Sabbathman

by Hurley, Graham

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Two kids? Heavy maintenance? Nowhere to live? After Belfast?’

  Kingdom nodded, saying nothing, wondering how many more questions Allder needed to ask, and why.

  Allder was still looking at him. ‘So who looks after your Dad? After you’re back in harness?’

  ‘God knows. I’m working on it. There’ll be a way. Neighbours. The welfare people. I’m, ah …’ he smiled thinly, ‘… making inquiries.’

  ‘And what if I asked you back early?’

  ‘Like when?’ Kingdom blinked. ‘Sir?’

  ‘Like next week.’ Allder paused. ‘Like tomorrow.’

  Kingdom smiled, recognising the feeling inside himself, an instant lift of the spirits, the old call to arms, every other responsibility instantly deferred.

  ‘No problem,’ he said, ‘I’ll find a way.’

  Allder looked at him for a long time, a coldness in his eyes. Then he reached for the envelope on the table and got up. ‘There’s another side to this,’ he said. ‘Someone else we ought to talk about?’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘Yes.’ Allder nodded, putting the envelope back in his pocket, ‘Annie Meredith.’

  They began to walk around the Thunder River ride, the bodyguard several paces behind. Annie Meredith worked for MI5, one of the young highfliers in ‘T’ Branch, the new arm of the service responsible for terrorist activities. It was an open secret amongst certain sections of the Metropolitan Special Branch that she and Kingdom had enjoyed what Allder now termed ‘a close relationship’ Allder was standing by a line of palm trees, peering at an artificial swamp.

  ‘None of my business,’ he said, ‘But fair comment?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Northern Ireland?’

  ‘There and other places,’ Kingdom nodded, ‘yes.’

  Allder glanced across at him. ‘And still friends?’

  ‘We still meet. She’s a busy woman, as you can probably imagine.’

  ‘But do you trust her? Are you still close?’

  Kingdom frowned, not answering, uneasy again about the drift of Allder’s questions. Annie Meredith was small, tough-minded, vivacious, and resolutely cheerful. She made no secret of her career ambitions, and he’d never met anyone so ruthless, but the times they’d shared in Belfast were the warmest Kingdom could remember. Loyalty wasn’t a word that Annie had much time for, but just now, under these circumstances, it was as good as any other.

  Allder was still waiting for an answer. ‘Well?’ he said.

  Kingdom looked down at him. ‘It’s an odd question,’ he said. ‘Do I trust her how?’

  ‘Does she ever lie to you?’

  ‘Not that I’ve noticed.’

  ‘Not even to spare your feelings?’

  ‘Never. Quite the reverse.’

  ‘So is she frank? With you?’

  ‘Very. Like I just said.’

  ‘But does she tell you everything?’

  Kingdom stared at him, at last beginning to understand. ‘You mean the job? Gower Street? All that?’

  Allder returned Kingdom’s stare, not bothering with an answer, and for the first time that day Kingdom laughed, shaking his head, turning away. ‘Christ, no,’ he said. ‘Why should she want to? And why should I ask?’

  Kingdom left Thorpe Park half an hour later, joining the queue of homebound families, the contents of Allder’s envelope still a mystery. He and Allder had returned to the cafe, Kingdom parrying more questions about Annie – where she lived, how often they saw each other, whether they ever went away together – irritated by the advantage the older man was taking of his rank. Kingdom had done his best to terminate the conversation, to indicate that there were certain limits, but Allder simply ignored the signals. When it came to the light touch, the deftly placed question, the need to play the sympathetic boss, the man had all the tact of a pneumatic drill.

  Back at the cafe, Allder had sent his wife and child for yet another ride on the Thunder River and pursued the interrogation with renewed vigour.

  ‘So when are you seeing her next?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Soon?’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘Don’t you really know? Is it that casual?’

  ‘No, not at all …’ Kingdom had paused here, seeing no point in not stating the obvious. ‘You want me to give her a message? Ask her to ring you? Fix a meet, or something? Only it might …’ he shrugged, ‘… be easier if you told me just what you wanted. Then I could oblige.’

  ‘Or not.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Kingdom nodded, ‘or not.’

