by Matt Johnson
The first thing Jenny did was take my hand and lead me up the stairs. There in the small bedroom lay Becky, fast asleep. She looked a picture. Her arms were wrapped around a tiny teddy bear. As I stood there in the half-light she stirred and then opened her eyes. It was one of those wonderful moments that will stay with me for all time. As she recognised me, she reached out. I sat down on the bed and held her hand. Jenny was standing behind me and as I glanced around I saw that she was crying again.
‘I’m sorry this all had to happen, Jenny,’ I whispered. ‘Sorry I never told you about my past and sorry that it’s all gone bent. I’m just so very, very sorry.’ A lump was forming in my throat that made the words hard to get out.
Jenny sat next to me on the bed. She put her arms around me. ‘Look at your daughter, Bob. Just look at her. She needs her dad. I need her dad. You can’t begin to imagine what it’s been like, sitting here worrying what is happening to you, fending off my mother’s accusations, trying to put on a brave face. If you want to quit now, I’ll understand. I know I said fight back. Now I’m not so sure. It’s easy for you, you’ve been trained for this. I’m not sure I can take it anymore.’
‘We need to talk,’ I said.
‘Not here. Let’s go for a drive.’
Becky fell asleep the moment I rested her hand on the sheet.
Jenny and I drove out into the countryside. I knew a quiet car park that overlooked Harrow on the Hill. Known locally as ‘Old Reading’, it was deserted. As we pulled in and parked, it reminded me of days when, as a teenager, I had brought girls to this very spot. That seemed like a previous life now.
Jenny had been quiet for the whole journey. I figured I would wait until we were parked up before we spoke. I needed to reassure her and I needed her counsel. In the event, we didn’t talk much. We kissed, cuddled and held hands. I did a lot of apologising; Jenny was very understanding. I was right about her mum – she had assumed we’d separated and Jenny had been unable to convince her otherwise. I described the damage to the cottage and how the builders had now fixed it. That was when emotions got the better of her again. She wanted to see the house. And she wanted to see it straight away. I pleaded with her to wait, I emphasised the danger. I had no hope, she’d made up her mind. I gave in.
As if matters couldn’t be any worse, there was a power cut when we arrived. I rootled around and found some candles and a small torch in a cupboard under the sink. The flickering candlelight gave the cottage an eerie, ghost-like quality that did nothing to help my attempts at reassurance.
But Jenny clearly wanted something other than reassurance. As I followed her around the cottage, I was talking about the way the cottage looked as good as new in the daylight, about Grahamslaw’s suspicions, about the disaster at Alma House and about the option we had to cut and run. It was only when we reached our bedroom and I put the candle down, and Jenny started to unbutton my shirt, that I realised she had other ideas. For a second, I resisted. She sensed my reluctance and held my face in her hands. She looked me straight in the eye.
‘I feel better now. Just being with you was what I needed. You’re going to win this battle, Bob Finlay. And before you do, I just want to remind you what you’re fighting for.’
Chapter 57
Sitting by the pond in the centre of Harlow Common would normally have been a relaxing experience. I watched quietly as young moorhens followed their mum across the water and dragonflies darted here and there in the gentle breeze. Hardly a sound reached my ears.
However, I was waiting for Kevin. We had plans to discuss and my mind was awash with thoughts.
After the Alma House debacle, Kevin had gone straight back to work. I admired his front. One night we were abseiling from a helicopter in a failed attempt to snatch a terrorist, the next morning he was driving a panda car around the streets of Hornchurch.
We agreed before splitting up that we would refrain from contact for a few days. If either one of us had been compromised by the Anti-Terrorist Squad, we figured it might be best for the other if we didn’t communicate.
Like me, Kevin had left the army a few years after the Iranian Embassy operation. He’d been married for two years at that time and hadn’t seen his wife for more than a total of six months. After missing the birth of his son and the celebration of his first birthday, he’d started to question his priorities.
