‘Dave …’ she said.
He hesitated. ‘Yeah?’
‘I’m not coming.’
‘What?’
‘I said I’m not coming.’
He looked at her, the hands still dusted with Oxo, the food on the table, the bottle of wine, her own private mortgage on a different future, not his. He had no right to the obvious question, but he raised it none the less.
‘Why not?’ he said.
She reached for the celery and the knife, and began to chop the sticks, one by one. Within their marriage this would have been a crisis already, days of silence. Now, years later, it was simply an exchange of information.
‘Because I prefer to stay,’ she said, ‘OK?’
Gillespie nodded. Her right. Her call.
‘That bloke the other night, is it?’ he said.
She stopped chopping for a moment and looked him in the eye. She knew she owed him nothing, but it didn’t really matter any more.
‘Yes,’ she said.
Gillespie shrugged.
‘He can come too if he wants,’ he said, ‘plenty of room.’
‘Thanks, but …’ she smiled and laid the knife aside for a moment, ‘he can’t come.’
‘Why not?’
‘He works at the hospital. He’s an anaesthetist. He thinks he ought to stay.’
‘The hospital’s closed.’
‘Yeah,’ she nodded, ‘for now.’
‘Ah …’ Gillespie smiled. Inside information. ‘I see.’ He paused. ‘Have you thought about the boy at all? How he might feel?’
‘Sean’s seventeen. He’s like me. He copes.’
‘I know.’
‘Well then …’ she shrugged again. Gillespie resisted the temptation to leave, to obey the instincts of a lifetime and simply abandon it all, closing the door behind him, cutting his losses, getting out. But he knew he might never see her again, this woman with whom he’d shared more than half his life, off and on, and he wanted to get one or two things straight, if only in his own mind.
‘Do you love him?’ he said. ‘This bloke of yours?’
She nodded. ‘Yes.’
‘Why?’ he said.
‘Because he’s kind …’ she hesitated, hating the corner the conversation had opened up, ‘and because he cares about me.’
Gillespie nodded, recognizing what she was really saying, the hidden reef beneath the simple phrases.
‘You think I never cared about you?’
‘No. I don’t think that.’
‘What, then?’
She put the knife down. There was a tiny curl of carrot peel on her wrist. Gillespie wanted, absurdly, to reach out and pick it off, to tidy up the scene, make it comprehensible.
‘What, then?’ he said again.
Sandra got up and stepped towards him. She came very close. He smelled the onions on her. Her eyes were a deeper green than he could ever remember. She put her hands on his face, holding it lightly.
‘I think you cared as much as you could,’ she said, ‘and I think you tried your hardest.’
‘But not hard enough?’
She looked at him for a long time, thinking about the question, making up her mind, not about the truth, but about whether or not to voice it.
‘You did what you could,’ she said again, ‘you did your best.’
‘But not enough?’
‘No. Not enough.’
Gillespie nodded, feeling his stomach describe that long slow somersault he recognized from way back. His body telling him to brace. To get ready. To expect the worst. Sandra was back behind the table. She smiled at him, softening the blow.
‘Don’t get me wrong, Dave …’ she said, ‘lots of it was bloody good.’
‘But not good enough.’
She looked at him for a moment.
‘It was your decision, Dave. You went. Not me.’ She paused. ‘Where are you off to this time?’
‘Ventnor,’ he said, ‘John’s place.’
‘Ventnor?’ She stared at him. ‘Why would you be any safer in Ventnor?’
Gillespie shrugged. He’d done the thinking, drawn out the blast circles, calculated the overpressures, made allowances for the weather and the wind and a less than perfect trajectory. Ventnor lay beneath a big shoulder of chalk downland, protected from the heat and the blast, and John’s place, he knew, had a deep basement. They’d be as safe there as anywhere. He looked at her and shrugged.
‘It’s complicated,’ he said. ‘But it’ll be OK.’
She smiled at him.
‘You should have said Marbella,’ she said lightly. ‘I might have come if it was somewhere nice.’
Gillespie shrugged again, and stepped back towards the door.
