Victory was sweet release but for Gifford nothing would ever be the same again. ‘Politicians,’ he wrote, ‘blame war on events. They say it’s diplomacy by other means. They say it’s something you get into when everything else has failed. That’s maybe true but it begs a couple of questions. The first is about war itself. War is the real enemy. It breaks you inside. It takes your pity away. In a single night we became old men, changed forever. If you bothered to look hard enough, you could see it when we got back home. All the flags, and the bands, and the banners, and the cheering, what was all that about? Us? Where we’d been? What we’d done? What we’d seen? Was that why people were celebrating? War is a conjuring trick. It depends on keeping your mouth shut afterwards, on not giving the game away, on maintaining the illusion. The illusion is simple. It says that it’s somehow honourable and necessary to deprive a mother of her son, a wife of her husband, a child of its father. But it isn’t. It’s none of those things. It’s depraved and ugly, and if you’ve been there and seen it and done it, it fucks you up for life. Nothing ever touches you, troubles you, ever again. You’re immune. You’re dead. You’re the creature from the Planet Zilch, an alien on earth, forever …’
Andy Gifford’s book was short, no more than 120 pages, and Kingdom was reading the postscript when the outskirts of Belfast appeared through a tear in the clouds and the captain announced the final approach to Aldergrove airport. Kingdom reached for his seat belt, not realising that it was still fastened from take-off, his eyes returning to the book. After the war was over, the defeated Argentinians were corralled on Stanley airfield. Soon afterwards, they were marched onto two civilian ships for the 400-mile crossing to Argentina. One of the prisoners, a young conscript, was stopped and searched. In his rucksack, in pieces, were the week-old remains of his brother. He was taking him home. To be buried. Kingdom shut his eyes as the aircraft bumped down through the cloud. This incident had evidently become instant legend. On the voyage back to Ascension, the paras had sung about it. ‘Pack up your brother in your old kit bag,’ went the chant, ‘and smile, smile, smile …’
The major from Bessbrook that Allder had mentioned was waiting for Kingdom at the airport. He said his name was Stanton. The driver beside him took Kingdom’s bag and they walked straight out to the car park. Stanton, thought Kingdom, had an old man’s face. He couldn’t have been more than thirty, probably less, but life seemed already to have walled him in. Sitting in the back of the unmarked Cavalier, Kingdom asked him how much he knew about Annie’s death.
‘Bits and pieces,’ he said, ‘not the whole story.’
‘What does that mean?’
Stanton didn’t answer, lifting a hand as they swept out through the security checkpoint. Finally he turned round in the seat, looking at Kingdom over the headrest. He had terrible skin, cratered with the burnt-out remains of a savage acne attack.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘I understand you two were close.’
‘That wasn’t my question.’
‘I know but …’ He shrugged. ‘I’m still sorry.’
Kingdom nodded, sensing at once the man’s reluctance to talk. Allder, earlier, had warned him it would be this way. The thing had obviously been a gigantic fuck-up, and whatever had happened to Annie lay at the very middle of it. No one would say more than they had to. Kingdom’s job was simply identification. Nothing more.
Kingdom gazed out of the window. Annie occupied a shelf in the fridge in the mortuary at the Musgrave Park Hospital. That’s where they were going now. Afterwards, as Stanton had tactfully put it, there’d be the option of lunch and maybe, just maybe, a chat. Then the ride back to Aldergrove, and another ninety minutes or so in the company of Andy Gifford.
Kingdom thought about him now. He’d called the book Enemy Territory. It was an exact phrase. It cropped up time and time again. It referred not just to the looming shadows of Mount Longdon, but also to the world to which Gifford and his mates had returned. Another book, authored by a fellow-Para, had contained allegations that Argentinian prisoners had been slaughtered in cold blood after the battle. These allegations were now being investigated by Scotland Yard. Conceivably, if the inquiry ran its course, ex-paratroopers could find themselves on trial for murder. It was a prospect that had, according to Gifford, reduced the men who’d fought there to helpless laughter. But there was a serious point to be made as well. ‘They’d loved the headlines, those politicians,’ Gifford had written, ‘and the victory parades, and all the stuff on television, but they’d never wanted to pick up the bill. So we got it instead. Once by going to war, and again by being wicked enough to kill the enemy. “Blood? You spilled blood? Oh my God … arrest that man at once!”’
