Free Vagabond by Gerald Seymour

in you, Danny, what I value in you? It is what you do not share with me. The past weighs on you. A man must have sensitivity and humanity if he cares so greatly for the sacrifice of those who died here. I like that in you, and sometimes I think I love that in you. But you don’t give me anything back, Danny – nothing. I wish you well.’
    He could have come up behind her, stopped her, held her and dried her tears. Instead he had walked back to the hotel where the customers were and talked to them about the next day, what they would see, as if no skewer had turned in his gut. It was no problem for a man trained in surveillance to follow a woman who had no inkling that she was being tailed.
    She went into a mini-mart. She came out with a plastic bag holding a litre of milk, maybe some tins, and a wine bottle. It was important that he should know what she bought and whether she was cooking that night just for herself or for someone else. He stayed behind her and she turned into the narrow street beloved of visitors for the hydrangeas in pots by the front doors and the prettily coloured window shutters. He worried that she wouldn’t need to get out her key, that the door would be opened and a man would greet her. Now his breathing sagged in relief. She let herself in, and was alone because the lights went on.
    Those years before, when Hanna had challenged him, Danny Curnow had stayed silent because he hadn’t dared to do otherwise. He was tainted. To walk with the dead was the debt he paid. He drove out of the town and took the road that would bring him to Dunkirk. In the morning he would meet – as he did every Monday morning – his clients.

Chapter 3
     
    He parked the minibus in the secure yard at the back of the hotel. The rain had eased but the wind had strengthened. For the last week there had been gales with heavy showers, but this Sunday evening at the start of autumn it was blustery, leaves blowing around him, as he went into the wide square.
    He felt at ease. Danny Curnow enjoyed his solitary meals on the evening before a trip began. He walked purposefully across the wide space, hair tugged, trousers flat against his legs and the tang of the sea in his face. He always went to the same place for his meal and the canvas covers over the outside seating rippled noisily. He glanced up – always did – at the high plinth in the centre of the square, topped by the statue of Jean Bart, a seventeen-century admiral, who’d scrapped with everybody who’d had a ship afloat in those times. In the town he was revered, but elsewhere he was regarded as coarse and ill-educated, if a skilled commander. He knew such men. His career in the Force Reconnaissance Unit had brought him face to face, in conflict terms, with guerrilla leaders of quality. They had been dedicated in a way that the salaried soldier rarely was. They had been targets for those operating out of Gough: it had been Danny’s job to see them dead. Tough work, hard slog. And he had quit. He always thought, when he arrived in Dunkirk on a Sunday evening, that Jean Bart had been a peasant fighter, one who had employed unpredictable tactics, which were not taught in any lecture theatre. Before he had walked away, he had killed such men. Some said he had ‘danced on the graves of brave men’. He had turned his back. His country was now populated by middle-aged counter-intelligence officers who had worked for myriad agencies across the Irish Sea, knee deep in the sewage of an undeclared war. They were alone, and he thought the isolation was cruel but unavoidable. And who cared? Nobody.
    In front of him the bistro was brightly lit, the church behind it.
    It was the right place to start. The walls of the church tower were pocked with artillery strikes, bomb shrapnel and bullet scars. Dunkirk would be the start, each week, of the journey he made. Danny Curnow, out of the regular military, could have been a ‘soldier of fortune’ or could have trained to be a teacher