(2005) Rat Run (5 page)

'Be happy to - if your Jocks haven't beaten them all half
insensible.'

'That is fucking outrageous, an insult.'

'Please yourself.'

The adjutant was at the door. He knew the answer to
what he'd say, knew what training the Intelligence Corps
people had - pretty little plump Cherie couldn't hit a main
battle tank at twenty-five yards with her Browning 9mm,
and the quartermaster who took her on shooting practice
wedged his knee between her thighs to keep her steady and
held her arms out rigid, but she still missed the biggest
target they could knock up. He put the question: 'You're
trained on combat weapons and patrol procedures? You
should be if you're going up to Buffalo Bill territory,
Bravo's ground . . . Of course you are.'

He knew she was not back yet, and it made him fidget. Malachy was aware of all of the night sounds of the Amersham, every noise from the plaza at the back. He should first have heard the clatter of Dawn's flat shoes and the shuffle of Mildred Johnson's feet, then the screech of the grille gate, the front door opening and shutting, the blast of the TV through the common wall.

She had disrupted what little peace he owned. He could not have told her how much he appreciated the two sessions a month of tea and sandwiches and listening to her talk, and now he sensed the relationship was broken, past repair. He still sat on the floor, wrapped by the darkness that was barely reached by the plaza's lights. Her prying had brought back the pain of memory, not to be escaped from.

He could see it: a child lost in his imagination, succouring fantasies, playing solitary games around the married quarters at Tidworth, Catterick, Larkhall or Colchester .. . Father was the Northern Ireland expert and always there; mother, a deserter from a nursing career, full-time unpaid organizer of other ranks' wives clubs and counsellor of teenage brides on credit-card debt and trying to keep together a hopeless partnership. Walter and Araminta Kitchen had been too consumed with the job and the good deeds to notice that their lone child was isolated. He remembered coming into the kitchen with homework, arithmetic that he couldn't do, unaware that his father had learned that afternoon he was not sailing with the Task Force to the South Atlantic, and getting a volley of abuse over a gin glass for thinking homework counted in the scale of things, and running. Sent to boarding-school in Somerset. Short visits from his mother, and an aloof one from his father to see the school play. Worst day ever at school was his father's visit a year after his retirement as brigadier, with full dress and medals, to inspect the Combined Cadet Force. Not an unhappy childhood, compared to what some at the school put up with, but remote from love.

Of course he would join the army: his small act of rebellion, and it had taken bottle, was to decide - himself - when and where. And then the puce-faced, spluttering reaction of his father when he announced that he'd enlisted, that afternoon, and been passed through by a Birmingham recruitment office, to be a private soldier and bottom of the heap. 'Silly little bugger,' Walter had called him, and Araminta had said quietly to her husband, 'Not to worry, darling. It never lasts when middle-class boys go slumming it.'

All the sounds, that evening, of the estate had wafted up to his room: music and screams, the wail of the sirens, then the intermittent flashes of blue emergency lights.

The memories came round as if in a loop, as they always did. He was in childhood, father away and mother out. Too awake to sleep. No escape possible.

He heard the stampede of feet, the thud of them, then the hammering on his door.

Malachy felt the fear catch his body He crawled away across the floor towards the far wall. The beating on the door was ever more insistent, and there was the cry of Dawn's voice.

It came in a torrent when he finally opened the door. If he had interrupted, it would not have halted her. She was in her night clothes. No slippers on her feet. Incoherent and with tears welling.

'It's Millie . . . What happened to Millie? Do you not know? The bingo. She went. I got flu. I can't go to the bingo. I tell her. I say to get you to walk her, or not go.

Did she get you? She went on her own. I told her not to. Nobody ever goes to bingo alone and comes back alone. She did. They got her, the vagrants got her.

She's mugged. You know what she has in her bag? She never has more than five pounds, that is before the bingo starts. They went for her bag. After the bingo and a cup of tea there would be two pounds only. She didn't give it. She hung on to it for two pounds. They dragged her. She fell. She is an old lady. She hit her head, and then they took her bag.'

