The Glory Boys (37 page)

'Straight bloody heave, then?'

if you see it that way, Jimmy, that's your problem. But do us all a favour and shove back to town so you're not knackered in the morning.'

'I thought there'd be some bloody clout from you,'

Jimmy was shouting, his words carrying across the still of the night, loud enough for those who could not avoid hearing to shuffle their feet and cough.

Jimmy swung on his heel and walked through the rope cordon, side-stepped the newspaper and television photographers, past the sightseers who would wait till there was any action of any sort at whatever advanced hour. He walked down the hill toward the town. There would be a taxi rank there and then there would be the hotel close to the flat where the night porter would fix him up with a half bottle. As he went he wondered about the life and times inside Number 2.5. He thought of McCoy with the hole in him, and of the Arab. Pictured the faces as he'd seen them in the glare of his headlights the moment before he'd fired. Wondered how they'd cope when the military came in. Wanted to be there, missing his bloody treat, and God he'd deserved the party. The tin that he kicked in his frustration careered clumsily and raucously down the road in front of him.

She knew that if she moved McCoy would wake. It was awkward, half-propped on one arm, and lying across the narrow width of the bed, with the weight of his shoulder and his head flattened against her stomach. His sleep was light, punctuated by convulsions when he twisted his body over from right to left, felt the pain, and swung back on to the undamaged arm. The wound through the upper chest was near to her head and it oozed strange and unknown fluids that showed in the half-light as opaque dribblings.

Sometimes she turned her eyes away from the hole and its debris, but then her imagination took over and besieged her more fearfully than the reality. Nightmarishly she could see the stunted column of lead striking the softness of the skin, could feel the splitting and carving of the tissues and wonder at the sensation of the fragments making their uninterrupted passage in the void beneath the flesh. And he had said it would all happen again. Had told her that they would come. Policemen with rifles, more bullets, bursting through the door, kicking their way across the tiny floor-space, brushing aside the white-wood and wicker chair on which she had laid his stained jacket and shirt and undervest. And what would he do when they came? His rifle was half under his legs, still held close to the trigger guard by the left hand. So small, and beside its shallow length the grenades, miniaturized. They didn't have the scale and size for her to believe in them as killing weapons. Too sparse, too insignificant. But when they came, when the police came, he would try to fire, try to pull the absurd circular pin on the grenade. And they would shoot. They would be quicker, organized, without pity. Then there would be the profusion of holes, beating formations in his chest, slicing through the rib cage that showed clear as he lay in his sleep. When they came it would be to kill, not to capture. Norah knew that.

Even had she not been so tired she could not have analysed her feelings for Ciaran McCoy. 'Love' was the magazine word, written in stories with windswept hills and boys who were dark and tidy, and girls with wasp waists and unbuttoned blouses and long hair. Infatuation she understood, read of it in the agony columns, real enough, able to match it with her own emotions; the boy last year who worked under Father at the factory. Temporary and heartrending, nice to cry over. But McCoy, this was something unique for her and surpassing her understanding. She could not envisage herself in love with a man capable of such horror as the strangulation of the policewoman whose picture the television had shown, not in love with the man of the hateful, animal-wild eyes imprinted in her mind from the newspaper picture. Yet she had lain with him in the grass of the park, and taken him in her arms, and pressed his head against her breasts, and said his name, and felt the warmth and the pain of him deep between her legs. And he was to die. Snuffed out.

Shot dead by the guns of men in uniform.

Norah reached down to the floor, to the square of carpet that covered the centre of the room inside the vinyl surround, and felt under her bed for her shoes, careful not to disturb his sleep. All her shoes were under the bed; the room was too small to provide the adequate cupboard space she required. Two pairs were there, her evening going-out ones, and the flats for work in the supermarket.

Further under were the back numbers of the magazines that came on Thursday mornings and that caused her to linger in bed and be late for breakfast and run for the bus.

