frowned and her eyes blinked, like they weren't sure.
As she stood, her heavy coat was caught for a moment against her father's leg, and the lining showed and the deep pocket and a cock pheasant's head jutting from the pocket. For a moment, Fran's fingers clung to old Brennie's shoulder, because it could not be real.
He stood his ground in the doorway.
Then the explosion of her movement. She ran across the room.
Four feet from him, she jumped. Her thighs were on his hips, her arms were round his neck.
Not a word said. Not a word from any of them.
Colt kissed Fran. Fran kissed Colt.
Old Brennie grunted something, and none of the kids knew what he said. But old Brennie went to the bar and he slapped down his pound coin, and told old Vic to get up a bitter dash.
Colt felt the pulsing energy of his Fran and her warmth. And when he had let her down, then he held her face in his hands, let his fingers rest on her cheeks, and he kissed her lips and her chin and cheeks and her nose and her eyebrows and her ears. He kissed her until old Brennie shook his arm and handed him the pint. He held her against his chest, and he drank the pint straight down, and tossed the glass at the group of them, and Zack caught it, and old Vic was already pulling his pump.
They were all on their feet and round him.
Zack said, 'Shit, boyo, you shouldn't be here…'
Kev said, 'Colt, the filth watch for you, they're here regular.. . '
Dazzer said, 'There was a Yank in the village… '
Charlie said, 'You show yourself here, Colt, you're for the fucking jump… '
Billy said, 'The pretty boy, the copper, he's always sniffing round your house… '
Johnny said, 'What we heard, they've guns when they come looking for you… '
'Have you come back for your Ma, young 'un?'
'Yes, Brennie, I came back to see her… '
'I was sorry to hear about your Ma.'
'Thank you, Brennie.'
Old Vic had come into the bar from behind the counter. He carried the filled pint sleeve glass to Colt. Old Vic went to the main bar door and he pushed it shut and he set the bolt across.
Colt saw it in old Vic's face. He was expected to drink up, and he was expected to get his arse out. Old Vic wouldn't want trouble. Old Vic had taken his position by the counter, his arms folded across his chest. He was waiting for Colt to be gone.
'Where you been, Colt?' Kev asked.
Colt drank.
Where he had been, what he had done, that would mean nothing to any of them. Old Brennie used to claim that he had never in his life travelled further than Warminster and the magistrates's Court. Billy and Zap had been as far as Southampton, to watch football, and given that up as a waste of weekend drinking time. Zack had been to Bristol for Crown Court and prison, Australia was the moon, Iraq was the stars. Kev had been to the special school in Warminster that handled pupils too disruptive for the comprehensive.
'I've been around,' Colt said. 'Here and there…'
His father would not have known the names of any of them.
His mother would have known their mothers through the Institute. They were the dregs of the village, Colt's father would have said.
Fran said, 'Are you going to drink, or are you going to come walking?'
She took off her heavy coat and slung it to her father, and the pheasant spilled on the flagstones.
Nothing changed, not in two years. The poacher's daughter was tall, big-boned, big-hipped. She had red flame hair that would have been on her shoulders if it had not been caught in a pony tail with an elastic band. Strong as a bullock, old Brennie had said. She took Colt's hand and walked him to the door. None of them would tell on him. Most likely, they'd have one of old Brennie's snare wires round their neck if they did.
They went out through the yard at the back of the pub. They crossed two fields, bent and close to the hedgerows.
There was a pillbox on the high ground above the village, to the west. There were brambles across the entrance, and under one of the gun-slits there were the diggings of a badger sett. It was where they had always come, it was where they had been two years back.
'Is the American for you?'
' Y e s. '
'What does he want with you?'
'First choice would be to kill me, second choice would be to take me.'
'We'll give him a run,' she said.
It wasn't raining now and Frlich used the bivouac cover as a groundsheet. He was a lew yards back into the trees, but he had a clear view down the slope of the fields to the house. He reckoned that he was six hundred yards from the house. An image intensifier would have been a help, but he would have to make do with the monocular glass. From his vantage point he could see the high narrow window on the stairs and he could see the kitchen window, both lit. The rest of the house was dark. The bedrooms were on the front of the house.
The isolation oppressed him. He must have been mad to have taken himself off to a God-awful lonely wood where the birch saplings were dripping and the cold rain water splattered from the big oak branches. He thought of Don and Nick and Vito and their so far empty bulletins, and imagined their warm, convivial evening in an Athens taverna. He saw Colt's father, clear, come down the stairs. He saw him framed in the back door at the kitchen, and he thought he saw the dog come past the man's legs, and a few minutes later the door was opened again, then closed.
The kitchen light went out. And then the stair light. After those fights had gone Erlich's spirits sank. He felt dismally alone. The shouting from the car park at the pub carried to him, and the revving of car engines, and after that only deeper silence beyond the sighing of the wind in the trees above him. He was scared. He nearly jumped out of his sleeping bag when a young roe buck passed ten feet from him, hugging the edge of the field. And he muttered an expletive in fear when a pigeon, alarmed by the slight shift of his body, exploded out of the trellis of branches over his head. He heard a fox vixen call, and once he heard the death screams of a rabbit and didn't know what predator was at its throat. There had been a moon to start with, occasional and in between the fast-moving cloud formations, but that moon was lost in thick cloud.
When it started to rain, he wrapped himself tight in the bivouac cover. He lay still. It was the first time since he had left Washington that he had missed the comfort of the sharp shape against his chest of a standard issue,. 38 calibre, Smith and Wesson revolver.
Good loving, just as it had been two years back.
She said that she had known he was back when she found the car hidden away in the old barn at the edge of the twelve acre.
She had known he was back and had carried three bales of straw to the pillbox.
She had stripped him off, she had stripped herself off.
They were on the rough straw in the pillbox.
She was great and she cared about nothing, other than getting the condoms on him.
The third time, she tickled him to life, so he could be useful to her again, with a stalk of straw.
Her on Colt, Colt on her, her back on Colt.
Soft and gentle loving, and fun.
And the talk was soft and gentle. Not heavy and not serious, because that wasn't their way, but fun…
' D o you remember…?'
When they had gone to the pheasant pens on the estate, let the lot out, screwed up the whole season's shooting for the posh crowd.
When they had been out at night, the night before the hunt had been due on the estate and the Home Farm land, and they had laid the trails with the aniseed in the sacking bag, and they had sat the next morning on the high ground and watched and laughed till it hurt at the chaos, and the Master looking as though he'd do his heart.
Fran hadn't joined the Front. Fran had said, after Colt had taken her to one meeting, that the A. L. F. were a
