by HRF Keating
Towel clutched round her, she ran wet-footed downstairs, rushed to the machine, still ringing, seized the receiver.
‘Yes? Yes?’
‘Harriet?’ came John’s measured voice. ‘Good morning, and good news. Or as good as can be expected. Malcolm’s still unconscious. But his condition’s stable, they say. They can’t, or won’t, make any predictions about the future. But, they tell me, every hour that he stays in his present state the better the long-term outlook is.’
These were words that penetrated now past the hologram figure. She felt a dam-burst of healing water wash over and over her.
‘Oh, John, thank God. Oh, that’s wonderful.’
Her hologram self took in that the glowing red figures of the answerphone were registering zero. So no night calls. Mechanically she put a finger on the power button. The machine’s cool female voice intoned ‘Answer off’.
‘Well, don’t let yourself be too optimistic,’ she heard John saying. ‘They warned me there could still be brain damage. Too early to tell. You know, when someone’s as badly injured as Malcolm, something can always happen that the doctors can’t foresee. His life could still be threatened.’
‘Yes, yes. You’re right. They’re right. But — but I’m going to hope. I can’t help myself.’
‘No, and neither can I. Hope’s the opposite of threat, you know. Hope and threat, they’re both in there fighting it out.’
‘Oh, yes. Yes, you’re right. And thank you for saying it.’
‘OK. Well, I’m going to set off in just a few minutes, when I’ve tackled the Full British Breakfast they say I’m owed. It’s a nice day here, so I should make good time. But I think I ought to go straight to the office, let them know I’m available if needed. The insurance industry has to go grinding on, you know, counteracting some of the disasters that do occur. But you? You’re not going in to your Headquarters, are you?’
‘Well, no. No, I was just thinking I wouldn’t, though I’d better get in touch to say so.’
‘Right, well, see you shortly then. And — and, darling, try to find your way back to life, if you can.’
‘Yes. Yes, I will. Or, no, I’ll try. But — but, John, Graham.’ She checked a sob. ‘Graham’s gone. Gone for ever.’
The receiver went down with a clunk.
And at once the phone beneath her hand rang out piercingly.
It took her some seconds to pick it up again and shut off the insistent ringing.
‘Mrs Piddock?’ a top-of-the-morning voice sang out. ‘Mrs Harriet Piddock? Birchester Television here.’
‘Yes?’ she said, hardly knowing she had done so.
‘Mrs Piddock, we were wondering if you would like to come into the studio this morning and record an interview.’
Harriet felt bewilderment go chasing, zig-zag, through her mind.
‘I — I’m sorry?’ she said.
A deep, suffering breath at the far end. Can’t the foolish woman understand the simplest thing?
‘Mrs Piddock, surely you want to tell people about this tragedy? How the outrage has affected you? I mean, you’ll want to make everybody realise, the Government and everybody, that terrorism has got to be stopped. So, can we send a car for you at, say, twelve o’clock?’
‘No.’
Once again she put down the handset. But this time with all the unhurried decisiveness of an official stamping out an order to quit.
*
But if she had thought that her spat-out ‘No’ had been enough to put an end to Birchester Television’s plans, she was soon to learn they had more shots in their locker.
Half an hour later, when she had just pushed away her bowl of cereal, half-eaten, the phone rang again. She did not, as she went to answer it, envisage for a moment that it would be the brightly cheerful young man who had called her earlier. Hologram Harriet had effectively dealt with him, as Real Harriet had dealt with many a reporter’s try-on in the past.
So, as ever, she simply answered the call, and experienced a small shock of surprise at what the secretarial voice at the other end said.
‘Mrs Martens? The Assistant Chief Constable would like a word.’
Mr Brown, she thought. Perhaps I should have let him know earlier than this that I must have some leave. I would probably have done so already, except for that Birchester Television man.
She heard the ACC coming on the line.
