The Solitary Man (5 page)

Harrigan fought to contain the panic that kept threatening to overwhelm him. Fifty years. Fifty godforsaken years. He could barely imagine that length of time. Fifty years ago there'd been no colour televisions, no portable telephones, no digital watches. Fifty years ago his parents were still at school. The war was only just over. The Second World War, for God's sake. The panic grew like a living thing, making his heart beat faster and his breathing come in rapid gasps. He took deep breaths of the rancid air, forcing himself to stay calm. It was going to be all right, he kept repeating to himself. They'd get him out. They wouldn't leave him to rot. He'd done as they'd asked, he'd kept his mouth shut, he'd followed orders. He'd done everything the Organisation had asked. So why was it taking them so long?

'Hey, chill, man,' said the Canadian. 'You're breathing like a train.'

Harrigan opened his eyes. 'I'm okay,' he said.

'You're burning up,' said the Canadian.

'Of course I'm burning up. It's almost ninety in here.'

The Canadian started to giggle. He stretched out on his bed and rolled over, resting his head in the crook of his right arm, the one he hadn't injected into. His eyes seemed to stare right through Harrigan, as if he wasn't there. Harrigan envied the Canadian the fact that he could look forward to being released at some point. He was hoping to be repatriated to Canada to serve the remainder of his sentence, but even if that fell through he'd still be out in six years. He had something to aim for; he knew he had a life ahead of him, a life outside. But fifty years wasn't a life sentence, it was a death sentence. Unless the Organisation got him out, he'd die within the walls of the prison. He banged the back of his head against the tiled wall. They had to get him out. He wouldn't grow old and die in prison, he'd rather kill himself first. He banged his head again, harder this time. There was something cleansing about the pain, it helped him focus his thoughts, his anger. He did it again, so hard that the dull thud echoed around the cell. Harrigan began to cry. He bit down on his lower lip so that he didn't sob out loud, but his body trembled and shook.

THE PORTABLE TELEPHONE BLEEPED and the Chinese teenager undipped it from his belt and spoke into it. Down on the pitch the South Africans were warming up.

'What a wanker,' said Tim Metcalfe, pouring himself a tumbler of lager from a green and white Carlsberg jug. 'Fancy bringing his phone to the rugby sevens. No class, no class at all.'

Warren Hastings grinned at Metcalfe. With his ripped and stained fake Lacoste polo shirt and baggy shorts, Metcalfe was hardly the epitome of good taste himself.

'What? What are you grinning at?' Metcalfe asked, wiping foam from his upper lip with the back of his arm.

'Nothing, Tim.'

'Well, come on, you've got to agree with me, right? We're here to watch the rugby, not to talk on the phone. Well, am I right or am I right?'

'You're right,' agreed Hastings. It paid not to argue with Metcalfe, who had the tenaciousness of a bulldog and would continue pressing his point home until he'd beaten down all opposition. It was a skill honed from years of selling life insurance.

Chris Davies, a burly bearded photographer, put a large hand into a McDonald's bag and pulled out a cheeseburger.

Metcalfe reached over and plucked the burger from Davies' hands. 'Thanks, Digger,' he said.

'You've the manners of a pig, Tim,' said Davies.

'That's an insult to pigs everywhere,' said Hastings, pouring the last of the lager into his tumbler. He tossed the empty jug into Metcalfe's lap. Metcalfe didn't notice - his eyes were fixed on the far side of the pitch. Hastings turned to see what he was staring at. A female streaker had climbed on to the field and was running across the grass, chased by Gurkha security guards dressed in red tracksuits. The girl was in her twenties with long blonde hair and large pendulous breasts that swung to and fro as she ran.

'Bloody hell,' wailed Metcalfe. 'Would you look at them buggers move.'

Hastings wasn't sure whether his friend was referring to the girls' breasts or the diminutive Gurkhas in pursuit. The stadium was filled with roars and catcalls and someone let off an airhorn high up in the stands. The referee blew his whistle and the players stopped to watch the girl run to the centre of the pitch, her hands raised above her head, waving to the crowd. The spectators in front of Hastings got to their feet to get a better look.

