prejudicial. He watched for the target and the target’s wife, and wondered whether she was resting or filling the suitcase that had been brought for her. The goon, the officer, had been on his chair as the sun had started to dip. He’d had the binoculars on his chest and seemed to use them to watch birds. Maybe birds were his turn-on… There was nothing for him to listen to but his nose was filled with the smell.
Badger did not apologise.
Perhaps it was not appropriate to apologise for diarrhoea. Maybe Foxy would have done if he’d had any other oppo. No apology… and no wind to freshen the air. Possible to go in reasonable secrecy from the hide after darkness came, but that was more than an hour away. Badger had swallowed Imodium, which would, sort of, plug him. Probably taken enough to stop Niagara in full flow. He hadn’t asked what the correct dose should be. Foxy watched the goon, and couldn’t get the stink out of his nose. When darkness dropped, Badger could move, with his bags, whatever was soiled and the collapsible entrenching shovel, to dig the pit.
The pig came, the sow. He knew stories about pigs, had heard them from the base medic, an orthopaedic specialist, who had talked about them after he’d put an interpreter back together – the man had been out in the marshes with a patrol when he was charged; a thigh bone had been broken and a knee smashed. When the big beast came out of the reed bed to the right of him and Badger and moved purposefully over the open ground, grunting, Foxy thought they faced a problem.
The problem worsened: the boar followed the sow.
Badger swore.
The sow led. Old teats hung slack from her underbelly and the mud glistened on her, was caught among the whiskers at her mouth. The boar had big bollocks and – more important – tusks jutting from the lower jaw. Badger thought the sow looked dumb, hungry, inquisitive, but that the boar was menacing. He could see why: at each side of his mouth, where the cheeks were, there were twin welts – the skin was broken and there were weepy patches. Badger realised that the tusks were in-growing and pierced the flesh, which would have been enough to make the brute mean.
They came closer, were within twenty feet.
They stopped. Now they were wary. Badger thought the sow might be the more cautious. The little eyes gleamed bright, tracking towards them.
In the last years, Badger had had birds come and perch on him, little songbirds, blackbirds and pigeons, and once a snipe had walked on elegant legs across his hands. Rabbits had played a few feet in front of him, and a fox had been over his back, jumping to clear it, as if his spine was a fallen log. Mice and rats had used his gillie suit for warmth. His ability to blend into nature made him good at what he did, as good as any – better than the old idiot beside him. A rat, heavy with the young it was carrying, had made a friend of him, enough for him to worry that he might be playing midwife when its time came. He could be still, and didn’t know how still Foxy could stay.
There were flies round him.
Badger could accept rats, mice and birds sharing his space but the flies fazed him during the day, and the mosquitoes were worse in the evenings. All irrelevant. The sow mattered most. Badger thought that if she backed away, or lost interest, the boar would tuck along. Her interest was aroused but she did not yet seem to feel threatened. The boar’s size was intimidating: he would have been more than a yard to the shoulder and the tusks were four or five inches long – the creature must live with perpetual discomfort.
Foxy had wriggled a little, making enough noise to raise the sow’s ears. He murmured, ‘I’ve a pepper spray.’
Badger thought he read it better. He had four plastic bags, all partially filled, one pair of fetid underpants and a body that stank. He flicked his eyes away. The kids had come out of the house with the old lady, and the goon was out of his chair. There was, far away, dust rising between the trees, where the road was, and guards were coming out of the barracks, rifles loose on straps across their backs and chests. The wife came, leaning on her stick. Foxy passed Badger the pepper spray, then clasped the headset tighter against his skull, tiny movements; he would have been straining to hear any remark made. Badger’s own movement was to take the penknife from his belt and unclasp it; the blade was only two inches long but he thought it enough, and preferred it to the spray.
He saw the car, the Mercedes saloon. It was driven past the barracks and veered towards the house.
At that distance, the cries of the children were faint but clear. Their excitement carried.
He might as well have laid a trail of aniseed, grain or swill. The sow came forward. Badger could not stand up, clear away the scrim and the camouflage, get hold of the plastic bags, chuck them out and wave a deodorant spray to replace the smell of his shit with lemon fragrance. He thought, now, the pig knew he was there.
She was beside the edge of the scrape, where the scrim and the dead leaves covered his bergen. She was two feet, perhaps a few inches more, from him. She pawed the ground. The boar followed.
The target came out of the car and his driver carried his briefcase. The children were around him, and he lifted the little girl. The goon faced out across the water, and the open space that flanked the reed bed would have been in his view. It was the wife who saw the pigs and pointed at them. The boar was pushing at the shoulder of the sow, trying to come close. Badger saw the eyes and each whisker, each bristle, the sharp broken end of a tusk. The boar panted…
Now the boar led. He had pushed aside the sow. He drove down with his nose. The scrim snagged on a tusk. The snout pushed. The beast might weigh a hundred kilos, a hundred and fifty. It routed in the scrim for the bags and… Badger had the knife.
The boar’s weight pressed down on him, and he used his left hand to hold the scrim tight, then jabbed the knife blade upwards and hit what felt like thick rubber or a leather wad. Blood spurted from the space between the nostrils. The pig reared back. The scrim ripped, the foliage fell away, and he let out a scream of pain, loud and shrill, parading that he was hurt. Maybe the boar didn’t know what had made the pain, who had hurt him. He ran across the mud of the open ground, heading for the lagoon. The sow followed, seeming reluctant and confused.
They hit the water.
In front of the house, everyone watched.
The sow and the boar lumbered at speed towards deep water until only their heads remained visible. They seemed to make for the end of the mud spit where Badger had built the platform, with foliage washed away from the reed bed, where the microphone was mounted. In front of the house, they turned away as if the spectacle was over and Badger chose that moment to congratulate himself. The pigs swam towards the spit.
Foxy’s head jerked forward. His turn to swear. The cable to the headset had tautened. The boar broke the surface close to the mud spit, kicked, rolled and tried to throw off an impediment. The cable was pulled up from the mud in front of the hide. Badger saw it rise in the water. There was a final convulsion and the cable from Foxy’s headset went slack…
There were gravel pits out to the west of Reading and alongside the motorway. The teenage Danny Baxter had known them as well as any heron did. It was to one of them that he had taken his dad’s accountant and brought him close to an otter’s holt. The man had never seen the creature up close and was thrilled enough to become a referee of status when Danny had gone for the police job. Anglers patronised the gravel pits. Once, from the hide he’d made for himself, he had watched a bent, straining rod, a tight line and huge swirls from the depths. It had gone on for twenty minutes or more until the line had floated back, loose, nothing to hold it. The guy hadn’t known he was watched, had sworn, kicked out and sent his stool and a rucksack into the water. It would have been a big pike that had snapped his line. Danny had seen it.
Now the line was exposed on the mud spit and floated on the water’s surface. He saw where it ran up the spit and went into the mess of foliage where the microphone was.
It hurt to speak to Foxy, but he had to know. It was like he took a backward step. One question. ‘Does it work?’
A nod, as if he were an interruption to concentration, therefore a goddamn nuisance. Then, ‘Yes, but couldn’t you have done a half-decent job with the cable? Bit bloody obvious, young ’un, because you didn’t bury it properly.’
It was. The cable was a dark line across yellow mud, then a black thread over the water. If the goon, the officer, went back to his chair and used his binoculars to look again for the birds, the otters or the pigs, he must see, had to, the cable on the mud and where it floated. He thought he’d done well in concealing it and better than that in getting rid of the pigs, but his efforts had been ignored.
Everyone except the security man was now inside the house, and the light was failing. They had nothing. His
