Rules of Engagement

by Hurley, Graham

  ‘Sir?’ he said. A question.

  Goodman looked surprised.

  ‘I’m going for a walk,’ he said. ‘Any objections?’

  Evans shifted a little, the gravel noisy beneath his feet.

  ‘No, sir.’

  Goodman nodded.

  ‘Good.’

  Evans didn’t move. Goodman tried to resume the walk. Evans didn’t let him. Goodman frowned.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ he said. ‘Am I under arrest?’

  Evans looked at him, eye to eye, cold, impassive, blocking the path.

  ‘I don’t know, sir,’ he paused, ‘it’s just Mr Quinn. Thinks you’d be better off in bed.’

  ‘Then I am under arrest. Effectively.’

  Evans shrugged. ‘I don’t know, sir,’ he said again, ‘I don’t know what you are.’

  The two men looked at each other for a moment, no ambiguities left. Then Goodman turned on his heel and went back to the house. Evans didn’t return to the car until he was sure that Goodman was back in the lounge, settled in the chair, taking the first exploratory sip at a large gin and tonic.

  Gillespie had finished his supper by the time Davidson returned to the small bare room on the first floor. His empty plate lay on the table, a small pile of carrots heaped neatly on one side.

  He looked up as Davidson stepped into the room. Davidson was still carrying the briefcase, and Gillespie wondered how many copies of the photographs they’d bothered to print. If they were sensible, they’d keep the prints to the minimum, and the more he saw of Ingle and Davidson, the more sensible he realized they were. He’d met class operators before, men and women who knew exactly what they were doing, but these two were something special. In a curious way, he felt flattered. Whatever he’d stumbled on, down at the dock, evidently mattered a great deal.

  Davidson sat down. He was more businesslike this time, brisker, a travelling rep with a quality product. He opened the briefcase, and extracted a single photograph. A wide shot of the dock. Cars. People. Both boats. The whole story, condensed into a single grainy image.

  He looked up and coughed, preparing the pitch.

  ‘Everything’s a question of interpretation…’ he began, ‘as you well know.’

  Gillespie nodded, said nothing. Davidson leaned back in the chair.

  ‘Take the unfortunate Miss Wallace…’ he said, ‘drunk, lonely, depressed, frightened…’ He paused.

  Gillespie looked at him.

  ‘So?’

  ‘So?’ Davidson shrugged. ‘So she takes one drink too many. She walks out onto the balcony. She thinks it’s all too awful. And she throws herself off.’

  Gillespie smiled.

  ‘Pathetic,’ he said.

  ‘I agree.’

  ‘I mean you. Your lot.’

  ‘I know you do.’

  There was a long pause, then Davidson picked up the photo on the desk. The dock. Gillespie’s scoop. The news he wanted so badly to share with the world.

  ‘Then there’s this,’ he said slowly.

  Gillespie nodded.

  ‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘there is.’

  ‘A handful of people,’ he said, ‘going nowhere.’

  Gillespie shook his head.

  ‘Nearly a hundred. Copping out. With a great deal of money, and a little help from your friends.’

  Davidson looked at him for a long time, saying nothing.

  ‘Murder carries life,’ he said. ‘They probably told you that before.’

  Gillespie nodded.

  ‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘they did.’

  ‘Be a shame, wouldn’t it?’

  There was another silence. Gillespie looked beyond him, out of the window, into the dark. Then he glanced down at the photo.

  ‘You want me to forget it,’ he said, ‘that lot.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘In return for what?’

  ‘Your freedom.’

  ‘Otherwise?’

  ‘Otherwise?’ Davidson laid the photo carefully on the desk, and leaned back in his chair. ‘Otherwise justice, I’m afraid, will take its course.’ He paused. ‘Fingerprints. Photographs. Motive. Opportunity.’ He paused again. ‘Theft.’

  ‘Theft?’

  Davidson smiled.

  ‘Her car,’ he said. ‘You know the way it goes.’

  Gillespie looked at him, eye to eye.

  ‘But I didn’t do it.’

  Davidson nodded.

