She went back to the bedroom and sat on the bed, pulling on a dressing gown, shivering, none the wiser. Times had moved on, she thought bitterly. No more of those wonderful old-fashioned bombs, the sort that only killed in hundreds. No more dining room tables. No more husband. She eyed the telephone, trying not to succumb to the panic inside her, trying to contain it all, to keep it at arm’s length, to die a decent death.
She closed her eyes a moment, felt herself swaying on the bed. Charlie stirred in his sleep, legs twitching, some private delight. She shivered again, and reached for the telephone. She’d scribbled Martin’s new number on the back of an envelope. He’d told her the phone would be OK. She was on the list, whatever that meant. She could use it, but only in dire emergencies. She listened to the air-raid siren, the demented howl of a world gone barmy, dialling the first of the digits, wondering – absurdly – whether World War Three was serious enough to qualify for a call.
Martin Goodman sat behind his desk, transfixed by the flashing light. The light was red, a 500-watt bulb screwed into a fitting half-way up the wall in the centre of the Bunker. It was flanked by two large maps of the city, each with its separate quota of chinagraphed lines and scribbled annotations. The maps told the story of the last forty-eight hours – the arrests, the demos, the heavily guarded key points – while the blinking light brought the whole saga up to date. Underneath the light was a warning, stencilled in heavy black letters. The warning read: ATTACK IMMINENT.
The light had been flashing for no more than ten seconds or so when Quinn burst into Goodman’s office. Goodman looked up, curious. The policeman crossed the room and picked up the gas mask on Goodman’s desk.
‘Put it on,’ he said, ‘now.’
Goodman frowned and began to protest, but Quinn was already flexing the straps at the back of the mask. Goodman nodded.
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘of course.’
He glanced out through the plate glass window, down at the Bunker below. One or two of the older men were already pulling on their masks, an automatic response to the two-tone alarm that Goodman could now hear through the open door, but the others were waiting for a positive command, faces turned towards him, not wanting to believe the evidence on the wall, the ICBMs already in flight, oblivion barely minutes away. Goodman glanced up at Quinn again, aware that the big policeman was on the brink of direct action, the kind he best understood, the kind Goodman most dreaded.
‘Give it to me,’ Goodman said, surprised at the authority in his voice. Quinn hesitated.
‘You sure?’
‘Quite sure.’
Quinn gave him the mask. Goodman looked at it for a second or two, a non-swimmer at the deep end, then shut his eyes and began to pull the mask over his head. He felt Quinn’s hands close on his, and opened his eyes.
‘Your glasses,’ Quinn was saying. ‘Take your bloody glasses off.’
Goodman grunted and did what he was told. Then he pulled the mask down over his face, smelled the sweet rubber smell, took his first shallow breath, felt the panic begin to rise inside him.
Quinn’s hands, rough, were at his scalp, pulling back his hair, closing the airtight seal. Goodman adjusted the mask again, trying to fit it more comfortably on his face, the world closing in. He looked around, nearly blind, his field of vision restricted by the perspex lenses, details hopelessly blurred without his glasses. The faces down in the Bunker, the movements and the noise, no longer mattered. Nothing did. Only the huge imperative of climbing out of the swamp, of taking just one more breath, of somehow surviving.
Far away, he heard a telephone ring. He looked down at his desk, the dim shape of the phone. It was the first call in nearly an hour. He thought the thing had been cut off. He thought they were incommunicado. He watched the hand reach out, the fingers crabbing across the desk, wrinkled black rubber, no longer part of his body. The hand picked up the telephone. It cupped the receiver to his ear. It was Joanna.
‘Martin?’ she was saying, ‘Martin?’
He closed his eyes. His breathing slowed. Her voice. His wife.
‘My love …’ he murmured.
At the other end of the phone, sitting on the bed, Joanna felt the coldest of hands on her heart. A voice she’d never heard before. Muffled. Metallic. Inhuman. A man with a megaphone four fields away.
‘Martin?’ she said again, ‘is that you?’
Goodman nodded vigorously, the sweat beading under the hot rubber.
‘Me,’ he said, ‘me.’
