A Line in the Sand (51 page)

you

e been here and the detectives wouldn't have come.

wouldn't hav

She

nts to belong somewhere special, wants control, wants people to

wa

talk

her.

about

Is she going to get hurt? Please, Miss Parker, try to

see

she doesn't get hurt."

Cathy left her sitting at the kitchen table, staring out of the window he sink at the song-birds wheeling around the hanging sack

above t

of

nuts.

n a course with the German GSG9 anti-terrorist unit, she'd

Once, o

heard

an instructor bark at the recruits about to practise a storm entry to a

, "Shoot the women first."

building

rove away from the mean little street, headed for the motorway

She d

and

The instructor had said that the women were always more

London.

dangerous than the men, more likely to reach for a weapon in the last critical seconds of their lives when there was no hope of survival.

336

She was wondering whether Farida Yasmin was a help to the Iranian, or a

liability.

Cathy thought of the girl, confused and willing, blundering forward with the man. Farida Yasmin craved a little spot where the sun shone on her, but Cathy didn't think she'd find it. A talent of Cathy's was

to make instant assessments of the people she investigated: Farida Yasmin was unimportant and she would write only the briefest of

reports

on her visit; the girl was a loser. But there was nothing she could do

to prevent her being hurt, and she felt quite sad.

She knew about loneliness.

"If we don't make it it will be the fault of all these wretched boxes.

But thank you for the thought. Luisa and I have always been

interested

in wildlife."

Simon Blackmore went back to his wife in the kitchen. They had been washing the plates, cups, mugs, saucers that had been wrapped in

newspaper by the packers. The man at the door had said his name was e was on the parish council, that he was the man to fix

Paul, that h

any

, was always pleased to smooth

little difficulties confronting them

the

way for new arrivals. He'd told them there was a meeting in the hall that evening of the Wildlife Group, with a talk on migration from

a

the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds.

warden of

Then, he'd

asked whether Luisa typed, and had explained how the group had lost its

ople I've ever known here, and I was born

typist: "The most selfish pe

the village.

in

The worst sort of in comers The sort of people who

don't give a damn for the safety of those they live among." Simon d seen the way that the man had looked at his wife's

Blackmore ha

wrists, at the slash scars across the veins.

"What you're being offered, Geoff, sweetheart, is 63 per cent more than

you're getting now. It's fantastic. On top of that there's the

bonus scheme, the private medical thing, there's guaranteed

inhouse

337

three-star minimum accommodation when you're working out of London, business-class flights into Europe. You'll be on at least double

the

pittance you're getting now at the end of the day. Your pay at the moment is actually insulting, they don't deserve people like you.

The

sooner you're gone, the better. Get your letter in straight away.

Write it tonight. I stopped off in the travel agent's on the way

from

your place. They said Mauritius or the Seychelles are great I'm

talking honeymoons, sweetheart. As soon as you're back from that

dump

tomorrow, day after tomorrow? let's get tramping round some

property.

Call me. Love you."

Geoff Markham heard her blow kisses down the telephone, and cut the call. His mind was too distracted to make the calculation of a 63

per

cent increment on his existing salary. He was thinking of the young man out at the rim of the reed-beds, and of the firm certainty of

his

gaze, watching the marshlands.

"And him, too." Frank Perry stood by the telephone in the kitchen.

"Gutless bastard." He stood by the telephone and read the lengthening

list of scratched-out names.

Bill Davies shrugged.

"I suppose I shouldn't have done that, cut him off your list sorry."

"I don't go to church, can't bear listening to his dreary sermons."

"I just thought, given the circumstances I thought it would help if he

showed support."

rned to the detective.

Perry tu

He was beaten down, grey-faced. The

hand resting on Davies's shoulder shook as it grasped at the jacket, to it.

held tight

er last night?"

"Was I out of ord

338

"Not for me to comment."

"I can just take it. Meryl can't.

ning.

She's drow

One more thing,

one more, another bit of chaos, she'll go under. How long?"

"I'm not supposed to talk tactics or strategy."

"Bill, please."

The detective thought his principal was close to defeat and that was not the policy.

ock on

He'd done them all: he had stood with the Gl

his

hip beside cabinet big-shots and foreign leaders and turned IRA

informers, and he had never felt any sense of involvement. He

thought

that whatever he said would go back to Meryl Perry.

"There's a fair bit going on, don't ask me what. We're beefed up, most

of which you won't see. It was said at the beginning that our

Tango couldn't last hostile ground, lack of resources, your location more than a week."

"What day are we?"

"We're at Day Five."

A tired nervy smile played at Perry's mouth. What's the Al Haig

story?"

Davies laughed out loud, as if the tension were lifted.

"Monday, right? Getting to the end of bloody Monday. It's

appropriate... United States Army General Al Haig was in Belgium on a

NATO visit. The sort of trip where there are convoys of limousines about a half a mile long. A security nightmare. The convoy's

hammering along a main route of course, the search teams have worked over it. But they missed a culvert. In the culvert was a bomb;

handiwork of a leftist anti-American faction. The detonation was

a

fraction late and, anyway, it malfunctioned. The car,

armour-plated,

didn't take the full force, kept on going, and the escorts. In the culvert had been enough explosive to bounce Haig's car right off the 339

road and make a crater fish could have lived in. Al Haig said, "I guess that if we can get through Monday then we can survive the rest of

the week." It's about hanging on in there. We've about got through Monday, Mr. Perry."

