A Deniable Death (51 page)

The match flashed and the cigarette was lit. The goon had taken a handkerchief from his pocket, stained, and Foxy knew it would be used to wipe a place on his privates, make it dry, so that the cigarette was not extinguished by the water that had been thrown at him.

Foxy did not cringe and didn’t attempt to bury himself in the angle between the concrete of the floor and the cement blocks of the wall. He knew the threshold would be crossed when he was burned. Everything he would say when the pain scorched his skin was in his mind.

The goon came close, limp prominent, and bent over him.

Foxy’s arms were tied behind his back and his right ankle was fastened by rope to a ring in the wall. He was very calm. Foxy was on his back and seemed to spread out his left leg. It was as if he exposed himself further, was more naked, could not defend himself and was close to the cracking point, the threshold and denial of the Code’s principles. He needed only to be tipped.

The goon was over him. Damn little strength left, and all of it so precious. The bruising, the cuts, the burns, the insect bites, now infected and raw, seemed less alive. He flexed the muscles of his left leg. The goon, Mansoor, crouched, and the handkerchief came down towards a place an inch or so above the hair at the pit of Foxy’s stomach. His skin was rubbed hard, dried and smoke poured from the goon’s mouth. The handkerchief went back into the pocket. The cigarette was taken from the lips and went down towards the skin.

It touched. Foxy reacted.

Didn’t feel the pain, not that time. It took all of his strength, and more, from reservoirs he hadn’t known existed any longer. His leg came up straight. Then he swivelled as best he could on his backside, the leg bent sharply at the knee, and the impact pitched the goon over. His weight would have gone onto the damaged leg and he stumbled. The cigarette dropped, he lost his balance and sprawled.

Foxy locked him with his leg.

He had no weapon. His arms were behind his back so he couldn’t punch. His ankle was roped so he couldn’t kick. He couldn’t grapple with the goon’s belt or get to his throat. He did the head-butt.

A young policeman, called to closing-time fights in pubs and late-night brawls in the streets, had learned that back-street combat was with a broken bottle or the bone at the front of the skull. He had seen it done, and known of the pain it inflicted on hard men. He held the goon close with his legs around the man’s waist and slammed his head into his face. He heard the squeal.

The pub and street fighters he had seen as a young policeman went for the nose.

Foxy hit again and again. The guards had come from the door and his ears were gripped. The small of his back was unprotected and boots lashed the bottom of his spine. For a moment the goon’s ear was close to Foxy’s mouth.

It was hard for Foxy to speak through the split lips, swollen gums and the gaps where teeth had been. He spoke in good, correct Farsi into the ear: ‘Who is fucking your mother tonight, Mansoor? Who is riding her? Is there a queue round the block waiting to fuck your mother? What do you do, Mansoor, while your mother is fucking the street? Do you get kids to suck you off?’ Vile language, learned well. He was dragged clear and his face was hit. His leg was bent back so that the goon could be pulled off him. He knew those sentences, in Farsi, by heart and had often spoken them. It was under instruction by the interrogators of the Joint Force Intelligence Team, when he’d done terping, that he had mastered the lines guaranteed to make an Arab prisoner or captured Iranian lose any vestige of cool. The interrogators knew their work, and Foxy had seen its success many times.

The goon was on his feet. He flailed his arms to drive back the guards, his chest heaved and blood flowed from his distorted nostrils. His feet stamped, and the bar of wood was in his hand.

The first blow struck him – Foxy would have been at the threshold if there had been another cigarette – and more deluged down on him. He saw nothing in the cell. The table was gone, and the cigarette packet, the matchbox, the chair, the guards at the door and the light in the ceiling. There was darkness. Foxy no longer fought the beating. He was overwhelmed, and his strength had gone.

He saw, at the last, a man in a darkened street. He wore a black frock coat and carried a top hat in one hand, a cane in the other, and walked proudly. It was the last thing Foxy saw – and the man’s head was lowered in respect.

‘Still a good turn out, is there, Doug?’ he was asked.

They were lucky in his village to have their own British Legion branch and the building was adequate, in need of repairs but the fabric was sound. Doug Bentley always came for a drink, or three, on the evening before a repatriation.

