‘Of course not!’
‘You were close with Phillips, though.’
‘Not close. We had normal relations, naturally, for the ministry.’
‘There are suggestions that you yourself were responsible for persuading the government to dress Phillips’s real work up as a normal factory.’
‘That’s completely absurd.’
‘So many nasty things are,’ I said, ‘and so is the logic behind them. In any case, we’ll see about that later. Meanwhile, these two men are after you.’
The minister swallowed. ‘Round them both up, then.’
I thought, I could shoot you. We have to risk our skins for the skin of a traitor. ‘Why do they want you?’ I said. ‘Come on. Why?’
‘I’ve no idea!’
‘You keep dodging around this,’ I said, ‘but it’s no good. You’re worrying about your future. You needn’t – it’s over.’
‘How dare you speak to me like that?’ He threw the words out in the tone he used on television when replying to what the media said about him. Personally, I couldn’t understand why the PM hadn’t got rid of him long ago instead of promoting him to a top job; but he was the kind of ageing time-server that no party ever seems able to get rid of. I could see him now, as Chancellor in a previous administration, taking the dispatch case up to the bar of the House, smiling in a winky way before he opened it, only to reveal what everybody who read a paper knew he was going to reveal anyway. He flung back his unjust silver head as he looked at me, the way he had no doubt once learned to do in Union debates. I saw him now as he always liked to appear when supporting a candidate at a marginal by-election, the dishonest hair flying wildly away from his spectacles in a disagreeable wind.
‘And you gamble,’ I said, ‘at the Rio de Janeiro. For a lot.’
‘And if I do? It’s a relaxation after a heavy day at the House.’
‘And the call-girls,’ I said, ‘of course, that’s relaxation too. Only, how much money did you spend on them last year? And were you good for it?’
He got rattled. ‘Everyone is entitled to his own private life, you know,’ he declaimed in a richly toned voice. Yet the voice shook, like mellow old architecture in an earth tremor.
‘Not in your job,’ I said. ‘Look, I’ll be frank. There’s nothing personal, but we don’t want you killed. It doesn’t suit us; your last headline would make too many headlines. It’s the Russians who want you killed before you grass them.’
‘I find you extraordinary!’ he said very loudly. ‘You’ve got the most dreadfully crude way of putting things.’
I could see how, if he hadn’t been so guilty and shaken, and if it hadn’t been quite so early in the morning, he would have been capable of much better repartee than that.
‘The way I put things goes with the work I do,’ I said. ‘Anyway I don’t often have much to do with high-grade con men; I’m more into common villains. Still, I don’t see anything that special about you, except that you’re a traitor like Phillips. Now come on,’ I said, ‘let’s have it, you and Phillips cut up the Russian money from that York robbery between you, Hawes was happy just with the wages. Between you, you and Phillips made that robbery easy – where it went wrong was just that unfortunate gay guard; Hadrill hadn’t marked his card.’
‘When this is over,’ he fumed, ‘I don’t know who you are, but I’m going to have you beached.’
‘You all of you say that once you’re beached yourselves,’ I said.
‘You have got the most amazing nerve. I shall report you to your superiors and that will be the end of you.’
‘Do it now,’ I said, ‘why postpone a treat? Pick up your phone, use it again, why not? But it’ll do you no good, you’ll find.’
He smiled his loathing at me sideways, through imperfect teeth. What he really wanted to do was hit me; I was just something that was in the way. I let him ramble. For me he was a pompous idiot, falling behind the times, who had let his ambition and his conviction that he was untouchable lead him far astray; he got no sympathy from me.
Finally, he didn’t use the phone at all. He rang another bell instead. A man-servant arrived and the minister said: ‘Mycock, show this person out.’
‘Don’t bother,’ I said, ‘I know the way. It’s the way I came in, and it’s the way I’ll come back.’
He didn’t look very good as I left. He looked grey under the eyes, like a very old partridge worn out by too much screwing, and the right side of his face had developed a tic. What I did notice was a most beautiful white marble mantelpiece that he stood by to make his last gesture. It had fruit and flowers carved on it that might have taken twenty years to do – the length of Bartlett’s sentence, I hoped.
