"Glad what's come out?"
"The thing I will tell you about when you're sober."
"Tell me now."
"When you're sober."
"Tell me now or I'll break your other nose."
"See, you are pissed. Forget it. In the morning I'll tell you everything. But right now I'm going to bed. You can stay there or you can go."
With that Fraser kicked off his shoes, peeled off his socks and jumped into bed. That he was otherwise fully dressed didn't surprise me. He always did look and smell like he slept in his clothes, and this confirmed it. He'd turned his back on me, and had either closed his eyes or was staring at the wall. I was faced with the choice of rousting him out of his bed or leaving.
I surveyed the room again. The newsprint and the pages ripped from books and the photocopies spoke of a mind out of control. I wondered what Dick Fellowes had made of it. Though when I stepped across to look at the untidy collage more closely, some of it was just football league tables, but pinned up next to scraps torn from a Bible; or lecture notes adjacent to full-colour magazine adverts for lawnmowers.
Fraser was snoring—or pretending to. Maybe it was the effect of the swollen nose. I thought about punching him again, hard, maybe on the leg. Instead I left him to snore.
On her return from lunch, Val told me that someone had chained himself to the railings at Buckingham Palace. Just the kind of everyday lunch time report you look forward to while working in one of London's many offices. Meanwhile I had to telephone the junior minister's office about the wretched government youth initiative. A chirpy female switchboard operator put me through to a decidedly non-chirpy staffer—the one who puts-the-powder-on-the-noses-of-the-assistants-to-the-junior-minister—who told me he was unavailable.
"Not chained himself to the railings, has he?"
"Pardon?"
"A joke. A small
jeu
."
"Who is this?"
I'd already told the dolt who I was, but I repeated my name, rank and number.
"Ah," said the staffer. "I think we just needed to know whether we had your support, that's all."
"I'm calling to discuss that very matter with the junior minister."
"So is that a yes or a no?"
"Oh, for God's sake," I almost shouted. "Tell him I returned his call." Then I put the phone down.
Some days are like that: you can't get hold of anyone and a sense of enfeeblement proceeds slowly down the spine and sets hard somewhere in the kneecaps, thereby stopping you from being able to stand up. But on such days you can return calls safe in the knowledge that the people you don't want to speak to won't be available. Then they have to return your return-call, and on it goes. I stacked up seven of these. Though it's a bit like gambling: you have to keep pressing your luck just for the fun of it, and it ran out on the eighth when I had to call the Scouts who were trying to downplay some unpleasantness involving a member of their executive board caught accessing paedophilic images from the Internet. They wanted to know if it might threaten their funding. I wanted to tell them:
I'd say it will
.
It was while I was trying to advise them on a press statement that my mobile phone went. It was Antonia. She very rarely called me, and almost never on my mobile.
"Hi, Antonia. I'm busy on the other line. Can I call you back?"
"It's pretty serious, my love."
Something about that
my love
made me get rid of the Scouts rather quickly from the other line. "Okay, Antonia. What is it?"
"Remember Seamus? The old soldier you sent me?"
"Yes. What about him?"
"Does he have anyone at all? Any family anywhere? I mean, anyone?"
"Heck, I don't think so. He's on the streets when he's not with you. I don't think there's any family."
"Anyone who might know a little about him? I mean anything at this stage."
"What's happened?"
"He's chained himself to the railings at Buck Pal."
"Oh, it's
him!
I'd heard something of that!"
"It's worse than that. They went to cut him free and he says he's got a bomb under his coat."
I felt my scalp flush. Then I remembered Otto. "Antonia, there is a guy. Served with him in the Gulf. Maybe he can help."
"I'm up here at Buckingham Palace now. Well, I'm with the police. Seamus told them he'd come from GoPoint and they drove me up here. It's a stand-off. They don't know if he's bluffing or not. But if Otto would talk to him it might help."
"I'll call him. Are you there now? I'll get to you as soon as I can."
Antonia gave me a number for the officer in charge, so that I could let him know we'd be coming. I called Otto in his toyshop. I got a silly laughing-policeman message from his answering machine. I left an urgent message and luckily he called me back instantly. I explained the situation and arranged to meet him so that we could go there together.