There were four beers in his round, all low-strength, which reflected the ages of his friends. He was standing and collecting the glasses to take them back to the bar. They couldn’t afford a paid steward any longer, and it was accepted that glasses were reused, not clean ones for when each drink was poured. ‘Still plenty there. It’s held up well.’

‘Third in a fortnight? Right, Doug?’ From an old Pioneer Corps man.

He paused. ‘That’s right, the third. It’s five have come through. Anyone want any crisps or peanuts?’

‘My Annie won’t watch it.’ From a paratrooper who had done Cyprus and Aden. ‘Upsets her. I used to watch regular, but I don’t now. It’s bad enough seeing it on TV, but it must be pretty difficult, Doug, week in and week out – for you, I mean. Yes, nuts, thanks.’

It wasn’t talked about much in the bar – it was in the early days, but it had been running for three years now. Doug Bentley had carried their standard for all of that time, and no one else had jostled him for the job. He didn’t talk about it unless another raised the subject of Bassett and the hearses coming up the High Street. He would have liked to share it more often – not just with Beryl – and the opportunity yawned. He took it. ‘It’s a damn sight less upsetting for us than for the parents and the grannies, the brothers, the nephews, all the kids from the family. One last week, a woman cried her heart out. All quiet except for her sobbing. It went right through to your guts. She was weeping her eyes out in the road. We all felt it, all of us in our line. What I remember, the week before, was all the hands that were just laid on the glass of the hearse, the nearest they could get to the coffin with the flag on it, and that same one – a big family and friends group had come over from the east of England – an older man shouted, “Well done, boys,” for the two of them going through, and others picked it up. “Well done, boys,” and they were all clapping. It gets in your bones, like rheumatism does. I wouldn’t miss it. I say that in honesty.’

‘I’m the crisps, the bacon ones, Doug.’ He was a veteran of Suez, artillery. ‘Do they really like it, being out there and having the world watching them? Nothing like that in our day – were popped down out there. Seems unnatural to me, like it’s a spectacle – I’m not criticising you, Doug.’

‘Fair enough. I was chatting with a sergeant from a unit last month, and he said the military and the families appreciate people being there – like it’s recognition. Could be called appreciation. It’s what’s said . . . I tell you, when they finish coming through Bassett I don’t know what I’ll do with myself . . . Right, four pints, one crisps and we’ll have two nuts.’

He went to the bar.

His neighbours thought it was morbid, and had told Beryl so, him and her going off so regular on the first bus to Swindon, the second bus to Wootton Bassett, and the long reverse journey. While he was down at the Legion, the night before a repatriation, she would be running the iron over his charcoal slacks to get a decent crease and brushing the shoulders of his blazer, the one with the Pay Corps badge. If she’d time she’d polish his three medals, and before he’d come out he’d do his shoes so that they gleamed and put the whitener on his formal gloves. Last thing, she’d check there were no crumples in the black ribbon she tied with a flourished bow at the top of the standard pole. His neighbours had empty, vacant lives and nothing to lift them. Doug Bentley thought himself blessed, and also that a hole, wide enough for a volcano to spew from, would be left in his remaining years when the repatriations stopped coming into the Lyneham base, and the hearses no longer drove up the hill into the town.

He brought the drinks back to their table, with the crisps and the nuts, and the artillery veteran asked if there was time for a cribbage game, and the paratrooper – who had last jumped thirty-nine years before – said there was; the Pioneer Corps man, who had spent two years digging latrines on tank ranges in Germany, agreed. Then they’d all three looked at Doug Bentley for his opinion: time for a cribbage game? They had to nudge him.

He’d been far away, just down the High Street from the Cross Keys, waiting for the command to raise the standards and . . . He said he’d enjoy that.

Len Gibbons watched.

Too many years since he’d been in a long raincoat and a trilby, hugging shadows in a doorway and listening: it was enough to make a new man of him. He saw the target, the target’s wife and the medical man. They paused on the step and the sleet had eased. He saw also the car across the width of the pavement close to the kerb. The driver reached back and flicked open the rear passenger door.

