The Woodcutter. Reginald Hill

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      Now the Morris turns into this very street, slows down, and almost before it has come to a halt the boy finds himself bundled out by the bald man and pushed through a doorway.

      But he is not yet so frightened that he does not observe the number 19 painted on the wall beside the door.

      He is almost carried up some stairs and taken into a room empty of furniture but full of men. Here he is dumped on the floor in a corner. He tries to speak to Ahmed. The young man shakes his head impatiently, and after that will not meet his gaze.

      After ten minutes or so a new man arrives, this one wearing a European suit and exuding authority. The others fall silent.

      The newcomer stands over the boy and stoops to peer into his face.

      ‘So, boy,’ he says. ‘You are the son of the British spymaster.’

      ‘No, sir,’ he replies. ‘My father is the British commercial attaché.’

      The man laughs.

      ‘When I was your age, I knew what my father was,’ he says. ‘Come, let us speak to him and see how much he values you.’

      He is dragged to his feet by the bald man and marched into another room where there is a telephone.

      The man in the suit dials a number, the boy hears him speak his father’s name, there is a pause, then the man says, ‘Say nothing. I speak for the Front for the Liberation of South Yemen. We have your son. He will speak to you so that you know I do not lie.’

      He makes a gesture and the boy is forced forward.

      The man says, ‘Speak to your father so he may know it is you,’ and puts the phone to the boy’s mouth.

      The boy chants, ‘Mille ani undeviginti.’

      The man snatches the phone away and grabs the boy by the throat.

      ‘What did you say?’ he screams.

      ‘You said he had to know it was me,’ gabbles the boy. ‘It’s a song we sing together about Paddy McGinty’s Goat. Ask him, he’ll tell you.’

      The man speaks into the phone: ‘What is this Ginty goat?’

      Whatever is said to him seems to satisfy him and, at a nod from the man, the boy is dragged back to the first room.

      Here he lies in the corner, ignored. Men come and go. There is an atmosphere of excitement as though everything is going well. Ahmed, who receives many congratulatory slaps and embraces, still refuses to look at him. He grows increasingly fearful and sinks towards despair.

      Then from below comes a sudden outburst of noise.

      First the splintering of wood as though a locked door is being broken down, then a tumult of upraised voices followed almost instantly by the rattle of small-arms fire.

      All the men rush out. Left alone, the boy looks for a place to hide but there is nowhere. The room’s one window is too small for even a small eleven-year-old to wriggle through.

      The din is getting louder, nearer. The door bursts open. The bald man rushes in with a pistol in his hand. The boy falls to the floor. The man screams something unintelligible and aims the weapon. Before he can fire, Ahmed comes in behind and jumps on his back. The gun goes off. The bullet hits the floor between the boy’s splayed legs.

      The two men wrestle briefly. The gun explodes again.

      And the bald man slumps against the wall, his hands holding his stomach. Blood seeps through his fingers.

      Ahmed stands over him, clutching the pistol. Now at last his eyes meet the boy’s and he tries to smile, but it doesn’t quite work. Then he turns to the door that has been slammed shut in the struggle.

      The boy cries, ‘Ahmed, wait!’

      But the young Yemeni is already opening the door.

      He hardly takes one pace over the threshold before he is driven back into the room by a hail of bullets that shatter his chest.

      Their eyes meet once more as he lies on the floor. This time the smile makes it to his lips. Then he dies.

      Folded in his father’s arms, the boy finally lets himself cry.

      His father says, ‘You did well, you kept your head; the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, eh? And didn’t I tell you that doing your Latin homework would come in useful some day!’

      Two years later his father will be killed when his car is blown up by a FLOSY bomb, so the boy never has the chance to sit down with him as an adult and ask what the subversives wanted him to do as the price of his son’s safety.

      Nor what his answer would have been if his own young wits had not been quick enough to reveal the street and the building number where he was being held.

      But before he went back to school he did ask how it was that his friend Ahmed, who had loved him enough to save his life and give up his own in the process, could have put him in that perilous position in the first place.

      And his father had answered, ‘When love is in opposition to grim necessity, there is usually only one winner.’

      He had not understood then what he meant. But he was to understand later.

       2

      Autumn 1989; the world in turmoil; the Berlin Wall crumbling; Chris Rea’s The Road to Hell top album; Western civilization watching with bated breath the chain of events that will lead to the freeing of Eastern Europe and the end of the Cold War.

      In a Cumbrian forest in a glade dappled by the midday sun, a man sits slumped against a twisted rowan, his weathered face more deeply scored by the thoughts grinding through his bowed head, his eyes fixed upon but not seeing the unopened flask and sandwich box between his feet. A little way apart, a second man stands and watches, his long brown hair edged wolf-grey, his troubled face full of a compassion he knows it is vain to express, while at his back a young girl too regards the sitting man with unblinking gaze, though her expression is much harder to read. And over the wide woodland tract, so rarely free of the wind’s soughing music above, and the pizzicato of cracking twigs below, a silence falls as if trees and sky and surrounding mountains too were bating their breath for fear of intruding on grief.

      Three hundred miles to the south in an East London multi-storey car park, five hoodies who probably wouldn’t bate a breath if Jesus Christ crash-landed on St Paul’s in a chariot of fire are breaking into a car.

      But they’ve done it once too often, and suddenly cops spring up all around as if someone had been sowing dragon’s teeth. The hoodies scatter and run, only to find there’s no place to run to.

      Except for one. He heads for a ten-foot concrete wall with a one-foot gap at the top. To the СКАЧАТЬ