Rules of Engagement

by Hurley, Graham

  ‘No. But there’s a list to go with them.’

  ‘A list?’

  ‘Yeah. A fax. We took it off him after we brought him in. Chapter and verse. Who paid who.’ He paused. ‘There’s serious money involved.’

  ‘Ah…’ Davidson winced, the worst confirmed. Harry Cartwright’s private excursion, courtesy Martin Goodman. He looked out at the Bunker, at Quinn bent over a desk talking to the Transport Chief. The policeman’s wife and kids were in those pictures. Bound to be. Prime targets for a bright young investigative reporter with scores to settle and a reputation to make.

  ‘The girl…’ he began, ‘the reporter…’ Ingle interrupted.

  ‘There’s a couple of other shots,’ he said, ‘not taken at the dock.’

  Davidson frowned again. ‘Oh?’

  ‘Yeah. We’ve got a body.’

  There was a silence. Through the open door, Davidson could hear laughter, female, the first for nearly a day. Someone was telling a joke about something that had happened during the small hours, something involving fear, flatulence, and the hated NBC suits. Davidson fingered the pad on Quinn’s desk.

  ‘A body?’ he repeated.

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Anyone we know?’

  There was another silence. In the distance, at the other end, Davidson could hear Ingle talking to someone else. Then, abruptly, he was back again.

  ‘You’d better come and have a look,’ he said. ‘Tell Evans to go to the flats on the seafront. The usual place. He’ll know where you mean.’

  Evans drove Davidson down to the city in Goodman’s official car. Davidson sat in the back of the big Rover, gazing out. The streets were still empty, but soon, he knew, they’d have to share the news from London, the prospect of a hot war receding, the tensions easing, both blocs laying aside their weapons, unbuckling their armour, asking themselves exactly what kind of mistakes had taken the world so close to the brink.

  For now, though, it was probably best to wait a little longer, to plan the thing properly, this difficult transition back to a world of traffic jams, and interest rates, and football violence, and the countless other daily irritations that had become so suddenly precious.

  Evans threaded his way through the back streets towards the seafront. There were one or two kids about, squatting in the gutters with a football or a skateboard, but otherwise it felt like the deadest of Sundays. The car slowed to a halt outside a modern block of flats a hundred yards or so from the seafront. Evans glanced back, over his shoulder.

  ‘I think this is the one, sir,’ he said drily.

  Davidson nodded.

  ‘Thanks,’ he said.

  He hesitated a moment before getting out of the car. Evans had said nothing during the journey down, choosing not to add to the telephone call he’d made only hours earlier. Davidson had been tempted to enquire further, to ask exactly what had prompted his concern about Goodman, but there was something forbidding in the Marine’s silence, something which kept Davidson at arm’s length.

  Davidson got out of the car. There was a police van at the kerbside, and a young WPC standing by the open passenger door. Davidson reached for his Home Office pass. She looked at it briefly, and nodded across the rectangles of grass towards the path that skirted the foot of the building. Davidson could see white tapes flapping in the wind.

  ‘Round the corner, sir,’ she said. ‘The pathologist’s already there.’

  Davidson thanked her and walked towards the tapes. The wind was cold off the sea. Davidson rounded the corner of the building. Twenty yards down the path was a small group of people. A photographer was setting up a tripod. A uniformed officer was gazing up at a balcony and making notes on a small pad. A woman in a tweed jacket was bending over a body sprawled across the concrete path. Davidson walked towards her. The woman glanced up, then returned to the body. It had rained overnight, and there was wet hair matted over the girl’s face. She looked young. She might have been asleep after ten minutes or so in the shower. There was very little blood. Davidson glanced up at the balconies above, following the policeman’s eyeline.

  ‘She fell?’ he said.

  The woman, a pathologist, nodded. ‘Yes.’

  ‘How far?’

  ‘A long way.’

  Davidson nodded.

  ‘Mr Ingle about?’ he asked.

  The uniformed officer glanced across at Davidson.

  ‘Mr Ingle sends his apologies, sir,’ he said. ‘He says he won’t be coming down.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I see.’

  Davidson frowned, wondering exactly what this body on the concrete had to do with him, what part his own presence served in the plans that Ingle was evidently hatching. Perhaps it was simply a question of involvement, of giving him a taste of the sharp end, flesh and blood and the remorseless pull of gravity.

