Thunder in the Blood

by Hurley, Graham

  The guts of the story concerned the involvement of an MI5 agent who had the smuggling operation under surveillance and was actively helping to move the stuff into the UK. In its own right, this was startling enough, but what gave it (in Wesley’s phrase) ‘legs’ was the fact that profits from the drug runs were going, via a series of laundering operations through Kilburn betting shops, to the IRA High Command in Dublin. This, of course, was why MI5 had got involved in the first place, but this kind of logic wouldn’t, Wesley felt, be immediately obvious to the Great British Public. Instead, they’d doubtless see it as yet another example of the spooks and the criminals working hand in hand.

  When he got back from Ireland, the headache got worse. Crouched over the electric fire in his bedroom, the typewriter on a tray on his knees, he began to shiver. He wrapped himself in a dressing gown. Over the dressing gown he put on an anorak. For the best part of a day, sensing the shadow at his door, he typed and typed, checking and re-checking his notes, getting down what he could and sending it by courier to Aldridge with a brief note and a list of expenses.

  That night, for the first time ever, he began to sweat. He’d read about the sweats that often accompany HIV. They didn’t come as a surprise, but as the fever took a real grip and the pile of sodden T-shirts grew on the floor at his bedside, Wesley began to panic.

  By this time, he’d taken a lover, a quiet, gentle twenty-three-year-old called Mark. Mark was an aspiring actor, and, like Wesley, HIV positive. He features again in this story and I’ve talked to him at length about what happened next. His recall is perfect, largely because he was sure that one day the same thing would happen to him.

  Mark came looking for Wesley three days after the fever began. He found him exhausted, curled under a pile of blankets, his knees to his chin, shuddering with cold. The mattress beneath his body was soaking wet. The path to the lavatory was strewn with paper cups. There was a terrible smell. Mark did what he could, helping Wesley out of bed, propping him up on a chair, changing the sheets, turning the mattress, opening the windows, filling the place with air freshener. When the doctor came, he retreated to the kitchen, making another pot of Wesley’s favourite herbal tea, watching through the half-open door while the doctor ran a stethoscope over Wesley’s chest. In three days, he seemed to have shrunk. Weight, in Mark’s phrase, had just fallen off him. Chalk-white, wild-eyed, still shivering with cold, he crouched in the chair, his hands pushed into his crutch, staring at the carpet while the doctor went tap-tap across his chest, up over his shoulder and down his back.

  The doctor sent him to hospital. Within an hour he was occupying a bed at St Mary’s, Paddington. By now, he’d lost all track of time. Dimly aware of the activity around him – nurses taking blood samples, Mark’s face at the foot of the bed, two visits to the X-ray department – Wesley surrendered to the fever. With his temperature nudging 103°, he was quite certain he was fighting for his life. His head was bursting. His stomach felt hot and raw. There wasn’t an inch of his body that hadn’t been scorched by this monstrous, implacable fever.

  He stayed at St Mary’s for nearly a month. After a week or so, the antibiotics began to get the upper hand. His temperature fell, he was able to keep liquids down and as the fever gradually receded he was left with a feeling of total exhaustion. He slept a great deal, sweating again when his temperature rose at night, then sinking into a kind of half-life, detached from his surroundings, monosyllabic, acknowledging visitors with a weak handshake and a glassy smile.

  One of the visitors was his mother, a small, timid woman of whom he saw very little. She lived out on the coast in Essex, and Wesley had never told her a word about his HIV. Mark, alarmed enough to phone her, had been less than specific and when she arrived, the consultant obliged Wesley with a vague reference to viral pneumonia. She stayed for half an hour, her woollen gloves folded on her lap, telling Wesley how terrible the trains were.

  Another visitor was Aldridge. He sat by the bed for the best part of an afternoon, reviewing the prospects for Wesley’s Irish drugs story, trying to mask how shocked he felt, what a difference a week could make to someone he thought he knew well. At the end of the visit, the nurses wheeling the screens into place around the bed, he bent quickly to Wesley’s ear and promised to return as soon as he could, but Wesley reached up, caught a fold of his jacket and shook his head. He didn’t want Aldridge to see him this way. He’d get better, quicker, on his own. Time, he muttered as Aldridge turned away. Just give me a bit of time.

