The Walking Dead

There was a grimace from Ozzie. He would have preferred to walk alone, but could not. If young Ollie told his mother, when the cousin brought her up on the first Saturday of every month, that Ozzie wouldn't walk with her darling baby, aged forty-four, there would be tears and bloody shrieks. He walked with his younger brother…Let the jerk try. He'd get the full treatment. Given the spade out in a wood and told to dig the pit, then get down in it, and he'd look up at the barrel facing him. When half his bloody head was shot to hell the hole would be filled in on him. The life of Ozzie Curtis was one of 'service industries': a service to supply the wheels, another to fence, a third to provide a slaughter-house where cash and diamonds were stashed and safe, a fourth to hire out firearms. There was also an industry, expensive but worth it, for a man who double-crossed on a deal. But it wouldn't come to that because the Nobbler would have spelled out the consequences of a double-cross, and only a bloody idiot would have ignored him.

'What's getting to me, Ozzie — while we're waiting, and it's going on like a clock ticking — is this. If we get put away big-time, how long's the respect we're getting now going to last? Does respect last if we're down for fifteen or more?'

God, why couldn't his kid brother shut his damn mouth? Respect mattered to Ozzie Curtis. He was a blagger, not a druggie importer. He did not fraternize with Crime Squad detectives, did not have any cosy little relationship that meant informing on rivals. The druggie importers were crap and he didn't mix with them on the landing but he reckoned that any of them, if they learned something confidential about him that they could squeal on to their advantage, would shop him. Inside Belmarsh, Ozzie Curtis had status, but he would lose it if the sentence was heavy. He would just be another shuffling wreck, getting old, a target for any arrogant kid on the block, and he'd have his bloody brother whimpering in his ear. He depended on the Nobbler.

'If we go down, Ozzie, there'll be all of those Asset Recovery guys crawling all over us. They'll bloody strip us bare. You thought of that, Ozzie?'

Targets for Asset Recovery, and he didn't need to be told so, included his house down in Kent, which was worth, minimum, one point two five million, his Lexus four-wheel drive, the wife's top-of-the-range Audi, and the villa on the hills above Fuengirola — a place in Spain of that size was another three-quarters of a million — and there were the Cayman accounts, the Gibraltar money, the investments in the Black Sea apartments and…His status in Belmarsh would seep away once he was down and the Asset Recovery team were digging at him. He'd be a bloody pauper, and there was no respect on the landing for one of them.

'Nothing to do but wait,' Ollie said. 'I hate waiting.'

'He must have courage,' Faria whispered. Then the pitch of her voice was bolder: 'Which of us would do it?'

She had cooked chicken breasts and served them with rice and a curried sauce. It was what she would have given her parents if she had been at home, and her two brothers, if they had not been doing religious instruction in Pakistan. She had looked up before she put that question. The doors to the dining area were still closed. Before she had brought the food from the kitchen, she had called through the doors that their lunch was ready.

'Would you? Would you do what he is going to do?'

'I have not been asked,' Khalid answered, but looked away. 'It is immaterial what I say. It is not expected of me. You want honesty among ourselves and between ourselves? No.'

Her finger jabbed at Syed. 'Would you? Do you have that bravery?'

'If it were necessary, perhaps. But another has been chosen. I do not have to answer because the question is on a false premise. I do more for our struggle by staying alive, by continuing as the servant of the Organization. I was never a volunteer, and I am thankful I was not asked.'

Leaning across the table and her food, her eye and finger moved on to Ramzi. 'Is the Faith in you to do what he will?'

'I would have, if I had been selected.' His chest swelled. 'Already I told people that I was prepared for martyrdom. It is a disappointment to me that I was not chosen…Yes.'

Her gaze crossed three empty places and came to rest on Jamal. 'Would you walk with the vest against your body?'

'I don't know. I can't say. Many heroes have, in Chechnya, Palestine and Iraq, so many that we no longer know their names.' He giggled, childlike. 'Do I believe what many of those heroes were told? Do they go, in Paradise, to the virgins? Are the virgins waiting for them? There are imams who say the virgins are there…Perhaps I would do it if I believed in the virgins.'

There was a thorns of the same question. 'Would you, Faria? What about you?'