She paused, frowning, hating the expression, its theatricality, its cheapness. Gillespie nodded, saying nothing. He felt curiously flattered by her candour. Normally, it took an age to coax out this initial admission, this statement of the facts, and by that time the relationship between them, client and customer, would already have been distorted, an open pocket for the woman’s feelings of shame, and neglect, and failure. In this sense, Gillespie himself became tainted, part of the betrayal, a feeling which no fee on earth could recompense. This was one of the reasons he’d recently decided to abandon matrimonial work, preferring to pass the jobs onto other men in the city, more thick skinned, less choosy. But this woman was different, with her composure, and her icy poise. She’d obviously done the thinking. She knew what she wanted, and it would simply be Gillespie’s job to help her get it.
She produced an envelope from her shoulder bag. The envelope was light blue, Basildon Bond. She began to open it.
‘My husband’s name is Martin,’ she said. ‘He’s the city’s Chief Executive. He works at the Civic Centre for the time being, but I understand that might all change.’ She paused. ‘Am I making sense?’
Gillespie nodded, remembering the removal vans at the kerbside in the Guildhall Square, the watchful squaddies looking on. The woman handed him a photograph, colour, postcard size. He glanced at it. A man in an open white shirt was sitting on a swing. A child of about seven was sitting in his lap. The child had purple lolly-stains around his mouth. The man had his hands around the child’s stomach, holding him still for the camera. He looked relaxed and cheerful. He wore glasses.
‘Last Easter.’ The woman hesitated a moment. ‘… It’s the most recent I could find.’
‘It’s fine,’ said Gillespie. ‘What do you want from me?’
The woman stiffened imperceptibly, a question she’d obviously been expecting.
‘I want to know who he’s seeing,’ she said. ‘I want her name. And her address. And a phone number … if that’s possible.’
Gillespie nodded.
‘That’s possible,’ he said.
The woman looked at him again, the same candour, the same determination.
‘And then I want the photo back …’ she tapped the print in his hand, ‘and I want you to have no more to do with it.’
‘Sure.’
The woman opened her bag again.
‘How much do you charge?’ she said.
‘Fifteen pounds an hour,’ Gillespie said, ‘plus expenses.’
‘Do you want something in advance?’
‘It would help.’
She nodded and produced another envelope, small and brown. She offered it to him.
‘Here,’ she said. ‘That’s forty pounds to be going on with.’
Gillespie fingered the envelope, decided against opening it, and slipped it into his back pocket.
‘How do I contact you?’ he said.
‘There’s a telephone number in the envelope. You can phone me.’
‘Any time?’
She hesitated a moment, and blinked, and Gillespie had a glimpse of the real woman behind it all, behind the mask, angry, and hurt, and bitter, but no less determined.
‘Any time,’ she confirmed.
He nodded, extended a hand. She touched it lightly, no more than politeness demanded, and began to turn away. Gillespie glanced at the photo again.
‘One thing …’ he said.
She hesitated, not wanting to talk any more.
‘Yes?’
‘Do you want photos?’
The woman’s eyes narrowed a moment while she thought about the proposition.
‘Is it usual?’ she said.
‘Sometimes.’
‘I see.’ She thought about it some more, and looked inland, towards the high rise blocks that rose from the city centre.
She began to belt the coat. She didn’t voice the thought, but the implication was clear enough in her face. Men, it said. Men and their silly, silly games. She sniffed.
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘send me the photos too.’
She gave him a thin parting smile and turned on her heel. Gillespie watched her walking away, firm, neat steps, in charge of herself again, her own person. He leaned back against the warm stonework, glancing down at the photograph, memorizing the face. On closer inspection, he wasn’t sure about the smile. It might have been genuine, or it might not. It was that kind of expression, practised, opaque, designed to impress, or amuse, or reassure, or baffle, wholly synthetic.
He looked to the east. The woman was already a dot in the distance. He turned away, and walked in the opposite direction, towards the Round Tower, one of the twin fortifications that guarded the entrance to the harbour.
