The Real World- the Point of Death

by Laurence Todd

  He sat still, staring at me. “And this’s the whole truth?”

  “Yeah, it is.” I held his glare. He looked distracted for a moment.

  “Good.” He seemed to regain his sense of direction. “Anyway, this is the situation as it stands, DS McGraw. You’ll be notified if anything changes.”

  I nodded and stood up to leave. I didn’t bother asking how MI5 had known the Evening Standard was planning to publish an article about John McGreely’s capture, because it was obvious. Someone at senior management level had a contact in MI5 and had informed them of what the paper was planning.

  “Apologies for your wife’s story being canned.” He paused. “Incidentally, I noticed your wife’s surname at the paper’s still listed as Taylor. Is she not becoming Mrs McGraw?”

  “I don’t know. It isn’t anything we’ve ever talked about.”

  Smitherman was shaking his head as I left his office. I’d little doubt this was another example of changing social mores he was struggling to come to terms with.

  *

  Taylor was feeling deflated about her story being spiked, but was resigned to the situation. She’d been a journalist on London’s premier evening newspaper for a few years, so stories being spiked was nothing new. Any resentment felt came from not being given a reason, especially as the editor had been gung-ho for it the day before and the story was undeniably in the public interest. Rather, Taylor had just been given a bland we’re not going to run with this for the moment, Sally comment from the editor, who’d then refused to tell her how this change of heart had come about, other than to state he wouldn’t be pulling a good story unless he had a valid reason. He’d asked her to trust his judgement. She couldn’t understand it, and I could add nothing, though I knew how it’d happened. Someone at the Evening Standard had tipped off their security source, and MI5 had had the DSMA notice imposed as a result.

  She calmed down after a few sips of the good Italian coffee we’d bought in Boston. We hunkered down for a while, forgetting the day’s disappointment and talking about life in general.

  “Oh yeah, I almost forgot,” she said, “I’ve something for you. Someone gave me this to give to you.”

  She reached into her shoulder bag, produced a white envelope and passed it to me. It felt like a greetings card of some kind with To Rob and Sally neatly handwritten on the front. I looked at the writing closely. It looked familiar.

  A few seconds later my eyes opened wide as it became very familiar, even though I’d not seen this particular handwriting for quite some time. I took a deep breath and felt my heartbeat increasing slightly. It couldn’t be, could it?

  Taylor was looking bemused at the expression on my face.

  “Where’d you get this?” I asked, almost certain I knew whose writing it was.

  “I was given it earlier today.”

  “When?”

  “Lunchtime. I worked mainly in the office today, so I went out to get a sandwich across the road and, when I got back to the building, some guy approached me in the foyer, said, You’re Sally Taylor, Rob McGraw’s wife, aren’t you? I said I was. I didn’t recognise him, so I asked how he knew me, but he just grinned and handed me the card, asking me to give it to you. I asked him who shall I say it’s from, but he just said you two were old friends, and old friends don’t need names. He said he’ll know who I am when he sees this. He just asked me to give this to you and say congratulations. So, there it is, and congratulations.”

  She smiled her killer smile, which made me go weak at the knees. Just as well I was sitting.

  “What happened after he gave you this?”

  “I asked again how he knew me, but he didn’t answer. Just smiled, turned round and left. The whole thing lasted less than ten seconds.”

  I looked at the handwriting again for four seconds. I was now certain I knew whose writing it was.

  “Come on, then, open it,” she urged me. “I wanna know who this mystery man is.”

  I hesitated. “Before I do, describe the guy who gave it to you. What did he look like?”

  “Oh God, I only saw him a few seconds and I wasn’t really looking too closely, but, from what I remember ...” She paused for a moment. “About your height, maybe, wearing a dark jacket, open-collared shirt, baseball cap. Longish black curly hair hanging over his ears. Wore glasses, had a kind of designer stubble, wispy beard. I thought he looked Greek or Italian, but he spoke fluent English with no sign of an accent.” She frowned. “Is he a friend of yours, or is this another of Byfield’s wind-ups?”

