Текст книги "All That Follows"

Автор книги: Jim Crace

Соавторы: Jim Crace,Jim Crace,Jim Crace
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Текущая страница: 13 (всего у книги 15 страниц)

It is almost two hours since Leonard left her sleeping. The approach streets to Alderbeech are calm and unpopulated. A typical predawn Sunday. The waste ground has already almost cleared. There are a few detachments of uniformed men there, clearing up, and the mobile lavatories and canteen are still in place, though locked and shuttered. Francine goes directly to the Buzz. There is no sign of Leonard, but that is no surprise. She cuts across the waste ground, past two marquees not noticed on her first visit, and enters the hostage street under the bluish flooding of police lights. She sees at once there is no barrier for Leonard to be spectating behind. It has been dismantled and its parts are piled up on the pavement awaiting collection. For the first time in more than four days the street is open to traffic and pedestrians, but there are none yet. If she were Leonard she would want to see inside the hostage house and investigate the full length of the street. That is where she expects to meet her husband now, on the pavement. She thinks she sees him standing a hundred meters farther down, beyond the lights. She waves and starts in his direction, walking along the far-side path, not even pausing to stare into the house, past the single policeman who is at the gate, keeping guard and getting very wet. He watches her, glad to inspect this attractive older woman, walking with a swing, and relieve the monotony of guard duty by wondering what has made her seem so spirited so early in the day. Apart from this one officer, there’s no activity at the hostage scene. No doubt the policeman’s many colleagues are tired and catching up on sleep. Forensic teams will come in when it’s light, she thinks. Film crews will return to finalize reports. She hurries on, but the figure she has taken for Leonard turns out to be a dog walker, a dog that barks and warns her off. She’ll wait for Leonard in the car. She’s sure she has a spare key in her bag.

On her return – on the nearer pavement – she does stop to stare into the house. It seems untouched, determinedly undramatic, dull. Most of the curtains have been drawn. The only light is in the porch. The only movement is a cloud of moths. It’s hard to even dream up a figure standing in the shadows, holding a gun at shoulder height and pointing it at Leonard in the street, as he’s imagined it: Kapow. You’re scathed. Kapow. You’re dead!

“All over?” she asks the policeman.

“Done and dusted,” he replies.

“Anybody hurt?”

“One of our guys took a tumble. Family wasn’t touched. Three individuals in custody, and hardly a scratch on them. All foreigners. That’s about the size of it. Nice work all round. Top job.”

Francine offers him her widest smile and keeps on smiling as she crosses the street, heading for the entrance to the waste ground by the two marquees. It is there that she spots, with immediate alarm, what looks like Leonard’s yellow beach cap swept up among the litter, the recent pile of paper coffee cups, pop cans, and takeaway wrappers. She doesn’t pick it up at once but turns it with her foot, expecting to discover some other logo on its peak – but no, its slogan is QUEUE HERE, just like Leonard’s. Now she bends for it. The cap is damp and heavy in her hands, caked with mud. She shakes and stretches it, then turns it inside out, hoping not to find her husband’s stage name, Lennie Less, inked along the rim.

15

THE WONKY, UNEDITED VIDEO of Leonard’s detention in Alderbeech during the early hours of the morning is greeted by clapping and whoops when it is first aired on the wall screens of NSF’s debooting and debriefing rooms. There’s little else of dramatic interest for the news networks to broadcast and nothing else for the armed incident squads, now going off-duty, to applaud; the hostage rescue itself was disappointingly routine, with at best a bit of shouting but not a shot fired or a punch thrown. So Leonard’s late, unheralded appearance on the street was a godsend in a way. The weirdo in the yellow cap provided their only opportunity, after more than four days of dreary vigilance, to let off a bit of steam. “That’s copybook, that is,” one of the officers calls out, as the intruder is brought to the ground in three easy movements. “Step up, those men. Rosettes all round.”