Suddenly he caught the harsh metallic tones of a megaphone. He crossed to the wall again, and looked down at the water. Two powerboats, one big and one small, were converging on a yacht. The yacht was about forty foot, big, edging slowly out against the flood tide. He counted eight people in the cockpit. One of the powerboats, the larger of the two, nudged alongside. An officer in naval uniform boarded the yacht, hopping nimbly from one deck onto the other. Even from a hundred yards, Gillespie could see the sidearm strapped to his hip. An argument began, voices raised, fingers pointing, heads shaking. Two other men emerged from the cabin, big men. One of them shouldered his way through the crowded cockpit, dwarfing the man in the naval uniform. He picked him up bodily, and threw him overboard. Gillespie heard the splash of the falling body, and the cheers and claps from the yacht.
A sailor on the powerboat ran forward with a boathook, but the officer had already floated past on the flood tide, back in towards the harbour mouth. He was swimming slowly, keeping his head above water, letting the current do the work. Another figure appeared on the powerboat. He carried a gun of some sort, snub barrel, stubby magazine, wooden stock. He knelt carefully on the foredeck and took aim at the bow of the yacht. A moment later, Gillespie recognized the sharp bark of the Uzi sub-machine-gun as the bullets stitched a line of holes in the yacht’s hull, inches above the water line. A woman screamed. The yacht hove to, broadside across the current, already beginning to settle in the water, and the naval officer, still holding his hat, drifted slowly out of sight.
Gillespie let the tableau settle in his mind, the powerboat closing again on the yacht, the woman cowering against the men, a new voice on the megaphone telling everyone to keep calm, and he realized, rather late in the day, what it all meant. They were closing the city down, by road, and by sea. And they meant the blockade to stick.
Mick Rendall heard the gunshots and ran to the end of the dock. A Royal Navy Land-Rover had been there since dawn, the three matelots from the Naval Provost taking a leisurely inventory of the boats moored alongside, preparing the Requisition Forms for each of the owners, checking names against a master list, ignoring the sour jokes from the fishermen lounging outside the pub at the dock entrance.
Now, breathless, Mick stood beside the Land-Rover, peering out towards the harbour mouth. The shooting had stopped, but he could hear the roar of a powerful outboard. Seconds later, a big inflatable appeared, circling a figure in the water. A lifebelt was thrown. A man knelt at the waterline, extending a helping hand, and a figure in naval uniform wriggled aboard. Mick blinked, not understanding it, and began to walk back towards the eighty-foot trawler he’d finally managed to charter.
The Timothy Lee was an old boat, the oldest in the dock’s commercial fleet, and twenty years at sea had taken their toll. The hull was chipped and rusting, the woodwork around the wheel-house was beginning to rot, and the accommodation aft was cramped and airless. The narrow companionways stank of fish, engine oil, and old chip fat, and most of the boat’s navigation aids were unserviceable.
By choice, Mick would have preferred one of the modern boats, the big beam trawlers that fished out in the south-west approaches, but the skippers of these, though willing enough to take his money, were wary of their boss, a self-made man called Nev
ille Price. Price, who’d begun life as a navvy in the dockyard, had a very short fuse and a legendary impatience with paperwork. He settled most company disputes the only way he knew how, and most of his skippers carried the scars to prove it.
And so Mick, in the end, had been obliged to return to Arthur McNaught, the one deep-sea fisherman in the dock with a boat of his own. McNaught, a slight, tanned, thin-faced, canny little man in his late fifties, had taken a good living from the Timothy Lee over the years, though lately the fishing had been poor. He now spent more time in the pub than he should do, and he’d listened to Mick’s pitch over his morning brandy, making no comment until Mick got to the meat of it all. Then he’d laughed at Mick’s first offer, and scratched the tattoos on the back of his hand, and told him to double it, and double it again. Mick, who’d seen this kind of arithmetic coming, doubled it once and left it on the table between them.
‘Forty quid a head,’ he said.
‘Up front?’
‘Half.’
‘How many people?’
‘A hundred,’ Mick said, ‘give or take.’
