Thunder in the Blood Read online

  I took the train to Wolverhampton the following day. Karen met me at the station. She was a large, brisk, impatient woman, middle aged, with a Japanese station wagon and two large dogs.

  We drove west on the motorway towards Telford, while Karen told me what had happened. She lived in the same village as Beth. She helped in the local nursery school that Laura, Beth’s daughter, attended and the two women saw quite a lot of each other. Lately, since Christmas, Beth had become very withdrawn, almost reclusive. She’d started behaving oddly, neglecting the house, not bothering to cook. Twice, to Karen’s certain knowledge, she’d forgotten to give her daughter any breakfast, sending her off to nursery school on an empty stomach. Both times, Karen had saved the day. She’d tried to talk to her. She’d known something was wrong and she’d tried to find out what. But Beth had told her to mind her own business.

  Then, two weeks ago, Laura hadn’t appeared at nursery school at all. After a couple of hours, anxious, Karen had gone to the cottage. She’d found Laura in her mother’s bedroom, huddled in an armchair, knees to her chin. Beth was still in bed, deeply asleep, a bottle of pills on the floor beside her. The bottle wasn’t empty and to this day Karen doesn’t know what had happened, but she’d phoned for the doctor and agreed to look after Laura while Beth was encouraged to spend a little time in hospital, under observation. We were driving to the hospital now. There I could draw my own conclusions. As far as Karen was concerned, the diagnosis was obvious. The woman was off her head. Simple as that.

  I nodded, watching the damp, flat fields speed by.

  ‘How did you find me?’ I said. ‘How did you get my name?’

  ‘Beth told me.’

  ‘What did she say?’

  ‘She said you’d once told her to ring. If anything went wrong.’

  ‘Did she say anything else?’

  ‘No.’

  Karen looked across at me, totally uninterested in who I was, or how, exactly, I was connected to Beth. Since we’d met at the railway station, I’d been wondering how much she knew about Beth’s husband, Clive Alloway, what he did, where he travelled, who he mixed with, and now I realized that none of it mattered to her. Her only concerns were Beth herself and the child. The rest, very sensibly, was irrelevant.

  The hospital was smaller than I’d expected, a psychiatric facility with limited accommodation for longer-stay patients. Beth occupied a corner bed in a flat-roofed annexe in the grounds. Squirrels were playing in the trees outside her window and she was watching them when we arrived. She recognized me at once and it was obvious I wasn’t welcome. Karen stood over the bed, hands on her hips, while I made small talk for a minute or two. Finally, I looked up.

  ‘It might be better if we talked alone,’ I said, ‘if you don’t mind.’

  Karen pursed her lips and for a moment I thought she was going to be difficult. Then she shrugged and made for the door. I turned back to Beth. She was staring up at me. The initial hostility had gone.

  ‘What happened?’ she said. ‘To your face?’

  My hand went up to my ear, a reflex action, and I felt myself reddening.

  ‘I… had an accident,’ I stammered.

  ‘When? How?’

  ‘Before Christmas. In a car.’

  ‘Was it bad?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said truthfully, ‘it was terrible.’

  She looked at me a moment longer, then she patted the bed, abruptly maternal, and told me to sit down.

  ‘What happened?’ she said. ‘Tell me.’

  I shook my head, totally wrongfooted, more distracted than I should have been by the hospital smells, the clatter of the trolleys and the sight of the screens going up around a bed by the door. I’d left all that behind me. I was better. I was whole again. Beth was still looking at me, still waiting.

  ‘Well?’ she said.

  I told her about the accident. I made it as simple as I could. She followed my every word, her eyes never leaving the curl of scar tissue tracking out across my cheek.

  ‘You poor love,’ she said at the end. ‘You poor, poor love.’

  ‘I’m better,’ I protested. ‘I’m OK now.’

  ‘Really?’ she frowned. ‘You don’t look better.’

  ‘Don’t I?’

  ‘No. You look thin. You look ill. I can tell. Believe me.’ She paused. ‘It must have been terrible.’

  I shrugged and said nothing. What little I’d told her had taken more out of me than I cared to admit. I was here to try and help and all I could manage was one long bleat.

