The Exit Club: Book 5: Old Comrades

by Shaun Clarke

  ‘Marty – ’

  ‘I know you don’t like me talking about this, Paddy, but I can’t let it go. I’m not the only one in the Association to believe that we’re in a good position to do more than simply find jobs for the boys.’

  ‘It’s not just jobs for the boys, as you put it,’ Paddy responded testily. ‘I’ve already caved in to you on finding them work as bodyguards and it’s given me a lot of headaches – reports in the press about former SAS men becoming mercenaries for foreign governments, complaints from the Ministry of Defence about Vigilance International meddling in military affairs – so I’m not about to cave in to you again, particularly regarding what I feel would be, in essence, the creation of an assassination squad. No way, Marty.’

  ‘That’s a melodramatic way of putting it. It wouldn’t be that at all. We’d simply be doing without permission what we’ve often done under orders in Northern Ireland and elsewhere– yes, even the Iranian Embassy– neutralizing enemies of our country for the general good. We’d simply be taking matters into our own hands where others with more authority have failed to do so.’

  ‘You’d be breaking the law.’

  ‘For a damned good reason.’

  ‘Neutralizing means killing, my friend, and that’s assassination. You’d be no more than a bunch of hit men practising lynch law.’

  ‘We wouldn’t be lynching the innocent,’ Marty insisted. ‘No one would be touched who wasn’t known to be a villain. We have excellent intelligence to back us up and we’d all vote before decisions are made. There’s no way in the world that someone undeserving, someone innocent, would be neutralized. We’re only thinking of going after the big fish and they’re easy to find.’

  ‘What kind of big fish?’

  ‘Arms dealers, munitions manufacturers, known terrorists who can’t be touched because of some arcane legality. You know the villains as well as I do and there’s little doubt about what they’re getting up to. The world will be a better place without them, so I think it’s a good cause.’

  ‘It’s not a good cause. It’s taking the law into your own hands.’

  ‘Only where the law is ineffectual.’

  ‘That’s exactly what lynchers always say.’

  ‘People don’t get lynched any more.’

  ‘No, Marty, they get shot and blown up instead, but it comes down to the same thing.’

  ‘Paddy – ’

  ‘I don’t want to hear any more about this, Marty. I don’t mind heading Vigilance International as a production company for anti-communist videos, as a commercial company offering advice and training and supplying bodyguards for security purposes. I don’t even mind it as an unofficial regulating body that keeps its eye on what goes on within the regiment. But I refuse– I categorically refuse– to let it be used as a regulating body for the country as a whole, much less one that will act as jury and hanging judge when it comes to certain undesirable elements. Suggest it once more and I’ll throw the Association out of Vigilance International. You’ll be on your own again.’

  Startled by Paddy’s vehemence, Marty waved his hands in the air as if beating him off. ‘Okay, Paddy, all right, calm down. I promise I won’t mention the subject again.’

  ‘Good. But I have one more thing to say.’ Paddy finished off his pint and started pushing his chair back, still annoyed and obviously preparing to leave the pub. ‘If I get the slightest hint, the merest whisper, that something in that line has been going on behind my back, I’ll disassociate myself and the company from you completely. Is that understood?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Good. Now I have to be off.’

  ‘So do I,’ Marty said, hiding his growing annoyance and resentful that Paddy could talk to him this way. Together, they stood up and crossed the busy pub to the front door. ‘I’m going to London straight from here,’ Marty said. ‘That’s why I suggested meeting you here instead of picking you up as usual. I have to get to the train station.’

  ‘Staying with Diane?’ Paddy asked, obviously trying to cool down and be his customary goodhumoured self again.

  ‘Of course. Where else?’

  They left the pub and walked to the car park. The June sun was bright. Marty welcomed the heat on his face as he squinted against the light. He saw the spire of the Norman cathedral soaring above the rooftops of the nearby town. It was a sight that gave him a feeling of permanence in a rapidly changing world.

  Paddy opened the door of his Honda Accord, then turned to face Marty. ‘So how’s Diane these days? The last time I saw her, in that pub in Soho, she seemed rather strung out.’

