The Walking Dead

He lied, and it didn't seem a big deal. The lie was that the ailments of his Principal's sick mother and father had worsened. A mercy call, and really necessary to be there through the night.

They'd started up again in the bedroom. Banks could hear them through the thin wall and the thinner door — grunts, groans, a mattress heaving — and he cupped his hand round the mouthpiece of the mobile so that his chief inspector would hear only the quiet of a house of the sick and the ill. He said lie hadn't telephoned because he hadn't wanted to distract his superior from the planning of a kid's birthday party.

'If that's not impertinent, Banksy, I don't know what is. That's bloody cheek. If I don't know where my people are, it reflects on me. It makes me a prat, which I don't like, an inefficient prat.'

He said that he took responsibility for his decision, and that this morning the patients seemed in better health and that he hoped the kid's birthday party would go well.

'You have an attitude problem, Banksy. That's what I was told, that's what I've found out for myself. Here's a fact of life: you were assigned to us because you weren't wanted on serious business. There's a major bloody alert on. Every gun in the goddamn force is out on the streets, that's the word, but not you. You were not wanted because you have a problem. Don't think this won't be reported. I gave you support and my reward is that you've shat on me…Go back to your bloody beauty sleep and, when it's convenient, take your Tango back where he's supposed to be — and don't move a bloody inch without my say-so…You there, Banksy?'

The groans of the mattress had become squeals, shrieks. He lied again, said a doctor was due to call when the working day started and would give Mr Wright an all-clear on his parents. Then he would take the Tango back to the location. Again he wished the chief inspector well for the kid's party.

'You're a plonker, Banksy, a useless plonker and a—'

He cut the call, dropped the mobile back on to his trousers, on to the holster. And they finished. A last gasp, a final shout, and bloody finished. He lay on his back and his thoughts returned to where they had been previously.

He was with the sniper.

What had been with him through the night were the calculations the marksman would have made…Four years back, they'd done a course with paratroops out on the Brecon Beacons, and there had been a sergeant instructor who'd talked them through a sniper's skills. Wasn't relevant to Banks, but he'd listened. It was more for S019 gun people who might carry a rifle and be put on rooftops for a state occasion or be tasked into a siege situation. He'd thought, before he listened, that a sniper had a damn great 'scope on the barrel that did the work. He'd heard about the mathematics of 'wind deflection' and 'bullet drop', and he'd been shown the little laminated charts that listed the equations. The sergeant had talked about the need to watch a flag's motion or the bend of trees, and how an aim might be at a roof gutter when the target was lounged by a ground-floor door, or by sunshine or snow. He had learned of the experience and skills of the sniper, which overrode a pocket calculator…and a target could be hit at a thousand paces. During the night he had set himself behind the 'scope sight and had seen the last of the autumn's dead leaves blowing between the pocked shell-holes of Hill 421 across the Ebro valley, and paper scraps carried by the summer — wind. The sniper had used his skills and experiences, the same as the sergeant instructor's, to fire the bullet into the chest of Cecil Darke. He could not see his great-uncle's face. The sniper had. The sergeant instructor, men quiet around him and listening to an expert, said that the sniper — among his own — was a hated man. Shrapnel from an artillery shell, a mortar bomb's splinters or the bullets from a traversing machine-gun carried, random death. The sniper looked into the features of his target, saw the magnified eyes, saw the chest where a heart beat and where a photograph of a loved one was pocketed, made a judgement, and fired. Could he? Could he look into the face, through the 'scope, of a stranger and make him familiar and take the time to know him, then kill him?

Play God-could he?

He rolled off the settee.

The apartment was still. Beyond the thin wall and the thinner door, they were spent.

He found, at last, a way to lose the image of the finger on the rifle's trigger bar.