Everything in that house was British, if overheated, and dated back to the days when we were all of us more honest.
Yes, everything looked honest in that room except him.
40
‘What about the McGruders?’ I said. ‘What about Hawes? I ought to go straight in there.’
‘I know,’ said Gordon, ‘but you can’t, not yet. One thing’s new, by the way. We keep ringing her number. It didn’t answer before, but it did ring. Now it doesn’t; all we get is the unobtainable signal, and the GPO reckons that whoever’s in there has ripped the phone out. Look, are you sure you want to play this on your own?’
‘If you don’t want the media to go mad over this,’ I said, ‘what other way is there?’
‘All right. I know.’ He added: ‘The minister’s made a terrible fuss about that interview you had with him.’
‘The situation he’s got himself into,’ I said, ‘he can go on fussing till he’s black in the face. He’s a dead duck, or will be, as soon as we’ve got the right songs.’
‘Have you worked out what in fact you’re going to do when you get up into that flat?’ said Gordon.
‘It’s easy to work out,’ I said, ‘I’m just going to go in and get them, that’s all. It’s only doing it that’s difficult. I’ll need a man with me, but I’ll pick him myself if it’s all the same.’
‘Yes, Christ, there must be two of you. We’ll be all round the place, mind. Plain clothes, nothing conspicuous.’
His red phone rang. He listened, rang off and said: ‘Well, you’re right about Hawes anyway; a man we’ve got on the roofs opposite says he’s just been seen at the window.’
‘If he’s in there, then they’re all three of them in there,’ I said. ‘McGruder, his ex-wife and the boyfriend – what a carve-up.’
‘You’d better draw a weapon.’
‘No,’ I said, ‘I never go armed.’
I went over and saw Frank Ballard. He was the same age as me. He’d done a spell at Unexplained Deaths as a sergeant and he was a good mate of mine. Now he was a detective-inspector in name; in fact he was in St Stephen’s in a private room, paralysed from the waist down after a gunshot wound in the back. He’d been driving home down Fulham Palace Road one night, off duty, when he saw two youths ripping off an Asian grocery just past Beryl Road opposite the Golden Bowl. He got out of his car and went in after them; he knew they had a firearm because he’d seen them waving it at the man in the shop. He told them to put it down but they didn’t; they pulled the trigger on him instead, and now here he was.
I went into his room, sat on the end of the bed and said: ‘Hello, Frank, how’s things? How’s the literature going?’
‘Fine,’ he said, ‘nice to see you, really cheers me up, seeing a few folk. Yes, I’m doing the First World War poets now.’ His bed and table were piled with books; he was working for an English degree.
‘It’ll be funny, you with letters after your name,’ I said.
‘How are you feeling about things these days?’ he said. ‘You know what I mean.’
‘Oh, it’s all right to talk about it,’ I said, ‘does me good, really.’ He was almost the only person I’d told everything to. ‘Well, I went to see Edie the other day; it was pretty depressing, she’s getting worse, I’m
afraid.’
‘I don’t think I could have taken it about the little girl,’ he said, ‘if she’d been mine.’
‘It’s a good thing we all have to work,’ I said, ‘I’m sure I’d have gone mad otherwise, Frank. Work for me is like you and your books – it stops you brooding so much. Talking of that, I don’t know what got into you, going after those two morons like that.’
‘I didn’t stop to think,’ he said, ‘it just drives me mad, seeing people being ripped off.’
‘Well, plenty of coppers would have looked the other way,’ I said, ‘particularly off duty. Anyway, which poet are you on now?’
‘Owen. You know his stuff?’
‘Yes, some. A few, a few, too few for drums and yells, may creep back quietly to village wells up half-known roads. Wasn’t that him? Brave little bastard.’
‘That’s him,’ said Ballard, ‘couldn’t keep away from the front, twice wounded, Military Cross, officer and all.’
‘Yes, and it got him killed,’ I said, ‘on the Sambre, the day before the end of the war.’
‘I don’t know why you don’t take this course yourself,’ Ballard said. ‘You could if you wanted.’ He lit a cigarette. ‘I’m smoking too much. It’s funny, I never used to at all before this happened.’
