Home Front

by Thomas Waugh

  A black and white mongrel, part staffie and part anyone’s guess, scampered around him, chasing birds and investigating all manner of scents. Violet sometimes reminded Porter of her previous owner – a friend, widower and former operative, Michael Devlin, who had shot himself a couple of years ago. Porter had inherited the dog, and a quiver of melancholy memories. But, for the most part, Violet was a source of joy and consolation in his life. The reserved ex-Guards officer loved the mutt, more than he would have cared to admit. Dog and owner were taking their midday constitutional. Porter endeavoured to take the route which would allow him to avoid encountering any gossiping neighbours. The financial consultant, as he often described himself, was much admired in the village and considered approachable - he lamented.

  Porter was well-attired. He wore a navy-blue Barbour summer jacket, russet cords from Jermyn St and a pea-green shirt from Brooks Brothers. A wide-brimmed hat, from James Lock & Co, a present from his wife Victoria, topped the ensemble off and kept the sun out his eyes. He was similarly well-groomed, having visited Trumpers in St James’s for a shave and haircut the day before. Porter may have been getting old, but he looked good for his age. Thanks to his wife’s encouragement, or nagging, he ate well and took regular exercise. He had cut down his wine and cigar intake. “I am healthier, if unhappier, for it,” Porter had half-joked to Marshal, when they had last spoken.

  Porter was retired. Retired from attending lunches in White’s with representatives of monstrous corporations, African dictators, and the British government. Retired from swaying local elections, by bribing or blackmailing candidates from both sides of the House. Porter knew, more than most, how they were all as bad as each other. Retired from arranging passports for fraudsters, criminals and “respectable businessmen” to enter or leave the country at will. Retired from keeping certain stories out of the news to save someone’s career - or leaking fake news to ruin someone else’s. Retired from introducing smarmy sexual predators to even smarmier reputation managers. Retired from arranging personal protection for vulgar or vicious celebrities. Retired from ensuring that the sons and daughters of Russian oligarchs or Indian industrialists entered the right schools and received the right exam results. If the money was good enough, then so was the client, in the fixer’s world. Retired from positing the argument that “Death is the solution to all problems. No man – no problem,” as the staunch Conservative would quote Stalin whilst offering certain services. Or he would sometimes mention that “seven grams of lead solves all problems.” Porter had employed a handful of ex-soldiers. Often ex-special forces. Killers. The hits could sometimes appear accidental, or others were intentionally bloody, to send out a message. Most of the victims deserved their fate. But not all. Porter was far from proud of some of the things he had done over the years. He had created rather than fixed some problems on occasion. He duly kept his work secret from his wife. He could not forgive himself for some of his misdeeds, so it was unlikely that she would, Porter reasoned. The best he could do was to keep busy and not dwell on past transactions. Porter now filled his days with family time, fishing trips, foie gras, Wagner, Elgar, writing an historical novel set during the Byzantine Empire, collecting (and drinking) vintage port, serving as a school governor, going on holiday with his wife and taking Violet for walks, among other things.

  Porter provided Marshal with some work years ago, as a driver and close personal protection operative for an array of clients. He had proved personable and professional. Last year, in exchange for Porter providing his former employee with valuable intelligence on a gang within the Albanian mafia, Marshal had agreed to drive his niece around for a few days, when she returned from New York to settle again in London. Marshal had never been on his payroll for anything but as a glorified chauffeur and bodyguard – but Porter realised how much the ex-Para was a born killer. He had shot the Albanians, without hesitation or regret. Without leaving a trace. The lapsed Catholic had missed his calling, Porter fancied. He was loath to label his friend a sociopath, but Marshal had a switch inside him which he could turn on and off at will. The army had probably polished - rather than forged - the weapon.

  Grace had told Victoria about the death of Marshal’s close friend. And Victoria had told her husband. Porter called a couple of old contacts, to get a lay of the land concerning the murder. The ex-Guards officer was far from impressed that someone had butchered a fellow soldier and dumped the corpse outside of the Special Forces Club. It was tantamount to leaving a dead priest outside of a church. Special Branch and counter-terrorism officers were confident that Mullen was involved, but the investigation had petered out. The culprits were seemingly ghosts.

