'Please, don't.'
Her voice rattled in his ear above the wind and the rumble of the surf. 'Can't you understand anything?
Malachy, I'm not looking to humble you – I'm not in the bloody queue that was whacking you. Denial doesn't help you. Just repeating I don't know what happened won't lift you. It's shit.'
She sagged back.
'Thank you. I'll do my own suffering,' he said grimly.
Her lips pursed, head down, she started to dig in the rucksack. She found what she searched for. The size of an ironed and folded handkerchief, it was layers of silver baking foil. She said quietly, as if it were important to prove herself, that she was trained and could keep her head down when she squatted and knew about burying the stuff and tinfoil masked smells, and she said she had food. She was on her hands and knees and near to him.
She touched his arm. Her hand was on his wrist.
'I think I've realized it, the truth. You really don't know what happened. Each time you say it, it's honest. You don't know, it's the truth… I'm batting on – like some bloody shrink – about denial, but you actually don't know what happened. I can see that now. What I'm saying, Malachy, for going on like a pig, I'm sincerely sorry.'
He saw the regret on her face. He took her hand, small and cold, lifted it, brushed his lips against it and dropped it. He watched her crawl away, then disappear down into a gully, go clear of the wind, and resumed his watch on the sea, the waves and the surf.
She was, he realized, the first person who believed him – and no other bastard had. Except her, they had all rushed to judgement, vindictive or ignorant.
27 April 2004
He was led by the client from the hallway and into the living room, and young Kitchen was following him.
'Oh, that's a fine room, excellent dimensions, right for a family,' Horace Wield enthused. He owned his high- street business outright, did not have the clutter of partners. He liked to believe that, as an estate agent, he provided a better service than the chains that competed with him. It was all about reputation and building confidence with clients, whether they were buyers or sellers. This was a seller, and his first estimate was of an asking price of?449,000, and a bottom limit if the going was tough of?419,000. 'So much you can do with a room like this – have a bridge party, friends in for a football game on the telly, a kids' session, relatives round at Christmas… I'm confident that a house with a room of this size will, absolutely, not hang around, and it's very nicely decorated. People like that – spend an arm and a leg on the house and want to enjoy it, not have to rip the wallpaper straight off. Very tasteful. .. Thinking of going somewhere smaller, are we?'
They were. Their son was on the move, but they had a daughter up north and wanted to be closer. A mass of silver-framed photographs stood on the mantelpiece over the gas fire
– small children, the daughter and her husband, and a young man standing proudly in profile, wearing mess uniform.
'The carpets and curtains look best quality. Do I assume they'll be staying, available to a buyer? Always good if they can be left… Mr Kitchen will note that.'
Well, he'd taken a chance on that young man, and Horace Wield had built a flourishing, trusted business on following the instinct of his nose. When he had advertised in the local free sheet for a trainee assistant agent he had been bombarded by youths with earrings and bulky women in trouser suits with shoulder pads, and there had been young Kitchen, who was ten years too old to be a trainee assistant, but had a bearing about him, and damn fine shined shoes.
Had something of sadness and something remote, distant, a presence and a good voice, had come out of the army, wanted civilian life. Horace Wield had gone with his nose, and it was a Friday that marked the end of young Kitchen's first week. Of course, the money was rubbish for a man of his age, but he'd drilled the magic word 'prospects' into him
– come Monday when he had Rotary, or Tuesday when he had golf, he would seriously consider letting young Kitchen out on his own, if the property was at the market's lower end. Truth was, he liked him, and thought a bit of polish walked with him.
When they reached the kitchen, and when they were taken up the stairs to see three bedrooms and a bathroom with walk-in shower, he had found the same cleansed perfection of the living room and the garden. A door off the hall was opened. This was a different room, an untidy space… a shrine.
He waffled, 'Ah, a little place where a chap can shut himself away. I suppose, a bit of a refuge. Sort of room every man should have. You're getting the details, Mr Kitchen?'
Why a shrine? There must have been four more pictures of the son in uniform, but not best dress. Helmeted and in a flak-jacket; unshaven and in fatigues; with an arm round a colleague, crouched in front of a small tank; turning to the camera and grinning and wearing full combat kit with a mosque dome and minaret tower as background – and in every picture a rifle was held in obvious readiness for use.
Two of the pictures were held with drawing-pins to the shelves of books, one was on the window-ledge, another was adhesive-taped to the side of the screen. Normally, Horace Wield would not have talked so fully at a first meeting with a client. He did it for the benefit of young Kitchen, to give him a feel for the patter.
'Don't tell me-your boy's out in Iraq. That's a hell-hole.'
The boy was in the Military Police. Had done Kosovo, then been posted to Al-Amara.
T sympathize. It must be a considerable anxiety to you both having him in that awful country.'
His wife refused to look at pictures of their son in Iraq, which was why they were in his den.
'Very brave young fellows, and a scandalous lack of support for them from too many back home. We should be right behind them. I think every last one of them is a hero – yes, a hero. We ought all to be grateful for their sense of duty and courage… Anyway, this is a very useful space for any member of a family and of any age – don't you think so, Mr Kitchen?'
He looked round, and the doorway was empty. When they went into the hall, Horace Wield assumed that his trainee assistant was in the kitchen and measuring, or in the con-servatory, noting details. A frown twitched at his forehead: against the coatstand was the clipboard that young Kitchen had carried. A chill draught came through the front door, which had been left ajar.
Gaunt climbed the stairs.
As a precaution, he had emptied his wallet of all credit cards and identification documents, and had left only enough money for the taxi ride to this feral place and a taxi back, assuming the impossible – that he could find one.
The driver who had brought him from the gates of Vauxhall Bridge Cross and had dropped him in the heart of the estate had leered at him as he took the money and said, 'You sure this is where you want to be, sir? Sorry and all that, but we don't do waits here.'
'Quite sure, thank you.' He had seen youths loitering at a corner where the graffiti was thick. They had hoods over their heads and scarves across their faces, and he had seen a man with two German shepherds, studded collars on short leashes standing impatiently while they peed in turn on mud beside a pavement.
He had lifted his tie knot, pulled a little more of his handkerchief from the breast pocket, swung his furled umbrella forward and stepped out for the block's entrance. He had looked at flat roofs and wondered from which three youths had been suspended, and at lamp posts and wondered at which a man had been trussed.
He avoided human excreta on the stairs, and at the second level he used his umbrella tip to ease a syringe into a corner. He came out on to the walkway. The taxi driver had said, 'I wouldn't have any of mine live here. They'd be better off in Bosnia… Good luck, sir, and watch your back.' He went by the doorways with the locked barricades, went past a door behind which a child howled and saw the number – where the man, Kitchen, with the cross on his shoulder, had lived. He had spoken half an hour earlier, before leaving the safety of VBX, to Polly and… Another door, another barricade. He rang the bell.
'Mrs Johnson? A very good morning to you, Mrs Johnson. Tony sent me.'
%
He made tea.
He smelt age and wondered if he, alone in the dotage of his retirement, would smell the same.
He was told in which cupboard he would find the biscuit tin.
He carried in the tray, poured through a strainer and was instructed on how much milk she took. He used old-world charm to relax her, complimented her on the decoration of her home, the choice of pictures and the
