Alice said, “… then everybody would be doing it. They’re not, it’s not easy. A fucking nightmare.”
He let his fingers linger on the coin’s surface. A good legacy for him. Was always tough to do the waiting time.
Gaz sat on the wall beyond the forecourt of the church. The quiet had been around him, broken only by drunks’ shouts and occasional tyre screams and a distant siren. Before he had taken a place opposite the front doors of the church he had been able to look down on to the harbour far below. Arc lights lit the bulk of the aircraft carrier and he saw two destroyers of Soviet times now ready for scrap. Saw the tangle of masts and rigging and ropes and nets where the fishing fleet was docked. The boat that had brought him across the North Sea, from Unst in the Shetlands to a landfall on the Norwegian coast, was there, waiting for him.
He wrestled with his dilemma. Betty and Bobby Riley would say, ‘If it’s right, then you do it, son, and if it’s not right, then you don’t do it. Don’t hold with pragmatics, and no justification in doing something because you’ve been told to. In your belly you know what is right and what is wrong. Can’t escape from the gut feeling.’ And a school teacher had said, ‘You are your own man, it’s not an excuse to say that you were told to do that.’ And a chaplain had said, ‘At a fork in the road, you make your own map. Go against your better judgements and take the wrong way and you will forever regret it.’ And Aggie had said, their fingers entwined and both of them braced against a gale, while they had walked on the cliffs at Noup Head, ‘What’s done is done, cannot be undone, good saying and true, utterly true… you have to live with yourself and your actions. Think how you want to be remembered, and respect yourself.’
The words of Knacker, the man who could manipulate him, purred in his mind. They might, down at the boat, have already eased their legs over the side and on to the quay and begun to amble towards the security check at the gate, and gone outside it and started to linger in the shadows, and they would lurk out of sight except for the glow of their cigarettes and would wait for a taxi to pull up and disgorge him, or a private car to drop him off and then spin fast through a turn and drive away, or they might be waiting for the soft tread of his feet. He’d said, like it was a joke: ‘Suppose I get an extra hour in the little whore-house, Murmansk’s finest, and miss the sailing time, promise you’ll wait for me.’ Raucous laughter, from men who harked back to the comradeship of war and a bus route through grim seas, and then solemn faces below the carpets of stubble and weathered skin, and a promise of what they would do. Accepting little was possible if the schedule was not met; one had said they’d not hang about long past sailing time, not invite suspicion, had to be gone, had to… He thought of them, and thought of the pilot who had flown him, and the jaunty south London girl who had escorted him, and of the briefer for the fence crossing and the trouble taken there, and of the girl from the village who deserved more than was given her… too many to think of. Heard voices and vehicles, and the scrape of a key in the heavy lock of the church door. All wishing him to succeed. Could not tell them, stand there and yell ‘It’s not my fault. I did what was asked of me. Just bad luck, and I’m not to blame.’ Could not shout that, but could not erase what Knacker had said, ‘Do it, take him down.’
Natacha came fast towards him. She had left him to his thoughts, had stayed back, now was like a protective terrier and coming close. Her hand went into his arm. The church door was opened wide. A hearse came and bearers lifted out a simple wood coffin. A widow wore black; children stood awkwardly with her, mourners forming her escort. A priest came from inside… Gaz assumed that at this hour, on the edge of midnight, the coffin would stay in the church for what remained of the night, that the funeral service would be in the morning but a vigil would start now. He thought this was where he wanted to be. They went inside, Natacha’s arm tucked in his. He entered a world of brightness and unreal beauty. The walls were covered in the icon pictures of that version of Faith, Christ images and those of the Virgin, all decorated in the highest quality of colour and gold leaf, and carved dark wood surrounds: a place of majesty, and of calm. The priest engaged him, a look of sympathy and support. Gaz accepted that he had gatecrashed, was a felon in the night to these people, but he used the location, as he had when outside, to assemble his thoughts… they were taught in the unit to think on their feet, to back their instincts. His experience, when he had been in hedgerows and ditches and in camouflaged scrapes in the ground, was that a man when isolated must make his own decisions and not bleat for company or help. Listening to the murmur of voices around him, and with Natacha holding his arm, Gaz felt the stress of the day was starting to float away. Knew what he would do, and calmness came; not what was expected of him, but what action he would take.
Gaz eased a path through the mourners, left the family and the coffin behind him. Stole a last glimpse at the magnificence of the icons and went out into the grey gloom of the night; he looked to see if the boat were still visible but could not find it and the mist was thicker and the rain had started again. Only the pallbearers were outside. A clock was striking in the distance, the chimes muffled. Too much time had passed. He turned to her… bloody girl thought he was going to smooch her and her face lit up with anticipation, but he put a finger across her lips.
“Something I want you to get me?”
“Get?” Wide-eyed, watching him, like it was a game.
“Get me a gun.”
“What do you want? You want a howitzer? A bazooka? Even a tank? Which?”
“Just a handgun, a pistol.”
She was laughing, and the pallbearers glared at her, and they’d have heard her inside. She tugged Gaz’s hand, and they started to run. Still laughing, chirping, ‘Just a handgun, a pistol.’
Chapter 11
“The gun, when must you have it?”
She had a good stride and Gaz was stiff in most joints and his muscles ached and his head reeled from tiredness.
“Before dawn.” A glance at his watch. “In two hours or three.”
“You don’t run fast.”
“I can run when I have to. Not more than three hours.”
“Then you have to run faster.”
Her laughter trilled and she quickened the pace. They went up a steep hill, past blocks of uniform apartments where lights burned and TVs shouted. Few cars passed them, fewer pedestrians. She was reaching into the hip pocket of her jeans and dragging out her phone.
“It is not just a joke, you need a gun. Because he is going in the morning and early, you need a gun… not to make a joke?”
“No.”
“And he is FSB?”
“He is a major with FSB.”
“And he is guarded, two men?”
“Yes. It has to be here before he leaves, after that he is beyond reach.”
“Not very much time…” Again she laughed and the sound was clear, sharp, like the crackling of breaking glass “… and only a pistol?”
“You can do that? Find a pistol?”
“Why not? You want me to use it, or Timofey?”
“Not you and not Timofey. I am the dog and it is my fight. What I mean, the job is mine, but I need a pistol.”
They had come off the street and were now into a darkened park area and there were wide, steep steps and he realised they had done something of a circle because the church was in front of them… They had made a loop and he realised that a foot surveillance team would have been confused, even lost. She had her phone jammed against her ear, close to her mouth, and she was giggling as she spoke. Gaz assumed she spoke with Timofey, her lover and her business partner. One day, if – biggest word that Gaz knew, if – it worked through, if he was back on Westray and then able to make the long journey south and get to Hereford and take a taxi to the barracks gate, and if he were met at the security check by one of the current instructors, if time was found for him, he would speak about a girl. Tell them about a girl who understood how to use tradecraft to throw off possible foot surveillance or vehicle surveillance, who had never been on a course, attended a lecture, or sat an examination, for whom failure carried a penalty of six months, or a year, in a lock-up. She had inbred suspicion, an understanding of survival. Would tell the instructor that they could not have drawn a better stereotype for an SRR trooper than this girclass="underline" jailbait, fun, not complaining, a nightmare for the leader of a team of watchers. She might have done his job, equalled him or been better, Gaz reckoned. She clicked off her phone, buried it back on her hip.