"I can hold her for two more days if nothing else breaks her first."

It was the end of the day, and the quiet was all around him. The

bird

sky danced displaying for him its regained flying skills.

But there was the quiet.

He no longer watched the bird, no longer took pleasure from the

extravagance of its flight. He watched the geese and the swans, the the wheeling gulls, and he looked for a sign, the quiet

ducks and

playing in his ears.

They did not stampede, they did not skim the water with flailed wings to take off in panic, they did not shriek as they would when disturbed.

They were quiet, as if they were warned.

Vahid Hossein could see the positions of the policemen on the far

side

of the marsh, on the higher ground. He had no fear of them. He knew y were.

where the

They would have thought they were still unnoticed,

but he saw each movement of their bodies as their legs, backs, hips, ers

should

stiffened and they shifted their bodies for relief... There

had been an Iraqi sniper on the Jasmin Canal who used the SVD Dragunov libre rifle with an effective range of 1,300 metres.

7.62-ca

He was

never seen, and he had shot eighteen men in three weeks. A prisoner aid afterwards that a mortar's shrapnel had hit him as he went

had s

to

ring position on the banks of the canal in the early morning.

his fi

It

was luck that a random shell had killed him. The birds on the Jasmin re always quiet in the hours before the sniper fired. He

Canal we

sensed the presence of a watcher. He felt a new atmosphere. He

mself now and he had only the evidence of the quiet to

believed hi

be

enged. A slight frown of apprehension had settled on his

chall

forehead.

f the day, as the wind quickened and trembled

At the fall o

the reed-heads, he made his plan to go into the water, away from the bank, towards the place he had seen yesterday deep in the beds of

old

340

and near to the central water channel.

gold reeds

He could not see the watcher, could only sense the new quiet that

had

settled around him.

Chapter Fifteen.

Sitting with the damp of the ground seeping into the backside of his rs and with the warmth of his dogs under his jackknifed legs,

trouse

in

his vantage-point, Andy Chalmers listened to the night sounds.

was no moon, no break in the rain cloud

There

was behind thick cover: if there

He

had been light he would not have

been able to see the reed-beds and the water channels. It was

le

possib

that the man had an image intensifier, night-vision equipment; he

would

not give him the chance to identify his position. Chalmers did not he land around him. Instead he listened.

need to see t

There was the quiet, the rumble of the sea on the shore, the call

of a

distant fox. A policeman two hundred metres away stifled a cough

and

another one four hundred metres away stood to urinate. He was still, ilent. When the fox called, his fingers felt the hackles

he was s

rise

on the necks of his dogs and he soothed them where they lay.

man was there, Chalmers knew he would hear him.

If the

that came from the west had turned, which pleased Chalmers.

The wind

It

the distant trees and fields, and came across the

scudded off

marshland

riffling the leaves and branches behind which he sat. He could

control

sight and sound, but not the body odour of smell. Sight, sound and ell all carried great distances over open ground at night but, in

sm

the

tains where he worked, he regarded smell as the worst of

high moun

the

stalker's enemies.

341

He had left the keys to his caravan, where he lived at the back of the

senior keeper's cottage, with Mr. Gabriel Fenton; the few coins from his pocket had been abandoned on the train; he carried nothing of

metal

in his pockets. It was his routine to make the owner's guests discard everything that could clink, rattle, rub together, before he started the stalk. His dogs were as still and silent as himself. There

would

be no sound for his prey to hear and no noise to disturb the birds in

the reed mass.

The wind was as he would have wanted it and would carry his smell

away

from the man, if he was there. An American, a guest of his owner, had

once brought foul pungent creams with him on a stalk and believed

they

would block the man-smell that a stag might scent. Chalmers had made him strip and douse himself in a stream to wash the stuff off him; a

French guest had rolled in sheep droppings, and that also was useless.

The only possibility of hiding man-smell from a target stag was to keep

the wind in the stalkers' faces. He had not yet smelt the man, if he

was there.

He sat and wrapped himself in his patience, let the night hours drift, and he listened.

He could sit still, silent, but he did not doze, did not allow himself to edge towards sleep.

If he had dozed, slept, then he would not have heard.

In the cold, the rain and the quiet, Chalmers set himself games to play

with his memory so that his senses were never less than alert.

Memories of stalks with guests of the owner, and clients who paid

for a

day what he earned in two weeks... The guest from Holland who had

failed at the start of the week, in the disused quarry, to put six 342

ets out of six, with a telescopic sight, into a four-inch target

bull

at

hundred metres he had refused to take him out.

a

Mr. Gabriel had

backed him, and the guest had been sent to thrash a river for salmon.

nt the City of London, with new clothing and a new rifle,

The guest fro

good on the target-shooting in the quarry, who had been led for five s an eight-year-old stag with a crown of antlers, been

hours toward

brought to within eighty yards for a side shot. He'd given the guest oaded rifle, the Browning .270 calibre, cocked it.

the l

He'd been

on

ope, on the beast, and the bullet had struck its lower

the telesc

belly.

d fled, wounded. He had told the guest he was a 'bloody

It ha