the biscuits from his pocket for them. He hadn't said where he was going, or what he intended, but he had walked away with the dogs scampering at his feet.
Geoff Markham, not knowing what else he could do, had heaved himself out of the seat, locked the car, had stretched, coughed, scratched, then went after him.
His shoes sloshed with water, his socks were wringing wet, and his shirt and coat had not dried out in the night. The letter was damp in his pocket. The wind was sharp off the sea, raw on his face. A coastal cargo ship nestled on the sea's horizon line. The birds were up over the beach and over the marsh. He was cold, damp, and his stomach growled for food. Where did the arrogance come from, the belief that his small efforts had changed the movement of events? He wanted to be in bed, warmed, close to Vicky, and ordinary, without responsibility, free from the consequences of his actions. If he posted the letter he would have none of the things he thought he wanted. He slogged on. It would be the supreme moment of conceit if he posted the letter, it would be the statement of his belief that he changed events.
He found Chalmers sitting, very still, on the bench, and the dogs were beside him. Chalmers, never looking at the sea, wouldn't have seen the coastal cargo ship; he was watching the Southmarsh. What disturbed Markham most about him was that the young man seemed merely to tolerate him and feel no need for his company.
The bench was where Geoff Markham had met Dominic Evans, the shopkeeper. It was set high enough for him to overlook the sea, the beach, the sea wall and the marshland where the reed-tips whipped in the wind. The sun, throwing low light shafts, made it pretty. His mother would have liked it there, and his father would have taken a photograph.
Eight of them materialized, in single file, along the path behind the bench where Markham and Chalmers sat in silence.
Buried under the weight of their equipment they marched past the bench and briskly down towards the trees that shielded the shore-line of the marsh from his view. It would have been settled after the death of Meryl Perry. The secretary of state would have bowed to irresistible pressures and taken the control out of poor old Fenton's hands. The military would have stepped eagerly into the void he knew the men, or at least the unit, from Ireland. He knew the kit they carried and the weapons. He had seen the troopers from the Regiment slip away at dusk from Bessbrook Mill and the fortress at Crossmaglen, seen them run towards the threshing blades of the helicopters on the pads in the barracks at Dungannon and Newtown Hamilton. They were the quiet men who seldom spoke, who waited and nursed their mugs of tea and rolled their smokes and moved when the darkness came or the helicopters started up the rotors.
Markham watched the column snake down the path towards the Southrnarsh and the black water where the wildfowl bobbed in the low sun's light. Two carried the Parker Hale sniper rifles. One had the snub 66mm anti- armour launcher, another cradled a general-purpose machine-gun and was swathed with belt ammunition across his torso, one had the radio, the stun grenades and the gas grenades. Three went easily with their Armalite rifles held loosely. They didn't look at him, nor at Chalmers and his dogs. Geoff thought it was the moment that his relevance, and Cox's and
Fenton's, ended. Their faces and hands were blacked up. Sprigs of foliage were woven into their clothes. It was as if, he thought, in bitterness, the job was taken from boys and given to men. He looked obliquely at Chalmers beside him and the very calm of his face abetted the bitterness. Control had gone to the guns of the killing team. Everything he had done was set at nothing, snatched from him by the men with guns who went down into the marshland and the reed-beds. The last one had slipped from his sight.
'That's it, we're wasting our bloody time,' he said savagely.
Chalmers remained impassive, silent.
'Time we were gone. Time, if you know how to use one, for a bloody bath.'
Chalmers sat on the bench and his eyes searched the clear gold blue of the skies over the marshes.
'Sending you was ridiculous, a humiliation for the Service. They should have been put in twenty-four hours ago. They're the professionals, they're the bloody killers. They'll find him.' He stood up.
Chalmers squinted at a point high above the reed-beds.
'They won't find him.' His head never moved, his gaze never shifted.
'Enlighten me. On what is that stunning insight based?'
'They won't find him because he isn't here.' Chalmers spoke from the side of his mouth. His head was stock still, and he peered into the lightening sky.
'He isn't here?'
'Not here.'
'Then, excuse me, please, tell me, what the fuck are we doing?'
'He saved the life of the bird, and I have time for that, and now he's hurt… I have respect for the beasts where I work, I have a duty to them when they're hurt. He fed the bird and treated the bird's injury. The bird is searching for him and cannot find him. If the bird cannot find him then he's not here.'
Markham sagged back down on to the bench. He looked out over the reed-banks and the water. The wind came into his face and his eyes smarted.
He peered into the clearing sky. Far below where he looked were the birds of the marsh and the Regiment's troopers. He searched for it but it was a long time before he saw the speck of dark against the blue. He held it, and perhaps it turned, and he lost it. It was very high, where the winds would be fierce. Chalmers's eyes were never off it. Geoff Markham blinked and his eyes watered as they strained, again, to locate the speck. Beside him, Chalmers sat rock still and relaxed, leaning back as if to be more comfortable. His dogs scrapped at his feet. When Markham found the bird again, he could have yelled in triumph. He was trained in the analysis of covert computerized data, he was offered work at what they'd call the coalf ace of fiscal interpretation, and he could have shouted in excitement because his wet, sore eyes identified a speck moving at a thousand feet up, about a thousand yards away. He saw the bird, and it had moved, gone north, and it still searched. He could have hugged Chalmers because the keenness of this stinking youth's eyesight had given him hope, at last.
'I am sorry what I said was out of order. I apologize. Did you think of telling them, the military, that he wasn't here?'
'No.'
He wanted only to be alone.
A woman police officer, a cheerful, pleasant girl with a blonde pony-tail of hair and a crisp clean uniform, knelt awkwardly because of her belt, which carried handcuffs, gas canisters and a stick, on the hall carpet to help Stephen with a colouring book and crayons.
To be alone and to think of her.
Blake, dressed but with his shoes kicked off, slept on the settee in the living room. While his eyes were closed and his breathing regular, his hand rested on the butt of his gun in the holster of his chest harness, his radio burping staccato messages from his jacket pocket.
To remember her.
Davies, in shirtsleeves because he had two bars of the electric fire on, was at the familiar slot of the dining- room table with the newspaper spread out, reading the market and the financial comment. He coordinated the radio link to the crisis centre and the locations of the mobile patrols.
And to mourn.
He was not allowed, by Davies, to go upstairs to their bedroom.
'Not protected there, Mr. Perry, I'm sure you understand.'
He was not allowed, by Paget, to go out through the kitchen door into his sunlit garden.
'Rather you didn't, Mr. Perry, wouldn't be sensible.'
They denied him the space that he yearned for.
Perry sat on the floor between the mattresses and behind the sandbags.
Chalmers moved.
It was a full half-hour since Geoff Markham had given up on the search for the speck. The sky was clearer, brightening blue with pale cirrus corrugated lines of cloud, and it hurt more to look for the bird. He was thinking of the future of his career, whether he would be positioned back with Rainbow Gold, whether, he would be assigned to a university town where there were faculties of nuclear physics and microbiology growing botulisms at which Iranian students were enrolled, or whether he would be dumped into the new team working on illegal immigration, or the old Irish unit or narcotics..' when Chalmers moved.