  ‘She was drunk,’ Marty replied too quickly, uneasily.

  ‘I believe it was more than that. I’ve always thought she was much too intense and she seems to be getting worse over the years. How is she really?’

  Marty decided to tell the truth. ‘Not too good. She drinks too much during the day and takes sedatives to put her to sleep at nights.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Well, as you rightly said, she’s been that way for a long time – from when she lost her dad, I suspect. She worshipped him and based her whole life around him, so when he died something broke inside her and she was never the same again.’

  ‘Well, that could explain some of it.’

  ‘Nowadays, though, it’s her work. You know how obsessed she’d become with it. Couldn’t bloody live without it! Then she started concentrating on corruption in the political world, various abuses of power, causing a lot of controversy and landing herself in hot water too many times. Finally, when her reporting on Northern Ireland helped sway the European Court of Human Rights into finding the British government guilty of inhumane treatment and torture over there, she became the victim of a dirty-tricks campaign. It was, so she said, designed to slander her and make editors too scared to print her articles. Maybe she was right. Certainly, the commissions gradually dried up and now they’ve practically stopped altogether. So she’s broke and desperate and paranoid, which makes her hard to live with.’

  ‘Why don’t you get out?’

  ‘I can’t leave her when she’s in this state, Paddy. That isn’t my style. Besides, I’m genuinely fond of her. I also happen to be sympathetic because I tend to believe most of what she tells me. Almost certainly, she’s the victim of a dirty-tricks campaign and we both agree on who we think started it.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Sir Charles Alfred Seagrove.’

  ‘The arms dealer?’

  Marty nodded. ‘Exactly. Diane’s been after him for years, tormenting him in the papers, with one scandalous revelation after another, and he’s threatened her with legal action many times. But a few months ago, she wrote a published article in which she pointed out that Seagrove had been selling arms to Libya’s Colonel Gaddafi, that Gaddafi had been training and arming the IRA, and that the IRA members were then returning to Northern Ireland to kill British soldiers with those same weapons. She emphasized in the article that this was the work of a man recently knighted for his services to the realm.’

  ‘Fair comment,’ Paddy said.

  ‘I believe so. Anyway, when Seagrove read the article he went bloody mad and personally called Diane to tell her that her writing days were over. He didn’t specify what he meant by that, but Diane was in no doubt that he was going to use friends in high places to put pressure on her editors and have her squeezed out of journalism altogether. As certain highly placed individuals in the Ministry of Defence had already made it clear to her and her editors that they were incensed by her reporting on Northern Ireland, she didn’t think that Seagrove would have too much trouble in raising a few allies when it came to a dirty-tricks campaign against her. And true enough, from that point on her troubles began and neither of us has any doubts that the man behind them is Seagrove.’

  ‘You’re probably right.’

  ‘I knowwe are,’ Marty said.

  Paddy was silent for a moment, clearly deep in thought, then he said, ‘Listen to m
e, Marty. It’s my belief that a lot of your recent thinking, of which I strongly disapprove, has been caused by your relationship with Diane. I’m not disputing for one second that a dirty-tricks campaign has been used against her – it isn’t the first, God knows, and it won’t be the last – but I amsaying that you shouldn’t take it too personally or let it turn your head to thoughts of personal vengeance. More importantly, you mustn’t let it motivate you into going ahead with your idea of turning the Association into a private, covert vigilante force. I said it before and I say it again: if I pick up the slightest hint that you’ve done so, I’ll disassociate Vigilance International from the Association. Do you understand that?’

  ‘Yes,’ Marty said.

  ‘And will you take heed?’

  ‘Yes,’ Marty repeated.

  Paddy stared searchingly at him, then smiled slightly. ‘So do we still part as friends?’

  Marty held his hand out. ‘Yes, Paddy, we still part as friends.’

  They shook hands, both smiling, then climbed into their separate cars, Paddy heading back to his home in nearby Peterchurch as Marty drove on to London for another weekend with Diane.

