(2005) Rat Run by Gerald Seymour Read Free Book Online

enough to see the flowers. He felt his inadequacy.
    When he was with the dossers, sleeping in the underpass on and under cardboard, drinking with what he had made from begging, and knowing he could not fall further, he had not felt this low. The silence nagged between them.

    Maybe an hour passed. She slept and he sat dead still so as not to wake her.
    The question cracked in his ear. Brusque. 'What's a piece of shit like you doing here?'
    The nephew was behind him. He carried a large, varied bouquet in one hand and a clear plastic bag in the other, packed with apples, pears, bananas, peaches, a pineapple and grapes.
    'Why are you here?'
    He was shivering. His whisper was a chatter in his teeth: 'I came to see if I could help.'
    'Oh, that's good, "help". Didn't "help" enough to walk her there and back - no, no.'
    Malachy stammered, 'She didn't ask me. If she'd asked me . . . '
    'No fool, Aunt Millie. Wouldn't have reckoned you up to it, walking her there and back.'
    'She didn't ask.'
    'You came down from a great height - right? Hit the bottom - right? I know who you were and what you did. I know what they called you. Fancy phrases from the medics, but the truth from the jocks. I know.'
    His head drooped into his hands. He sensed the nephew go past him and he heard the kiss placed on Millie's forehead, would have been where the bruises were. More sounds. The splash of water, then the thud in the tin waste-bin, the crackle of the Cellophane wrapping on the bouquet.
    He kept his hands tight on his face, could feel the stubble on his palms.
    'What I don't know, my friend, my little piece of shit, is where you're going. Are you going to go on failing? That's easy, isn't it? I don't know if the only road you're comfortable with, my friend, is the easy one . . . Take your bloody hands off your face. Look at her! Does that take guts, looking at an old lady who's been done over for her purse? Look at her and remember her.'
    He did. He saw the slightness of her and the bruises in their mass of colours, the thin upper arm in its sling. And he saw the stems of his flowers upside down in the bin, and the glory of the bouquet on the cabinet. He pushed himself up from the bed and turned for the aisle that ran through the ward.
    'There's an easy road and a hard one - most, when they've fallen like you have, take the easy one.'
    Out of the hospital, he walked on the embankment.
    The river seemed sour and dirtied. Rain ran down his face, was not wiped away. He walked on and did not know where, walked until a massive cream and green building - an architect's dream - blocked his path.
    Then, he turned, retraced his steps and headed back to the Amersham where he could hide behind a door that was locked and bolted.
    Had Frederick Gaunt looked out through his fifth-floor window, reinforced and chemically treated glass that could withstand bomb blast and electronic eavesdropping, he would have seen a man walk on the Albert Embankment towards the wall that blocked further progress to the building where he worked, then loiter and drift away. But there was more on Gaunt's mind that lunchtime than the aimless advance and retreat of another of the capital's work-shy low-life - that would have been his description if he had seen the loafer. His sandwiches were
    untouched and his bottle of mineral water unopened.
    Gaunt's room in Vauxhall Bridge Cross, the

    monolith occupied by the Secret Intelligence Service, was in an isolated corner of the building. Nominally, eight per cent of the Service's budget was devoted to the investigation of organized crime, but the resources made available to this section of the fifth floor's open-plan areas, cubicles and rooms had been pared down to meet the demands of Iraq and the burgeoning al-Qaeda desks. Gaunt did Albania. On another man's back it would have been a hairshirt, an irritation that required continued scratching without relief, but he knew the way the system worked and would have reckoned bloody-minded sulking