Rules of Engagement

by Hurley, Graham

‘South.’ Goodman frowned, recalling the shapes on the map, the long fingers of land extending out into the Atlantic. ‘West.’

  ‘I see.’ The harbour master paused, fingering the binoculars on the desk, his badge of office. ‘And the passenger list?’

  ‘About thirty people.’

  The harbour master nodded, suddenly businesslike, pulling a pad towards him. ‘Names?’

  Goodman began to lose his temper, a hot, gusting anger that he tried, briefly, to contain.

  ‘Forgive me …’ he said evenly, ‘but I’m a busy man. We’re all busy men. I want you to know what we’re doing. I’m offering you the courtesy of telling you in advance. I have a team of men. The city depends on them. It’s vital I give them what little peace of mind I can. I intend to ship their loved ones out. Tonight …’ he did his best to smile, ‘with your permission.’

  The harbour master looked at him, too thick-skinned to heed the warning signals, to note the tell-tale flicker of nervous strain beginning to appear beneath Goodman’s left eye. He tapped at the pad.

  ‘Women and children …’ he said speculatively. ‘Have you thought this thing through? Properly? Are you aware of the risks involved?’

  ‘The boats are perfectly seaworthy. I’m assured of that.’

  ‘I’m not talking about the boats. Though naturally we’ll require an inspection.’

  Goodman looked briefly nonplussed, trying to out-guess this tiresome old bureaucrat, trying to beat him at his own game. Cartwright had made it sound utterly feasible, a question – as ever – of supply and demand. No hitches. No drawbacks. Simply a matter of casting off and heading west. The harbour master got up from his desk and turned his back on Goodman, gazing out of the big picture window. The harbour was virtually empty, a tribute to the zealous efforts of his private flotilla, recruited overnight, and already assured of a modest line or two in the history of the place. So far, in six brief hours, they’d turned back more than a hundred boats, from six-foot yacht tenders risking the five miles to the island, to fifty-foot ocean-going sloops, victualled for months at sea, equipped with satellite navigation aids, and jam-packed with instant sailors. Most of the skippers had conceded to the blockade without a fight, sour, sullen, resigned. A handful, especially some of the city’s lawyers, had tried to argue their way to the open sea, disputing the authority of the harbour master, and citing obscure constitutional precedents in support of the citizens’ rights of passage. Arguments like these were simply ignored. Boats were either taken in tow and confiscated, their crews dumped in the shallows on one of the city’s beaches, or turned around at gunpoint, and left to drift back inland, up-harbour, towards the muddy creeks and saltings that led, quite literally, nowhere.

  The harbour master turned slowly back into the room.

  ‘These passengers of yours …’ he began. ‘These dependants. Where will they go aboard?’

  ‘The Camber Dock,’ he said. ‘As I understand it.’ The harbour master nodded.

  ‘And have you thought about the security implications? All those lucky people, with their children, and the odd chattel or two? Getting away? With our blessing?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  The harbour master shrugged, the gesture of a man weary of dealing with fools and ingénues.

  ‘The Camber is an open area,’ he said, ‘You’ll have a riot on your hands.’

  ‘I’ll seal it off,’ Goodman said automatically, feeling the anger again.

  ‘With what?’

  Goodman was aware of something snapping inside him, something almost palpable. He pushed his chair back and stood up. The exchange between them was over.

  ‘The boats will leave tonight,’ he said coldly. ‘They’ll be under my direct jurisdiction. You will be notified of their names, their tonnage, and their intended destination. You will not receive a passenger list, and you will not impede them in any way.’ He looked the harbour master in the eye. ‘Is that clear?’

  The harbour master nodded, pale with outrage, and Goodman knew at once that he’d made an enemy for life.

  ‘Perfectly,’ he said. ‘Though the responsibility is entirely yours.’

