Rules of Engagement

by Hurley, Graham

  ‘We were taken aside,’ he said, ‘at least, I was.’

  ‘And me?’

  The reporter looked at her.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said, ‘I didn’t see. Not exactly …’ He hesitated, apologizing more than necessary. ‘It all happened very quickly. It was all over like that.’ He snapped his fingers. Annie winced.

  ‘What was?’

  ‘Whatever happened to you.’ He gestured at her face, the blood stains on the pillow.

  Annie’s hands went up to her face for the first time. High on her forehead, just below the hairline, she could feel a thin crust of blood. It seemed superficial, like a graze or a gravel scrape. She explored further. The back of her head was swollen, and there was more blood matted in the tight curls of hair.

  ‘Someone hit me,’ she said reasonably. ‘Quite hard.’ She frowned, remembering the camera, and the face in the back of the car. She had the evidence. She could press her case.

  ‘Where’s the camera?’ she said.

  The young reporter shook his head, regretful.

  ‘They took it,’ he said. ‘My Uher, too.’

  ‘Took it?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Who took it?’

  ‘They did. The military.’

  ‘Oh.’ She nodded. ‘So why didn’t they take us, too? Do the job properly?’

  The young reporter shrugged. ‘No idea,’ he said. ‘They just told me to bugger off. A couple of them put you in the back of your car, and I drove it home. They …’ He shrugged again, letting the sentence trail away. Annie looked at him. The more he talked, the more she pressed him, the more evasive he became, and Annie began to recognize what must have happened while she was lying there, unconscious, in the road, the threats they’d made, the pressures they’d applied, the brisk promise of violence in support of civil power. She’d seen the technique before, during the miners’ strike in ’84 … except that this time it had been the Army, without a police uniform in sight, though the face in the car, she was positive, had been a civilian.

  She struggled upright in bed and swung her legs over the side of the divan. The inside of her head began to throb again, and she swallowed the hot gusts of nausea that bubbled up from her stomach. She tried to stand on the threadbare old carpet. The reporter caught her.

  ‘Who were they?’ she said.

  He looked wary. ‘Army,’ he said.

  ‘Names?’

  He looked away and shook his head, and she knew at once that she’d been right. He’d been badly frightened. He’d say no more.

  ‘This your place?’ she said, looking round.

  He nodded. He looked uncomfortable. He knew what she wanted, names, numbers, units, details, some sort of handle on the experience she’d been through, some sort of toehold on the near-impossible climb she’d set herself, but he’d been there too, understood plain English, and whatever they’d told him, however they’d put it, they’d done a very good job. He helped her towards the tiny basin in the corner of the room, and began to fill it with water. Annie looked at herself in the mirror on the wall. She’d been right about the forehead. The skin was grazed, the blood black against her sallow skin. There was another abrasion on her nose, more blood, and her face looked doughy and misshapen. The reporter tested the temperature of the water with his elbow, and began to soap a flannel. He was a kind man, she thought, caring, and for the first time she realized how young he was.

  The door opened behind them and a woman stepped in. She was carrying a very small baby in the crook of one arm, and a cup of tea in her other hand. She looked anxious and strained. She offered the tea to her husband, nodding at Annie, a gesture of helplessness. Annie studied them both for a moment in the mirror, understanding it all, the reluctance to become involved, the sudden absence of memory. On reflection, she realized it had been brave of him to come with her in the first place. But that had been before he knew what they were up against, the scale of the thing, the odds stacked against them. She took the flannel from him. He gestured, half embarrassed, at the woman with the baby.

  ‘Evie,’ he said. ‘My wife.’

  The woman did her best to smile, but it didn’t work. Annie answered the question she wanted so badly to voice, but couldn’t.

  ‘Hi,’ she said. ‘I’m off in a minute. Don’t worry.’

  The reporter frowned, genuine concern.

  ‘Where will you go?’ he said. ‘The city’s closed.’

  Annie smiled at the lumpy face in the mirror, a private joke.

  ‘There’s a friend of mine,’ she said. ‘Lives locally.’

