The Walking Dead

He held the notebook in front of his eyes and lingered on each sentence, every pencilled word. Voices were in his ears, but Banks ignored them, and the card game…That morning, the Delta team had been, in the dawn light, down the motorway in convoy — with the sirens going and the motorcycles ahead — to Heathrow, to deposit the Minister for Reconstruction. They had waited with him until it was time for his flight to Amman, the first leg of his journey home to Baghdad.

The team — less the Royal and Diplomatic guys — were now in the canteen of the police station at Vincent Square, a usual watering-hole when they were stood down and killed time before the next briefing. The talk at the far end of the table, which slid past Banks, was of clothing kit, a tour of the business end of Downing Street organized by a Special Branch sergeant, and a new modification to the Heckler & Koch's telescopic sight…The only image of the morning that had lasted with Banks was the insistence of the Minister — going home to bloody Baghdad — that he should shake their hands individually, thank them one by one. God, and they weren't bullet-catchers: none of the Delta team would have chucked his body into the line of fire to save the poor bastard. The plane had barely started its taxiing run before they had been on their way back for the canteen, cards and chaff talk.

'Hey, Banksy, what you got?' He was with Cecil Darke, far away. 'Banksy, are you in this world or out of it?'

What he missed most was his inability to fashion a picture of Cecil Darke. He could not put a face or features to his great-uncle. Did not know whether he was tall, as David Banks was, whether he was well-built with broad shoulders, as David Banks was. Dark- or fair-haired, or shaven bare at Albacete, did not know. As a substitute, while he read, he imagined a short young fellow — fourteen years younger than himself — with a pale complexion, and probably a concave, shallow chest, with clothes or a uniform that hung on him as they had on the scarecrows Banks's father had erected on new-sown fields. There would have been thin shoulders, pulled back with pride, weighed down by the old French rifle as he'd gone up the Gran Via. But it was only Banks's imagination, a poor substitute for knowing.

'Anyone home, Banksy?'

He tried to think what he believed in. What would have made David Banks — a detective constable who had never gone for the sergeants' exam — travel to join someone else's war? Couldn't imagine it. What would have made David Banks — divorced from Mandy, resident in an Ealing bedsit — go into a secondary line and think about sleep under shellfire rather than the dawn when he would charge over open ground? Couldn't comprehend it.

'Banksy, don't mind me saying it, what's the matter with you?'

Perhaps they were bored with the merits of various brands of thermal socks, or the self-esteem that came from a Downing Street tour and access to the Cabinet room, or the added magnification of the latest gunsight…He closed the notebook and saw the printed, faded, gold-leaf name. He knew so little of the man whose name it had been, and who, in the morning, would face an enemy and fight.

'It's a diary Banks said quietly.

'What's so special about it — makes us not interesting enough?' Banks said, 'It was written by my great-uncle seventy years ago.'

'And…So…? The way it's been stuck in your hands it might be a Tablet brought down from the mountain.'

Trying hard to control his irritation, Banks said, 'My great-uncle, aged twenty-one, packed in his job in London and went to Spain for the Civil War. He was a volunteer in the International Brigades and—'

'One of the great losers, a fucking Commie?'

His head rose to face Deltas 6, 8, 9 and 11. 'He was not a Communist,' Banks said evenly, through his teeth. 'He was an idealist. There is a difference.'

They came at him as if in an avalanche, and boredom was gone. It was sport.

Delta 6: 'Come off it, they were all reds, Soviet-supplied and Soviet-funded, controlled by the Comintern, recruited by the Communist Party of Great Britain.'

Delta 8: 'Just a load of wankers interfering in another dog's fight.'

Delta 9: 'What you could say, your great-uncle was yesterday's terrorist — like any of those bastards from outside going into Iraq, exactly the same, to slot that Principal who's on his way home. What you reckon, Banksy?'

The notebook was in front of him, with its worn leather cover and its faded gold-printed name. At that moment, David Banks could have grinned and shrugged and even laughed — could have pushed himself up off the hard chair and asked who needed another coffee or tea, how many sugars, could have defused it. But the blood ran warm in him. He was tired to the point of exhaustion and his temper surged. 'You lot are talking right out of your arses.'

'Oh, that right, is it?' Sport over, conflict joined. 'That's not very pretty, Banksy.'