  Beth bent forward, her hand on my arm. ‘Are you married, dear?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Boyfriend?’

  I hesitated. ‘No,’ I said at last, ‘not just now.’

  ‘Worried about it?’

  ‘No. Not at all.’

  I frowned, the questions intrusive, the boot for once on the other foot.

  ‘I’ve come about you,’ I began. ‘I’ve come to find out how you are.’

  Beth looked at me for a moment, saying nothing. Then she squeezed my arm, very gently, genuine warmth, the last thing I’d expected.

  ‘You and me,’ she began, ‘we’re on the same side, really. Aren’t we?’

  I gazed at her, not beginning to understand, watching her eyes moisten, the tears beginning to fall.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ I said. ‘What’s wrong?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘What’s happened? Tell me? Why…?’ I gestured round. ‘Why all this? Why are you here?’

  Beth reached for a corner of the sheet and tried to dry her eyes. I could see a nurse coming now, walking down the ward towards us. I bent towards her, my face very close to hers.

  ‘Tell me,’ I said, ‘tell me what’s wrong.’

  Beth looked up, the smile quite gone. We were back in the cottage, months ago, years ago, that same conversation, that same ravaged face.

  ‘They’ve hung a man in Iraq,’ she said simply, ‘and my husband thinks he’s next.’

  8

  ‘He’s not.’ Stollmann was emphatic to the point of near contempt. ‘It won’t happen.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘Because Bazoft was a journalist. The Iraqis hate journalists.’

  ‘And Alloway?’

  ‘Alloway’s a businessman. They need businessmen.’

  ‘Is he in prison there?’

  ‘Christ, no.’

  ‘Where is he?’

  ‘In the UK, as far as I know.’

  ‘Is he still going to Iraq?’

  ‘You tell me.’

  ‘She says he is.’

  ‘Then maybe he is.’

  ‘Shouldn’t we know?’

  ‘Of course we know.’

  ‘Then don’t you know?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then why not tell me?’

  Stollmann leaned back. He was losing patience fast. I could see it in his eyes, the way he kept looking at the ceiling, shaking his head, not believing my persistence, my naïvety. Though technically still on sick leave, I’d shamed him into giving me half an hour of his precious time.

  ‘Do you ever read the papers at all?’ he said at last. ‘Superguns? Nuclear triggers? All bound for Iraq? Does any of that sound familiar?’

  I nodded. The last few days, the papers had been full of stories about UK firms exporting illegally to Iraq. Customs officials had seized parts of what they called a ‘Super Gun’ on the dockside at Teesport. Firms in the West Midlands and Sheffield were under fire. Some of the names quoted I recognized from our own files, heavily starred for maximum security classification, and I’d been surprised to see any of them in print.

  Stollmann was still staring at me. For once, I appeared to have stirred a real response. ‘Doesn’t it bother you at all?’ he said. ‘A maniac like Saddam? Prepared to gas his own people? Getting his hands on all that technology?’

  ‘That’s not the point.’

  ‘No?’ Stollmann leaned forward again. ‘It’s not?’ />
  ‘No.’ I shook my head. ‘It’s not.’

  There was a long silence. Stollmann was back in control again, reined in, the voice low, barely a mumble, and I suddenly remembered him sitting by the swimming pool, two years back, how vulnerable he’d seemed and how frail.

  ‘This Alloway woman,’ he was saying, ‘you shouldn’t have gone up there. Professionally, it was crass.’

  ‘I care,’ I said quietly. ‘I care what happens to people. To Mrs Alloway. To her husband. The dangers we expose them to. The risks we make them run.’ I paused. ‘She reads the papers. She sees the Iraqis hang people. She’s got a name. Farzad Bazoft. He’s a journalist. I know that. Iraqis hate journalists. I know that, too. But that isn’t the point. The point is that he carries an English passport, just like her husband, and he had a perfectly good reason for being there, just like her husband, and now he’s dead.’ I paused again. ‘Can’t you see that?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘And can’t you see what it might do to her? A woman in that state? Half mad already?’ I leaned forward, angry now. ‘She thinks we’re close to killing her husband. That’s what she thinks. I know she does. She doesn’t actually say it. But that’s what she means.’ I leaned back. ‘And she might have a point. No?’