Elsewhere in the building, in the rooms above the custody suite where the four detainees are being held in separate cells, the responses among members of the NSF command team are not so celebratory. It’s not only that the first broadcasters of the video, already syndicated round the world, have failed to pixilate the faces of the arresting officers. That is an easy fix. A phone call, or a text reminder of the National Security Standards in Broadcasting, and it’s dealt with. There are greater problems, less easy to massage or to solve. What is now clear is that what they flagged up as “a delicate and risky” security operation has proved to be an embarrassing anticlimax. According to the brisk report just delivered to them by the duty CO, the siege could have been ended much earlier “by a couple of coppers on a tandem.” When the armed squads stormed in, according to the first reports, everyone inside the hostage house – the family, the gang – was asleep. It was Operation Wakey-Wakey, not so much Shock and Awe as Rouse and Arrest. All but one of the hostage-takers’ guns were soon discovered to be replicas, and the single working revolver was unloaded, with no trace so far of any spare ammunition. There were no barricades, no booby traps, no ropes, just evidence of takeaway food, the stink of cigarettes, and unusual tidiness. A jigsaw puzzle of London’s Tower Bridge lay almost completed on the living room table. Add to that yesterday’s tip-off from NADA that the Emmerson kidnapping and SOFA’s grim threats of “an eye for an eye” were nothing but a stunt, and the whole standoff begins to look absurd. “No need to make any of that public. Yet,” one of the team says. “Embargo it.” Unfavorable details such as these can be buried in the minutiae of the official incident report, he suggests. And the report itself can be delayed for a week or so, at least until the public and the press have lost interest, as they will.

It is less easy, though, to know how to handle the embarrassment of the wonky video, especially with the summit leaders scheduled to discuss freedom and security in two days’ time and all the world’s press already in town and hungry for a British story to tide them over. What is needed, just to offer balance, is a strip of film showing a heroic and risky intervention by the NSF. A few injured officers paraded for the cameras would help. But there is nothing. They can’t even hope anymore for some drama associated with a rescue or release of Lucy Emmerson. Some shots of a pretty teenager, hurt possibly but certainly tearful, would have played well on the newscasts. Instead, the nation is getting up to watch three of the security force’s celebrated “burly bastards” knocking to the ground, with what commentators are already describing as excessive force, a shabby, middle-aged member of the British public who is guilty of little more than straying.

The command team plays and replays the video footage, looking for a PR spin but finding none. The liberty lobbies are going to have a field day. No question about it, the first kick is rule-breaking; this civilian is clearly offering no threat. He’s walking off, in fact. The man’s back is turned. His arms are down. He is not attempting to run. That kick cannot be justified. Nor can any of the subsequent blows: a knee in the back and a fist to the chin are not appropriate, especially given that the target is offering no resistance and is, to use the parlance of the force, already tarmacadamized. The video’s sound track – enhanced by NSF techs – is little help. It worsens matters, actually. It can’t be long before the news networks enhance the audio for themselves and hear exactly what was whispered full to camera into the arrested and incapacitated man’s ear as he lay stunned on the ground: “You so much as twitch and you are getting tasered. That’s fifty thousand volts, understand, you fuck?”

“Yes, understood – and all too bloody well.” The officer turns off the telescreen. “That’s bloody tasered us, that’s what that’s done.” The other commanders shake their heads in glum agreement. This is a mess. A classic case of excessive and unwarranted, which at best will earn the NSF another roasting in the liberal press – especially when it transpires, as it must, that their captive was not a danger at all but just a nosy parker – and at worst will have its payoff on the streets. Riots, possibly. The mood is jittery already. And it could escalate. The “demo mob” has a hero and a martyr now.

“What was he doing there, anyway?”

The duty CO checks his report sheet. “Picking up his car, it says.”

Leonard has not yet seen the news reports or video. He has been sleeping for an hour or so, despite his bruises and the narrowness of the banquette in the custody cell. The night’s events are tumbling. He makes no sense of them. He mostly dreams of Maxie crashing through the windscreen of the Buzz. But when the command team sends for him, he’s dreaming that he and Maxie have escaped from Alderbeech. Together. Bullets wing the car at first. Then they find themselves in empty neighborhoods with no one in pursuit. “I came for you,” he says to Maxie, the streetlights turning into stars, a sudden blast of light. “Comrade Leon saves your sorry arse.”

