Chapter 5
The lady who had been walking her dog in Belgrave Square now left it at home each morning when she went to the doctor’s surgery. The elderly GP allowed her to talk for at least ten minutes each morning before gently shooing her back to her flat and the hysteria and depression that had engulfed her since the shooting. The doctor appreciated the need of the widow, who had been his casual and infrequent patient for twenty-three years, to talk to some friend who could comprehend her meticulous description of the screaming woman, the man with that awful banging gun at his shoulder, the petrified children, the sirens, and the shouting, helpless policemen.
He gave her mild sedatives, but had been unwilling to prescribe habit-forming doses in the hope that time would eventually erode the images of the killing. He had been surprised and annoyed when she had told him that the detectives had been to see her again, a clear week after they had received her signature on what was described as the final and definitive statement she would need to make. She had told the doctor of the queer equipment they had brought, and how over and over she had been made to describe the man with the gun.
It had been sufficient of an ordeal for her, this last visit, to set back her recovery, and accordingly the doctor had phoned the Scotland Yard officer who was named in the papers as heading the enquiry. But such was the pressure on his time, and the size of his register, that he had taken the matter no further when told that no policeman had been to visit his patient in the last nine days. He had blustered a bit when he was told that, protested about the obvious inconsistency between the police story and his patient’s, and then rung off. It still puzzled him.
The Secretary of State for Defence was in his office early, clearing his desk for the start of a short holiday, and arming himself with persuasive and informed argument that he would need for his nine holes with the Prime Minister. The civil servant who was briefing him on the missile gap and the sagging morale of denuded units in Germany continued his lecture in his usual professorial manner. He had a turn of phrase that had infuriated a series of Ministers as the civil servant had progressed upwards to his position of a Man Who Ran Things. His role in the vast department was all-commanding, his power and influence huge. One of the smaller cogs in his well-oiled machine was Davidson, and one of the less frequently mentioned properties on his books was the house near Dorking.
Tentatively the Minister spoke to him.
‘That suggestion of the PM about the Danby killing — you remember, putting a chap in there. He’ll want to know… what’s happening?’
‘Yes. He phoned last week. I wouldn’t worry about it, Minister. We’re still going over feasibility et cetera at the moment. It’s not a fast business, you know; not a thing we can successfully knock off overnight.’
‘Nothing definite yet, then? You’ve already spoken to him? That’s a bit odd, isn’t it? On to you direct, and by-passing me? He may be in charge of security and all that, but it’s a bit off. What did you tell him?’
‘That things were in hand. That he’d get a briefing the moment there was something to report, when there were developments.’
‘I think you see me as some sort of security risk or something.’ The Minister grimaced. The civil servant smiled generously. The subject was terminated. It was back to rocketry and more conventional theatres of war.
Twenty-five thousand feet up, between Liverpool and the Isle of Man, Harry was working things out. The reality of it all had been brutally clear as he had stood in the queue waiting to be searched by the Securicor team at the departure gate. Whoever heard of an agent getting his own bags taken apart by his own bloody side? It was painfully clear why his promised Smith & Wesson would have to be picked up at the Belfast main post office, where Davidson was to send it to await collection. He tried to concentrate on his cover story. Merchant seaman going home after years away, land in turmoil, oppression over the minority. Time for all true Irishmen to get back to back, together to withstand the English bastards. Three hundred years post Cromwell, and nothing changed. Blood of martyrs on the streets again. Would anyone be daft enough to come back to that stinking hole, just because things were getting worse? Be out of their minds. Irish might be daft enough, have to be daft. One thing — bloody English wouldn’t come home, they’d all go off to Australia or South Africa. Wouldn’t catch them risking their precious lilywhite backsides.
The story was as firm in his mind as it ever would be.
He lay, half awake, half asleep, in no man’s land. What of the commitment he had taken on? Motivation was vague and unthought-out. It wouldn’t be as strong as the other side’s. No chance. Motivation was against the code with which he had been instilled. Officers didn’t need motivation. It wasn’t all clear.
Rights and wrongs, pluses and minuses, blacks and whites were all vague. In Northern Ireland things don’t divide and coalesce neatly. That’s too easy. What was it the politicians had said? ‘Anyone who thinks he knows the answer to Northern Ireland is ill-informed.’ Good, that. Lots of ill-informed types in the mess in Germany then. Came back with the solution worked out. One big swoop, one big push, the tough hand, the gentle hand, the ‘saturate them’, the ‘pull the plug and leave them’. All the answers, none the same, but all spoken with such authority. Amazing how you can learn three hundred years’ bigotry in four months looking after five blocks in a scruffy council estate.
Harry, heavy with sarcasm, had once congratulated a brother in uniform on the good fortune the other had in being able to see things so clearly. To be able with such confidence to apportion his blame and praise, culpability and credit — that made him a lucky man. In Mansoura, just out of Sheik Othman, where the gunmen were running round while the boyos in Ulster were still on their iced lollies and sing-songs, it had been so much easier. The Red Cross man from Switzerland, in his little white suit, even with a big bright cross on his hat so they wouldn’t throw a grenade at him from a rooftop, had come to visit the unit once. He’d said to the colonel something like, ‘One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.’ The colonel hadn’t liked that. Pretty heady stuff, they all thought in the mess. Such rubbish. Terrorists they were then, wog terrorists at that.
But in Aden Harry had thought it was obvious to even the most stupid that British society was in no way being protected by their efforts… business perhaps, but nothing else.
Whatever else men died for in the sharp staccato engagements of small-arms fire, the green fields of home were a touch removed from the Mansoura roundabout picket, Checkpoint Golf or the Chartered Bank in Crater. As an Ulsterman, and so never allowed a posting home to fight, Harry had often wondered whether soldiering there was any different to Aden. Did all the stuff about duty, purpose and reason mean that much more just because the fighting was down by the local supermarket and not six hours away on a VC10? He reckoned he was as disinterested now in the welfare of the great body of society as he had been then. He had been given a job to do, and he was doing it because someone had to, and by a series of accidents he was better equipped than most.
But by the time the Trident was arching over the landfall to the south of Strangford Lough, Harry had decided he was not a little flattered he’d been asked. He had been chosen for a mission, after all, called for by the Prime Minister. In the close heat of the plane he thought of his wife, warmth and closeness flooding through him. It was a pity she couldn’t share in his pride. The passenger across the aisle noticed the slow smile spreading across the cheeks of the man slumped by the window.