  The woman in the tweed jacket was taking careful swabs, sealing them in polythene bags. Davidson watched her for a moment, the pathologist building the case, trying to script the final five minutes of this young woman’s life, the events that had led her out onto the balcony, and beyond.

  ‘Anything obvious?’ he asked.

  The woman looked up again.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘She’d been drinking.’

  ‘I see…’ Davidson paused. ‘Anything else?’

  The woman began to answer, but then her eyes flicked left, some sudden distraction, and Davidson turned in time to see Evans coming to a halt behind him, staring down at the girl on the concrete, the forceps and the collection bags and the pile of unused swabs. There was pity there, certainly, and revulsion. But something even more obvious. Disgust.

  Evans looked at Davidson. He was slightly out of breath.

  ‘It’s Mr Quinn, sir. On the car phone. Needs to talk to you urgently.’

  Davidson nodded. ‘Fine,’ he said bleakly, ‘I think I’ve seen enough.’

  It was Ingle who suggested the walk. Annie fell into step beside him, the sun warm on her face after the overnight rain, the first of the autumn’s leaves rustling softly beneath her feet.

  The big detective had come to her bedside at nine in the morning. He’d given her a cup of black coffee with two custard creams in the saucer. He’d said it was a nice day. He’d said they ought to walk. The overnight promise of instant oblivion, the wail of the siren, appeared to be history.

  Now, mid-morning, they paused by an empty bench. Ingle nodded at it. Annie sat down. There were squirrels in the long grass beneath the big chestnuts, foraging for food. Ingle lay down on the grass. He was wearing an old corduroy jacket, torn under one arm. He produced a slice of white bread from his pocket and tore off a corner. A squirrel sat up, looking at him, small brown eyes shining.

  ‘Your friend…’ he began, ‘Gillespie.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘How well do you know him?’

  Annie looked at him, trying to gauge the weight of the question, the direction it represented, the precise door he was trying to open.

  ‘Quite well,’ she said carefully.

  Ingle glanced up at her, shredding the bread, crumbs in his lap.

  ‘You sleep with him?’

  Annie nodded. ‘Sometimes,’ she said.

  ‘You love him?’

  Annie gazed at him, thoughtful.

  ‘Strange question,’ she said at last.

  Ingle shrugged, coaxing the squirrel towards him. ‘Not really,’ he said.

  The squirrel seized the first piece of bread and began to nibble at the edges. Annie watched it, thinking of Gillespie, the cropped hair, the sudden smile, his careful private ways. She and Sandra had spent half the night talking about him, a strange conversation, fond and affectionate, shadowed by Sandra’s conviction that he might well be dead.

  Now, she thought about Ingle’s question again. Love was a complex proposition. She wasn’t sure what the word really meant.

  ‘I dunno,’ she said finally, ‘I’m not sure.’

>   Ingle nodded. There were crumbs all over his lap. The squirrel had gone.

  ‘But you’d share everything with him?’ he said. ‘And vice versa?’

  Annie looked at him, finally understanding the drift of his questions, the sudden plunge into intimacy, the hook tied neatly at the end.

  ‘Ah…’ she said, grinning, ‘do we kiss and tell?’

  Ingle looked up at her, returned the grin.

  ‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘something like that.’

  Annie laughed.

  ‘What do you think?’ she said. ‘Is he here? Have you met him?’ Ingle said nothing. Annie drew the obvious conclusion. ‘You have met him,’ she said, ‘and he is here. Only he won’t tell you what you want to know.’ She paused. ‘Is that it?’

  Ingle lay back on the warm grass and closed his eyes.

  ‘Might be,’ he said, ‘might not.’

  ‘So you think you might get it out of me instead.’ She paused again. ‘Yes?’

  Ingle got up on one elbow, and looked at her, thoughtful.

  ‘Yes,’ he said.

  Annie shrugged.

  ‘OK,’ she said, ‘what is it you want to know? Give us a clue.’

  Ingle began to tear holes in the bread again, not bothering to answer. The girl was sharper than he’d thought. Much sharper. She’d turned his key question on its head, offering it back with exactly the same casual innocence. The way she played it, alert, amused, he was no closer to knowing whether she’d been party to the business at the dock. She might know everything. She might not. It all depended on her relationship with the man Gillespie. And that, for the time being, was a mystery.