At the embassy, Kevin had killed the youngest Arab terrorist. He had been with Trooper Billy Hart when they had located the boy hiding in a third-floor toilet. Billy had taken out the door lock with his shotgun and then dropped a stun grenade through the hole where the lock had been. As it exploded, a young man had screamed behind the door. At the operation debrief, Billy had explained how the boy had been crouched on the toilet, his arms wrapped around his head shielding his face. He was whimpering. Kevin had hesitated for a moment before firing. It was a lesson to us all and the reason that the CO had asked him to mention it. The reason was that the boy looked so young, maybe fifteen; sixteen tops. Kevin’s moment of hesitation could have cost both his and Billy’s lives. In the terrorist’s right hand, he was holding something metal, with an aerial. To Billy, it looked for all the world like a transmitter.
The boy had held his hands up. Only then had Kevin opened fire. His first two rounds had shattered the boy’s hand and wrecked the radio he held up so pathetically. The next burst tore through the boy’s face and spread blood, bone and brain tissue across the cistern and wall behind. Only afterwards did it occur to Kevin that the young boy may have been trying to surrender. But, as the CO correctly pointed out, if it had been a detonator in his hand, the result of the operation might have been very different.
During the debrief we found out the young Arab’s name. It was Abdul Farik. As a way of reassuring Kevin, the intelligence officer who interviewed the entry teams suggested that Abdul had feared capture and ridicule more than he feared death. He had been told that if caught he would be tortured and put on display. Abdul had probably held up the transistor radio he had bought in Selfridges so Kevin would think it was a bomb and shoot him. Kevin had granted his wish.
Kevin had asked to be excused at that point. When he hadn’t returned to the debrief after ten minutes, I had been sent to find him. I found him locked in the toilet. He was curled in a ball, his arms wrapped around his head, exactly as Abdul Farik had been.
About a week later, I was called in to see the regimental Sergeant Major to discuss some problems that Kevin had been having. Apparently he hadn’t been sleeping well and had experienced nightmares about shooting Farik. The RSM also mentioned how Kevin could be having a normal conversation one moment and the next, for no apparent reason, he would launch into an argument with one of the other lads.
The medics had diagnosed it as combat stress. Kevin was prescribed anti-depressants and rest. After a few weeks, the dreams passed and he had been able to sleep undisturbed.
In the years that followed, Kevin and I became good mates. It wasn’t often that NCOs and officers became friends, but we spent so much time together on deployments that it was odds on we would grow either to love or to loathe each other.
When it came to leaving the army, Kevin was first to make the move. Within three months of applying, he had handed in one uniform and collected another. After sixteen weeks recruit training at Hendon he was posted to Hornchurch. Ann and he had bought their first house, a semi in Barkingside.
Kevin had settled in well to his new life. He had trained as a driver and then taken on a community beat. He liked looking after kids and took the lead in forming two youth clubs to keep them off the streets.
So it was all looking good for Kevin. He had a weakness, though, and it cost him his marriage.
One day, a neighbour asked him over to help mend her leaky washing machine. Temptation got the better of Kevin. The neighbour was attractive and he couldn’t resist chatting her up. When she dropped little hints about her husband being a long-distance lorry driver and her ‘not being likely to get
pregnant as he was always too tired’ he had guessed what was on offer. He guessed right. What he hadn’t bargained on was that his wife would wonder why he was taking so long and would come over to see if he was going to be much longer.
Ann Jones had walked through the back door and heard the noises from the bedroom. She hadn’t come in, but when Kevin had gone home and found her packing, he knew he’d been caught. His protests and pleas fell on deaf ears and within a fortnight he had been served with divorce papers. Ann had gone back to Leicester to live with her mother and had taken their son with her. Kevin had kept the house.
The relationship with the neighbour never got going and six months later she moved away as well.
Kevin had remained single, a situation that I now envied to some extent. With no family to look after, he could devote all his energies to the fight we were now facing.
