Watching the light, he shed from his mind the source of the fear that had nagged, eaten at him all the hours they had waited. A man stalked him. A man followed him. Straining into the darkness and seeing the roll of the light up and against the cloud, the thought of the man was wiped from his mind.
Squinting, he saw the light beyond the dim beach expanse, and the cresting lines of the surf… He'd be wading into it, into the force of the waves – that was what Harry had said – into that bloody sea, in bloody darkness… but he was Ricky Capel, and he was a big man. The wind hammered against him and would have pitched him back if he had not held, tight, to the arm beside him.
'Should stay patient – I don't reckon we should move too soon, that's my opinion.'
The light shone out ahead of her, and was away to her right, and she made her calculation on the point of the beach it approached.
Methodically, Polly rolled the sleeping-bag and the sand in it, filled the rucksack and wriggled its straps over her shoulders.
Then she hit the combination of buttons on her mobile for a secure call, and dialled. She heard it ring out twice before an automated voice – not Freddie Gaunt's – informed her that she was being diverted. It was answered. Crisply, without preamble, she was asked to speak.
'It's out there, the light. I can't be exact, it's dark as hell, and I don't know the sea, but I estimate it about a mile offshore. Damn, damn, they've killed the light
… It was there, was coming in. I suppose it was on long enough to alert the target group, b u t… '
There was criticism. She should not 'estimate' or
'suppose'. Facts were required of her. She swore under her breath, soundless. She could not estimate why Gaunt had done it to her, could not suppose why he had quit on her.
'There was a light offshore, on for eight minutes. At the moment it was switched off, the light was one nautical mile from the tideline.'
They wanted bullshit, they would get it. She did not know whether the light had been visible for six minutes or nine minutes; neither did she know the length of a nautical mile nor see the tideline. She imagined them round a table crowded with phones, consoles and screens, with maps dominating their room's walls, and… She was asked for the location of Kitchen.
'Don't know, and that is neither an estimate nor a supposition. I have not the faintest idea where he is.
So as you understand, it is pitch bloody black out here, and it is peeing with rain and blowing a gale. He could be a mile away or ten yards away, and that is a fact. It is also a fact that I have not been issued with night-vision equipment.'
The cold cut through Polly, but they would not have been interested in that. She was asked what were Kitchen's intentions when he left her.
'Can't estimate and can't suppose – not a clue. I will call you on further developments. Out.'
A career gone down the drain? Perhaps. Her teeth rattled as she shivered. Perhaps… Did she give a damn if a career was lost? Maybe… She pocketed the phone. Polly wondered if she now had the status of being a flagged pin on a wall map. She scrambled down off the dune and tumbled to the start of the loose sand that the sea never reached. She was perplexed that she had not seen an answering light from away to her right on a point of high ground, did not understand that, could not reckon how the trawler would be guided in – or the men to be picked up would be floundering in water, would be battered by the surf – and was confused. She went, slowly and carefully, below the dunes and above the beach, stopped to listen, then went on, stopped again… It hurt so bloody much that Freddie Gaunt had quit on her.
'Makes you think, doesn't it? The last chap here – his feet where we are. Wagons out at the front with everything he and his family own, and he's looking around at all that's familiar, then he's going to the door, and going to nail it shut after him, and then he'll be joining his neighbours in flight. And the enemy is over the hill – not quite literally, but the barbarians are at the gates… and this is where he stood for the last time.'
It no longer rained and the wind had slackened.
Frederick Gaunt knelt in the pit and the high lights glistened the mud and he scraped with his trowel at the edge of the small patch of uncovered mosaic. He did not know the man beside him, had not dug with him before. In a few minutes they would break for tea from an urn and that would be welcome for warmth and would be respite from the monologue in his ear
… The man was young, lean-faced and lean-bodied, and scraped and talked with matching intensity.
