The voice came back with a blur of static. “Don’t understand what you are saying.”
“Words of one syllable. Get it done. Cavalry can’t get there, so it has to be you.”
“Just not possible.”
“Can’t see a problem, my boy.”
“Not in my field, not my role, not…”
“We are not in a fucking trades union, not talking restrictive practices. Needs must… Get it over with. I can’t hang about, no opportunity for a shop stewards’ sub-committee meeting. Flexible rostering, let’s call it that.”
“Not fair. Was sent to do a job. I’ve done the job. Sorry if this is not what you wanted to hear.”
“You were there, you saw it, and now you’re backing off. How many were zapped that day? Want me to tell you? The courage of that girl, her strength. God, I could give her a bloody table knife and she’d get it done, and how. Are you squeamish?”
“I did what I was supposed to do.”
“Which was a bare minimum and did not allow for moving goalposts… I can’t put the people in place that are recruited. Can’t be done, not in the schedule. Means, dear boy, that we either have you to do the nasties, or we jack it in.”
“It is not my fault – it is not what I do.”
“What you do, sorry and all that – as I understand it – is sit on your arse and only get up when someone needs the bloody grass cut, or has to have some new corrugated iron nailed on to a roof. You opted out… I pitch up and give you the chance to walk again with some pride, face your demons. I reckoned you had the character not to look away. Gaz, I thought better of you. And that girl, that Faizeh, she’d have thought better of you. All of those poor people who clamour for revenge, call to you from the dark and the cold of a mass grave, aren’t they owed something?”
He turned the screw. Not fast, but with increasing pressure, but the call was drifting and should be cut as soon as the message was delivered, rammed down the damn man’s throat. A silence greeted him, and a cough, then more silence. He pitched on, charged for the conclusion. Hesitation would have been fatal – a demand for time to chew on the problem, a promise to call back. Not Knacker’s way. He knew the answer he would get. A request – take a life – made without hope but from necessity. Turned the screw but… for once he anticipated that the famed ‘Knacker’s magic’ was not going to pull a rabbit from this hat.
“Apologies, sir, but I cannot.”
“We are rattling round, need to cut to the quick. I suppose you can push off down to the docks and get aboard your transport and sail home, and go back to your refuge, and let’s hope the fairies… Gaz, I trusted you, and a host of people have that faith in you. Find a way, always a resourceful soldier, weren’t you? Do it, take him down.”
“I don’t have the means, don’t have a weapon.”
“You were issued with one, a handgun.”
“Refused it.”
“Am I supposed to credit that?”
“I was offered a handgun and a magazine, and declined to take it.”
“Then maybe you’d better find one, a resourceful boy like you.’’ A screw that would barely move through another revolution, and he felt the matter was close to conclusion. The girls were behind him, listening, and knew that the recce trooper was a fish gradually submitting to the strength of the rod and the line.
“The supermarkets, if you didn’t know it, are closed at this hour in Murmansk, so I doubt I’ll find a handgun among the vegetables or the frozen chips.”
“Very witty, Gaz, glad your idea of humour is holding up… So, you had better get off down to wherever it is and link up with the transport – and you can tell the guys that it didn’t work out, and they can tell you what they risked for old times and old loyalties, and you can wave as you sail away and hope the sleepers have gone back to bed and not been compromised, that their involvement was for fuck-all. Let’s look on the bright side: you won’t have to face the girl, not confront Faizah and tell her that you couldn’t manage it, and I expect she’d be gracious and understanding but she’s already on a flight and gone back to where she’s attempting to rebuild her life. I’m not sure that I and the team will be here to meet you on the way back, but you’ll be fine, you’ll find your way home. Good luck.”
He cut the call. Knacker raised his eyebrows, as if inviting comment. A meeting would be convened for late the next morning, the Round Table gathering to induct a new member, Camilla Turnberry, tough as an old leather boot it was said, with a deft record in Ukraine. The kettle howled in the kitchen. Sorry not to be there because the gatherings seemed of increasing importance to him, the coming together of the eccentric thinkers. The girls would tell him what they thought over a cup of tea.
He passed the phone to Natacha. He made a gesture with his hands of snapping it in two.
They were on a small platform, overlooking the harbour, grey in the long dusk, and there was a statue near to him of a woman gazing far out towards the Barents Sea – a fisherman’s wife, or a sailor’s mother. Iron railings around the statue were covered with scores of cheap padlocks and Gaz knew them to be the symbol of lovers, leaving something to be a witness of permanence. He doubted if he knew the meaning of love, maybe never had, and thought that, from what he had said and what he had heard, he would not see Aggie again, tell her anything that mattered… thought himself cheapened. What Knacker had said squirmed in his mind. Above them, was a floodlit church: he thought it a place he would need.
She did not break the phone but opened it. She took the card from its innards. Then took her cigarette lighter from her jeans pocket – gave the card back to Gaz and let him hold it between his thumb and forefinger while she flashed the lighter. The flame ate at the card, let off foul fumes, and when it crumbled in his hand and the heat scorched his skin, he dropped it, stamped on it. She went to an overflowing rubbish bin and dipped her hand far down inside and that would be the last resting place, till the bin was cleared, for Knacker’s phone. Gaz wondered what a statue counted for, a woman waiting for a man to come back from danger, whether he were included.
He said what he wanted to do, pointed to the church.
“He won’t do it, Knacker,” Fee said.
“Sorry to be the pooper at the party, Knacker, but I can’t see it, not him,” Alice said.
“He’s not a Hereford boy, doesn’t have that ruthless bit.”
“Had a pretty high level breakdown, Knacker, went and hid.”
Fee poured tea into a mug for Knacker. “Those people, the reconnaissance troops, they lie on their stomachs and watch and report, and they slip away. They’re long gone when the serious stuff starts.”
Alice added milk. “He’ll be on the boat. I guarantee it, nothing on their local news, and him on the boat.”
“Just didn’t work out.”
“Have to get the hitters on to a flight, send them home. God, they’ll bloody grumble.”
“It was a good idea, Knacker,” Fee said. “Just didn’t get to take off. He wasn’t the man for that job, a bit too ordinary.”
He would have disappointed both of them. Did not rise to what they told him, but paced the kitchen of their safe house, and jangled money in his pocket and could feel his coin of 1800 years before, and considered how it would have been for that Roman military intelligence officer who would have had speculators out in those empty misted wildernesses. Considered also how it would have been for the woad-painted chap, who he identified with, who would also have had covert agents prowling near the forts on the Wall and maybe farther behind the lines and beyond help. He did not rise, nor did he deny them.
Fee said, “What you always say, Knacker, if it were easy…”