Rules of Engagement

by Hurley, Graham

  ‘Fine, sir,’ he said, his voice quite dead, ‘fine, thanks.’

  Evans drove Goodman home. Goodman sat in the back, quite alone. His suit was torn, one shoulder ripped along the line of the stitching. His tie was askew, and there was blood on the front of his shirt. It was Davidson, in the end, who’d helped him away from the scene of the riot, found the remains of his glasses for him, assured him that the situation was, after all, totally under control. The crowd had dispersed, leaving a litter of rocks, and empty baton rounds. Billy Duffy, the man on the balcony, had been arrested, but Quinn was retaining a presence in the area in case trouble should flare up again. Of Quinn, after the first few minutes, Goodman had seen nothing, but he remembered the policeman’s terse comment as he stood over him amongst the rubble and the broken glass.

  ‘Your own fault,’ he’d said. ‘Your own bloody fault.’

  Now, as Evans hauled the big Rover off the motorway and up the hill, Goodman felt a cold, hard anger knotting inside him. Events had at last found a focus, and he’d been there, in the middle of it. He’d seen the bitterness, the grief, the implacable hatred for any form of authority, and he understood only too well what he, as Controller, would have to do. He’d already instructed Davidson to meet him at the Wessex TV Studios in an hour’s time. There, a little later than planned, he’d record the first of his messages for the city, Public Communiqué Number One. After two days of confusion, of indecision, of events getting the better of him, it was suddenly very clear. Of his own life, and of the city, he’d now take charge. The time for compromise was over.

  The car swung in through the gates of the house, and stopped outside the big Georgian front door. He glanced out for a moment, the neatly trimmed lawn, the sandpit, the swing, the oblong of pale grass where he’d recently spent the night in a tent with James. His life. His kids. His responsibilities. Evans eyed him in the mirror.

  ‘Time’s getting on, sir,’ he said, ‘I told Mr Davidson six o’clock.’

  Goodman got out of the car and let himself into the house. Caroline heard the key turn in the lock and ran out of the lounge to meet him. She was half-way across the hall before she saw the torn suit, the blood on her father’s shirt, and she stopped at once.

  ‘Daddy!’ she said, in genuine alarm, ‘Daddy!’

  He reached out for her, and patted her cheek. The kitchen door opened, and Joanna appeared at the far end of the hall. She was wearing a coat, dressed to go out. She stood there, taking him in, the state of him. She ran across the hall towards him. She reached out, hands on his face, exploring, finding out, making sure. Then she kissed him, pulling his body into hers, folding her arms around him.

  ‘What happened?’ she said. ‘What have they done to you?’

  He led her upstairs by the hand, explaining, leaving out the details, minimizing the dangers, but talking far too fast, and admitting that, yes, there’d been a spot of bother, a minor local upset. He paused on the upstairs landing, looking down at her, his wife, his Joanna, the mother of his children. He felt the tears rolling down his face, the shock of it all, the tension, the realization of what might have happened, and he counted the seconds before Joanna was back again, from the bathroom, with a wet flannel and a towel. She wiped his nose, and dried his tears, and pressed the cold flannel to the back of his neck, the way he’d seen her attend to James, sprawled on the gravel, his millionth accident on the bike. She looked up at him, forgiveness as well as compassion. He reached out for her, folding his arms around her small, slight body. Joanna squeezed his hand.

  ‘My love,’ he said, beginning to sob again, ‘my love.’

  Gillespie parked the Marina outside his house, and checked his watch. Nearly half-past five. In ten minutes, he was due to meet Goodman’s wife. After that he’d drive round to Sandra’s to sort out about the boat and the boy, who was going, who wasn’t. Then he’d find some diesel, wait for darkness, and ship out. Annie would come too. Of that, he was quite sure.

  He stepped out of the car, and hurried across the pavement. The curtains downstairs had been pulled. Annie must have woken up again, drunk the tea, swallowed the aspirin, and felt OK enough to risk a little daylight. Maybe she’d even had enough time to reflect on the lessons of it all, to draw the odd conclusion, pull in her horns, take a back seat for a change.

