on her shoe. Zeinab was sick. Never in her life had she been sick in a street. There was a neatly trimmed hedge separating a small garden from the pavement, and she vomited into it.

Did she know the face?

She retched phlegm from deep in her throat, and coughed and spat… She did not know the face. She was told he was an informer. She repeated that she did not know him. He was a police informer and had started recently to try to get close to the boys, had asked too much and too often, and had been questioned, and had been… and had died. He was an informer. She said again that she had not known him, not seen him.

And she was lectured in hissed whispers. She should understand that the death of an informer was inevitable. A betrayer, a traitor. An informer could not extricate himself with untruths. This was how an informer died. She heard them out. She supposed it was a warning. The boot was slammed shut. She was told where she would next see them, what response was expected from her, and for a moment, unexpectedly, the face of the boyfriend, the lorry driver, flickered in her memory. She walked away from them. All she knew of them were their code names: Krait and Scorpion. She heard the car start up, and the lights spun as it turned sharply in the width of the street. She went on down the sloping road and could see a light by the door of her home – her father would have switched it on as a welcome to her. She spat once more and cleared a little more of the taste of vomit from behind her teeth. For a moment she trembled, seemed to feel danger and weakness – spat again, then walked more briskly towards her home. There, nothing was known of her secondary life, with whom she mixed, and what she sought to achieve.

She rang the bell, and the lie Zeinab lived was total. She was brought inside and was hugged and saw the affection in the eyes of her mother and father, and their innocence, and she gave them no sympathy for her deceit. The eyes of the dead boy, wide but dulled, had been the worst of it. It was right that it should have happened to an informer.

A makeshift incinerator reeked of the last fumes of burned plastic. Crab stood at the door, sniffed, waved the beam of his torch. His driver and minder, Gary, held another torch and was a pace behind Crab.

He had been born Oswald Frith… He thought, what he could see in the torchlight, that the kids had done a decent enough job with the sanitising of the area. All of the plastic had been taken down, and all of the string lengths that had attached it to the frame untied and removed, and everything off the concrete flooring and that area swilled with bleach… Born Oswald Frith, aged twenty, and living in the shadow of the Old Trafford football stadium, and setting up his own minor protection business, just a few shops and a couple of pubs, starting to make a name for himself. He had fallen foul of a bigger man who reckoned to have that area tightly sewn, and had come with an iron angle bar to sort out the intruder on his patch. He’d done six month in hospital while surgeons had put together the bones in his right leg, had eventually been discharged, had limped away from the Wythenshawe wards and had gone to visit the man who had belted him with the bar. With his crab-like walk he had walked into the guy’s house… The man did not walk again, crab-like or otherwise, and was buried a week later. Oswald Frith, because of his impediment, was from that day known as Crab. No evidence left behind, and the widow had been sensible and not testified, and the business had been seamlessly transferred. Crab liked to joke that, although reared near to Manchester United’s stadium, the only season ticket he’d had was to Her Majesty’s Prison, Strangeways, and most tended to laugh at his joke. He moved awkwardly and, in the winter, felt bad pain in the injured limb, but never winced and never complained. He was satisfied with what he saw. He liked to work with professional people, could not abide laziness or carelessness. The place, his building, seemed to have been well cleaned. The loaning of it had been facilitated through an old contact between one of his sons and these Asians, and they were friends after a year on the same landing in gaol. First there was an approach, the usual circuitous routes and an offer, and he had not turned his back on it but had dug into his own wad of associates, and had rather liked the taste of what was on offer… Then the request, only 48 hours previously, that a bit of floor space was needed. He did not know these new people, the Asians, but the little that had been run by him had seemed effective and planned with thoroughness. He had no complaint. The torch beams flickered over the flooring and up the walls and came down to rest on an old chair, heavy wood – could have been a half century since a joiner had put it together – and there were no stains, no signs of damage. And he liked the way it had been put to him, that these people – the Asians – had a powerful way of dealing with a tout, someone who snitched. He liked it to be robust because that way a message was passed and there’d be fewer volunteers for going up the same road. In the morning they’d have a second check to be certain that any traces were obliterated. The oil drum used as an incinerator still smouldered. Crab hobbled out, and Gary was close to his shoulder…

There had been a time in Manchester when the newspapers had referred to him – not by name – as a ‘Mister Big’ of the criminal underworld, and there had been cheap headlines at the expense of the mystery man, but no longer. He was choosy what he involved himself in, and with whom. Had not been inside prison for seventeen years, had no wish to renew the experience, but a deal had been offered him, and might lead beyond the boundaries of his comfort area. An attractive deal, and a chance to do business with an old friend, one of the best. He had never been into this sort of trade – could do rackets and girls and Class A stuff – never this. But the deal intrigued him. Crab could never resist an attractive deal, and never had been able to… and all in place, and all starting to run and the pace of it quickening. Was a sucker for it, a decent deal.