He heard the boy toss in the adjacent room, and he heard a car door opening, the sound of a man urinating, the door closing again. Meryl was silent beside him, staring at the ceiling. Like sinners, neither of them could sleep.
Chapter Six.
e went too fast on to the bridge and, too late, saw the twist in the road beyond it.
Yusuf Khan had met the man, stood in awe of him. He had come out of the darkness in response to the flash of the headlights, just as the intelligence officer had told him. He had babbled greetings to the man and tried to please him with the warmth of his welcome. Nothing had been given him in return. He had been told sharply, in good but slightly accented English, that he talked too much.
He was in a myriad web of narrow side-roads and he was lost and did not wish to show it. The first light was already a smear in the east. He went too fast over the bridge unaware of the right-hand bend immediately beyond it.
First the man had peeled off his wet suit, then stood in his longtrousered underclothes and had clicked his fingers irritably at Yusuf Khan, who watched. He had been caught idle and felt keenly the criticism of the snapped fingers. He had dragged the newly bought clothes from the bag, and the man had cursed softly because the shop labels were still on them. Yusuf Khan had torn them off before handing them back. He had held the torch and passed the man the camouflage trousers, the tunic and the thick socks. The fact that the new boots were not laced provoked another savage glance.
When he had set out the schedule in his mind, he had not expected that the clothes would be worn now; he'd assumed the man wouldn't be using them from the start. And he had not expected that the man would demand the opening of the tubular bag. With only the torch beam to guide him, the man had been meticulous in his examination of the weapons. He had broken open the mechanism of the launcher and examined each of the working parts~ studied them, cleaned some with the window rag from the car, and reassembled it. Because it was only a small torch beam Yusuf Khan had recognized that the man had worked virtually blind. He had leaned forward, anxious to please, held the torch closer but had abruptly been waved back. The schedule had gone.
The man, in the fragile light, had then turned his attention to the squat form of the rifle. Yusuf Khan had never seen a man take apart a firearm, and was amazed at the seemingly casual way that the weapon disintegrated into pieces. Each round had been examined before two magazines had been filled, and the pressure of the coil tested. By the time he had started up the car his fingers had been stiff and his legs taut, and he had lurched through the manual gears. The sausage bag with the weapons had been on the floor behind him within the man's reach as if, already, he was prepared for war, to kill. The man had leaned back in his seat and closed his eyes.
He was lost, stressed, when he came too fast over the bridge and into the hidden right-hand bend beyond it. As he swerved to hold the centre of the road, the wheels failed to grip, and Yusuf Khan stamped on the brake pedal. At that moment the 5-series BMW was out of control.
The car slewed on shrieking tyres across the width of the road. He saw the pole that carried telegraph wires. Short of it was the ditch, looming towards him in the headlights' glare.
Yusuf Khan saw everything, so clearly, so slowly.
Plunging into the ditch, the bonnet going down the ditch throwing the back of the car upwards the man's arms went up to cover his forehead, but he made no sound the car standing on its nose no fear on the man's face the roof of the car impacting against the telegraph pole.
There was a wild pain in his leg, a fleeting sensation, as the car came down, crazily angled in the ditch. His skull hit the point where the roof met the windscreen.
Blackness around him, and peace.
His partner, Euan, would be in the shop, cleaning the floor and the windows, stocking the shelves, putting out the ice-cream sign, taking a list of the postcards that needed replacing.
The early morning was a precious time to Dominic Evans.
He loved his partner deeply, but he also loved the early-morning walk, on his own, out of the village and towards the Southmarsh. Left behind, in Euan's care, was his dog because the sweet little soul would disturb the glory of the early-morning's tranquillity. He was forty-nine, had come to the village and bought the shop fifteen years back with the money from his mother's estate. For twelve of those fifteen years Euan had been his partner. He thought the villagers, with their Neanderthal minds, accepted him and did not jeer at him because he had integrated carefully and made it his ambition to write down the old history of the community. Through learning the history, explaining it, sharing it, he had won acceptance, and he was discreet. It was a good place to gain the sense of history's inevitability, to recognize the futility of man's efforts to combat the power of nature. In time the sea would claim all of it: everything that man had built would crumble off these soft cliffs and be lost to the waves.
In the half-light, he walked past the narrow, silted stream that had once been a great waterway where skilled artisans built big ships. That summer, he would write a special pamphlet on the ship-building from Viking to Cromwellian times, publish it at his own expense and lecture on it to the Historical Society. But that morning, each morning for a month, history did not intrude on his thoughts.
It was the miracle month of survival and navigation, the month when the birds completed the migration from the south seaboard of the Mediterranean and the west coast of Africa. Each morning in the dawn before the shop opened and each evening in the dusk after it closed, he went to watch for the arrival of the birds on the Southmarsh. That they came from so far, that they could find their way to this particular area of water channels and reed-banks, was truly incredible to Dominic.
He settled on the damp ground, at his watching place. Usually he went to the Southmarsh, more rarely to the Northmarsh. There were godwits~ war biers and avocets, but they had not come from Africa, nor the shelducks, nor the geese. It was a few minutes from the time that he should return to the village and open the shop when he saw the bird he was waiting for.
The tears pricked in his eyes, and the sight made this gentle man cry out in anger.
The harrier flew low in tortured flight. A pair had come back to the Southmarsh three evenings before and their wing-beat after the journey of thousands of miles was firm, true; they had left the next morning for a destination further north. It was as if this bird flew on one wing.
For all his anger, for all his gentleness, there was nothing Dominic could do to help the bird.
It had come home, it was injured. The infection would be in the wound. It would die a starved, agonized death. He lost sight of it as it came down into the reeds.
He wiped his eyes. The harrier, Circus aeruginosus, rust and copper feathering, was the most beautiful bird he knew. It would be in pain, in hunger, in exhaustion, and he was helpless.
He went back to open his shop.
Vicky slept as Geoff Markham dressed. While he did so he played in his mind with the words she had written down for him, made sentences for them. I believe in the totally ethical use of finance… A bank, in my opinion, should never deny the participation of the investor in the handling of his or her affairs… Money is for the benefit of the whole of the community, not just for the wealthy… Finance stands at the interface of society and should be used to create general wealth and not narrow affluence… Vicky had said that he must use the modern idiom, not the cobwebbed language of Thames House.
He put on the new tie she had bought, thin, woven, with brightly coloured stripes.