‘Mrs Piddock,’ his Scots-tinged voice pronounced, ‘let me say at once that you have the sympathy of every man and woman in the CID at your Graham’s death. An appalling thing. Appalling. And Malcolm? Do you have any up-to-date news about him?’
‘Yes. Yes, sir. My husband’s down there in London and saw the doctors early this morning. He told me Malcolm’s got through the night all right, and they’re a little more hopeful.’
‘I gather he was very severely injured, though. Is that right?’
‘Yes, sir. I saw him myself last night, and — and, yes, he did seem to be in … in a very bad state.’
‘Well, let’s hope. Hope and pray.’
She remembered then that the ACC was a practising Christian, brought up indeed in the severest Scottish traditions.
‘Thank you, sir,’ she managed to reply.
‘Now, of course, Mrs Martens, you are relieved of your duties at the present. Yes, at the present. But …’ He paused so long that she felt obliged to put in a ‘Yes, sir?’
A cough.
‘Mrs Martens, a few minutes ago I had a call from Birchester Television. They told me they had wanted to interview you, but that you had refused. Categorically.’
A quiet rolling of Scots r’s.
‘Now, I am going to ask you to change that decision. No, don’t tell me to mind my own business, though I am sure the words are on your lips. But let me first say that I see it as your duty as a police officer, whatever unpleasantness may be involved, to expose yourself to this.’
‘Sir —’
‘No. I haven’t finished. You and your sons have become, however unfairly, victims of the enemy in what they call the “War on Terror”. It is a war — in so far as that’s the right word for it — which the Police Service is required to fight in whatever ways are necessary. And I am suggesting to you now that your appearance on television is one of those necessities. We are not alone in this fight. Every decent citizen in this country, and in others, is involved. Many of them, however, do not as yet recognise that. But you, appearing on their screens this evening, and telling them what you and your sons have suffered at the hands of these deluded individuals, can make a considerable difference. No, will make a considerable difference.’
Harriet stood in silence, the phone held hard to her ear.
‘Very well, sir,’ she said at last. ‘If you put it to me in those terms, of course there is nothing else I can do but accept.’
‘Very good, Harriet. I’ll get back to these people and arrange for them to get in touch with you.’
*
So shortly before six that evening Harriet was led into the make-up room at the TV station for an interview to appear almost immediately on the local News. She submitted then, not by any means for the first time, to being told that her nose was shiny and needed powdering, and to having her hair, which despite everything she had managed neatly to deal with earlier, being combed and teased into a shape that pleased the make-up girl.
It was only when, in purely thoughtless innocence, the girl asked if she would like her cheeks given a touch of colour because she was looking ‘a bit pale’ that she rebelled. And even then she managed to contain herself.
‘No. No, thank you. I think I’m better as I am.’
Then she was taken to the studio and patiently went through all the changes of position and angle the cameraman asked for.
The interview itself began smoothly enough. The glib words of condolence were spoken and Hologram Harriet acknowledged them with a stiff dip of her head.
Soon she was asked — in crude terms, she co
uld not help thinking — what exactly had happened to Malcolm. And she managed to take shelter behind a lack of knowledge of the actual facts and avoid giving the grim particulars of what, the night before in the intensive care ward, had so appalled her.
‘And your other son,’ the interviewer asked, plunging on, ‘he was killed instantly, wasn’t he?’
If you know, she thought with steely fury, why do you have to ask me?
‘Yes,’ she shot out.
Across the gloom that divided her from the interviewer, each of them in their separate pools of light, she thought she could see in his face much the same ‘Christ, can’t you react a bit for me?’ expression that he had sent down the phone to her first thing in the morning.
But she saw no reason why she should provide him with spilled-out words that would allow him afterwards to pat himself on the back and say he thought his interview had gone ‘pretty well’.
Other questions followed. None of them, as far as she could see, rightly phrased to give her a proper chance to bring out the depths of the misery she was feeling, depths which the ACC had wanted her to make the watching public feel. Feel and react to.
She caught, as she produced a few more laboured words, her interviewer giving a swift glance at the big studio clock.
