A Line in the Sand (45 page)

was not included, not need-to-know, just a

what they'd said. She

man

wo

who was a nuisance.

"How long are you here? For ever?

ng

Is that my life, for ever, havi

u listening?"

yo

t one, Paget, said quietly, "We're here, Mrs.

The shor

Perry, till

."

Wednesday night. That's the end of our shift

The tall one, Rankin, said gently, "Thursday morning's a lieu day, Mrs.

rry, then we start our long weekend."

Pe

ctually, Mrs. Perry, we'll have clocked up twenty-eight hours

"A

overtime in the week, so they won't mess with our long weekend."

"Then we're on the range for a day not an assessment, just practice."

"After that, we might come back and we might not. We're always the oing..."

last to be told where we're g

the tractor from her then crouched to pick up the wheels.

Rankin took

e tears were filling her eyes.

Th

She thought they were indifferent

as

297

ether they came back to this hut,

to wh

this house, her life, or were

to another location. Rankin had the tractor wheels back

assigned

der

un

liers.

the toy's body and Paget passed him a small pair of p

She was

st a makeweight woman who had lost control.

ju

She turned and leaned

against the wall of the hut, her eyes closed to pinch out the tears.

en she opened her eyes, the picture was

Wh

in front of her three or

four

ches from her face.

in

It was hazy, a grey-white image of the bottom

fence of her garden, the apple tree and the sand pit Frank had built tephen. The shape of the man they sought stood out and the

for S

silhouette of the rifle.

rittle, fractured.

Her voice was b

you do when you drive away from us for your long weekend?"

"What'll

fishing, Mrs. Perry, off the south

"We were thinking of going

ast."

co

good rate on a boat this time of year, Mrs. Perry."

"You get a

get smiled. Rankin gave her back the repaired tractor.

Pa

e smeared the tears off her face.

Sh

in front of us, before you go fishing, in front of

"Will you stand

Frank and Stephen and me?"

. We're not

Rankin said, "I won't lie to you, Mrs. Perry

llet-catchers. I don't expect to get killed on the say-so of a

bu

fat-cat bureaucrat sitting in a safe London office. If the

,

opposition

him..." He gestured harshly towards the picture Sellotaped to the wall. '... if he wants to die for his country then I'll willingly help

m along, but I don't aim to go with him. If he wants to end up

hi

a

us for five minutes, that's his choice.

martyr, famo

I'm here to do

the

at's possible, and Joe is, and that's as far as it goes.

best th

If

you

don't like it then you should get your suitcase down off the top of the

wardrobe... That's the truth, Mrs. Perry, and I'm sorry no one told it

298

u before."

yo

you."

"Thank

e turned for the door.

Sh

The cloud had covered the sun and her home;

what was precious to her seemed both drearily mundane and

yingly

terrif

dangerous.

f.

She held the door-handle for a moment to steady hersel

It was Joe Paget who called to her.

"I'd like to say something, Mrs. Perry. We didn't do well last night,

on't be like that again. We'll kill him if he

but we learn. It w

comes

back, and that's not just talk." He paused.

"You should get back in the house and make yourself a fine pot of tea.

I don't know him, or anything about him, but I'll shoot him, or Dave will. You can depend on that, we'll kill him."

The husband stared belligerently at the sofa as Cathy Parker wrote briskly in her notebook.

His wife spoke: "I wouldn't know anything about her, except that when my aunt died I had the job of sorting through her papers. My uncle had

passed on three years earlier. It was a sort of surprise to find

any

reference to my cousin, but she'd written two or three times a year to

her mother, my aunt. I say it was a surprise because my uncle never spoke of Edith, it was like she didn't exist. My uncle was an

engineer

with the Anglo-Iranian Oil Corporation, based in Abadan. I think

they

lived pretty well, servants, a good villa, all that. He just

couldn't

accept that his nineteen-year-old daughter should fall for and want to

marry a local. Ali Hossein was a medical student in his early

twenties. My uncle did all he could to break the relationship and couldn't, and gave up on Edith. He didn't go to the wedding and

forbade my aunt to go. He just cut her off, pretended there had never been a daughter, an only child. I don't think he ever knew that my 299

aunt kept in touch with her..."

She was a neat, fussy woman. On her lap were old letters and a small bundle of photographs held together by a frayed elastic band.

"It was a traditional Muslim wedding. She must have felt very alone with just Ali's relations and friends. Her letters, over the years, were sent to a post office near where my uncle and aunt lived in their retirement, up north, and

aunt

my

collected them. It was a sad little

t of subterfuge but necessary because my uncle's hostility never

bi

lessened, not till the day he died. The letters stopped coming in 1984

and my aunt, in the following months, badgered the Foreign Office

to

find out why. She made up excuses to be away for a whole day, and went

to London and nagged the diplomats for information.

ally they

Eventu

ld her that Edith had been killed in a rocket attack in Tehran,

to

and

told my uncle.

she never

But it's their son, Edith's and Ali's boy,

that you want to know about?"

Cathy Parker was quiet. It was the photographs she had come for,

but

it was her way never to appear eager. She let her informant talk.