  He tossed the last of the bread into the shadows, and got to his feet. The back of his jacket was covered in grass.

  ‘Shame,’ he said regretfully, ‘this could have been a doddle.’

  Davidson went straight to Quinn’s office when he got back to the Bunker. The atmosphere, at once, was very different. The engineers had managed to fix the air-conditioning, and the place was cooler, less stuffy. There was fresh milk in the fridge in the tiny galley, and the NBC suits were piled neatly in a corner beside the biggest of the fire extinguishers.

  Except for the lack of windows, they could have been back in the Civic Centre. Just another working day. Tea, biscuits, and the usual mountain of paperwork.

  Davidson tapped on Quinn’s office door and stepped in. The policeman, back in civilian clothes, was bent over his desk. He waved Davidson into a chair.

  ‘Home Office have been on,’ he said, ‘your lot.’

  Davidson raised an eyebrow.

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘Yes. If peace breaks out, they want us back to normal as soon as possible.’

  ‘Any particular reason?’

  ‘Yes. The feeling is that we might have overplayed our hand.’ He paused. ‘They were remarkably frank.’

  Davidson frowned, remembering the months of careful planning, the long process of selecting the key city, the one they’d button up really tight. At the time, there’d been no mention of afterwards.

  ‘What are they worried about?’ he said.

  Quinn looked up at him, impatient to finish his work.

  ‘The media,’ he said briskly. ‘I think they want us all to be friends again.’

  ‘I see.’ Davidson nodded, thinking of Bullock. So far, the body count had been remarkably low, a single death, a mistake, an understandably nervous finger on a trigger, simple to explain, easy to justify. The body he’d seen this morning had been something else completely, a private death, nothing to do with him, or the regime his masters had imposed upon the city. Later, he’d talk to Ingle about it, find out why the girl was so important. In the meantime, though, his Queen’s Gate colleagues were evidently in a lather.

  ‘So how did they leave it?’ he said.

  Quinn frowned. He, more than anyone, wanted Davidson back where he belonged. In London.

  ‘I said you’d phone them back as soon as you could,’ he said. ‘They gave me a number.’ He paused. ‘Evans back yet?’

  Davidson nodded. ‘Yes,’ he said.

  ‘Good.’ He looked at his watch. ‘We’ve got a little problem on the seafront. Girl found dead.’

  Davidson frowned. ‘I know,’ he said.

  ‘Do you?’ Quinn scribbled his signature on a last sheet of paper, and clipped the silver biro into the top pocket of his jacket. ‘Then you’ll bear with me,’ he said, ‘it’s a question of formal identification. She appears to have no relatives.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So…?’ Quinn echoed the question, looking Davidson in the eyes. ‘So we take him down to the mortuary.’

  Davidson looked blank for a moment. ‘Take who?’ he said.

  Quinn paused, not quite sure whether Davidson was joking. He nodded out, into the well of the Bunker, out towards the storeroom.

  ‘Goodman,’ he said, ‘your precious Controller.’ He smiled. ‘Her boyfriend.’

  Davidson gazed at him, remembering Ingle on the telephone, the conversation cut short, and Evans in the car, picking his way so surely to the seafront block of flats. Been there before. All part of the job. He closed his eyes for a moment, trying to assess the damage, drawing together the looser ends. Ingle’s surveillance on Gillespie. The photos of Goodman and his girlfriend on the bench. The phrase of Reese’s he’d used in the report. Distraught, the man had said. They’d both looked ‘distraught’. And now this: Goodman on the edge of a nervous breakdown, blood all over his NBC suit, his girlfriend dead.

  Davidson opened his eyes.

  ‘She lived in the flats?’

  Quinn nodded. ‘Number 913.’

  Davidson shook his head slowly. The jigsaw, quite suddenly, made all too much sense. God knows what they’d find in the flat. In Goodman’s car. On his NBC suit. At best, already, the thing was a shambles. At worst, it was a catastrophe. Their showpiece Controller, embroiled with a racketeer, involved in sudden death. Absolute power, abused absolutely. If the details ever leaked, the press would have a field day. Even the gentler papers would tear the experiment to pieces, and him with it, a shattering blow from which no career could possibly recover.

  Davidson looked up at Quinn again. The big policeman tore the top sheet off a yellow legal pad and offered it to Davidson. Davidson looked at it.