He rocked, felt himself cringe. He did not say what her nephew's opinion of him was: a loser and a failure. Malachy could not tell her that Mildred Johnson would not have asked him to walk her to and from bingo because he had said that a story of a catastrophe was nobody's business but his, that he was the last man from whom the proud, obstinate little lady would have begged a favour.

'She's in the hospital. The police had found her bag, without two pounds. In the bag is my name and my flat number. In my bag is her name and her number. I cried when the police told me . . . Why, Mr Malachy, did she not call you to take her and to bring her back?

Why? You were her friend. Why did she not ask you?'

'How is she?'

The nurse looked up. She had been hovering over the bed. 'Are you a relative?'

'No - no, I'm not. Just a friend.' Malachy held the flowers beside his leg and the water off them ran down his trousers.

'How close a friend?'

'I live next door to Mrs Johnson.' He was supposed to have been, once, an expert in interrogation. With the tables turned, now, the questioning unsettled him.

He shuffled his feet. The nurse's body blocked his view of Millie. It was the furthest he had been away from the Amersham since he had come to live there the previous autumn. It had been a big journey for him to get to the sprawled complex of St Thomas's Hospital. That morning, Dawn had come again to his door. She must have been on her way home after the early cleaning shift in Whitehall. He had thought of Millie, and the guilt had seared him.

'I suppose that'll do . . . ' The nurse had a freckled face and bags under her eyes, seemed half asleep with tiredness and spoke with an accent that was west of Ireland. 'She was knocked out. We thought about Intensive Care but there wasn't a bed. She got the best we could give her, but it wasn't IC, with pulse, blood pressure and pupils checks every half-hour, and we didn't think there was inter-cranial bleeding . . . That's why she's in General Medical. So, it's serious bruising to the head and a broken arm - not a complicated break. Always the same with the old folk - they hang on and don't let the bag go. Silly, but that's them for you.'

The nurse moved, started to smooth down the bed.

Millie, to him, looked so small. She was half sat up against a pile of pillows. She wore a loose-fitting smock, several sizes too large for her. Her face, usually proud, independent and haughty, was a coloured mass of bruises, and the right side of her grey hair had been shaved away above the ear. He could see the two-inch-long gash with the stitches in it. Her right arm was across her small chest, enveloped in a sling.

She seemed to stare at him, baleful and defensive. He did not know whether he was recognized, if that was the stare she gave to anyone approaching her bed. The nurse slipped a thermometer into her mouth, which was puffed, with distorted lips.

'She'll be in two or three days, because she lives alone and there's no one to look after her. Problem is that we might ship her out today, and if she starts vomiting or goes to sleep, we've an inquiry to worry about. When the swelling's down on the arm it'll be pinned or plated - and she'll have to manage. That's the way it is, these days.'

'There's a friend next door to her, a good lady. She'll be there.'

'And you said you were a neighbour.' The nurse put down the thermometer, then fixed Malachy with her eye. 'I expect you'll give her a hand - or do you go to work?'

'I'll do what I can,' he murmured. 'I don't suppose you have a vase?'

He had gone to the East Street market. He had considered how much he could spend. The benefit he was entitled to, after deductions, left him with eighty pounds to last for two weeks. Divided up that gave him spending money of five pounds and seventy-one pence each day. He had asked the woman on the flower stall for the best she could do with five pounds.

It was a good display of bright chrysanthemums that he had brought to the hospital.

The nurse reached to the bottom cupboard of the cabinet beside the bed and took out a man's urine-sample bottle, grinned, filled it with water from the basin, and took the flowers from Malachy. As if she'd made the judgement that he wasn't capable of flower-arranging, she did it for him and settled the stems in the bottle. 'The vases all get nicked,' she said. 'It's the best I can manage. Don't stay too long. You shouldn't tire her.' She left him.

Malachy sat on the end of the bed beside the little bump her feet made. He did not know what to say, or whether it was right to say anything. He tried to smile encouragement. She had turned her battered head enough to see the flowers. He felt his inadequacy.

