She was wondering whether Farida Yasmin was a help to the Iranian, or a liability.
Cathy thought of the girl, confused and willing, blundering forward with the man. Farida Yasmin craved a little spot where the sun shone on her, but Cathy didn't think she'd find it. A talent of Cathy's was to make instant assessments of the people she investigated: Farida Yasmin was unimportant and she would write only the briefest of reports on her visit; the girl was a loser. But there was nothing she could do to prevent her being hurt, and she felt quite sad.
She knew about loneliness.
"If we don't make it it will be the fault of all these wretched boxes. But thank you for the thought. Luisa and I have always been interested in wildlife."
Simon Blackmore went back to his wife in the kitchen. They had been washing the plates, cups, mugs, saucers that had been wrapped in newspaper by the packers. The man at the door had said his name was Paul, that he was on the parish council, that he was the man to fix any little difficulties confronting them, was always pleased to smooth the way for new arrivals. He'd told them there was a meeting in the hall that evening of the Wildlife Group, with a talk on migration from a warden of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds. Then, he'd asked whether Luisa typed, and had explained how the group had lost its typist: "The most selfish people I've ever known here, and I was born in the village. The worst sort of in comers The sort of people who don't give a damn for the safety of those they live among." Simon Blackmore had seen the way that the man had looked at his wife's wrists, at the slash scars across the veins.
"What you're being offered, Geoff, sweetheart, is 63 per cent more than you're getting now. It's fantastic. On top of that there's the inhouse bonus scheme, the private medical thing, there's guaranteed three-star minimum accommodation when you're working out of London, business-class flights into Europe. You'll be on at least double the pittance you're getting now at the end of the day. Your pay at the moment is actually insulting, they don't deserve people like you. The sooner you're gone, the better. Get your letter in straight away. Write it tonight. I stopped off in the travel agent's on the way from your place. They said Mauritius or the Seychelles are great I'm talking honeymoons, sweetheart. As soon as you're back from that dump tomorrow, day after tomorrow? let's get tramping round some property. Call me. Love you."
Geoff Markham heard her blow kisses down the telephone, and cut the call. His mind was too distracted to make the calculation of a 63 per cent increment on his existing salary. He was thinking of the young man out at the rim of the reed-beds, and of the firm certainty of his gaze, watching the marshlands.
"And him, too." Frank Perry stood by the telephone in the kitchen.
"Gutless bastard." He stood by the telephone and read the lengthening list of scratched-out names.
Bill Davies shrugged.
"I suppose I shouldn't have done that, cut him off your list sorry."
"I don't go to church, can't bear listening to his dreary sermons."
"I just thought, given the circumstances I thought it would help if he showed support."
Perry turned to the detective. He was beaten down, grey-faced. The hand resting on Davies's shoulder shook as it grasped at the jacket, held tight to it.
"Was I out of order last night?"
"Not for me to comment."
"I can just take it. Meryl can't. She's drowning. One more thing, one more, another bit of chaos, she'll go under. How long?"
"I'm not supposed to talk tactics or strategy."
"Bill, please."
The detective thought his principal was close to defeat and that was not the policy. He'd done them alclass="underline" he had stood with the Glock on his hip beside cabinet big-shots and foreign leaders and turned IRA informers, and he had never felt any sense of involvement. He thought that whatever he said would go back to Meryl Perry.
"There's a fair bit going on, don't ask me what. We're beefed up, most of which you won't see. It was said at the beginning that our
Tango couldn't last hostile ground, lack of resources, your location more than a week."
"What day are we?"
"We're at Day Five."
A tired nervy smile played at Perry's mouth. What's the Al Haig story?"
Davies laughed out loud, as if the tension were lifted.
"Monday, right? Getting to the end of bloody Monday. It's appropriate… United States Army General Al Haig was in Belgium on a NATO visit. The sort of trip where there are convoys of limousines about a half a mile long. A security nightmare. The convoy's hammering along a main route of course, the search teams have worked over it. But they missed a culvert. In the culvert was a bomb; handiwork of a leftist anti-American faction. The detonation was a fraction late and, anyway, it malfunctioned. The car, armour-plated, didn't take the full force, kept on going, and the escorts. In the culvert had been enough explosive to bounce Haig's car right off the road and make a crater fish could have lived in. Al Haig said, "I guess that if we can get through Monday then we can survive the rest of the week." It's about hanging on in there. We've about got through Monday, Mr. Perry."
"I can hold her for two more days if nothing else breaks her first."
It was the end of the day, and the quiet was all around him. The bird sky danced displaying for him its regained flying skills.
But there was the quiet.
He no longer watched the bird, no longer took pleasure from the extravagance of its flight. He watched the geese and the swans, the ducks and the wheeling gulls, and he looked for a sign, the quiet playing in his ears.
They did not stampede, they did not skim the water with flailed wings to take off in panic, they did not shriek as they would when disturbed. They were quiet, as if they were warned.
Vahid Hossein could see the positions of the policemen on the far side of the marsh, on the higher ground. He had no fear of them. He knew where they were. They would have thought they were still unnoticed, but he saw each movement of their bodies as their legs, backs, hips, shoulders stiffened and they shifted their bodies for relief… There had been an Iraqi sniper on the Jasmin Canal who used the SVD Dragunov 7.62-calibre rifle with an effective range of 1,300 metres. He was never seen, and he had shot eighteen men in three weeks. A prisoner had said afterwards that a mortar's shrapnel had hit him as he went to his firing position on the banks of the canal in the early morning. It was luck that a random shell had killed him. The birds on the Jasmin Canal were always quiet in the hours before the sniper fired. He sensed the presence of a watcher. He felt a new atmosphere. He believed himself now and he had only the evidence of the quiet to be challenged. A slight frown of apprehension had settled on his forehead. At the fall of the day, as the wind quickened and trembled the reed-heads, he made his plan to go into the water, away from the bank, towards the place he had seen yesterday deep in the beds of old gold reeds and near to the central water channel.
He could not see the watcher, could only sense the new quiet that had settled around him.
Chapter Fifteen.
Sitting with the damp of the ground seeping into the backside of his trousers and with the warmth of his dogs under his jackknifed legs, in his vantage-point, Andy Chalmers listened to the night sounds.
There was no moon, no break in the rain cloud
He was behind thick cover: if there had been light he would not have been able to see the reed-beds and the water channels. It was possible that the man had an image intensifier, night-vision equipment; he would not give him the chance to identify his position. Chalmers did not need to see the land around him. Instead he listened.
There was the quiet, the rumble of the sea on the shore, the call of a distant fox. A policeman two hundred metres away stifled a cough and another one four hundred metres away stood to urinate. He was still, he was silent. When the fox called, his fingers felt the hackles rise on the necks of his dogs and he soothed them where they lay.