‘I wish I could take the course,’ I said, ‘I wouldn’t mind lying back with time to read and think, you jammy bastard.’
He never complained. They’d decorated him, the Queen Mother and everybody had been in to see him; thousands of letters, money and donations had come in to him from the public and colleagues up and down the land. But he was like me; he just wanted to be a copper.
‘They tell me you’re on the Hawes–McGruder case,’ he said.
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘and it’s come to the boil now. That’s why I’m here, Frank; I need some advice.’
‘Pat Hawes is a murdering bastard.’
‘You should see McGruder.’
‘They tell me he admitted doing the plastic bags job.’
‘That’s right. To me.’
‘They’re together? And you’ve got to go in somewhere and get them out?’
‘That’s it. It’s for today.’ I looked at him and could feel him wishing he were in on it himself and how, if he could have walked, he would have been. I said: ‘It’s got to be done without any fuss; there are reasons, Frank.’
‘You need a man to cover you? You going in armed yourself?’
‘No, but the other man’ll have to be, and it’s who it’s going to be that matters. You know how it is over on A14. Nine times out of ten I work by myself; apart from a few people like you, I hardly know anyone except to say hello to. So I don’t know how any of them’d behave when things got really tight.’
‘The man you want is Ernie Foden,’ Ballard said. ‘He used to be on SPG with me as a sergeant, but then he passed his exam for detective-inspector and went over to CID. Fit? Ernie? Christ, he could split a brick with his hand, and he’s a dead marksman, which he didn’t just prove on the range. But he’s bright, too. You in charge?’
‘Of getting them out? Yes, there’s no rank on this one; it makes a change. I’m doing this with the Branch.’
‘Go and find Ernie, then. He’s over at Tottenham Court Road; I’ll phone him right away and tell him you’re coming.’
‘Thanks.’
‘I wish I was coming,’ he said, ‘I’d cover you, you’d see.’
‘I wish you were too.’
I left the hospital. Remembering what Frank had asked me about Dahlia, it made me think of her, and the tragedy came up in my throat again as if it was new; it always did. I saw her again being weighed at birth when she was only ten minutes old, and then her death: her sad little coffin going into the ground – Christ, do people think we are made of stone? How could anyone so innocent have been so wickedly destroyed? Oh, I remember you had a woolly hat on in winter one year, you were three, and you brushed your head against my shoulder and your hat went down over your face, your little red face, and you laughed, and I yearn for you, Dahlia, yearn for you, and everything I do for justice, I do it in your name; and it is my terrible guilt that I could have saved you from your mother. But instead I went off to work that day and how shall I ever forget you at the window as you waved me goodbye? Oh, it goes to my heart those times when I think of the horror, and through my fault, leaving in me an appalling emptiness that can never be filled.
41
‘Inspector Foden? Hello, I’m on this Hawes–McGruder caper.’
‘I know. Frank Ballard rang me.’
I explained to him what had to be done and said: ‘Let’s be clear about this. I’m just asking you.’
‘Forget it.’
‘As long as you realize you’re in no way obliged.’
‘I know what my obligations are.’
‘It’s going to be tricky.’
‘Anything to do with Pat Hawes always is.’
‘McGruder’s worse.’
‘What’s the position?’ he said.
‘They’re holed up in this council flat, and what you and I have to do is go in there and get them out. Are you armed? Because you’ll need to be.’
‘Yes.’ He opened a drawer in his desk and put a pistol down in front of him, a thirty-two automatic. ‘And you?’
‘No, I never use them. One weapon’s enough.’
‘How do you want to do this?’
‘Just walk through the door. Put my foot through it if they won’t open. As long as you’re there, handy.’
‘I will be. Three of them, you say?’
‘Yes, the two men and McGruder’s ex-wife; it’s her flat. Anyway, as long as you’re there behind me.’
‘Don’t worry.’ He added curiously, perhaps to make things seem more everyday: ‘Wasn’t that you, by the way, who screwed up that board for the Branch the other day?’
‘That’s right.’
‘Must seem weird, working with them right after.’
‘They don’t appear to mind.’
‘It certainly went the rounds,’ he said, ‘that story did.’ He added: ‘Incidentally, where does this business with a certain cabinet minister come into it? It comes into it somewhere, I believe.’