They’d put the price on one side for a while, sorting through the practical problems. Victualling – food and drink – was obviously down to Mick. Likewise the sleeping arrangements. A hundred bodies, said McNaught thoughtfully, would fit nice in the big fish hold. The floor was pretty flat and there was plenty of room for a layer of mattresses. They’d be sleeping side by side, head to toe, packed in like sardines, but it was a fishing boat, after all, and any kind of berth was presumably preferable to staying put.
Mick had agreed with this, acknowledging the logic but nonplussed at the vision of a hundred punters jigsawed into a fish hold. He wasn’t sure it was exactly what Cartwright had in mind, but the fisherman was right. Beggars couldn’t be choosers.
The question of the destination had come up next. In principle, McNaught was prepared to go anywhere. The boat was solid, he assured Mick, and he wasn’t to be too bothered by the dodgy navigational aids. He never went to sea without a sextant, and if needs must, he’d use it.
‘Ireland?’ Mick had enquired cautiously, ‘Portugal?’ The little man had shrugged.
‘Your shout,’ he said, ‘we’ll go wherever you want.’
The other details – like fuel – were again down to Mick. There was evidently plenty of diesel around, but the supplies were now under the Government cosh, and Mick would need some kind of official permission to get at the pumps. Quite how he’d acquire this, McNaught didn’t know, but he assumed that Mick had connections and he advised him to overbid on the capacity of the trawler’s tanks. The black market in diesel, he said, had quadrupled the price. Anything spare would be more than welcome.
With McNaught studying yet another empty glass, they were finally left with only one problem. Since dawn, said McNaught, the Navy had taken control of the harbour. All movements were banned. Anyone casting off, and making any kind of way in the harbour, was liable to summary arrest and forfeit of the boat. At the time, eight o’clock, Mick hadn’t believed him. It was, he’d told himself, a wind-up, an obvious device to screw the charter fee even higher. Since eight, though, he’d heard of a number of incidents which confirmed McNaught’s information, and now, walking back along the dock, it was all too clear that the Navy meant business. He didn’t know exactly what the shots had signified, but gunfire was very definitely something to avoid.
Mick clambered aboard the Timothy Lee. McNaught had disappeared for the time being but Albie was hard at work, stacking mattresses beside the gaping mouth of the fish hold. Mick paused, one foot on the gangway, one foot on the deck.
‘Harry turned up yet?’ he said.
Albie barely looked at him, humping the heavy mattresses across the deck, and dropping them one by one into the fish hold below. He’d picked them up from a friend of a friend who ran a DHSS bed and breakfast place on the seafront. He’d taken thirty-two at a quid each, with the promise of another couple of dozen to come. The place was a right doss-house, and a lot of the mattresses were falling apart, others soaked in urine or worse. It was disgusting. It offended him. The way people lived. Mick repeated the question. ‘Where’s Harry?’
‘Dunno,’ he said, ‘you tell me.’
‘He mention anything about this other boat he wants?’
‘No.’
‘Oh.’
Mick frowned, remembering Harry’s brief description. Small. Fast. Seaworthy. He looked around the dock, wondering why two boats, why the need. Harry was a sharp man. Did everything for a reason. Problem was, he rarely shared his little secrets.
Martin Goodman returned to the city mid-morning, sitting in the back of the official Rover as Evans inched the car carefully out between the small mountains of sandbags and barbed wire that now flanked the Bunker’s entrance. This addition to his personal safety had appeared, quite literally, overnight. When he’d arrived with Davidson, at one in the morning, they’d been waved through by a couple of soldiers and a dog. Now, only hours later, it looked like a Hollywood set: layer after layer of sandbags, thickets of barbed wire, floodlights cabled to the Bunker’s mains supply, and a large sign declaring the area a Prohibited Zone. There was an obvious reassurance in it all, a commitment to enfold and protect the administrative heart of the city, but there was something else as well, infinitely more personal. He’d begun to be aware of a growing sense of claustrophobia, of circumstances closing around him. It gave him a feeling of tightness in the chest. It made him anxious and fretful, uncertain where to turn next. In this sense, the sandbags and the barbed wire heightened the walls around him. He hated the Bunker. He was glad they were getting out.
