Jago (11 page)

‘Teddy,’ the man said to one of the boy’s drinking friends, ‘go after your brother and make sure he doesn’t do anything really stupid.’

‘Yes,’ he gulped. ‘Okay. Thanks, James.’

Teddy took off after his brother. Outside, it was fully dark.

‘Welcome to Somerset,’ said Allison, sitting down with them.

H
alfway between the Valiant Soldier and his cottage, Danny Keough slumped against the rust-eaten concrete and metal shelter left over from the distant past when Alder had a regular bus service, and cried in the dark. He punched graffiti-etched metal plates with a soft fist, and tried to hold the sobs in his throat like choked-back vomit. He was shaking violently, uncontrollably, from the shoulders down. He pushed himself away and sat down with a thump on the grass-and-earth verge that separated the pavement from a dusty, whitewashed wall. He hugged his petition folder to his chest, further crushing the papers jammed into it. It was ruined. All his work, ruined.

He had knocked his knee without noticing, and it was a useless knot of pain. There was dirt on his clothes, his petition, his face. Someone had spat in his hair. His eyes leaked like wounds. He ground his dentures, relishing the ache in his gums, and made fists so tight his palms bled. The memory of a painful erection tingled along his urethra. He felt the longest-lived of his needs, the desire to hurt somebody, to destroy something. To wipe out the humiliation of the last fifteen minutes.

They were after him, and he was standing alone. Everyone in the pub had looked into their pints while the kids crucified him. They had got everywhere, creeping behind faces he had known for thirty years, eating away even at the heart of England. The boy with the gun was Reg Gilpin’s son, the girl who had thrown the petition to the carnival freaks was Bob Conway’s daughter, Bernie Conway’s granddaughter. They belonged to the village, just like him, but had gone over to the other side.

It was a clear night, a heatwave night. In the sky, the rind of the moon shone like an obscured face, blind and uninterested.

He had been assaulted. By the Gilpin boy and by Lytton, Jago’s man. If he only had the money, he would sue. If there was anyone with the backbone to support his side of the story, he’d call the police in. But he realized he was alone. By tomorrow morning, no one in the pub would remember the way it had really been. They were either with the enemy or completely duped. The Gilpin boy had a gun, and Lytton acted as though he could kill with his hands. They had dropped their cover and gone for him. The next assaults, he knew, would be from another direction. They were clever, and he’d have to be continually alert.

Even before this, he’d suspected a concerted campaign against him. He had trouble with the petition. After the Maskells, several others had point-blank refused to sign; and more put their names down in completely illegible handwriting and fudged when it came to listing their addresses. They were gutless fools, afraid of reprisals. That was the kind of behaviour that left the country open to the enemy. He would have to start all over again. The now battered folder had been new this morning. By the moonlight, he saw that his name and address, which he’d inscribed in a proud copperplate, were smudged. The petition was unpresentable as it was. The freaks had marred it with obscenities and false names, and it had been abused in the tussle. He couldn’t present this to his MP. He wept for the despoliation of his handiwork.

Finally, there was no more crying in him. He wiped his cheeks with the back of his hand, rubbing grit into wet skin. He found a handkerchief in his jacket pocket and blew his nose until his sinuses hurt. Then he stood up. He felt in his bladder the weight of the tea he’d been given as he went round the village. He unzipped his fly and, still feeling a ghost urge in the head of his cock, pissed in the gutter. He imagined the closed, mean face of the Gilpin boy grinning in the asphalt under his stream. It was no worse than he deserved. He got into his flow and, just as he passed the failsafe point, was caught in the headlights of a passing car. Danny shrivelled, feeling a lance of pain inside his tool as his piss came and went in spurts. Hastily, when the car was gone, he finished his burst and zipped his fly, the last drops seeping through his underpants, running down the inside of his trousers.

He picked up his petition and began to trudge home. To discourage burglars he always left the hall light on, and he could see it from a hundred yards away. He slowed his pace to a halt, and remembered his precautions. Tired and upset, he still knew the importance of precautions. He had seen what happened when those who should be vigilant got slack. Danny had no intention of joining the failures buried in a jumble in some military graveyard, their individual name markers a lie. The bodies had been so scrambled it was impossible to sort out who was what.