The sudden blast of light comes from a set of interrogation lamps, pointing toward the ceiling. The duty CO stands at the end of the banquette, grinning stiffly and holding Leonard’s coat, belt, and shoes and an envelope containing his cell, ID fob, and keys. His instructions are to bring Mr. Lessing up to the visitors’ lounge without his seeing a television screen and to sit him in the soft-backed chair facing the window, out of harm’s way. It is here that he is served a canteen breakfast on a tray while the service paramedic dresses and photographs his wounds and makes light of “the rugby damage” he’s received. A middle-ranking female officer has been instructed to placate and scold the prisoner before releasing him. He should leave the building persuaded that it’s best to make no fuss. Certainly any complaint for wrongful arrest or a claim for damages would be “mischievous and unwarranted.” She shakes Leonard’s hand and offers her regrets for the “necessarily firm” treatment he received. The three men responsible have already been suspended from all duties, she explains, glad to see that he looks surprised and guilty when he hears the news. But the truth is that Mr. Lessing has been foolhardy, in her view and in the view of anyone who saw him on the street this morning. Straying into the middle of a security operation is never wise. But – she’s checked – he has not broken any laws. “We can congratulate ourselves,” she adds, pleased with her bantering tone and the phrasing she practiced before walking into the lounge, “that this is still a nation where straying is not a crime but merely inadvisable. And inconsiderate. And best not repeated.” There will be more questions to be answered, possibly, but not in custody. He can expect a home visit, perhaps. But in the meantime, it might be better, judicious even, if “discretion is allowed to rule the day, on both our sides. We will not be releasing your details to the press, out of consideration for your privacy.”

She does not say that her next task is to preempt any problem he might cause by ghost-briefing some of the NSF’s pet dependents in the press, telling them what she’s learned from a NADA leak just a few minutes ago: that this Leonard Lessing might not be as squeaky as he seems. Somehow he’s linked to Maxim Lermontov and to the not-so-missing girl. He has history as a militant, some Texan connection. He is known to be someone who has provided information to the police. He’s been spotted in a cafeteria with Mrs. Emmerson. Foolhardy, indeed. She shakes his hand again. “Now, let us reunite you with your vehicle, Mr. Lessing. You look as if you’d benefit from …” She pauses, judges that she’d better not be personal. “From forty winks.”

Francine is sleeping in the car, her mouth hanging open like a child’s, when Leonard is finally returned to the now almost vacated waste ground a little before 10 a.m. She must have checked out of the room as soon as it was light and waited at the Buzz for his return, not panicking, even though his cell was off, but finding comfort in logical and reassuring explanations for his absence, as he’d expect of her. She’s always level-headed when she has to be. His yellow cap is clutched in her hand, he sees. That’s puzzling, although he can’t say why. He has to reel back through the events of the morning before he recalls losing it and where. It’s all a haze at first. He can clearly remember the early walk through Alderbeech, the conversations that he had—“What are you? Press?”—the two marquees, the engulfing shadows of the garden wall. Each step of it is still crisp in his memory. It’s crisp until the fireflies start to glow. But when the mayhem begins, the snatch squads and the stun grenades, the heavy boots, the heavy fists, the hoisting of his body in the air, the impact of the metal wagon into which he’s thrown, the shouting and the threats, he cannot concentrate or be certain of the details. Is that concussion or champagne? Is it himself or Maxie Lermon whom he can half remember crashing to the ground? The scene itself has lost its definition. Victim and witness are the same. All he remembers now is haste and pain. Everything is physical.

Leonard rubs his chin. It’s dislocated, possibly. It’s tender, for sure, from the tip into the jawline. It is as though the stubble hurts. Now he more clearly remembers being punched – rubbing the injury has helped – and how the sudden, expert blow clicked his head back sharply. That’s the moment his cap came off. He has it now. The pain shot through his face and shook his forehead with such force that his cap detached and dropped into the street … where Francine picked it up. Finding her husband’s cap but without her husband under it must have unnerved her, surely. It would have been a shock. He’s touched that she has bothered to retrieve it, even though she hates the cap—“That filthy thing”—dislikes all hats on men, and has threatened many times to chuck it in the bin. He needs to believe that she was worried for him just a bit. He looks for signs of anxiety on her sleeping face. But there are none. She looks serene and comfortable for once. Perhaps she fell asleep as soon as she sat in the Buzz and hasn’t realized that he’s been missing for – what? Almost six hours now.