‘Yeah … well …’ he said, ‘beggars can’t be choosers …’
She glanced up at him and smiled, a wry, affectionate grin, the left-overs from twenty years of friendship,
‘Yeah …’ she said, ‘I know. Same old story, eh Dave?’
The Bunker was nearly full by the time Davidson and Goodman returned from the TV studios. The individual desks that flanked the long central well were all manned, Civic Centre executives trying to make sense of electronic typewriters, other heads bent to telephones, hands racing across lined foolscap pads. There was a series of alcoves that ran the length of the room, bays between the big concrete pillars that supported the blast-proof ceiling. Each of the bays housed a different secretariat – transport, medical services, Royal Observer Corps, food supplies – and there was also a small four-cubicle switchboard to handle incoming and outgoing calls. At the far end of the Bunker, raised above the central working area, was the glassed-in office from which Goodman and Davidson would direct operations. The office was sound-proofed behind thick double-glazing which, under the circumstances, was just as well.
Goodman opened the door and stepped in. Nigel Quinn turned from the big wall map. Small red circles ringed the evening’s major trouble spots. Goodman counted them. There were seven. He looked at Quinn.
‘Make yourself at home,’ he said drily. ‘Be my guest.’
Quinn ignored the sarcasm.
‘There are three of my men in hospital,’ he said, ‘and you put them there.’
Goodman looked at him, unmoved by the directness of the accusation. Since the riot, he’d begun to feel a strange sense of detachment, of immunity from the pressures building up around him. Briefly, in front of his wife, the pain and the shock had come flooding in, but she’d sealed this one gap in his defences, dammed it up with her compassion, and her good sense, and her limitless forgiveness. His life, where it mattered, was whole again. The rest of it, all this, was simply a series of decisions, the application of cold logic, the kind of exercise that had put him where he was today. Goodman glanced at the map again. He knew about Quinn’s casualties. Davidson had told him in the car.
‘They were doing their job,’ he said, ‘and I’m duly grateful.’
‘That’s hardly the point. You put their lives at risk. It was quite needless. Pure whim.’
Goodman looked at him.
‘I don’t agree,’ he said. ‘As you might expect.’
He sat down, and gestured for Quinn to do the same. The big policeman stared at him for a moment or two, finding it as difficult as ever to submit to the younger man’s authority. Successful policing, he knew, depended above all on consent, on preserving the fiction that the forces of law and order were really the paid servants of the public at large. Destroy that illusion, and the whole damn thing would come tumbling down.
Already, since the riot, he’d lost two police cars, ambushed, overturned, and set on fire by marauding gangs of youths, fuelled on rumour and copious supplies of looted lager. In both of these incidents, men of his had been injured, and one of the drivers had been lucky to escape with his life. Areas of the city were beginning to resemble west Belfast, and only the shortage of fuel supplies was preventing the mass manufacture of Molotov cocktails, though soon someone was b
ound to discover that certain other substances worked just as well. For the time being, the situation was still in hand, but nightfall would bring out the real loonies, and then the city might go critical. It was a terrifying thought and he had no intention of keeping it to himself. He finally sat down in the chair opposite Goodman.
‘You’ve got about an hour,’ he said, ‘to think of something to do.’ He leaned forward. ‘Otherwise, there’ll be chaos.’
Goodman looked at him, that same dead look, the look of a man apart, on his own, utterly beyond reach.
‘I’ve done it,’ he said bleakly.
‘Done what?’
‘Recorded the broadcast.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘They’re transmitting at ten past nine. After the Queen.’
‘And what have you said?’
Goodman hesitated a moment, fighting the sudden urge to yawn. Or laugh. Or cry. Anything to lighten the darkness around him. Two grown-up men. Behaving like three-year-olds. He leaned back in the chair, letting the moments pass.
‘I’ve imposed a curfew,’ he said. ‘Anyone on the streets after ten will face the consequences.’
Quinn stared at him, pure disbelief.
‘You’ve done what?’ he said.
‘Imposed a curfew.’ He smiled. ‘Stay at home or else.’ He glanced across at Davidson. ‘That is the national policy, isn’t it?’
