Sabbathman (46 page)

‘Oh?’

‘Yes.’ He nodded. ‘Those bonds that Marcus Wolfe was flogging,
they’ve got a full client list, the people who really got clobbered, the ones who lost everything.’

‘And?’

‘One of them was a woman called Dorothy Gifford.’ He reached for the last pot of jam. ‘Our friend’s mother.’

Kingdom dropped Allder at New Scotland Yard, pausing long enough to check for messages. Before midday, everything had been rerouted down to Winchester and the afternoon had produced nothing new. Kingdom checked as well in the L-shaped administrative office one floor below Allder’s. The woman in charge had been one of the first to pick up the gossip from Belfast when Kingdom and Annie had originally met, and ever since then she’d appointed herself keeper of Kingdom’s secrets.

‘Nothing from Five?’ he inquired. ‘No calls?’

‘Afraid not.’ She glanced up. ‘The lady gone missing again?’

‘Yeah.’

‘No postcards?’

‘Not one.’

‘Heartless cow.’

Kingdom closed the door on the cackle of raucous laughter and walked down the corridor to the lifts. Allder had spent the last part of the drive back to London clarifying what he expected from Kingdom’s visit to Skye. The Monday course lasted until the following weekend. The enrolment forms were being completed in the name of Gordon Travis, and he’d be posing as a freelance journalist in need of a break. The course, by all accounts, was rugged and Kingdom might be wise to take a day or two off. Plenty of kip. Plenty of good, solid food. Easy on the fags. Not too much to drink.

Kingdom had sat in the Wolseley, still wondering whether Allder could possibly be serious. Time was precious. Even if Dave Gifford turned out to be Sabbathman, there were a thousand loose ends to tie up but when he pointed this out, Allder seemed unconcerned. Kingdom, he’d said with sudden warmth, had cracked it. He’d come up with a couple of names and enough circumstantial evidence to fit the known facts. There were hundreds
of other bodies on the Branch who could deal with the supplementary inquiries. What mattered now, he said again and again, was motive. Why would the Giffords have done it? Why would they have launched this extraordinary conspiracy?

Kingdom left the office at five. The traffic was solid down Victoria Street and he decided to leave the Wolseley in the underground car park at the Yard, taking the tube to Brixton. The walk to King’s College Hospital took less than five minutes, and when he asked for Ernie at the reception desk in the A and E Department, a woman directed him to a ward on the second floor.

Kingdom took the lift. The ward was crowded, half a dozen or so beds down either side of the room, lines of blank old faces staring into space. There was a television on a shelf at the end of the ward but no one seemed to be taking very much notice. A young nurse spotted Kingdom by the door. She was holding a bedpan in one hand and a plate of uneaten food in the other. Kingdom asked her where he might find his father and she indicated a bed beside the window.

‘I might be wrong,’ she said, ‘but I think he’s asleep.’

Kingdom sat beside his father’s bed for nearly an hour. In the last few days, Ernie had aged ten years. His face seemed to have shrunk to the shape of his skull and his scalp showed white through the thinning hair. There were cuts on his chin where someone had tried to shave him, and wisps of cotton wool clung to the scabs of clotted blood. Except for a glass of water, the cabinet beside the bed was quite bare – no flowers, no books, no cards – and Kingdom realised how empty his life had become. This old man had nothing. No peace, no dignity, not even the comfort of a memory or two. The one person who might have made a difference – Barry – was denied him and the best he could now expect was another bed like this in some Godforsaken nursing home or other until the big heart stopped altogether.

Kingdom felt for his father’s hand. The nails were long and cleaner than he’d ever seen them, not Ernie’s nails at all. Kingdom reached out, touching his face, and the old man grunted, some private thought disturbed. He turned his head and a thin trickle of saliva found a path to the pillow. Kingdom wiped his mouth with a corner of the sheet, his lips close to his father’s ear.

‘Dad?’ he whispered.

The old man’s eyes opened. They were filmy and moist and the pain showed at once, the way he screwed his face up.

‘You OK?’

The old man blinked, not understanding the question, not understanding anything, only the pain. The consultant had warned that it might be this way. The anaesthetic, he’d said, could play havoc with the remaining brain cells.

‘Dad?’