‘But—’
‘I’m in a mask. I’ve got a mask on. I’m wearing a mask.’
‘What?’
‘A mask. A bloody mask.’
‘Martin …?’
Goodman ripped the mask from his face, and threw it across the room. He saw Quinn in the Bunker below, look up and stare at him. He was putting on his own mask. Goodman bent to the telephone, ignoring the man, his voice low, urgent, confidential. He was crying now, sobbing, the child he’d never been.
‘Darling …’ he said, ‘darling …’
Joanna blinked. Martin’s voice. Definitely Martin. Normal again. But hurt. Distressed. Needful. Hers. At last she closed her ears to the wail of the siren.
‘My love …’ she said. ‘My love …’
Goodman slumped back in the chair, drained, not caring any more, quite oblivious, his voice sinking even lower, the batteries gone. A figure in a gas mask was striding towards the office. He recognized the walk. It was Quinn.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said simply, ‘I’m very, very sorry.’
He reached forward and let the phone fall the last inch or two onto the cradle. The door burst open and Quinn stood there, identified only by a name tag dangling from the clip on his chest. He strode across the office, hands outstretched. Goodman watched him, beginning to laugh, at last seeing the joke, the cosmic punch line, all of them in the Bunker no more than semicolons in the grandest of plans, his own small paragraph utterly at an end. He began to get up, quite why he didn’t know, but he was still laughing when Quinn hit him, the rubber-gloved knuckle slightly off centre, the left of his mouth, the taste of fresh blood, and the curious sight of the floor coming up to meet him, an entirely unplanned development, yet another of life’s little surprises.
In the dim grey light of her bedroom, Joanna held the phone at arm’s length. The end of the conversation had made no sense. Her husband had been rambling, his voice dying away. Robbed of contact, of clues, she could fit no pictures to the noises on the line. He might be in trouble. It might be worse than that. She simply didn’t know.
The bedroom door opened. She looked up, startled. James stood there, in his Action Man pyjamas. He was wearing the Marine cadet beret Evans had given him, and he was carrying his favourite plastic gun. He was doing his best to look grown-up.
‘What is it?’ she said.
James took a step or two into the room, determined to maintain his cool, the man of the house, his daddy away, a terrible noise at the window, baddies everywhere.
‘It’s OK, Mum,’ he said, ‘I’ll get them.’
Sean was asleep by the time they came to fetch Gillespie. At first, hearing the siren, the boy had panicked. His defences down, still shocked, he’d turned his face to the wall and started to cry, deep throaty sobs, wild gasps for air, an incoherent mix of grief and anger and raw fear. Gillespie had looked across at him in the darkness, tried to comfort the boy, told him it was yet another rehearsal, another try-on, some clown seeing whether the bloody things worked in the dark, but the boy had been inconsolable, calling for his mother, the bewilderment and the terror bridging the years back to his youth.
After a minute or two, Gillespie had got off his bed and stepped across to Sean, making enough space to lie beside him, gently taking the boy’s head in his arms, pulling him into his own body, close, warm. Sean had responded at once, burying himself in his father’s chest, blotting out the world and the terrible, terrible fear he’d been living with now for weeks. Not so much what
it would feel like at the very end, the searing heat, and the blast, and the last swirling moments of life on earth; but what it would feel like now, six minutes, or six hours to go, the dreadful certainty of death.
An hour later, the siren silenced, the city still intact, the boy was calmer, his body slack in Gillespie’s arms, his breathing deep and regular. Gillespie heard footsteps again, out in the corridor, a different walk, slower. The door opened softly. Gillespie looked at the door, recognizing the silhouette of the big man he’d seen by the boat, the man with the hair, the man in civvies. He heard a voice, soft, considerate, not wanting to disturb anything.
‘Awake, are you?’
Gillespie swung carefully off the bed, pulling the blanket up around him.
‘Yeah,’ he said.
‘Good.’
The man at the door stepped back into the corridor, the invitation obvious. Gillespie followed him, not bothering to pull on his shoes, blinking in the harsh neon. The big man led the way down the corridor. They went into a small, bare room. Window. Desk. Three chairs. There were two cups of tea on the table and a bowl of sugar. The big man sat down behind the table and motioned Gillespie into one of the other chairs. He didn’t bother to shut the door. He reached for the sugar bowl.