  Allder had left the conversation there, no explanation, no more questions, just a tug on the sleeve of his shell suit, a quick look at his watch, and a gruff reminder about the traffic.

  ‘Best be off,’ he said, ‘before it gets sticky.’

  Now, Kingdom inched forward. The traffic was backed up for at least a mile, nose to tail. Two teenage girls in the back of the estate car in front were giggling at him, pulling faces. One of them was chewing bubble gum, the stuff ballooning from her scarlet lips. Kingdom stared at them, unseeing, still thinking about Allder, still wondering about the bluntness of his interest in Annie. Internal politics, he thought. Has to be. It wasn’t Annie he was after, not the little blond ruffian he’d got so fond of, but the people she worked with, the people in Gower Street, the ones who were suddenly making life so hard for the likes of Allder.

  The relationship between Scotland Yard and MI5 had never been simple, but Kingdom knew that the last few years had been especially tricky. The end of the Cold War had left the spycatchers with very little to do, and MI5 had lobbied hard for a change of role. They’d insisted that what they were best at – gathering intelligence – applied as readily to terrorists as it did to foreign agents, and one result of this had been a hefty push onto Special Branch turf. The Yard had fought the incursions tooth and nail, arguing the toss through countless Whitehall committees, but the battle had finally been lost and a recent Home Office announcement had confirmed what many had long suspected inevitable: that MI5 now took the lead in the intelligence war against Provo terrorism on the UK mainland.

  Quite how this would work in practice was still anybody’s guess, but Kingdom knew the prospects were far from rosy. The top men at the Yard – good thief-takers, shrewd detectives, natural leaders – had no intention of simply providing ‘backup’ to the faceless apparatchiks of MI5. On the contrary, they saw themselves as society’s rightful shield against the madness of the Provos. Guys who used Semtex in public, who risked spilling kids’ blood for some half-baked Republican ideal, were little more than lunatics. To call them enemies of the state, to accord them warrior status, cut little ice with the Mickey Allders of this world.

  Kingdom lit a cigarette, feeling the car juddering as he crawled forward on the clutch. While the mainland battle for primacy was recent news, Belfast was a different story. There, the real war had always been between the local police – the RUC – and the various intelligence arms of the British Army, but even so, there’d still been room for a series of other skirmishes, lower down the pecking order, and in these the winner had, without doubt, been MI5. In the seventies, they’d seen off MI6. In the eighties, under the eyes of the locals, they’d carved out a handful of well-protected foxholes, sheltering behind the authority of the Director of Intelligence at Stormont, running agents on both sides of the water, monitoring Army and RUC activity, quietly thickening their computer files, looking all the time for fresh advantage, more juicy windfalls to put in front of the mandarins in Whitehall.

  And the strategy had worked. No question. Indeed, Kingdom’s own posting, the two-year spell in Belfast, was itself evidence that MI5 were firmly in the driving seat. On paper, the job specification had talked of ‘target evaluation’ and ‘intelligence co-ordination’ but face to face the commander in charge of Special Branch operations at the Yard had left him in no doubt about the real priorities. ‘Keep an eye on Fiv
e,’ he’d said. ‘Don’t let the bastards grab it all.’ Kingdom hadn’t. And Annie was the living evidence. But that, too, was a different story.

  At last the traffic began to move, and Kingdom eased the big old car up through the gear box, hearing the familiar whine as the worn-out syncromesh engaged. Back on the motorway now, he settled in the centre lane, a steady 60 mph, lighting a cigarette and pulling out the little silver ashtray recessed into the dashboard. The car was his father’s prized possession, a 1964 Wolseley, immaculate bodywork, polished walnut interior trim, unmarked dense-pile carpet, deep-stitched leather seats front and back. The old man never drove any more, but the very thought of the Wolseley, parked in the lock-up across the road, still appeared to be some comfort to him. It had somehow represented everything he’d ever worked for, his reward for all those years in the market, all those pre-dawn starts, driving his ancient van to Covent Garden, collecting the hessian sacks of fruit and veg, dressing the stall on Leytonstone High Road, bagging the stuff out, the parsnips, the spuds, the ice-cold mountains of Brussels sprouts. As a kid, on Saturdays, Kingdom had helped out, responsible for his own corner of the stall, warmed by his father’s enormous popularity. Then, they’d called him Ernie’s boy, Little Ernie, and somewhere he still kept the filthy pair of fingerless gloves he’d worn on the colder winter days. Wendy had once tried to throw them out but he’d rescued them from the dustbin, ignoring her gibes. What would she know about the wonders of being Ernie’s boy? What would anyone?