The car telephone began to bleep. Goodman watched Evans reach forward, and pick up the phone, and put it to his ear. He nodded several times and eyed Goodman in the rear-view mirror. Goodman leaned forward, anticipating the call: more problems, more decisions, another colleague utterly bewildered by it all.
‘Young lady, sir. A Miss Wallace.’ He paused. ‘She’s phoned already, sir. She sounded quite upset.’
Goodman reached forward and took the phone.
‘Hi,’ he said, ‘how are you?’
Suzanne reacted at once, a mixture of anger and something she tried to pass off as bonhomie. Just another day. Just another phone call.
‘I’m fine,’ she said, ‘Just wonderful.’ She paused. ‘I suppose you’ve heard the news?’
‘There isn’t any news.’
‘Precisely.’ There was another pause. When she spoke again, the anger had gone. Instead, she sounded vulnerable, and frightened, and utterly alone.
‘Martin …’ she said, ‘I have to see you.’
‘You do?’ he said mechanically, watching the back of Evans’ head, wondering what he must make of it all. The speedometer was touching 100. The harbour was flashing by. Suzanne’s voice again, lower.
‘Soon.’
‘Of course.’
‘This morning.’
‘I …’ He hesitated, looking at his watch, knowing how impossible it had already become. Suzanne returned, in his ear, pleading, no games, no clever dialogue.
‘Martin …’ she said again, ‘please.’
Goodman leaned back and shut his eyes, feeling the big car slowing for the roundabout at the end of the motorway.
‘Half-past twelve,’ he said, ‘on the bench.’ He handed the phone back to Evans without saying goodbye. The Marine clipped it back into its cradle on the central console.
‘Still the harbour master, sir?’ he said drily.
Goodman nodded. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘still the harbour master.’
‘And then?’ He nodded at the fuel gauge. ‘Only I’ll need petrol.’
‘The Civic Centre,’ he said, ‘for twelve-thirty.’ He leaned back against the warm leather. The sandbags, he thought again, the barbed wire.
Gillespie sat on his bed, loading film into his faithful old Olympus OM-1. The huge zoom lens lay beside him on the duvet. The last time
he’d done a photographic job, he’d closed the case in less than a day and a half. But this one would be different. Already, it had the makings of a combat situation – a complicated stalk, a heavily protected target – and the exercise might, for a day or two, return him to the world he thought he’d left for ever. He grinned. After too many years of civilian life, flabby, torpid, dull, things were at last looking up again.
He stepped across the tiny landing, and took the stairs two at a time. He found the number in the book within seconds. A receptionist answered. He asked for Martin Goodman. There was a pause, then another woman’s voice.
‘Freeman & Co,’ Gillespie said gruffly, ‘want to know whether Mr Goodman’ll be needing another wagon.’
There was a pause at the other end. The girl was evidently puzzled. Finally she said she didn’t know. Mr Goodman was out at the moment. She’d check as soon as he returned.
‘When’s that, love?’ said Gillespie.
‘Half-past twelve,’ said the girl.
Goodman stood in the window of the harbour master’s office and repeated his request.
‘Two boats,’ he said, ‘leaving tonight.’
The harbour master frowned, considering the application, enjoying the authority the situation had given him.
‘Why?’ he said.
Goodman looked at him, the small bright eyes, the thin bony nose, the crisp white shirt with the gold epaulettes. He hadn’t come to argue, or pick a fight, but he was suddenly sick of the emptiness of his authority, the helpings other men were taking from his plate.
‘Because I say so,’ he countered briskly. ‘Because I think it’s the right thing to do.’
‘What sort of boats?’
Goodman hesitated, determined not to be wrong-footed, remembering Cartwright’s terse description.
‘One big, one small,’ he said, ‘don’t ask me for details because I haven’t got them. Yet.’
‘I see.’ The man pursed his lips. ‘And where are these … ah … craft going? Exactly?’
‘Ireland,’ said Goodman blindly.
‘South? North?’
Rules of Engagement Page 18