On the speaker was Markham's metallic voice. '… I suppose it's because so few people, these days, ever get really tested that they're so scared of the unpredictable."
Her tone was dead, flat, like her eyes and the pallor of her cheeks.
"I hope I'm not disturbing you, I came for Stephen's tractor."
Paget remembered her screams over the detective's radio, and Rankin had heard them as he had tried to get round the house and fouled up in the cold frame. Paget scrambled to kill the speaker. Rankin groped under his chair and found the boy's tractor.
"Do you always listen to us? Is everything we say, Frank and I, listened to?"
Chapter Thirteen.
At that moment, Meryl hated them.
"Do you hear everything? What I say to Frank, what he says to me, are you listening? Is that how you spend your days?"
She could hear the rising pitch of her own voice. Paget wiped old crumbs from his mouth and looked away from her. Rankin passed her Stephen's tractor. She snatched it. To her, they were huge, dark shapes in the baggy boiler suits with the big vests over their chests. They were older than her, older than Frank, and they seemed not to care. Standing at the door before they'd known she was there, she'd seen one of them grin at the smooth reassurance being dished out to Frank.
"You get a big laugh out of what we say. Do you snigger when you hear us in bed? Not much noise when we're in bed, is there?"
Her control was gone. Meryl was over the edge. They would think her hysterical, stupid, or just a woman. They would wonder why she didn't just shut up, start the ironing, do the dusting, make the beds. She squeezed the tractor in her hand, tighter, hurting herself. Nobody told her anything. The wheels fell off the tractor. When any of them talked to Frank, and she came close, they stopped, and Frank cut short what they'd said. She was not included, not need-to-know, just a woman who was a nuisance.
"How long are you here? For ever? Is that my life, for ever, having you listening?"
The short one, Paget, said quietly, "We're here, Mrs. Perry, till Wednesday night. That's the end of our shift."
The tall one, Rankin, said gently, "Thursday morning's a lieu day, Mrs. Perry, then we start our long weekend."
"Actually, Mrs. Perry, we'll have clocked up twenty-eight hours 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 last to be told where we're going…"
Rankin took the tractor from her then crouched to pick up the wheels. The tears were filling her eyes. She thought they were indifferent as to whether they came back to this hut, this house, her life, or were assigned to another location. Rankin had the tractor wheels back under the toy's body and Paget passed him a small pair of pliers. She was just a makeweight woman who had lost control. She turned and leaned against the wall of the hut, her eyes closed to pinch out the tears. When she opened her eyes, the picture was in front of her three or four inches from her face. It was hazy, a grey-white image of the bottom fence of her garden, the apple tree and the sand pit Frank had built for Stephen. The shape of the man they sought stood out and the silhouette of the rifle.
Her voice was brittle, fractured.
"What'll you do when you drive away from us for your long weekend?"
"We were thinking of going fishing, Mrs. Perry, off the south coast."
"You get a good rate on a boat this time of year, Mrs. Perry."
Paget smiled. Rankin gave her back the repaired tractor.
She smeared the tears off her face.
"Will you stand in front of us, before you go fishing, in front of Frank and Stephen and me?"
Rankin said, "I won't lie to you, Mrs. Perry. We're not bullet-catchers. I don't expect to get killed on the say-so of a 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 him along, but I don't aim to go with him. If he wants to end up a martyr, famous for five minutes, that's his choice. I'm here to do the best that's possible, and Joe is, and that's as far as it goes. 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 you before."
"Thank you."
She turned for the door. The cloud had covered the sun and her home; what was precious to her seemed both drearily mundane and terrifyingly dangerous. She held the door-handle for a moment to steady herself.
It was Joe Paget who called to her.
"I'd like to say something, Mrs. Perry. We didn't do well last night, but we learn. It won't be like that again. We'll kill him if he 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 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 my aunt collected them. It was a sad little bit of subterfuge but necessary because my uncle's hostility never 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. Eventually they told her that Edith had been killed in a rocket attack in Tehran, and she never told my uncle. 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 hilt. The child, Vahid, was left to himself, and it wasn't a surprise that he became a tear away a street hooligan. He was involved in demonstrations, in fighting with the police. Myself, I'd have been horrified, but Edith wrote of her pride in the boy's determination. After the revolution, when that awful man, you know, the Ayatollah, came back and there were all the executions, public hangings and shootings, the boy went into the military and was sent away to the war with Iraq. He was at the front line when Edith and her husband were killed by the rocket."