The Walking Dead

He slid off the stool and braced his weight on the surgical sticks. The crowd parted for him and he hobbled out. When GG, or Gorgeous George, or George Marriot, had first arrived in the village, moved in with his sister in the last cottage on the Hexton Road, come to the pub and taken the stool, they'd seen how badly he walked. Even with the aid of the sticks, his progress was painful to watch. Many had offered to drive him home and been ferociously refused. It would take him the best part of an hour, in the moon's light or in rain, defiantly edging along the road with his sticks, to reach his sister and the little two-bedroom cottage, with roses on the wall, that was their home.

Always, when he stood in the door, the landlord would shout across the bar crowd, 'Safe home, GG. See you next week.'

'Would you like to take a chair, Banksy?'

But David Banks was wary. To be called in on successive evenings by the REMF, his inspector, broke the pattern of life in protection. He shook his head, didn't care if that wasn't the polite response. And he wouldn't be calling the inspector by his given name, Phil, which was usual. He stood by the door and was trying to puzzle out why, late on a Friday evening and Delta just coming off a hotel run with a Principal, the Rear Echelon Mother Fucker didn't have a home of his own to go to.

'Please yourself, Banksy. You remember our little chat last night?' He lied, but casually, 'Vaguely, sir.'

'Then I'll refresh your memory. I asked you if the atmosphere was good on Delta. You said it was fine. You went on that if I wasn't satisfied with that answer I should ask around, speak to the others. You remember that?'

'I do now, sir.'

'Well, I did just that.' There was the earnestness that was well practised in a veteran of policy meetings. It itched correctness. 'Banksy, I value esprit in a team.'

'Don't we all, sir?'

'A close team works well, Banksy. A divided team does not.'

'Sir, you won't find me arguing with you.'

He was, at heart, a country boy, from the border farmlands where the counties of Somerset and Wiltshire joined. The spring of his childhood had been happiness, and every summer evening and every day of the school holidays he had ridden with his father in the tractor's or the combine's cab.

'Right, I'll spell it out from what I can tell. I understand that Delta is not working well — and, most certainly, is divided.'

He said quietly, but with flint hardness, 'I'd say you've been listening to gossip, sir, ill-informed gossip.'

'I'm being patient, Banksy, trying to be reasonable — and you playing the dumb bugger isn't helping. All right, all right, you can have it straight. I'm told you're on the outside of your team following your striking of a colleague, a blow that drew blood. I cannot think of much that is more serious than that.'

'You won't find me snitching, sir — and you shouldn't believe everything you hear.'

A hand slapped on to the desk. 'That's offensive, Banksy, bloody rude and unworthy of you. You struck a colleague and, as a result, blood was spilled. That's what I hear.'

'I have no comment to make, sir, except that what you may have been told is a parody of the truth.'

He had been with his father, on a November weekend, ploughing a field into which wheat would be sown. He hadn't noticed the pain that creased Henry Banks's face, had only been alerted by his last little gasp as the tractor had slewed off course. At nine he'd known how to halt it — and that his father was gone. He'd run a half-mile across sodden fields, mud caking on his boots, to the nearest farmhouse and had made the call for an ambulance, then gone back to the tractor and sat holding his father's hand till the crew had come. When his father's corpse had been taken away, he had walked two miles home, and had told his mother when she came back from work. It was the day he never spoke of, but it was inside him and always with him. It had shaped him.

'In denial, is what you are. You disappoint me, Banksy. I admit it, I'm surprised at your response. Well, I've put a deal of work into this. I have better places, right now, to be than here — at this God-awful hour — with you playing semantics.'

'Then, sir, why don't you go home?'

'Banksy, you're trying me…' Again the smile was used, but was not sufficient to disguise growing frustration. 'There was some horseplay in the canteen, some mucking about. You lost your temper, which is not something to be expected of an AFO. An Authorized Firearms Officer is supposed to have emotions, sudden anger attacks, well buckled down and under complete control. I'm looking at a failure on your part, and the failure led you to strike a colleague on the ear,and hard enough for it to bleed. True or false?'