  The drive back took an age, an endless series of traffic snarl-ups. Dropping in from the M25, two miles short of Leytonstone, Kingdom glanced at his watch. Twenty to eight, the pubs well and truly open, a chance for a pint or two before another long evening in the gloomy silence of the tiny terrace house. He turned into the car park of the first pub he found. Inside, the lounge bar was empty except for a couple of lads locked in conversation over pints of lager. In one corner, away from the bar, a television stood high up on a shelf, and Kingdom recognised the face on the screen, an ex-Minister, one of the many who’d sealed their careers with a 600-page memoir and one of the lucky few to cap it with a series of well-funded TV documentaries.

  Kingdom ordered a Guinness and sat down. The ex-Minister was talking about loyalty and the final days of Margaret Thatcher. His own conscience was clear, he was saying. He’d supported her to the hilt, and he was appalled at the way the party had closed ranks against her. Kingdom sipped at the Guinness, recognising the rhetoric for what it was: a bid to get the story straight before the historians reached for their pens, and demolished the fantasy.

  Kingdom settled back against the red velvet banquette. Early in his Special Branch career, after the driving school, and the comms classes, and the firearms course at Lippitt’s Hill, he’d spent nearly three years in the Close Protection Squad, as bodyguard to a succession of public figures. One or two he’d liked, minor members of the Royal Family especially, decent people with a ready sense of humour and seemingly limitless patience. But the politicians, by and large, had been a different proposition: men and women trapped in a web of their own making, caged by their civil servants, rushing pell-mell from meeting to meeting, progressively more detached from the punters they were supposed to represent.

  The ones he’d known best – the ones he’d guarded, advised, shopped-for, discreetly shepherded up and down the country – had simply been overwhelmed by the job: by the paperwork, by the never-ending phone calls, and by the growing realisation that little they did would ever make any difference. The latter was the real killer. That was when their grip began to slacken. That’s when the exhaustion, and the alcohol, finally took over.

  Kingdom took a long pull at the Guinness, still half-watching the screen. Towards the end, he’d noticed, you could see it in their eyes. They lost focus, especially on the rougher days. And then that first drink of the day, the one that got you back to normal, would produce an instant sheen, a filminess that slowed them down, and returned a smile to their ravaged faces, steadying the nerves enough to dish out more of the usual nonsense. Kingdom smiled. The ex-Minister was talking now about enterprise. The people, he said, had been set free. The dead hand of government had been lifted. Only now, with the blessings of real choice, could Britain truly prosper. Kingdom looked round the empty pub, the young lads gone, the landlord half-asleep, the unfed fruit machine winking in the corner, the lunchtime pasties still curling in the hot cabinet. Enterprise? Prosperity? Choice? He smiled, reaching for his glass again.

  Kingdom left the pub an hour and a half later. He’d found a copy of the Observer and read it front to back. Beside the lavatories, on the way out, he spotted a pay phone. He fumbled for change, piling coins on the window-sill, and then dialled his ex-wife’s number. She and the two boys still lived in the modest semi on the edges of Bexleyheath. For thirteen years, he’d called the place home. The number answered, his ex-wife’s voice.

  ‘Wendy? Alan. If the boys are still up I’d like to–’

  ‘You said you’d come round.’

  ‘I know. I got held up.’

  ‘They were expecting you, Alan. You said you’d come.’

  ‘I know, I know, I told you, I–’

  ‘Have you any idea how much they want to see you? Have you any idea what that means to them? Do I have to spell it out again?’

  ‘No, love, it’s just–’

  ‘Don’t “love” me, Alan. That’s a word I don’t want to hear. If you loved any of us, you’d have come. You’d have been here. Instead of …’

  She broke off, the usual mixture of anger and grief.

