‘What happened?’ he said.
The Brigadier looked across at him. He’d never had much time for civil servants, though he’d worked with Davidson for more than a year now, and he was wary of the man. He pulled down a map on a roller on the wall. Goodman had the impression it was a movement he practised regularly. It gave him certain rights of ownership. His city. His men. His problem.
‘One of the local kids,’ he said briskly, ‘tried to get across the creek.’ The Brigadier turned towards the map and tapped a section of the creek towards the east of the city. ‘Here.’ He paused, the ruler moved west, no more than an inch or two. ‘I had patrols here …’ the ruler moved west again, ‘and here. Full daylight. Perfectly visible.’
‘And?’
The Brigadier frowned, not used to direct questions.
‘Yellow card procedures,’ he said. ‘You know the drill.’
‘Were your men in danger?’
The Brigadier hesitated, reluctant to commit himself, the old conflict, loyalty versus the truth. Goodman wondered when he’d start using the term ‘enemy’.
‘Yes,’ he said at last, ‘in their judgement, yes.’
‘How?’
‘The boy was armed.’
‘What with?’
‘This.’
The Brigadier lifted a fold of newspaper on his desk, revealing a small, black pistol. There was mud on the barrel. He offered it to Davidson. Davidson looked at it, but didn’t pick it up.
‘It’s a starting pistol,’ he said, ‘fires blanks.’
‘My men didn’t know that.’
‘Ah …’ Davidson nodded. ‘Live by the gun…’
‘Exactly.’
Goodman walked across to the window and gazed out, listening to the Brigadier. The boy had come from a tower block of council flats in the very middle of the city. His mother, and her common-law husband, had already held an impromptu press conference. There had not been many journalists there, but the activists were out in force. For days they’d been looking for a handle on the situation, a stick to beat the authorities with, and now they’d found it. Jason Duffy. Fifteen years old. Killed in action. The city’s first martyr. The rioting was still sporadic but the Brigadier’s men were thin on the ground, and the situation was fast getting out of control. Goodman smiled grimly, remembering Davidson’s earlier comments about the lack of public reaction, how easy it had all been. He walked to the desk and picked up the gun. He looked at it a moment, thoughtful, and then turned to the Brigadier.
‘If I wanted to talk to the boy’s parents,’ he said, ‘how many men could you spare?’
The Brigadier stared at him.
‘What?’ he said.
Goodman repeated the question, glancing across at Davidson for support. Davidson remained impassive. The Brigadier shrugged.
‘Seven,’ he said, ‘eight at the most.’ He paused. ‘Are you serious?’
‘Perfectly.’
‘Is that an order?’
Goodman looked at him, at Davidson.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘It is.’
Annie was woken up by the telephone. She rubbed her eyes and hinged upright on the sofa, and got to her feet. She was nearly at the telephone when she realized that her head didn’t hurt any more, just ached, a dull, muted, background feeling, like an underscored bass note in a symphony. She picked up the telephone, wondering how to announce herself. She recognized Bullock’s voice at once.
‘Annie?’ he said.
‘Me,’ she agreed.
‘How are you?’
‘Much better.’
‘Listen. There’s been a shooting. Somewhere along the creek. Army job. I’m getting phone calls. Have you got a pen?’
Annie nodded, reaching for a biro from the bookcase.
‘OK,’ she said.
‘The kid’s name’s Jason Duffy. His mother lives at 1804 Hudson House. That’s a big tower block near the library. She’s not on the phone.’
Annie frowned.
‘Jason Duffy,’ she confirmed, writing down the name. Her hand was shaking. ‘1804 Hudson House.’ She paused. ‘That all?’
There was silence on the other end of the phone. Then Bullock came back.
‘No,’ he said, ‘your friend Goodman.’
‘Yeah?’
‘Keep an eye open. He and the bloke from Whitehall have been up here again. I don’t think it’s as simple as it looks.’
‘What isn’t?’
‘The relationship between them.’ He paused. ‘The command set-up.’
‘No?’
‘No.’