He tucked the folder into the seat of his trousers like a schoolboy expecting a caning, and went down on all fours, stick in his right hand, ignoring his protesting knee. Slowly he crawled, stick sweeping the pavement in front for obstructions, trying to keep his body in the well of shadow made by hedges and fences.

He passed his neighbours’ houses, alert to the slightest unusual sound. The Cardigans, the young couple who had moved into Mrs Graham’s cottage, were in their front room, cuddled up in front of the television. Danny was not sure of the Cardigans. They put up Labour Party posters during council elections and had a painting of two naked bodies twisted together hung over their mantelpiece. They had the lights off, so their window was dimly lit by the shifting colours of the television. He heard a newsreader’s voice talking about nuclear power stations. Television was such rot these days; even the BBC had gone over to the enemy. Sometimes he dreamed the real programmes came through if you twiddled the dial, wireless programmes:
ITMA, Dick Barton, Special Agent, Much Binding in the Marsh.
Danny stood up slowly and peered into the Cardigans’ window, just to make sure. On the sofa, Mr Cardigan had his hand inside his wife’s blouse, working away at her breasts. Not much of a threat, he supposed, but they ought to draw their curtains. They were lax, like all softie lefties. They wanted to give away all Britain’s weapons, but would be the first to moan when the enemy walked in. He left them fumbling in their ignorance, and edged nearer home ground.

He remembered the first time he’d been made aware of the enemy. In the war, when the parachutist came to Alder, and the knot inside him had first been tied…

All was quiet at Gosmore Farm as he crept past, in a crouch now, stick ready. The pottery sign hung unmoving by the front gate. He took care not to disturb the display on the verge. The pots were ugly, strange-coloured things, not at all like his own floral-pattemed plates and royal-family mugs. But he was still careful. The people who had the place over the summer would check in the morning. Certain
they
were with the enemy, he had not even bothered to take his petition to them. The man was supposed to be a writer. They were the worst, the so-called intellectuals, listening to violin music while they beat you with lead-filled hosepipes, wiping their arses with Union Jack toilet paper. When he was a kid, they had had real writers: Sapper, Captain W. E. Johns, Edgar Wallace. They had not written about slackers.

The Conway house was quiet too. Bob and his wife were in bed; he could see an upstairs light. They probably didn’t care that their children had gone over to the enemy and were out terrorizing the countryside.

His light was only a few houses away. His cock shifted, stiffening as his sureness grew.
They
were in the darkness somewhere, lying in wait. He was certain. He could picture them: olive-faced youths, tattooed numbers in the crooks of their elbows, oil on their skins, skeleton rifles at the ready. They would have someone on the garage forecourt, hiding behind the petrol pumps, rifle sighted on his front door. On some nights, they took pot shots at his greenhouse, shattering panes with silenced bullets for sport. They wanted him to know they were there, that they could come for him any time. They had all the modern equipment: sniperscope night sights, hair-trigger tripwires, body-heat-sensitive antipersonnel mines, brain-scrambling UHF transmitters.

But he had the edge. They had trained on poxy A-rabs and bum-boy bombslingers. Easy meat. He was British, and this was Great Britain. He would outwit them. He would show the stuff that would make Dick Barton and Bulldog Drummond proud. He grinned, sucking in his teeth, fixing them tight in his mouth. He knew eight different death blows that could be struck with his cherry wood. He had practised on an old tailor’s dummy. The enemy was as good as dead.

He passed the village hall, clawing uselessly at the festival posters. They wouldn’t come free. The Gilpin boy would be with
them,
of course, and Jago’s crowd of crazies. Killers all. It was easy to see where Allison Conway came in. She’d do for the whole troop every night. They would have her two or three at a time, getting into her from every angle while Bob and Nicola brewed them tea in the kitchen. They’d have taken over several families by now, just to get near him.