  Chapter Two

  Coming off the Westway and inching into the dense traffic heading east, Marty was in a state of deep depression. The sun was still shining, reflecting off the windows of the elegant Georgian houses, and people were out enjoying the summery instead of taking buses, many motorbikes, weaving expertly between the honking cars, growling trucks, black taxies and red doubledecker buses, commuting between Shepherd’s Bush, Holland Park, Earl’s Court and Notting Hill Gate in a festive atmosphere undoubtedly due to the good weather. Nevertheless, as he crawled along in the traffic, feeling sweaty and drained, his spirits were not uplifted by the sight of the many young girls in miniskirts, hotpants, skin-tight blue jeans and low-cut blouses or halter tops, many of them beautifully suntanned. Instead, he was still gloomily considering what Paddy had said and also wondering what state Diane would be in this particular weekend.

  As he crawled on in second gear, inching past Ladbroke Grove Station, where the newsvendor was waving the latest edition of the London Evening Standard and bawling about English soccer fans rioting in Turin – news that was receiving more coverage than the ten million people facing starvation in East Africa– he realized that although he had told Paddy about Diane’s fraught condition, he hadn’t told him the half of it.

  In fact, Diane ’s condition was so bad that he could barely admit it to himself, though every weekend he saw her was worse than the one before and he was weather, walking

  on bicycles or certain that she was coming close to the edge. Between her drinking, which she did all day, and the sedatives, devoured each evening, she was almost catatonic and came alive, temporarily revitalized, only when some news item on TV reminded her of her work and of all the wrongs, real or imagined, that had been done to her.

  Over the past few months, her tensions had developed into full-blown paranoia mixed with chronic fear and despair, making her drink even more and rail at him about the world’s iniquities. Marty sympathized with her, believing most of what she told him, but despite that he was finding it more difficult to deal with her outbursts. Smoking like a train, cursing like a trooper, often sobbing hysterically, she would pace the living room of her flat like a caged tiger, trying to talk it out of her system and exploding into rages at even the slightest hint of disagreement. She was like a wild, wounded animal.

  ‘You don’t believe me,’ she would say. ‘You think I’m fucking mad. You pretend to believe me, but you just don’t want a fight. You’re fed up and you want to go back to Hereford and play fucking soldiers.’

  ‘No, Diane, that’s not true.’

  ‘I can’t get fucking work. Every door’s been closed to me. That bastard, that knighted shithead Seagrove, has trampled all over me, pulled every plug, and now you’re telling me that I shouldn’t drink so much. So what do I do, Marty? Where do I go from here? I sit here on my own, day in and day out, and I wait for the fucking phone to ring and it never rings any more. Sometimes I try ringing out – oh, yes, I do try– but now my old friends are always at a meeting when I happen to call. Do they ever call me back? Not anymore, they don’t. So I sit here from dawn to dusk, in interminable silence, and I drink – damn it, Marty, yes, I drink – to deaden the silence. What else can I do?’

  It was pointless arguing with her – she was too far gone for that. Being well into her forties and deprived of her work, she had not the slightest glimmer of a future that would be worth the having. Marty had said he would stick by her, even marry her if she wanted, put her into a safe harbour where she wouldn’t need to work, but that only added insult to injury and made her even more angry.

  ‘That’s so fucking magnanimous! Make a decent woman out of me! Leave me sitting there at home, in a house with a pretty garden, pruning hedges while you run off to the Sports and Social to have fun with your SAS mates. And what about my work? My journalism was my fucking life! I’m not about to sit at home like a good little wife while bastards like that Sir Charles fucking Alfred fucking Seagrove not only arm terrorists, but get rewarded with knighthoods and then dig graves for those who trying exposing them. Why the fuck don’t you do something about it instead of offering to marry me?’

  ‘Do what, Diane?’