"He was called Vahid. I think Edith had a sense of guilt about the way

she and Ali brought him up. Ali was involved in dangerous politics, he

was even arrested and beaten by the secret police, and Edith supported him to the

child,

hilt. The

Vahid, was left to himself, and it wasn't

a surprise that he became a tear away a street hooligan. He was

ved in demonstrations, in fighting with the police. Myself,

invol

I'd

been horrified, but Edith wrote of her pride in the boy's

have

determination. After the revolution, when that awful man, you know, ollah, came back and there were all the executions, public

the Ayat

hangings and shootings, the boy went into the military and was sent the war with Iraq.

away to

He was at the front line when Edith and

her

ere killed by the rocket."

husband w

Behind their heads Cathy Parker could see an ordered, well-tended

small

garden. Their bungalow was on the outskirts of a small village west 300

of

Chard in Somerset. She thought how difficult it would have been for ly woman, reading the letters, to understand the world of

this elder

revolutionary Iran, but she made no show of sympathy.

e to him, after I'd gone through the letters, to tell him there

"I wrot

were blood relations alive in England, but the only address I knew of

was the house where his parents had been killed. It was pretty silly, would have been destroyed by the rocket, and I never had

the house

a

why have you come from London and why is the Security

reply. So,

Service interested in Edith's boy? You're not going to tell me, are

. He's a nice-looking lad well, he was a nice looking lad

you?..

in

ast photograph, but that was taken a long time ago. He'd be

the l

thirty-seven now. Would you like to see the photographs?"

The bundle was passed to Cathy Parker. She flipped through them,

ference. They were what a daughter would have sent

feigning indif

to

r mother.

he

It was the usual progression: a baby, a toddler, a child

in school clothes, at a picnic and kicking a football, a teenager.

Only

two pictures interested her: a young man holding a

the last

Kalashnikov

posing with others in ill-fitting fatigues at a roadblock,

rifle and

and the mature man he'd become sitting hunched and dead-eyed in the a small boat with water and reed-banks behind.

front of

She didn't

ask, just put the last two photographs into her handbag.

"A good-looking boy, yes?"

Cathy made her excuses. She had seen the dead, aged and cold eyes of

young men in Ireland, and seen the misery they could inflict. She sein's aunt for the photographs that might help to

thanked Vahid Hos

kill him.

Andy Chalmers was driven to Fort William in Mr. Gabriel Fenton's

Range

Rover.

He sat, truculent and quiet, in the front seat, with the dogs behind him.

ains and

The light was going down to the west of the big mount

the

301

sea loch as they approached the station.

"Don't take any shit from them, Andy. I've said it before and I'll say

it again do it your way and the way you know. They'll be superior and

they'll treat you like dirt, but don't take it. You're there at Mr.

invitation, there because you're bloody good. You may be

Harry's

a kid

're the best stalker and tracker between here and Lochinver,

but you

the

ver seen and my brother knows that.

best I've e

Don't let me down.

There'll be plenty there who'll want you to fall on your face in the il, and you're going to disappoint them.

mud, and fa

I thought I was

useful, in the Radfan up from Aden, but I hadn't a half of the skill lessed with.

you're b

Mr. Harry's out on a limb for you, that's his

his bastard and if you

degree of trust. Take care, Andy. Find t

ing

br

me back his ears then I'll have them mounted and hung in the hallway s a joke, you understand, a joke..."

that'

He trailed, from the Range Rover, behind his estate owner into the station and he jerked his dogs to heel. It would be the first time in

Andy Chalmers's life that he had left the mountains that were his

home.

Mr. Gabriel Fenton collected the first-class ticket, return,

and the sleeper reservation, pointed through the doorway to the

waiting

n the arm and left him. Chalmers

train, cuffed him cheerfully o

lked

wa

towards the platform and heaved the dogs after him, ignoring the scowl endant and the amusement of other passengers, before

of the att

picking

gs and climbing on board.

up his do

lease, Mr.

"P

Fenton, you have to listen to me. I've just come from

that house. Believe me, it's horrendous in there. We've created

a

monster, and I'm not overstating the case here..."

There was a secure line in the newly created crisis centre at the

ce station in the town of Halesworth, twelve miles inland from

poli

the

llage.

vi

Down the line Fenton told Geoff Markham he was suffering

302

an

attack of melodrama, should pull himself together.

"You're not here. If you were here then you'd understand. Let me tell

you, it's dark, there's hardly a light on, they're bouncing round

off

niture. She's the problem. Sometimes it's hysterical

their fur

weeping, sometimes it's just sitting, withdrawn. She's

ed.

traumatiz

He'll follow her, he thinks he's going to lose her he's got the guilt ps saying it's all his fault.

bad, kee

It'll be worse in the morning

because the kid doesn't have a school to go to. They're near to

g.

quittin

We're crucifying this family, and he's close to demanding

a

safe-house, a new identity."

Fenton told Geoff Markham that his job, down there, was to keep Frank in place.

Perry

"That may seem reasonable enough in London, Mr. Fenton, but viewed from where I've been today it seems poorly informed rubbish. I am o stay calm, of course I am.

trying t

What do you suggest I do? Do

I

him what use was made, in Iran, of the information he provided,

tell

how much blood there is on his hands? Do I tell him about a tethered goat?

t'll really get to him, Mr.

Tha

Fenton, too right... I'm not

losing it, Mr. Fenton, I merely try to explain the situation

onting me."

confr

told Markham that policy dictated Frank Perry should stay