Thursday legends

'But wasn't he all over the Sundays a while back?'

'I don't like to talk about that. It's true, but that's all behind him now, behind both him and Sarah. He's got over his obsessive period, now he's focused equally on his job and his family, as he should be. There's nothing he likes more than taking his kids for a walk of a Sunday afternoon; that's his greatest pleasure in life these days.'

A silence hung over the table as Rhian sipped her coffee. 'So what about this talk that we were going to have tonight?' she murmured, eventually.

'Let's make it tomorrow, honey. My head's wasted right now. How about if we just went home to bed?'

'I'll settle for that.' She smiled again, a big gloom-brightening grin which lifted his spirits in an instant. 'As long as it doesn't become a habit. I'm a lively young thing, you know.'

Two hours later, they lay entwined in each other's arms, in the dying light from the open bedroom window. The duvet was on the floor and they were slicked with sweat.

'Hey,' she whispered in his ear. 'Remember what I said earlier about not making a habit of this?'

'Mmhh.' His tongue flicked out, licking her neck gently, making her shudder.

'In case you were in any doubt, I was joking.'

'That's good. Handling rejection's never been my strong suit.'

'What do you mean?' 'I mean I don't like being chucked.' 'What happened with your fiancee? Who really chucked whom?'

'Let's say that we agreed it wouldn't work.'

'Sure you did. And that's why you have her photograph on the sideboard downstairs. All these girlfriends of yours, yet she's the only person on display, other than your mother. Something big happened. What was it?'

'Don't push it.'

'Ah, you did catch her, then.'

Sharp, way too sharp. 'Actually, she got pregnant, then had our child aborted without telling me about it.' 'So you broke off the engagement?' 'Yes. Immature, eh?'

'No. Principled, I'd say. I can tell how much it hurt you to finish with her, yet you had to.'

'Oh yeah? And why did I have to? Why couldn't I have gone along with it?'

'Because if you had, you'd never have been your own man again, not completely. And someone like you has to be, doesn't he?'

He looked at her, so close that it was an effort to focus his eyes on her. She was right; he had searched for months for an answer to the riddle of himself. Now Rhian had come up with it, on "their second night together. And of course, Alex, her father's daughter, was exactly the same; she had his no compromise gene. That was why it could never work again, because neither of them was physically capable of doing the thing that would make it so; yielding to the other's will.

'So what about you?' he asked. 'What would you do in Alex's shoes?'

'I'd have the baby… but I'm not Alex. I mean, I'm not knocking her or condemning what she did. It was her right. But families are a two-way commitment, aren't they? Could you handle a family, properly, and your job at the same time?'

He rolled on to his back and stared at the ceiling. 'You were at that post-mortem this afternoon. Did it affect you?'

'I'm a doctor, or I'm going to be. I'm being trained not to form emotional attachments with live patients. Dead ones on a slab should be no problem for me.'

'Don't give me theory, give me fact.'

She thought about it for a few seconds. 'It wasn't the dissection,' she said finally. 'It was the commentary; the way Sarah described, for the tape, the things that had been done to that man. Did you know that he actually drowned in his own blood?'

'No, but it doesn't surprise me. I looked into the guy's face, or where his face should have been, as soon as we took him out of the water. I saw his hands and feet, his legs, his chest, everything that was done to him.

'I saw worse on Friday night; yes, worse than that. And you know what? Afterwards, I went home with Karen, my sergeant; she was there, she saw it too. We've got a history together, and right then we needed to help each other get over that hellish thing. We spent the night together because neither of us could face going home alone. I'm sorry if that hurts you, but it's the truth.' He looked into her eyes, and saw her flinch.

'Now, to bring it all back to your original question, could I handle family life? The fact is, Rhian, I don't know for how much longer I can live as I do, and carry on doing my job. I'm really envious of Bob, in that respect. I need stability, I need the normal home life that Alex and I had for a while. I suppose I've been looking for it since we split.

'Otherwise, things like Alec Smith's murder, or like looking at that bloke last night and realising that there's a fair chance we'll never even find out who he was… I have this fear that the job will either break me, or take me over to the point that there will be no room in me' — he tapped his chest — 'here, inside me, for anything else. When I can look at an ex-colleague with his-' He stopped himself. 'When I can look at that then go home as if it's just another day at the office, as a man, I'll be done.'

She gripped his fingers in hers, squeezed them and held them between her breasts. 'Then let's just make sure, that there's always someone there for you.'

She rubbed her forehead on his shoulder. 'Maybe I've been looking for something too,' she whispered. 'And maybe, just maybe, the first time I saw you, I knew I'd found it.'

14

Detective Inspector Mario McGuire wore a broad grin. 'Welcome to the shadowy, glamorous world of Special Branch, Sergeant,' he boomed. 'Welcome to the centre of this spider's web of intrigue. Exciting, isn't it?'

Stevie Steele leaned back in his hard chair and looked around the drab room, with its bare, magnolia-painted walls, and its single small window. 'Wow,' he said.

'This is the reality of the job, Steve. We're the true crime-prevention department; we keep an eye on potential trouble and even more important, on potential trouble-makers. That's the way it's always been. Back in the fifties and sixties, we used to keep an eye on the local communists and fellow-travellers: trade-union guys, left-wing Labour Party guys and acknowledged CP members. Now terrorism, more than anything else, is the perceived enemy.

'Back in the old days we had help, of course — local journalists who'd go along to meetings and report back to us for a few quid. We could trust the local newspaper hacks, they were poorly paid and always needed the money. But there were journos on the other side too. The NUJ had a communist as its president back in the sixties: wherever he travelled, all over the country, he had a Special Branch escort.

'The boys in Glasgow, they had a permanent bug in the offices of the Daily Worker, but of course the hacks there knew it, so there was never anyone in their bloody office.

They used to do all their business in pubs and send their copy to London from phone boxes. Everything we did, of course, was to ensure that guys like them couldn't deliver this great democracy of ours into the slavering Soviet maw.'

'It worked, then,' said Steele, dryly.

'Not really. Like I said, SB priorities changed in the early seventies when Ireland blew up. We had to stop playing with the wild-eyed Left to a great extent and concentrate on the real danger. It's been a different game since then, with a constant IRA and Loyalist threat for thirty years and, at the same time, the growth of international terrorism. We haven't always been successful in preventing attacks, but for every one that's succeeded there have been a right few others that we've headed off.'

'Isn't it quieter now than it was?'

'No it ain't. Sergeant. There will always be fanatics with a mission to destroy, quote, unquote, our decadent Judea/ Christian Western society, and there will be idiots among us who admire and support them. The Special Branch task has never really altered; the enemy just changes every so often, that's all.'