  I took another deep breath. There was no question whose handwriting it was, even though the description she’d given didn’t completely tally with the person I knew. I held my breath and opened the envelope.

  It was a card showing a colourful pastoral scene, overlaid with a picture of silver wedding bells. Inside, in the same familiar handwriting, were the words Congratulations to Robert and Sally on your wedding day. We hope you’ll both be very happy in your future life together.

  The card also contained an apology for not being present at the wedding, and saying I’d know why he wasn’t able to be there, and I should make my apologies to Sally for his non-attendance. It was signed love to you both, with two names below it.

  I noticed the signature and exhaled on a sigh. I was right. He was back in the country.

  The card was from Michael Mendoccini.

  A series of disorganised and confusing thoughts immediately crowded into my brain. I’d had no contact with him since he’d called months ago, ten days after he’d fled the country, so how would he have known about my marriage? Who did he know who’d know both him and me sufficiently well to have told him about it? How would he even have known who Taylor was to give her the card? How did he know where she worked?

  I was more curious, though, about how he’d got back into the country. He’d fled from England after his involvement in a money laundering scheme for the terrorist group Red Heaven had been identified, and he was last known to be living in Milan, working for his family’s food and wine exporting business.

  “Wait,” Taylor said, looking over my shoulder, “this is the guy you were friends with when you were younger, right?”

  Taylor already knew his name as I’d mentioned him before when we’d discussed things we’d done as teenagers. I brought my laptop across, fired it up and opened a file of pictures.

  “Is this the guy who gave you the card?” I was showing her Mendoccini’s picture.

  “Yeah, that’s him,” she said after a few seconds looking at the picture.

  I closed the laptop and sighed.

  “So, come on, McGraw, tell me about you and this Mendoccini character.”

  I did. I began by explaining how close we’d been during our formative pubescent years and how, with neither of us having siblings, we’d each become the brother the other’d never had. I described how I’d felt when he left for Italy just before I’d started university at King’s College London, nearly fifteen years back, and how much I missed him when I’d returned home at the end of term. I recounted my delight when our paths had crossed again in, of all places, a Chinese restaurant in Gerard Street, coincidentally opposite the one where Taylor and I had had our first real date, and my bewilderment and then my utter emotional confusion upon being told by MI5 about his being involved with Red Heaven, and how distraught I’d felt when I’d finally realised it was actually true.

  I then went back and recounted a few of the scrapes we’d got into as teenagers, including a fight we’d got into outside a pub when the boyfriend of a girl Mendoccini was attempting to chat up had taken exception to this.

  I also told her of the night in the pub in Soho a while back, breaking every rule in the book as I hadn’t informed my superior officer I was meeting up with him, when for a few glorious hours it’d been just Rob and Michael again, two old friends swapping anecdotes about life, the universe and whatever else. For a short while, I’d been caught up in the moment and had forgotte
n what he was involved in.

  I then recounted my failed attempt to arrest him; I’d lost him somewhere near Piccadilly Circus, after two rookie police officers had stopped me to ask why I was running so fast, and came under suspicion from an MI5 officer, Colonel Stimpson, who’d assumed I’d deliberately allowed my friend to escape. Fortunately for me, Smitherman had had my back and nothing came of it.

  I tried to explain how confused I’d felt when, about ten days after we’d lost him, Mendoccini had phoned from Italy to tell me how much he’d enjoyed seeing me again, and how he wanted us to still be friends. He’d told me he loved me and how, no matter what, I was still his soul brother, and that would never change. I’d agreed but hadn’t said so. When he’d rung off I’d realised I’d probably never see him again and I’d cried as though I’d suffered a bereavement. I’d never reported this conversation to Smitherman or anyone else in authority, or even to anyone in my family, and I swore Taylor to secrecy about it.