  The tests, at first, revealed nothing. The consultant, aware of Wesley’s HIV, told him that it could be any of a dozen infections. His immune system wasn’t working too well. Some bug, resident or otherwise, had got the upper hand for a while. Wesley thought about it, the hot dark spaces of his body crawling with infection. He felt, he said, a sense of betrayal. Not by fate. Not by the guy in New York. But by the feeble chemistry of his own system. Sitting in a bath in the tiny tiled room at the end of the ward, he looked down at his pale flesh, astonished at how thin he’d become. As he tried to shave, his eyes followed the razor in the mirror, exploring unfamiliar territory, the skin tauter, thinner. Even the bone beneath, he told me later, felt raw to the touch.

  After the first bout of fever came the depression. Wesley lay in the bed, quite still, a needle in his arm dripping yet more antibiotics. When the trolleys from the kitchen appeared, clattering down the ward, he shut his eyes and turned his head into the pillow. The smell of food, any food, made him want to vomit and he tried to visualize other things, scenes from his recent trip to Ireland, the shape of a fold of land, the twists and turns of a particular conversation, peat smoke shredding in the wind, fat little parcels of cloud bellying in from the Atlantic. Once or twice he tried to read, picking up a paper, letting his eyes wander down the page, unable, for the first time in his life, to make sense of any of it. This failure of concentration compounded the physical hurt, and by the tenth day he was wondering whether there was any point in carrying on. Part of him, an old man already, had had enough. But there was another part, too, that was still angry, still hurt, still determined to get better.

  A week later, the doctors no wiser, the fever returned and with it came yet more tests. Semi-delirious, Wesley tried to concentrate on counting the tiles in the ceiling while the nurse coated his upper body in KY jelly and a technician arrived with an ultrasound scanner. The pictures of his spleen and liver, though, revealed nothing, so the consultant decided to do a liver biopsy, half a syringe of local anaesthetic and two fine wires inserted through the body wall while Wesley lay immobile, on his side, forbidden to move for hour after hour. The following day, still in the dark, they wheeled him away for a CT scan, inching his body through a big white plastic arch, building up a 3D picture of his stomach. Back in bed, surrounded by bottles of Badoit, Wesley felt worse than ever. Every bit of him hurt. The bits that touched the pillow hurt. The bits beneath the sheet hurt. The bits in contact with the mattress hurt. Even the soles of his feet hurt. Unable to sleep, he simply lay there, thinking about the next hour, and the hour after that, and all he felt was dread.

  Next morning, the consultant arrived. It was 8 July. He was smiling broadly. The CT scan had caught the offending bug. Wesley had TB of the stomach. Now they could set to work and make him better.

  And they did. Within ten days, still very weak, Wesley left the hospital with Mark and took a taxi back to Stoke Newington. Waiting for him there, a nice touch, was a letter Aldridge had sent by courier that same afternoon. In it he promised Wesley that his job was safe for as long as he wanted it and that he should take his time getting better. Only at the end of the letter did he mention the Irish story. The piece, he wrote, was sensational. Wesley had done a fine job. But certain aspects had proved especially sensitive and after a great deal of thought Aldridge had decided not to run it. Nothing personal. Just an old-fashioned editorial decision he hoped he’d understand. Wesley didn’t understand, but what was more important was the realization that, ju
st now, he didn’t much care. Mark, coming in from the kitchen with yet more soup, had watched the letter flutter to the floor. Years later, he still remembers the expression on Wesley’s face: pure indifference, a residue of the fever that had very nearly killed him.

