The Walking Dead

He rarely looked at them. The brothers sat away to his right shoulder. They faced the judge, were behind their legal team and the prosecution's, and were flanked by prison guards. They were in their mid-forties, with wide chests pushing against their suit buttons and muscling bulged in the sleeves. They had clean shirts for each day of the hearing, and the type of quiet tie that a senior civil servant — or a top administrator in the education authority — would have chosen; he assumed that the ties had been nominated, along with the executive suits and daily changed shirts, by their defence people to make a 'good impression' on the jury. There was no way that a suit costing what Jools took home in a month would fool him. On their wrists were heavy gold chains, and he thought that under the laundered shirts and the fall of their ties there would be heavier gold necklaces. When he did look at them, sharp side-of-eye glances, he could see their intimidating bulk, and the cold arrogance of power in their faces. All right, all right, he would admit it — to himself: they frightened him. There were fathers who came to the school to complain when their child was suspended or sent home, fathers who clenched their fists and spat anger. Fathers frightened him, but not as much as the brothers did. The trouble was that each time he stole a look at them — having been drawn to do so, moth to a flame, compulsion — they seemed to sense it: their heads would twist and their eyes would fasten on to him, leech secure. He would turn away fast and look at his hands or shoelaces, the judge or the court reporter. But always, when he looked right, there was the moment when they trapped him and he felt the fear. He knew what they'd done, had heard in crawling detail of their entry into the jewellery shop, had listened to the stumbling recall of witnesses terrorized by the guns and the certainty of violence if they'd resisted. The fear made him shiver.

He cursed silently. Now he must find a new eyeline, somewhere else in court eighteen, to focus on. The elder brother, with a springy step, was being escorted by twin minders from the dock to the witness box, and from there would face the jury. Jools gazed at Mr Justice Herbert's nose, and the mole on its left side; he did not know where else it was safe to look.

He had never told his wife that eye-contact with the brothers frightened him. He was no hero, and Babs would have told him so. He had never before tasted the sourness of danger, and when this trial was complete he doubted he ever would again.

* * *

There were no snow-capped mountain peaks here, no caves above the iceline where hunted men hid. There were no tracks on which sure-footed couriers brought reports for evaluation and took away messages laced with hate that demanded execution. There were no cliffs against which old men would stand, leaning on sticks for support and holding rifles to guarantee their power, to denounce a sprawling society they loathed.

There were no deep-rutted roads along which armoured vehicles edged, and helmeted men, sweating in bulletproof vests, peered over the sights of machine-guns for an unseen enemy.

Nothing of this town showed the possibility that it might become a front-line outpost in the new war. Normality ruled in Luton That afternoon, the Bedfordshire town, thirty miles due north of central London, had a population of a few hundred short of 170,000 inhabitants. It boasted a major automobile factory and an airport patronized by tourists flying out on cheap charter flights. The town had been named — and had angrily rejected the title—'Britain's crappiest', with the 'worst architecture in the country' and 'wrist-slittingly moribund nightclubs'. But front line Luton was not.

In St George's Square, sandwiched between the town hail and the shopping centre, drunks and hooded kids had taken occupancy of the benches and were sprawled over them. They, and the shoppers, who skirted them warily, the office workers who came out to smoke in spite of the rain, the council's cleaners emptying overfilled rubbish bins, and the youngsters trooping into the public library off the square to use the computers, did not concern themselves with the war. Why should they? For what reason might they consider themselves threatened and labelled as legitimate targets? All thought themselves safe from terror. Months before, detectives had broken down doors and taken away handcuffed men. A year and a half before a vehicle had been left at the railway-station car park by four men who had taken a train to London to kill themselves and fifty others…Too long ago, best forgotten.

To the men and women of the town, the war was confined to television screens, distant beyond comprehension. But confined inside the boundaries of the town resentment simmered in ghettos of Asian immigrants — where a few Muslim radicals awaited the call to jihad.

The town that sprawled on either side of the river Lea did not, could not, know it.