  ‘So you keep saying.’ He got up, leaving the photograph on the desk. He picked up his briefcase and put his hand lightly on Gillespie’s shoulder. ‘Take your time, Sergeant,’ he said, ‘it’s your choice. Your call.’

  When Mick Rendall finally woke up, it was dark again. He tried opening his eyes. His eyes hurt. He tried to swallow. His mouth was parched, fuzzy with something unspeakable. Then the pain hit him, a sharp insistent throb that began somewhere deep in his skull, and blossomed outwards, breaking in waves against the insides of his face, nauseous, making the dim outlines of the room sway and bend.

  He groaned and tried to turn over. Nothing happened. He called out, beginning to remember, wondering what was supposed to happen after the first bomb, the one that tore whole cities apart. What was he doing in bed? Was he still alive?

  He swung one leg out of bed and felt the thick shag carpet between his toes. He tried to sit upright, then fell over. He crawled across the room to the door. On the landing, for the first time, he heard the noise.

  He looked round. His landing. His Athena prints on the wall. He listened hard. Something was happening down below, in the living room. Something rhythmic, the squeal of metal against metal. A spring somewhere. Creaking.

  He felt his way slowly to the head of the stairs, knowing he was going to throw up, wondering about radiation sickness, whether or not you died before your hair fell out. He paused on all fours at the top step, gazing down.

  The lights were on in the living room. Albie was sitting on the rowing machine, naked except for his boxer shorts, rowing fast, back and forth, in and out, the sweat glistening on his chest, his eyes locked on some imaginary point half-way up the opposite wall.

  Mick began to fumble his way downstairs, lost his balance, and fell. At the bottom, he let the room stop spinning, then slowly disentangled himself, one limb at a time. The noise had gone away. Albie had stopped rowing.

  Mick looked at him, trying to get the words together, the right order, not too fast. There was an empty litre of vodka, upside down in the magazine rack. The sight of it made him feel giddy.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  Albie sniffed and wiped his nose on the angle of his shoulder. Then he was off again, the same rhythm, the same expression, deadly earnest.

  ‘Harry fucking Cartwright,’ he said at last. ‘When I find him, I’m gonna kill him.’

  Annie McPhee met Duggie Bullock at nine in the evening at a pub on the mainland. The roadblocks had been lifted to the north of the city, and the only trace of the last three days were sets of caterpillar tracks scored by the big APCs in the soft mud on the roadside verges. Petrol was still impossible to find, but Annie’s car was intact outside Gillespie’s house, and there was enough fuel left in the tank to carry her the six miles to the rendezvous. Before she’d driven away, she’d checked through Gillespie’s place. The house had obviously been searched. Drawers had been emptied onto the carpet, cupboards ransacked, even the side of the bath levered off. But of Gillespie himself there was no sign. Still at the hospital, she thought. Still under questioning. Probably in trouble, but doubtless still very much alive.

  At the pub, she found Bullock sitting at a table in the corner, nursing a soft drink. The pub had long since run out of alcohol, but there was plenty of fruit juice on sale from big jugs behind the bar.

  ‘Welcome back,’ Bullock said, raising his glass of orange in a toast. ‘Here’s to Armageddon.’

  Annie smiled. ‘Cheers,’ she said.

  She told him what had happened in the city, the riot ou
tside the flats, Goodman arriving, the flying wedge of troops, the man on the balcony, the rocks and the rubble, the riot squads kneeling carefully in the flower beds, the baton rounds skeetering across the dusty concrete. Afterwards, a big policeman, someone powerful, someone important, standing over Goodman, visibly outraged.

  ‘I got some great shots,’ she told him, ‘great stills. Only they took them off me.’

  Bullock nodded.

  ‘Useful,’ he said drily.

  She told him the rest. About Davidson, the hospital, the detainees, the atmosphere of the place, pages from some Russian novel. She told him about the sessions with Ingle, his incessant questions, her abrupt release.

  ‘What did he want?’ Bullock asked at the end of it all. ‘What was the point?’

