by Andy McNab
A big white porch led to the front door. I retrieved the key from under a flower pot, turned the lock in the heavy oak door and ushered Ruby and Tallulah inside.
I followed them into a large kitchen with exposed ceiling beams. I put the kettle on the hot Aga. There was an old oak table and chairs, and a dresser that looked as ancient as the house, but also all the mod cons: fridge/freezer, dishwasher, washing machine, tumble dryer. And I was pleased to see there really was a microwave.
The snug living room had an open fireplace with a stack of turf next to the hearth and a dark mahogany parquet floor covered with bright rugs. Comfy-looking armchairs and a huge sofa completed the picture.
There was a separate dining room with oil lamps and antique mahogany furniture. Glazed double doors opened onto the back garden.
'You two go bag the best rooms and I'll unload the car.'
I was going to leave them to it but Tallulah followed. 'Ruby can explore.'
We went back into the kitchen and I switched on more lights. It was only then that I spotted the flowers on the table, and a bottle of wine and a card. Tallulah opened it.
'It's from Dom!' She was thrilled. 'This is Dom's place? I should have guessed as soon as you said Donegal!'
'Friends in high places.' I was rather pleased with myself.
'All the time we knew them, Pete always said we'd visit and we never . . .'
Her head dropped. A tear rolled down her cheek. I never knew what to say or do at times like this. Arranging the trip was the best I could manage.
'Thank you. It's lovely. I want to make sure you know this. Things are hard for us right now and I really appreciate everything you're doing . . .' She paused. She fidgeted.
'Sounds like there's a bit of a but on its way?'
'But . . .' She smiled. '. . . it's just that, please, you mustn't worry about treading carefully. Everybody we know is still being so kind and understanding. I didn't realize how much I needed to get away from the . . . the . . . the whole widow thing. Do you know what I mean?'
I sort of nodded.
'Thank you. I don't want you thinking you have to secondguess us the whole time and wrap us up in cotton wool. This should be your holiday too.'
I spent longer than I needed to outside, and when I came back with my arms full of gear she was gone. I dumped it all on the floor. It took several more trips until the car was empty, and by then the kitchen looked like a bomb had hit it.
Tallulah reappeared. She'd composed herself. I helped her ferry their stuff – which meant everything apart from my small holdall – to the two rooms Ruby had bagged. Both were upstairs.
Tallulah had a big double with an old panelled ceiling. Ruby had the single next to it. They also had the only bathroom.
'And what have you picked for me, Ruby? The barn?'
She pointed downstairs. 'It's nice. There's a basin.'
16
I tipped out my holdall on the double bed and studied the badly wrapped parcel. I wondered if I'd bought the right thing.
It was strange to think of myself having a family Christmas – if you could call it that. First, because it wasn't my family. Second, because my own family's Christmases had been a nightmare. My stepdad would get pissed the night before and come home and beat up my mum. The presents were normally clothes for school, and the dinner was always crap because my mum would be in shit state. The only good bit was not having to go to school.
I threw my few clothes into a chest of drawers and listened to the sound of laughter drifting downstairs. They had lost a partner and a father, but they still had each other. I had no one, male or female; no friends, let alone a partner. I hadn't been lying. They were doing me a favour. At least this trip meant I got to talk to someone normal for a few days.
'Nick?'
Tallulah stood in the doorway.
'One other thing . . .' She didn't quite know where to look. 'It's just that I don't want you to think this can go beyond friendship . . . for now, anyway. Everything is still very raw . . .'
'That's not why I'm here.' I edged past her into the corridor. 'Fancy a brew?'
Her eyes suddenly sparkled and I felt her breath on my cheek. 'At the same time, Nick, don't run away from it.'
'Milk and sugar?'
As I disappeared to the kitchen, I heard her laugh out loud for the very first time.
17
I woke up early. It was still dark outside but I could tell the weather was going to be against us. Rain splattered the window. This was more like the Ireland I knew. I liked it. I'd had some good Christmases here in the army.
I got up and went and filled the kettle. While I was waiting for it to boil, I grabbed a lighter and a couple of old newspapers and headed for the living room. It would be nice for the girls to come down to a roaring fire. I was rolling and twisting a few pages as kindling when a photograph made me do a double-take. It was definitely him: the word Bahiti in the headline said so.
Liam Duff was kissing and telling. In fact, to quote his actual words: 'Since the Republican leadership has sold out, I might as well too.'
The article beneath his picture was a taster for what was to come – broad-brush stuff to make sure the readers ordered next week's copy. 'For many years I was loyal to the Republican cause, but I also supplied information to the British when I felt the leadership had strayed from its principles.'