  Gillespie let himself into the house and closed the front door with the back of his foot. The cat came sideways down the hall, arched back, mewing and tipping up its nose, the old accusation.

  ‘You never fed the mog,’ Gillespie called, stopping to pick the cat up. ‘Bloody thing’s starving.’

  Hearing no answer, he walked into the living room. The room was empty. He frowned, trying the kitchen. The kitchen too, was empty.

  ‘Annie!’ he called, ‘Annie!’

  He returned to the living room. The blanket lay in a heap on the floor at the foot of the sofa. It suggested haste, a summons, or perhaps worse. He walked slowly across to the telephone and picked up the pad, inspecting it closely under the light from the window. He traced the faint line where the biro had tracked across the pad. Hudson House. Some kind of number. One … two. Then two digits he couldn’t decipher. He looked around, frowning again, suddenly aware of something missing, and then he had it, the holdall, with his camera, and lenses, and film. He turned on his heel and sprinted upstairs. Annie’s bag lay where he’d left it, beside the bed. Of the holdall, there was no sign.

  He swore to himself, softly, under his breath, not, as yet, able to piece it all together, not able to coax the clues into any real pattern, but knowing all too well the exposed film, his morning’s work, had gone. And that Annie, once again, was to blame.

  Suzanne Wallace sat in the tiny windowless office, staring at a map of southern Ireland. Upstairs, she could hear Cartwright on the telephone again, nothing distinct, nothing intelligible, just the soft murmur of his voice between long silences. He’d been making calls all afternoon, getting up occasionally from his desk, footsteps on the floorboards overhead, the metallic rattle of drawers in a filing cabinet. She’d been far too busy on the phone herself to take much notice, but now she was nearly through, and she’d begun to wonder. For a business that had apparently closed, the man was still remarkably active.

  She consulted the list at her elbow, and transferred more details onto the map. She’d worked from the contact book she always carried in her attaché case, the distillation of five years in the travel trade, and the first calls had been to the obvious sources: the Tourist Board in Regent Street, the big hotel groups in Dublin, the South-west Accommodation Bureau headquarters in a quaint little street in Killarney. She had contacts in each of these offices, men and women with whom she’d done business over the years, but the more calls she made, the more obvious it became that Ireland was rapidly filling up, and that the tourist and hotel organizations were swamped with bookings. None of her contacts was blunt or tactless enough to talk about refugees, but this assumption hovered at the edges of their conversations, and Suzanne knew enough about Irish history to appreciate the sweet ironies implicit in the situation. The Irish were once again on the receiving end. But the terms were at last their own.

  Finally, after an hour and a half on the phone, Suzanne had abandoned the usual channels and struck out on a new tack. Three years back she’d had a brief affair with an. Aer Lingus pilot. The man had been big, red-faced, eternally cheerful, with a warm sense of humour and the most expressive hands she’d ever seen. She’d met him at a Folk Festival in Tralee, part of a special Bord Failte promotion, and she’d stayed on for a week afterwards, driving south with him to a huge draughty house overlooking the Kenmare River. He’d inherited the house from his parents, but since the death of his wife he’d spent very little time there.

  Recently, though, he’d begun to tire of the twice-weekly milk run to JFK, and decided to convert the place into a country hotel. He had the grandest plans, and they’d spent five wet days pacing the big old house, trying to decide which of the te
n bedrooms offered the best view, and whether or not rich Americans could survive without central heating. The week in Kerry had been marvellous, and she’d seen the man a couple of times over the next year or so, weekends in the Tara Hotel in Kensington, one wild night in Boston. The relationship had never threatened to go anywhere serious – they laughed too much for that – but they’d parted firm friends, and she knew she could call him any time. Whether or not he’d actually abandoned Aer Lingus for the big house in Kerry, she didn’t know. But the rest of Ireland was full, and she was now desperate to give it a try.

  By some miracle, he answered her call in person, his voice hollowed by the big empty hall where he kept the phone. She could almost feel the rain on the windows, and the wind lashing the tall stand of conifers at the back of the house.