There was another pause. Annie gazed down at the photo of the man on the swing, wondering whether to mention it, but Bullock didn’t give her the chance. She could hear the other phones ringing in the background.
‘Get what you can,’ he said briskly, ‘but be careful.’ The line went dead and Annie stood there for a moment or two wondering what, precisely, he’d meant about Goodman and Davidson. Not as simple as it looked?
She put the phone down and glanced at her watch. Nearly five o’clock. She ran quickly up to the bathroom, and soaped her face. Then she retrieved her leather jacket from the banister and made for the door. Only when she was on the pavement outside did she think about Gillespie’s camera. She hesitated for a moment, still searching for her car keys, then she went back into the house.
The Olympus with the big zoom lens was still in the holdall. She took it out, very carefully. It was evidently loaded with film, but the frame counter told her that the roll was fully exposed. She rewound the film, and opened the back of the camera, taking out the film and putting it to one side. There was more film in the holdall, and she loaded a roll of 400 ASA, fast enough to let her shoot interiors. Then she checked the light meter, adjusted the ASA ring, and slipped the camera over her shoulder.
The exposed roll of film lay on the bookcase where she’d left it. She looked at it for a long moment, knowing it probably contained the answer to the questions Gillespie refused to even acknowledge, questions about Goodman, the new Controller, the master of the little white lie. She wondered whether to take it, to put it in her pocket and simply walk away, but she knew that would stretch their relationship to breaking point, and she realized to her own surprise that she didn’t want that. She made for the door, then paused again, annoyed with herself, another hideous compromise, putting sentiment before principle, her feelings for Gillespie before the demands of the situation. She stood there, not knowing what to do, which way to turn, then she stepped back into the room, and cursed herself, picking up the exposed roll of film, and slipping it into her pocket. Her head was beginning to throb again, and she recognized the churning in her stomach. The fear had come back.
She drove north, towards the city centre, and the tallest of the council blocks. About a mile from Gillespie’s place, at the point where the new road system swept around the shopping area, she met the first of the police patrols, a stick of half a dozen men, helmets, visors, short wooden truncheons, and the big Perspex shields she recognized from Saltley and Brixton. Riot control, she thought, engaging gear again and pressing forward.
Hudson House lay a couple of hundred yards from the Civic Centre, an enormous Sixties tower block, an up-ended shoe box, slab-fronted and system built. Annie pulled into a lay-by, and walked the hundred yards across wasteland and builders’ rubble to the path that circled the estate. A largish crowd had gathered at the foot of the flats, and a man was haranguing them from a balcony four floors up.
Annie slipped the camera off her shoulder, and wound on the film to the first exposure. The man in the balcony was in full flood now, plenty of movement, both arms, one finger stabbing the air, driving home point after point. Once or twice the crowd cheered, but for the most part they were dour and sullen. One or two of the women were obviously drunk, screaming obscenities.
Annie lifted the camera and took a couple of shots of the man on the balcony. It was difficult to hear exactly what he was sa
ying but it obviously related to the shooting, an incident he twice described as ‘plain fucking murder’. This phrase drew spontaneous applause from the crowd, and Annie began to realize that events were rapidly getting out of control. Of the police, there was so far no sign.
She pushed forward through the crowd. What she needed, she knew, was five minutes alone with the parents. Only then would she start to put together the case she needed, start to assemble facts, make friends, forge relationships, earn herself a tight secure niche in their affections, ready for the day when it might suddenly all be over, and she could make the film that Bullock wanted. When that happened, scenes like these would already have become legendary, the stuff of public bar tirades, distorted beyond recognition. It was then, as a film maker, that she’d need the hard evidence, that precious handful of shots that would say it all, the faces, the grief, the hatred, expressions that no reenactment could ever recapture.
She emerged at the front of the crowd. Three large men blocked the door to the flats, young, ugly, local. Annie fumbled in her jacket and produced a press pass. She showed it to one of them. He had tattoos on his knuckles, and smelled of stale tobacco.
‘What’s that?’ he said.
‘Press pass.’
‘What do you want?’
‘A word.’ She nodded up at the flats. ‘With Mrs Duffy.’