  Albie Curtis had known since dawn that the city was finally on its own. His younger brother, who had a half-share in a fruit and veg stall in the market, had driven north to pick up produce from a market garden on the mainland. He’d been turned back by police well short of the roadblock, though he’d seen enough movies to recognize the oil drums and barbed wire and sandbag clearly visible half a mile up the road. When he told the police he had work to do, spuds to collect, a living to make, they’d simply shrugged and indicated the lay-by on the left where he could start the U-turn that would take him back into the city. He’d given them a good mouthful, but he’d done their bidding, and by the time he’d got to Albie’s tiny bedsit down by the seafront, what was left of his anger was strictly philosophical.

  ‘Pissing in the wind,’ he told Albie, as his brother decanted hot water onto a tea bag. ‘Fuckers never listen. Not now. Not ever.’

  Albie, who hadn’t got to bed until three in the morning, had asked him about the petrol in the van. His brother had told him he had a half a tank, maybe a bit less. Albie had nodded, indicating the pile of leaflets on the floor. He tried to treat his brother the way Mick treated him. It never worked, and he never really understood why.

  ‘OK,’ he’d said, ‘deliver that lot.’

  His brother had frowned. After the tea, he’d other plans. First a visit to the market to elbow the stall for the day. Then an early call on a bird he was shafting. Her husband was in the Navy and away for the duration. Any time, day or night, she couldn’t get enough of it. Albie had looked pained.

  ‘There’s a war on,’ he said. ‘We might all be dead by lunchtime.’

  His brother, who had neither the taste nor the time for international crises, had simply grinned.

  ‘Exactly,’ he’d said, throwing Albie the keys. ‘You do it. I’m off.’

  Now, a couple of hours later, Albie had personally delivered about half of the leaflets, and given a couple of local kids five quid each to get rid of the rest. He’d chosen the poorer areas of the city, tightly packed, back-to-back houses, old people with long memories, and modest savings, and perfect recall of the cold January nights when the Luftwaffe had levelled street after street. Then, during the war, white paint on the windows had been highly prized, the official antidote to the heat and the blast of exploding bombs. Now, fifty years later, there was no obvious reason why it shouldn’t work again. Unless of course, you happened to know anything about the terrible chemistry of nuclear fission, about blast rings and overpressure, about lung haemorrhage and third degree burns. And even then you might still pop a tenner or so on the offer, one last fatuous gesture in the face of oblivion.

  That, at least, was Albie’s theory, a totally individual piece of free enterprise that had nothing to do with Mick Rendall and his fancy ideas. The telephone number on the leaflet belonged to a hairdressing salon in the city’s commercial precinct. His sister’s best friend worked there. Evidently trade was on the thin side, and he’d promised her five per cent for taking firm orders. These orders he’d pick up later in the day, and service as best he could, cash on the nail. He’d done the sums several times, but whichever buttons he pressed on the borrowed calculator, it still came out on the right side. If he was unlucky, if he’d got it all wrong, he’d still make a quid or two. But if it worked the way he knew it could, he’d make a fortune. 50 per cent take up at ten quid a window? He smiled, swingi
ng the van out of the last of the streets he’d targeted, and heading for the docks. Last night, outside the casino, he’d fixed to meet Mick at eight. It was already half past nine.

  Oliver Davidson brought his borrowed car to a halt, stifled a yawn, and stepped out into the sunshine. The main block at St Ursula’s was away to his left: a big, four-storeyed Victorian pile with tall, shadowed windows, and an imposing flight of steps leading to a heavy revolving door. The building housed all the hospital’s administrative offices, the principal out-patient clinics, and a handful of specialist wards for drug addicts, alcoholics, and sundry other rogue groups which now qualified for psychiatric care.