  ‘What’s that?’ he said numbly.

  Quinn smiled, sweetest revenge. ‘The Home Office number,’ he said. ‘I told them you’d lots of ideas.’

  Quinn got up from the desk and retrieved a file from his in-tray and left the office without further comment. Davidson watched him walk down the Bunker to the main exit at the end. He glanced at the number Quinn had given him, and reached for the phone. After a moment’s thought, he dialled six digits, and waited a second or two before the number answered.

  ‘Inspector Ingle,’ he said briefly.

  There was brief pause. Then a man’s voice. Apologetic.

  ‘I’m afraid Mr Ingle’s very busy,’ he said. ‘He’s not to be disturbed.’

  Ingle chewed at the end of his pencil, listening to Gillespie spelling it all out. The photographs were back on the table between them, the faces at the dock. Ingle nodded at the photos, feigning bemusement, wanting to be sure.

  ‘Again,’ he said, ‘tell me again.’

  Gillespie nodded, leaning forward, eager to remove the last shreds of ambiguity.

  ‘OK,’ he said, ‘let me take you through it. It’s really quite neat. What you have is a wall around the city. Not a real wall, but roadblocks and policemen, and the odd squaddie with an SA 80 to put the shits up the punters. That means that most of us stay put and do what we’re told. Except, of course, those who can afford to leg it. Now who might they be…?’ He paused, surveying the faces on the desk in front of him, spoiled for choice. He reached across and pointed to a middle-aged man with blow dried hair and a sharp blazer. He had a baby in his arms. Gillespie tapped the photo. ‘Him for a start…’ he said, ‘he’s a property
developer.’ His finger moved to another photo, another face. ‘And him. String of garages. And her. She runs the classier tarts for the business crowd. And Lennie Bishop, here. He’s got the gaming machines…’ He paused, looking up. ‘Now what do this lot have in common? Eh?’ He nodded, vigorous, remorseless, answering his own questions. ‘Money. Bent money, legit money, but money all the same …’ He paused again, pulling Ingle along, inviting him to share his outrage. ‘Sick, isn’t it? While you and me and Fanny down the road sit and wait for the Big One, these comedians have bought themselves some kind of second chance. They’re laughing, mate …’ he reached for yet another photo, ‘and so is he.’

  Ingle peered at the face in the photograph, small, white, glasses and a neatly trimmed moustache.

  ‘Who’s that?’ he said.

  ‘Harry Cartwright. He’s the brains. He’s the one who’s cleaned them all out. Dog eat dog. The old story. Mind you…’ He paused for a moment.

  Ingle looked up. ‘What?’

  Gillespie frowned. ‘There are some other faces here that don’t really belong.’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Yeah.’ He pointed to an ample woman standing beside a minibus, surrounded by children. ‘Her for instance. Her name’s Molly Quinn. She’s our Police Chiefs wife. Now what would she be doing with this bunch of animals?’

  Ingle looked at him, committing the names to memory. Cartwright. Quinn. God knows who else. ‘You tell me,’ he said.

  Gillespie shrugged.

  ‘OK,’ he said, ‘so you’re Harry Cartwright. You’re frightened. Like we’re all frightened. So you want out of the city. Like we all want out of the city. But you’re greedy too. Because you can never resist a deal. With me?’ Ingle nodded, still chewing the end of the pencil. ‘OK, so you find yourself a boat. And you find yourself some cargo. Friends and clients and the odd business associate. And you charge them what you think they’ll pay. Not money, of course. Not readies. But some fancy deal you’ve cooked up with your lawyer. Some deal that lets you help yourself for the next couple of years. Big fat slice of the profits of all these businesses here.’ He paused. ‘You read the fax?’ Ingle nodded again but said nothing. ‘OK,’ Gillespie smiled, ‘but you’re still left with one problem. Getting away’s against the law. Or it is for most of us. So what do you do?’ Gillespie leaned forward, returning to the photo of the big woman with the children. ‘You take Molly Quinn. And you take her. She’s the Chief Medico’s wife. And these two. They’re the City Treasurer’s kids. You charge them some nominal fee. Or maybe you even take them for free. Kindness of your heart. Act of civic duty. Either way it makes no difference because you’ve made your money and you’ve broken out. And what’s even sweeter, you’ve done it all with official blessing. Totally corrupt. Totally above board. Neat isn’t it?’