  Stollmann slumped in the chair a moment, his head back, his eyes closed. He looked, if anything, exhausted.

  ‘Sooner or later,’ he muttered at last, ‘you should expect arrests.’

  ‘In Baghdad?’

  ‘No.’ He opened one eye. ‘Here. In the UK.’

  ‘You mean Iraqis?’ I frowned. ‘Buying arms?’

  ‘No.’ He offered me a thin, mirthless smile. ‘Brits. Selling them.’

  I gazed at him a moment, the penny beginning to drop.

  ‘You mean people like Clive Alloway?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because they’re breaking the law.’

  ‘By doing what?’

  ‘By selling to the Iraqis.’

  ‘But we encourage them. Or the DTI does.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘And he’s been helping us, too. It’s in the file. I’ve seen it.’ I leaned forward again. ‘Doesn’t that count?’

  Stollmann said nothing. Just looked at me. Finally, he bent across the desk, his face close to mine. ‘The law’s the law,’ he said. ‘Or that’s the way the Customs people see it.’

  ‘And you? You agree with all that?’

  ‘Yes.’ He nodded. ‘As it happens, I do.’ He shrugged. ‘Parliament makes laws. We enforce them. Seems pretty straightforward to me.’

  ‘And the rest of it?’ I stared at him. ‘Our involvement? The DTI? Whoever else? Doesn’t that matter? When people like Alloway get hurt? Total innocents? People just making their living? Doing their bit? Doing their best?’

  Stollmann opened his mouth and began to say something, then thought better of it. Instead, he got up and went to the window. When he turned round, his voice was almost inaudible. ‘I’m sorry about what happened,’ he said. ‘I’ve seen better operations in my time.’

  I felt myself going scarlet. I kept my hand away from my face, but only just. ‘They did their best,’ I muttered. ‘It could have been worse.’

  ‘That’s not what I meant.’

  ‘It’s not?’

  ‘No.’ He stood up. ‘The reports from Londonderry are conclusive. Someone fucked up.’

  I shrugged, affecting indifference, still keen to get the conversation back to Alloway.

  ‘Happens,’ I said. ‘No one’s fault.’

  Stollmann looked at me for a moment or two. There was a strange expression on his face, an expression I’d never seen before. Partly speculation. Partly something close to regret.

  ‘Nice try,’ he said quietly, ‘but wrong.’

  I returned to work on 30 April 1990. I arrived to find myself allotted a desk in the big open-plan office on the second floor. The desk had a keyboard, a computer screen and the personnel department had already phoned through the combination that opened the drawers. In the top drawer there was a long white envelope. The envelope contained a copy of a letter from my Belfast controller and a brief covering note from Stollmann.

  The Belfast letter detailed my operational record in Northern Ireland. It was extremely flattering and had drawn a small round of applause from Stollmann. He said it was ‘meritorious’ and ‘evidently no more than you deserve’. He had lodged it on my record and he was happy that the Treasury had seen fit to approve his application for a compensatory payment. I read his note twice before looking at the accompanying cheque. The prose was as wooden as ever, but he appeared to be saying that he was proud of me.

  The cheque was made out in my name to the sum of £76,000. A curt line of officialese on the attached remittance advised me that the monies were ‘in full and final settlement of any later claim’, and included ‘an apportionment for pain, suffering and inconvenience’. I shook my head, remembering the months of hospital ceilings and bed baths, and the long nights spent wondering quite what I’d look like when they’d finished with me. There were several words which I might have used to describe it all, but ‘inconvenience’ wasn’t one of them.

  I stayed at my desk throughout the early summer. After the first afternoon of smiles and handshakes, most of my colleagues were slow in picking up old friendships. They hadn’t a clue what I’d been doing in Northern Ireland and they knew it was pointless asking, but the apostrophe of scar tissue curling on to my cheek appeared to tell its own story. If they felt anything, it seemed to me to be a kind of embarrassed acknowledgement that my career had come full circle. I’d done my training. I’d been out in the trenches. And now I was back, tap-tapping my way into those same Registry files, an early casualty returned to the rear area. It was a journey that reeked of failure and no one drew that conclusion quicker than me. Slowly, week by week, I began to fall apart.

