‘Well,’ Keith said, as if Fred was a little dog that had walked in wagging its tail, ‘have you rounded him up yet?’
‘Not exactly, sir. But he’s in the attic, and can’t get down. He pulled the ladder through the trap door after him, and we’re getting another in position. The biking lads will be ready to go up any minute.’
‘So there’s a desperate man — for all we know — waiting for the first person to show himself? If he doesn’t have a knife he’ll take a running kick at the head. Call them off, except one to keep watch. We’ll go up in our time, not his. It’s only midnight.’
‘Yes, sir. I’ll tell them.’
He threw a credit card on the table. ‘Then you can go on supplying us with coffee and food. Or drinks, if anybody wants them.’
‘He’ll charge you double,’ Eileen said when he had gone.
‘No, he won’t. If I paid in cash he might short-change me, but not this way.’
‘I don’t much like him,’ she said.
‘You don’t have to. All he has to do is do as he’s told.’ Any man who couldn’t do that wasn’t worth his salt, because everyone had to do as they were told at some time or other in their lives, and the present situation demanded it. All the same, he didn’t want her to think he was too harsh. ‘I’m not sure whether I like him either, but there’s only one way to get things done.’
If he hadn’t been so good as to give her a lift in his nice car she wouldn’t have landed in this hotel with some madman who didn’t know Guy Fawkes Night had already gone. Even if what the man in the attic had said was true, and even if what the woman said he had said to her was true, it either didn’t bear thinking about, or it was going to be the funniest thing that had ever happened to any of them. If Keith hadn’t given her a lift when she was walking across the moor she might have been dead in a drift already, so she still had a lot to thank him for and would only have a bone to pick with him if she got blown to pieces, which would be too late anyway. ‘What would you do if there was no Fred or Enid to make your coffee?’
He looked surprised. ‘I’d have to make it myself, then, wouldn’t I?’
‘And burn your hand like you did on the moor? My dad never made his tea. Other men I’ve known didn’t, either, not if a woman was within a mile. All the men I’ve known were bone idle.’
He wondered what other men someone like her could have known, but didn’t say it, because she was so young, and could only have been familiar with her own sort. Men are idle when they have no interest in their work, though when they do have they usually get on and out. ‘Your father couldn’t have been idle if he brought up a family.’
‘He did as little as he could, and grumbled every time he lifted a finger.’
‘I’ll bet he worked hard, all the same,’ Parsons said. ‘Only you didn’t know it. Kids never do. What work have you done, anyway?’
‘I worked nearly two months in a knitwear factory. Then I got laid off. There ain’t much work to go round any more. What world are you living in?’
‘Everyone lives in their own.’ Keith put a hand on her arm. ‘There isn’t much to be done about that.’
‘I’m over the rainbow,’ Percy cried, ‘because I’m on my way to Bognor. Who wouldn’t be? In fact I must be a few miles beyond, because it’s snowing!’
He’s going again. Alfred’s face reddened when Enid — the little bag — laughed. I shan’t be able to relax till I get him there, if ever I do. If I could get my hands on that bloody maniac in the loft I’d gladly squeeze the life out of him.
‘I’ve been happy all my life,’ Percy said, ‘even when I was unhappy! I’ve had work I was interested in, a good and loyal wife, fine kids, and a roof over my head. So why shouldn’t I be over the rainbow, eh?’ he asked Garry, who came in and stood by the fire to light a cigarette.
‘I’ll only be over the rainbow when we’ve got that prick-squeak down from upstairs. It’s marvellous what can happen when you come out for a spin. One minute you’re free, and the next you’re stuck in a place like this and might be blown to bits. When I was twenty everything I did was because I wanted to live, and now that I’m thirty I do it because I don’t want to die.’
Keith felt as near happiness as he had any right to be. Various solutions drifted in and out of his mind, but it was hard to avoid the notion that, whatever happened, he couldn’t allow himself the luxury of thought.
TWENTY-THREE
Daniel, squatting simian-like between two beams and not caring that his persecutors registered every move on the radar screen of their feeble minds, told himself that he nevertheless had them at his mercy. All my life I’ve wanted to have a say as to whether people should live or die, but only in order to do them good because that would allow me to call it a victory. Now I have achieved it, but at the sacrifice of my own life, so what kind of a victory is that?
One had to make a choice between good and evil, whatever power you had, any middle way a paralysis of the moral sense. If your opponents considered you evil you could deceive them by simulating good, then engulf them in an evil demise when they weren’t expecting it. You opened yourself to certain defeat when you allowed people to pride themselves on being good by assuming you to be evil.
Sun Tzu said it was a mistake to attack at the strongest point, that the weaker party should create uproar in the east so as to strike unexpectedly from the west. Such homespun maxims of senseless violence were only relevant when you believed that your cause was just, but if evil was with the weak (as it was now with him) then the ploy was false, and you became paralysed. Revolutionary cracker mottoes were coined for those without the intelligence and moral subtlety to ponder on the finer strands of good and evil, and needed their convictions reinforcing by slogans fit only for simple minds.
He had set out on his journey to take a load of high explosives from one point to another, an automaton who nevertheless felt the joy of being evil, which he could not give up because to do so would empty him of any reason for having been born.
Cold tears fell on his wrist, and he fastened the buttons of his jacket. Stop thinking, wait for the fearful bang and split-second flash of oblivion. Would it be evil, to let it happen to them all? Some could live another fifty years, but what was that compared to eternity? There might be so much suffering in those fifty years that a painless death now would be a blessing. Blind chance had brought them together, but ‘blind chance’ was only another name for God who was testing his servant Daniel with one last problem.
Knives of cold came against him from the shrieking blizzard. The vast attic was his inheritance. Life was good because God said so, and so had his mother. She had given him his name because there were three men in the Bible who had found favour in God’s eyes: Noah, Job and Daniel, and she had made him promise that he would try all his life to be like one of them. During his nightly prayers, impossible not to say yes to his mother, an obstinate inner voice out of his childish self said: ‘I won’t do as she says. I won’t’ — words spoken without gladness but enabling him to hold on to the unique spirit he had inherited. Having been born, he could have given no other response, and the memory distressed him more than the freezing isolation of his attic.
To be physically destroyed would deliver him from turmoil, but to die before solving his dilemma would damn him for ever. Even if there was no place beyond life, those who were left behind would judge him. You did evil because the world would not extend its love to you, but that was because you had no love in you for the world, and so could only go through life consumed and consoled by evil.