‘It’s even worse,’ Lance said. ‘It’s a moral problem. If we put him on trial, and then execute him for being a terrorist and killing us, or killing any of us, we’ll be guilty if we’re alive tomorrow. But if we don’t do him in for killing us, and we get blown to smithereens, and he doesn’t, he’ll only get twenty years in clink. He’ll be free and on the streets again in fifteen, back at school teaching kids.’
‘But what if he gets blown up as well as us?’ Wayne said.
‘Dead men tell no fucking tales,’ Garry said, ‘so we might as well top him. There’s some lovely beams in the attic, and I saw a coil of rope in that spare room.’
‘It’s still a moral problem,’ Lance said. ‘You can’t get away from it. That’s what moral problems are like. He used to talk to us at school about moral problems. Just think of it! He was shunting fucking guncotton all over the shop, and he talked about moral problems. Not that I understood a word of what he chuntered on about, so we can’t try him on that count as well.’
‘It’ll only be moral if we hang him.’ Garry made another roll-up. ‘Even if none of us die we can make him swing, just for having a load of bombs that he knew would blow people up. He might only get six months in a court of law, not twenty years, but to me it’s a hanging matter. I mean to say, I don’t have fuck-all to do with his politics. Nobody does here. We’re just innocent bystanders, aren’t we?’
‘Too fucking true,’ Wayne said solemnly.
‘We top him, then,’ Garry said. ‘Right?’
‘You can for me. He’ll swing a treat.’
‘I expect he ought to be tried first,’ Lance said.
‘Oh, we’ll try him all right,’ Garry said. ‘We aren’t fucking heathens. All square and above board. Then we’ll hang him. After all, his bomb load’s outside, ain’t it? We should know. We drove it here.’
‘That means you’re the guilty ones.’ Sally’s words were loud enough to suggest they were indisputable. Daniel shook from the icy cold that was his alone. ‘At least he left it in a place where it wouldn’t harm anyone.’
‘Except a few passing motorists,’ Garry said.
‘Or bikers,’ Wayne jeered.
‘You deserve to die, as well.’ Garry altered position to ease his leg. Ferocious ants were gnawing at it. ‘You took his part, so how do we know you aren’t one of them? You was in it from the beginning, and followed him in your car to make sure he got to where he was going.’
‘I arrived before him,’ she said coolly.
‘What difference does that make? You only went ahead to make sure the coast was clear. Terrorists use people like you because nobody would dream of suspecting you. You can’t fool me. It’s only shits like you who help terrorists to blow ordinary people like us to bits.’
‘I don’t suppose they even get paid for it,’ Wayne said, ‘apart from expenses. They’ do it for kicks. I dream all the time of making a fucking great blaze in the middle of Chesterfield, but I’d never do it. I might hurt somebody, or get put inside if I was caught.’
She couldn’t plead for Keith to hold them back, though he would be happy to hear her do so, for he was her sort after all, and would stop them sooner or later. One minute she loved Daniel, to a pitch never felt before, a melting together of temperaments that pushed tears to her eyes. She fought them, also, then became still, with a desperate uncertainty as to where such weakness would take her. A few hours ago she was driving to the airport, no one closer than dull and familiar Stanley.
Wayne pushed her aside to reach Daniel. ‘Your van’s full of explosives, eh?’
Words came thick and distorted out of his battered features. ‘It is. I wish it wasn’t, but it is.’
‘When is it due to explode?’ Keith, needing them to hear it from the Devil’s own lips, pulled him by the arm to make him sit up.
The world and everyone connected to it was meaningless, too far away from Daniel, except for Sally’s warm hand, and even that was taken from him. Sharp aches ran through his legs and head, and he smiled because his limbs were becoming real again. ‘Eight o’clock is what I heard. I’m not supposed to know.’
‘Stand up,’ Keith said.
Daniel knew an order when he heard one, helped up through the climbing frame of pain which would prevent him falling once he was at the top. He feared the three savages who had pulled him from the attic, but Keith was more dangerous, merciless grey eyes close to his face: ‘Where were you supposed to take it?’
‘Coventry.’
The fist showed a large ring with an aquamarine stone, dull in the candlelight. ‘I want an address.’
He had photocopied the town plan in his mind. ‘Fourteen Dants Street.’ Even in the dark he would have found it.
‘Then where would it go?’
‘I don’t know. Probably London.’
Keith believed him. Whoever it was meant for were safe, but they in the hotel were not. Fourteen dead would surely satisfy them for a while. Hearing the news on the radio the terrorists would be laughing and hitting each other on the back at their bloody brew-up, then arguing for the privilege of the phone call to tell the world who had done it.
‘So when do we put the rope around his neck?’ Garry scooted his cigarette stub towards the fire. Fred picked it up from the mat and put it in an ashtray. ‘You must admit he deserves it.’
‘It’s half-past one,’ Keith said, ‘which gives us a few hours to decide how to get away, but no time to think about killing anybody. He’ll be dealt with when we’re safe.’
‘We’ll get into our kit and leave at five to eight,’ Wayne said, ‘just far enough to watch the explosion. Then we can come back and sit in the ruins to keep warm.’
‘I won’t make it with this gammy leg,’ Garry said. ‘Look how it’s swollen up. I’d like to kill him just for skimming that slate. I expect he smeared poisoned pigeon shit along the edge. He would have danced a reel and two jigs if he’d killed me.’
‘We’ll rip a door off and carry you on it,’ Lance said.
‘Not my weight you won’t. I’ve put back too much ale in my life. But I’ll be all right. Nobody gets the better of me, not even a fucking snowstorm.’ Nor will they, whatever O Levels he hadn’t got. He didn’t remember his father because he was knocked arse over backwards by a concrete mixer on the motorway and killed while doing his stuff as a chainman for the surveyors. The emptiness of infancy was normal, but when he was two his mother married again, and he knew the man couldn’t be his father because Garry got a kick every time he went close. Henry was his name, and in the beginning he waited till Garry’s mother was out of the house, but later he didn’t care, and when his mother told him to stop kicking Garry he kicked her as well. In three years the man spent what was left of his father’s insurance, and then lit off, leaving his mother with two more kids.
She lived on National Assistance, and slutted after what men she could get while the kids ran around wild and half starved. Some nights they waited on the steps of pub or bingo hall hoping she would come out with lollipops or a bar of chocolate. A fancy man might chuck fifty p to get them out of the way. All men were bastards, so it paid to grow into a bastard yourself and keep them in their place. And all women were bitches who had anything to do with men like that. Only you yourself were left, and all you could do was find a couple of mates you could trust and have as good a time as you could. The rest was bullshit.
He never forgot insult or injury, and twenty years after the toe-capping Henry came to see his mother but she threw him out. A few weeks later Garry saw him in a pub on Saturday night, standing at the bar over a meagre half-pint. Garry clapped him on the back in friendly fashion and talked of the good old times when Henry had been kind to him as a three-year-old, and Henry had the gall to say: ‘I’m glad you remember. I was good to you, wasn’t I? But that’s how I am. I allus was good to little kiddies.’ The man’s face was ageing and spiteful, but a few pints even got him talking again about his mother.