The Devil's Home on Leave (Factory 2) (25 page)

‘Of getting them out? Yes, there’s no rank on this one; it makes a change. I’m doing this with the Branch.’

‘Go and find Ernie, then. He’s over at Tottenham Court Road; I’ll phone him right away and tell him you’re coming.’

‘Thanks.’

‘I wish I was coming,’ he said, ‘I’d cover you, you’d see.’

‘I wish you were too.’

I left the hospital. Remembering what Frank had asked me about Dahlia, it made me think of her, and the tragedy came up in my throat again as if it was new; it always did. I saw her again being weighed at birth when she was only ten minutes old, and then her death: her sad little coffin going into the ground – Christ, do people think we are made of stone? How could anyone so innocent have been so wickedly destroyed? Oh, I remember you had a woolly hat on in winter one year, you were three, and you brushed your head against my shoulder and your hat went down over your face, your little red face, and you laughed, and I yearn for you, Dahlia, yearn for you, and everything I do for justice, I do it in your name; and it is my terrible guilt that I could have saved you from your mother. But instead I went off to work that day and how shall I ever forget you at the window as you waved me goodbye? Oh, it goes to my heart those times when I think of the horror, and through my fault, leaving in me an appalling emptiness that can never be filled.

‘Inspector Foden? Hello, I’m on this Hawes–McGruder caper.’

‘I know. Frank Ballard rang me.’

I explained to him what had to be done and said: ‘Let’s be clear about this. I’m just asking you.’

‘Forget it.’

‘As long as you realize you’re in no way obliged.’

‘I know what my obligations are.’

‘It’s going to be tricky.’

‘Anything to do with Pat Hawes always is.’

‘McGruder’s worse.’

‘What’s the position?’ he said.

‘They’re holed up in this council flat, and what you and I have to do is go in there and get them out. Are you armed? Because you’ll need to be.’

‘Yes.’ He opened a drawer in his desk and put a pistol down in front of him, a thirty-two automatic. ‘And you?’

‘No, I never use them. One weapon’s enough.’

‘How do you want to do this?’

‘Just walk through the door. Put my foot through it if they won’t open. As long as you’re there, handy.’

‘I will be. Three of them, you say?’

‘Yes, the two men and McGruder’s ex-wife; it’s her flat. Anyway, as long as you’re there behind me.’

‘Don’t worry.’ He added curiously, perhaps to make things seem more everyday: ‘Wasn’t that you, by the way, who screwed up that board for the Branch the other day?’

‘That’s right.’

‘Must seem weird, working with them right after.’

‘They don’t appear to mind.’

‘It certainly went the rounds,’ he said, ‘that story did.’ He added: ‘Incidentally, where does this business with a certain cabinet minister come into it? It comes into it somewhere, I believe.’

‘You shouldn’t have heard about that,’ I said. ‘There’s leaks everywhere; they’ve got to tighten up on security.’

‘Security? That’s just coppers talking, we’ve got a tongue in our head. Strange, that,’ he added, ‘a minister.’

‘Not unknown, though,’ I said. ‘But you’re right, the whole of this thing, it’s all connected. It’s like a grenade with the pin pulled out; that’s what you’ve got to realize.’ I stood up. ‘Well, we’d better get it done. We’ve got my car, it’ll do, it’s unmarked; we might as well drift over there now.’

‘Pity they don’t just take the place by assault.’

‘Pity for us, yes,’ I said, ‘but it wouldn’t do; it’s the very thing they want to avoid. They just want to squash this thing without any publicity, but you can’t do that if the Branch and the SAS open up with bursts of small-arms fire. The way you and I are going to try and play it, it’ll make a lot less fuss. Then afterwards Phillips and the minister can be dealt with on the side; the press’ll be told what to print and what not to, statement on TV, and the whole balls-up’ll be processed as if it were run-of-the-mill – which of course it isn’t.’

‘OK,’ he said. He added: ‘Had anything to eat yet?’

‘No, I skipped lunch.’

‘Good,’ he said, ‘same here. You know, just in case you did stop one. I never eat before a job like this. McGruder was a paratrooper, they say; he’s unlikely to just kneel down and say his prayers when we come in.’

‘No,’ I said, ‘and Hawes neither. They’re both frantic, jammed up in there with that woman. Anyway, McGruder’s going off his trolley, I reckon. You got your W/T, by the way? Good, well, if things do get bad, call the mob, OK? Play it by ear, you know.’

