"That's it, we're wasting our bloody time," he said savagely.
Chalmers remained impassive, silent.
"Time we were gone. Time, if you know how to use one, for a bloody bath."
Chalmers sat on the bench and his eyes searched the clear gold blue of the skies over the marshes.
"Sending you was ridiculous, a humiliation for the Service. They should have been put in twenty-four hours ago. They're the professionals, they're the bloody killers. They'll find him." He stood up.
Chalmers squinted at a point high above the reed-beds.
"They won't find him." His head never moved, his gaze never shifted.
"Enlighten me. On what is that stunning insight based?"
"They won't find him because he isn't here." Chalmers spoke from the side of his mouth. His head was stock still, and he peered into the lightening sky.
"He isn't here?"
"Not here."
"Then, excuse me, please, tell me, what the fuck are we doing?"
"He saved the life of the bird, and I have time for that, and now he's hurt… I have respect for the beasts where I work, I have a duty to them when they're hurt. He fed the bird and treated the bird's injury. The bird is searching for him and cannot find him. If the bird cannot find him then he's not here."
Markham sagged back down on to the bench. He looked out over the reed-banks and the water. The wind came into his face and his eyes smarted.
He peered into the clearing sky. Far below where he looked were the birds of the marsh and the Regiment's troopers. He searched for it but it was a long time before he saw the speck of dark against the blue. He held it, and perhaps it turned, and he lost it. It was very high, where the winds would be fierce. Chalmers's eyes were never off it. Geoff Markham blinked and his eyes watered as they strained, again, to locate the speck. Beside him, Chalmers sat rock still and relaxed, leaning back as if to be more comfortable. His dogs scrapped at his feet. When Markham found the bird again, he could have yelled in triumph. He was trained in the analysis of covert computerized data, he was offered work at what they'd call the coalf ace of fiscal interpretation, and he could have shouted in excitement because his wet, sore eyes identified a speck moving at a thousand feet up, about a thousand yards away. He saw the bird, and it had moved, gone north, and it still searched. He could have hugged Chalmers because the keenness of this stinking youth's eyesight had given him hope, at last.
"I am sorry what I said was out of order. I apologize. Did you think of telling them, the military, that he wasn't here?"
"No."
He wanted only to be alone.
A woman police officer, a cheerful, pleasant girl with a blonde pony-tail of hair and a crisp clean uniform, knelt awkwardly because of her belt, which carried handcuffs, gas canisters and a stick, on the hall carpet to help Stephen with a colouring book and crayons.
To be alone and to think of her.
Blake, dressed but with his shoes kicked off, slept on the settee in the living room. While his eyes were closed and his breathing regular, his hand rested on the butt of his gun in the holster of his chest harness, his radio burping staccato messages from his jacket pocket.
To remember her.
Davies, in shirtsleeves because he had two bars of the electric fire on, was at the familiar slot of the dining-room table with the newspaper spread out, reading the market and the financial comment. He coordinated the radio link to the crisis centre and the locations of the mobile patrols.
And to mourn.
He was not allowed, by Davies, to go upstairs to their bedroom.
"Not protected there, Mr. Perry, I'm sure you understand."
He was not allowed, by Paget, to go out through the kitchen door into his sunlit garden.
"Rather you didn't, Mr. Perry, wouldn't be sensible."
They denied him the space that he yearned for.
Perry sat on the floor between the mattresses and behind the sandbags.
Chalmers moved.
It was a full half-hour since Geoff Markham had given up on the search for the speck. The sky was clearer, brightening blue with pale cirrus corrugated lines of cloud, and it hurt more to look for the bird. He was thinking of the future of his career, whether he would be positioned back with Rainbow Gold, whether, he would be assigned to a university town where there were faculties of nuclear physics and microbiology growing botulisms at which Iranian students were enrolled, or whether he would be dumped into the new team working on illegal immigration, or the old Irish unit or narcotics.." when Chalmers moved.
Chalmers was already twisted round, his eye-line no longer on the skies above the marsh. The Regiment men would be down in the reed-banks and the water now, and there was nothing to show their presence. Chalmers stood, his back turned to them, and moved.
There was no discussion, no conversation, no explanation.
Chalmers whistled softly for the dogs to come to his heel, then started to track back up the path towards the village.
He walked with his head craning upwards, as if the sight of the bird, the speck, was too precious to be lost, and Markham was left to trail behind.
The path brought them back to the village between the hall and the pub. Chalmers strode surely, briskly, never looked down to see where his feet trod, and puddles splashed on to his trouser-legs.
Cars scuttled past them, and a van with a builder's ladder lashed to the roof, but that was the only motion of life in the village. It was a bright, sunny morning with cheerful light and a bracing wind, but no one walked and took pleasure in it. He thought the fear and the shame were all around, in the houses, the road and on the lanes as if a plague had come and the inevitability of disaster was upon them.
A fierce rapping, knuckle and glass, and a protest shout, startled him. He saw a woman at a window, her face contorted in fury. The woman pointed at her cut front lawn. One of the dogs had crapped on it, the second lifted a stumpy rear leg against the Venus statue that was a bird-bath. Chalmers didn't call off his dogs, didn't look at her or seem to hear her, just walked on and all the time he studied the skies. Markham stared pointedly at the far side of the road.
They went by the house on the green, the sun making silver patterns on the new wire of the screen.
Chalmers never glanced at the house, as if it held no interest for him.
They went through the village.
A few times, Markham looked for the bird and could not find it. He thought of it, high in the upper winds, soaring and circling and searching, and he thought of the power of the bird's eyesight and he thought of the man, Vahid Hossein, in pain and in hiding. Andy Chalmers had talked of respect and of duty to a beast that was hurt. He didn't think they would understand at Thames House, and it was pretty damned hard for him to comprehend why respect was due to a wounded killer and what duty was owed him. Chalmers walked remorselessly through the village, and out of it.
Beyond the village was a river-mouth, then more wave-whipped beaches; at their furthest point were the distant bright colours of a holiday community nestling in the sunlight.
A path ran alongside the river on top of an old flood-defence wall. In the fields between the village and the path, cattle grazed on grassy islands among the pools of the winter floods. Chalmers was ahead of him, high above the river and the fields, and all the time he gazed upwards.
Hungry, thirsty, the foul taste in his mouth, his shoes sodden, his feet cold, his back stiff, Geoff Markham followed blindly, thinking of food, coffee, a shower, dry socks, a clean shirt and dry shoes, and… he careered into Chalmers's back, jolted against it. Chalmers didn't seem to notice him. Beyond the fields, going away from the village, and the banks of the river and the raised pathway, was Northmarsh. The sunlight gently rippled the water.