  ‘Hi,’ she said, the usual greeting, ‘it’s me. Your little English tart.’

  He recognized her voice at once with a roar of approval, and they compared notes for a minute or two before she got round to explaining why she’d called. He’d understood at once. Kenmare was full of the infidel, he said, but there’d be no problem putting folk up. The house was, he warned, a little bare, but he’d do what he could in the interim, to make preparations for her arrival. She hesitated at this, wondering whether to tell him she herself wouldn’t be coming, but decided against it. When she mentioned forty people, he simply laughed. Forty. Four hundred. Made no difference at all. They were to steer for the south-west corner of Ireland, turn north, take the third river to the right, and head inland. Unless it was raining, he’d hang white sheets out of the top windows. When they got to Kenmare, they’d have gone too far. He rang off, still roaring with laughter.

  Relieved, her job done, Suzanne had transferred the important details to a tourist map of Ireland, a souvenir of one of her many trips. She’d already phoned a chandlery down near the dock, and tried to reserve an Admiralty chart of the area. The man at the shop had been apologetic. He said they’d run out of charts of the south-west approaches, the demand had been unbelievable, but when she pressed him hard, explaining exactly what she was trying to organize, mentioning Martin’s name, he promised to ask around and phone her back before six.

  Suzanne put a last heavy ring around the location of the house, added a name and a phone number, and began to tidy her papers back into her attaché case. As she did so, a light on the fax machine in the big office outside began to blink. She looked at it through the open door, remembering Cartwright’s promise that a detailed passenger list was expected from Goodman at any time.

  She got up and walked out, into the big office. The fax was rolling slowly out of the machine, line by line, the print slightly smudged, the paper still warm. The line at the top, in capitals, read ‘Agreement’. There was a space, then the first paragraph. She began to read it, idly, realizing at once that it wasn’t the list she’d been expecting. The language was formal, dense legal prose. One party was making certain undertakings to another. There was a question of assets and percentages. Dates were mentioned. A bank. An account number. An address in St Helier, Jersey. Suzanne smiled to herself. Maybe news travelled slowly in the Channel Islands. Maybe it was some client who hadn’t picked up a paper for a week, never listened to the radio, never watched the TV news, didn’t know that business had been suspended for a while, pending the end of the world.

  The machine paused for a moment or two, some interference on the telephone line, and she turned away, wondering whether to phone Martin and confirm the numbers herself, tell him that it was OK, that she’d done her job, his personal travel agent, worthy of his trust, worthy of a corner in his heart, and that his wife and kids would be safe, away from it all, away from them, in deepest, farthest Kerry.

  A door opened across the room, and Cartwright appeared, this strange little man, with his shiny suit, and his tiny moustache, and his long white hands. She’d never met him before, but she’d heard a good deal about his reputation, surprised that he should be such a close friend of Martin’s. He looked across at the fax machine, at her, and she knew at once from the expression on his face that something was wrong. He looked irritated, slightly embarrassed, like a conjuror caught in some private rehearsal.

  ‘Finished?’ he said abruptly.

  She nodded. ‘Yes,’ she said.

  ‘Found somewhere?’

  ‘Yes.’ She nodded at the open door into the office where she’d spent the afternoon. ‘It’s all waiting for you.’

  ‘Good.’

  He crossed the room towards the fax machine, carefully circling her, giving her the widest berth. She knew he wanted her gone, out of it, away. She walked back into the tiny office, still waiting for the phone call from the chandlery. She picked up the map, checked her annotations one final time, then turned round. She frowned. The big office was empty. Cartwright had disappeared again. The fax had gone.

  Annie McPhee lay on the iron bed, staring at the ceiling. The ward was big, two dozen or so other beds, all occupied. The windows were barred on the inside, and there was a guard in a blue uniform on the door, a large man with a day’s growth of beard. Annie recognized the silver insignia on the epaulette of his jacket, the badge of a private security firm she normally associated with bank deliveries and the guarding of building sites. Privatization rules, she thought. Even now. Even here. She smiled grimly. Especially now. Especially here.