‘How many?’ he said.
‘Two.’
The big man tipped sugar into one of the cups and stirred it with the bitten end of a pencil. He pushed the tea towards Gillespie. Gillespie picked it up. It tasted foul. He drank half of it and put it back on the table. The big man was watching him, appraising him, a smile on his face. Gillespie felt faintly uncomfortable. This bloke was making the running without saying a thing. He’d never met it before, not as certain, as subtle, as this. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.
‘I’ll save you the trouble,’ he said.
‘Beg pardon?’
‘I said I’ll save you the trouble.’ Gillespie leaned forward, a straight exchange, no bullshit, no nonsense. ‘Yes …’ he said, ‘it was me who did your bloke tonight. And it was me who nicked his gun. And his I.D. And it was me …’ he frowned, running through his mental check list, ‘who was about to get in my boat and sod off,’ he sniffed, ‘before you blew it away.’
The big man looked at him, that same expression, completely oblivious of Gillespie’s brisk tally of misdemeanours, the truth neatly packaged, laid out for inspection, word perfect.
‘These photos …’ he said after a while.
Gillespie frowned. ‘What photos?’
‘The photos your son mentioned. About an hour ago,’ he smiled, ‘before you shut him up.’
There was a silence. Gillespie stared at him, nonplussed.
‘Photos?’ he said woodenly.
The big man smiled again and leaned back in the chair, feet on the desk, hands clasped behind his neck. He had a conversational air about him, went to some pains to avoid the direct approach, the frontal assault. The threat, when it came, sounded almost speculative.
‘Mr Gillespie …’ he said, ‘we can make this easy. Or we can make this hard.’
Gillespie shrugged.
‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘I know.’
The smile widened, jowly. The man needed to lose weight.
‘I’m talking about your son, Mr Gillespie. Not you …’ He paused. ‘Take your time. Think about it. The boy’s still asleep. It’s your choice.’
Davidson spooned the Largactil into Martin Goodman’s open mouth while Quinn held his face steady, the two big rubber gloves cupping the dried blood and the stubble on Goodman’s chin. Goodman swallowed the thick grey syrup without protest, watching Davidson screw the cap back on the bottle, and wipe the plastic spoon with a ball of Joanna’s cotton wool. The Largactil had come from a charge nurse at St Ursula’s. On the phone, Davidson had talked vaguely of a problem in the Bunker, spot of panic, and asked for something in the tranquillizer line, pretty strong. The charge nurse had complied at once, no names, no questions, readying the bottle for Evans, who’d been sent down to collect it. He’d told the Marine a maximum of 100 millilitres. Any more than that, he said, and you might as well use a cosh.
They carried Goodman’s body from his office, down the steps, across the Bunker, and into the storeroom, now emptied of NBC suits. Davidson had already laid a mattress on the floor, amongst the boxes of dried marrowfat peas and the big catering tins of French onion soup, and now they lowered Goodman carefully onto it. They folded a blanket under his head, making sure his mouth was open, his breathing clear. Quinn checked quickly through his pockets, while Davidson looked on. In the breast pocket of his jacket, under the NBC suit, he found what he was looking for. It was a pair of Yale keys. He held them up, forefinger and thumb, Exhibit ‘A’. Each key was tagged with a small blue plastic label. Davidson gazed at them.
‘Storeroom?’ he said. ‘NBC suits?’
Quinn nodded, looking down at Goodman, his face full of contempt.
‘Of course,’ he said, ‘what did you think?’
Back in the office, Davidson shut the door and motioned Quinn into Goodman’s chair behind the desk. The Attack Imminent light was still blinking, but they’d managed to mute the two-tone alarm, returning a hot, uncomfortable silence to the Bunker. People sat behind their desks, not talking, barely looking at each other, masks off, NBC suits loosened at the neck, an overwhelming sense of collective exhaustion. One or two individuals were trying to sleep, heads nodding on their chests. Others were gazing out into the middle distance, passengers in some transit lounge, numb with expectation, still waiting.