'I suppose he knew it was coming – yes, he'd have realized that his time was up. Must have wounded him to think that civilization, all of the comforts of a building like this, was going to be tossed over, and that the day of the hordes – Goths, Visigoths, Picts, you name them – had come, and the start of a Dark Age with them. He wouldn't have known it, but I think it's a law of history that new forces will inevitably overwhelm an old order.'
The site was in Wiltshire, south of Keysley Down and to the west of Berwick St Leonard. It was approached by a rutted farm track, and was lit – at fifteen minutes to midnight – by a row of generator-powered arc-lights. Negotiations with the landowner had given the diggers a clear seven days and seven nights to work on the villa, and after that the excavated ground would be covered with thick plastic sheeting, which would in turn be covered with the moved soil and sods of the field. It was the third night
… Until that afternoon, before his meeting and his butchery at VBX, Gaunt had not thought he had the vaguest chance of joining these enthusiasts. They were mostly students, recruited from a south-coast university, but he had been allocated to the team leader, who talked.
'Inevitable that it'll all come crashing down once the decadence sets in. Our chap, who stood here in his sandals, he'd become too comfortable – had too much wealth and too much privilege – and he'd lost the hardness to fight. That's it, isn't it? His civilization, morally corrupt, could not compete with the simple brutality of the barbarian – so he ran and left his home to sixteen hundred years of ruin and pillage, then the stones of the walls were taken, soil was washed by the rain over what was left, then it was buried and eventually we pitched up. Comfort and decadence, they're killers for any society confronted by an enemy that's hungry, ruthless.'
At the extremity of the mosaic there were stone slabs and then the first signs of the praefurnium, the stoke nole, and in the mud that he lifted on his trowel Gaunt found a small piece of compressed black material. With near reverence he placed it in the bucket by his elbow. When they took tea he would show it to the site surveyor: a piece of charcoal that could be radio-carbon-dated, that could tell them when, to the year, a fire had been lit before the arrival of the forces of that day's axis of evil. He found the man's thesis not irritating but marginally amusing.
'What I believe frightening is that corruption is at our gates now and tonight… Trust me, I'm a general practitioner – know what I mean? You should see what crosses my surgery five days a week, nine hours a day… I promise you, I'm not a doom merchant, but we're busy losing our way. Drug addiction, teenage pregnancy, child abuse and paedophilia, debt entrapment, obesity, alcoholism, benefit dependency, ignorance and illiteracy, and every symptom of yobbery.
I see it, and I practise in a little backwater, in Devizes.
It's the drugs culture that's the worst – and so few seem to care… What seems to me to be so wretchedly stupid is that we are preaching for our failing lifestyle to be adopted by Islamic states. Such conceit.'
He stiffened. The trowel slipped from his hand.
Gaunt, working at the dig site with the voices – and sometimes the laughter – of young people around him, had felt rare tranquillity. He no longer scraped for charcoal pieces or for bone scraps that had been thrown away, centuries before, on to the cut wood and open-cast coal in the praefurnium… He had believed he had escaped, and had not. What now was relevant?
As if a nerve in him was pinched, he saw himself as an old warrior too tired for combat when the barbarians swarmed at the gates. A man who spoke of a society, decadent and doomed, in the corridors of Vauxhall Bridge Cross, would – Gaunt thought – be taken to the stake and burned alive as a heretic. Did a doctor from Devizes tell a truth that none dared name? It was a mandatory-death-sentence offence, in the offices of VBX, to suggest that victory was not assured.
'I hope you don't mind me prattling on… Do you think our time's up, like this chap's was? I wonder about it. Is all this we hear of the new fundamentalist enemy just modern-speak for barbarians at the gates?
Are we now as decadent as our chap, standing here for the last time? Quite a rum thought: in sixteen hundred years, folk will be scratching at the foundations of my home and getting all excited when they've found the sewer pipe and can tell what I ate, and have a chuckle and say, 'Yes, he'd have known his time was up.' Sorry… sorry, talking too much, my wife says I always do… What's this?'