  It was all but over.

  But not for Marshal.

  “I thought you might call. How are you, James?” Porter’s clipped tone – a product of private schools and parade grounds – was patrician and polite. As a result of Marshal dating his wife’s niece, Porter had spent a fair amount of time in Marshal’s company over the past year – and considered him a friend. When the two women retired to bed of an evening after a meal, the former officers stayed up to share a dram, inappropriate jokes, and war stories.

  “I’ve been better, and I’ve been worse. So, same as usual. How are things there?”

  “Victoria and the children are finding new and ghastly ways of spending my money. My fellow school governors are sending ever more pointless emails. And the fish seem to be biting in the Kennett for everyone but me. So, same as usual here too.”

  “I need your help, Oliver,” Marshal remarked, neither begging nor demanding. There would not be a need for too much exposition. If any. He judged that Grace would have told Victoria about the killing of his friend. Porter was one of the last half-dozen people in the country who still regularly read the newspapers too. He would have kept abreast of the story. Porter knew of Foster’s connection to Marshal. Marshal also judged that Porter would not be surprised if he chose to investigate or pursue Mullen.

  “How close were you to him?”

  “Close enough.”

  A brace of crows cawed over Porter’s head, perhaps complaining that Violet was disturbing their feeding time. She looked up at the birds and wagged her tail in excitement and friendship. Porter paused, internally sighing. It would be pointless to try and dissuade his friend from his current course of action, even if he explained the carnage it could cause. He would not refuse to help Marshal either. He was damned if he did and damned if he didn’t.

  “If you email me, in the usual way, and I’ll attend to it,” Porter remarked, amiably, with a heavy heart.

  The two men shared a couple of lines of small talk and hung up. Part of Porter felt like throwing his phone into the field. Let it sink, six feet under. Violet may well mistake it for a toy and fetch the blasted thing, though. One cannot escape one’s self, or past, Porter fancied. Marshal was living proof of the assertion. Foster was proof of it also. It seemed that John Mullen had one foot in the past too.

  Porter creased his face in pensiveness, as if someone had just told him that an old friend had passed away - or had been diagnosed with cancer. The crow’s feet around his eyes became more pronounced, like scars. Before, this morning, his only concern had been to find someone to take care of Violet whilst he went on holiday with his wife. The resort on Reunion was expensive, but not ostentatious. Someone had just let him down, having promised to look after Violet. He would not sleep easy, putting her in a kennel for a week, or even for a day. He would rather cancel the trip. But now Porter had a second thing to fix.

  Violet stared up at her owner, quizzically tilting her head to the side a little. She even ceased wagging her tail. Did the dog somehow know that John Mullen had unwittingly declared war on the one-man army of James Marshal?

  Smoke poured out of the chimney at the rear of the red-brick chapel. The mourners for John Foster began to disperse. They scattered like ashes, as another funeral party began to congregate in front of the building, white tissues and handker
chiefs visible - like tufts of foam in an ocean of black.

  10.

  Marshal returned home. Rain began to spit against the window, like a basket of vipers emitting their venom. Coulson had been right to carry an umbrella. Marshal switched on some music, mindful of not playing any songs which would make him think of Grace, and poured himself a large Talisker, in honour of his dead friend. He wanted to wash the bitter taste of grief out his mouth. Revenge would taste more fruitful. It had been two weeks. Two weeks of letting Mullen think that he had gotten away with murder. Two weeks of letting Coulson believe that he would not do anything foolish. Two weeks of having Special Branch generate a wealth of intelligence and surveillance, which Mariner could hack and give to him. Two weeks of keeping Grace at a distance, so he would now have space to work in and keep her safe just in case he was compromised. Time had not been a great healer. The wound had not turned into a scar, these past two weeks.

  There would be no digital footprint of their transaction. Marshal logged into an email address he shared with Porter and left a message in the draft folder, requesting any and all information on Mullen and the investigation into his friend’s abduction, torture and murder. Porter would log-on, read and delete the message. The fixer would then contact Mariner in a secure way, who would put the intelligence together in a dossier for the client. “Money is no object,” Marshal insisted.