'Come on, get her off the pitch!' shouted Davies. 'Get on with the game!'

'Hey, give the girl a chance,' said Metcalfe. He had a pair of binoculars around his neck and he raised them to his eyes. 'Bloody hell,' he repeated.

Hastings arched his back and rotated his neck. He'd been sitting for more than two hours, and although he was enjoying the rugby, the stadium seats were far from comfortable. He took off his steel-framed spectacles and polished them with the bottom of his shirt.

One of the Gurkhas lunged at the girl but she swerved and the man fell at her feet. The crowd roared with delight and the girl stopped and took a bow.

'Shit, we could use her on our team,' said Davies in admiration.

Hastings put his glasses back on. Suddenly the hairs on the back of his neck stood up as if someone had touched his spine with a piece of ice. He had a feeling of dread, as if something terrible was about to happen, but for the life of him he couldn't imagine what it was. The streaker had started running again, but the Gurkhas had surrounded her and Hastings could see that it would only be a matter of time before they brought her down. He massaged the back of his neck, wondering if the feeling of unease was nothing more than the onset of flu. Around him spectators were cheering the girl and whistling at the security guards. Hastings shivered. He looked over to his left. All eyes were on the streaker, with one exception.

A grey-haired man in his late fifties was looking away from the pitch, towards where Hastings was sitting. He was about two THE SOLITARY MAN 35 hundred feet away, in the top tier of the stadium, five rows from the front, high up beyond the corporate boxes. He was wearing an off-white jacket and a dark shirt and smoking a large cigar. Hastings frowned. The man was too far away for Hastings to make out his features, but he was sure that the man was staring right at him, staring at him and grinning. It was an eerie sensation, as if something physical linked the two men, something that cut through the crowds and set them apart from everybody else.

The noise of the crowd swelled to a deafening roar. Metcalfe grabbed Hastings by the shoulder and shook him. Hastings looked at the pitch. Three Gurkhas had wrestled the naked girl to the ground but she was covered in perspiration and they were having difficulty holding on to her as she wriggled and shook like a stranded fish.

Hastings twisted around to look at the upper tier again but he couldn't see the man with the cigar. The spectators at the front of the tier were waving a large South African flag and cheering. Hastings craned his neck but the flag blocked his view.

Down below, the Gurkhas carried the naked girl off the pitch and the spectators sat down, eager for the game to restart. On the upper tier, the South African supporters dropped back down into their seats. Hastings cupped his hands around his eyes to shield them from the sun. The seat where the man with the cigar had been sitting was empty. Hastings wracked his brains, trying to remember where he'd seen the man before.

'What's up, Warren?' asked Davies.

'Nothing,' said Hastings, sitting down.

'You look like somebody just walked over your grave.'

Hastings shivered again. Davies was right. That was exactly what it had felt like.

PADDY DUNNE USED HIS key to open the front door of his sister's house. On previous visits he'd rung the doorbell, but she'd paid it no attention as if unwilling to allow anything to intrude on her grief. 'Tess,' he called. 'It's me, Tess.'

There were three letters on the carpet, an electricity bill and 36 STEPHEN LEATHER two circulars, and Dunne put them on the hall table. He went through to the kitchen where his sister was sitting at a wooden table, a cup of tea in front of her. The tea had long since gone cold and a brown scum had settled on to its surface. Tess was staring at the cup as if it were a crystal ball into which she was looking for some sign of what the future held for her.

'How about a smile for your brother, then?' said Dunne as cheerfully as possible.

Tess didn't look up. Dunne was carrying a plastic bag of provisions which he took over to the refrigerator. He opened the door and put the carton of milk and the packets of cheese and butter on to the top shelf, then put a loaf of brown bread into the pine bread bin by the stove. He looked in the sink. There were no dirty dishes there, no sign that his sister had eaten breakfast.

'Are you hungry, Tess, love?' he asked. She didn't even bother to shake her head. 'How about a nice piece of toast? With some lemon curd, like we used to have when we were kids? How about that, Tess? Does that sound nice?'