  Kingdom frowned. ‘Instead of what?’ he said.

  Wendy blew her nose. Then she came back on the phone, her voice unsteady. ‘You’re in the pub again, aren’t you?’ she said. ‘Alan, don’t bugger me about, I can almost smell it.’

  There was a click as she put the phone down and then the line went dead. Kingdom hesitated a moment in the darkened lobby. Then he retrieved his coins from the window-sill and pushed through the door.

  Out in the car park, he unlocked the Wolseley and slid in behind the wheel. The smell – partly leather, partly the sweetish scent of the little pink deodorising balls his father used to hang from the driving mirror – engulfed him again, and for a minute or two he simply sat there, immobile. Leaving his kids had been the hardest thing he’d ever had to do. He’d thought at the time that nothing in life could ever be more painful. Now, though, he wasn’t so sure. The old man in the house up the road wasn’t his father at all but someone else, and the shame of it was that he’d never had a chance to say what he’d wanted to say. Simple things. Things like goodbye, God Bless, and thanks. Now, the phrases would be meaningless, more fragments in the gibberish that passed for conversation, but once they would have meant everything. His father would have earned them. And, being the man he was, they would have brought tears to his eyes.

  Kingdom frowned, fumbling for the keys he’d dropped on the floor, surprised and a little alarmed by the force of his own feelings. Checking the mirror, he stirred the old engine into life, and swung out of the car park onto the main road. His father’s house was a few minutes away, an easy drive in light traffic, and Kingdom relaxed his long frame, one hand on the wheel, the other reaching for the radio. The radio was tuned to Classic FM, an evening concert, a piece of Dvorak, suitably wistful. He reached out, adjusting the mirror, recognising the shape of a Ford Escort perhaps ten yards behind. The Escort was black with low-slung suspension and rally lights. There were two men inside. One appeared to be talking into a handset.

  Kingdom frowned. A well-developed instinct for danger had served him well over the years. It was something that had surprised a succession of guv’nors. They’d always said he looked too sleepy, too detached, too laid-back, but it was there nonetheless. Indeed, in Northern Ireland, it had twice saved his life. He had a natural eye for detail, for the smallest print of any scene, and now he knew that something was wrong. At the next intersection he
turned left, no warning, hauling the big old car round the corner, and changing down a couple of gears to urge it up a shallow climb. He was in a quiet suburban road now, bay-fronted semis behind neatly trimmed hedges. He checked the mirror again. The road behind was empty, the junction at the foot of the hill receding into the dusk. Then, unmistakably, the lights of the Escort reappeared, and he heard a squeal of tyres as the driver floored the throttle.

  Kingdom closed his eyes a moment, cursing himself for the Guinness. Two pints would have been adequate, three pints a treat. But four? Given the likely outcome of the next few minutes, four pints was madness. If he’d read the threat properly, if the guys in the Escort were who he thought they were, he was in imminent danger of making the late news. He knew the way they’d do it, up alongside him, the passenger window wound down, the ski masks on, the guy on the sharp end taking his time, levelling the automatic, those specially drilled rounds they liked to use to guarantee a decent hole. In Belfast they called the guns ‘shorts’, and Kingdom remembered the word now, cursing again as he did so.

  How had they traced him? How long had they been watching? Had they found the house? His father’s place? Had they shadowed him all the way to Thorpe Park? Had Allder’s bodyguard put them off? Was that the way it had been?

  Kingdom turned left again, another street, narrower, quieter realising too late that he’d driven into a cul-de-sac. He accelerated towards the end, slewing the car sideways on the handbrake, reaching for the glove compartment, relieved to find the big automatic still there. He pushed the door open, rolling onto the cold asphalt on the blind side of the car, hearing the howl of gears as the Escort changed down. On his knees now, the gun readied, he peered into the gathering darkness. The Escort swung into view at the mouth of the cul-de-sac, and Kingdom began to raise the heavy Browning, his hand steady, his eyes narrowed against the glare of the headlights, a perfect head-on shot. Then he paused. Something else was wrong, something else that made no sense. On top of the car, blinking, was a blue police light, the portable kind you stick on for emergencies. Kingdom stared at it. A trick? Something new in the repertoire?