Osama (16 page)

Maybe he’d been seeing things. A pint or two of Kronenberg too many.

Sixty seconds later he was away from the main road, walking on autopilot through the network of streets that formed the route from the Three Barrels back home. The names were familiar: Ashbourne Crescent, Meadow Way, School Close. In the corner of his mind he thought it should be comforting that he was here, and not patrolling some shithole of an Afghan village. Somehow, though, it wasn’t. The street lamps dazzled him and he couldn’t walk in a straight line. He saw two young women cross the road to avoid passing him. One of them wore a T-shirt with ‘Arctic Monkeys’ emblazoned over her breasts, the other was holding a rat-like chihuahua on a lead.

Antrobus Road. Fielding Avenue. Grosvenor Place.

And finally, Lancing Way. No parked vehicles. No pedestrians. The no-parking barriers edging the pavement glowing fluorescent orange in the lamplight. Joe weaved drunkenly across the pavement and clattered noisily into one of them.

He swore, then looked up and saw a car in the road.

It was forty metres away, about ten beyond his own front door. Its headlights were on full beam, but it wasn’t moving. He squinted. It was a 4 x 4 – a Range Rover maybe? He could make out rails on the front . . .

Joe stopped. He didn’t know why. He found himself estimating how quickly he could get to his house. Ten seconds, at a sprint.

Palpitations. Something was making him nervous. A sixth sense, finely honed after years on the front line.

Only this wasn’t the front line. This was Lancing Way. Home.

This was paranoia. He remembered the doctor’s questions.

‘Fucking bullshit,’ he muttered under his breath. He needed to get back to the house. Sleep off the booze. Start his whole fucking disastrous homecoming all over again.

He looked down the road. The car was moving towards him. Slowly, he thought, though it was difficult to judge speed in the darkness. He shoved his hands into the pockets of his leather jacket and upped his pace. It was with a kind of defiance that he ignored the approaching car. So what if it was moving slowly? Probably just some John kerb-crawling for a hooker. He was in the wrong street . . .

Or maybe it wasn’t. He could hear the revs of the car’s engine as it increased in speed. Suddenly. Violently.

The car was twenty metres away when, still accelerating, it veered across the road towards Joe. It was ten metres away when it mounted the kerb. There was a massive clattering sound as it ploughed into the barriers, slicing through them with two wheels on the pavement and two on the road.

The headlights blinded him. Everything started to spin again. He dived to the side of the pavement, where his face scraped against a rough brick front-garden wall and his left shoulder thumped down heavily on the pavement. The stench of burning rubber hit his senses, and he was aware that the car had come to a halt just three metres forward of where he had fallen. Joe pushed himself up to his feet as it started reversing away from him, back the way it had come. Still blinded by the headlights, he sprinted towards the car. The distance between them closed to two metres. One.

The car stopped abruptly. Joe was alongside the driver’s door now, and the lights were no longer shining in his eyes. Although he was still dazzled, he managed to feel his way to the door handle and yank it.

Locked.

More revs from the engine. Joe raised one leather-clad elbow and smashed it hard against the driver’s window. The glass splintered, cobweb-like, but didn’t shatter. It needed another blow, but the car was moving forward. His vision was clearing now, and he could see through the rear passenger window.

A face was looking out at him. He recognized it, even though he didn’t notice the yellow tinge of the teeth.

And then the car was back on the road, accelerating away, the engine screaming. Five metres. Ten. Joe sprinted into the middle of the road and squinted after it, trying to make out the plates. But his vision was blurred and he couldn’t read them.

The car turned right into Grosvenor Place, out of sight; the noise of its engine disappeared.

Silence.

Joe felt his left cheek. It was wet with blood. His shoulder throbbed. On the other side of Lancing Way, the door to number 17 opened. A fat man Joe half recognized appeared, wearing a dressing gown and lit up by the hallway light behind him. ‘What the bloody hell’s going on?’ he shouted. ‘It’s half past bloody twelve at night! What you doing standing in the middle of the road? I’m calling the bloody police . . .’

