The Walking Dead

as tolerant as was Banks; as bloody-mindedly stubborn as was Banks. He did not move towards them, they did not move towards him. If the team had been on the road, or in the hail and listening to the Principal's speech, there would have been professional linkage between him and them; the job would have been done. But they were in the canteen and there the relationship had collapsed. Of course Banks had thought about it…Push his chair back, get to his feet, cross the chasm of the canteen and spout the necessary. A place at the table would have been found for him, a magazine would have been heaved at him and he would have been told, 'Good shout, Banksy. It never happened. What do you reckon on those long-johns? They say your bollocks'll never freeze in them, but they're forty-eight quid a pair and…' But he didn't, couldn't, was never even close to pushing back the chair and starting the walk. For Christ's sake, one of them could have done the trot over the canteen floor, and none had.

He had read late into the night after getting back to his bedsit, had had to read slowly because the handwriting was steady in its deterioration, and what was to come — he sensed it — would be agony.

If he had not been on double time, weekend duty, he would have been tramping the streets, not reading the diary of Cecil Darke but getting himself over to Wandsworth and a little cul-de-sac where a developer had squeezed in a block of modern terraces. He would have been heading for Mandy's home. Pathetic, but still she dominated him. The divorce had gone through years back, but Mandy obsessed him, her and the money. If he had reached there, had turned into the cul-de-sac, he might have stood on the corner and looked along the street to where she lived, or he might have hit the door with his fist and started the futile inquest again; the source of the acrimony was always the money — the worth of the wedding presents, his maintenance payments, the sale of the old house, his cut and hers. The escape from it was overtime and maybe, now, the leather-covered notebook in his jacket pocket.

The other guys, the rest of the Delta team, talked marriages, relationships and girlfriends, and would have included him if he'd wanted it. He had never talked of Mandy with them — it wasn't any of their damn business.

They'd ship him out. He'd heard there was a WDC on the Golf team who was off on maternity leave and had heard also that a DC on the Kilo lot was transferring to the Anti-Terrorist crowd. He would be parcelled off, and it would not be the end of his world, just a different set of magazines and different chat. On Golf or Kilo, life would go on — fresh start — and he would have the same status.

What he thought, sitting in the shadows of the canteen and as far from the big window as he could be, he had stayed true to Cecil Darke, his great-uncle. Precious little else in his life was as important as staying true to that man. He reached down.

There was no bloody purpose in his own life. None, and it hurt.

Too right, that man was a hero. He'd had principles, guts, but no bloody thermal socks and long-johns and no training days in the Alley to sharpen him. He hadn't had the best weapons all oiled and loved in the Armoury, but he'd had hope. Banks had not intended to produce the notebook, but he did. He lifted it from the pocket. He turned aged pages that told of the great journey. In the emptiness of his own life there was only, as a goal, a transfer to Golf or Kilo…and the cold, and the brotherhood of friends. He found the place where he would walk again with a hero.

He read.