Davidson nodded. ‘In essence,’ he said, ‘yes, it is.’
Quinn’s eyes travelled between them, trying to measure the collusion, trying to guess the weight of the alliance. At first, he’d assumed that Davidson was in control. Now, he wasn’t so sure. He looked at Goodman again.
‘Or else what?’ he said.
Goodman gazed out through the thick plate glass. Fiona, his secretary, was making tea. He wondered idly whether the milk was OK. They’d been having trouble with the fridge. The coolant pipes were corroded, and the thing wouldn’t work properly. He sighed, another problem, and quickly looked back at Quinn again. The man was staring at him very oddly. He frowned, remembering his question. The curfew. The big stick. How to deal with miscreants. He yawned.
‘I’m not entirely sure,’ he said, ‘but I suggest we shoot them.’
Gillespie was several streets away from Sandra’s house when he first spotted the car on his tail. He was driving fast, taking care with the gear changes, choosing his line through the corners, checking and rechecking the mirror, trying to swamp the anger he felt inside himself. It was an old Service trick, total concentration on the task in hand, and if it didn’t work entirely, then it certainly drew his attention to the car, always there, the shape in his rear-view mirror, a hundred yards or so behind him.
Something about the car, its colour, snagged in his mind. It was an old Ford Cortina, with a ‘T’ registration plate and a broken-off aerial on one of the front wings. The driver, at a distance, was totally anonymous, a small, hunched figure at the wheel. Glancing at his fuel gauge, Gillespie applied the simplest of tests, turning left, and left again, and then completing the square through a grid of streets he’d known since his youth. After the third turn left, he stopped and reversed quickly into a tiny cut between two rows of terraced houses. Parked in the cut, engine off, he was invisible from both directions.
He waited for about a minute, winding down his window, smelling rain in the air. He heard the Cortina before he saw it, the familiar rattle of loose tappets, the hoarse wheeze of an off-tune carburettor. He stared out at the road. The Cortina crept past. The man at the wheel was talking into a hand-held microphone.
Gillespie let the Cortina go past. His feelings about Sandra, the anger and the jealousy, had disappeared completely. In its place was a small, hard determination to find out exactly who, or what, had been sent to keep tabs on him. He was a private man. He paid his taxes. Knew his place. He neither sought nor wanted attention. The shape in his mirror, the man in the buff Cortina, was an intrusion, an affront, an act of the grossest trespass. He felt threatened. Worse still, he felt insulted. You’ve got the wrong man, he thought, reaching for the ignition key. You’ve made a big mistake. A big, big mistake.
Suzanne Wallace was still waiting for the phone call about the chart when Cartwright appeared again. She’d already heard him locking his office above. Now he stood in the open door of her own tiny cubby hole. He was wearing a knee-length raincoat and carried a small black briefcase. He was evidently going out.
‘Finished?’ he enquired.
She shook her head.
‘One last call,’ she said. ‘Still waiting.’
‘Important?’
‘Afraid so,’ she said, not bothering to explain any further.
He hesitated a moment, as awkward as ever, then glanced at his watch. She knew it was already gone six, but she wouldn’t leave the office until she was certain she could lay hands on the chart. Sending Martin’s wife and kids blind into the Atlantic would be unforgivable. She smiled at Cartwright.
‘Don’t worry,’ she said, ‘I’ll lock up.’
He nodded, clearly far from happy, and told her to put the lights out and pull the front door shut behind her. The alarms would automatically engage. She need worry about nothing else.
‘What about the fax?’ Suzanne enquired, as he turned to leave. ‘Shall I turn that off too?’
Cartwright hesitated a moment, recognizing the mischief in her voice. Since he’d disappeared with the mysterious Agreement, she’d heard him overhead, back on the phone, his voice as quiet and toneless as before, the calls incessant, never incoming, always at his own instigation. Once or twice, she’d been tempted to creep up the stairs, and listen through the keyhole, curious to know what could possibly occupy so much of his time, but there was a dimension to this man that she found creepy, and the last thing she wanted was any kind of confrontation. Far better he leave her to it. Far better she work alone. Cartwright pulled the raincoat around him, the long white fingers fumbling with the bottom button.