Chapter 58
Where have you been, boss?’
The sudden interruption to my thoughts caught me by surprise. I stood up slowly and brushed dirt from my trousers.
Kevin looked like he had come straight from work. He still had his white shirt and black trousers on. I turned and started to walk slowly across the common. ‘Walk with me, Kev,’ I said.
We sauntered, without speaking, across the grass and away from the public car park.
Kevin broke the silence. ‘You ok, boss?’
‘Not really. They nearly got me Kev – blew up my little 2CV, right outside the cottage.’
‘Fuck a duck, why didn’t you call me? They kept that out of the news. How the hell did they find out where you live?’
‘I don’t know, but just like Skinner, they found me.’
‘I’ve been trying to ring you all week. When I tried work, they said you’d gone sick.’
‘The new boss put me on compassionate leave.’
‘How’d Jenny take it?’
‘Pretty well. I had to tell her everything.’
Kevin scowled. ‘Everything? Including what we were planning to do with McGlinty?’
‘Not that, no.’
‘OK, but it might have been better to hold back on the details of what we’re doing. The fewer people who know, the better.’
‘Yeah, I know Kev and I’m sorry, but she needed to be told the truth. I couldn’t go on lying to her.’
I could see by the look on Kevin’s face that he understood even if he didn’t agree. I could also see his viewpoint, but it was easy for him, he only had himself to worry about. I didn’t want Jenny finding out the truth from some anonymous uniform calling at her front door with news of my death.
‘OK, so what now?’ Kevin asked.
‘Get back to Monaghan I suppose, see what he wants us to do.’
‘You can get back to him, I’m finished, I’m not doing any more dirty work for him.’
Kevin’s response surprised me. ‘He won’t like that. He wants to find out where the files are.’
‘Look, boss. What happened on that landing … we were set up. There’s no other way of looking at it.’
‘That’s what I thought. But remember Rupert Reid?’
‘What’s he got to do with this?’
I explained what Rupert had told me. The warning, about the young PC being OK and the part about the police helicopter disturbing our ride as it hovered above the flats. I also related my chat with Grahamslaw – his suspicions and ideas. I told Kevin about how the car bomb had gone off just as Rupert was about to try and make it safe and how he ended up in hospital. I didn’t mention the way Grahamslaw had tricked me and that he was now getting close.
Kevin stopped and touched my arm. ‘It was me.’ He looked suddenly pale.
‘How do you mean?’
‘I called your mobile. Must have been about the time Rupert was going over your car. The signal must have set the damn thing off.’
I chuckled. ‘Christ, we’re making a right mess of this.’
‘What do you expect from a couple of old men?’ Kevin joined in my laughter, looking happier, now relieved to learn that the helicopter had been forced to abandon us at Alma House rather than deliberately setting us up to be captured.
As for me, I was just glad to have someone I could talk to. Someone I didn’t feel responsible for and who was in this to help.
However, we were still no closer to finding out who was behind the attacks. I decided to run things through with Kevin again.
We went over it all, the Castlederg break-in, how our files could have left Hereford, Alma house, everything. We even discussed my theory about the Iranian Embassy connection, but that took us nowhere.
‘The only possibility of it being linked to the embassy is if the Arab terrorists we took out had mates that have now found us,’ said Kevin.
‘After all these years? And anyway, Grahamslaw told me the people looking for us are Irish.’
‘I thought he’d said it went deeper than that? What did that mean?’
‘I’m not sure,’ I said. ‘He didn’t elaborate. I can only guess he’s suspicious about how our files fell into their hands.’
‘So, we’ve a good idea who it is – the IRA.’
‘But it still doesn’t really answer “why” though, does it, Kev? And it doesn’t answer what Rupert Reid said about them being mercenaries.’
‘Revenge, simple enough. Oldest motive in the world. The IRA have long memories and maybe these mercs just do some of their dirty work for them. And there’s another thing that strikes me as well.’
