She thought her aunt too engrossed in the old magazine to notice what she did.
Alicia was stifled in the kitchen, hurt by the thought of her neighbours' wives, who were a part of their husbands' lives, and she slipped towards the kitchen door. By the door, on a unit, was a small television set
– not showing a noisy game show but the silent black-and-white image of the drive where the Bear had parked the Mercedes. Above the set, screwed to the wall, was the console board of pressure buttons that each had a single red light, bright and constant. She pressed two buttons, to nullify the beams covering the back garden. She turned the door key. She was halfway outside, and the chill of the night was on her face, the suffocation of the kitchen's heat and her sense of rejection lessened, when the voice grated behind her: 'Where are you going?'
'Out,' she said. 'To walk.'
'You'll catch your death.'
Who would notice? If she caught a chill that sent her to bed, who would care? She said meekly, 'I will be a few minutes.'
She closed the door after her.
Alicia headed for her summer-house, her refuge.
She could never leave, could never go home. Not one man or woman in her family, back at the village in the mountains north of Shkodra, would welcome her or risk the inevitability of the blood feud – the hakmarrje
– with the Rahman clan. She had no existence away from the house in Blankenese, and was as much a prisoner there as the women who worked on their backs in the brothels owned by her husband on the Reeperbahn or the Steindamm. She skirted the light thrown on to the lawn from the dining-room window, saw her husband and his guest standing but bent as if they studied papers, and the Bear with them. She reached the summer-house, her place of safety.
Settling among the cushions on the bench, nestled in the darkness, Alicia shivered and clasped her arms round her for warmth. An owl called, broke the night's silence.
From where she sat Alicia could see the men in the dining room.
He had found the path. Its entrypoint off the side road was some thirty yards along the thick-growing hedge from the closed steel-shuttered gates. Malachy groped down it in darkness, and thought it an old right-of-way track now used by dog-walkers. He was sandwiched between the two fences: he held out his hands and felt the rough wood of the planks on either side. He came to the end of the Rahman garden. The property behind it had a security light on a high wall that flooded a lawn. He stopped, reached up and wrapped his fist over the top of the Rahman fence, above his head. His hand grip tracked along the top of the fence till it reached the obstruction of a concrete post, where he judged the fence to be strongest and most able to take his weight.
He breathed in, deep into his chest. He had no plan but felt calm. Malachy steadied himself.
He heaved himself up. The fence rocked but held against the post. He struggled but finally he had worked his knee on to the sharpness of the plank tops.
He saw the light that spilled from a ground-floor room on to the grass, and more light that came through a blind's slats at the end of the house. In a room on the first floor a child gazed out as she undressed. In the ground-floor room, his view of it broken by branches, he saw the shapes of three men with their backs to him. He balanced, wavering on his perch as the wood gouged into his knees. He found what he expected to find. They ran from a hidden stanchion off the upper part of the post: layers of barbed wire. Below the upper strand, with the needle-sharp points, was a smooth length that was narrow but tautened: a tumbler wire.
Brian Arnold had talked about them. On a quiet afternoon at Chicksands, Brian Arnold liked to reminisce about old Cold War days. Behind his back, most of the young officers and sergeants would make mock yawns, dab their hands over their mouths and offer any excuse to quit his presence. Malachy had not: he had sucked in the anecdotes. The Inner-German border stretching from the Baltic to the Czech frontier, six hundred miles of it, had been fenced with barbed wire and with the tumbler strands that activated sirens. If the fugitive, usually a kid with a dream of the greener grass of capitalism, had hiked from Leipzig, Halle or Dresden, and had circumvented the trip-wires, minefields, dogs and guards, he reached the final fence with barbed wire to snag him and the tumblers to bring the border troops, who shot to kill.
The way Brian Arnold told it – from the memory of a young Intelligence Corps officer based at Helmstedt – the tumblers had cost young men their lives.
He crouched with the heels of his shoes on the top of the fence, coiled himself – swayed and prayed that he would not fall – balanced, kicked and launched. As he fell, his shoe brushed the top strand, the barbed wire, but did not snag. His heavy coat billowed out when he was in free fall, then he thudded down and the branches of a bush arrowed into him. The breath was knocked out of him. He stayed still for a full minute until his breathing softened, his nose and face in earth and old leaves. He moved forward on his stomach, wove his way through the bushes.
Away to his left was the dark silhouette of a summer-house, in front of him the house with the half-lit lawn. He assumed there would be security beams, but there were woods at the back and he assumed also that foxes lived there and would roam to hunt, and predatory cats: security beams, safe to bet on it, would be set to catch the waist of a walking man to give foxes and cats free passage at a lower level.
Malachy crawled from the shrub bed.
He went on his stomach, hugging shadows, pressing himself low, as if he was a slug.
As a focus point, Malachy took halfway between the window with the slat blinds and the window from which light poured. Down on his stomach he could no longer see the men, but as he came closer he heard low, indistinct voices. There was winter-dead creeper, maybe a clematis, climbing by the window where the curtains were open and when he'd reached the wall he edged towards it, eased up off his stomach and on to his knees, then stood and flattened himself against the brickwork. He heard the voice he remembered: 'I say so, Dad… Get rid of him, Davey.' Then his ears had been ringing from the impact of the kick. 'We don't want people like that in our close – and I'm surprised you let him get this far.' The voice was a murmur to him.
'What's it called?'
'Baltrum.' A quiet growl marked the difference of a second voice. 'It is called Baltrum. I think it suitable.'
'You got co-ordinates for it, what the skipper'll need?'
'Yes… Are you cold, Ricky? It is cold, yes?'
The curtains were snatched at and drawn across the window. Light died on the grass, and the voices were lost. But, Malachy had only the frail outline of a plan, not thought through but made on the hoof. No rope, no binding tape, no plastic toy and no canister. He slid away. Past the slatted window was a lock-up shed, and he thought it would be where a lawnmower was kept, shut away for the winter, and where there would be fuel for it. He reached the shed door and his fingers found a smooth hasp, no rust or weakness on it, and a heavy padlock. There was the summer-house. Oil, rags – would they be in a summer-house? No plan.
It was only reconnaissance. He needed control.
Control was calm. There was the darkened summer-house as a place for a lie-up, a sangar from which to watch the building. For a moment, hand on the padlock he had felt a winnow of disappointment, but it was now wiped. He crawled on his belly round the edge of the grass then came to the decking ledge in front of the summer-house. His chest, his belly, his groin and his knees went up two steps and his fingers found the opened door.