He went on to say that the Bahiti operation had been betrayed by someone in the organization – not him – and that the legendary IRA bomber Ben Lesser had been murdered by the British. Strong stuff.
I put a match to the pyramid of paper sticks and sat back on my haunches. I checked, but the other papers I'd brought in pre-dated this one, and so did the ones in the kitchen. Last week's edition, when Duff would have spilled the beans, was nowhere to be found.
I laid a slab of turf on the blazing kindling and it began to glow. I added a couple more and put the guard across. I wasn't too worried. The paper was old, and there couldn't be anything to link me to it or Dom would have said something – if Special Branch hadn't got there first. For all that, Duff was an idiot. If he thought guys like Richard Isham would take this lying down, he had another think coming. He was going to be spending the rest of his days on the run.
I felt myself break into a smile. Not a bad idea: I could do with a bit of exercise myself.
18
It was weeks since I'd been near a gym or done any road work and I missed the endorphins. I poured water over a teabag and went and threw on my running gear. By the time I came back the brew was ready and it was just coming to first light. I drank it looking out of the window. The rain had done Avis a favour. The newly washed Merc gleamed like it was straight from the showroom.
I jogged down the drive in my usual steady rhythm. My ears and hands burned with cold, and my nose started to run as I breathed in freezing rain. I'd always liked running in winter. Maybe it was because I got wet and muddy, so the run felt a bit more gruelling, and I had accomplished more. How many thousands of miles had I run in my time as an infantryman and SAS trooper, then since? Eight years a soldier . . . Ten years in the Regiment . . . About twelve since I'd left. Thirty years, man and boy. I got to the bottom of the drive. Fifty weeks times thirty was one thousand five hundred. Left or right? Even Stevens. I turned left.
One thousand five hundred, times five for the number of runs per week . . . and an average of ten miles a run. Fuck me, seventy-five thousand miles. How many times round the earth was that? There might be a spot for me in the Guinness Book of Records.
Once over my first wind, my breathing became deep and regular and I was warm. I liked this. Running was when I got a lot of my best thinking done.
The sky was getting lighter, and the scenery around me was rugged. I passed a thatched cottage. They must have been early risers. Smoke curled from the chimney and I smelled burning turf. Probably not a second-homer like Dom; maybe a farmer or fisherman.
I pounded on methodically. At least Tallulah was talking a
bout her grief. Not like some people who shoved it all deep down inside, slammed the lid and threw away the key. But hey, I liked it that way. Less to say and less to think about.
I hadn't known Pete well, but I missed him. It wasn't just because he'd saved my life during a fire-fight in Basra. It was because in a very short space of time I'd come to love him like a brother.
Pete and Dom – Poland's answer to Jeremy Bowen – had been embedded with British troops in Southern Iraq. It was my job to make sure each story they covered wasn't their last. Dom wasn't one of those bunker journos that gave their action-packed report from the safety of a Green Zone balcony. And that was my big problem. I spent every waking hour either pulling him down or away from something or someone that was trying to kill him.
Dom was one of those people who believed he could walk through a battle zone without a scratch. Pete had nicknamed him Platinum Bollocks; he said he was the sort of guy who seemed to walk into nothing but good.
He lived in Dublin with his wife and stepson. They also had a holiday cottage in Donegal, and when I phoned, he didn't hesitate to let us have it. He felt he owed me as much as I owed Pete, and he probably wasn't wrong.
I pounded into a neat, sleepy village – a handful of houses scattered around a crossroads. There was one shop that doubled as the post office and pub. The air was thick with the smell of the sea.
Tallulah and Ruby had never been far from Pete's thoughts.
'You got family, Nick?'
'I did have, once.'
I could still remember the sudden rush of pins and needles in my legs.
'A little girl that looked a lot like your Ruby, as a matter of fact. Her parents were killed; I was her guardian. I never really got the birthday thing right . . . in the end I had to ask someone more reliable to take over.'
Somebody once told me I lived that part of my life with the lid on, and I guessed they were right. It was the way it had to be.
I saw a sign for a nature walk. Pete had said Ruby and Tallulah were into all that stuff.
I remembered asking him if there'd be things he'd miss when he left the front line and started taking pictures of flowers and squirrels instead. I could still hear his reply. 'Sure. The camaraderie. The brotherhood. Even when you're up to your neck in shit, you're surrounded by mates.'
He'd been in Kabul when Ruby's mum had fucked off to Spain with the bloke who built their extension. It was Dom and all the other guys who kept him afloat.
