The classes had run for a month, two hours every Thursday afternoon for four weeks, and they'd seemed so inappropriate to Malachy as he prepared for his posting to the military attache's office at the embassy in Rome. He dug deep to remember more of what he had been told on those Thursdays when his mind was clouded with the statistics of the Italian armed forces and NATO strengths. 'If it's a one-man lie-up, and it has to be sometimes, you'll feel isolated.
Keep your head clear. Start feeling bloody sorry for yourself and you'll show out. Stay focused.
Everything you see in front of you is relevant,' the chief instructor had said, at the end of the last Thursday.
He'd been packing away his clipboard of notes When a young sergeant had raised her hand diffi-dently. 'Excuse me, I've just one question,' she'd said.
What do you do if a dog's right up against you, a mean dog?'
The chief instructor had grinned. 'I tell you there's not a dog I can't handle. Get through to them and they're all soft as brushes. Act like you've the right to be there – if you show fear the dog'll recognize it and you're screwed. You want to be on your hands and knees and offering love, tender loving care. Any dog'll fall for it. And don't ever forget that a dog that lives in a home is always put out at night for a sniff round and a crap. Last thing, the dog's going to be out and free to run. When I was based at Bessbrook Mill and we were doing a lie-up near a farm at Newtown Hamilton, there was this big hound, a massive bugger, and… ' Malachy had slipped away, had felt the need for more time on his Italian files.
There were no sheep on the Amersham, no flies in the darknes dog. s to get up his nostrils, but he had seen the It had come out with the woman an hour earlier.
She'd pushed the pram one-handed, and had hung on the short leash with the other. It had strained and pulled her and its head had been high as it sniffed the air. She'd been gone twenty minutes, in the direction of the kids' play area.
A television was on in the pensioner's unit living room and the brightness flicked at the curtains and lit the bars.
After she'd come back, the man – the target – had brought a plastic bag out through the door and dumped it in the wheelie on the pavement. He thought of all those who had made the demons. They cavorted in his mind: soldiers, officers, medics and Roz, the retired brigadier, who was his father, and the prim, tall woman, who was his mother. The little man who had owned the estate agents had called up the last of the demons… He wondered, crouched in the darkness, whether any of them considered what had happened to him – often, rarely or never – and whether he was a source of amusement or was forgotten.
With him, Malachy had the sticky-backed binding tape, rope, a length of cloth, the plastic toy and half a packet of digestive biscuits. A mini-bus came to the edge of the estate, the road beside the pensioners' block.
He watched. Three youths jumped down from the side door. He had seen them, each face lined with terror, as they had been hoisted up, then lowered jerkily over the rim of the flat roof. They would have blinked at the view, bird's eye, of the spinning pavement below. Freed on police bail, Malachy assumed.
There was division among them, sullen argument, as they stopped close to the ground-floor door – where they would have gone before. But this was another night, after unpredicted change. The door opened. The dealer's voice came sharp to Malachy: 'I heard your bloody voices. Don't come here no more.
Get the message – you're dead, history. Piss off.'
Malachy felt nothing, as if the demons had cauterized emotion, no sympathy for them and no anger. He saw them drift away and one gave a finger to the closing door. Youths joined them. They were jostled, pushed and one fell. Then they ran. He had no concern for their future.
He had gone feral, did not recognize it and none who had known him would have. He wore the vagrant's clothes, damp and stinking, and the lustre of the shoes was gone, with smeared mud from toe to heel.
It was past midnight. Malachy ached with stiffness as he huddled into the hedge's shadows. A chain was loosened, a bolt drawn, a lock turned. Light flooded the pavement. The dog, off the leash, bounded out, crossed the road and came to the grass in front of the hedge. He saw the man stand in the doorway and there was the flash of a cigarette lighter. The dog came to the hedge, cocked its leg. If you show fear, the dog'll recognize it and you're screwed. He saw the smoke, across the road, rise from the man's mouth. He cooed softly, so gently, and in his hand were biscuits. There was a moment when the hackles on its neck were up and the growl was deep in its throat – then the docked tail swung, wagged and against his hand was the warm wet slobber of the mouth. He gave it love, tender loving care. He stroked the jowl fur of the dog and murmured at its ear.
The snarled shout came across the road and the grass. 'Come on! Where are you? Just get on with it, you little fucker. Hurry up! Do I have to come and get you?'
Chapter Seven
The sirens had sounded across the estate and there had been a single shot from a low-velocity weapon, muffled and distant. Then Malachy had slept.
He was curled on the living-room floor, his breathing regular. No dreams to toss him. On the carpet, he was a fallen statue. If he had dreamed it would have been of old Cloughie, sixth-form history, the romantic, who broke up the Thirty Years War or the Industrial Revolution or the Rise of Parliament with un-connected poetry. Sometimes Tennyson, more frequently Keats or Shelley. Hunched, as if broken by exhaustion, he lay without a cushion at his head. If old Cloughie had been with him on level three, block nine, his surrogate parent would have found the relevant passage
Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown, And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command, Tell that its sculptor well those passions read, Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, and would have recited in his falsetto tone, shrill with excitement. But he did not dream. The images were gone, lost under the shifting sand – he slept deep.
He was naked.
The vagrant's clothing was back in the bin-liner, under the bed in the next room with what remained of the tape, the rope and the plastic toy. When he had come back he had eaten the few biscuits left in the packet and had put the wrapping into the rubbish can.
Then he had begun to clean the shoes. Like a fanatic, fighting off tiredness, he had wiped off the mud that had camouflaged their shine, smeared on the polish and rubbed till they glowed in the dull light. Only that self-given task had kept him awake.
He needed to hear the sirens: they were proof that what he had done was not mere imagination. They had come, finally, before dawn. When the wind had pushed back the curtains and first light had seeped inside, he had heard the shot and had not known what weapon had fired it.
Malachy slept. Far from him, as if briefly he escaped their reach, were the voices that accused. Then…
Maybe a door slammed on the walkway. Maybe a car below screamed when the gears failed to mesh.
Maybe the dream was never far enough away. He twisted and jerked on to his stomach.
He woke.
Rubbed his eyes.
Felt the cold of the air on his body.
Hands on his ears, as if that would shut out the voices that dinned in his mind.
His body shook.
'God,' he cried out. 'What do I have to do? What?'
13 January 2004
'Where's that wretched man now?'
'Outside, sir, sat on a chair.'
'Bloody hell, it's all I need.'
'On a chair, sir, in the sunshine.'
The major, commanding Bravo company, paced his operations bunker, made a little trail of bare concrete where the dust was kicked aside. Frustration, not the Iraqi heat, flushed his face.