Enemy territory. Kingdom sat back as the motorway in from the airport unrolled before them. He’d already been onto some of his Belfast police contacts, phoning a series of unlisted numbers at RUC headquarters at Knock. He’d left a lot of goodwill behind him after his year in the city but none of the men he’d talked to could help him about Annie. Her body had been found wrapped in black polythene in the back of a car on a country road down near the border. There was evidence that the car had been abandoned in a hurry. There was a can of petrol on the back seat and an unprimed grenade. The grenade had been traced to a consignment listed as stolen from an Irish Army depot across the border. The car, too, had been stolen, this time from a quiet street near the university. But that, regretfully, was about the sum of it. The body had been retained by the British Army. Further inquiries were in the hands of the Director of Intelligence at Stormont Castle. The body, subject to confirmation, belonged to one of the British security agencies. The investigation, therefore, was a strictly family affair.
The outskirts of Belfast appeared, the tower blocks veiled in drifting rain. Kingdom stirred. Since Allder had given him the news, he’d been trying to piece together Annie’s last known movements.
‘She must have been over for a meet,’ he said, ‘that night.’
Stanton didn’t bother to turn round this time. ‘So I understand.’
‘Somewhere in the city? Belfast somewhere?’
Stanton didn’t say anything. Kingdom asked the question again.
‘I’m afraid I don’t know,’ Stanton said at last, ‘I’ve not seen the file.’
‘Would that be the Sabbathman file?’
‘The what?’
‘Sabbathman? Our serial killer?’
Stanton shook his head. ‘I’m afraid I can’t help you.’
‘Can’t? Or won’t?’
Kingdom waited for an answer, knowing already that there wouldn’t be one. Finally he sat back, not bothering to hide his contempt.
‘Forget it,’ he said, ‘I’m sorry I asked.’
The hospital was still being repaired after a successful IRA bomb attack months earlier. They parked outside the military wing and went straight down to the mortuary. In an outer office, a woman in a white coat sat behind a metal desk. The in-tray was piled high with paperwork and on top lay a pair of white latex gloves. Kingdom couldn’t take his eyes off them.
‘Dr Tomlinson,’ Stanton said, doing the introductions, ‘our pathologist.’
The woman stood up and offered Kingdom a limp handshake. She smelled of bleach.
‘I’m afraid this won’t be pleasant,’ she said at once, ‘I apologise in advance.’
‘Not your fault,’ Kingdom said automatically, his eyes going back to the gloves.
The doctor took him through to a long white room adjoining the theatre where she performed post-mortems. Everything was tiled except for a bank of fridges along one wall. The smell of bleach was stronger, despite the steady hum of the big extractor fans recessed in the ceiling. The pathologist paused a moment, explaining that Annie had been dead a couple of days before the body had been found.
Kingdom caught the drift at once. ‘You mean she’s …’ He shrugged. ‘Gone off?’
‘Decomposing.’ The doctor nodded. ‘We’re thinking central heating. Wh
erever she was kept must have been pretty warm. You’ll appreciate it isn’t easy to be precise about these things but, well …’ She offered Kingdom a tight little smile. ‘You’d better see for yourself.’
Kingdom nodded, glancing at Stanton. The legal position had begun to bother him. ‘Say it’s her,’ he began, ‘who do I tell?’
‘Me.’
‘Is that enough?’ Kingdom frowned. ‘Isn’t there a procedure here? A formal statement? Something for me to sign?’
Stanton and the pathologist exchanged glances. Then the pathologist walked across to the bank of fridges and opened a door at the end. The fridge was full of bodies wrapped in white plastic shrouds. The runners squealed as she pulled out a tray near the bottom. Kingdom looked down at it. Annie’s parcel was much smaller than the rest.
The pathologist glanced up at him. She’d produced a pair of scissors from the top pocket of her coat.
‘OK?’
Kingdom nodded. Last night, for the first time in months, he hadn’t had a drink. Nothing would help, he’d told himself, not when it came to this. The pathologist bent to the tray again and began to snip the tapes securing the parcel. Then she unwrapped it, stepping back. The smell bubbled up towards them and Kingdom heard a shuffle of footsteps behind him as Stanton turned away. The pathologist was still looking at Kingdom, an almost forensic interest in his reaction.