I rounded a bend and the sea spread out in front of me. A huge, horseshoe-shaped bay with breakers the height of houses. The harbour looked like it had seen better days. Now the stocks had declined and the EU quotas had come in, it looked like tourism had taken the place of fishing. Every shabby little building seemed to be a scuba-diving or windsurfing school.
The road skirted the bay. I ran towards a cluster of disused huts and shacks on the headland.
It had taken me a long time to put all the pieces together, but I eventually discovered Pete had been killed by an operator in the Firm who'd been using it as a cover for a heroin-running operation. I knew him as the Yes Man. For years he'd been my boss. I killed him. I also killed his two Northern Ireland-born enforcers, Sundance and Trainers.
Tallulah knew none of this, and she'd never learn it from me. She had enough on her plate. Her husband of just a few months was dead, and he'd been an orphan. With no other family to hand Ruby over to, his daughter was now her responsibility.
I turned and headed back towards them.
19
I'd met Tallulah a couple of days after Pete was killed. Dom went missing, and I flew back to London with my forearm brassed up by a 7.62 short.
I'd been parked on a hard plastic chair in the A&E department at Guy's Hospital for the best part of four hours the next morning when two Polish builders alongside me got very excited about something on the TV. I looked up to see the crystal clear, black and white night-sight images of me tumbling into the Basra sewage and Pete being my hero.
It was being played over and over, not only because it was great bang-bang footage, but also as a tribute to Pete – and Platinum Bollocks, of course, for filming it. Luckily, the Poles didn't make a connection between the face on the screen and the one sitting next to them.
When she opened the door of their house in Herne Hill, Tallulah was wearing a baggy red jumper and her feet were bare. The shock of long, blonde, wavy, hippie hair I'd seen in Pete's photographs and movie clips was tied back to the nape of her neck.
I remembered her reaction as I unzipped the side pouch of my Bergen and handed her the bag containing Pete's belongings.
'Thank you so much for doing this, Nick. You don't know what it means to me.'
She'd begun lifting out his things one by one. She almost caressed each item.
Then she came to his almost-new wedding ring and her shoulders convulsed.
I turned up from the lane and my trainers slapped along the drive. The rain had stopped. The sun was up; the Merc glistened.
Might something happen now between Tallulah and me? Maybe it would, maybe it wouldn't. I was scared by the possibility, but if it happened I'd go with it. But for now, it was early days. I liked the idea, but at the same time, it frightened me.
I leant against a tree to do my stretches. The cottage looked even more beautiful in this light, and I asked myself if I'd done the right thing turning down Platinum Bollocks' offer of a set of permanent keys.
Dom had read English Literature at Krakow University, done his national service and sailed into a job on the news desk of a Polish national newspaper. The rest was platinum-plated history. By the time I met him in Basra, he was the star of TVZ-24, a Polish channel with offices in Dublin.
He was tall and annoyingly good-looking, even when a thick layer of desert dust had given him a horror-film face. His Top Gun-style dark brown hair, blindingly white teeth and firm jaw line were featured most weeks next to his wife's equally good looks in Poland's answer to Hello!.
Dom had had another agenda while he was in Basra, I discovered. He was running a private investigation into the heroin trail from Afghanistan. It was a trail that eventually led him to the Yes Man. Pete was murdered as a warning, but Dom was like a dog with a bone. He ended up being bundled onto a rendition flight to Kabul, where I'd tracked him down and rescued him.
So yes, he owed me big-time, but no one knew that more than Dom himself. When I asked if I could borrow their cottage over Christmas, he said that he should really be handing me the deeds. I laughed. Of all the countries in all the world, Ireland would never be the wisest place for me to settle – Good Friday Agreement or no Good Friday Agreement.
It was just after nine. I pictured Tallulah messing around with the coffee grinder and the bacon sizzling in the pan. If it wasn't, I'd get it on the go. I wasn't as useless in the kitchen as I let on. I knew my way around a frying pan as well as a microwave.
I leant forward in a stretch. The rain hadn't cleaned the car quite as well as I'd thought. There was a muddy smudge along the door sill. Finger marks. There was also a depression in the mud beneath it, like the hollow a woodland animal makes when it sleeps.
I turned and walked away. I went in through the front door, and immediately threw the bolts behind me. Then I ran to the back of the house and did the same, and ran round and made sure every window was secure and kept the curtains closed. And then I went upstairs.
How the fuck was I going to explain to the girls their holiday was over before it had even started?
20
I put my ear to Tallulah's door. I could hear them talking. Either they'd shared a bed or Ruby had crept in during the night or when she woke up.