It must all be coming to an end. And, all right, Mr Brown hadn’t got the responses he wanted to fire viewers with determination to combat the reckless forces poised to bring devastation.
Well, too bad. I’m a police officer, not a bloody actor milking outrage.
‘Mrs Piddock, as a mother with one son dead and the other terribly wounded, what is it you feel at this moment about the people who made that bomb?’
Is this my chance after all?
But the blunt insensitivity of the question produced in her, in Real Harriet, something absolutely unexpected. Totally from nowhere.
‘Yes,’ her answer shot out. ‘Yes, one of my sons is dead. And the other is so badly injured they fear for his life, if not his sanity. And you, you sit there, expecting me to denounce the people who did that, expecting me to say we must all go to war against any axis of evil we can find in the world. To fight it and obliterate it. But I am not going to do that. I’ve scarcely been able to think in the single day that’s gone by since my sons suffered so awfully. But one thing I do know. However evil, evil as people say, men such as these are, and women too, women, they do not do what they are doing, here and all over the world, out of some mere wish to kill and to maim. They do it, rightly or wrongly, because they feel they have a grievance. A deep grievance. And it is up to us, those of us who so far have escaped injury at their hands, and those of us who have not, to look at those grievances. To ask ourselves whether our unthinking attitudes and actions over the years have created the menaces that hover now above all of us. Then, when we have seen what it is that motivates what we so easily label evil, seen it and have moved to remedy it, then, if you like, we can go marching into war against them. Then, when those grievances have been tackled, and hopefully will be removed, in so far as is possible, then we can feel justified in fighting the enemy that is left.’
Chapter Three
Harriet had not felt it possible simply to go home after she had walked out of Birchester Television studios. She had been disoriented, more than a little, by the stream of words that had come from her in answer to that ‘This is what you should say’ question. Instead, she had gone into the first coffee shop that had caught her eye and had sat there in a vacant armchair, statutory cup in front of her, not thinking. Only when at last it had come to her that time had passed did she get up, pay and make her way home.
There she found John, back from his office. He had jumped to his feet at the sound of her key in the door and come rushing out.
‘Darling,’ he greeted her, ‘you were splendid.’
She blinked, for a moment bewildered. Then she realised that he must have been in the house for some time and had switched on the Six O’Clock News.
‘Splendid? On TV?’ she said. ‘Was I? I — I scarcely realised what I was saying. But, tell me, was what I did say really splendid?’
‘It absolutely was. I thought of having a bottle of fizz here to greet you. Until, of course, it came to me that this was no time for any sort of celebration. But I still want to do something. Will a kiss do?’
It did. A long, warm, husbandly embrace.
‘Yes,’ John said, releasing her, ‘it couldn’t have been better put. Certainly to my way of thinking. In fact, it anticipated what I’d not got round to working out.’
‘No, I hadn’t worked anything out either. I could scarcely think all day of anything but that one bleak, blank fact. Graham’s dead. Graham’s dead.’
Graham’s dead. In a deluge the whole meaning of it poured back into her mind. The blank blackness blotting out everything.
But she saw, she was able to see, that John was looking at her, concern plain on his every feature. And it was that which dragged her back from the heavy depths.
She shook her head clear.
‘It — it was only when —’ she said. ‘It was only when that interviewer — I suppose I’m meant to know his name — only when he put that crudely expressed question to me that it penetrated, all in one instant, right down to the thought that had been growing there in the depths of my mind. And you think I was right? You think what I thought then, what I said in reply to him, was right?’
‘I do. I did. If last weekend, only last weekend, I’d been asked after the Hasselburg horror, what I believed was the answer to it all, I’d have probably groped towards just what you came bursting out with. Darling, I could positively see it coming rushing up to the surface from — what? — your brain? No, from your heart.’
She felt a pale smile appearing on her lips, in her eyes.
‘Only you wouldn’t have been quite so incoherent,’ she managed to joke mildly.
A smile in return.
