(2005) Rat Run (15 page)

round had come in close.

Feverishly, Malachy polished.

Back from his walk, the door locked and bolted behind him, he had gone to his bed, knelt and taken the shoes from the black sack.

They were his most valuable possession. His

mother had said, T know it's all sand and donkey poo down in Basra, dear, but there'll be times when you need to be smart. Your father found that in Aden when he was a sprog subaltern and you were just a star in my eye. You should never be short of a good pair of shoes. I always say that a man's character is judged by his shoes.' Roz hadn't gone with him to Devon for that last lunch before he'd flown from Lyneham to Iraq. She wouldn't have gone if elephants had been dragging her - not after his father had refused to attend his son's wedding to a girl who wasn't 'suitable'. Over sherry before lunch his mother had produced the gift-wrapped parcel with a ribbon round it. When he'd opened the box, the shoes had gleamed at him, and they'd fitted to perfection. He'd gone back with them that night to Alamein Drive and had not shown them to Roz, but he'd worn them on the flight down, and all the days that he was in Brigade before his transfer to the Scottish-based battalion . . . and he'd worn them when they had flown him out.

Roz had hovered above him in the bedroom at the quarters. He had packed a rucksack and a suitcase, everything he would need except the helmet, the flak-jacket and the Browning 9mm, which would be issued to him the next evening when he landed. The evening sun had lit the bed. She had stood over him while he had transferred the neat piles of clothing into the rucksack and the case, and had not helped him. He had sensed the attack was coming and had not known what would trigger it. The shoes had. The strings of the sack were fastened. The photograph of her that he loved most - he had taken it at the Colosseum in Rome, the light bright on her hair and on the walls behind her, happiness on her face - in a silver frame that her parents had given them went into the suitcase and he zipped it shut. He had laid out the starched uniform he would wear on the aircraft, and then he had gone to the wardrobe and taken out the box and the shoes. The attack had gone through sarcasm to anger then on to a sneer when she had seen his mother's note and the crosses for kisses. 'Oh, that's nice. Only the best good enough. What did they cost -

two fifty? Where did you find two fifty to spend on a pair of shoes? Isn't there anything
here
that needs two hundred and fifty quid spending on it? Sorry, sorry, a present from Mum. How touching. Be sure to send her a postcard from sunny Basra and tell her you're wearing Mummy's shoes and keeping them nice and

shiny.' Her father had retired as a warrant officer (Instructor) at the Royal Military Academy; his father had retired with the rank of brigadier - he'd thought it didn't matter, and had been wrong.

He polished hard - as hard as he had worked on the boots issued him for Basic Training before his father had pulled strings and opened the gates of Sandhurst for him. Malachy sweated as he rubbed the cloth over the toes and was frenzied at his work.

When he had left Chicksands, when he had tried to find work as a civilian, he had worn those shoes. His mother had never seen them on him; his mother and father had declined to meet him. And he had worn the shoes when he had taken the train to London, when he had laid out his money on the counter of the off-licence opposite Marylebone station and had bought the two four-packs of Special Brew, then found a bench and had started, for the first time, to drink away the demons. Midnight, with nowhere to go, and he'd ended up with the derelicts - without a blanket and without cardboard - and he'd seen the eyes covet his shoes. He never took them off. If he had taken them off, that night or in the nights of the weeks that followed, they would have gone. In the hostel he had slept with them under his pillow. His watch had gone, a twenty-first birthday present from a godfather, and his wallet, and his money from begging, which had been in a cheap little purse on a bootlace round his neck, with his tags, but his shoes had stayed on his feet.

Now it was as if Malachy tried to polish away the scars, on the shoes, of his life. With ferocity he burnished the toecaps. They shone - he could see his face in the brogue patterns. More polish. He gripped the left shoe and worked the cloth over it.

He heard the knock at his door and Dawn's voice called to him.

He turned the lock and drew down the bolt. She did not look at his face but stared at the shoe. She said distantly, eyes never off the shoe, 'I am going to the hospital. I want to be there when they take Millie to theatre, and then I will stay till she is awake again. It will be late when I come back. I am going to have to walk from Walworth Road, from the bus. Would you, please, meet me from the bus? I would like that.'

