The Walking Dead

'Just thinking of ghosts.'

'I reckon this ghost's on his way.'

Naylor hadn't heard it. He peered into the mist and low cloud above the runway that had run west to north, saw nothing and heard nothing. A full minute after the American had alerted him, he caught a first glimpse of the grey shadow that was a car, and it was not for a half-minute more that he heard its engine.

'I think I'd like to sit in, Dickie.'

'I'd expected that you'd want to,' Naylor said drily.

'See that the right questions are asked.'

'They know what's required of them. I won't be there.' He followed with what he hoped was irony. 'I wouldn't want to be in the way.'

'My experience, Dickie, is that in these circumstances it's easier to give orders and not get dirty — easier on the conscience.'

He thought a dart speared him. The car had stopped. He recognized the two of them. They reached inside a rear door and dragged out their ghost. Both were heavier in the body and thinner in the face than they had been when he had last seen them. The ghost tried to shamble between them, but then his feet were kicked out from under him and they dragged him as if that would augment the wretch's fear and humiliation, his helplessness. The taller one, his hair greyer than Naylor remembered from the Bosnia-Herzegovina assignment, had the rucksack hooked on one shoulder. The shorter one was balder, his head shinier than when a Serb warlord had been the ghost — and the answer required had been the location of a kidnapped aid-worker, being held by Arab fighters, whose life was in extreme jeopardy. He was seen; the shorter man — Clydesdale — tapped his chest, as if to indicate that the envelope delivered to RAP Northolt was secreted there. He was noticed; the taller man — Boniface — raised his spare fist and gave him a thumbs-up. They were as unconcerned as the pair of jobbing gardeners, father and son, who came to his home every month and always had pleasant small-talk for Anne.

Holding the umbrella, he guided the American towards the door of the building. He reached the entrance, saw a torch beam roving and heard their surprised pleasure.

'Oh, that's good, Donald, there's a new power point. Oh, gets better! There's a tap and all.'

'Excellent, Xavier — water and electricity, couldn't be better.'

The hooded figure cowered against a wall. For a moment Naylor was a voyeur and could not take his eyes from him. On an A Branch night exercise, a generator was run off the power point — the cable laid at the Service's expense — and the water supply had never been cut off after the war; then and now it was used for brewing tea.

Naylor said brusquely, to assert his authority, 'Excellent to have you both on board. Time is of the essence, and we don't have much of it. My colleague will be with you, and he has my full confidence. Myself, I've calls to make.'

He stumbled away, the lie ringing in his ears, back out into the rain. His age caught him, and shame, and he shook, could not control the trembling. He left them with the American and the ghost, and thought himself damned.

* * *

She was alone. Groping her way through the house, Faria was guided only by slivers of light that came through the boarded-up windows. Around her was the smell of old, dried filth, but it was old…The yobs who had wrecked the interior had not been inside for months, no vagrants had slept there for weeks. It would do for them.

She checked the dismantled kitchen, the back room, the front room and the hallway, but not the stairs. She heard the scurry of the mice as they fled ahead of her and her face brushed against thick spiders'

webs. She was alone but trusted. After their flight from the cottage and after being told the schedule they now worked to, she had said that she knew of a house out to the west of the town centre, behind Overstone Road, that was owned by the cousin of a friend of her father, that was derelict, that would not be put up for sale until there was improvement in the property market. Faria lived in the ghetto fashioned by the ethnic minority to which she belonged. Inside it, she was isolated. It shaped her. Within it, her feelings of revulsion for the society around her, beyond self-created fencing, spawned spores…Meandering through the grey darkness of the house's ground-floor, she could recall each insult that had been offered her. She believed she had the strength to earn the trust. His fingers had been on her stomach, in the crevice of her navel, and she would do what was required of her — that strength had been given her.