  Looking back with the benefit of a great deal of good advice I can now see what was happening. My body, fitter than most, had largely survived the trauma of the crash. My gold medal hopes for the hundred metres were over, and I’d be wise to think twice about sky-diving or anything ambitious in the sub-aqua line, but I was back on a modest training schedule and I felt, physically, in reasonable shape.

  But that, in a sense, was irrelevant, because my brain, or my soul or whichever bit of me is really me, hadn’t in truth begun to cope. At the Gransha Hospital, in Londonderry, a wise old priest had once spent half an hour at my bedside. He knew I wasn’t a believer and we had a nice secular chat about Africa (which he knew well), but when he was on the point of leaving, he’d bent low over the pillow and given me a blessing. I’d thanked him through my swollen lips and he’d paused for a moment or two by the door. ‘In God’s good time,’ he’d said. ‘Believe me.’ My limbs encased in plaster, my head bandaged, my brain numb with drugs, I’d half registered the phrase, thinking it was nice of him to come, sweet old thing. Only years later, in very different circumstances, did I realize what he was on about.

  Three things happened next, all interlinked. On 21 June 1990, more than two months after my conversation with Stollmann about Clive Alloway, a Customs and Excise team descended on an engineering factory in Coventry. They spent most of the day asking questions about sales of machine tools to Iraq and they carted away a great deal of documentation. I was one of the first to know because I was cross-indexing some source reports that day, which meant open access to the inter-agency loop on the computer, and I noticed specially flagged ‘alert’ messages dropping into a number of departmental ‘baskets’. These alert messages normally generated traffic of their own, electronic ripples in the Whitehall pond, and in this case the volume of stuff coming out of the DTI was astonishing.

  Sitting back from the computer, my own task well in hand, I watched the internal phones begin to wink. At our level, no one quite knew what all the fuss was about, but later that afternoon there were a number of heavy m
eetings on the top floor and by close of play the office gossips were talking in terms of ‘headless chickens’. The chiefs were evidently scurrying around, leaving the building in droves, commandeering our small band of chauffeurs to run them to this ministry or that. Only Stollmann, curiously enough, stayed put and I remember thinking at the time that he, above all, should be wise to the ways of the Customs and Excise people. I met him in the lift in the early evening, descending to street level, but when I asked him about the Coventry developments and whether or not the arrests he’d mentioned might follow, he just shrugged. Anything, he muttered, might happen, and probably would.

  The following week, on the Saturday morning I got up late. By now, I was having the paper delivered every morning, a small domestic gesture that somehow smacked of permanence and routine, important glues in a life that I knew was close to disintegration. By now I was a wreck. I couldn’t sleep properly. I couldn’t think straight. I couldn’t make the simplest decisions. Whatever I did, wherever I went, I ended up shaking. Big deep tremors. Impossible to anticipate or control. So far, thank God, I’d managed to hang on to my job, mainly by keeping the lowest of profiles, but I knew it was only a question of time before someone noticed and filed the inevitable report. Not even my chums at MI5 could be that blind.

  I picked up the paper and went back to bed. There was a big piece on the front page about Bush suspending talks with the PLO. I read it twice, making little sense of it on either pass. Irritated at my inability to concentrate, I opened the paper and began to leaf through. On page three, half-way down, there was a single-column report from Birmingham. A businessman had been found dead in a car, in woodland, near Bridgnorth. The man had run a small business consultancy in the engineering field. He’d left a widow, two sons and a daughter. His name was Clive Alloway.

  I remember staring at the name. I remember the shakes coming back and hearing the thunder of my own blood, swirling around my head. I remember groaning, turning over, putting my head under the pillow and crying and crying until the sheet was wet. Then I got out of bed and tried to find my address book, and couldn’t. Finally a little calmer, I phoned my mother.