'Of course I will.'

'There is a cafe by the bus stop. Can we say at eleven o'clock?'

'Yes.'

'Am I silly to be frightened of walking in the Amersham that late, even after what happened to the boys?'

'I don't think so. I'll be at the cafe by the bus stop at eleven o'clock.'

The siege was over. The firemen's tenders blocked Kostecna, and a lacework of hoses ran down the alley that was too narrow for them to pass. Ladders were thrown up against the building's walls and water dripped. Wisps of smoke filtered up between the tiles where, hours before, there had been flames and billowing black clouds. No more gunfire from under the roof, and the last grenade explosion was a distant memory. It had a finality about it. Hard for Polly Wilkins to recall the excitement of being in the different vans that had kept the street entrance under surveillance, and the frustration of being held back while the storm squad had gone in, and the emotion of seeing the bloodied casualties brought out.

She was at the alley's entrance, where it joined the street, and from there she could smell the charred roof timbers on which the hoses played. Every five minutes, sometimes less, she demanded of Ludvik when she would be permitted to climb the stairs and see the scene for herself; each time she was offered only a shrug. Of course Ludvik did not know. What had been dramatic in its unpredictability now had a dreary certainty. Polly understood why her station chief, Braithwaite, had gone back to his office and had stayed there. She shivered as the evening's cold settled on her - not that it mattered, but that night there might be one of the year's final frosts. The last time she had phoned Braithwaite to complain about the slowness of the fire crews and the further delays in her getting up the stairs to see where they had made their stand, he had said to her, with annoying plausi-bility, 'You can put a kettle on the stove, turn on the gas and light it, but shouting at the kettle won't make it boil faster.' She detested that sort of banal logic.

All around her, she heard the cursed protests of residents whose apartments were unaffected by the fire but who were still prevented from returning to their homes. They seemed unable, unwilling, to comprehend the scale of the threat that had settled among them in the top-floor apartment. Bombs, killing, mayhem, catastrophe - the face of al-Qaeda.

Two men of al-Qaeda were dead - not an arm or a hand or fist of the Organization, little more than the tip of a fingernail.

She swore aloud and Ludvik turned sharply to look at her.

Polly wouldn't explain. So few did. Dominic had not understood. He was Foreign and Commonwealth Office, had a future, and had bought her an engagement ring with a double diamond twist; the wedding had been talked of vaguely for 'some time next year'

and they'd lived together at his Battersea flat, not her Wandsworth pad. He had been posted to Buenos Aires. 'You'll like it there, darling, fascinating culture.

You don't want to hang around that place where they kicked you.' What about him chucking in the FCO

and coming out to Prague? 'You're not serious, darling, are you? What? Throw up my career?' Was the work of the Secret Intelligence Service of less importance than tramping a cocktail circuit in Argentina? Two months after she'd arrived in Prague and a month after he'd bedded down in Buenos Aires, the email had come: 'Don't think this is going to work.

Sorry about that but you made the bed and you'll have to lie on it. Please send the ring, at your convenience, to my parents and they'll know what to do with it. No hard feelings but better to cut and run. I wish you well, Dominic.' The end of the great affair of Polly Wilkins's life . . . because he didn't understand.

Only Frederick Gaunt understood. Al-Qaeda, and what it could do - the importance of a co-ordinator -

dominated her life, left no room for love . . . damn it.

She waited, with Ludvik, to be called forward, and wondered how it had been for the two men in the top-floor apartment during the last moments of their lives.

Flush against the road, bright as a temple of light, was the gaol wall. They cruised down Artillery Lane.

Ricky Capel did not know how many hundreds of men were held in HMP Wormwood Scrubs. Truth

was, he knew little about the prison. He knew about HMP Brixton, about Pentonville and Wandsworth because - as a kid, with his sisters - his mother had dragged him to them and in through the big gates to see his father. What he could remember was that he had screamed and fought and she had held his arm, vice-like, and each time he had seen his father brought through a far door into the visits area, with the screws pressed round him, he had gone quiet and buried his head in his mother's shoulder. He had never looked into his father's face, had never spoken. Out of the big gates, each time, he had run like the wind to the bus stop and not looked back at the walls. But he didn't know Wormwood Scrubs because his father had never done time there . . . He thought his grandfather had, but that was before he was born.