  Elsewhere, dotted amongst the shrubs, and gardens, and dusty copses of trees, were the half-dozen or so villas which served as regular psychiatric wards, smaller, two-storeyed buildings, self-contained, each with beds for up to forty patients. Over the past three days, the less severely afflicted had been discharged, returned to relatives, or friends, or the uncertain mercies of the DHSS bed and breakfast hotels that littered the city. In their place, overnight, a convoy of coaches had arrived, each with its separate escort of police cars, shipping in a new category of inmate. Many of them were young, most of them were politically active, and all of them had been roused from their beds in a series of 2.00 a.m. raids across the south of England. The small print of the operation had been organized by Special Branch and an offshoot of MI5 known as ‘Waste Disposal’. But the broad strategy had been framed by a working group at the Home Office. Davidson had served on this officially non-existent committee for eighteen months, and it was he who’d coined the expression ‘Out Takes’ or ‘OTs’ to designate this new category of citizens who found themselves suddenly qualifying for a bed in a psychiatric ward in one of the country’s high-risk target areas. By ‘OTs’, he’d confided to a colleague, he’d actually meant Political Detainees, but the latter phrase had a slightly South African ring to it, and on balance he felt happier with the new formula. Words, he was constantly reminding the Committee, were democracy’s favourite camouflage. With words, he assured them, you could get away with anything

  By and large, so far, the thing had worked remarkably well. The city, he knew, had a reputation in Whitehall for mute compliance, bred from generations of dependence on the Naval Dockyard. Lately, according to private soundings amongst people who should know, there’d been an upsurge in drunkenness and after-hours street brawling, but this violence was no different from anywhere else in the country: a sullen mix of adolescence, money, and high octane lager. It certainly had nothing to do with political discontent or any discernible undertow of left-wing sentiment. On the contrary, Tory councils had governed the city since the war, and their stranglehold on the committees that mattered was complete. Nevertheless, it was wise to be cautious. No one, no city, had ever been in this situation before. It was virgin territory, and in the absence of maps, one could only do one’s best to apply the lessons of the past, to divide and rule, to keep apart the combustible elements of any successful opposition: the students and the intellectuals on the one hand, and what now passed for the working class on the other. It was all pretty orthodox stuff, but the city had a large polytechnic, and a vigorous working population, and he felt a little easier to know that the local OTs included forty or so of the likelier subversives on the Special Branch arrest list. It was these individuals, articulate, passionate, well-read, who must be silenced.

  He smiled, pocketing the car keys, and remembering the curious little incident at the roadblock in the early hours, the girl sprawling in the gravel, her boyfriend standing aghast to one side, the officer pulling the soldier away, the camera lying under the front wheel of the big, black Rover. Evans had accelerated away immediately, scenting danger. Davidson had heard the camera disintegrate beneath them.

  A figure stepped out of the villa and walked across the grass towards him: tall, bulky, rumpled, the enormous face curtained by the black, lank, shoulder-length hair. Davidson had only known Ingle for a month or so, but he’d already developed an enormous respect for the man. He’d never met a more unlikely policeman, but he’d read the files, and made his enquiries, and now he saw a perfectly logical path from the neat, cropped unsmiling face in the Hendon class photo, to the figure standing before him in the sunshine.

  A decade of undercover work had left its mark on the man. Unusually, he’d emerged from the Drugs Squad without a whisper of gossip. No rumours of graft or free holidays in Miami. No expense account lunches in the Dorchester or the Inn on the Park. No funny bank accounts in Zurich or Dubai. Just the big, flat, slightly Slavic face, and the coal black eyes, and the first hints of grey in the eternally unwashed hair. Ingle had a reputation for cunning and endless patience. He was said to get results not by any of the usual methods, not by closing the door, and pulling the curtains, and rolling up his sleeves, or by plea bargaining, or verballing, or dropping fat hints about insurance rewards, but by something infinitely more subtle. He could, said the handful of people who knew him well, have been a psychiatrist or an actor. He had an uncanny talent for empathy, for getting behind the denials and the anguish and the endless protestations of innocence, for taking a good look round, for sussing what really made a man tick, and for easing him towards the confession they’d both, finally, agree was inevitable.

  Enemies of Ingle, and he had many, said he was slow and difficult, a bit of a liability. By the latter, they normally meant that he was unduly exercised by the truth, by the record of what had actually happened to a man, and Davidson now knew enough about justice to recognize that this could indeed be counterproductive. Nevertheless, he valued Ingle highly, and he’d brought him south to take charge. Ingle was a one-off man for a one-off situation. And Davidson was glad to have him.