I knew it would take Otto at least forty-five minutes to get into town, so I finished up at the office, advising the Scouts to distance themselves from the paedophile and recommending that they move away from short trousers altogether. Just as I was pulling on my coat the phone went again. Val took the call and whispered that it was the junior minister's powder-boy. Or words to that effect. I waved her away and as I left I heard her lie sweetly that I'd already left the building.
I met Otto at Victoria and we hotfooted it up to the palace. The police had cordoned off Birdcage Walk and Constitution Hill, and a quite sizeable crowd had been pushed back way behind the Queen Victoria Memorial. A police officer in a flak jacket put his hand out to stop us getting any nearer, but I gave him the name and number of his commanding officer and after radioing ahead he let us pass. We were then escorted up to the command point.
I could see Antonia in a borrowed police coat, talking to an officer of rank. They were standing next to a police Land Rover, surrounded by a lot of armed officers in flak jackets. They all seemed to have earpieces and mouth-mikes. Up by the railings lay propped the lonely figure of Seamus. I could only see his head, because the area immediately in front of him, and the palace forecourt behind the railings, had been sandbagged.
Antonia introduced me to the commander, a tall, grey-haired figure with a long jaw and a jovial expression. "We've just worked out we were at school together," Antonia said.
"Who, you and Seamus?"
"No," the commander said, rubbing his large white hands together, "me and Antonia here."
That was Antonia. Give her two minutes and she'd establish the common ground. Five minutes and she'd have the commander on her committee. They both looked at me as if they expected me to join in the chat about schooldays, then the commander pulled himself up. "Are you the fellow who knows him?"
I said I wasn't, and introduced Otto. "We were in the Gulf together," Otto said. He sounded apologetic.
"He says he's wired. Was he trained in explosives?" the commander asked Otto.
"Yes. He was a colour sergeant. Knew a bit of everything. But he's not wired. You can take it from me."
"I'm going to need a lot more than that," said the policeman.
"He's not a bomber. Let me talk to him. I'm all he's got. I'll talk him down."
The commander glanced up at the heavens, which were filled with plump dark clouds. He seemed to bring the threat of rain down from the sky when he fixed Otto with his gaze. You could feel clouds moving overhead.
"He's just a dosser," Otto tried again.
"All right. We'll stand back."
"You've got to treat him well," Otto said. "He's been to hell, that man."
"Go and have a word," said the policeman.
"I'll come with you," Antonia said.
Otto looked at her. "No." Then he turned to me. "You come."
I looked at the commander and he nodded assent. For the first time the implications actually dawned on me of what might happen if Seamus
had
strapped himself up with explosives. But like Otto I knew that he had neither the means nor the resources, and together we walked across to the railings where the old soldier had chained himself, watched by TV cameras and a thousand eyes.
We stopped just in front of the sandbags. A long way behind Seamus, in the palace forecourt, the royal guards in their bearskin hats stood to unflinching attention, just as they did for the tourists every single day of the year. The commotion hadn't even scratched their routine.
How very English,
I thought.
How very fucking stupid.
Come the hour, I had no doubt they would change the watch with all pomp, utterly regardless of what was happening outside the railings.
"Seamus," Otto shouted, "what the fuck you doing?"
"Who's that?" croaked a voice from the other side of the sandbags.
"It's Otto, mate. Otto."
"Otto? What you doing here?"
"More to the point is what you are doing here, Seamus. Can I come and have a word?"
"Who's that with you?"
"A mate of mine. You know him. Can we come and have a little conflab? Talk tactics. Eh Seamus? Eh?"
"I don't mind."
Otto turned and signalled the thumbs up to the police clustered around the Land Rover. We stepped inside the sandbagged perimeter.
Seamus looked very different. He'd shaved his head. Something very large was bulking out his coat. I didn't like being there one bit. I wondered why Otto had asked me to be with him.
Otto said, "Well, this is a right bloody caper."
Seamus turned his gaze on me. A fleck of hoar frost glittered in his eye. I thought again of the Ancient Mariner, and I wondered if I'd ever see another wedding. "Who's he?"