It is tempting to remove the sun cap from her grasp and pull it on. Leonard likes to drive in it, especially to gigs and concerts. His much-repeated tease is that it helps him to concentrate, not only on the driving but also on the music he will play. He has never worn the cap onstage, of course. He knows it isn’t cool or hip. Francine has persuaded him of that. It isn’t blue. But afterward, when he is signing programs and booklets, he sometimes pulls it on, just for fun; its slogan, QUEUE HERE, seems pertinent and witty. He leaves it, though, in Francine’s grasp. He does not want to wake his wife just yet. He is not in a hurry to explain himself to her. He wants to settle himself and unravel his story first, sort out what he has dreamed from what occurred. Besides, the prospect of her waking up naturally only to find him sitting calmly at the wheel is an appealing one. He can play it very cool, he decides. He looks forward to her gasp of pleasure and relief, and then the shock when she sees his injuries.

Leonard succeeds in driving out of Alderbeech through the busy Sunday traffic and almost reaching the motorway before Francine wakes briefly. She puts her hand on his thigh and says “Sweetheart” without even opening her eyes. When he squeezes her fingers, she says “Sweetheart” again, more flatly than before, her voice a little slurred.

“You’re whacked,” he says. “Don’t wake, Frankie. I’ll tell you all about it when we’re home. You’ll be amazed.” But she does not respond to the bait. For the moment she would rather sleep than be amazed.

“Who’s the dormouse now?” he asks out loud, for his own benefit. He is already a bit annoyed with her. It’s time she showed some evidence of anxiety. It’s time she saw the state of him, his damaged chin, his blistered, purple mouth, his torn and muddied clothes. “Wow,” she’ll say. “What happened to your face?” And he will reply, pianissimo and casually, “They beat me up, the police. Three guys. They turned their guns on me. They had me in their sights. I very nearly died. I spent the night in cells.” He wants to see her snap awake at what he says and stare wide-eyed at him. He wants to hear her mention pure valiance. Say it, say it, valiance.

“I’ll tell you all about it when we’re home,” he says again, though mostly to himself. “Cooked breakfast, or will it be lunch, in bed? How’s that sound?” Francine appears to nod but does not make a sound. She rolls across the seat, drawing up her knees, and rests her head on his shoulder. They are that loving couple in a moving car that safety adverts warn against: Keep Your Distance from the Vehicle in Front; Keep Your Distance from Your Passengers. Her hair is unusually unkempt and springy on his cheek, he notices. Like it was when they first met. Her breath is spicy and familiar. It is not until he’s pulled up at the house and turned the Buzz’s engine off that Francine finally speaks. “Carry me upstairs,” she says, just as she did on Thursday evening, but this time there is no agenda other than her need to sleep a little more. Her eyes are open and she’s looking at his face, but she does not seem to notice how hurt he is. Perhaps he’s not as badly hurt as he would like.

16

LEONARD KNOWS, as soon as he chimes into the house, that there have been uninvited visitors during his absence and ones who have not made much effort to cover their tracks. The first abnormality is that their burglar alarm is not set. It was operating yesterday when he and Francine crept out through the back garden and their neighbor’s side gate to drive to the Emmersons’ house. It’s possible, he supposes, that in their ill-tempered hurry they forgot to turn it on, though that would be a first for him. He is neurotically careful about security. He daren’t risk the loss of his customized saxophone. That first cheap instrument stolen from him with punches in the pub car park many years ago still reverberates.

At least Leonard does not have to key in the alarm code before struggling Francine up the stairs and into her bed. She is not light, small though she is, especially when sleeping or only pretending to sleep, as he suspects. She clearly wants to be treated like an exhausted toddler and returned to her own clean bedclothes where, knowing her, she will doze quite happily until midafternoon. Rest comes first, as ever. He cannot hold her like a toddler, though. The stairs are steep and narrow on the turn. He has to tuck his good shoulder into her waist and give her a fireman’s lift. His right shoulder tenses, but despite the pain, he manages to tumble her onto the mattress, pull off her shoes, and cover her with the duvet. It’s difficult to know if she has offered him a groan of thanks or is merely glad to be in her own bed at last. He considers joining her. He ought to sleep, but he can tell he will not sleep, not while it’s light outside.