He slipped into a narrow passage between two cottages, and squatted among the Starkeys’ dustbins. The folder made his waistband bite into his gut. He smelled rotten food. He had no reason to suspect the Starkeys, but it would be best not to bring them into it. They’d be a danger to themselves as much as to him. He went into the garden of the other cottage. It belonged to the Starkeys too, but had been gutted and was being refitted for sale. The piles of bricks, bags of unmixed concrete and stacks of wooden planks made ideal cover. He found a spot shielded from all sides, and paused to take stock.

Peering over the top of a heap of rubble, he saw two tiny red dots up on the hill. They moved independently, occasionally vanishing behind trees. They were like the lights on his wireless that proved the batteries were working. The killers up in the woods had electronic equipment, obviously. It was so quiet he could hear a train rattling across the moor over five miles away. He breathed in silent gulps, nerving himself up for the final moves of the night. He’d be inside his house in ten minutes, the watchers beaten again.

There was another narrow gap between the empty cottage and his own. From his kitchen window he could see through the hole in the wall where a similar frame would be put. Belly to the ground, Danny crawled through the doorless doorway into the enclosed dark. He stood up and leaned in a corner, out of the window lines of fire. He brushed dirt and wood shavings off his clothes. A bath would do him good. His knee flared up again, and he leaned hard on his stick. In the hot darkness, he discovered he’d been sweating freely. For an instant, as the blood went to his head, he was on the lip of blacking out. He pulled himself sharply back. Nearly home safe, he mustn’t let himself slip now. He stepped into the room that was once, and would soon again be, a kitchen. Glass crunched under his shoes. He tensed, stick up, ready for an attack. None came.

He had the Jew-boy cowards on the run.

The sink was tapless and dry. He climbed into it, and crouched, looking into his own house. The hall light seeped under the kitchen door, and he could make out the newspapers laid out under the cats’ bowls. He was sorry about the cats. They’d been company. But they’d got careless, and been casualties. The animals were unfit for the war. One, he was sure, had turned traitor. He’d caught her in a forbidden place and hanged her with all due ceremony. She wasn’t buried with the others. He’d put her in the dustbin.

He braced his hands against the brickwork where the window frame would be, and lowered his legs. His back rubbed over the sharp ledge. His shirt came untucked, and his file shifted into an even more uncomfortable position. It’d be over soon. His feet touched the concrete of his own side path. He sagged between the cottages, hugging his own property. He listened for noises from inside the house. His ears were sharper now than they’d ever been. Breathing would give the bastards away. They could not hold their lungs for ever.

There was nothing.

Anyone would think the kitchen window was conventionally locked. The arm was in place and wired, but it was a dummy. Danny had hacksawed it through and glued it back in position as a blind. His whole house was like that; secure, but offering anyone who knew the secrets immediate emergency entry or exit. Only Danny knew the secrets. He looked both ways. The red lights were gone. They must be on the move. He didn’t have much time. He pushed the window inwards, and eased it gently to the right until he heard the hidden catch click free. Then he pulled, opening a crack at the bottom. He felt under the frame, probing for a pull wire. That was the most favoured detonator. He couldn’t find trace of any infernal device.

Silently, he yanked the window open and dragged himself into it. He nearly got stuck halfway, but managed to struggle free. Using the taps as handholds, he hauled his lower body into the house.

Home free!

In the dark, he sat on a tall stool by the draining board and pulled the window shut behind him. He secured it with the real bolts.

His stick was still in the empty cottage, but he’d be able to get it back in the morning before the workmen began. The enemy could not operate in daylight. It was over for the night. They could huddle in their camouflage gear or take their turns with slag Allison. He was going to have a bath, then go to bed.

He pulled the folder out and dumped it on the kitchen table. Then he turned the lights on. The writing on the folder was a livid red. It hadn’t been there when he left the Valiant Soldier. It was in Hebrew script; he couldn’t read it, but recognized a death threat.

The bastards! They must have someone in the house.

He took a carving knife from the rack. The blade was keen enough to cut hair. Every week he gave it a hundred passes through the sharpener. They knew he was in the kitchen, but wouldn’t come to him. He’d have to draw the killers out. He opened his kitchen door and stepped into the hallway.

Nothing happened.