  My own career, meanwhile, had ground to a halt. By now, I’d been at Curzon House for well over a year. The novelty had gone, the challenge had worn off and I’d had more than enough time to ask myself some of the harder questions. One or two of them had to do with a growing sense of claustrophobia. The offices themselves were dull and airless. No one ever seemed to laugh. There was no spark, or sense of real involvement. My colleagues, most of them, were obsessed by status and petty slights. My superiors were largely invisible. And away from the building, out in the real world where the product was gathered and spent, there was only a mysterious void. I’d said yes, all those months ago, because I thought I could contribute. Now, I spent my working life in front of a computer screen, a million miles from what I fondly thought of as the action.

  MI5 has a form for moods like these. It’s called an HR7. You fill it in and send it upstairs. After a while, if you’re lucky, they ask to see you. In my case, it was autumn before the summons came, a peremptory phone call telling me to report to an office on the fourth floor. I recognized the voice at once. It was a voice you didn’t forget: flat South London vowels half-buried under a thin, nasal whine. It belonged to the younger of the two men I’d met with Rory at the Soho restaurant, the one who’d subsequently reappeared at my formal interview. Since then, I’d seen him perhaps half a dozen times, awkward meetings in lifts or the central lobby, a nod and a grunt and a passing reference to the weather, nothing I could dignify with the word ‘conversation’. The only thing I really knew about him was his name, Eric Stollmann, and that fact that he’d come to us a couple of years back from Customs and Excise.

  The latter was occasionally a subject of canteen gossip. Customs and Excise were well known as zealots, keen-eyed shock-troop types with terrible complexions and inner-city educations and absolutely no sense of humour. As far as I could judge, Stollmann was the perfect example of all three. Quite why he’d transferred his affections to our little brotherhood no one seemed to know, but he was universally mistrusted, not least because no one had a clue what he did.

  I knocked twice on his office door and stepped in. He was sitting behind a desk with his back to the window. The sun, low, cast a long shadow over the blotter. He was toying with a paper clip, thin bony fingers, bitten nails. For the first time ever, he smiled.

  ‘Long time,’ he mumbled, ‘no see.’

  We talked for nearly an hour. I remember everything about the conversation because – to be frank – it was the first time I’d got any real sense out of any of my superiors. He began by saying he was sorry. My induction had taken rather longer than had been planned, more the firm’s fault than mine. Unexpected resignations in Registry had left the department undermanned. In consequence, I’d been obliged to backfill. Under the circumstances, the view was that I’d done rather well. A series of source reports I’d analysed on certain developments in Northern Ireland had attracted a great deal of attention. I obviously had a knack for the work. I could recognize what was important and what was rubbish. I had the intellectual courage not to qualify my conclusions. I was bright and forthright and I obviously wasn’t frightened of hard work. One of the things he wanted to say, he muttered, was thank you.

  By this time, as you might imagine, I’d rather warmed to the man. With the blinds down on the window behind him, shielding me from the sun, I had the opportunity to take a real look. He was certainly young – I guessed maybe early thirties – but the tightly cropped hair was beginning to grey at the temples, and his face was hollow with fatigue. Physically, he was medium height, thin, with a white, indoor face and coal-black eyes. He was carefully dressed – blue shirt, subtly striped, nicely cut suit, quietly original tie – and there were no rings on his fingers. The desk, likewise, was virtually bare – blotter, wire basket, telephone, internal directory, two cheap Biros in a plain white mug – and it somehow matched the impression I was beginning to form about the man himself. It looked spartan. It spoke of efficiency, hard work and long hours. Empty of photographs or ornament, it made no concessions to a life outside.

  After a while, he enquired whether I’d like tea. I asked for coffee instead and he grunted, smiling at my usual obduracy, lifting the phone. When he put it down, he opened a drawer and took out a file. It was a red file. Red files, at Curzon House, are subject to internal restrictions. He slid it across to me.

  ‘Read it,’ he said. ‘I’ve got some biscuits somewhere.’

  I opened the file. Inside was a thin sheaf of source reports. The numbers on the tops of the pages weren’t consecutive. I was only getting part of the story. I read the first report. It quoted at length from a letter which had been received a week and a half earlier. It was on House of Commons notepaper and signed by an MP called Lawrence Priddy whose name I recognized from the papers. I glanced up.

