The Walking Dead

Hegner was sitting easily in a collapsible chair, picnicking. Boniface and Clydesdale were hunched on the floor, eating, but were not on their backsides because water lay in splashed puddles across its whole width and length. The prisoner was prone, still hooded and bound, with most of his weight against the back wall. Above him was a quite ghastly meat hook, and a canvas bucket was beside him. His body was soaked and his shivering was convulsive. Naylor understood the use of the bucket, had seen it often enough and knew its proven value. A man's head was forced down into a filled bucket. Water was swallowed and ran through the nostrils, and he was held down for perhaps ten seconds. Then he was dragged up, coughed, spluttered and choked, and was asked a question. No answer was given. The head went back into the bucket, perhaps fifteen seconds: no answer. The bucket was refilled, and the head was inserted again, for perhaps twenty seconds — and the coughs, splutters and chokes were worse, and it was ever harder to get the water up out of the lungs. On and on, through thirty seconds and thirty-five. That was torture and pain — and it was expressly forbidden in the police interview rooms at Paddington Green.

Boniface looked up at him. 'Just having a break, Mr Naylor, and something to eat. It's only MREs, but you're very welcome to what we have.'

Clydesdale said, 'Meals Ready to Eat, Mr Naylor. I can do you a beef curry.'

He saw the small tins in their hands, and the little plastic utensils. In Ireland or Bosnia-Herzegovina there had always been a garrison barracks to return to. He had never eaten from a Meals Ready to Eat tin, and the sight diminished his hunger. 'Don't think I will, but kind of you to offer.'

He saw that the prisoner had not been given food.

Hegner leered at him. 'We're getting there, Dickie, slowly but surely. Before we stopped for lunch, we'd gotten far enough down the line to have a location and an approximation of the time. The target, he says, is Birmingham and the timing is the coming Saturday morning. That's what he heard but was not told it directly. He does not know where in Birmingham or at what hour. He was not in Birmingham, himself, on the reconnaissance.'

A sharpness in Naylor's voice. 'Do you believe him?'

'I think I do, haven't found a reason not to.'

It had to be said. Naylor would not have admitted to being expert on the arts — bloody dark ones — of torture, but papers crossed his desk that raised the question. Psychiatrists — and God only knew where they'd been dug out from — wrote that men or women, under the extremities of agony, would blurt out anything, any damn thing, to halt the pain. He saw the twitch in the prisoner's body and could smell that the sphincter had broken. It must be asked.

'After what's been done to him…You know, after…Well, is that information to be relied upon? There are heavy consequences if it cannot be.'

There was a little chorus of mild complaint.

'Not like you to doubt us, Mr Naylor.'

'No, not after all these years.'

Hegner said, 'I'm sure you won't want to rubber-neck, Dickie, and I'm sure you will want to communicate what's been told you. I'm watching your back, but these are fine men and don't seem to need an oversight…It's best, Dickie, that you get on out and not clutter up the floor space.'

He was flustered. Their calm detachment from their work bit into him, but his eyes were on the hooded body and the tremors running through it. 'It's only a start that you've given me. I need so much more — the size of the bomb, what the bomber is likely to wear, targets that have been talked about, the safe-house, the numbers in the cell and the identities, the recruitment, the—'

'Get on out, Dickie. I'm very clear on what you need to know.'

The tins had been dropped into a plastic bag, mouths were wiped with handkerchiefs and fingers sucked clean. Hegner settled back in his chair, and the two men — not unkindly — hoisted up the prisoner and linked his hands back over the ceiling hook. And he screamed. Naylor fled into the dusk, and ghosts scrambled round him.

From his car, he made the call to Riverside Villas, and told what he had learned.

* * *

The row erupted on the coach. As with anything volcanic, it had simmered and rumbled for an hour. When they were within a half-hour of the barracks, it fractured the membrane that had hidden it. It spewed, and the catalyst was Peter. He articulated what they all knew.

'I can see it, and you can see it, what old Herbert's schedule is…All right for him. Damn certain he didn't stop to think of us. Defence grinds on all day, and could have done it, said it, before lunch. Summing up from Herbert should have been this afternoon, but he's doing it tomorrow. So, instead of us going out in the morning and getting the whole thing wrapped up by midday and going home, we're stuck in that God-forsaken place for the weekend.'