  Porter called his associate a “digital ninja… a cyber Scarlet Pimpernel.” Despite having worked with him for several years, Porter knew surprisingly little about his associate. His favourite film was Sneakers, starring Robert Redford. He probably still lived with his mother. He often inserted an expletive or two in the same sentence, when referring to Julian Assange. And he displayed more than one symptom of being on the spectrum for autism. But Mariner was reliable and talented, which was all Porter cared about. There were very few systems the former computer programmer could not access. He was a gamekeeper turned poacher. Mariner knew which threads to tug on - which holes were empty, and which contained buried treasure. He regularly hacked the networks of global corporations and foreign governments. Over the past year he had also worked for MI5 and MI6. He helped a counter-terrorist unit trace the funds a Wahabi cell was using back to the Saudi Royal Family. “The infraction will be swept under the carpet, but I imagine we will raise the price of our next arms sale to them by two percent or more, as a form of payback,” the hacker explained to Porter. He also discovered an ongoing operation whereby Russian agents were helping to fund trade unions and left-wing activist websites, but his paymasters reacted with amusement rather than anger. Mariner was a digital mercenary on the frontline of the cyber war. It was better to have him pissing inside rather than outside the tent. Whilst working for the security services last year Mariner left a backdoor into the system for himself, so he could bypass firewalls and access government databases at will. Retrieving the information Marshal sought would not be overly difficult or time-consuming.

  Sure enough, by the end of the afternoon Porter sent Marshal a message to say he would meet him in London the next day with the relevant information.

  A promise is a promise. Marshal could think of a dozen reasons why he wished to avoid attending Grace’s book launch event, but he had given his word. He showered and picked out a reasonably ironed shirt. Marshal had no desire to suffer the heat, or Morlocks, of the tube so he booked a cab to take him across London to the bookshop in Chiswick. There are two things certain in life: death and taxis.

  The party was in aid of toasting publication for The Battle of the Bulge: A New History, by Rupert Ashbeck. Marshal did a bit of due diligence in the taxi and looked up the book and author. Ashbeck was schooled at Stowe and Oxford. After studying PPE, he became a foreign correspondent and reported from various warzones around the world, including Iraq and Afghanistan. Marshal knew only too well how much the Ministry of Defence kept the stringers so far behind the frontline that they may as well be back in Blighty. Ashbeck had been described as “a modern-day William Russell,” albeit by his publicist. A couple of reviews had already come out, in advance of publication. One was a five-star glowing review, by Tristram Miller. “Ashbeck writes with sympathy and panache… He is the new Max Hastings. The book is more than a tour de force.” Marshal noted how the reviewer had also attended Stowe and Oxford. The second review was less kind, though seemingly more honest: “There is scant that can be considered new about this book, and one only wishes that the author’s editor would have reminded Ashbeck that he was commissioned to write a history book about the Battle of the Bulge, not bleat on about current US military incursions at every ill-judged opportunity… The narrative runs out of steam quicker that the Wehrmacht ran out of petrol… Monty would have approved of the author’s self-regard and propensity to swap out fact for propaganda.”

  Marshal’s phone vibrated whilst seated in the back of the black cab, with a message from Grace:

  Guests are beginning to arrive. So far, I have heard four people bemoan Brexit, two people turn their nose up at the wine, one person tell me their preferred pronouns, and another tell me – twice – how they have donated to Black Lives Matter. Are you on your way? Save me!

  The taxi pulled up outside of the bookshop. One window was full of Summer Reading paperbacks, the other housed a pyramid of copies of The Battle of the Bulge: A New History. Grace asked the author if he could mention Becky, her assistant who put the window display together, and thank her in his speech. He promised he would - but didn’t. As much as Marshal craved at least one cigarette before mustering the energy to endure the event, he went straight in to check on Grace.

