The Walking Dead

She dressed, then rooted in her bag. She lifted clear from it the black robe, the jilbab, that would cover her from neck to ankles, then searched for and found a deep grey scarf, the dupatta, that would mask her neck and hair and would be drawn across her face. But Faria did not yet dress in the jilbab and the dupatta, would not make them filthy.

He slept and her movements threw glancing shadows on to his skin. He seemed to reach out for her, not find her, and his arm subsided, but he did not wake. In two hours his life would be over — finished, destroyed — and she thought it good that he slept. She slid on her shoes. What should she tell him at the last? What were the last words she would speak to him before she slipped away, left him? Awake, him holding her and her holding him, she had rehearsed what she would say…She took the new bucket and went to the door.

Faria heaved open the loose plank. It groaned. She thought he must wake, but he did not.

She crawled through the hole. The back of her T-shirt caught a wood splinter, and she wriggled to free herself.

Looking around her, up at the windows of the houses on either side, out into the gardens beyond the broken fencing, Faria saw that she was not watched. She took the top from the rain butt, lowered the bucket into it, filled it and saw the swirling scum. She replaced the top, and went back into the dark and the damp of the room, through the hole and worked the bucket after her.

He slept, but soon she would wake him — must.

* * *

'Tell me about the way men walk, describe to me every inch of their faces.'

'Yes, Joe — same as the last time you asked me.'

The low sunlight made jewels on the wave caps, but Naylor sat beside Joe Hegner in the recesses of the shelter hut where the sun did not penetrate. It was more than an hour since he had last rung his assistant director…Nothing to add that was new. Neither had he rung home…Nothing to say. They were in place as the American had demanded. A hundred yards west along the esplanade was the pier, and the tide must have reached its high point: the sea lapped the top of the pillars then fell back and tossed up weed. Set in the middle of the esplanade, level with the pier, was a foot-high brick square in which Parks and Gardens had planted shrubs and alongside it were the boys, Boniface and Clydesdale, in their cat A further thousand yards, Naylor's approximation, down the esplanade was the entrance to the ferry-port, where the big boat now unloaded articulated lorries from its bow ramp. A man came towards them, pushing a pram in which a baby yelled.

'He's fifty. A grandfather, maybe. Caucasian. It'll be the daughter's kid and howling.'

'Thank you, Dickie. I'm not deaf as well.'

A minute passed. He had no conversation, nor did it seem expected of him. Hegner sat beside him, hunched, alert, and he had the stick upright between his legs and leaned his chin on it. Another man came.

'Little chap, could be forties, but he's all wrapped up. Has a fishing bag on his shoulder and—'

'Thank you, Dickie.'

Another minute slipped. No, Dickie Naylor would not have said he was near to panic, would have denied panic. But his gut was tightening and his hands clasped and unclasped, and he shifted his weight continually on the slats of the shelter seat, and his eyes ached from peering ahead. Not yet panic, but closing on it. Thoughts raced, jumbled, in his mind. A bomber would strike and he didn't know where — a cell member, a junior, under torture, had supposedly spoken of a ticket and where it would be used and at what time — a gamut of arrogance and egocentricity and the chase for a career's legacy had put him, Dickie bloody Naylor, into the palm of the American.

'Two lads, around twenty. Big rucksacks. One is Caucasian and one is Afro-Caribbean. Look to be half pissed…students.'

'Thank you, Dickie.'