  It was nearly midday before Annie risked the stairs, and the garden path, and the drive back to Gillespie’s place. The worst of the nausea had gone, and her head had stopped hurting quite so much, but there was something else, deeper, an insecurity so physical that once or twice she had to sit down, and force her knees together, and hug herself tightly to stop the trembling that threatened to engulf her. She’d never been assaulted before, and she’d always been mildly curious to know what it felt like, what it did to you, the difference it made. Now, she knew. And the countless interviewees she’d filmed all over the world, the men and women who’d been beaten and humiliated in the name of some political creed or other, had been right. It hurt like nothing else. Not a physical hurt. Nothing a casualty nurse could enter on an admission form. Nothing a swab, and a bandage and a couple of days’ rest could put right. But something far deeper, a profound sense of unease, a feeling that the world wasn’t quite the place she’d assumed it to be, but somewhere infinitely colder, more alien, more dangerous.

  The young reporter felt it too, she knew, and when she paused by her car, and he gave her the keys back, she reached forward and touched him on the cheek, a fellow member of this curious brotherhood to which they now both belonged.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ she told him, ‘I won’t be back.’ She smiled. ‘And I don’t blame you.’

  He pretended confusion, and shrugged, and said it was all beyond him, all too much, which was a kinder form of capitulation. They’d both been listening to the radio all morning, waiting for word from London, from abroad, some hint of exactly where events might be leading, but the news channels had closed down, and the normal hourly bulletins had been condensed into a brisk two-minute address on the importance of obeying local directives, and the folly of trying to plan any kind of journey. The nation’s road network was evidently clogged solid, hundreds of miles of stationary cars, most of them without fuel. Quite what the occupants of these vehicles were now doing was never discussed, though Annie had her doubts about the truth of the story in the first place. Visions of starving families foraging for food in a bleak and hostile countryside was a great way of keeping the punters at home. And this Government, like any other, would pull any stroke to maintain control. Of that, she was quite certain.

  She got in the car, and headed back through the warren of streets towards Gillespie’s house. Her knowledge of the city was far from perfect, and twice she had to stop and ask for directions. On both occasions she was struck by how friendly people had become, how approachable. As well as answering her question – second left, first right, right again at the burned-out cornershop – they wanted her to pause a while, to share the gossip, to listen to the latest rumour, to agree that things were tough, yes, but would undoubtedly get much worse. In the latter expectation, she sensed a certain grim delight, a feeling that this final cataclysm was somehow inevitable, that the world had been living beyond its means for far too long, and deserved what was coming to it. ‘It’s been on the cards since the last one …’ an old man told her three streets from Gillespie’s, ‘and about time too.’ She’d smiled at the comment. Maybe the film was a simpler proposition than she’d thought. A blitz movie, scored for wagging heads, and brave smiles, and the usual chorus of sentimental tosh.

  Annie parked outside Gillespie’s house, retrieved her bag from the back seat, and got out. She peered up the street, looking for the rusty old Marina, but it had gone. She wondered for a moment whether he’d already shipped out – Sean, Sandra maybe, a crate or two of Guinness, and the big sheaf of Admiralty charts he kept under his bed. The more she thought about it, the more likely it became, and to her surprise she realized she’d be disappointed if it was true. It had been difficult the last time they’d met. She’d bullied him into doing the interview, and, she’d offended him with her final impatient volley of que
stions. Yet beyond it all – his war, her series, her precious bloody career – she realized that she missed this strange reticent man, with his gruffness, and his gaucheness, and his old-fashioned ideas. When they laid aside all the clutter about making films, all the arguments about patriotism and the hidden hand of Government, it had been remarkably simple. They’d had a good time, a few laughs, and they’d touched each other in close, important ways. Annie had a deep mistrust of phrases like falling in love, regarding them as a cop-out, but her months with Gillespie had been as good as it ever got, and it saddened her to think that the relationship might be over. Especially now. Especially the way she was.

  She rang the front door bell a final time, and then searched her bag for the key he’d given her way back. She found it and let herself in. The house smelled, as ever, of bleach and fresh air. Gillespie was meticulous about the way he kept the place. He hated dirt. She walked down the hall.

  ‘Dave?’ she called.