When he was with the dossers, sleeping in the underpass on and under cardboard, drinking with what he had made from begging, and knowing he could not fall further, he had not felt this low. The silence nagged between them.

Maybe an hour passed. She slept and he sat dead still so as not to wake her.

The question cracked in his ear. Brusque. 'What's a piece of shit like you doing here?'

The nephew was behind him. He carried a large, varied bouquet in one hand and a clear plastic bag in the other, packed with apples, pears, bananas, peaches, a pineapple and grapes.

'Why are you here?'

He was shivering. His whisper was a chatter in his teeth: 'I came to see if I could help.'

'Oh, that's good, "help". Didn't "help" enough to walk her there and back - no, no.'

Malachy stammered, 'She didn't ask me. If she'd asked me . . . '

'No fool, Aunt Millie. Wouldn't have reckoned you up to it, walking her there and back.'

'She didn't ask.'

'You came down from a great height - right? Hit the bottom - right? I know who you were and what you did. I know what they called you. Fancy phrases from the medics, but the truth from the jocks. I know.'

His head drooped into his hands. He sensed the nephew go past him and he heard the kiss placed on Millie's forehead, would have been where the bruises were. More sounds. The splash of water, then the thud in the tin waste-bin, the crackle of the Cellophane wrapping on the bouquet.

He kept his hands tight on his face, could feel the stubble on his palms.

'What I don't know, my friend, my little piece of shit, is where you're going. Are you going to go on failing? That's easy, isn't it? I don't know if the only road you're comfortable with, my friend, is the easy one . . . Take your bloody hands off your face. Look at her! Does that take guts, looking at an old lady who's been done over for her purse? Look at her and remember her.'

He did. He saw the slightness of her and the bruises in their mass of colours, the thin upper arm in its sling. And he saw the stems of his flowers upside down in the bin, and the glory of the bouquet on the cabinet. He pushed himself up from the bed and turned for the aisle that ran through the ward.

'There's an easy road and a hard one - most, when they've fallen like you have, take the easy one.'

Out of the hospital, he walked on the embankment.

The river seemed sour and dirtied. Rain ran down his face, was not wiped away. He walked on and did not know where, walked until a massive cream and green building - an architect's dream - blocked his path.

Then, he turned, retraced his steps and headed back to the Amersham where he could hide behind a door that was locked and bolted.

Had Frederick Gaunt looked out through his fifth-floor window, reinforced and chemically treated glass that could withstand bomb blast and electronic eavesdropping, he would have seen a man walk on the Albert Embankment towards the wall that blocked further progress to the building where he worked, then loiter and drift away. But there was more on Gaunt's mind that lunchtime than the aimless advance and retreat of another of the capital's work-shy low-life - that would have been his description if he had seen the loafer. His sandwiches were

untouched and his bottle of mineral water unopened.

Gaunt's room in Vauxhall Bridge Cross, the

monolith occupied by the Secret Intelligence Service, was in an isolated corner of the building. Nominally, eight per cent of the Service's budget was devoted to the investigation of organized crime, but the resources made available to this section of the fifth floor's open-plan areas, cubicles and rooms had been pared down to meet the demands of Iraq and the burgeoning al-Qaeda desks. Gaunt did Albania. On another man's back it would have been a hairshirt, an irritation that required continued scratching without relief, but he knew the way the system worked and would have reckoned bloody-minded sulking to be vulgar.

The lunch was uneaten and the water undrunk.

Little that normally landed on his desk, dumped without ceremony by Gloria, required more than dutiful attention. Albania's organized crime was the trafficking of narcotics, firearms and people. His CX reports were carefully crafted, always readable, and painted a clear picture of a society wedded with enthusiasm to criminality. Most could have been drafted when he was half asleep - not the one that now turned in his mind.

'You haven't touched them - you have to eat.'

Gloria put down a further file on his desk, already crowded with seven paper heaps. 'No breakfast, no lunch, and I'll wager nothing proper last night.'

He grimaced. She scolded because she cared about him. The first of the files had arrived the previous morning and the heap had built through the day. Most of the pages now referred to telephone traces sucked down by the farm of dishes on the Yorkshire moors.