the confusion of the expressions of the postman and the carpenter and the grave-digger, as if they also had not understood.
It was important to the Headmaster to keep his secret as long as it was possible for him to survive the pain.
The music from the hall in his school beat at the meshed grille high in the door of the cell.
' After the music, after they were drunk, they might come back to the cell with the fire… He did not know how long he could protect his secret, but by the night, by the time they were drunk, surely the young man would have turned away from the evil that was Rosenovici. It was his hope. 'Run hard, young man,' he murmured to the walls of the cell. 'Run hard so that I do not betray you…' She had offered him berries from her store that was under the rags of her bed, while they waited. The berries were bullet-hard, dried through, and he estimated they had been picked the last autumn from the dog rose brambles in the wood, and from the branches of thorn trees. They had waited an hour in the cave, as the shadows had fallen into darkness, for the Headmaster. It was all in gestures because they had no language. He showed her the palms of his hands, rejecting the berries, then declining the root section that she offered. The Headmaster had said he would come, and they had waited. And he knew as certainty that she did not have the strength to come, across country, with him to the cease-fire line, and he did not have the language to persuade her, nor to tell her that the Headmaster must record her statement. Penn would have bet, high stakes, that the Headmaster would return. After the first trumpet call of the big owl from a high tree down towards the valley, she wrapped her shawl tighter around her face, she knotted the string more closely around her overcoat, and she replaced the berries and the root in her food store under the rags, and she stood. Penn smiled at her, to reassure her, and did not know whether she saw his smile in the cave's gloom. He had the pistol in the pocket of his coat and a spare magazine, and he checked that the pistol was armed and on 'safety'. He felt a skein of worry, that the Headmaster had not come. It was Katica Dubelj's decision that they should wait no longer for the Headmaster. She took his hand, as if she could reassure him. He was trained by A Branch of the Security Service, he carried a Browning 9mm automatic pistol, there were four hand grenades in his backpack, and the shrivelled-up woman, eighty plus years of life lived, reckoned he needed her reassurance… Christ. She babbled words at him, and the only word that he caught was the name of 'Dorrie'. Going back to Dome's place, Dome's death… and he knew her only by the words of others who held the love, and by the photograph, and nothing before in his life had mattered so much as the truth of Dorrie Mowat's village, Dorrie Mowat's killing. He would go from Rosenovici. He would not return to the cave. It was the best time for him to say his thanks to her. He had his hands on her light shoulders and he kissed the old woman softly, on her forehead, below the line of the stinking tight shawl, and she pecked at his cheek, stretching up, with her dried mouth that had no teeth. The humility dug into him. He hoped that he would never again feel the arrogance that was the trademark of a watcher of A Branch. He hoped that he would never again swagger in conceit… She laughed, guttural, and dragged him out of the cave. They went fast down the narrowed track from the cave. All the time she held his hand. He scrambled to keep up with her skipping short stride. They came nearer to the high tree where the big owl shouted. Gaps in the tree trunks, and Penn saw the small pin lights of the village across the stream. The wind was coming into the trees, and Penn heard the murmur of music from the village across the stream. She went quickly and pulled him clumsily after her. It was the movement of a scavenging vixen fox. When they were out of the wood, she used the overgrown hedge at the side of the field, scurried close to the spread hazel and the thorn. Stopping and scenting and seeming to sniff for danger, and going on. No shadows now. The gold from the sun gone grey behind the trees above Rosenovici. She never lost her grip of him… He grinned to himself. First she had felt the need to reassure him, now she did not trust him to move silently in darkness. They went by the corner of the field, not stopping. A sharp thought… where was the Headmaster, why was the Headmaster not with them?