Kingdom took his time. The body had no head. The hands and feet had gone too, hack-sawed off, but there was no mistaking the rest. Kingdom knelt quickly beside the tray. This was what gangsters did, he thought. Remove every trace of identity, every fingerprint, every tooth, every feature, until nothing remained but a bloated torso and the stench of death.
Kingdom looked up at the doctor, indicating a series of brown marks across Annie’s chest. The marks all intersected at broadly the same point, although bits of the tiny rose tattoo that Annie kept between her breasts were still visible.
‘What are they?’ he asked.
‘Burns.’
‘Before or after?’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘Was she dead or alive,’ he nodded at the marks, ‘when they did that?’
The pathologist, for the first time, looked uncomfortable. ‘It’s hard to be–’
Kingdom was on his feet again, his face so close to the pathologist’s that he could see the contact lenses swimming in her eyes. ‘A straight answer,’ he said softly, ‘please.’
The pathologist stared at him for a moment or two, then glanced at Annie’s remains. The smell was overpowering now, the sweet cheesiness of decomposition.
‘Before,’ she muttered, ‘just.’
Kingdom sat in a bar in Great Victoria Street. Two women were comparing divorces in a cubicle near the window. Kingdom watched them, emptying his second pint of Guinness, trying to sluice away the memory of the last couple of hours, but every time he lifted the glass to his lips, the smell of the mortuary returned. He’d been to the lavatory twice already, soaping his hands under the scalding water, but the foulness seemed to have penetrated his very flesh. Once they’d returned Annie to the fridge, he’d found Stanton on the phone in the pathologist’s office. Kingdom had stayed long enough to confirm that the body was Annie’s and to ask about the funeral. The remains were evidently being airfreighted to London. Arrangements for whatever happened thereafter was obviously in the hands of relatives.
Kingdom had been standing in the open doorway. ‘What relatives?’
‘Her parents, I imagine …’ Stanton had tried to soften his awkwardness. ‘And people like your good self.’
After his second pint, Kingdom went to the telephone. He’d used this pub regularly during his time in Belfast and he knew the phone was on a shelf beside the Streetfighter II console. While he waited for Allder to answer, his fingers found the Fire and Move buttons and the phrase came back to him yet again. Enemy territory, he thought, Annie had strayed into enemy territory. And ended up in pieces.
Allder’s secretary plugged the call through at once. ‘Well?’ he asked.
‘It’s her. Definitely.’
Allder said he was very sorry. Then he began to talk about Dublin but Kingdom interrupted. Until he heard the sound of his own voice, he didn’t realise how angry he was.
‘They won’t talk about it,’ he was telling Allder, ‘they won’t say a word, not a fucking word. Not where it happened, where she was going, what she was up to, who she was with, not a fucking dicky bird.’
‘Who did you ask?’
‘The guy who met me, the one they sent to the airport. He knows. I know he knows. And he knows I know he knows. But I might as well have been some punter off the street …’ He paused, letting the anger drain out of him, shaking his head. ‘Is this war, or what?’ he said at last. ‘Only it might be helpful to fucking know.’
‘War,’ he heard Allder saying, ‘definitely war.’
‘Us? Us and Five? Us and Five and the Army people? Us and the rest of the fucking universe? Only from where I sit–’
‘I don’t know,’ Allder said quickly, ‘but it’s getting clearer.’
‘Yeah? Tell me about it.’
‘I will, but listen. I’ve been talking to our friends in Dublin. The Special Branch people in Harcourt Terrace. The ones I mentioned before, the ones who wanted me to go over when the Fishguard thing blew up.’
‘Yeah?’ Kingdom couldn’t wrench his mind away from the mortuary. The tattoo, he kept thinking, Annie’s precious rose. How many times had he touched it? Kissed it? How many times had she offered it to him, enfolding him between her breasts, moulding herself to him? Grief, real grief, smelled of body oil lightly tainted with bleach. He shuddered, hearing Allder again. ‘His name’s Dermot Reilly,’ he was saying, ‘He met Annie last week. Did she mention a photo at all?’
‘What?’
‘A photo? Blokes at some piss-up or other?’
‘No.’ Kingdom shook his head, trying to concentrate. ‘Nothing like that. She said she’d been to Dublin, though. Before she went off.’
‘Went off where?’