Their room is still in disarray. She wouldn’t let him tidy up before they set off on the drive down. But did they leave the desk lamp on? And were the curtains fully pulled open like that? Leonard has an idea that they weren’t. He looks down onto the patio as he snaps off the light and draws the curtains across again. He’s half expecting to see shattered window glass, some signs of burglary, his saxophone case abandoned on the lawn. There is no point in looking for evidence in their bedroom. All the drawers have already been pulled out and emptied onto the rugs, the chests and boxes have lost their lids, clothes are shaken from their hangers. A burglar would be hard-pushed to find any valuables. His spectacles are lost in here, Leonard remembers. But with the curtains now shut and Francine breathing evenly, he cannot and had better not hunt for them yet.

The door to their room is a little lower than the others. It has a Tanzanian carving added on – a frieze of drums. Leonard hesitates, as he often does, directly under the lintel and stands on his tiptoes until he feels the touch of timber on his hair. He has not heard anything to alarm him, but in his current apprehensive mood, hearing nothing is disquieting in itself. Usually there is a distant radio or someone trimming hedges or the thrum of a reversing car. At least there should be birdcalls, shouldn’t there? This silence seems almost physical, a rippling of hinted sound, something present but unexpressed. What if he and Francine disturbed the burglar or the burglars when they returned, and one of them is still inside the house, holding his breath, holding his knife? Leonard looks for something to defend himself with, but in the half-light of the room can find only a heavy leather belt. He pulls it free from his discarded jeans, wraps the strap twice round his hand, and swings the buckled end in readiness. The floorboards creak as he steps out onto the landing.

He climbs up the attic stairs toward Celandine’s room first. It’s almost comforting for old times’ sake to find it’s in a mess, though not as bad a mess as their own bedroom and not even as bad a mess as Celandine might have made herself when she was home. The police have been comparatively restrained. One or two bureau drawers are pulled out. The floor is littered only with a few saved magazines, a towel, some socks. The bed itself has been pulled back, a little overzealously, perhaps – looking for Lucy Katerina Emmerson, fast asleep, he supposes. There is a canvas bag of birthday presents and a few birthday cards hung up on a clothes hook, where Francine must have secreted them last week, which the police, showing some diplomacy, have left unopened. Most of the gifts are decorated playschool-style with Francine’s exuberant designs. The number 50 is prominent, of course.

Leonard lifts the bag off its peg and tiptoes with it downstairs to the first-floor landing. Again he detects the glitter of no sound. He pushes open all the doors with his toe, one by one, and, still gripping the belt and the bag of gifts, peers inside: the guest room with Francine’s worktable; the bath and shower room; the lavatory; the little laundry room where they overwinter plants. He is most fearful of the door into the narrow side room under the eaves where he composes and practices when his wife is home and demanding quiet. He keeps his chord sheets and his music stand there, and all his instruments: two tenors, an alto that he hardly ever plays (“Too ripe”), Celandine’s school flute, the electronic keyboard with which he notates his tunes, and a one-note township saxophone made from beaten tuna cans. He waits on the landing for a moment, listening. There is sound at last, but only Francine breathing. He toes back the door a little more and steps inside, quickly taking stock. More mess. But no one’s there. Nothing’s missing. Not even the treasured and valuable Mercury citation, or the Carnegie Excellence Medal, or the costly art deco bronze statuette The Trombonistthat Francine bought for him as a wedding gift and that he keeps on the windowsill, where the light is flattering. Any self-respecting thief would help himself to that.

Leonard is puzzled even more when he goes downstairs again and, still swinging the belt buckle, spots at once what he couldn’t see when he got home and Francine was in his arms: that the circulars and papers have been gathered up off the hall floor and tucked neatly into the deep wicker bowl where their post and keys are usually kept. That can’t have been his work. The newspapers were delivered only this morning. They won’t have picked themselves up off the mat. Nor, come to think of it, would burglars bother being so attentive as to tidy them away. That’d make no sense. It would be inefficient, even. Now he hurries into the kitchen, less nervously and a bit relieved because – of course, it’s obvious – he now can guess what must have happened, something more likely than a burglary. He pauses, though. He sniffs. That’s the unmistakable odor of tobacco. It cannot be the ghostly residue of Lucy’s roll-ups that Leonard washed off on Thursday evening at the sink. Tobacco lingers, certainly. It hangs around, keen to betray its user, always ready to offend. But it doesn’t linger that long. There can be no doubt, then, someone has been smoking in their house. Recently. Someone has been drinking coffee too. Stealing coffee. Three used mugs – crockery that neither he nor Francine likes – have been hurriedly rinsed and upended on the draining board. There’s gritty sugar spilled on the worktops. The fridge door has not been firmly closed. It’s spilling light and cold.