He looked at her narrowly. He obviously hated the press.
‘You know they killed her nipper, don’t you?’
‘Who did?’
‘The Bill. The fucking Army. How do I know?’
She nodded. ‘Yeah,’ she said, ‘I’d heard. That’s why I’m here.’
‘She’s in a right state.’
‘I’m sure.’
There was a pause. Some of the youths at the back of the crowd had drifted across to the patch of wasteland and were picking up bits of rubble and were stoning passing cars. Totally random. Totally meaningless. Annie glanced up at the balcony, where the man was developing a nice line in incitement. ‘Fascists,’ he was saying, ‘deserve every fucking thing they get.’
Annie looked at the man with the tattoos.
‘Who’s he?’ she said, nodding up at the balcony.
‘That’s his brother,’ he said. ‘Young Billy.’ He sniffed. ‘He’s upset too. We’re all upset. Fucking upset.’
There was a sudden movement in the crowd, and the deep two-tone of a pair of powerful air horns. Over to the left, towards the city centre, was a car park. Into the car park drove a pair of Army Land-Rovers. Seven or eight troops jumped out. They carried rifles. They formed the tight end of a flying wedge. Behind them, in a dark suit, strode a figure that Annie recognized at once. Martin Goodman.
Annie lifted the camera and racked the image into focus. Martin Goodman was looking left and right, not stopping, still coming forward, committed to the protection of the troops up ahead. She tightened the shot on his face, seeing the surprise, and the shock, and the beginnings of fear, as the first chunks of rubble began to sail over the crowd and shatter on the concrete at his feet. The soldiers hesitated a moment, looking round, checking each other, Goodman, their line of retreat back to the Land-Rovers, but already the path was closing as the crowd surged around them.
Overhead, from the balcony, Billy Duffy was roaring now, urging them on, leaving the faces below in no doubt that here was their chance to get their own back, to redress the balance, to do the decent thing by little Jason and teach the pigs a lesson they’d never forget. Annie’s fingers trembled on the shutter release, shot after shot, as the first of the soldiers went down, blood pouring from an open wound in his face. She briefly glimpsed Goodman, hair flying, glasses smashed, trying to get to the soldier’s side, trying to calm things, pleading with the crowd to take a pace back, to show a little respect. But it was hopeless, and he knew it, the big empty face in the viewfinder, still struggling towards the fallen soldier, still trying to make amends. Annie took more shots, an instinctive admiration for the man, his folly, his blind courage, and suddenly there were bodies falling, as the first of the shots rang out, and women were screaming, men cursing, turning left and right, pack animals, trapped, not knowing where to run, not understanding how this carnival of violence, their due and proper revenge, had turned so suddenly into a nightmare.
The crowd began to stampede, away from the flats, away from the Land-Rovers, and as they flooded out across the open ground behind the flats, Annie glimpsed the helmeted line of police, squatting beside the path, amongst the clumps of tired shrubs, reloading their riot guns, and sending the long plastic baton rounds skeetering across the tarmac behind the fleeing mob.
Annie took more shots, the film nearly exhausted, then swung around again to the Land-Rovers. The injured soldier was lying on his face. Blood was pooling around his head. Goodman knelt beside him, staring down, utterly immobile. There was a wail of a siren, and a squeal of tyres, and a police Transit van drew up. The passenger door opened and an officer stepped out. Annie recognized the insignia of a Chief Superintendent on the shoulder of his jacket. He glanced around, hands on hips. The rubble. The broken glass. The injured soldier. Goodman. He shook his head, a sudden movement, raw anger. He walked quickly across to the soldier and knelt beside him, checking his pulse. He said something terse to Goodman, and then got up again, signalling to the driver of the van. The van began to move slowly forward. Goodman got to his feet, unsteady, and Annie watched, fascinated, as the police officer walked away. Annie began to raise the camera, one last shot, Goodman back on his knees, looking for his glasses, then she felt a pressure on her arm, the lightest of touches, polite, almost regretful. She lowered the camera slowly and looked around. A man stood beside her. Suit. Glasses. And that same faint smile. The face in the car. Davidson.