Davidson sat on the corner of the desk. Quinn picked up the balls of cotton wool, one after the other, and dropped them into the waste-paper bin until the desk was finally bare. Then he looked up.
‘Well?’ he said.
Davidson shrugged. It was 06.16. They’d been expecting an attack for more than four hours. Plainly something had gone wrong. Maybe ghost missiles on the big early warning screens at Fylingdales. Maybe a test run, ordered by some over-zealous official in the quarries at Corsham. Maybe a simple fault in the alarm.
‘I don’t know,’ Davidson said.
‘Can we find out?’
‘We can try.’
‘Then I think we should.’
Davidson smiled. The contrast between Goodman and Quinn was complete. The big policeman had assumed control effortlessly, adapting the habits of a working lifetime to Martin Goodman’s empty desk. Just another job. Just another set of problems to be resolved, methodically, one after another. Armageddon? Nothing that hard work and self-discipline couldn’t sort out. Davidson stirred, shifting his weight on the desk.
‘We have a problem,’ he said.
Quinn looked at him, unamused.
‘We have,’ he said, ‘you’re right.’
‘I mean locally.’
‘Oh?’
Davidson nodded. ‘There’s a chance this thing may resolve itself.’ He nodded out at the Bunker, the figures hunched over the desks, the red attack alarm still blinking. ‘We should anticipate that.’
‘And?’
Davidson glanced across at the big wall map that dominated the office.
‘Your Mr Cartwright …’ He paused. ‘I understand he tried a spot of free enterprise.’
Quinn nodded. ‘Stopped in his tracks,’ he said. ‘Turned back at the harbour mouth. We’ve had them taped since yesterday.’
‘And the wives and children?’
‘On their way. As agreed.’
‘By whom?’
‘By myself and …’ he gestured at the empty desk, ‘our friend here.’
Davidson nodded slowly.
‘Have you considered the implications,’ he said, ‘should the facts come out? Mr Cartwright’s little excursion? The city’s businessmen? Buying their way out? With our blessing?’ He frowned. ‘Wouldn’t look good, would it?’
‘They were stopped,’ Quinn said impatiently, ‘I just told you.’
‘That’s hardly the point. The
point is that our Controller let them go in the first place.’
It was Quinn’s turn to frown.
‘That’s his fault,’ he said briskly, ‘his pigeon.’
Davidson shook his head. ‘No, my friend,’ he said, ‘it’s ours.’
Quinn looked at Davidson and shrugged. He’d built a successful career on doing the obvious things very well, on confronting situations squarely, on taking the measure of men and applying to them his own brisk recipe of good sense and vigorous self-discipline. He had a provincial policeman’s gut mistrust of metropolitan ways, and he had no time for Davidson’s interest in the political nuances of situations, the half shadows cast by other men’s actions. The thing was simple. Goodman had fouled up. He and the harbour master had put things right. Harry Cartwright’s passengers were back where they belonged, back in their own beds back within the city’s limits. Their money had been returned to them, and they’d been warned about the need for a discreet silence. In their own interests, they’d keep their mouths shut. He knew it.
He got up and turned his back on Davidson, realizing for the first time that the Attack Alarm was no longer blinking, that movement had returned to the Bunker, people circulating from desk to desk, the odd conversation, someone plugging in an electric kettle, even the steady wink of an incoming call on the minitelephone exchange. He glanced over his shoulder at Davidson.
‘False alarm,’ he said. ‘Chance to get our act together.’
Davidson smiled at him.
‘Exactly,’ he said.
Ingle’s men found the rolls of film tucked deep in the recess in the front of Gillespie’s borrowed VW. They retrieved the film and returned to the hospital. Ingle was woken up and ordered priority development on the colour prints. Before he turned the light out again, he enquired whether the planet was still in one piece. Assured that it was, he grunted, turned over, and went back to sleep. Twenty years of CID work had given him a profound trust in the power of self-interest. If the world could find a way of not blowing itself up, he suspected it would.
Rules of Engagement Page 35