Now Leonard is pretty certain what’s happened in their absence. Not a burglary but a bust. The raiding party has returned. Those policemen and the NADA man who spoiled his birthday and turned the house upside-down on Saturday have come back for a second visit. And not long ago, by the looks of it: it was after the newspaper deliveries, that’s for sure. Either they knew what he and Francine were up to all along (and that is worrying) or his phone call from Maven’s prompted it. They rang the bell and, getting no response, just let themselves in to snoop around, smoke cigarettes, drink coffee, and create more mess. They won’t have taken off their shoes, he’s sure of that. It does at least explain why nothing seems to be missing and there is no sign of forced entry. Locks and alarms are meat and drink to trained policemen. They probably set up some means of reentry during their first visit. They might have lifted a window latch or even taken an impression of the front-door key. They must have some device for identifying and unlocking alarm codes. Such chilly arrogance. They should know better, though, than to smoke in someone else’s home.

Leonard is offended. He has suppressed his outrage over everything that occurred earlier this morning, before first light, following his final visit to the hostage street. It has not been clear till now what he should feel about it all, the dark disturbances of Alderbeech, or what to do. Now, attached to this uncomplicated principle, the integrity of private households, passive nicotine, all his buried resentment wants to be expressed. He puts down the canvas bag of gifts on the kitchen worktop and pats his pocket for his cell phone. He’ll call at once. He will demand an explanation and apologies. Some recompense, perhaps? First he’d better check the other downstairs rooms for further signs of impertinence and damage, before searching for the number stored on his cell from yesterday’s call to Agent Rollins. He doesn’t suppose that Rollins will be reachable on a Sunday, but that shouldn’t stop Leonard from leaving a firm message of complaint about this latest, odorous intrusion. He’s pretty sure that it is Rollins himself who broke in this time. What had he said, so icily, on the first visit? “Let’s leave it there, for the moment.”Leonard should have guessed. A second visit was implied. What were they looking for, what had they found?

There is a fourth used mug and, astoundingly, a greasy plate smeared with sauce and crumbs on the carpet in front of the futon in the teleroom. The screen is switched on, although the sound is muted. “Make yourself at home. Do, please,” Leonard mutters peevishly to himself. This room shimmers even more loudly than anywhere else in the house with unexpressed noise. So that is all he’s sensed on the upstairs landing, the implied chatter of a silenced telescreen. Now he can relax. He can indulge his anger. He regrets that he hasn’t taken the phone number of the woman officer who apologized to him this morning. Someone ought to kick up a fuss among some top brass about this invasion. If the three officers who knocked him to the ground when he was trying to reach Maxie were suspended from duty, the men who broke into his house (in the absence of “the authorizing householder”) should expect at least the same. Their actions were literally unwarranted (he smiles at this; he’ll use the play on words in his complaint) and are proving to be, in many ways, more upsetting than the rugby tackles and the blows he endured in Alderbeech. He might have brought those on himself. At least in this case nobody can accuse him of being foolhardy. Or inconsiderate. He strikes the futon with the belt.

It is that hair again that catches his attention. Maxie’s on the telescreen for an instant, and then almost at once it is replaced by advertisements. Leonard hunts for the console and finds it end-up on the mantel shelf, almost hidden by a vase of teasel heads and dried artichokes. He settles with it on the futon, in his usual place. It’s odd to realize that despite the drama of the past few days, he hasn’t even glimpsed a television or heard any broadcast news since seeing Lucy’s face on the concourse telescreen outside Maven’s store on Saturday. He’d better update himself before he phones, see what they’re saying about the ending of the siege. He shuffles through some channels and, as it is now almost exactly midday, is showered with a choice of news bulletins. Every one has Maxie. There’s no escaping him this morning, or the mug shots of the other two arrested “suspects,” all photographed in the NSF custody suite within hours of the freeing of the hostages. Leonard recognizes the decor, though that’s a generously inexact description of the cells’ stippled gray walls, the canvas investigation screen, and the strips of interrogation lamps. It is a shock for Leonard – and a bit of a lost opportunity – to learn too late that he was so close to Maxie during the early hours. Maybe, stretched out on their banquettes, they were separated only by the thickness of a wall. They could have shouted out. They could have talked.