"Show the wound to me."
Through the night she had listened for the crack of distant gunfire and she had heard only the owls.
As the hours had slipped away, so her anxiety for him had increased, nagging and worrying at her, until she could no longer bear the loneliness of the vigil. She had felt an increasing sense of disaster breaking. In the dawn light she had left the car and tried to trace the route he had taken her the day before. In Fen Covert, she'd avoided fallen dead branches, stepped lightly on the leaves and not scuffed them, kept wide from the path, as he'd shown her, and she had heard the baying of big dogs. Then she had walked more quickly and her anxiety for him had been at fever point. Across the marshes, beyond Old Covert, she had been able to see right to the tower of the village church. The early sun gleamed on the river that ran from the marshes, and by the river were the dogs.
Behind the dogs, controlling them, were the handlers. Behind the handlers, guarding them, were the marksmen with the guns on which the bulging telescopic sights were mounted. They hunted for him. They had not killed him, and the knowledge of his survival brought pricking tears of happiness to Farida Yasmin's cheeks.
"You don't have to be shy but you have to show me where you are hurt so I can help."
While the sun had risen and the clouds had gathered off the sea and chased it, the dogs had tracked back on the riverbank, then searched away from it, and she'd known they'd lost the scent. When the cloud had crossed the sun, and the greyness had dulled the marsh reeds, she had seen the handlers call off the dogs. But she had taken note of where the marksmen settled, where they watched from after the dogs had gone. She had kept in the trees. She had gone into the woodland of Fen Hill.
Because of what she had endured, the anxiety, her anger snapped.
"Fine, so you won't show me where, so you don't want help well, get up, keep walking, turn your back on it, go home. Don't think about me, what I've done."
If it had not been for the bird Farida Yasmin would not have found him. It had lifted off, flapped away, cried, then circled the bramble clump into which he'd crawled. He had seemed to be sleeping, which had amazed her because his face was furrowed in pain. She had wriggled on her stomach into the back of the thicket and been within arm's reach of him when he had woken, jerked up, slashed his face on the thorn barbs, gasped, grabbed at her, recognized her and then his eyes had closed, his body had arched as if the pain ran rivers in him. He had told her of his failure, of the car, the lost rifle. The words had been whispered and his head stayed down.
She whipped him with her hissed words, "Because of you what I've done for you I've police waiting for me. I'm on the line for you. Are you staying or are you going? Are you going to let me treat your wound or not?"
The rent was at the side of his fatigue trousers. The car must have caught his hip and upper thigh, ripping the seam of his trousers at the pocket. She had seen the long distance he had come, from where the dogs had lost his scent to Fen Hill. He could not have come that far with a broken femur or fractured pelvis.
Farida Yasmin thought the failure would have hurt him the worst.
Her hands trembled as she reached for his belt, unfastened it and dragged down the zip. It was hard to pull down. The trousers were sodden wet. She crouched low above him, under the roof of bramble and thorn, then pushed her arm under the small of his back and lurched his buttocks clear of the ground. He didn't fight her as she dragged the trousers down towards his knees.
She saw the mottled purple and yellow bruising.
She saw the hair at the pit of his stomach, the limit of the bruising, and the small contracted penis. He stared up at her.
Her fingers, so gently, touched the bruise and she felt him wince. She tried to soothe his pain. She told him of the dogs and where the marksmen were. She told him what she would do and how she would help him. Her fingers played on the bruising and caught the hairs and she saw him stiffen. It was where her fingers had never been before. His breathing came more slowly, as if the pain lightened. It was what the girls had talked about in the schoolyard, and in the coffee shop at the university, and in the canteen at work, and then she, the virgin, had thought their talk disgusting. Her fingers caressed the bruising as his fingers had stroked the neck of the bird.
The voices were soft, atmospheric, metallic, coming over the monitor.
"I don't know whether she can take it, not much more."
"I have to assure you, Mr. Perry, that your security is constantly under review."
"If I'd known, realized, what I said to you and that jerk who came with you, what it meant, Geoff what it would do to me, and, more important, what it would do to her…"
"There are now two more ARVs sorry, that's armed-response vehicles in the village, four in total, and eight highly trained men. That's in addition to Mr. Davies and Mr. Blake, and the men in the shed. You should see it, Mr. Perry, as a ring of steel dedicated to you and your family's safety."
In the hut, the speaker was turned down low. Paget was eating sandwiches, Rankin watched the screen and flicked between the image of the rear garden and the front door, while they listened to the two men talk.
"You've bloody changed your tune. Why?"
"There are questions I cannot answer."
"That's convenient."
"You have to believe, Mr. Perry, that everything that should be done is being done. Look, take last night, a professional and expert defence-' "Are you serious? It was fucking chaos."
After the han dover and the debrief, Joe Paget and Dave Rankin had been up into the small hours going through, in exact and minute detail, every moment of the alert. Had the camera given them a target? Why was the next garden not covered by the beams? Why had they not moved the cold frame from the side of the house? They had been close to, bloody disaster, Rankin had said, maybe a few seconds off it, and Paget hadn't disagreed.
"That's not the way Mr. Davies reported it."
"What the hell do you expect him to say? Grow up. Get real! She can't take the punishment, not much longer."
"We've made our commitment, Mr. Perry."
"When I told you and that jerk we were staying, it was because I believed we were among friends. That's the worst."
"Don't you read newspapers? It's how people behave when they're afraid each week it's in your newspapers. A family have a child recovered from meningitis and they're about to fly back from a sunshine holiday, but the other passengers won't travel with them for fear of infection. They're bumped off the flight, no charity. How many examples do you want? It doesn't matter where you are. An American Navy ship shoots down an Iranian passenger aircraft, and it's a mistake, but the Iranians don't accept apologies and bomb the car driven by the captain's wife on some smart street in San Diego. The detonator was incorrectly wired. She lives, but she's chucked out of her job, she's a pariah and might endanger others. I can reel them off. It's a herd mentality. The fear makes them vicious, dictates they turn on the victim. It's human nature, Mr. Perry…"
There was the squeak of the planks at the door of the hut. Rankin swung, Paget gulped on the last of his sandwich. Meryl Perry was in the doorway.