She straightened, gently and slowly, taking time till she could ease out the pillow that had nestled in the small of her back. Together they were sufficient. First the magazines, then the shoes, then the pillow. With one hand she steadied his sleeping head while she wormed as far back toward the wall as her body had room to move, and then there was the space for her to build the counterfeit lap.

The height was the same, and when she eased his head on to the softness of the pillow his eyes stayed tight shut, and there was only the forced and erratic breathing.

She was not betraying him, she told herself, only offering him salvation. This way he would survive. Go out of her life, that was inevitable, but survive. On her window-sill were the keys to the outside doors he had brought upstairs with him. It was easy for her to select the one that opened the front door.

Past three she saw on her watch when she stepped out on to the landing of the house and went barefoot, and on her toes, without sound towards the staircase. At the head of the stairs she stopped to listen to the light noises of the house. McCoy's breathing, audible, painful. Fainter movements from the rooms where her parents lay.

Pray God he doesn't wake, she said to herself, and eased on to the first step.

Famy had gone over the wall and into the park. Once inside he ran till his legs would carry him no further. Fast, hard and direct toward the south-west, sprinting so that many times he had plunged without warning into bushes, stumbled in the grassed-over drains. His hands were cut, and there were tears round the knees of his trousers. The rifle made it difficult, clutched as a talisman, with only one hand free to protect him when he pitched forward. But McCoy had made the sacrifice. McCoy had stayed behind to win him the distance he now sought to put between himself and the pursuit. No idea how many hours' start he would have, whether the hunt had in fact already begun, whether it would come at dawn or not for a full day. But the Irishman had sacrificed himself, probably given his life to gain him the ground he now swept over. It clinched his motivation, and when his legs sagged under him he rested only for the muscles to tighten, the control to be regained, before starting once more.

When the brickwork of the park wall swung away from the direction he sought, exhausting its usefulness, he looked for escape in the streets and roads outside. It took great effort for him to force his way up on to the summit of its height, and he toppled rather than jumped on to the ground on the far side. Soon he was out of the cover of the trees and under street lights, passed by late traffic, and running by houses where lights still shone and from which came the flicker, blue-grey on the wallpapers, of television sets. When he came to the river he walked along the bank, anxious lest he should miss the bridge marked on his pocket-book map. But when he had found it he quickened his step. There would be no more such barriers for him now, the map showed that, just a network of streets and roads and gardens stretching across his path, separating him from the great open space of flattened concrete that was the airport and from which David Sokarev would fly.

He knew his way, was unerring in tracking his route.

Every ninety-five seconds a jet-powered passenger air liner roared above him on its descent to the tarmac, red and green belly lights flashing the message to the Arab far beneath that he was on his course.

EIGHTEEN

It was the policeman crouched in the shadows of the doorway directly opposite Number 25 who first heard the faint sound of the bolt being withdrawn behind the door across the road. He stiffened into an aim position, his FN

rifle at his shoulder, barrel pointed across at the floodlit porch, and talking all the time into the radio clipped to his tunic. Within seconds of his first message he could hear the scraping of activity around him, others alerted, more marksmen preparing themselves. The superintendent's voice was relayed to him over the miniature loudspeaker set into the same instrument. Disembodied and unreal came the instruction, if the men come out, shoot. Only if their hands are up and they are obviously not armed do you hold your fire. If they have hostages with them, shoot.

Under no circumstances are they to reach the darkness, either of them.'

All right for him to say that, the policeman thought, all right if you're down in the control vehicle. The door edged open, two inches at first, time for the constable to ease off the safety clip on the right side of the rifle, an inch or so above the magazine. He was sweating, could feel the moisture on his hands. He'd only ever fired in practice, and the last time eight months before. Then the door swung fully back on its hinges, but the light from the beam down the road came at such an acute angle that the hallway was only a black rectangle of darkness. He strained without success to see into it. They'll come in a rush, he told himself, all together, the parents and the girl in front, the men behind. And his orders were to shoot.