  She paused for a moment, then went into the living room. The curtains were still half-closed, the room in semi-darkness. She put her bag on the floor and gazed around. There was a towel draped over a radiator under the window. An open book lay face up on the armchair by the fireplace. Montgomery: Master of the Battlefield. She smiled, and walked across to the telephone, meaning at last to talk to Bullock, to find out what was going on, to tell him about last night, to bring him up to date. Beside the telephone was a photo. She picked it up. The photo showed a man on a swing, his arm around a small boy. He was smiling at the camera. She picked the photo up and walked slowly across to the window, where the light was better. Her head was beginning to throb again, the pressure and the pain returning. She gazed down at the photo, remembering the man in the newsroom, the man in Bullock’s office, the man in the interviewee’s chair, deftly fielding Prosser’s questions, turning them to his own advantage, rewriting the script. No doubt about it. Martin Goodman. The city’s new Controller.

  Gillespie had been in the Guildhall Square for more than forty minutes by the time the big black Rover returned from the dockyard. During the morning, since his last visit, the security had been tightened. There were crowd control barriers barring the steps to the Civic Offices, and armed troops knelt in the shadows flanking the entrance to the building. Police were everywhere, in twos and threes, and there was a modest demonstration taking place which gave Gillespie all the cover he needed.

  The Rover pulled to a halt at the kerbside, and one of the policemen opened the back door. His salute alerted Gillespie at once to the passenger, a tall, slim figure in an expensive suit and glasses. The man acknowledged the salute with a nod, and turned briefly back to the car to talk to the driver. As he did so, Gillespie recognized the face on the swing: good, even features, signs of strain around the mouth and eyes.

  Gillespie folded his paper and returned it to his shoulder bag. The big Rover slid away from the kerb and disappeared. Goodman, his target, hesitated, one foot on the first of the steps up to the Civic Offices, checking that the Rover had, in fact, left. Then he turned abruptly on his heel, and walked away across the Square, hurrying towards the exit that led to the station and the city’s Botanical Gardens. Gillespie watched him carefully, and then began to follow.

  From Martin Goodman’s fifth-floor office, Oliver Davidson monitored the scene below. He’d been waiting for Goodman since noon, impatient to confirm the details of his first official broadcast, booked for transmission at ten past nine, after the Queen had addressed the nation on the national networks. Davidson had already drafted the speech, a deft blend of regulation and reassurance, and he’d arranged for Goodman to record both television and radio versions in mid-afternoon, leaving the evening clear for the detailed conferences he’d itemized in another long memorandum.

  Now, though, looking down on the square below, the city’s new Controller was nearly out of sight, picking his way amongst the handful of protesters who’d broken off from the main demo and were arguing with a shirt-sleeved police inspector. More to the point, there was another figure, thirty or forty metres behind, moving in the same direction, not taking his eyes off Goodman.

  Davidson had noticed the man earlier, away in a remote corner of the square, his head buried in a newspaper, his back against the wall. At first, there’d been nothing remarkable about the man, but every time Davidson had looked out of the window, waiting for Goodman, the man had still been there, and when Davidson looked more closely, he began to realize that the man was plainly there for a purpose. He appeared to be watching someone. Davidson, after a while, had drawn the obvious conclusion, but when he’d picked up the phone and called Ingle at St Ursula’s, Ingle had disclaimed any knowledge of a surveillance operation. He had no men in the square, he said, though he had plenty available should they be required. Davidson had told him no, not for the time being, but now he lifted the phone again, and dialled the same number, only to find that Ingle had, as usual, beaten him to it.

  ‘Jeans?’ he said. ‘Leather jacket? About thirty-five? Forty?’

  Davidson turned towards the window, watching Gillespie disappear after Goodman.

  ‘That’s him,’ he said, looking for Ingle’s man but picking up nobody obvious. ‘Under control?’

  He heard Ingle chuckling at the other end.

  ‘Ours,’ he said. ‘And thanks for the introduction.’

  Martin Goodman found Suzanne on a bench in the shadow of the big glass hot-house that dominated the Botanical Gardens. The Gardens, three acres of shrubs, and trees, and neatly trimmed flower beds, was one of the few areas of open ground in the city’s centre. Normally, at lunchtime, it was full of secretaries and office workers enjoying a sandwich and a brief hour in the sunshine. Today, though, with most of the city’s offices closed, it was nearly empty.