  Shocked that even now, after his confrontation with Paddy, he was still thinking of defying him, Marty turned right at the traffic lights by Notting Hill Gate station and drove down Kensington Church Street, which he thought had retained the charm that was disappearing from so much of London. Turning right again, he drove along Diane’s street, glancing appreciatively at the elegant Georgian houses, most of which had been converted into flats. His appreciation of these architectural splendours was obliterated when he couldn’t find a parking space and had to explore the surrounding streets for another ten minutes before he managed to do so. Ending up at a parking meter a good twenty minutes’ walk from Diane’s place, he made his way back to her flat while boiling over with anger and nervous tension.

  These dangerous emotions, he realized, had become commonplace of late and could clearly be attributed to a variety of causes, including the impotence he felt over Diane’s worsening condition and the realization that he was quarrelling with his best friend, Paddy, even as he was suffering grave doubts about his own proposals for the Association.

  You’re in a state of deep confusion, he thought. Get a grip on yourself.

  If only he could.

  Using his own key to open the front door of the converted Georgian house, he took the lift up to the third floor, now feeling even more tense and nervous. As he opened the door to Diane’s flat with the second key, he wondered what mood she was in and felt a wave of dread rippling through him. Much as he had wanted her and possibly even loved her, he didn’t think that he could take much more of her tantrums, let alone the guilt he felt at the knowledge that he could do nothing for her.

  Closing the door quietly behind him, he stepped into the living room and saw that the TV was on, showing haunting images of starving men, women and children in the refugee camps of East Africa. Diane was not there. Assuming that she was sleeping (since she often went to bed in a drunken stupor at this hour of the day, leaving the TV turned on) he went into the bedroom and saw that the bed, though dishevelled, was empty, with an almost empty gin bottle on the bedside cabinet, beside an overflowing ashtray. The room smelt awful: a combination of alcohol, stale cigarette smoke and a general lack of fresh air.

  Having long since adjusted to Diane’s slovenly ways, he ignored all of this and went straight to the bathroom, expecting to find her soaking in the bath, probably smoking and drinking at the same time. In this, he was not wrong.

  She was in the bath, certainly, naked, her eyes closed. There was an ashtray on one side of the bath and a bottle of gin on the other. The cigarette stub in the ashtray had smouldered out a long time ago. The bottle of gin was nearly as
empty as the one in the bedroom. A razor blade covered in blood lay on the floor by the bath. The water in the bath, while covered in soap bubbles, was also red with blood.

  Feeling himself slipping into a nightmarish unreality, he bent over the bath, heard himself shouting ‘Diane!’ and then grabbed her under the armpits to tug her out of the water. Her head flopped to the side, falling over his forearm, and as he pulled her up higher, unable to stop his choked sobbing, he saw the ugly slashes across her wrists and, in the bath, just beneath her right hand, the dull gleam of the bread knife she had used.

  He sobbed uncontrollably, holding Diane close to him, trying to bring her back to life with his warmth, receiving only her coldness. He dropped to his knees, leaned over the side of the bath, and held her as best he could in his soaked arms, whispering, ‘No! Oh, God, no!’ He stayed there until his grief turned into rage and he could reach a decision. He made that decision even as his tears were falling. His tears fell a long time.

  Chapter Three

  There was no turning back now. Deciding to be the first, to ask no one for help, he drove to the house after midnight, continued driving past it, then parked about a thousand metres from it. It was a large house in Surrey, backed by a golf course, with burglar alarms and CCTV cameras on the outside walls, an armed guard in the front drive.

  Having already reconnoitred the area, knowing just what he would do, he got out of his car, wearing a black rollneck pullover, black trousers and black shoes, with an overnight bag dangling from his shoulder. After glancing left and right to confirm that the street was clear, he slipped into the narrow lane near the end of the street, emerged to the golf course, and made his way to the rear of the house.

  Advancing at the half crouch, avoiding the CCTV cameras, he knelt by the back wall, removed the bag from his shoulder and withdrew a small home-made bomb. It consisted of RDX plastic explosive with a time-fuse connected to a non-electric firing cap. After taping it to the high brick wall, which was, he knew, wired to the audio-visual surveillance systems, he set the time-fuse for five minutes, then made his way back to the narrow lane and emerged once more to the street.