The car had been there, on a restricted-parking line, all the time Gibbons had been in place, but the opening of the door, and the flooding of the interior with light, enabled him to see the driver: hardly a taxing identification. Dark-haired, swarthy, stubble, and a shirt buttoned to the throat without a collar. The car, an Opel saloon and granite grey, did not have
Corps Diplomatique
plates, but Gibbons reckoned it was an embassy vehicle. He had, of course, done his discreet walk round the block, the café across the campus street. The car was all the security offered to the target and his wife. He used a little of a veteran’s tradecraft. He had good ears, could hear – Catherine said – every cat that came into the garden to scratch up the new bedding plants; he wore a hearing aid. It was a tip he’d picked up from the Provos: they had worn them when their hit teams advanced on potential attack sites and needed to know if they were covered by military or police guns; with an aid, they could hear better when a weapon was cocked. Gibbons had borrowed one from the technical people in the basement annex. It fitted comfortably, and was good value.

It was said first in German, as if the consultant made his point in that language, then repeated in English, but not in Farsi. The consultant had personally escorted them to the doorway, and said, ‘I shall look at the MRI and the X-rays overnight. Tomorrow I can tell you what is possible and what is not. Please, your appointment with me is at eight thirty. You understand that I can promise nothing.’

He was gone. The target supported his wife down the one step and across the pavement, then helped her into the car. Gibbons saw her face, haggard, and saw the target’s, numbed. The door slammed, the light was cut, and the car drove away, no ceremony . . . Incredible. The lack of security, the absence of a full escort, astonished Gibbons. It told him that as yet the authorities had not reacted to a capture in the marshes. Extraordinary. He didn’t follow the car and had no need to know where the target would sleep that night. He didn’t want to test the professionalism of the driver and give him the opportunity to recognise a tail in place. But it had been a satisfactory evening that nothing had blighted. He had gained the knowledge that would facilitate a killing, its location and time. His step was almost jaunty as he walked to his own vehicle.

The Cousin was across the street and low in his car – it was near to the bus stop where parents were waiting for their youngsters to get back to Roeckstrasse. He attracted no attention. He saw the big car, symbol of an individual’s triumph in his chosen field, sweep off the road into the driveway, the tyres scattering gravel. The house was dark, obviously empty, and offered no welcome. The car door was swung shut.

The breadwinner was home and no one greeted him. That stirred a chord with an old warrior from the Agency: he was now, most of the time, out to grass, and would only be dragged back – not, of course, inside the Langley complex – when deniable work was called for. In his own life, before she’d finally quit, there had been times enough when he had come home late, tired, to find she’d decamped to her mother, her best girl friend, her worst girl friend, any fucking place. He understood. Woman trouble: couldn’t live with them, and couldn’t live without them. He saw the consultant, who hadn’t drawn the curtains or dropped a blind, pace in a room on the ground floor and eat what looked like a slice of cold pizza. He had no more, there, to learn.

The Friend took the young man into the city, parked near to the cathedral, then invited him to walk.

Had he had a good journey on the ferry? He had. Had the weather been bad in the Baltic? Not a problem. How had he passed the long hours? On the deck, reading. What had he read? Just a magazine. That had settled the Friend’s opinion that the spear-carriers of the state were best left to themselves, and that banal conversation was meaningless.

Both wore caps with deep peaks and both had scarves over their faces, but that was natural in the cold cloaking the city that night, with the threat of the first severe snowfall. They went past the cathedral, with its massive floodlit sharp-tipped spire. The streets were narrow, and old houses pressed close to them. Little side turnings went into brief cul-de-sacs with small homes that might have dated back four centuries, when his own country had been sand, camels and migrant Bedouin. He did not tell the man that the apparent age of the streets they walked was bogus, that the British bombers had come at the start of an Easter feast and destroyed the city with incendiaries: that Lübeck had been rebuilt with care for its history. They went by the modernised church of St Anne, a Franciscan building, and he stopped to gaze for a moment through an iron-barred gate that was unlocked and slightly ajar. At the end of a paved path was the door to a brick building and above it a dull light burned. He said it was the synagogue of Lübeck, and led the way.