‘Fuck knows. She took a …’
Kingdom stopped in mid-sentence. The relays in his brain weren’t working too well. The fuseboard kept tripping out, thoughts forming and re-forming, memories getting muddled up, no coherent pattern emerging, no sense. But this was different. Allder was onto something. The cab company. The lot who’d sent a car for Annie. They’d have records, dockets, a print-out of some description. He frowned, thinking hard now, letting Allder prattle on in the background, something else about Dermot Reilly. Annie had phoned the cab company from the flat while he’d been in the bedroom. He remembered her closing the bedroom door with her foot when it came to her giving these guys the address where she wanted to go. They were a local firm. He’d seen the logo on the car door when he’d acknowledged her farewell wave from the front bedroom window. Kingston Cabs? Kingston Mini-cabs? Kingston something. He was sure of it.
Allder was still talking. ‘You get that?’ he said, ‘Harcourt Terrace? Six-thirty? Dermot Reilly?’
Kingdom took the train to Dublin. He’d phoned the Irishman from Belfast. He’d explained about the train and Reilly had given him the name of a bar in O’Connell Street. The service from Belfast was often late. He’d be sat at a table in the back of the bar. If Kingdom had nothing better to do then they might as well make a night of it. He was sorry, he added, about Annie. He’d got the gist of it from Allder.
Reilly was right about the train. It was over an hour late and it was nearly eight o’clock before Kingdom found the bar. It was crowded with drinkers, a mix of businessmen and students, and Kingdom picked his way between them, looking for the table beneath the Murphy’s calendar that Reilly had described. For the first time that day, it occurred to him that he’d had nothing to eat.
Reilly was on his feet at once as Kingdom emerged from the scrum of drinkers round the bar. He leaned across the table, extending a hand, a rumpled figure, younger than Kingd
om had expected, with thick black curly hair and a ruddy smile. Sitting opposite was an older woman, thin, slightly dessicated, wearing a smart tweed jacket with a plaid bow tie. Reilly introduced her as Siobhan, no surname, disappearing to the bar to buy a round of drinks.
Kingdom sat down, aware of the woman watching him. At her elbow was the remains of what looked like an orange juice. Around her neck was a neat gold crucifix. After a while, she leaned forward and Kingdom realised that she was even older than he’d first imagined. Late fifties, he thought. Easily.
‘Bless you,’ she said.
Kingdom thanked her for the thought, aware of her hands on his. Her hands were warm and dry, an inexplicable comfort. Kingdom looked up. Reilly had returned with the drinks. He gave Kingdom a tumbler of Jamieson’s, explaining that the Guinness would take a while to settle. Then he nodded at the woman.
‘We have a little team over here in Dublin. You might have heard. Keeps an eye on the fellas from MI5.’ He smiled. ‘Siobhan runs it.’
They stayed in the pub all evening. Kingdom did most of the talking, progressively detached from any real sense of time or place, gladder than he could say to have the company of strangers. He owed these people no apologies. They had no prior ties. He could start from square one, and all they need contribute was patience and a listening ear.
He felt, he said at the outset, like a refugee. He had no secrets to trade, no gossip even, just an overwhelming sense of bewilderment, a bottomless grief that threatened to swamp his little boat entirely. Dermot, he knew, had met Annie. Allder had told him so. Maybe he’d had a drink or two with her, spent the evening together, shared one or two laughs, glimpsed the kind of person she could be. Given all that, he’d maybe understand. And if he understood, then maybe he could also explain a thing or two. Like where had she gone? And what had she been up to? And why, please God, hadn’t someone been there to protect her?
Dermot Reilly, and the woman he called Siobhan, listened to Kingdom, offering sympathy and a steady supply of Guinness. Towards the end of the evening, when Kingdom was trying to work out why he still felt so sober, why so much alcohol had made so little impression, Dermot began to steer the conversation in a new direction, tossing in bits of information, watching to see what Kingdom made of them. MI5 had become a major force, he said, in the Republic. Using the usual mix of blackmail and hard cash, they’d managed to penetrate both the IRA and Sinn Fein. MI5 had always maintained a presence at the British Embassy at Ballsbridge, the so-called ‘Irish station’, but this latest operation was run directly from London and was different in scale to anything they’d mounted before. It was obvious, said Dermot, that they were desperate for trophies and it had come as no surprise that the first Brit to appear after the Fishguard debacle had been from Five.
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