‘Yes, sure.’

I said: ‘It’s fucking dangerous, I’m afraid.’ I looked at my watch; it was four in the afternoon. We went out to get my car; it had started to rain again. I was pleased about that. It would help keep the streets clear if it did come to a battle, though the street was sealed off.

I remembered as I drove what McGruder had told me about his past, that night we were in the Painted Lady. It was strange the way he would relax and talk to me once I got him going. He said: ‘I dare say you find me strange.’ Yes, I said, I found him that all right. He said: ‘We came in to Belfast to find work from Coleraine when I was a kid. Coleraine, that’s a miserable place now. My dad was in the building trade. We’re Protestants, and he was always behind Paisley, right up to his neck in it till the night the Provos did him in a hedge out by the border, nine years ago, that was. If I’d liked my dad I’d have found those that smashed him up and that would have been it. But I didn’t. He used to belt us right up to the day I got too big for him to do it to me any more. That night, I was sixteen, I smashed him with a frying-pan the minute he started – bang! He got the message. You know? I was always a loner; I always had this idea I smelled. That’s why I keep myself clean, spotless. Politics? Ireland? Ulster? Don’t give me that crap. They taught me the violence – the rest of politics is blackmail. Me? Everything I’ve done, I’ve done it for money. I like money. I like not spending it. I like money better than people. People try and fuck you about – well, you’ve got to teach them to leave you alone. Killing people? No, that means nothing to me; if the money’s right, half of it up front, the contract’s on, it’s a runner. Strange – I’ve never told anyone any of this before, I don’t know why I’m telling you, I really don’t. I expect you’ve noticed I’ve got a good brain; also, the army taught me a lot. Really everything. First sergeant I ever served with, he said to me: now, Billy boy, this is easy, the nig-nogs are over there and we’re over here. But we’re going to do this and this and this and then, when we’ve cleaned up, they won’t be over
there any more, we will be. I want you to go over and do that sentry they’ve got, top him and give ’em all a fright; we’ll do the rest, we’ll go through ’em like a fart after a hot dinner, they won’t know what’s hit ’em. He and I, we understood each other fine, he got me my stripes the first time. Be cunning, McGruder, he said, and you can flatten the lot. He didn’t have to tell me! Married: oh, you knew that, did you? To that stupid Yugoslav tart? She couldn’t keep her knees shut if it was snowing on her fanny, yes, thanks for the tip but I know who it is.

‘My dad? Yes, last time I saw him he was in the sitting room there with a bottle to hand. In his chair. After what the others did to him he couldn’t properly use his legs any more. Good builder, mind, a brickie, but he’d turn his hand to anything in the trade; you wouldn’t find a harder worker in the six counties, I’ll say that. It’s this deal that’s arranged between us, the fifty thousand, I reckon that’s what makes me really feel like talking to you – we’ve got confidence between us now, haven’t we? Yes, my old man: but he was marked down as political, no boss wanted to hire him. Anyway, things being as they are in Ulster there was never any work. No point rebuilding a place if it’s just going to be knocked down again, is there?

‘My mother? I hated her. I tell you, there was no pity to be had from that woman. Big, prissy, Protestant bitch – couldn’t get her legs open if it was to have a piss. My old man must’ve forced her to get us, me and the kid brother. Religious. Opinionated. Bigoted. Not that it helped any of us. I tell you, what a life for a kid – drunken father, upstage mother, everyone screaming politics, no money in the house. You call that a life for a kid? I don’t call that a life at all. Lucky for me, I was strong and I was fast. I moved fast, I always did. Playground terror, I was. I still am, only on a big scale now. Good in school, too. I’ve got a good brain, see? Figures? Reading? Christ! Even then I thought: knowledge, that can be useful. Authority? I liked it. Very soon I was it. Authority punishes, and I like to see people punished. I always wanted authority; that’s one of the
reasons I joined the army. But I never took any shit; that’s why Brownlow went down. Only I was careless that time, acted too hasty; I should’ve waited. But I wasn’t careless any more after that.

‘What my mother taught us was discipline, I’ll say that for her. You made a mess anywhere in the house and it was a backhander. Yet it kind of stunts you in the end, backhanders – stunts like the growth of your mind. My brother? The Kid, Kid McGruder they used to call him – he’s dead. He was in a fight he couldn’t handle outside a dance-hall in the city and got his head kicked in at seventeen.

