had done for them, sentenced them to the dropped lace curtains when they walked the village street and to dropped voices when they used the shop that was also the Post Office. After the raid there had been the surveillance and the clicking interruptions on their telephone line and the delay on their letters that most often took four days from postage to delivery.
'You're just a bloody fool to go to the pub.'
'Nobody'll tell on me.'
'You're so bloody arrogant, and so bloody naive.'
'They're my friends.'
'Friends?… You don't have any friends. They're junk, trash.
You have your mother, and you have me… You have no one else, Colt.'
His mother's hair had still been fair, soft sunlight gold, when the police had come that early morning. Now it was grey-white.
The medical people that they had traipsed to see, from one specialist to another, searching for better news, said that extreme stress hastened the spread of the cancer. The raid had only been the worst. There had been the time when Colt had stayed away a week, and the papers and the radio had carried the story of the bludgeoning of an animal scientist in his own home. Nothing had been said, but they had known.
After the raid, the two of them, together, had tidied the house.
Neither of them had mentioned the boy's name, not for hours, not until the work was finished. If he had mentioned the boy's name she would have broken. But he wasn't a rogue dog that he could have had put down if it bit the postman, he was their son.
There was no escape from the love, whatever the agony, whatever the confusion.
'Is there anything you want?'
'I didn't come here to take anything. I came only to see my mother.'
' D o you want money? I could go to the bank… '
'I need nothing. I have more money than I can spend.'
'You're a whore… ' And he bit on the word. He stepped back because for the briefest of moments he wondered if his son would strike him. Facing him was only the total calmness of the boy. It was, he thought, as if Colt had been through hell and fire and tempest and to be called an abusive name was merely trivial.
God, and he loved the boy. Colt's voice was gentle. 'Were you happy in France?'
'I had a cause, I had something to fight for.'
' Y o u didn't think that then.'
'It was right what I did, I knew it was right.'
' Y o u never thought about that.'
'What do you think I did it for?'
'Because it was freedom.'
His freedom had been being hunted, and never believing that he would be caught, tortured, shot, never believing that. Freedom had been making up his own rules, far from the armchair warriors at S.O.E., from the buggers who had never slept in a cave and never stripped a belt-fed machine gun and never run like the wind from a wired shunting yard.
'We're the same, Dad. You have to see that…'
He looked down into his son's face. God, and how he loved the boy.
He said, 'Before you go, if you can come again, please…'
The boy kissed his cheek. He hugged the boy.
He stood on the landing and watched his son lope away lightly down the staircase.
The shadows had gathered around him, and his age and his loneliness. As he went back into the bedroom to prepare the night medicines he heard the kitchen door close on his son's back.
A wild and awful night, a night when the badgers moved without threat of disturbance, when the rabbits crushed their bellies against the ground and fed fast, when the fox coughed a hoarse bark to bring a screamed answer from a vixen, when a tawny owl clung with talons extended to the ivy skein of an old oak.
A night on which an Astra car was parked for safety in the driveway of the local police constable in the adjacent village, across the parish border.
The night for a man who gloried in the wild and who would never be trapped. Colt was at home. He was at one with the darkness and the elements. He was as free as the badger and the fox and the owl in the oak above him.
Standing in the black doorway of the pillbox, he did not consider what error of his had brought men from the Security Service and the F . B. I, to the village. In his mind were images of animals transported to the slaughterhouse; of beagles with masks on their heads so that they breathed only nicotine smoke all the way to the first shadows of lung cancer; of a polar bear, its brain damaged by captivity stress, in the zoo at Bristol; of chickens reared in confinement so close that they could not walk nor beat their wings; of a gin trap tight on a bear's leg, and the animal in its pain gnawing at the limb that it might find crippled freedom.
Fran was close to him. With a slow and deliberate movement she pointed away to his right, to the fringe of the wood, to where the wood was directly behind the Manor House. He saw the movements.
T i s a dull sight
To see the year dying,
When winter winds
Set the yellow wood sighing:
Sighing, O sighing!'
' F o r Christ's sake, Bill, shut u p. '
'Edward Fitzgerald, perfectly good poet, didn't hit the big lime like Tennyson, but…'
'You'll wake the whole village. Is that what you want?'
'Just didn't want you to be bored.'
They had been in the wood for two hours.
' I ' m going to shift a few hundred yards along to get a clear view of the side of the house. Do you see the corner of the wood?
I'll be there. Sing out if you get lonely. Otherwise I'll be back before daybreak.'
'Yeah, okay…'Erlich hoped his regret wasn't plain to hear.
He felt the shake of the bivouac as Rutherford crawled away, and heard the sounds of his body scraping away through the leaves. He heard the wind sigh and whistle after the sound of Rutherford's movement was gone. He heard the ram splatter onto the bivouac. At the house, through his monoglass, he saw nothing.
Rutherford took pleasure in his slow progress along the wood's edge. Knees. Elbow, Knees. Elbows. And all the while. weeping the twigs from his path, stopping every two or three minutes to study the house and sweep his binoculars over the gardens. Me found a patch of leaves, almost dry, under a beech close to the furthest edge of the treeline and shrugged his way down into their cover. He settled into a nightmarish reverie ol long nights of surveillance in Armagh. He wondered what absurd notion had possessed him to leave his flask behind. A gift from Penny's father. This was the last time he'd go on night exercises with windy Americans without his flask. Anyone who talked that much had to be scared. Probably allergic to rabbits.
The scream…
Shit…
The scream was desperation.
He was on his feet. The scream was in the air and in the trees.
Where, where was the scream?
The cry. Had to be Erlich.
The cry was pain and terror.
He charged, blundering through the trees, through the low branches and the brambles. He couldn't see a blind thing, and he ran with his arms outstretched in front of him, barging off trees and fighting and kicking his way through the undergrowth.
Gasping and running, knowing that he had heard Erlich's scream.
A lifetime to where he had left Erlich, through the lashing branches and the catching, tearing bramble undergrowth. And he hadn't a weapon. He had nothing more lethal than a pencil torch in an inner pocket.