‘You shouldn’t have heard about that,’ I said. ‘There’s leaks everywhere; they’ve got to tighten up on security.’
‘Security? That’s just coppers talking, we’ve got a tongue in our head. Strange, that,’ he added, ‘a minister.’
‘Not unknown, though,’ I said. ‘But you’re right, the whole of this thing, it’s all connected. It’s like a grenade with the pin pulled out; that’s what you’ve got to realize.’ I stood up. ‘Well, we’d better get it done. We’ve got my car, it’ll do, it’s unmarked; we might as well drift over there now.’
‘Pity they don’t just take the place by assault.’
‘Pity for us, yes,’ I said, ‘but it wouldn’t do; it’s the very thing they want to avoid. They just want to squash this thing without any publicity, but you can’t do that if the Branch and the SAS open up with bursts of small-arms fire. The way you and I are going to try and play it, it’ll make a lot less fuss. Then afterwards Phillips and the minister can be dealt with on the side; the press’ll be told what to print and what not to, statement on TV, and the whole balls-up’ll be processed as if it were run-of-the-mill – which of course it isn’t.’
‘OK,’ he said. He added: ‘Had anything to eat yet?’
‘No, I skipped lunch.’
‘Good,’ he said, ‘same here. You know, just in case you did stop one. I never eat before a job like this. McGruder was a paratrooper, they say; he’s unlikely to just kneel down and say his prayers when we come in.’
‘No,’ I said, ‘and Hawes neither. They’re both frantic, jammed up in there with that woman. Anyway, McGruder’s going off his trolley, I reckon. You got your W/T, by the way? Good, well, if things do get bad, call the mob, OK? Play it by ear, you know.’
‘Yes,
sure.’
I said: ‘It’s fucking dangerous, I’m afraid.’ I looked at my watch; it was four in the afternoon. We went out to get my car; it had started to rain again. I was pleased about that. It would help keep the streets clear if it did come to a battle, though the street was sealed off.
42
I remembered as I drove what McGruder had told me about his past, that night we were in the Painted Lady. It was strange the way he would relax and talk to me once I got him going. He said: ‘I dare say you find me strange.’ Yes, I said, I found him that all right. He said: ‘We came in to Belfast to find work from Coleraine when I was a kid. Coleraine, that’s a miserable place now. My dad was in the building trade. We’re Protestants, and he was always behind Paisley, right up to his neck in it till the night the Provos did him in a hedge out by the border, nine years ago, that was. If I’d liked my dad I’d have found those that smashed him up and that would have been it. But I didn’t. He used to belt us right up to the day I got too big for him to do it to me any more. That night, I was sixteen, I smashed him with a frying-pan the minute he started – bang! He got the message. You know? I was always a loner; I always had this idea I smelled. That’s why I keep myself clean, spotless. Politics? Ireland? Ulster? Don’t give me that crap. They taught me the violence – the rest of politics is blackmail. Me? Everything I’ve done, I’ve done it for money. I like money. I like not spending it. I like money better than people. People try and fuck you about – well, you’ve got to teach them to leave you alone. Killing people? No, that means nothing to me; if the money’s right, half of it up front, the contract’s on, it’s a runner. Strange – I’ve never told anyone any of this before, I don’t know why I’m telling you, I really don’t. I expect you’ve noticed I’ve got a good brain; also, the army taught me a lot. Really everything. First sergeant I ever served with, he said to me: now, Billy boy, this is easy, the nig-nogs are over there and we’re over here. But we’re going to do this and this and this and then, when we’ve cleaned up, they won’t be over there any more, we will be. I want you to go over and do that sentry they’ve got, top him and give ’em all a fright; we’ll do the rest, we’ll go through ’em like a fart after a hot dinner, they won’t know what’s hit ’em. He and I, we understood each other fine, he got me my stripes the first time. Be cunning, McGruder, he said, and you can flatten the lot. He didn’t have to tell me! Married: oh, you knew that, did you? To that stupid Yugoslav tart? She couldn’t keep her knees shut if it was snowing on her fanny, yes, thanks for the tip but I know who it is.
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