  ‘Tory? Somewhere in the West Midlands?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  I nodded, returning to the file. Priddy had received a visit from a constituent, a woman called Beth Alloway. She’d come, in strictest confidence, because she was worried about her husband. Clive Alloway was a businessman. He ran a small consultancy in the engineering field. Priddy had evidently met him on a number of occasions and described him in the letter as ‘a minor player’.

  There was a tap on the door and the coffees arrived. I began to close the file but Stollmann signalled for me to read on. I did so, dunking the first of his stale digestives in the thin black liquid, committing the information to memory, brick by brick, the way I’d been taught. Clive Alloway sold high-tech tooling, much of it for export. In consequence, he spent a great deal of time abroad, winning orders, doing deals, troubleshooting hiccups. For the last year or so he’d been in Iraq a lot, often for weeks at a time. In ways that only a wife can recognize, these trips appeared to have changed him. He’d become secretive, evasive. He wasn’t sleeping well at nights. Strange calls on the house phone had begun to disturb him.

  Beth Alloway had answered one or two of these calls herself when her husband wasn’t at home and it had always been a foreign voice at the other end, polite enough but never offering a name or a number for a return call. This had made her wonder a bit but then, very recently, she’d been readying one of his jackets for the dry cleaners and she’d found a plain brown envelope, unsealed, in one of the pockets. Inside the envelope was a thick wad of fifty-pound notes. She’d counted them. They came to £2450. Astonished that he should be carrying so large a sum when she’d been told repeatedly that times were hard, she’d confronted her husband with the money, wanting to know more, wanting to know where it had come from, wanting to find out what it was that had changed him so much. Brusque and defensive, he’d dismissed her questions, demanding the money back, accusing her of ‘meddling’. There were some things, he told her, he simply couldn’t discuss. Not with her. And not with anyone else.

  After some thought, Beth Alloway had decided to search the house. Under the desk in her husband’s tiny office she’d noticed a loose floorboard. Under the floorboard she’d found a revolver. With the gun was a box of bullets. She’d put them both back and not told her husband, but she’d known then that she needed help. Going to colleagues would have been disloyal. A psychiatrist, though tempting, would simply enrage him. So in the end, half convinced she already knew the answer, she’d put the question to her local MP, a man whom her husband seemed to count as a personal friend. What was happening to Clive? Why was he going off his head? Who was getting at him?

  I looked up. Stollmann was sipping his coffee, watching me over the cup.

  ‘Well?’ I said. ‘Who is getting at him?’

  ‘We are. And the Iraqis.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because he’s selling them the goodies they’re after.’
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  ‘What goodies?’

  ‘Arms-making equipment. Lathes. Computers. State of the art stuff. The kind of gear they need just now.’

  I nodded, fingering the next report in the file. Iraq was still at war with Iran. They’d been at it for years and they were getting through a lot of everything: shells, mines, military hardware of every description. Much of the equipment had once come from the Soviets, but now the Iraqis wanted to make it for themselves. For that, they needed the right tooling, and you didn’t have to have a business degree to see the openings for men like Clive Alloway. I frowned.

  ‘I thought it was illegal,’ I said, ‘exporting lethal equipment to Iraq? I thought we’d given up all that? I thought there was an embargo?’

  ‘There is.’

  ‘Then who gave this guy the go-ahead?’

  ‘The DTI.’

  ‘But aren’t they supposed to police it? Issue the licences? Make sure everyone stays in line?’

  ‘Yes.’ Stollmann nodded. ‘Of course they are.’

  I gazed at him. Around Whitehall, the Department of Trade and Industry had a reputation for a certain maverick independence, though I wasn’t aware it extended to sanctions-busting.

  ‘They really let him get on with it?’ I said. ‘Help the Iraqis on their way? Despite all the other guff?’

  Stollmann didn’t answer for a moment. Then he shrugged. ‘That’s not the point,’ he said. ‘Licences are only as good as what you put on them. It’s a question of how you phrase it. You can stretch and bend these things. Call the stuff dual-use. Say you’re building tractor parts. Happens all the time.’