  Annie frowned, no wiser now than then. Already, it seemed like weeks ago, a strange, lost episode, inexplicable, gone.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said, ‘I just don’t know.’

  Bullock nodded. ‘They’ve stripped the library,’ he said. ‘There’s nothing left.’

  Annie frowned. ‘What do you mean?’

  Bullock fingered the beer mat, the closest he was likely to get to a real drink. Then he told her about the television network closing down, central control from London, a nightly diet of sitcoms and game shows, a pre-med for the big operation. The viewing figures, he said, would be sensational, the best ever, but what little chance was left to do a real documentary, the kind they understood, had gone for ever. Two officers from Special Branch had arrived only that morning with a sworn warrant, and removed every video cassette shot since the beginning of the Emergency. A week and a half of pictures – refugees from France, bread queues, arms convoys, demonstrations, roadblocks – had disappeared on a trolley into the back of a hired Transit van. Bullock had phoned for legal help, done his best to protest, but the two men had ignored him, and the last he’d seen of his precious archive – the raw material they’d need to anchor any investigation – was a cloud of dust as the van accelerated out of the car park, back towards the motorway.

  By now, the phones back on, he’d had a chance to talk to colleagues up and down the country, and he knew that the situation on his own patch had been unique. Nowhere else had the Government tried to corral an entire city. Nowhere else had they so shamelessly revealed their hand. But the evidence had gone – his video, her stills – and that made their job near impossible. People could still write about it all, of course, but the history that really mattered was now television, and the Government’s finger was firmly on the Erase button.

  He looked up at her, and shrugged.

  ‘Still…’ he said, ‘I suppose we should be grateful.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Well…’ he smiled wearily, ‘it all worked. We all survived. We’re still here.’

  Annie nodded. ‘Yes,’ she said, unconvinced. ‘But that’s hardly the point, is it?’

  Gillespie lay in the darkness, back in his room, his head on the pillow, his shoes on the floor, his feet on the big iron rail at the end of the bed. When they brought him back, Sean had gone. He’d seen the empty bed, and turned to ask what had happened to the boy, but the door was already shut, the key scraping in the lock, and when his patience snapped, and he threw himself across the room, beating on the door, splintering the wooden panels, there was only the sound of footsteps receding down the corridor.

  Now, an hour or so later, he stared up at the ceiling. He’d given half his life to the service of the Crown. Lots of it had been boring. Some of it had been tough. Once or twice, in the Falklands especially, he’d nearly died. But never, not once, had he thought to question the pact he’d made, the oath he’d taken, the act of faith he’d turned into a way of life. For Queen and Country, they’d told him. For Queen and Country, he’d agreed.

  Now, though, he wasn’t so sure. He sensed the power, the sheer reach of the animal he’d angered, the massive state apparatus behind the pale-faced man at the desk, with his big brown envelopes, and his photographs, and his godless proposition, and he realized for the first time what older and wiser men had often told him. That there was no such thing as honour. No such thing as principle. Only expediency. Means and ends.

  He stirred in the darkness. There were new footsteps out in the corridor, lighter. They paused outside the door. The door opened. A figure stepped into the room, silhouetted against the light outside. The head tilted. For a moment there was total silence. Then Davidson spoke. The voice was barely audible.

  ‘Well, Sergeant…’ he said, ‘what’s it to be?’

  Eleven

  The Service of Deliverance was announced exactly four weeks later.

  Gillespie read about it first in the local paper. The local paper had already published a special ‘Front Line’ souvenir edition, prefaced on the front page with a black outline of the city, circled and cross-haired. ‘Ground Zero’, it read, ‘Seventy-Two Hours When the City Held Its Breath’. Inside, amongst the stirring articles on the city’s strategic importance, and the Navy going to war, was a brief chronology of events, and Gillespie recognized at once the fingerprints of the official line. No mention of police excesses, or the unfortunate Jason Duffy. No mention of the black market in bread and petrol. No mention of the busy night at the dock when those who could afford it prepared to open the city’s door, and make a bolt for the open sea. Instead, a mish-mash of nostalgia and cheap sentiment and ‘blitz recipes’. As an exercise in collective amnesia, Gillespie thought, ‘Front Line Special’ already deserved an award. Now, though, it was evidently to go one better. Instead of an award, an official blessing.

