another man had been kicked in the face – and she could taste the stale scent of his mouth.
'I really appreciate this, Mr Rahman/ Ricky Capel babbled. 'I gave my word to my grandfather, to old Percy, that I'd come here. He's never been himself, but it was important to him that I came. They were his friends – could have been him if they hadn't shipped him out the squadron and sent him to Egypt. I'm grateful you've taken the time.'
There was a shrug and a wallet was produced.
Money was passed to him, and Ricky ducked his head in thanks. He chose, from the flower-seller at the gates, two bunches of red roses, each with a half-dozen blooms. In the car he sat in the back seat and water ran from the roses' stems on to his trouser leg.
He looked around him and saw the high mature trees of the cemetery and the banks of rhododendrons.
Couldn't say when it had last happened to him, and it was not a mood he liked, but he felt moved by the great quiet of the place. He had not been to a cemetery since his grandmother, Winifred, had been buried, and it had pissed with rain and his best suit had never been right afterwards – and he hadn't cared about her death because the old woman had loathed him. He thought this place lovely. The Bear stopped the car. Ricky climbed out, but Rahman waved for him to leave the flowers on the seat – which confused him, but he followed Rahman.
They walked to a wide space among the trees, where long grass made a cross, with a square, high-walled building at its heart. There were no markers here of individual graves, not like he'd seen on TV.
Each of the grassed lengths, he reckoned, was at least a hundred yards long.
'What's this, then?'
Rahman said, sarcastic, 'It is what the friends of your grandfather did, Ricky. It is where German people are. They died from the bombs when the RAF made the firestorm. The air burned. Prisoners from a concentration camp dug the pits and there are more than forty thousand souls buried here. In one week, more than forty thousand.'
'Well – Nazis, weren't they?'
'I expect some, Ricky, were children.'
He grinned. 'Well, going to be Nazis, weren't they?'
He gazed around him. Couldn't really comprehend it, not forty thousand people killed, burned up, in one week.
At the car, he was passed his roses and they walked across the aisle road and down a neat pathway. Then it was like he had seen on TV. He faced rows of white stones set in careful lines. Bloody beautiful, and clumps of flowers growing in little areas, no weeds, in front of each. He had never been to a place like it, and so quiet. He said what the names were, old Percy's friends, and he took one sector and Rahman another, and the driver a third part – and the stones were all so clean, like they'd been there since last week and not the best part of sixty years. It made him shiver, thinking of it – men in a plane and all that flak hitting it and the plane starting to dive, out of control, and not able to get out, and coming down from three and a half miles up. How long would that bloody take? Made him feel kind of weak. All of them, heroes, weren't they? Could he have hacked it? Yes
… sure.. – certain
… He was Ricky Capel. But, the shiver and the weakness had come on bad and he was swaying on his feet.
The shout came. Rahman had found them, the only ones of the crew who had been intact enough for identification. Two stones side by side. A wireless-operator's grave and a bomb-aimer's grave, and they'd both been friends of his grandfather. He never did photographs and had never owned a camera: cameras and pictures, to Ricky, were the Crime Squad and the Criminal Intelligence Service. If he went, and it was rare, to a wedding, he'd spend half the reception making bloody certain he was not in a photograph, that no camera was aimed at him
Would have been nice to have a picture to take back to old Percy, though. One of them had been twenty years old and one was nineteen, and there were pansies and daffodils in front of the two stones. He stood in front of them, pulled in his stomach and straightened his spine, and the rain fell on him -
Rahman was on the phone, which didn't help the dignity of it. The uppers of his shoes were wet from the grass and his trousers clung to him. A full minute he stood there, and Rahman came off one call, then took another. Then, doing it for his grandfather, he laid the roses in front of each stone in remembrance of a wireless-operator and a bomb-aimer, dead in the first week of August 1943, stepped away and felt good for what he'd done.
As they walked back to the car, Ricky said, 'I expect, Mr Rahman, you're proud to be Albanian, and I'm proud to be British. You'll love your country, Mr Rahman, as I love mine. Mad, isn't it? You come to a place like this and you're proud. Daft, isn't it, how a place like this gets to you? Don't mind saying it, I love my country…'
No one, in twenty-six months, had come to seek her out.
She lived in south-east central England in a town best known for its budget-cost airport and motor- manufacturing industry: Luton, with a population of 160,000. Her home was with her parents, who had come two decades before to Britain to escape the brutal ravages of political oppression in the Libyan city of Benghazi. That she had been born a healthy, vigorous baby had been by chance, her father had often told her. Her mother had been two months pregnant with her when the thugs of the regime's secret police had come to their home and beaten each of her parents in turn, on suspicion of handing out leaflets of protest at the godless rule of Gaddafi; blows from boots and batons had been used against her mother's belly. Her father, once a teacher of philosophy at the University of Benghazi, worked in Luton on a production line, manufacturing windscreen wipers for vans and lorries.
Through childhood and her teenage years she had harboured hate for any who rejected the true faith of Islam. She had been chosen at a mosque in the town: her fervour had been recognized. A video had been shown, in a back room to a selected few, of what the imam called the declaration of a martyr widow. A Chechen woman, clothed in black and veiled, had worn the belt holding the explosives, the wiring and the trigger button, and had made a statement to the camera of her happiness at gaining the chance to strike against the Russian enemy who had murdered her young husband. She had spoken – not in a language understood in the mosque's back room
– in a voice of calm, love and resolve. The film had continued with a distant street shot. A slight, small figure in black had approached a checkpoint of soldiers and when she reached them there had been the detonation, fire, smoke and chaos. At that moment, the woman in Luton had stood before the video ended, and cheered in exultation, in admiration at the blessing of martyrdom.
Now she never watched such videos and was never invited to the back room of the mosque. She worked in a creche with children too young for school, while their mothers stood in lines and manufactured
PVC
windows. She was good with the children and her employers praised her dedication – and she waited. A man would come, either to her home or to the creche, one day. He would say: 'And He sends down hail from mountains in the sky, and He strikes with it whomever He wills, and turns it from whomever He wills.' She would answer: 'The vivid flash of its lightning nearly blinds the sight,' His statement and hers were in the Book, 24:43. Five days a week she played with and amused small children, and at the end of each day she was thanked by mothers for her kindness and devotion.
When he came, she would slip away from the creche and would do what was asked of her.
'What we cannot accept, Freddie, is a further failure.'
'Of course not.'
The meeting between Frederick Gaunt and the assistant deputy director took a familiar choreography.
He paced as he talked and the ADD, Gilbert, stayed awkwardly hunched at his desk.
'Quite simply put, a new failure would be intolerable.'
'Of course.'
Rain laced on the window and the desk light failed to lift the gloom.
'It just cannot be countenanced, Freddie.'
'I'm on board. Bodies crammed in morgues, mutilated victims stacked on corridor trolleys waiting for doctors, the shock and trauma of blood on the pavements. Without reservation, I accept that a major atrocity in our cities is not acceptable. No argument.'