  She yawned, trying to fight the instinct to doze, to drift away, to lose track of it all. She’d recognized the place as a hospital at once, peering out through the mesh windows in the sides of the Land-Rover. A big, red-brick pile, sister institution to all the other psychiatric hospitals she knew around London. They’d driven past the main building, and out into the grounds, bumping over the potholes in the tarmac. She’d been taken from the Land-Rover into a small building, put in a room by herself, then searched by a brisk, efficient woman in jeans and a tennis shirt who’d stripped her naked with the skill of a trained nurse. The search had probed the usual nooks and crannies, but the woman had been nice enough to warm her hands first, under the tap, murmuring an apology at the length of her nails. The body search had produced nothing to add to the small pile of possessions on the table, stuff from her jacket and her jeans, and afterwards she’d been allowed to dress again. Minutes later, another woman had come in for the booty, picking up Gillespie’s roll of exposed film with great care, thumb and one finger. Annie had already parted company with Gillespie’s camera, slipped gently from her shoulder by the big man with the long black hair who’d met the Land-Rover when it finally rolled to a halt. Annie had noticed him at once, head and shoulders above the rest of the small reception committee. She’d noticed his eyes, coal black, and the way he absorbed things, the long appraising look he gave each of the figures that stumbled out of the back of the Land-Rover.

  Now, nearly an hour later, she wondered again what had happened to Gillespie, and what he’d make of his absent camera and missing roll of film. Yesterday’s interview, the questions about Northern Ireland, already seemed a month ago, but the man had a very long memory, and she suspected her credit was almost exhausted. Pity, she thought.

  Three rooms away, down a corridor and round a corner, Davidson and Ingle sat on opposite sides of a small wooden table. Gillespie’s camera lay between them. Beside it was the single exposed roll of film, already tagged with a buff label by the woman who’d retrieved it from Annie’s jacket pocket. Davidson was still wearing his coat. Any moment now, he’d have to leave and return to the TV studios. Goodman was due to record his broadcast in half an hour.

  Ingle rubbed his nose. Davidson had already told him about the girl, using the military net after the riot. Ingle had told him to bring her in. Now he gazed at the camera.

  ‘Journalist, isn’t she?’ he said at last.

  Davidson nodded. ‘Yes. Freelance. Working locally at the moment. Based in London.’

  ‘Ah …’ Ingle smiled. ‘The real thing.’

  He picked up the exposed roll of
film, looking at it speculatively, dispensing for a moment with the formalities of developing fluids and fixer baths and all the other clutter. The newly installed darkroom had been working non-stop since coming on line before dawn. It would be hours before they got round to this one.

  ‘Any ideas?’ he said.

  Davidson shook his head. ‘No.’

  ‘She make a fuss?’

  Davidson smiled briefly, remembering the scene at the roadblock in the middle of the night, her body stretched full length in the middle of the road.

  ‘No,’ he said again, ‘none.’

  ‘You think she might be a problem?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘But you think there’s a chance?’

  Davidson considered the proposition for a moment. For most journalists he knew, work amounted to little more than a visit to the cuttings library, and a handful of precautionary receipts in case the expenses were ever questioned. This girl, though, was different. For one thing, the soldier at the roadblock had hit her pretty hard. Yet back she’d come, twelve hours later. Different camera. But same motivation. Same instinct. Same fascination for the noise, and the swirl, and the danger at the centre of it all. It could, of course, be something pathological, some private nerve she liked reality to touch, some affection for raw violence from which she got her kicks. On the other hand, it could be something else, something infinitely more dangerous, a putting together of the symptoms, a diagnosis of the underlying disease. Until they had time to access her Special Branch file, to give the girl a history, friends, contacts, political affiliations, they couldn’t be sure. But in the meantime, it was wise to be cautious. The riot at the flats was a nasty portent. There might be worse to come. He asked himself Ingle’s question again, and nodded.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I think she might be a problem.’