(2005) Rat Run (64 page)

'Good - different minds bringing different thinking to ongoing problems. We don't want to lose you, Freddie. We'd hate a man of your talents to throw in the towel and make an overhasty decision on early retirement, though the packages on the table are generous to a fault and offer many opportunities for the pursuit of valuable hobbies. We'd hate you to walk away. What's vacant, because of Wilson's diagnosis of diabetes, is Uruguay. It's a bit of a backwater, but that's where we are. What do you say to Montevideo, three years and perhaps an extension to four?'

If he gulped, he did not show it. If he felt a frisson of anger, he hid it.

Gaunt said, 'I'd like that very much.'

They wanted his neck on the block, wanted him gone. He would deny them the satisfaction. He saw the face across the desk flex in the irritation caused by his acceptance.

'I'd say Uruguay for three years, or four, would be most challenging . . . worthwhile.'

Gulls wheeled, screamed and dived on the bright-coloured intruder that was marooned at the base of the red stone cliffs.

An ornithologist saw it and reported to the coastguard station on the North Sea island of Helgoland that an upturned dinghy had been washed ashore. He was able to return in time to the cliffs and watch men come by cutter and retrieve it, but he was on a day's visit and did not have time to learn what the) had found. He telephoned from the mainland the next morning and heard the dinghy carried the name of a British registered trawler, and heard also that the cliffs and beaches of Helgoland had been searched, but without further result.

'No bodies have come ashore?'

None had been discovered.

'Perhaps it was taken off the deck by that storm last month.'

Perhaps it had been.

He came out of the stairwell and into the summer heat that burned off the block's concrete. A voice boomed behind him, 'How you doing, Mr Johnson? How you keeping?'

He turned, saw the big West Indian with the

weightlifter's shoulders.

'Fine, Ivanhoe, just fine.'

'More important than how you're doing, keeping -

how's Millie?'

'She's well, as good as to be expected, quite chirpy

. . . She asks after him.'

He had a handkerchief out and mopped his forehead, saw that sweat ran rivers on the social worker's face.

'She can ask but I doubt she'll see him. A new man, a changed man, and without old baggage. You, Mr Johnson, and me and her, we'd be old baggage, but he came back to the Amersham.'

'Millie heard he was here, not living on the estate but working.'

'I just seen him the once, turned up at my office door and all humble requested a job. I sent him where he wanted to go. They fixed him - a low grade because of no qualifications. I've not seen him since.'

'Where did they place him?'

The arm of Ivanhoe Manners waved expansively, generalized, in the direction of the estate facilities, buildings that had survived the warfare of vandalism, where the money of the New Deal for the Community had been swallowed, where the Pensioners'

Association played bingo and the Tenants' Association held meetings.

'Over there's where he is.'

'You got time to show me?'

A wide frown played on Ivanhoe Manners's forehead, as if the question perplexed him, as if an answer would embarrass him. Then he scratched at his ear, and seemed to wince as if the request hurt him . . .

Tony Johnson knew the basic detail of what had happened, months before, on a German beach, but what had crossed his desk had been sanitized of intelligence material. He knew the proof of it because, with half a hundred others from the Criminal Intelligence Service and the Crime Squad and the Organized Crime Unit, he had gone down to Lewisham to see the coffin of Ricky Capel - the untouchable smart kid -

put down in the earth. Not a wet eye to be seen; a parson clamouring through the service like he'd another one backed up; poor turnout and almost a carnival mood from those who'd showed. He was just home from holiday, two weeks on the Algarve, and Millie had told him that Malachy was back - ears like bloody surveillance antennae the lady possessed. He had come, almost, to wish he hadn't asked.

'I'll take you, but it's not for talking - just watching.'

'That'll do me.'

They went across a plaza, through a play area and across a road. The building where the facilities were, Tony Johnson thought, was like a damn great bunker

. . . and he reckoned it bloody needed to be. Past mums pushing brats in buggies, and kids on a block's corner - maybe it was the sunshine, but he rated the numbers of the kids as smaller than usual, but that would be the sunshine because the kids were night workers.

He heard the rumble of many voices and - God's truth - laughter in the Amersham.

They were at the bunker wall. One window set in it, covered with thick wire mesh.

'You heard me, Mr Johnson? Just watching, brief, and not talking, ever. We're the past and he don't need us.'

'I heard you . . . See nothing, hear nothing and know nothing, that's me.'

He peered through the wire and the sounds -

yelling, shouting, laughing - belted him, and Ivanhoe Manners's mouth was close to his ear.

'It's the kids he's getting on his side. Now it's basketball, earlier it might have been football, later it'll be the pool tables. See him, he's a natural. Me, I'm too old for them, and you. He's not that much younger than me, or you, but it's like he's lost years. There's more kids now, playing basketball with him, than I ever seen . . . You know what? Like now, he's always in shorts and his T-shirt has no sleeves. Why? Look there, the little pucker marks on the right thigh and shoulder. They're top credibility with the kids, bullet scars. Two bullet-holes, hardly healed over, they win respect - I didn't hear where he got them, or how . . .

They don't know he was ever here, like he came out of nowhere. That enough for you?'

They walked away, left a basketball game behind a window.

Tony Johnson said, 'I'll see you around, Ivanhoe .. .

Like you said, best left alone, because we're the past and of no use to him. Good to see him standing, finding himself. Look after yourself.'

He went to his car.

He knew where Malachy Kitchen had been, and the hell of that place, and the price paid . . . and he wishec those who had put the man there could have stood with him, on tiptoe, and peered through a wire mesh.

and seen a man born again.

THE END