  I stopped talking after about fifteen minutes, feeling emotionally delicate. I’d been bottling up my feelings about Michael Mendoccini for some while. I’d not told anyone about what had happened and how I felt about the ambiguous role he now had in my life. Somewhere inside me, I still loved him. This was not in doubt and, despite all the evidence pointing to the contrary, I really wanted to believe my heart, which said he was still the same guy I’d known up to when we’d lost touch at eighteen. My head kept telling me how absurd this belief was. I’d seen plenty of evidence of the terrorist atrocities Red Heaven had perpetrated across Europe, including in this country; I’d seen the pictures of dead bodies and the devastation caused by their random bombings, often with no warnings given. I also knew he’d sanctioned the deaths of two people just before he’d fled the country, though of course I could prove none of this.

  Taylor was a good audience for pouring out my unstructured thoughts, which bordered on being stream-of-consciousness. I’d been looking at the sky through the window as I’d been talking, but then I suddenly realised she was sitting back against the couch, next to me, listening attentively. I couldn’t even remember her swapping seats.

  “Oh, McGraw, that’s so sad,” she said quietly, taking hold of my hand. “You’ve mentioned his name before, but I’d not realised you two were quite so close. Your friend’s an actual terrorist, then.”

  I hesitated, then sighed. “Yeah, I suppose he is.”

  “No, there’s no supposing about it; he is a terrorist. I mean, he doesn’t plant bombs, and maybe he’s never killed anyone directly himself, but he helps to finance the group doing it. He makes it possible for Red Heaven to function as it does.”

  Taylor sat quietly for several seconds, thinking about what she’d heard.

  “You’ve only seen him properly, what, once in fourteen years, and you know what he now is, so why, after all this time, why d’you still think of him as a friend?” she enquired.

  I knew what she meant. It was a good question. One I had no answer for.

  “I don’t honestly know,” I replied, sighing. “I know I shouldn’t, I just do, and there’s no doubt Smitherman’ll nail me to the floor if he ever even suspects what I really think.”

  When he’d been told by Colonel Stimpson I’d met Michael Mendoccini in a Soho pub, without following operating procedure and informing my superior officer beforehand, I’d expected an official reprimand at the very minimum, but Smitherman had accepted why I’d done what I did, and he’d had my back when Stimpson was in favour of coming down hard on me. Instead of a reprimand, he’d given me a gentle, though stern, unofficial warning never to repeat what I’d done. He’d given me the benefit of the doubt once about Mendoccini, but he wouldn’t do it again. Of this I was certain.

  “But I’ve still got feelings for the guy,” I continued. “We had some great times together as kids. Like I said, for a time we were each other’s brother. My parents accepted him as a surrogate son; his parents did the same for me.” I grinned, briefly thinking of those times we’d woken up on the couch in the other’s front room as one of us was too skittled, as we used to say, to make it home.

  “But a lot’s happened to both of you in the past fourteen or so years, hasn’t it?” Taylor said, squeezing my hand lightly.

  We sat silently for a while.

  I attempted to marshal my thoughts into some sort of logical and coherent pattern. My mind focused on several bombings I knew to be the work of Red Heaven. I remembered those ones where, as well as property damage, innocent lives had been taken. One which particularly resonated with me involved a car bombing in Italy when a visiting American lawyer, on holiday with his wife and son, showing them the land of his grandparents, had been blown to pieces, quite literally, whilst buying an ice cream. He at least had died instantly, but his wife and son had received horrific injuries, and both died soon afterwards. The young Italian ice cream seller, a nineteen-year-old student, working part-time to pay for his college tuition, had also perished. Nobody had claimed responsibility but everyone knew this had been the work of Red Heaven.

  It had become an international news story because the victim, Edward Giavante, had been ahead in the running to become the Democratic party candidate for the governorship of New York state, and there’d been considerable political fallout as a result. The Americans had pressed the Italians hard to find the perpetrators but, despite an intensive manhunt, whoever’d planted the bomb had never been apprehended.

  “So, what are you gonna do now?” Taylor asked eventually. We’d been silent about a minute.