The eyes closed again and the mouth fell open. After a while, the breathing resumed, shallow, half-hearted, the chest barely rising under the cotton sheet. Kingdom stayed for a while, hoping his father would wake up. Finally, he tucked the hand underneath the blanket, and left. No point, he thought, walking away from the ward, trying to make sense of the blur of signs in the corridor outside.

Kingdom walked back to Scotland Yard. Before he reached the river, he called at a pub near the Elephant and Castle. He drank three pints of Guinness, each with a chaser of Bells. By the time he was back beside the Wolseley, the alcohol was beginning to work. Anaesthetic, he thought, sliding in behind the wheel.

He was halfway up the exit ramp before he spotted the note on the windscreen. It was tucked behind the wiper on the passenger side. He pulled up at once, leaving the engine on, getting out of the car, retrieving the fold of yellow paper. It was dark now, and he stood beside the Wolseley, oblivious of the patrol car stalled on the ramp behind him, the barp on the horn, the impatient frown beneath the uniformed cap.

‘Room 1807,’ the note said, ‘before you leave.’

Kingdom got back in the car. Room 1807 was Allder’s office. The note was in Allder’s handwriting. What did the man want now?’

Kingdom took the lift to the nineteenth floor. The door to Allder’s outer office was half-open. Inside, through the ribbed glass on the inner door, Kingdom could see the outline of his diminutive figure behind the big desk by the window. Allder was on the
phone. He could hear the rasp of his voice. He hesitated a moment, then knocked and walked in. Allder peered across the room at him, bringing the conversation to an abrupt end. He put the phone down and stood up. He was in his shirtsleeves, his jacket over the chair by the cocktail cabinet.

‘Drink?’ he said at once.

Kingdom sank into the chair in front of the desk. He could hear Allder behind him, pouring the drink. It sounded enormous.

‘Here.’

He put the crystal goblet in Kingdom’s hands. Then he circled the desk and sat down. There was an inch or so of Scotch left in the bottom of the bottle. Most of it went into the glass at his elbow.

‘Cheers.’ he said.

Kingdom raised his glass, echoing the toast, wondering whether the Commissioner had been on again, a new deadline, an even shorter piece of rope for Allder to hang himself with.

Allder nodded at the telephone. ‘Belfast,’ he said.

‘Sir?’

‘Just now. Your mates from Knock. Just to say …’ He tried to end the sentence but couldn’t, turning his face away, revolving the chair towards the window, the glass to his lips again. Kingdom, watching him, felt a sudden chill, an icy hand inside him, encircling his heart. Annie, he thought numbly. It’s about Annie.

‘What’s happened?’ he said quietly. ‘Just tell me.’

Allder got up, his back still turned to Kingdom. ‘The army people found a body. This morning. Down in Armagh somewhere. Crossmaglen.’

‘Annie’s? Annie Meredith’s?’

‘Yes.’ He nodded. ‘They think so.’

‘
Think
so?’ Kingdom stared at him. Lisburn had photographs, fingerprints, everything. It was standard procedure, positive ID in case the army ended up shooting the wrong people. ‘Sir?’

Allder turned round at last. The glass was empty, his face quite expressionless. ‘They have a problem. They’re saying the body’s incomplete. They’re saying …’ He made a vague circular movement in the air with the empty glass. ‘You’re the one who’d know best.’

Kingdom read Andy Gifford’s book on the plane. In a way, as he quickly realised, it was better than alcohol or tranquillisers. Here was a pain as deep as his own, and an anger no less savage.

Andy Gifford, as Kingdom already knew, had served in 3 Para. As a nineteen-year-old, he’d been shipped south to the Falklands with the rest of the Task Force, and found himself walking across ninety miles of sodden, windswept bog. Every bone in his body had ached from the weight he was carrying. He’d suffered trench foot and periodic bouts of dysentery. But by the eve of battle, in his heart, he’d known that he was ready for it. After three weeks in the open, the men were like animals. They’d shed their excess weight. They’d hardened themselves to the cold and the wet. Battle would now be an overwhelming release. ‘Swift and hard,’ Gifford wrote, ‘that was our mantra.’