  There was not a non-white face among the pro-diversity crowd. Guests air-kissed one another. Middle-aged men – journalists who had lost their columns – ogled younger women, hoping that they were at least old enough to remember their by-lines from The Guardian ten years ago. The air was riddled with a blend of expensive perfumes. Marshal’s eyes watered a little as he moved through the throng clogging up the entrance to the shop. He stood on tiptoe and endeavoured to spy Grace, before finding a quiet corner. Becky thankfully saw him and brought over a glass of wine.

  “You look like you could use this,” she sweetly remarked. The literature student had a heart-shaped face and bright spirit. She had yet to be besmirched by a callous world. Marshal was a figure of curiosity for her. Grace had told her about his time in the army, but he never mentioned a word about it. Rather he spoke to Becky about Milton, Bernard Malamud, and Alexander Pope. He also seemed to know more about Russian Literature than her uninspiring tutors.

  “Looks are not deceiving,” Marshal said, taking a mouthful immediately. “Keep them coming. Too much will not be enough. The window display looks great, by the way.”

  Her face broke into a smile and her spirit burned even brighter as she moved on with the tray of drinks carefully balanced in her hand.

  Marshal checked his phone again - just in case there was an update from Porter and some of the files would be available earlier. He then scanned the room once more for Grace, but he still failed to spot her. He did recognise a few faces, however. Phillip Foxton was holding court with a few “fans” in the opposite corner. Foxton had once been lauded as the next Robert Fisk. To boost his credentials the foreign correspondent just needed to find a few more pieces of unexploded Israeli ordnance and be awarded a visiting Professorship at Bristol or Goldsmith’s university.

  The oleaginous, floppy-haired literary agent, Nigel Raglan, moved around the room – oozing as if he were leaving a trail of slime in his wake. He was a sack of shit in a silk-blend shirt, Marshal fancied - a moth attracted to book sales and young, bare flesh. The ardent socialist was keen to ask people about which accountants they used, to lessen his tax bill, and where he could find a new nanny – “inexpensive but easy on the eye.” The self-proclaimed self-made man had been voted Agent of the Year twice, after inheriting the successful agency from his father.

  Charles Royce, the “BBC le
gend,” also graced the event with his august presence. The veteran newscaster was talking to a woman, impressed by his namedropping or the size of his pension. Her overly vibrant floral dress nearly activated Marshal’s hay fever. Royce occasionally surveyed the crowd, to make sure that people were recognising him. The silver-maned “national treasure” had recently instructed his agent to tell the apparatchiks at the BBC that he would be willing to take part in Strictly Come Dancing, for the right fee. The exposure would provide the necessary leverage for his agent to secure a large advance for his third autobiography. The working title was “Voice of the People”. Hopefully, no reviewer would remind readers of his recent comment that he considered the British electorate “moronic and cretinous” for voting for Brexit and Boris Johnson.

  Marshal could not be entirely sure, but he thought he saw the literary novelist, Xanda Doleman, through the ever-swelling crowd. Doleman’s first novel, When Evening Comes in Tuscany, had been a critical and commercial success (Nolan’s then wife was able to put the book into the hands of a daytime TV producer, who owned a villa in Tuscany and arranged the programme’s Book Club feature). Subsequent novels – Faulkner’s Pillow and When Evening Comes Again in Tuscany – had fallen short of the publisher’s expectations, however. Doleman had since changed his agent, twice, but he was struggling to regain the sales and advances of yesteryear. Thankfully, his father had just died, and the only child inherited the family home in Suffolk. He would sell the property to pay-off his re-mortgaged flat in North London. He could not imagine living anywhere else but Hampstead. Rumour had it that Ezra Pound had once lived in the property. Or he sometimes disclosed that Laurence Olivier once lived there, to impress the actresses he knew. Money from the inheritance would help fund his writing, while he changed agents and delivered another book – When Morning Comes to Tuscany. To help raise his profile Doleman would approach a contact at The Independent and write a piece, declaring that he considered himself non-binary. He had written a similar piece, some years ago, outing himself as being pan-sexual. The author would only support the non-binary community, however, if the paper paid him a pound a word for the article. Doleman was wearing a scarlet cravat and a pained expression, as if to send a message out to the world that no one truly understood him. It was more the case that no one truly liked him.