The Walking Dead

The prisoner lay in deep shadow against the back wall. He had no shape, might have been a mass of half-filled, discarded sacks. Seemed not to move, was silent but for occasional wheezing groans. Naylor stared hard into the darkness and finally made out the hood and the shoulders, the feet that had no trainers on them or socks. Close to the feet a tangle of cables with bulldog clips lay loose, and he followed them to where they attached to the terminals of the floor plug.

It must have been four hours since Naylor had last evacuated himself from his car in the Nissen in answer to a fainter scream from the brick building. The last time he had come, like an intruder, Naylor had seen the prisoner suspended from the ceiling hook, his bound wrists over it, the wires clipped to his toes, and he had asked that same question: 'Where are we at?' The answers had been shrugs, and he had turned away. Not now. He searched for resurrected authority. 'The use of electricity was not sanctioned by me and — '

The easy drawl: 'Don't want to embarrass you, Dickie. Don't want to bring you down off your high horse.'

'- and I should be told how far forward we have come.'

'What I said was, we have a ticket. This is one obstinate man.'

'A ticket for whom, from where and where to?'

'Try making patience a virtue, Dickie. The man, right now, is more frightened of God's damnation, which comes with betrayal, than he is of us. He fancies that damnation will hurt him more than we can. We have to change his viewpoint, and that's where we're working.'

'Whose ticket?'

There had been something clinical, in the past, about the work of Boniface and Clydesdale…clinical and fast. A beaten Adeni Arab, from Sheikh Othman, with a split lip and bruised eye sockets, had been quick to tell where a safe-house was. An Irishman from Newtown Hamilton or Forkhill, without fingernails and pissing blood, was fast to spill where a fifty-calibre machine-gun was buried, and could then be released and would never reveal the pain inflicted for fear of his treachery becoming known. The face of a Bosnian Serb could be battered as a punchball — his testicles and kidneys too — and he would give up the secret of where an aid-worker was held in a makeshift gaol, a cellar…So why was this flicking man so bloody obstinate? He remembered the cockiness the prisoner had shown in the Paddington Green interview room…He had not believed that the confidence would translate to raw courage — hadn't another damn word for it, courage—in the face of the pain transmitted through the bulldog clips.

'Dickie, when I have something you can act on, I'll tell you about it.'

'That is hardly an acceptable reply. I need to know where we are.'

'You are getting in the way now. If you don't want to be here, you should get yourself somewhere else.'

Naylor snorted. 'Too damn right.'

He should have been in the front bedroom, with the curtains drawn, blocking out the late-afternoon early-evening view of the cherry trees coming into blossom. That was somewhere else. Should have been dressing in a new shirt and a best tie with the Service's discreet shield and motto embroidered on it, and the suit that was back from the dry-cleaner's. Should have been giving his shoes a last buff over the toecaps and round the heels. Should have been going bloody gracefully. It was his final day, and the last hours were being eked out, and the drawers of his desk were not emptied, or his safe, and the cubicle was not cleared for Mary bloody Reakes on Monday morning. But Dickie Naylor was not somewhere else — he was in the door of a shitty little building set among fields of growing pea-pods, and the chalice he sought that would make his career remembered was still denied him.

'I'll be in the car,' he said.

'Best place, Dickie. Have a seat and maybe play some music.'

'What I am concerned about — is he…' he motioned at the figure on the floor, then grimaced'…is he too weak to tell us what we have to know? You know what I mean.'

'All under control, Dickie. I'll tell you two things: he's fine, he's fighting, but he will lose. Second, this is not standard stuff. We don't have time to sit on our backsides, play mind games and hang on till next week or next month. We leave that to the Echoes. It's what we do at the Bagram cage outside Kabul. It's how it goes in Guantanamo. Maybe the Echo does six hours straight, and then he goes to the mess and eats a steak with fries, and he believes that next week, next month, his man will crack. Patience is a luxury, Dickie. My life and yours, and the boys' lives, are not luxury. I don't have next week and next month, I have the next hour. I have to learn in the next hour where a ticket will be presented. All I have is the word "ticket", but I have to have more or the time and the opportunity are wasted. So, do the decent thing, and go get yourself a seat in that cat'

Authority, once ceded, was not regained.

Naylor shuffled his feet, locked his hands and cracked the joints.