… Sharp, because she hurried him past the black pit of the dug grave. She stopped, suddenly, and he cannoned into her back, and she turned, only a slight outline in the darkness, and her finger jabbed at him, as if she criticized the child she led, as if bloody Penn knew nothing of covert movement. She waited, the vixen fox, at the broken gate at the end of the lane, and listened to the night. He heard only the bleating music and the grind of a swinging door and the creaking movement of fallen rafters. Penn was led to her house. He was taken into the house, through the open and hanging door. She was miming what she had seen. She stood at the window at the front of her house, and she pushed her head against the shards of the broken glass, identified what had been her viewpoint. Penn was not yet accustomed to the dark of the interior before he was pulled again and his feet crunched the glass and he cursed, and she hissed her complaint. She took him back out into the lane. Now she loosed his hand. He stood in front of Katica Dubelj's house and he watched, squinting to see, the mime act of the eyewitness. She was the guards, and she seemed to kick some forward, and to beat others as with the stock of a rifle. She was the walking wounded, and she seemed to carry some, and she seemed to drag others. She spoke the name, she was Dorrie Mowat, and she seemed to support two heavy men, and her arms were out, and she seemed to buckle under the weight of the men, and she seemed to turn once and aim a kick back behind her. She took his hand again. She walked Penn back through the fallen gate and into the field. They slithered together on the wet of the grass and the weeds, and across the tyre ruts left by the jeeps. Penn was led to the edge of the pit. She made the mime again. She was the guards, and she moved to take their places in a half circle facing the pit, and she seemed to aim down towards the ground. She was the wounded, sitting. She was the wounded, lying. She said the name, and she was Dorrie Mowat, and she seemed to crouch down on one knee and her arms were outstretched as if she held the shoulders of two men against her small body, and her mouth moved as if she shouted a defiance. She was the bulldozer and she growled and she jerked up her arms as she walked the length of the pit, and she seemed to throw back the pit's earth. He watched, and he would forget nothing. He would not forget that Dorrie and the wounded men had watched the bulldozer gouge out their grave. She scrambled across the earth wall and down into the pit. He could barely see her, the black-grey shadow shape against the black-grey earth of the pit. The music, across the stream, was a frenzy. She lay in the mud at the bottom of the pit. She was the wounded and waiting. She stood. She made the knife thrust and she made the chopping blow of a hammer… She moved, a pace. She seemed to stand above the next of the wounded, waiting, and she thrust with the knife and chopped with the hammer.. . another pace.. another… Penn forced himself to watch. Dorrie had been the last in the line, Dorrie and the boy that she loved. He had to watch Katica Dubelj, because it was what he had come for. She was a guard, she was a man from the village where the music played across the stream. She seemed to try to pull them apart, Dorrie and her boy, and she recoiled back and held her eyes as if extended fingers had been punched into them. She spoke the name. The whisper. 'Milan Stankovic.' She went crab fast to the near end of the pit, and her hand was first at her face to show the length of the beard. 'Milan Stankovic.' She was Milan Stankovic, and she seemed to hold a pistol in her hand. Stopping, aiming, the pistol hand kicking, a pace… stopping, aiming, the pistol hand kicking, a pace… This was hard for Penn to watch, Milan Stankovic working methodically down the line and fetching the last life from the wounded who had been stabbed and bludgeoned… Stopping, aiming, the pistol hand kicking, a pace… She did not hurry herself, she made each movement as she had seen it, she was the eyewitness… Stopping, aiming, the pistol hand kicking, a pace… Going closer to Dorrie Mowat and her boy. She seemed to stand above them, then reach down as if to break the hold, and then she seemed to double away and clutch her hands at her groin as if that was where the kick had gone. She was reeling back. She was reaching for the knife and slashing. She was reaching for the hammer and crashing it down. She was aiming the pistol. The pistol hand kicked twice. She whispered the name, 'Milan Stankovic.'
He turned away.
It was what he had come to find…
The power of the light seared into Perm's face.
Thirteen.
His eyes saw only the white brightness of the light. There were excited shouts from in front of him and then all around. The light stripped him bare. He stood in the white brightness. He dared not move. If the fear, the panic, had not been frozen into him in that moment when the light caught him, then he might have tried to duck away or throw himself to the edge of the light, but the fear was in him and with the fear was blindness. The old woman had been behind him. She had been in the pit behind him when he had turned away. With the shouts, with the click of the safety catches, there was a sudden stifled scream, a man's hoarse pain. The light never left Penn. It was what he himself would have done, or what his instructors from far back would have told him to do. 'Put the light down,