'Go right,' Ricky said, from the back seat.

His cousin Davey drove, and his cousin Benji was beside him. His cousin Charlie was next to Ricky in the back. They turned into Ducane Road. Davey was a harder enforcer than Ricky, didn't care a fuck about the blood he drew and the pain he inflicted. Benji was a clearer thinker than Ricky, scratched at an idea till there was a plan to execute it. Charlie had more comprehension of money and how to move it than Ricky, how to wash and rinse and scrub it clean. But the decision-taking was Ricky's, and he brought together their differing talents. When Ricky, the youngest of them by five clear years, said what would happen there was no disagreement. His leadership was accepted.

The gaol, brilliant under the high arc-lights, fascinated Ricky. He had never been in prison. Few secrets existed between Ricky and the cousins; but his fear of prison was one of them. It was not something he would confide to them, to Joanne, his parents or his grandfather. He kept the secret close, but it lurked in his mind as he peered up at the height of the walls.

Only the top floor of the nearest wing was visible, lights behind small barred windows, some of which had washing draped outside. Inside the car, even with the window down and straining to listen, he heard nothing. However many hundreds of men were there, and staff, and however many barred gates there were to slam shut, no sounds came from the place.

'Go right again.'

'There's cameras on us,' Benji murmured.

'I said, go right again.'

'Sure thing, Ricky.' Davey eased the wheel, took them into Wulfstan Street, and past the quarters for prison staff. A curl of contempt licked at the side of Ricky's mouth. Two screws were walking on the pavement, anoraks over their uniform shirts, each carrying a plastic supermarket bag with the

possessions they took home from their shift.

'Then right again - isn't this the place, Benji, what you were talking about?'

'Braybrook Street, spot on, Ricky.'

'Tell me about it, like you did.'

They left behind the north-west corner of the prison's perimeter and Davey slowed to a crawl.

Behind them were the walls, the lights, the wire and hundreds of men - Ricky twisted a last time to see -

then, to the right, was a great open mass of darkness, football pitches, open parkland and the floodlights of a running stadium. On the left, behind a line of parked cars, were semi-detached homes like the one where Ricky lived with Joanne and Wayne.

'It's Braybrook Street, late sixties, sixty-six or

-seven. There's three guys in a car and they've got shooters and they're parked up and killing time before a job's ready. A police car, three blokes in it, comes by and doesn't like them sitting there. They're going to do a check on the vehicle.'

'Like it will be if we don't keep moving. Go on, Benji.' It was as if Ricky were an addict, needed the fix of hearing the story again now that he was here, a gawper in the shadows between the street's lights and half hidden by the parked cars.

'One of them in the vehicle's Roberts, Harry Roberts. The first copper leans through the window and starts with his questions. Roberts shoots him, then gets out, shoots the second copper in the street. I think that's the story, and the third one's shot in the police wheels. Two of them's gone, but Roberts is still inside, or was last time I read about him. Thirty-some-thing years he's done.'

'Mad, wasn't he?'

'It was just after they'd finished with the rope. A few months earlier and they'd all have hanged.

Roberts didn't get hanged but he's done thirty-eight years and—'

'OK, OK, I heard you.' Ricky didn't need the story any more. 'Wasn't smart, was it?' In unison, the cousins nodded agreement. 'Right, let's get on back -

what's the business?'

They drove away from the gaol. •

Charlie said, 'The big new growth area is behind that wall and behind that wire. Class-A stuff is what they want when they're banged up. They want brown and they want coke, and I reckon it's Es as well. What I hear, eight out of ten who go down are showing traces of class-A stuff when they have the check on arrival. That's a heavy market, which is not tapped into. There's no organization for regular supply and that presents an opportunity too good to miss out on.