Three Para were assigned a feature called Mount Longdon, a long ridge of rocky outcrops guarding one flank of the road to Stanley. On top of Longdon sat a large number of Argentinian troops, some of them highly trained special forces. They had radar, mortars, 106 mm rifles, heavy machine guns and limitless ammunition. Most important of all, they’d had the time to bed themselves in, to dig their trenches, to site their heavy weapons. Geography and sheer weight of numbers piled the odds against the Paras. In technical terms, they were crazy even to plan an attack. But insanity, as Gifford acknowledged, was part of the contract. ‘We came from the Planet Zilch,’ he wrote, ‘though none of us yet knew what deep space really meant.’

The attack on Mount Longdon started at half-past midnight.
The Paras attacked from two directions. Andy Gifford, as part of ‘B’ company, went up the long forward slope of the mountain. Men around him were dying in some numbers, the work of snipers hidden in the rocks above. Life on the receiving end, as Gifford drily noted, could be ‘fucking unpleasant’.

It got worse. ‘B’ company fought its way to the top of the mountain. Amongst the crags and gullies, the carnage started in earnest. There were bodies everywhere, both British and Argentinian, and seeing people they knew blown away stung the Paras to yet greater violence. Fuelled by fear and the primitive drive for revenge, they pushed on through the rocks, clearing bunker after bunker. Much of the fighting was hand to hand. The Argentinians were wearing heavy winter clothing. To kill with the bayonet, you went in through the eye. There was little time to take prisoners.

By daybreak, half the mountain had fallen but the battle for the rest was still in progress. By now, Argentinian gunners in Stanley had the range of the Paras. The incoming artillery shells screamed towards them, sucking the air from the mountain top. Gifford, crouched behind a rock, saw one of his closest mates caught in the open. The shell exploded, red-hot fragments of shrapnel everywhere. Covered in earth, trembling uncontrollably, Gifford lifted his head. The lower half of his mate’s body lay in a heap beside the charred edges of the shell hole. Blue smoke was curling from his combat trousers. The left-hand side of his face clung to a nearby rock. The rest had gone.

Later, the battle over, the Paras tidied up. The smell was appalling. There was shit and bodies everywhere. Many of the surviving Argentinians were kids, teenagers. In their pockets, the Paras found letters from home, photos of their mothers, rosary beads. Occasionally, the big guns in Stanley would open up again and a round or two would rasp towards the mountain and the cry ‘Incoming!’ would send men diving for cover. On one such occasion, curled in a shell scrape, Andy Gifford watched two injured men sitting with their backs against a wall of rock. One was Argentinian, the other a Para. Both just sat there, helpless, unable to move, like spectators at some insane international.

Victory was sweet release but for Gifford nothing would ever be the same again. ‘Politicians,’ he wrote, ‘blame war on events.
They say it’s diplomacy by other means. They say it’s something you get into when everything else has failed. That’s maybe true but it begs a couple of questions. The first is about war itself. War is the real enemy. It breaks you inside. It takes your pity away. In a single night we became old men, changed forever. If you bothered to look hard enough, you could see it when we got back home. All the flags, and the bands, and the banners, and the cheering, what was all that about? Us? Where we’d been? What we’d done? What we’d seen? Was that why people were
celebrating
? War is a conjuring trick. It depends on keeping your mouth shut afterwards, on not giving the game away, on maintaining the illusion. The illusion is simple. It says that it’s somehow honourable and necessary to deprive a mother of her son, a wife of her husband, a child of its father. But it isn’t. It’s none of those things. It’s depraved and ugly, and if you’ve been there and seen it and done it, it fucks you up for life. Nothing ever touches you, troubles you, ever again. You’re immune. You’re dead. You’re the creature from the Planet Zilch, an alien on earth, forever …’

Andy Gifford’s book was short, no more than 120 pages, and Kingdom was reading the postscript when the outskirts of Belfast appeared through a tear in the clouds and the captain announced the final approach to Aldergrove airport. Kingdom reached for his seat belt, not realising that it was still fastened from take-off, his eyes returning to the book. After the war was over, the defeated Argentinians were corralled on Stanley airfield. Soon afterwards, they were marched onto two civilian ships for the 400-mile crossing to Argentina. One of the prisoners, a young conscript, was stopped and searched. In his rucksack, in pieces, were the week-old remains of his brother. He was taking him home. To be buried. Kingdom shut his eyes as the aircraft bumped down through the cloud. This incident had evidently become instant legend. On the voyage back to Ascension, the paras had sung about it. ‘Pack up your brother in your old kit bag,’ went the chant, ‘and smile, smile, smile …’