‘Go on.’
‘Well, let’s imagine the embassy is the connection for a minute and that it’s not the IRA. There must have been thirty guys on the embassy, at least. They’re all over the world now. Apart from Mac Blackwood, every attack has been on a Met Police officer. They’ve even come back for another go at you. Why all this activity in London? I mean, we’ve got to be the hardest targets. Some of the other guys are doing protection work, running bars and pubs. They’d be easy to find and easy to kill off. Surely whoever it is would go for the easy targets first?’
‘So maybe the “why” is nothing to do with the fact that we were all at the embassy,’ I said.
‘That’s what I reckoned.’
‘And why two attacks on me? Why try so hard to get me? You’re right Kev. Is there a connection between Bridges, Skinner, you and me, apart from the obvious?’
‘Not that springs to mind and, so far, nothing has happened to make me think that I’m a target.’
‘Apart from what Monaghan said – that we’re all at risk.’
‘OK, OK. Point taken. But, at least no one has tried to kill me.’
‘Yet…’
Kevin was right. There had been no attempt on him. Monaghan had only brought him in to persuade me to get involved. Finding out if there was another link was now a priority. There was only one place to find out. The Regiment Headquarters at Hereford.
As we walked back to our cars, we agreed that I would contact Monaghan. Kevin would go to Hereford, check through our files and talk to some of the boys. It would be a great chance to have a look at the new camp in Credenhill, where the regiment had moved.
In the meantime, Monaghan should have found out whether the Arab boy was on the loose. If he was, it might be that my theory would need another look.
Chapter 59
I arrived outside Monaghan’s club at six.
The door was opened by the same man I had seen on my previous visit. This time he showed me straight in. We walked along the dimly lit corridors to the lounge. As I settled into a leather armchair, he asked me if I wanted a drink. I made it a large gin and tonic, plenty of ice. I was thirsty as hell.
I didn’t have to wait long. With my drink resting on a silver tray, the doorman reappeared and gestured for me to follow him. We stepped back into the corridor where one of the large side-doors now stood open. I took my drink and walked through. The door closed gently behind me.
I was standing in an office about fifteen feet square with anoth
er oak door facing me on the far left wall. Underfoot, the thick, green carpet felt soft and expensive. A large walnut desk against the opposite wall looked similarly exquisite. The room reeked of extreme wealth and appeared almost unused.
Monaghan emerged from the door in the left wall. He was surprisingly warm, his handshake strong. The friendly reception threw me slightly.
‘Good to see you, Finlay, I was worried when I heard about the device under your car.’
‘You were always threatening to put a bomb under me,’ I quipped.
‘Indeed I was. Most of my troop commanders had to be chased occasionally.’
Monaghan grinned and then appeared to become hesitant. It was as if he didn’t quite know how to continue the conversation.
‘If it was me, I think I would be very worried,’ he continued at last. ‘I presume you asked for this meeting to see about a new identity, a new start.’
Now I understood the uncertainty. He thought I wanted out. In his place I might have expected a similar reaction. In some ways, he was right. Half of me did want out, to hide away and make a new start. The other half wanted to fight. Jenny’s words flashed into my mind. ‘Nowhere to hide, Bob. Nowhere to run’. And I’d promised Kevin.
‘Not just yet,’ I said. ‘Have you found out whether the Iranian kid from the embassy has been freed?’
Monaghan sat at the desk and opened the briefcase he had with him. He pulled out a large brown envelope.
‘What’s this?’ I asked.
‘A piece of the puzzle.’ Monaghan opened the envelope and placed four large colour-prints on the desk.
I looked them over. The first two were of an Arab man; they were close-ups, taken with what was probably a long-lens camera. I guessed it was the kid from the embassy. This was the answer to my question. I was right. He was behind this. As my focus shifted to the second pair I drew a sharp breath.