‘No. No, I admit what you said may not have been expressed with the utmost clarity. But what you meant came over without the least tinge of confusion. I know it did. And all the people watching — well, most of them — will know what it was you came out with. Well done, well done, well done.’
But then, once more, the jangling phone wanted its say.
Malcolm, she thought. Oh God, don’t let it be St Mary’s and bad news, the worst news.
John, after one quick glance at her suddenly apprehensive face, picked up the receiver.
‘Yes. Yes, she’s here. But —’ He listened for a moment. ‘Oh, yes, I can certainly give her a message.’
He paid attention again.
‘Yes. All right, I’ll tell her.’
He put down the receiver.
‘That was your Assistant Commissioner’s secretary. He wants to see you in his office at eleven tomorrow morning.’
She dropped into a chair, legs suddenly unable to support her.
‘What — what do you …? I mean, he’s going to be furious. He wanted me to do the interview so as to alert people to the dangers that have come to hover over them. I — I sort of said that’s what I would do. It was only when …’
‘Darling, I know. And until you get to see him … What did that girl say his name was? I’ve forgotten.’
‘No wonder. It’s Brown, plain Andrew Brown. But he’s by no means the ordinary man-in-the-street that might imply. I’ve always found him distinctly impressive, the comparatively little I’ve had directly to do with him.’
‘Well, we’ll see what Mr Brown’s reaction will be when you hear it. His secretary can hardly be expected to indicate what his feelings are.’
‘Yes, you’re right. But it’s a long time to have to wait.’
‘With the threat of the great man’s displeasure, or even of his active anger, hanging over you? So I’ll tell you what we’ll do. First of all, I’ll pass on what I had meant to tell you all along. I rang St Mary’s shortly before you came in, and they said Malcolm’s still unconscio
us but that he is showing some signs of progress. Good news, as far as it goes.’
Harriet felt a pulse of new life go through her. But she was unable to put her feelings into any words.
John went on.
‘Now, I’m going to call that take-away place and order us some supper. Then I’m going to go to the medicine cupboard and find you a couple of those sleeping pills I think we’ve still got. And, finally, you will go to bed, however early it is, and you’ll have a long, long restorative sleep.’
*
Still blurrily affected next morning by a night of dreadful dreams, Harriet seemed only to half-hear the Scots’ voice coming from the far side of the wide desk.
‘Very well, Superintendent,’ it pronounced, ‘I can’t say that last night you provided exactly what I had hoped to hear. But I can well understand how it burst out. If those people in television stopped for even a moment to think what they were doing … However, they don’t, and we must live with the results. So, let me say, I agreed with every word I heard. And, let me add, that I forbid you to tell any soul beyond these four walls that I said so. A senior police officer cannot go mouthing off with his any and every opinion. That sort of conduct can be left to officers stepping out of a courtroom after they’ve secured a conviction and telling the world how evil the man or woman is who’s just been put away. And they wouldn’t do that if I had my way.’
Harriet gave the man opposite, solidly seated there in his pale grey suit, plain blue tie, white shirt with its thin blue stripe, a quiet smile of relief, and of gratitude.
‘But,’ he went on unbendingly, ‘we’ll say no more about that. I’ve something else to put to you. Something altogether different.’
Better adjusted now to his hanging-in-air pauses, Harriet allowed half a second to go by, and then produced her ‘Yes, sir?’
But she still was not to get a reply.
‘Aye,’ it came eventually, and heavily.
Another pause. But a much shorter one.
‘Now, Harriet, you know well what pressure the whole of Greater Birchester Police is under. Every man and woman on the alert, as a prime duty, for any sign that we’re going to be made into another Hasselburg. You’ll know about that as much as anyone, with all you’ve been doing these past weeks. And don’t think your efforts have gone without recognition. Still, that’s by-the-by. What I have to tell you … What I have to ask you, despite the trouble you’re in, is whether you’re fit to be tasked, here and now, with something else, something altogether more like active police work?’