Seven
The briefing took barely half an hour. The Squadron Leader sat on the table at the front, taking them through the blow-ups, one after the other. The blow-ups were projected onto the wall behind him, the best of the line-scans from the afternoon’s radar recce flights. Black and white with a tinge of blue. Barely four hours old, they showed that nothing had changed: the same tank parks, hidden deep in the foothills of the Harz Mountains, the same tell-tale traces of field hospitals, and refuelling bowsers, and hastily camouflaged SAM-7 sites that circled the forward air bases the other side of the border. After the false dawn of Glasnost, the Russians were back in force, and it was a tribute to years of RAF training that none of the young men in the room was the least bit intimidated.
They’d seen the grey silhouettes a million times before, and they knew exactly what do about them: on which runways to plant the big deep-penetration cratering bombs, when to deploy the smaller anti-personnel cluster bombs, and exactly what circumstances should call for release of the nuclear-tipped WE177 free-fall bombs that would move the war into an entirely new phase. The job of these young pilots, should it come to it, would be to cause havoc behind the Soviet front line, halting the second wave of armour, and turning an invasion of NATO territory into a fifty-kilometre traffic-jam, a prime target for the short-range tactical nukes the British had so successfully kept out of the SNF talks. That they could achieve this end, none of them doubted. That they’d survive intact, was far less certain.
The Squadron Leader finished with the last of the blow-ups. The adjutant snapped on the lights. The two dozen or so men in the audience, G-suits wedged behind tight little desks, flying helmets on the floor beside their chairs, blinked in the harsh neon. Most of them had already flown two sorties that day, taking the sleek Jaguars, heavy with ordnance, to within kilometres of the border, probing the Soviet defences, helping to plot the major radar emissions, flying fast and low over the fields that lapped the barbed wire, and the watch towers that once again divided East from West. 450 knots at 500 feet converted most features into a blur, but sometimes, in one of the tight 4G turns, it was just possible to pick out the shirt-sleeved figure of a farmer below, cupping his hands over his ears, staring up at t
he plane, wondering whether it was really worth harvesting the crops around him.
The Squadron Leader called for a weather update, and while the Met. Officer chinagraphed fresh lines on his map, and traced the progress of the latest front, he studied the rows of watching faces. By and large, he was pleased with the way they’d coped, but there were one or two individuals who were beginning to look tired.
One in particular, a lad from the north called Craddock, was a real worry, and the Squadron Leader had begun to wonder about standing him down for a day or so. The boy flew number two to one of the squadron’s best pilots, and he knew that he was finding it increasingly difficult to match the other men in the air. The work load on Jaguar pilots was enormous, and ever since Craddock’s wife and baby had departed for the UK on one of the Gütersloh emergency trooping flights, the lad had been on edge. Only that morning, he’d been spotted alone on the airfield, head down, hands in pockets, walking slowly away from the Mess. The Adjutant had stopped his car, and offered him a lift, but the lad had shaken his head and said no thanks, and simply walked on. There’d been egg stains on his trousers, and his shoes needed a clean. Bad signs.
Now the Met. man finished his update, and the Squadron Leader brought the briefing to an end. The pilots pushed back their chairs, stretched, yawned, turning to each other, comparing notes. The squadron would shortly return to instant readiness. The men would be back in their cockpits within half an hour, lined up at the end of the runway, fully armed, fully fuelled, ready to go. Once airborne, each of them would listen out for the special code that would wheel the squadron east, towards the border. At that point, they’d be three-and-a-half minutes away from the thick red line that always ended every NATO exercise, the thick red line beyond which the world, so far, had chosen not to go.
The room began to empty, the pilots drifting away in twos and threes. Craddock was one of the last to leave. The Squadron Leader stopped him by the door.
‘OK, Barry?’ he said.
The young pilot looked up, surprised. The strain showed in his eyes. He’d not slept for three nights. He talked to his wife twice a day on the phone. And he couldn’t stop thinking about his tiny baby daughter, Emma-Louise.
Rules of Engagement Page 23