Dunne sat down opposite her and took her hands in his. Her skin was cold and dry, the nails bitten to the quick. He held her hands gently as if afraid they might break. 'It's going to be all right,' he said. 'Mr McCormack phoned me this morning.' He hunched forward over the table. He was twelve years older than his sister, but since her son had been arrested she'd aged dramatically, and the life seemed to be ebbing out of her. There were dark circles under her eyes and her hair was dull and lifeless, hanging in uncombed strands around her sunken cheeks. Her son's arrest seemed to have hit her even harder than the death of her husband, five years earlier.

'It won't be long now, Tess. Mr McCormack said it's being taken care of, they're going to get Ray out.'

For the first time she looked at him. 'I want my boy back,' she said, her voice a cracked whisper.

'He's coming, Tess,' promised Dunne.

'I want my boy back,' she repeated, as if she hadn't heard him.

THE OLD WOMAN HELD the egg-shaped poppy pod between the first finger and thumb of her left hand and collected the congealed sap with her metal scraper. The scraper was the size of a small saucer with a crescent cut out of it, blackened from years of use. The old woman had been given the scraper when s she was a child, when she'd worked the poppy fields of northern * Thailand, long before she'd crossed the border into Burma with her family, chased out by the Thai army.

It was the second time the poppy field had been harvested. It was a good crop, one of the best she'd ever seen. It had rained only twice during the cold season and the plants were healthy and tall, with many of them producing five flowers. She scraped carefully and methodically, but quickly, her fingers nimble despite her years. There were three parallel lines of brown sap, and close by them were three scars where the pod had been cut the previous week. Each poppy pod could be cut three, maybe four times over a period of six weeks. Then she and the rest of the workers would collect the biggest and best of the pods to get seeds for next year's crop.

The work was repetitive, but the old woman was lucky: she was small and the poppy pods came up to her chest so she could harvest the pea-sized balls of sticky latex without bending. She and the six other women working the field had to be finished before midday. In the morning the sap was moist and easily scraped. By early afternoon it would set and the work would be that much harder, so the opium collectors had gone into the field at first light and would be finished before the sun was high overhead.

The old woman wiped her resinous scrapings into the small brass cup hanging around her neck. The cup was old, too, older than the woman herself. It had belonged to her mother and she'd been given it on her twelfth birthday, the year she'd married.

She moved on to the next plant. The old woman preferred collecting sap to making the incisions on the poppy pods. The pods had to be cut from midday onwards, when the sun was at its hottest, so that the heat would force out the milky white sap. It was unbearably hot in the fields in the afternoon, even with a wide-brimmed straw hat, and the sun was merciless on any uncovered skin. The old woman's skin had long ago turned to the colour and texture of leather, but she still burned if she didn't take care.

The cutting was done with a three-bladed knife, and the making of the parallel incisions was the most skilful of the jobs involved in the opium harvest. Too deep and the sap would drip to the ground and be wasted; too shallow and not enough would trickle out. The cutting required more concentration than the collecting of the sap, and any lapse could result in sliced fingers. The old woman's fingers were crisscrossed with thin white scars.

Another reason the old woman preferred collecting the opium to making the incisions was that workers had to walk backwards when they were cutting so that they didn't smear the opium on their clothes as they moved through the field. It was slow, hard work, but it had to be done. She'd been working in opium fields for almost sixty years and had never complained. The opium paid for her food, her clothes, and had allowed her to raise a family.

She looked across at her grand-daughter who was using a small oblong scraper to collect sap from the plant next to hers. The old woman smiled down at the little girl in her white cotton dress, amused at the way her tongue was stuck between her teeth as she concentrated on her task. The girl knelt down and scraped the resin into a bowl which she kept on the soil by her feet, then grinned up as she realised that her grandmother was looking at her.

'Not tired?' the old woman asked.

The little girl shook her head. She wiped her forehead with her arm and sighed theatrically. 'No. I'm fine.'

'We'll have a break soon. You can drink some water.' A break would also give the old woman a chance to smoke some opium. Not the fresh sap that she'd just harvested but opium from the previous year's crop which she kept in a horn box in the pocket of the black apron that she wore over her red embroidered jacket. Her opium lamp and spirit pipe were in a bag at the edge of the field.