The Walking Dead

He saw mugs emptied of their dregs on to the concrete and the dirt, hands wiped on trouser thighs. Naylor saw the prisoner lifted up, inert. He saw Boniface and Clydesdale gasp, grunt, as they raised the weight to the hook, then let him sag. Naylor saw them scrabble for the ends of the cables where the clips were. He turned away, went out into the last light of his last day.

Naylor did not see Hegner screw his face in concentration as if the complexity of a mathematical formula exercised him, and did not hear his quiet voice.

'Guys, I reckon we need to up the voltage. Give the boy more juice.'

* * *

He was waiting for her in what had once been the chancel of the cathedral.

'Good to see you, Mary'

'You look well, Simon, very well.'

She might have slept with him — gone to his room or him to hers in the hail of residence — but had not. He had been a theology student and quiet with his ambition, and they had been soulmates for three years, but never more than friends.

'It's been too long.'

'Too much water under a bridge.'

She might have married him — in white in the church near to her parents' home or in a town hail — but had not. She had gone to London and fast-tracked through the graduate entry into the Security Service, craving advancement. He had taken the route to ordination.

'I think of you, Mary, often enough.'

'Thanks for that last card. Took an age to reach me, but it arrived. I appreciated it.'

It had come, courtesy of the American military's postal service in the Green Zone of the Iraqi capital, and had shown a bland view of the river: 'Dear Mary Can't say in truth that I wish you were here, but these are interesting times — and tragic times. Love, Simon.'

The card was in the privacy of her bedroom, hooked under the frame of her dressing-table mirror. All his cards were there — . from his three-times-a-year visits to Baghdad — and they made a ring round the mirror, and all showed the same view of the Tigris river. He was the only man that Mary Reakes, troubled and confused, would have thought of coming to speak with. She had left Thames House in midafternoon, having told her assistant that she could be reached on her mobile, had taken the train to Coventry and a taxi to bring her to the cathedral, had seen him waiting for her in the ruins where the chancel had been. She was a rising star in the ranks of the Security Service; he was an unknown junior priest in the cathedral's International Centre for Reconciliation. She had little belief; he lived by faith. She worked in a protected building in a supposed safe city; he travelled to Baghdad to support children's charities and a beleaguered church. She believed in the crushing of enemies; he strove to bring together adversaries in dialogue. Mary admired him, and Simon thought her beyond reach.

'Can't talk in a building — sorry and all that,' she said.

'Then we'll stand out here — I think the rain's easing. Forecast's good for tomorrow…Is it the Cross of Nails you need to touch?'

'I'll touch anything that gives me guidance.'

Mary Reakes told her friend of a suspicion. They stood, close to each other, inside the old lowering walls of the cathedral church of St Michael, which were retained as a reminder of the barbarity of war. On the night of 14 November 1940, fire bombs had rained on the city and a centuries-old building had been gutted. She told him of a plot identified, of a suicide-bomber loose on the streets, of a facilitator who had come from Iraq, of a prisoner who had been taken and brought south. A new cathedral, away to her left, had been built and dedicated to Forgiveness and Reconciliation, but she saw only the ruined walls and their stunted outline against the dusk. She told him of the release of the prisoner, of an argument with an assistant director, of the disappearance of her superior in the final and critical hours of the countdown, and of a blind American. In the days after the raid's destruction, a clergyman who was picking among the debris had found three long nails from the roofing beams and bound them together with wire to make a cross. She told him it was her belief that the prisoner was now abused, under torture…What should her posture be?

'You are, Mary at the vitals of morality.'

'I don't know what to do.'

'You can be a whistleblower, or you can turn your cheek.'

'I am comfortable on the upper ground, not in the gutter.'

'Does it matter what is at stake?'

She told him of the morning at Thames House, the start of a July day, the sun's warmth on the streets, as the news had come in torrent blurts of four bombs targeting the capital's commuters. They started to walk, pacing on the sheen of the flagstones. She told him that in every office open area, as they rooted in their files and flashed them up on screens, television sets showed the images of the dead and injured, and some had wept at what they saw.