Joe didn’t answer. He just put his head down and hurried back to the pavement. Thirty seconds later he was walking up to his own front door, inserting the key in the lock and stepping inside.

The house was quiet.

The lights were off.

Joe was dripping sweat, and breathless.

Whatever had happened out there, it had sobered him up. He locked the door behind him and, instead of climbing the stairs to bed, he hurried into the kitchen, where he found the same knife he’d taken earlier on, and which Caitlin had now returned to its usual place. Back in the front room, he pulled open the curtains of the window that looked out on the street.

No movement.

It did nothing to ease his state of mind. He wiped away the patch of condensation made by his breath.

‘Joe?’ Caitlin’s voice was timid. ‘Are you coming to bed, honey?’

‘Get upstairs.’ He threw her a dark look over his shoulder.

‘Oh my God, Joe – what’s happened to your face? What’s going on?’

‘Get Conor. Take him into our room. Lock the door. The windows too.’

Silence.

‘
Do it!
’

‘Joe, sweetheart, you’ve been drinking. I can smell it . . . Joe, you heard what the doctor said . . .’

He turned on her, his face ablaze, the knife still in his hand. And the look she gave him, lit only by the shard of yellow light that came in from the street lamp outside, was no longer irritated, or anxious. It was scared.

‘Get upstairs,’ he said, his teeth gritted.

She nodded and stepped back slowly, her fingers spread out, pacifying him. Joe turned and looked out of the window again; seconds later he heard Caitlin thundering upstairs, and the kerfuffle as she woke Conor up and took him into their room.

And then silence again.

Just Joe’s heavy breathing, the ticking of the clock and the thumping of his heart.

He stood by the window, motionless, his eyes alert for any sign of movement. The clock chimed: 1 a.m. He felt tired, but he forced himself not to give in to it.

Maybe he
was
sick. Maybe he
was
paranoid.

But one thing was sure. For the second time in forty-eight hours, he’d almost died. And a single question that he couldn’t answer was rebounding in his head.

Why?

Eight

Joe had thought that things might look better in the morning. He was wrong. As the sky grew lighter and condensation dripped down the inside of the window, people started to appear. A man walking his dog. A Lycra-clad cyclist hunched over her handlebars. The same two girls he’d passed last night, staggering home, the worse for wear. Every movement made him tense. The axe-split of a headache he was suffering wasn’t just the booze. Joe didn’t let go of the knife.

The clock chimed six times. He didn’t move. Seven. There were sounds from upstairs. Floorboards creaked. Footsteps descended. He sensed Caitlin staring at him from the door.

‘Pack a bag,’ he said.

‘Joe . . .’

‘Pack a bag.’

He didn’t know at what point during his vigil he had come to the decision, but now that it was light he had made up his mind: they weren’t staying here. Maybe someone had tried to kill him last night; maybe it had just been a bunch of pissed-up, joyriding dickheads unable to keep control of their vehicle and the kid with the Coke bottle was just a kid with a Coke bottle. Either way, getting out of Hereford felt like the right move.

‘Where are we going?’ Caitlin asked.

‘JJ’s.’

‘Does he know?’

For Joe and his family, JJ’s meant holidays. Whenever Joe’s mate had any down time – which was hardly ever – he spent his time at the secluded old farmhouse, ten klicks from Berwick-upon-Tweed, that his grandparents had owned. There, he kept his eye in by shooting every last game bird he could find with an old two-bore shotgun. ‘No difference,’ he’d said to Joe just three weeks previously, ‘between a bird and a bad guy.’

‘Joe, does JJ know we’re . . . ’

‘No!’

‘But—’

‘JJ’s got other things on his mind, trust me.’

Caitlin didn’t much like it up in Berwick, but Joe loved the remote bleakness of the place. And with JJ stuck out in Bagram, he knew the house would be empty. More importantly, he’d be off the radar.

