“Go careful. Keep him talking as long as you can.”
“Yes, sir.
“Good luck.”
Constables with rifles were surrounding the house.
He walked slowly down the short path towards the shotgun. As soon as he could, he tucked himself back behind the sculpture.
“Sam,” he called. “You there?”
No answer.
“Did you hear? Eddie is dead. He was shot. They thought he was you.”
“You killed him. You English people.”
“You’ll die too.”
“Why should I care?”
“It’s pointless, Sam. There’s nothing to be gained. Please.”
No answer. Breen heard a noise behind him and turned. A policeman with a gun was crouching just behind the wall, pointing his rifle past Breen. Breen shivered. There was no shelter. His white shirt stuck to his skin.
“Please, Sam. Send out the women at least.”
“If they are harmed, it will be your fault. You killed Eddie Okonkwo. You shot him like a dog.”
“You killed Morwenna Sullivan. That was your fault.”
“It was her father’s fault. He stole our money. He promised me guns. He was a liar and a thief. It was him I wanted to hurt.”
The police had stopped moving now. They were all in position, he assumed.
“So you kidnapped Morwenna?”
“Our entire country is being held as a hostage. Hundreds are dying every day.” Breen was shivering uncontrollably now, his jaw juddering with the cold. “He took our money. I am tired of talking, Mr. Breen. All I want is to go home to Africa. All I want is to go home.”
“You can’t go home, Sam. You don’t have a home anymore.”
“I have to.”
Breen thought he could bear it no longer. Rain trickled from his hair into his eyes. This was taking too long.
“Your daughter loved her,” said Breen.
“That is not love,” shouted Ezeoke.
A gust of wind rattled the windows of the house, sending raindrops flying down the collar of Breen’s shirt.
And then the shooting started, and the screaming. Wild, lurid, loud, pained screaming. Seabirds flew up from the shoreline. Breen crouched down below as the bullets flew, shattering wood and glass, smacking into brickwork. Dust sprayed all over him, sticking to his dampened shirt. His eyes stung. Glass sprayed out onto the gravel behind him. The smell of cordite stained the air.
All that was left was the sound of a woman still screaming, pausing briefly for breath, and then screaming again.
Thirty-four
The terrible screaming gradually faded in volume and then stopped. As he crouched by the sculpture, he heard wood splintering; the sound of men breaking down the front door.
Breen could not see. Only by keeping his eyes closed could he stop the excruciating pain of the brick dust in his eyes. He took in the world in brief blinks, each one feeling like sandpaper was passing across his corneas. His ears still rang from the gunshots, but he heard well enough to make out the sound of policemen breaking down the front door, tramping inside and shouting. “Keep Briggs out of here. His wife is dead.”
A hand touched him. “You all right, chum?”
Painfully he looked. A young police constable was standing over him. “Who was screaming?” Breen asked.
“Don’t know. It’s a bloody mess in there.”
Breen stood and looked around. He stumbled through the broken door of the cottage. In a series of blinks he viewed the living room. The walls were cratered by gunshots, and glass and splintered wood from the window lay across the floor. He noticed Ezeoke first. The man was slumped against an ottoman, blood soaking through his trousers from a wound somewhere in his leg. His hands had been cuffed. He had a dazed look on his face, as if he was just waking from a sleep.
Mrs. Briggs was just behind him, sprawled across the small living-room floor. She was dressed in a black polo neck and a miniskirt and, yes, she was dead. A bullet had smashed part of her jaw away. White teeth protruded through a bloody mess. Her top was spattered with blood.
“Where’s Constable Tozer?” he croaked.
No one answered.
Louder. “Where’s Constable Tozer?”
He pushed through them into a dining room at the back of the little house. Unlike the front room, this was completely untouched, six chairs tucked neatly in around a dark mahogany table, dried flowers in a vase on the sideboard. A painting of a man on a horse. The room looked bizarrely normal, unaffected by the catastrophe that had just taken place.
The sergeant was in the kitchen at the back of the house talking on his radio. “Leg wound. He’ll live.”
It was as wrecked as the living room. He looked at Breen and said, “Nothing like this has ever happened round here,” making it sound like an accusation.
Police had smashed down a stable door at the back to break in; windows had been shattered by the gunfire. The remains of a hasty breakfast of cornflakes and toast lay on a pine table.
“Where’s Constable Tozer?”
The sergeant didn’t seem to hear him; he was talking to his lapel radio again.
Breen returned to the living room. Two ambulance men were crouching over Ezeoke, who lay, eyes shut, on the floor now. They had torn away his trousers and were pressing gauze onto a wound just below his blood-soaked underpants. His skin looked gray.
“Fuck you,” he said to no one in particular.
Breen noticed a small, narrow staircase at the back of the room. To reach it he had to pick past Mrs. Briggs’s body, eyes wide, looking up at him as he stepped over her.
He found Tozer upstairs in the back bedroom, fully dressed in her uniform, lying on top of the covers of a single bed, a tartan blanket over her. Her hands and ankles were tied with cord to the side of the metal bed, her eyes shut, her mouth slightly open. He leaned over her and put his face next to hers.
She was warm. He felt her soft breath on his unshaven face. He stood there leaning over her for some time, feeling her breathe in and out, grateful, occasionally running the sleeve of his shirt across his eyes. Groans and complaints rose from below as they lifted Ezeoke onto a stretcher. He stayed with her, his face against the warmth of her skin, until the inspector appeared at the door.
“She alive?” he said.
Breen jumped back, as if he had been caught doing something he shouldn’t have.
“She’s OK, I think,” he said.
As two coppers lifted her awkwardly down the stairs, still unconscious, Breen found the bathroom and started to rinse his eyes, splashing ice-cold water up onto his face from the basin.
They had given Ezeoke a painkiller and handcuffed him to the small bed in the ambulance.
“Shame they stopped hanging people, in my opinion,” said the ambulance man.
Breen and a constable sat opposite, jerking from side to side as the ambulance navigated the narrow Suffolk lanes. Ezeoke’s rage at the world seemed to shine from him, even in semi-consciousness. Breen’s failure had been not to recognize that anger. Ezeoke had kept it half-hidden inside him. Perhaps it was the immigrant’s trick. The ability to exist in two places at once. Two halves of a mind, each not recognizing the state of the other. His father had learned to hide so much of himself. Breen was only now learning how much he had kept secret.
Ezeoke opened his eyes. “You,” he said.
“Mrs. Briggs is dead,” said Breen.
Ezeoke nodded. “She wanted to go to Africa with me. To fight.”
There was a notice that said No Smoking, but the young constable ignored it.
“Jesus,” said the copper. “It shakes you up a bit, doesn’t it? Did you see her?”
Ezeoke’s right hand was handcuffed to the side of the bed he lay on. They had dressed the wound on his leg.
“Did you really ever intend to make it back to Africa?” said Breen.
“Of course,” said Ezeoke, though his eyes flickered with what looked to Breen like doubt and he turned his head away from them.