Naylor took Hegner close. He looked down into the face and thought it that of a wild creature. The eyes, burning, stared back, raged. There was discolouration already in the centre of the throat, near the chin. The mouth was open and the breath rasped. The plastic binding was tight on the wrists and ankles, and the two men's weight was squatted down on him…yet Naylor could not believe, not completely, that the man no longer represented a danger to him. It filtered into his mind: it was an old poem from school, and a grievously wounded naval captain — an Elizabethan hero — was on the deck of a Spanish galleon, helpless, but his captors would not go close to him, still feared him. He told Hegner what he saw, what was in his mind. But Hegner broke the grip restraining his sleeve, and reached out. It was Boniface who took Hegner's wrist, seemed to know what he wanted, and guided the hand down. Clydesdale had his fist in the man's hair, ensured his head could not move. Hegner's fingers were taken down, so gently, by Boniface, and came to rest on the man's forehead. The fingers slid on the skin from the forehead to the eye sockets, from the eyes across the cheeks and over the shape of the nose. They skirted the mouth and rambled over the stubble on the chin. Naylor understood. Hegner learned the man, as if his fingers on the features made a photograph for him.
Hegner rocked back, and Naylor pulled him upright.
Not to Naylor, Hegner said, 'I want his bag and his documents, and I want him weighted.'
It was done. Boniface searched pockets, produced a ticket, a passport and a slim wallet, then threw the bag at Naylor's feet. Clydesdale did not loose the hair, but kicked hard and backwards with heavy boots and broke the side of the shrub bed to loosen the bricks.
To Naylor, Hegner said, 'Don't you countermand what I ask of them.'
Naylor said, vomit in his mouth, 'I'll not describe it, damn well won't.'
To Boniface and Clydesdale, Hegner said, 'Weight him well and put him over, where it's deep.'
He saw whole bricks and broken bricks shoved into pockets and down the trouser waist, knew they would be held in place by the ankle pinions. He wondered whether the man would cry out, beg, plead, at the last. He gazed into the face of an enemy, at the features over which Hegner's fingers had moved. Saw contempt and defiance. It struck him then, worse than any kick or knee blow or punch, the power of that enemy. Could it ever be bloody beaten? They had him up. One on each arm, in a shuffling run, they dragged him on to the pier. Naylor turned away.
He watched the approach of the young women. He held a handkerchief over his face and hoped to hide the split lips, the blood and the bruising. They never looked at him, did not break step, or their conversation. He heard the babble of their talk as they passed him. Was it done in their name, to keep them safe, and the babies they pushed? He listened for a splash but heard only the waves, above deep, dark water, pounding the pillars.
Naylor said, 'Joe, if it is for vengeance, then that is a shaming motive. It does no credit…'
Hegner said, 'Put him in the legal chain and he has a lawyer, and he doesn't speak during human-rights-controlled interrogation, and he becomes an icon of resistance, and kids all over speak his name. My way, he disappears. He's gone from view, from sight — where to? Confusion is created. Men move, men make calls, men hit the email. They have to know where he is. And if they don't? Then it's disruption and chaos. It hurts them, hurts them so bad, because they don't know. I live off mistakes made. Do they change codes, change safe-houses, change the membership of cells? They're in ignorance and they flounder…Think about it. Now, can we go find some coffee, Dickie?'
He saw Boniface and Clydesdale walk back from the pier, short lengths of the plastic ties in their hands. They would have cut them at the moment they stunned him with a blow, then pitched him over…Could be a week, or two weeks, longer, before the nameless body was found, and he thought of the scientists and engineers — the new soldiers of the front line in the new war — scouring air waves for messages sent by an enemy who was confused and disrupted…and thought also of a boy in a white T-shirt with an angry bloody swan on it.
'You forgot that damned Saudi kid.'
'Didn't forget him, but I prioritized. Please, I'd like to go back and look for my glasses, what's left of them, then I want some coffee. Dickie, you let the kid take his chance and you don't know, and I don't, what might happen. All I'm saying is, the glass is half full — believe in the bright side.'
Lee Donkin's targets were those who hoarded a bus fare in their purses, didn't have a car available to them and would walk all the way down the main road into the town and would not fritter what money they had collected for the sale in the shopping centre.
The sun was on his pale face.
His hood was up and, drawstring tied, none of his hair and little of his features, vindictive and cold, were visible. His gloves were on, and those of his right hand were in his pocket and on the handle of the short, double-edged knife. Because it was too many days since he had last injected himself, it was difficult for him to walk and more difficult for him to concentrate on a target. Once, he went forward, increased his speed sharply and came near to a woman with a buggy, but she must have heard the hiss of his breath: she turned abruptly and confronted him. She had an umbrella, folded and concertinaed, in her fist as a weapon, and he backed off.
The aches in his chest and stomach were not from hunger or thirst, but from the craving.
He saw another woman, ahead and on the pavement, and again stretched his stride, but he saw a police car crawling in traffic towards him, and the chance was lost.
He looked ahead and behind and could not see a lone prey, without people close. He swore…He reached a favoured place. Had struck there three times in the last two months, and there were boarded-up toilets beside the pavement that were surrounded by an overgrown evergreen hedge, then a school's playing-fields. He leaned against a lamp-post.
Must wait — and desperation swam in him.
What did he need food for? He did not need food, and she had none to give him.
She had heard his stomach growl as he had prayed.
He had knelt and faced a wall barely visible in the dull, dark room. She did not know what his mind saw but there was content on his face when he had finished. Her own lips moved, spoke the rehearsed speech, but in silence. She weighed it, the decision as to when she would make the speech, and whether it was necessary…There was no need for him to eat, and Faria knew the time had come.
She took the bucket to him, and the damp, sodden T-shirt she had used the night before. She washed him again. In his armpits and round the neck where sweat had gathered in the night and his arms, legs and face. She squirted the scent on him. He looked down at her as she crouched on her haunches in front of him, but she could not read him.
He lifted his feet and allowed her to manoeuvre the pants and trousers over them, and she pushed them up and pulled the zipper high, then buckled his belt. She put on his socks and trainers, tightened the laces and knotted them, and her hands fumbled it. He was impassive; she did not know whether he felt fear, whether the strength she had tried to give sustained him. She stood, then bent to lift the T-shirt from the careful pile she had made. He held out his arms and she threaded it over them. Faria saw the swan, and its open beak, its wide, outstretched wings: did the bird, in its anger, curse her? She gazed into his face, then sucked breath into her lungs.
She took the waistcoat from the plastic sack, felt its weight. She swatted at the flies crawling over the bags of shit tied to it. Nothing in her life had prepared her for this. Nothing at home, nursing her sick, demented mother, nothing in keeping house for her father and brothers before they left for the religious schools of Pakistan, nothing at school, where she had passed with distinction all the examinations she had sat, nothing in the room above the house that had become a cultural centre, where she had watched the videos of smiling women making declarations of Faith and then had seen buses, military convoys and street markets erupt in fire, where she had been recruited…nothing in the long months as a sleeper, and the call nothing in the cottage.