The Walking Dead

Two men, alternately, thrashed the back of Omar Hussein with an iron bar and a pliable rubber truncheon. The cell in which he was suspended had a floor space of less than three metres by less than two. He had now defecated and urinated in his underpants. He could not protect his back from the blows, and when he screamed the bar and the truncheon hit him with greater power. He could smell his own filth. He thought he had done right…He screamed at the pain, hoped only for unconsciousness, and cursed his son.

* * *

The questions came…When had he first known? Who had recruited his son? What was the target of his son? Was not the whole of Asir Province a snake's nest of dissent, a foxes' den of violence against the Kingdom? Did he support his son's belief in murder? The answer was a single croak inside the hood over his old head: he knew nothing, nothing.

And then his tormentors left him.

Again, muffled by the hood, he screamed the curse against his son.

He had been working late, was in no hurry to be home after the early spat with Anne and, for a break, he had slipped out of Riverside Villas and walked to the park at the back. He shared a bench with a pathetic creature, sodden with a bottle of full-strength cider and destitute, but Dickie Naylor was ignored, left alone with his thoughts and his lit pipe.

When six more working days were done, Naylor would never again sit in the evening quiet of St John's Gardens. He had learned the value of coming to the park and sitting under the high plane trees when the world, his world, collapsed around him. And here he could smoke a pipe and be free of the tobacco police.

It had been a burial ground. He fancied that he, and the vagrant, sat with phantoms long deceased. That did not bother him, was actually something of a comfort; he could cope with the past and inevitability. Three and a half centuries before that spring evening, and the ebb of his working life, the cemetery had been full and an extra yard deep of topsoil had been carted in so that new graves could be dug on top of the old. An enterprising solution to a capacity problem. He had sat here, with the same pipe stem clamped in his teeth, on the evening of Nine-Eleven.

On that September day, some had rushed round the offices and corridors of Riverside Villas, acting the parts of whirling dervishes, or clutched paper sheets, or had mobiles pressed to their ears and called for meetings, or rifled for files from the archive. Dickie Naylor had watched the frenetic action, then walked to the solitude of St John's Gardens and smoked, using the quiet to ponder. He had returned and said, 'This day will turn out to be as significant as. that of the first of September sixty-two years ago when the battleship Schleswig-Holstein fired the first shells at the Polish garrison of the Westerplatte at Danzig.' He did not flatter himself that any had listened. A month later the new section was formed to monitor for the arrival of suicide-bombers into the United Kingdom and he had been nominated as second in charge. After a year Freddie had gone, retired to golf or tomato-breeding, and Naylor had taken his place and occupied his cubicle. The tick of his own retirement clock had started.

But the new topsoil dumped on the garden had created its own problems. Solutions always bred consequences, Naylor believed. The shallow graves, not excavated deeply enough for fear of disturbing the already interred, had provided scope for body-snatchers. 'Block one hole and another appears', he would have said, if the vagrant had asked him. By 1814, what was now St John's Gardens had been patrolled by armed guards, carrying not cudgels but primed pistols, and the hospitals were denied the cadavers they needed for dissection tutorials.

He had come here, to the same bench, on the day that jargon now called Seven-Seven. That day, Riverside Villas had been stunned and quiet. 'God, it's bloody well reached us — us,' he'd heard an ashen-faced branch director murmur. The building's business was compartmentalized. An officer was supposed to know his own area of study, but not of investigations in hand adjacent to his desk. 'Need to bloody know' was the mantra of the Villas. By mid-morning on Seven-Seven that sacred rule was shredded. A verdict of failure had consumed the building. The guards on the big doors to the basement car park, the canteen cooks and the director general in a lofty suite of offices would have known it. There hadn't been a damn whisper of what was going to happen. Four guys, with clean skins, had walked through all the beavering efforts of detection with which the Service was charged. Naylor had come to the gardens that lunchtime, eaten a sandwich and thought that the illusion of all-seeing competence manufactured in the Villas was gone. He had come back in, swiped his card, taken the lift up, tramped down his corridor and an officer had asked him, 'What the hell should be our response, Dickie?'