  “I don’t know.” I shrugged. “I mean, my job, obviously, but . . .” I was struggling to make sense of my thoughts.

  We were quiet for a moment longer.

  “One of the last things he said to me ...” I sighed sadly. “He said something like, when this whole thing’s over, he wants him and me to still be friends. He still has feelings for me as well, it seems.” I grinned at her. It felt wrong on my face, slightly too manic. “What a pair, eh? You think Freud could make any sense of this?”

  I got up and poured another coffee. I sat back down. Taylor moved closer to me. I realised it was getting dark because we’d not turned the lights on.

  “So,” Taylor said, “he’s back in the country. Are you gonna report it to the authorities?”

  “Not at the moment, no,” I replied several seconds later. “I’ve no evidence he’s even in the country, have I?” I realised I was still holding the card. “The guy who gave you this could have been anybody, though it’s definitely his writing. So I’m gonna wait, see if he gets in touch again and, if he does, I’ll take it from there.”

  “You showed me his picture,” Taylor said. She sounded sympathetic but worried. “I told you it was him.”

  I didn’t have anything to say in answer to that.

  “Are you gonna try looking for him yourself?” She brushed her hair from her forehead and looked at me over the rim of her glasses. I could see the concern in her eyes.

  “I’m gonna make a few discreet inquiries, yeah.” I almost smiled.

  “What’ll you do if you find him?”

  “I’ll shoot him.” I grinned, trying to lighten the moment.

  “I’m being serious, McGraw.” She looked me in the eyes. “You think you could bring him in without your feelings obstructing your judgement?”

  It was another good question.

  “I hope so.” I held her gaze. “I know some of the things he’s been involved in.”

  I told her about the deaths of Darren Ritchie and Roger Bradley, integral figures in the money laundering operation at Karris and Millers which Mendoccini was involved in, and how they’d been killed by an American mercenary named Bartlett Poe on the say-so, I’d been informed, of Michael Mendoccini. I also told her about Nigel Hemsley’s suicide, plus the killing of a freelance journo who’d been investigating claims of money laundering after being hired by Hemsley. She listened carefully.

  “I’m gonna put you on the spot
now, McGraw.” She paused, looking like she was thinking about the right way to ask the next question. “What if the only way you could bring him in, or stop him doing something which would result in the loss of life, was to point a gun at him, or even to use it against him? You think you could do it?” She looked concerned for me.

  I thought for a few seconds.

  “Yeah, I could,” I said confidently. “In a situation like that, my every instinct as a police officer would kick in, and I’d happily drop anyone using bombs to make a point.”

  “But would he shoot at you?” Taylor asked quietly.

  “I hope not.” I tried a smile. “But that’s the great unknowable, isn’t it? I just hope neither of us ever has to find out.”

  I realised I was choking up, talking about my friend and what he’d been involved in. It was surreal even thinking about the possibility of one of us shooting at the other. I stopped talking for a couple of minutes and sat back, reflecting. I was confused.

  I put my arm around Taylor, pulled her closer to me and kissed her forehead lightly.

  “Not your day, eh?” I sighed. “Your story spiked, and I dump emotional baggage on you.”

  “True,” she said, smiling. She squeezed my hand and laid her head on my shoulder. We sat like this for several minutes.

  *

  I had a tough time sleeping. My brain was wired, fully engaged in thinking about Michael Mendoccini and the pivotal role he’d once played in my life. Other than my father, he was the only man I’d ever loved.

  I remembered how I’d felt when Colonel Stimpson had told me of Mendoccini’s involvement with Red Heaven. I’d not believed it at first but, as the evidence of his involvement in terrorism had become clear, I’d reluctantly accepted what he’d become. If Smitherman ever realised how morally conflicted I was feeling right now, I’d not be allowed anywhere near any operation intended to apprehend and detain him. I wasn’t even sure Smitherman would allow me to remain inside Special Branch; he might claim I was too compromised to act rationally.