‘Maybe we should just stay here . . . The Regiment want you to go in and—’

‘
Fuck
the Regiment.’

Caitlin jumped. She had that look again. Anxious. A little scared – maybe of him? Perhaps he should tell her what had happened last night.

Or perhaps not. She already thought he was losing it.

Joe took a deep breath to calm himself, then approached her and brushed one hand against her soft cheek. ‘We need some time out,’ he said. ‘Just the three of us. I need to wind down, babe. Get away from it all.’

It was the right thing to say. Joe knew it would be. Caitlin’s eyes softened; she bit her lower lip and nodded at him. Fifteen minutes later she had three bags packed and was back in the front room, standing just behind Conor with her hands on his shoulders.

The boy looked tired. Dark rings. Pale skin. He was wearing a light blue anorak and clutching his DS. ‘What happened to your face?’ he asked.

‘Don’t worry about it, champ.’

‘Just asking.’

‘We should get moving,’ said Joe.

‘What about school?’ asked Conor.

‘Look, just forget about school, OK?’ Joe snapped. Conor flinched and withdrew a little into his mother’s embrace. Joe pushed past them. ‘Let’s go,’ he said.

It was a silent trip north. Conor slept in the back of their silver Mondeo estate; Caitlin removed her shoes and hugged her knees in the passenger seat; Joe put talk radio on to fill the silence. Some arsehole of a shock jock was presiding over a banal phone-in. Joe barely heard what they were saying until two hours into the journey when, snapping out of his driving trance on the M6, he realized the conversation had inevitably moved on to bin Laden. An ‘expert’ – he sounded Middle Eastern – was giving his opinion: ‘. . . and it’s quite simply wrong of the American government to suggest that Osama bin Laden’s body was disposed of according to Islamic practices . . .’ Joe slammed the button to turn the radio off, drawing another of Caitlin’s anxious glances. He could tell she wanted to talk to him about what they’d just been listening to. She wasn’t stupid. She knew that ops like the raid in Abbottabad were Joe’s bread and butter. But she also knew it was a waste of breath asking him about what he did when he was on Regiment time.

Joe glanced in the rear-view mirror. His face was still dirty and scabbed, but he wasn’t looking at that. He saw a red Citroën Picasso behind him, and an XK8 behind that. He hadn’t noticed either car before, but he still pulled out into the centre lane and lowered his speed suddenly, forcing them to overtake on the inside before he dropped back into the slow lane behind them. If Caitlin noticed what he was doing she gave no indication of it – she had removed a bottle of nail-polish remover from her bag, along with a wad of cotton wool. She dabbed her nails in silence, while Joe kept his eye on the two cars. The Picasso pulled off at the next junction; the XK8 zoomed off into the distance.

Conor woke at midday. Joe kept driving as Caitlin passed their son sandwiches she’d made before they left. Neither she nor Joe had an appetite for them. He kept his eyes on the road. She kept hers on her nails. From the back came the beep-beeping of Conor’s DS.

They stopped around 3 p.m. to buy food in a dingy supermarket – the closest to their destination, but still thirty klicks south-west of JJ’s. Caitlin didn’t comment on the booze Joe piled into the trolley: a case of Tennent’s, two bottles of Famous Grouse and half a dozen bottles of cheap wine. She concentrated on adding microwave meals – JJ was no Jamie Oliver and his kitchen looked like it. Twenty minutes later they were back in the car. And an hour later they were at their destination.

JJ’s house stood alone at the foot of a hill that was covered with grazing sheep. When he was younger, Conor always used to say that it looked as though it had a face, and he was right. The narrow windows and cracked pebbledash render made it look mournful. It wasn’t helped by the rain that had started the moment they had caught sight of it. An old iron fence, about a metre high, marked the boundary of the property, but it was so covered with bindweed that the metal was barely visible. The grass to the front of the house was a couple of feet high. Their vehicle made a clear track through it as Joe pulled up by the front door, whose green paint was peeling to reveal the white undercoat beneath. The house looked a little shabbier every time they came here.