"We met before, Seamus," I said. "I sent you to GoPoint."
He wrinkled a leathery nostril. "I don't know you."
"You want a ciggie?" said Otto. "Go on, have a smoke. Go on."
"I'll have a smoke off you. Yeh, I'll have a smoke."
Otto lit a cigarette and passed it to Seamus. Then he lit one for himself. I don't smoke, but I asked for one, too. Otto said, "What's this all about, then."
Seamus tapped the side of his nose. "Special ops."
"There is no ops, Seamus. We don't do ops any more, you and me. We're in civvies. Better off, too."
"Not on about that."
"What you on about, then?"
"All a fuck, isn't it? It's all about a fuck."
Otto looked at me and wiped a finger under his nose. "What's all this about bombs? What you got strapped under that coat? You've got nothing there. Tell me there's nothing there. What do you expect to get out of this, eh?"
"I want an audience with the Queen. I want to tell her what I know."
"Eh? The Queen? Queen don't give a fuck about the likes of you and me, Seamus."
"I've been a fucking loyal soldier to the fucking Queen. I want to tell her what I know. And if she won't come down here, she can ride raggy-arsed to Birmingham." Whatever this phrase meant, Seamus found its utterance very funny. He tipped back his head. "Ha ha ha ha ha!"
Otto looked to me again. "Tell him the Queen won't come. Tell him she's eating pie in the palace, and too busy."
"He's right, Seamus," I said. "The Queen won't come here."
The old soldier looked around at the gritty pavement on either side of him. "Yeh," he said seriously, "it's a bit mucky, innit? Maybe we should sweep up a bit."
He looked at me. His idea for tidying up the street was in earnest. "Killed that girl, you know," he said to me. "Bumped her off, they did. It's known. Everybody knows."
"Which girl, Seamus?"
"Diana. Princess Di. Didn't want her marrying an Arab, did they? Lovely girl. Met her. Land mines thing. Got a thing about land mines, me."
"Right," I said, nodding. I didn't know which way this thing was going. "Right."
"You tell the Queen I need her down here. She needs to talk to me. Then if she winks at me, I'll know."
"Know what, Seamus?"
"That will be between me and the Queen. Queen don't wink, do she? So if she comes here and winks at me, I'll know all I need to know."
It was gibberish. It didn't give us a handle. I was trying to think of something to say when Seamus twisted his features at me. There was a fierce glint in his eye. Hoar frost. He said, "Terrible isn't it? I'm trying to get a cup of tea."
I was shocked. His words were an exact echo of what he said to me from the darkened doorway that time, the day I put him in a cab and sent him up to GoPoint. It was like I was suddenly back there for a moment, as if there had been a wrinkle in time.
I heard Otto say, "No problem, mate, I'll fetch you a cup of tea."
Otto winked at me. I don't think Seamus was supposed to have spotted the wink, but he did, and I saw him stiffen. Something passed across his face. He glanced between Otto and me as if we might be part of some conspiracy. I know it's a small thing, but I wished Otto hadn't winked at me like that.
"No," said Seamus, "Let 'im fetch it. You stay here with me."
I didn't mind being errand boy and I said so. "How do you like it, Seamus? Milk? Sugar?"
"Milk and three sugars. Get a cup for Otto, will ya? He's been good to me, he has. Deserves a cup of tea. My old mucker. Here, take this. I don't want it any more."
He handed me something that had been rolled into a cylinder. It was wrapped in a dirty red-and-white-chequered scarf: a traditional, tasselled Arab
shemagh
.
"Don't look at it now," he said. "It's what I know. Put it in your pocket for later."
I wasn't about to argue with him so I did as he instructed and made my way—slowly—out of the sandbagged area and back to the command point, where a huddle of police officers and Antonia watched my approach. I now saw they had marksmen in the shadows with high-velocity rifles trained on Seamus. It all seemed completely over the top. But I supposed there was the Queen to think about.
The commander, Antonia and all the others looked at me without saying a word as I drew up beside the police Land Rover. I said, "He wants a cup of tea."