  Gillespie studied the brief announcement. The Service of Deliverance would be held in the city’s cathedral. The Lord Mayor and city dignitaries would attend. Gillespie ringed the date and the time, and laid the paper carefully aside. Deliverance from what? he thought bleakly.

  He went upstairs and lay down in the darkened bedroom. It was October now, fully autumn, but the weather was still superb, the sun warm, the gentlest of breezes stirring in the early afternoon, in off the sea. He’d been afloat once or twice, a boat borrowed from a friend, alone, without the boy, trying to shift the dead weight that lay inside him, the knowledge of exactly what had happened that last night in the hospital, Davidson sitting on the other bed, all too understanding, all too real. He’d said yes to the offer, agreed the deal, and now he, too, was part of this charade, this careful filleting of history. In a way it was the same old story, the Falklands all over again, telling the people what they wanted to hear. Don’t bother them with the small print, the hypocrisies, the duplicity, the thousand ugly details that compose the real picture.

  On the table, beside his bed, the phone began to trill. Gillespie turned over, ignoring it, shutting it out of his head. For the last month, he’d seen barely anyone. Annie had left countless messages on the ansaphone, asking him to get in touch, imploring him to return her calls. Sean had come round, telling him the sea bass were on the feed, gorging on the slipper limpets in the deep channel off the harbour mouth, the fish better than ever. Sandra had invited him over for Sunday lunch, an invitation he couldn’t even be bothered to acknowledge. And although Jenner was allegedly back in the city, back from the Scilly Isles, Gillespie had yet to make contact. For now, he told himself, he could get by on what little cash he’d managed to stuff away in the savings account. For now, he’d simply rest up a while, and let his head sort itself out. For now, he’d stay low, totally camouflaged, totally hidden, safe behind his own front door.

  But it hadn’t worked. None of it. The days had simply begun to slide into each other, a seamless wilderness of dead time, and when he’d stopped running in the mornings, he knew he was in real trouble. At first he’d told himself it was simple exhaustion. His body wouldn’t do it, no matter how firm his resolve. But deep inside, he knew that this was bullshit, and after a week or two of doing nothing – no running, no fishing, no anything – he’d begun to wonder about his mental state. May
be, after all, they’d been right to take him to the nuthouse. Maybe he was going barmy. Maybe they were even cleverer than he’d thought.

  The phone stopped ringing, and he turned over again. Tomorrow, according to the paper, was the Service of Deliverance. In the interests of fiction, and what little sanity he’d managed to preserve, he decided he ought to attend.

  Duggie Bullock sat in the tiny restaurant, studying the menu. Philip Cussins, Vice-Chairman of the TV Wessex Board, sat opposite, sipping a glass of kir. The meal had been Cussins’ idea, an abrupt invitation that Bullock’s secretary had fielded only this morning. The Vice-Chairman of the company had always fascinated Bullock. He was younger than most successful businessmen he’d worked under, no more than 37 or 38. A tall man, quiet, watchful, he was always exquisitely dressed with perfect manners and a smile that was all the more effective because he used it so rarely. He’d made his money in property development outside London, trading estates and business parks on the margins of the major motorways, and then come south to oversee the building of a big marina on the east side of the city. The area in general had appealed to him, and he’d stayed, acquiring a large modern house in the country, and a new wife called Sabine. He’d been living in the south now for nearly four years, and had an important finger in a number of the city’s fatter pies.

  From the start, Cussins had viewed TV Wessex as simply another vehicle for profit and for profile, paying lip service to other members of the Board with more serious programme aspirations. With his business contacts, and his large personal shareholding, and his sheer intelligence, he’d quickly become the one member who really mattered. The retired admiral who chaired the Board routinely deferred to his judgement. Other Board members rarely raised their heads above the parapet. Even Bullock made very sure of his facts before pursuing any kind of independent line.