There was a pause. ‘Pretty dull evening?’
‘Oh shut up. You know me, David.’
‘Indeed I have that privilege.’
‘I may be many things, but one of the things I am definitely not is an assassin.’
‘Long experience in these matters,’ he took another deep swallow of beer and smacked his lips, ‘has led me to the view, master, that everybody is definitely not an assassin, until they become one.’
I looked at him for a moment. ‘I’m going to swear now, David.’
‘As you wish, sir.’
‘What the fuck is that supposed to mean?’
The estate agents had moved on to the subject of women’s breasts, from which they were extracting much humour. Listening to them made me feel about a hundred and forty years old.
‘It’s like dog-owners,’ said Solomon. "‘My dog wouldn’t hurt anyone", they say. Until one day, they find themselves saying "well he’s never done that before".’ He looked at me and saw that I was frowning. ‘What I mean is, nobody can ever really know anybody. Anybody or any dog. Not really know them.’
I banged my glass down hard on the table.
‘Nobody can ever know anybody? That’s inspired. You mean in spite of us spending two years practically in each other’s pockets, you don’t know whether I’m capable of killing a man for money?’ I admit I was getting a little upset by this. And I don’t normally get upset.
‘Do you think I am?’ said Solomon. The jolly smile still hung round his mouth.
‘Do I think you could kill a man for money? No, I don’t.’
‘Sure of that?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then you’re a clot, sir. I’ve killed one man and two women.’
I already knew that. I also knew how much it weighed on him.
‘But not for money,’ I said. ‘Not assassination.’
‘I am a servant of the Crown, master. The government pays my mortgage. Whichever way you look at it, and believe me I’ve looked at it lots of ways, the deaths of those three people put bread on my table. Another pint?’
Before I could say anything, he’d taken my glass and headed for the bar.
As I watched him carve a path through the estate agents, I found myself thinking back to the games of cowboys and Indians Solomon and I had played together inBelfast.
Happy days, dotted around some miserable months.
It was 1986, and Solomon had been drafted in, along with a dozen others from the Metropolitan Police Special Branch, to supplement a temporarily buggered RUC. He’d quickly proved to be the only one of his group worth the air-ticket, so, at the end of his stint, some extremely hard-to-please Ulstermen had asked him to stay on and try his hand at the loyalist paramilitary target, which he did.
Half-a-mile away, in a couple of rooms above the Freedom Travel Agency, I was serving out the last of my eight years in the army on attachment to the snappily-titled GR24, one of the many military intelligence units that used to compete for business in Northern Ireland, and probably still do. My brother officers being almost exclusively Old Etonians, who wore ties in the office and flew to Scottish grouse moors at the weekend, I’d found myself spending more and more time with Solomon, most of it waiting in cars with heaters that didn’t work.
But every now and then we got out and did something useful, and in the nine months we were together, I saw Solomon do a lot of brave and extraordinary things. He’d taken three lives, but he’d saved dozens more, mine included. The estate agents were sniggering at his brown raincoat.
‘Woolf’s a bad lot, you know,’ he said.
We were into our third pint, and Solomon had undone his top button. I’d have done the same if I’d had one. The pub was emptier now, as people headed home to wives, or out to cinemas. I lit my too- manyethcigarette of the day.
‘Because of drugs?’
‘Because of drugs.’
‘Anything else?’
‘Does there need to be anything else?’
‘Well Yes.’ I looked across at Solomon. ‘There needs to be something else if all this isn’t going to be taken care of by the Drug Squad. What’s he got to do with your lot? Or is it just that business is slow at the moment, and you’re having to slum it?’
‘I never said a word of this.’
‘Course you didn’t.’
Solomon paused, weighing his words and apparently finding some of them a bit heavy.
‘A very rich man, an industrialist, comes to this country and says he wants to invest here. The Department of Trade and Industry give him a glass of sherry and some glossy brochures, and he sets to work. Tells them he’s going to manufacture a range of metal and plastic components and would it be all right if he built half a dozen factories inScotland and the north-east ofEngland? One or two people at the Board of Trade fall over with the excitement, and offer him two hundred million quid in grants and a residents’ parking permit inChelsea. I’m not sure which is worth more.’
Solomon sipped some beer and dried his mouth with the back of his hand. He was very angry.
‘Time passes. The cheque is cashed, factories are built, and a phone rings inWhitehall. It’s an international call, fromWashington,DC. Did we know that a rich industrialist who makes plastic things also deals in large quantities of opium fromAsia? Good heavens, no, we didn’t know that, thanks ever so much for letting us know, love to the wife and kids. Panic. Rich industrialist is now sitting on a large lump of our money and employing three thousand of our citizens.’
At this point, Solomon seemed to run out of energy, as if the effort of controlling his fury was too much for him. But I couldn’t wait.
‘So?’
‘So a committee of not particularly wise men and women put their fat heads together and decide on possible courses of action. The list includes doing nothing, doing nothing, doing nothing, or dialling 999 and asking for PC Plod. The only thing they are sure about is they do not like that last course.’
‘And O’Neal…?’
‘O’Neal gets the job. Surveillance. Containment. Damage Control. Give it any flipping name you like.’ For Solomon, ‘flipping’ constituted strong language. ‘None of this, of course, has anything whatsoever to do with Alexander Woolf.’
‘Of course not,’ I said. ‘Where is Woolf now?’ Solomon glanced at his watch.
‘At this moment, he is in seat number 6C on a British Airways 747 fromWashington toLondon. If he’s got any sense, he’ll have chosen the Beef Wellington. He may be a fish man, but I doubt it.’
‘And the film?’
‘While You Were Sleeping.’
‘I’m impressed,’ I said.
‘God is in the detail, master. Just because it’s a bad job doesn’t mean I have to do it badly.’
We supped some beer in a relaxed silence. But I had to ask him.
‘Now, David.’
‘Yours to command, master.’
‘Do you mind explaining where I come into all this?’ He looked at me with the beginnings of a ‘you tell me’ expression, so I hurried on. ‘I mean, who wants him dead, and why make it look as if I’m the killer?’
Solomon drained his glass.
‘Don’t know the why,’ he said. ‘As for the who, we rather think it might be the CIA.’
During the night I tossed a little, and turned a little more, and twice got up to record some idiotic monologues about the state of play on my tax-efficient dictaphone. There were things about the whole business that bothered me, and things that scared me, but it was Sarah Woolf who kept coming into my head and refusing to leave.