The Walking Dead

His alarm, old-fashioned with a clapper bell, woke Steve Vickers. His had been a good, dreamless sleep. Off to the bathroom and he ran the piping-hot water. He was content, as close to happiness other than when he had an attentive audience round him. Without his daily bath he would have been — his opinion — a lesser, unfulfilled man. Living alone, he had no queue outside the door, no one to bang it and urge him to hurry. He lay among the suds and talked to himself, aloud, of the history he would impart that morning. He believed that what he did in bringing history alive was valuable, couldn't imagine anything else he might achieve had greater value. He lingered, ran more hot water, had time enough before he met his audience in the town square.

George Marriot's sister shook him awake. She gazed down at him and he recognized the affection that linked them. He assumed that at the pub — could not be otherwise — his life with his spinster sister was a source of sniggering amusement. She was already dressed. They would laugh in the pub, when he had gone out through the door and had started on his walk home with his sticks to aid him, that they were two lonely, misplaced souls, the flotsam rejects of ordinary life…They knew sod all…She was always up at five and she always woke him at six. He could get to the bathroom without the support of the sticks. There was a line made by his hands along his room's wallpaper, along the corridor and into the bathroom. Informer times, it was him that would have risen at five, but they were gone. He used the shower, always cold water falling on him. It took him back to the days of the camps at Kandahar and Jalalabad, when the dawn peeped up over the mountains and fighting men prepared for their day and the scars on his legs still puckered and were deep blue where the surgeons had probed for detritus. The chill of the shower invigorated him, gave scope to his memories of the best of days…One cloud, always one bloody cloud in a sky of clear blue. The petty remarks about his shirt — true, but should not have been said — had hurt, were wounds. When he had eaten his breakfast of kedgeree — egg, fish and rice, she cooked it for him every day of the week — he would go down to the village, take the bus to the town, buy three shirts in the sale and, with luck, still have change from a twenty-pound note and bring flowers for her back with him. The water ran on his skin, as it had done when it had dripped from an elevated oil drum and he'd hunted men for bounty, when his life had had purpose. The long-nurtured memories gave him comfort.

'He'll have slept rough,' Hegner said.

'Joe, I'm already about a light year's miles beyond any authority I once owned. I'm outside. Hours back, the card I swipe at the door of Riverside Villas will have been made invalid. If we lose this, I'm done for.' Dickie Naylor would be anyway, and he knew it.

He heard the snort of derision. 'I've gotten the feeling you're a man who sees his glass as always half empty. Buck up, Dickie, tell me where we are.'

His boys, the elderly Boniface and Clydesdale, were in their car and the glow of their cigarettes lit their faces, so passive and calm, as if what had gone before was past history, worthless. Not so with Naylor. He seemed to hear the screams, had heard them while he drove south and west. They were the same, piercing, as those of the gulls that had flown from the water when the first of the dawn's smear was on the horizon.

Naylor said, 'We're facing the sea.'

'I feel it on me.'

'About two hundred yards to the right of us is the entrance to the ferry terminal. Two entrances, for vehicles and foot-passengers. Nearest to us is the foot-passengers' gate. Going on from the terminal is the commercial area, warehouses and company offices, but that's all fenced off. Then there are cliffs that go out to the big headland. We're on the esplanade, that's the walkway between the road and the beach. The road is well lit, but not the walkway. The lights are aimed away from it. There are benches and—'

'Not a tourist brochure, Dickie, stick with the programme.' Asked, with acid, 'What time is your flight?'

'Time enough for this to have finished — and don't you worry, Dickie, you're going to be a hero. Take me left.'

There was a low mist on the beach, hovering at the edge of the esplanade. He described it. He could see a pier, supported by pillars against which waves broke, a haze clinging round it.

'Am I getting on your nerves, Dickie? Don't mean to. I would have traded my right ball, right anything, in exchange for the sight of two good eyes. You're a friend to me. How far is the pier and what's beyond it?'