‘You know the Red Devils. I saw them as a kid doing exhibition parachuting on TV. That turned me on hard. It meant getting around, too, joining a parachute regiment, and I like that. Our mother with her punishment, Dad hurt like that, the law and the army always around the place – there was nothing at home. Ah, fuck it, I thought, I’m eighteen, I’m off. And I went down to the recruiting office.

‘Yes, I liked the army, liked it a lot. But I tell you – no shit. There was a young officer thought he could fuck me about. You know; we got up each other’s nose. He was hard, big bloke, pretty with it. One day I’d had enough and I went up to him quietly, just us two, and I said, what’s it to be, then? Karate, he said. That suited me. We met in the gym. Word had got around; the whole unit turned out. He thought he was good – Christ, I nearly massacred the cunt; it took eight men to get me off him. And you know what? I was booed! Yes! By my so-called mates!

‘I’m violent. But it’s a very cold violence I’ve got now – that comes with practice. I like to be cool; I don’t like a load of mess when I do a man, blood all over the pad and that. No, I like things clean. Quick, clean and final, that’s the way I like things. Kill, wash up and away on your bike, yes, that’s the trick.

‘Army training? Action? Jumping? Heights mean nothing to me. They didn’t to my dad either; I’ll say that for him. And I tell you I was fast. I may have had a drink now, but it’s true.

‘Villains? I’m a villain! You’ve got my record to prove it. Another villain in the unit – I’d spot him. Yes, any military villain’d come to Billy McGruder.

‘The colonel didn’t like me, nor the company commander, Major James. I did that nine months at Shepton, and when I got back to the unit the colonel and Major James sent for me and told me: You’re a good soldier, McGruder, but you’re a most unpleasant man, and I said yes, sir. He said, the colonel, we don’t want you with us, you can get out now. I said, but I want to stay on, sir. Major James said, we’ve had psychiatric reports on you, McGruder, you’re a very unstable character. Well, sir, I said, but there’s my service record. True, said the colonel, there is that. He said, you don’t seem to know fear, McGruder, but the trouble is, you inspire it, and in your own mates. I’ll try and do better, sir, I said. He thought for a time and said well, I’ll give you one more chance. I’d been stripped down to private, of course. Three times I was busted from corporal. Three! Well, I said thank you to the colonel and that first night, a Saturday, I went out into the town to sit somewhere quiet and have a soft drink in the dark because I’m no drinker – besides, they’d cropped my head in the prison and I didn’t want to be seen like that in the town. So I took my Pepsi into a park and was sitting drinking it alone and then suddenly they were onto me, two sergeants and a corporal. They jumped me and really hurt me for what I’d done to that man with my messtin. And do you know what they did to me when they’d given me a stamping? Well, you mayn’t believe this, but they all three got their cocks out and pissed all over me. They put the boot in while I was down and said, that’s all you’re good for, McGruder. Yes. That’s what they did. The corporal was Corporal Brownlow; we’d never got on. Well, you know what happened to him.

‘What I liked best was action! I lapped it up, what we called the bother spots. I’d pick my weapon, something silent that I happened to fancy, and go off patrolling on my own. Just wander around near where they were, you know. I’m very, very quiet, and I’d be well
stocked with my gear, everything to hand and not a sound. No rifle, no grenades. A needle now out of my sewing kit, a cut-throat, a knife even. Or my hands. I’m useful with my hands.

‘The piano wire at Saighton that time? Yes, I don’t know, I just fancied that for Brownlow. I got the idea when I saw three defaulters knocking down that old piano behind the officers’ mess. I thought, well, I think I’ll just help myself to a wire when they’re gone to dinner. Yes, I’ve always had an eye for an unusual weapon. Something easy to use and dead silent. Why silent? You’re right, yes, it’s not just that it doesn’t draw attention. Shall I tell you something? There’s the satisfaction that in the silence you can hear him go, it makes a noise like a woman when she yields.

‘Later? After I’d done my bird? Yes, well, then I found there were plenty of other armies. Pay was better, too – very good. Angola, Guatemala, Middle East – what the fuck did I care if the money was right? Liberia now, that’s a handy place. And Central America again – El Salvador. I don’t have to worry about the fare; they pay it this end and expenses. No mess, a little finesse, and that’s Billy McGruder for you.’

‘That’s right,’ I said, ‘the devil never comes cheap.’