What had he done? Their backs to him, they had headed for the door. Now he sat in his chair and thought of his son, Anwar, who was betrayed by his own father. He had heard their car speed away, and knew they would be going fast to the police headquarters in Alexandria on Sharia Yousef. He wept and thought that his own flesh and blood had destroyed him.
As he shrugged out of his overcoat and hitched his umbrella handle on the hook, Gloria gave him the signal received, via the Cairo station, from Alexandria. He read the name, then said it out loud as if that reinforced its weight: 'Anwar Maghroub…
Well, Mr Maghroub, I think I hear the clink of handcuffs on you/
Gaunt listened and she played him the tape from the answer-machine, then passed him the transcript she had typed.
'All tightening nicely. Please, what's in my diary this afternoon?'
'You are seeing the nurse, the annual health review, blood pressure, et cetera – I did tell you.'
'Be so kind, cancel it.'
She mimicked horror. 'The AHR is set in granite, about as compulsory as anything gets.'
He grinned, acted sheepish. 'Cancel it, thank you, with abject apologies, and plead an appointment with God,'
He began to smack his console's keys furiously. For fifteen minutes, in a document he entitled 'Rat Run', which was littered with typographical errors, he wrote the report, some material sourced from provenance and some not. He spilled down through the paragraphs: what had been told him by a pensioner widow; the story of an unpaid debt; the heresies of an expert in Islamic studies; the nightmares of a Thames House colleague at Belmarsh magistrates' court; the detail given by a harbourmaster; where Polly Wilkins was, and the hired hand she had recruited…
After he had finished, Gloria tidied and printed it.
Carrying his report, Gaunt went to heaven by the elevator, briefed the assistant deputy director, and requested that a meeting should be called for early afternoon.
Back in his room, he lowered his blind and shut out that perfect, privileged view of the river. He loosed his laces, kicked off his shoes, swung his heels on to his desk, tilted back his chair – and reflected that a chaotic, confused investigation was now close to satisfaction, cursed himself for presumption – then cat-napped.
'Come on, what have you seen?' She knew he held back but could not fathom why.
She was cold, chilled to her bones by the wind, and the old man kept a distance from her. She had been up on the platform when he had come back. He had not joined her but had squatted down against the pole she had helped to strengthen. She had come down the rickety ladder and had sat beside him, but then he had stood and moved away from her. She had closed the distance between them, and again he had moved.
Had he walked the shoreline? He had nodded, non-committal.
Had he seen anything of interest? He had pointed down to the little patch of spread feathers, then pointed up and away into the distance, and she had identified the harrier above a reed bed.
Had he watched people out in the wilderness? He had shrugged, as if the movement of people was of no matter to him. Had he noted the presence of strangers on this part of the island? He had snorted, then looked away.
She shivered, and the motion made the words in her throat croak.
'I think, Oskar, that tonight my business in your paradise will be finished. After it is finished, I will never return… I am here to find strangers who have come to Baltrum… Oskar, I need your help in finding them.' She spoke softly, tried to find gentleness.
'Please, if you have seen strangers, where was it?'
But he showed her his back and gazed down on the ducks. She had heard of, but never met before this week, men who lived their lives as hermits, cocooned in isolation. They found a refuge beyond the need of others. She reflected. This man, living with the stink of old sweat and old dirt and old damp, ran from reality – as did Malachy Kitchen. God save her – two recluses, the one trapped on this nowhere island, and the other trapped on an inner- city sink estate. Just her bloody luck to get two of them, and need them, in a single week. She sought to honey her voice.
'Oskar, you are running. You can tell me – what from?'
He faced her, and smiled at her, as if he believed himself sane and her an idiot, and he said, 'I run from the sight of the dancing bare feet of children.'
As he walked away, he took a piece of bread from his pocket and she saw the green of mould on it. He gestured with his hand that she should not follow him and he went down the slope below the viewing platform. He was breaking the bread and throwing it forward towards the cluster of ducks. Bloody mad – or worse? The dancing, bare feet of children… What did that add up to? A paedophile? The dancing, bare feet of children. A man who hung around playgrounds in a city, with a bag of sweets in a pocket? She saw, damn right, a reason for running, as great a reason as hiding in a sink estate from cowardice.
Her temper snapped. She had played gentle and it had taken her to bloody nowhere.
In her fluent and best German, she barked against the wind: 'You hide, then, see if it matters to me – or bloody keep running and see if I'm bothered. Not that it would interest you, with your problem, but I am attempting to save lives. That's the lives of ordinary, totally innocent people, but you wouldn't care, would you? So bloody absorbed in your own foul little world, voyeuring kids… Watching the dancing, bare feet of children and, no doubt, imagining what's under their skirts and shorts. You make me, with your selfishness, sick. Hear me? Sick… '
He did not turn. At her attack, his shoulders seemed to crumple.
His voice was frail, uncertain: 'My uncle drove a lorry from the KZ at Neuengamme that took children to a school's cellar. Medical experiments had been performed on them and they were killed so they could not testify against the doctors. The feet that danced were those of the children who were hanged in the cellar of the school… Leave me alone. Go away.'
She rocked, reeled.
She had nothing to say.
The cold engulfed her. She went, dismissed, and shame blistered her.
He had heard the sluicing of the water and the screams.
Now Timo Rahman heard the whimpers of his wife and the stamp down the stairs of Alicia's aunt. It could not have been otherwise.
The last night he had slept in the guest room, which was never used because no guests were invited to stay at their home. The Bear had driven the girls to school and they had gone, sullen and frightened, aware of but not understanding the crisis afflicting their parents. They would never challenge their father and neither had dared to ask why their mother was locked, a prisoner, in her bedroom.
He sat in the living room, his head and body statue still, the coat with the Harris tweed label clutched in his fists on his lap, and he waited for her aunt to come off the stairs and cross the hall, which he could see.
The Bear, who loved Alicia to the point of devotion, was in the garden and away from sight through the window. He raked leaves and perhaps wept – but it could not have been otherwise.
In the village, in the mountains where Timo
Rahman had been raised, she would have been beaten to death at his own hand, then buried in a shallow, unmarked grave, and would never again have been spoken of.
Her aunt passed the door. She did not stop to show her long arms and the skin on them wet from the bath, soiled with blood. She did not hold up the brush of steel bristles that had last been used by the Bear to scrape rust from an old bucket. She went by the door, but he had seen the blood and the brush.
He knew that his wife had met a man in the summer-house of their garden – knew it because Ricky Capel would not have dared to lie to him and had denied the man was at the house because of him
– and knew that, for her betrayal of him, she was now cleaned.
He could hear each sound she made through the bedroom's locked door and down the stairs and across the hall and into the living room – and knew her body was now cleaned by a brush of steel bristles, the dirt scoured away so that the skin bled, It could not have been otherwise.
The man, Dean – or whatever he was supposed to call him – cleaned the gun.
Ricky said, 'I'm alive… Why am I alive?…
Because I lied. I lied to Timo Rahman. If I hadn't lied, I'd be dead. He'd have strangled me or broken my head