‘The fax is off,’ he said. ‘You needn’t touch it.’
He sealed the conversation with a nod, a busy man bidding good-night to his secretary, and walked across the office, and out into the hall. She heard the front door open, and close, and the low purr of his Jaguar outside.
She got up and switched on the overhead light. The weather had been dull since midday, big banks of heavy grey cloud rolling in from the west, and now she could hear rain on the windows of the big office outside. She gazed at the map of Ireland she’d been using all afternoon, and checked the arrangements she’d made. Her airline chum had been garrulous and cheerful as ever, a man unbothered by the prospect of Armageddon, but she trusted him implicitly and she knew he’d deliver what he’d promised. In a way, she was sorry she couldn’t be there. If there was anyone who could see the lighter side of World War Three it would surely be him, and there’d be worse ways of spending one’s final weeks on planet earth. Whether a chilly bed in County Kerry would provide any permanent security in the event of war, she didn’t know. But she assumed that Martin had done his homework, and she was glad above all that this hasty evacuation had finally obliged him to make up his mind.
She loved the man more than she’d ever thought possible, and she’d never been in any real doubt that he felt the same way. They were simply too close, too well matched, too similar, for there to have been any possibility of mistake. She never played games with people. Never had. Never would. She always spoke her mind, and expected the same in return. Martin had seen it, and understood it, and taken up the challenge. That was why it was so strong between them, and so durable. And that was why it was right to keep the baby.
She smiled, fingering the ring he’d given her only a couple of weeks back, a plain gold ring to be worn, he’d said, on the finger of her choice. She wore it now, on the third finger of her right hand, continental style. It was, she told herself, a modest and entirely personal piece of symbolism. One day, they’d get away from it all. Far, far away. Somewhere warmer. Somewhere south. Somewh
ere exclusively their own. In the meantime, as ever, they’d cope.
The phone began to ring, out in the big office. It rang three times, and then the recorded message engaged on the ansaphone. Suzanne got up and walked through. The ansaphone was on a small desk under the window. She reached down and turned the volume control to full. A woman’s voice was telling the caller to leave a message after the tone. There were three beeps. Then a rich, dark brown voice on a bad line, but perfectly audible.
‘Harry?’ said the voice. ‘It’s Tristan. I’ve had some thoughts about your evacuees. I’m faxing back the list in a moment or two. You’ll find the account numbers beside each name. And some contractual queries at the end. The sums look good. Oh …’ the voice chuckled, ‘I’ve found a berth for your boats. Even the Timothy bloody Lee. Hotels, too. Bye for now.’
The phone went dead, and in the silence that followed, Suzanne could hear the click and whirr of the ansaphone as the tape re-cued. She walked slowly across to the fax machine and switched it on. The stand-by light glowed red. Another phone began to ring, back in the office where she’d been working. She ran back across the room. It was the man from the chandlery. Her chart was ready. She’d need to pick it up at once. The shop was closing in fifteen minutes.
‘Yes,’ she said, eyeing the fax machine, ‘of course.’
She put the phone down and gazed out into the big office. Whatever was happening had something to do with Martin’s plan. Of that, she was certain. The voice on the phone, Tristan, had talked of evacuees. Of a list. Of hotels. That meant the boat plan. Had to. Yet her understanding was a handful of people, thirty at the most, to go to Ireland. Official approval. Safe passage out of harbour. She frowned. All afternoon, something had been bothering her about Cartwright, and she now realized what it was. The man didn’t want her around. She was supernumerary. Irrelevant. Deadweight. That was why he’d barely listened when she’d told him her arrangements. That was why he’d been reluctant to leave her alone in the office.
She heard the fax machine engage, and she watched the leading edge of the paper roll begin to appear. She wondered whether it was a long document, whether she could afford to stay, or whether she should just forget it, put out the lights, shut the door on it all, and do only what she’d been asked.
Rules of Engagement Page 26