  The two men shook hands, and Davidson took Ingle by the arm and steered him away from the villa, out into the grounds where they could talk more freely. He wanted to know how the transfers had gone, how the OTs had settled in, whether there’d been any nonsense about solicitors or civil rights. Ingle told him that there’d been an incident or two, but nothing they couldn’t handle, and that the guards supplied by the local security firm were, if anything, over-zealous. He suspected they’d been watching too many Clint Eastwood movies. Some of them, he said, wanted to be issued with firearms, a request he’d turned down flat.

  Davidson asked about the surveillance teams, shipped down from London over the past few days, men and women hand picked by Ingle after the Queen’s Gate decision to make the city the principal OT reception centre for the south. Ingle nodded, confirming they were already deployed, already out there, haunting the pubs, queueing for bread and milk, ears to the ground, alert for gossip and rumour. So far, he said, it had been remarkably quiet. People, if anything, were bewildered, unable to distinguish between the real threat – their home, their kids – and the international soap opera transmitting hourly on the nation’s screens. Now, of course, all that had changed. No more news. No more comment.

  The two men paused by a bench. One of the long-stay patients sat back against the warm woodwork, a man in his early sixties, gaunt, hollow-eyed, with big bony hands, and thin wisps of white hair. He had a handbag on his lap, and kept removing the contents: a pension book, a box of crayons, and a single dirty woollen glove. His body rocked back and forth as he mumbled to himself, packing and re-packing the bag, itemizing the objects, an endless private mantra.

  Ingle gazed at him thoughtfully. Davidson sensed an instant kinship, uncluttered by embarrassment, or pity, or any of the usual social defences. He glanced over at Ingle, an enquiry, an unvoiced question. Ingle blinked, momentarily off-guard, and then started to walk again.

  ‘Ex-copper?’ he mused after a while, ‘or civil servant?’ He smiled at Davidson. ‘What do you think?’

  Gillespie arrived at the rendezvous a couple of minutes early. The woman had rung again shortly after nine, the same voice, the same slightly brittle defensiveness. She said that she wanted to talk, and t
hat she would meet him on the old fortification walls overlooking the harbour mouth. She’d be wearing a dark blue dress, and a light tan coat, and a red silk scarf. She left no name and no number. Gillespie had made a note of the rendezvous, shaken the creases out of a newly laundered pair of jeans, fed the cat, and walked the mile and a half to the harbour mouth.

  Now, five minutes past the rendezvous time, he sat on the big stone wall overlooking the sea trying to guess the woman’s age and what kind of car she might drive. He’d nearly settled for a Volvo estate when a voice interrupted him.

  ‘Mr Gillespie?’

  He swung round, squinting in the sunshine. The light tan coat was unbelted, and the woman had a small leather bag slung over one shoulder. The red scarf was loosely knotted at the side of her neck. She looked cool, and thoughtful, and not at all the way he’d imagined. An attractive intelligent woman, coping with a difficult situation.

  Gillespie levered himself off the wall and wiped the dust from his hands. For September, it was very warm. He nodded at her.

  ‘Mrs …?’

  She looked at him a moment, frank, appraising.

  ‘Goodman,’ she said, ‘Joanna Goodman. Charles Jenner put me onto you. He said you …’ she frowned, looking for the right phrase, ‘did jobs.’ She smiled for the first time, a chill rearrangement of the lower half of her face. ‘I hope I didn’t wake you up,’ she said, ‘the first time I phoned.’ Gillespie shook his head, remembering the message on the ansaphone, the sentences trailing away into silence.

  ‘Not at all,’ he said, ‘I was out.’

  ‘Out?’

  ‘Running.’

  ‘Oh,’ she nodded, still looking at him, ‘I see.’

  There was a brief silence, then Gillespie fell into step beside her.

  ‘How can I help you?’ he said.

  The woman said nothing for a moment or two, then looked at him again. They both stopped.

  ‘It’s my husband,’ she said. ‘He’s having an affair.’