God help us all, he thought, lips bitten tightly, hands shaking, causing the sight on the end of the barrel to waver in gentle helpless meanders. In normal times he drove a squad car; a marksman's role was something he had never taken on before. Only his eyesight, that was superb, qualified him for the shooting position he occupied twenty short paces from the doorway.

His finger tightened around the trigger, and then he saw the girl come from the shadow and hesitate on the step.

There was a surge of relief through him. At least the bastards were not right behind her. It would give him a chance to miss her, perhaps hit them. Very quietly, little more than an aside, he broadcast her progress along the four yards of paved path to the front wicket gate. Here again she stopped, and the fifteen rifles that had covered her as she walked forward traversed their aim back to the dark recess of the doorway.

A hundred yards away and watching now through binoculars the superintendent called into his microphone,

'Tell her to get into the middle of the road, and keep the bloody door covered.'

The constable stretched up, straightening his legs against the stiffness that had long crippled his knee joints. The girl wouldn't have seen him yet, wouldn't have seen any of them, would be bewildered by the silence and the emptiness of the street.

'Keep walking,' he said, more staccato than he would have wanted. Nerves, he put it down to. 'Come out into the street, hands high. Out in the middle.'

Still the girl seemed unaware of his presence, simply obeyed the commands. She came to the centre of the road, and the constable could see her glazed eyes, could see the bloodstains, too, on the white of her blouse, the scattered hair strands, and the uncertain steps. Like a sleepwalker, he thought, like someone learning to walk again in a hospital. 'Walk down the road, and slowly. There's a rope across it about a hundred yards down. They'll meet you there. And don't run.' The girl veered to her right, and began to walk, and the policeman's concentration returned to the open doorway, rifle grip marginally relaxed, waiting.

When she reached the rope a host of hands greeted her.

Under her shoulders lest she should faint, hands of comfort around her back. She felt weakness till two detectives frisked her, and she was alive again, backing away from the fingers that ran down her body, circling her waist, on the inside and outside of her legs. 'Just formality,' said the voice behind her, but close and reassuring, and then there was one arm around her, strong, protective. She made no effort to stem the flow of tears that wracked her as they led her to the control van. They helped her up the steps, and the superintendent muttered to his men, 'Keep it very gentle. When she starts to talk I want it coming easily.

Rush it now and we'll screw it for all time.' He was old enough in the business of interrogation to know that hasty, capsulated and impatient questioning could cause the girl to freeze, make the progress endlessly slow and confusing.

They gave her a chair, and the superintendent said, it's Norah, isn't it?'

She nodded, blank agreement.

'Tell us what's happening, Norah, in your own words.'

She smeared her arm across her upper face, diverting the tears, snuffled, and started to talk. Her voice was very low and the policeman and the SAS captain who had crowded into the van had to stretch forward to hear.

'He said you'd attack, and when you came in you'd be shooting. You'll kill, I know you'll kill him. You'll murder him in there.' The faces of her listeners were impassive, showing no reaction. 'I couldn't see him die, not like that.

He's hurt, there's a terrible wound, blood . . . and he got me to clean it. He's sleeping now, he was when I left him

.. . I made a pile for his head so that he wouldn't know I'd gone. He needs help, needs a hospital. I thought if I let you in you'd take him alive, you wouldn't shoot him.'

Behind her a detective whispered, half to himself but not subdued, 'Little cow. Little bitch.' She seemed not to hear.

'The door's open. He's up the stairs, in the small room at the front. It's my room. He's on the bed there. Asleep.

He doesn't know I've come. He'd kill me . . . ' The tears came again and her head sank forward on the smallness of her chest.

The army captain leaned close, one question to ask,

'What sort of guns does he have? Where are they?'

'There's a rifle, a little one. It's in his hand, and there are some grenade things. They're beside the rifle, that's all he has.'