  Goodman walked across the grass, and joined Suzanne on the bench. Suzanne glanced across at him. She looked wooden, and cold. Her face was drawn, and she’d taken less care than usual with her make-up.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘Again.’

  Goodman didn’t answer at once, staring out across the gardens. Suzanne had no parents. They’d both died when she was barely ten, killed in a motorway pile-up on the M6. She had no brothers and sisters, either, and this isolation of hers, a human being with no relatives – quite literally – to turn to, had always made her somehow even more attractive. She very rarely talked about it, hiding the aloneness and the vulnerability beneath a busy life and a successful career. But it was there, none the less, and now he felt it acutely. His responsibility. Someone who had come to depend on him.

  ‘Suzanne …’ he said, ‘Suzy … this isn’t easy. None of this is easy.’

  Suzanne reached for his hand.

  ‘My love, it never was.’

  Goodman nodded.

  ‘No,’ he said. He looked at her for the first time, seeing how gaunt she’d become, the shadows under her eyes, the obvious strain. ‘You mustn’t use the car phone,’ he said.

  She looked at him, a curious blank look, almost autistic in its emptiness.

  ‘So I gather,’ she said. ‘I’ve told you. I’m sorry. I apologize.’

  Goodman withdrew his hand and sealed the subject with a shrug.

  A chill silence descended on the conversation. Goodman felt suddenly exhausted, wondering what he really wanted, what he really felt strongly about, and realizing that it was sleep, the simplest release of all. Suzanne shifted beside him, a small uncomfortable motion of her body. Her voice had lowered. Flat. Dead.

  ‘There’s something you ought to know,’ she said.

  ‘What?’

  She looked at him. Then away again.

  ‘I wasn’t going to tell you,’ she said, ‘but under the circumstances …’ She shrugged. ‘I thought it merited a phone call.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘I’m pregnant.’ She looked at him again. ‘With our baby.’

  Goodman nodded, numbed. Flesh and blood. His. Theirs.

  ‘
I see,’ he said. ‘How pregnant?’

  ‘Nearly four months.’

  ‘I see,’ he said again.

  They both stared out, across the grass, towards the row of trees that usually softened the roar of the traffic. Today, there was no traffic, and the silence made it somehow worse. Suzanne felt for his hand again, and turned towards him. There was a warmth in her voice, and something else that took Goodman a moment or two to recognize. Finally, he was able to put a name to it. It was pity. Suzanne smiled at him.

  ‘My poor love,’ she said. ‘You don’t know what to say, do you?’

  She leaned over him, solicitous, caring, and kissed him gently on the cheek. Goodman, in spite of himself, stiffened, wanting it to stop, wanting everything to stop, to go away, to leave him alone. Suzanne left her hand in his for a moment or two, reading his mind, his expression, his half-hearted attempt to mask what he really felt. She stood up.

  ‘It’s all right, Martin,’ she said, cold again, ‘playtime’s over. You can go back to the office now. I just wanted you to know. That’s all.’

  She looked at him a moment longer, and then turned on her heel and left. Thirty metres away, between the leaves of a rhododendron bush, Gillespie had time to get three more good shots, head and shoulders, before the focus began to drift. While she was still walking away, he snapped two more studies of the man on the bench, his face beginning to sag, his chin slumping imperceptibly towards his chest, a tiny twitch under his left eye. The roll of film finished, he stowed the camera in the bag, looped the strap over his shoulder, and walked away, keeping track of the girl as she hurried towards the gate that led to the car park.

  In the car park, she got into a grey VW Golf GTI. Gillespie noted the registration while she dabbed at her eyes with a corner of Kleenex. Then she gunned the engine, and accelerated away. The squeal of tyres masked the motordrive on the Nikon in the hands of the man on the pavement across the road. Still watching the car, Gillespie didn’t notice the gleam of sunlight on the lens, or the face behind the camera, or the swirl of black raincoat as the man turned quietly away and began to saunter east, towards the sea.