A Breed of Heroes (33 page)

‘Thanks.’ Nigel went and Van Horne raised his eyebrows slightly as he put the money in his pocket before following Nigel out.

Later, in the Mess, Nigel said to Charles, ‘You seem to be rolling in it. Why were you giving it all to Van Horne? You paying him yourself or something?’

Several others were present, though not the CO. ‘Taxpayers’ money,’ said Charles promptly. ‘Community relations fund. Let me know if you want a hand-out.’

‘Great. What do I have to do?’

‘Build a community hall, then wait for the Provisional IRA to burn it down and claim the insurance.’ It came very pat off his tongue without the slightest hesitation. His sense of
guilt had evaporated quickly under the threat of discovery. The twin evils of exposure and of being unable to save enough to leave the Army soon had made him hard and determined. He felt that he
was fast losing all compunction about almost everything.

N
othing much happened during the next few weeks. The meals, the remarks, the routine, the pettiness of battalion headquarters continued without
hope of alleviation until the tour ended. During the long watches of the night it was difficult to believe in any other existence. Quiet conversations in the early hours revealed surprising aspects
of people, sensitivities and feelings deeply hidden during the day, but repetition soon robbed them of their impact. The only real privacy to be had was in bed, in the few delicious moments before
sleep. Life seemed to revolve around the tribal map of Belfast, the humming radio and the cheerless obscenities of the soldiers. The battalion was becoming lethargic and restless. Every day the
number of soldiers on CO’s Orders seemed to grow.

The CO himself continued to become moodier and quieter. Although he never mentioned it, it was clear to those who studied him most closely – which were those whose lives were most subject
to his whims – that the affair of the boy and the pipe bomb had made a deep impression on him. In conversation he referred to the IRA only as monsters or brutes. The nearest he came to
acknowledging them as people was when he called them psychopaths or thugs.

‘The CO’s idea of people,’ the adjutant said to Charles one day, ‘is a moral one. He can’t accept the idea of immoral people. For him it’s a contradiction in
terms.’

‘He can’t accept as a person anyone who differs from himself.’

‘That’s not fair. You’re judging too harshly. He accepts idiots and geniuses and other regiments. It’s just villains he can’t accept.’

Between his moods the CO would have enthusiasms. Several days would be spent in cabals with Nigel Beale, then he would give up Intelligence and take to lecturing the O Groups on what was going
on in other battalion areas. There was a noticeable switch from rioting to terrorism. Shootings, claymore mines and bombings became more common. Fire bombs in city centre shops were a great
favourite. But nothing happened in their area. ‘It’s because we’re sitting on them,’ he said. ‘It’s because we harass them day and night. I want company
commanders to do it even more often from now on. Knock on the doors of all known leaders – politely though. Just let them know you’re around and watching them. Give them the impression
you know everything about them, right down to what toothpaste they’re using and how often. If they use it.’

On other occasions he would say that the quiet was simply the lull before the storm and would urge all ranks to keep on their toes, with their noses to the grindstone, the same to the coalface,
their ears to the ground, their eyes peeled and their socks from slipping.

‘Bloody funny position you’d end up in,’ said Henry Sandy after one O Group, during which he’d been awake throughout. He normally fell asleep because of his nightly
debaucheries at the hospital, and had to find out from other people afterwards whether anything had been said that applied to him. One day, though, he announced to Charles that he had become
impotent, and he continued in that state for some weeks despite valiant efforts by a series of bewildered and disappointed ladies. He said he didn’t mind so long as he didn’t go on
wanting to do it when he couldn’t and after a while he stopped wanting to. Chatsworth would ring from the Factory every day to get an account of Henry’s doings and was unashamedly
cheered by his decline, which he saw as a judgment upon him for having indulged in a surfeit. But a more than usually tired-looking Henry announced one day that the judgment had been lifted.
‘It was Olympian,’ he said quietly and sincerely. ‘An anaesthetist from Londonderry. I knew it when I saw her in the theatre. We were doing an appendix. There weren’t even
any preliminaries. I just asked her up to my room and we undressed without speaking. We shagged each other silly all night. It was beautifully clean and anonymous. I think it would be wrong to see
her again, though, except by accident. It would spoil it. I shall try someone else tonight.’

‘Chatsworth will be sorry.’

‘I’ll tell him myself. Make him suffer.’

But for the CO the war continued. He was convinced that something was going to happen and was quick to punish slackness, especially what he thought were violations of the hard target principle.
Within a period of three days he fined six soldiers twenty pounds each because he was able to see them as he approached their sentry positions. ‘If I were a gunman I would have shot
you,’ he said. ‘Regard yourself as dead. Take his name, Mr Bone.’

All times were busy for Nigel Beale, as he regarded all information as Intelligence. What he regarded as a major coup, and which sent him into a passion of intense secrecy for several days,
occurred with the arrest of a squalid, middle-aged, incoherent man smelling of whisky, who had returned from the United States in order to avenge the murder of his brother, the victim of an IRA
feud. He had in his jacket pocket a loaded Colt .45 and over two hundred and fifty Green Shield stamps. He kept saying that he was going to wipe out the Provisional leadership. ‘Why did you
arrest him?’ Charles asked Nigel.

Nigel was immediately on guard. ‘What makes you think we have?’

‘I saw him, like everyone else. I spoke to him on the way in. He seemed keen to talk. He was drunk.’

‘You’re not supposed to know. Keep it quiet.’

‘Why don’t you let him go so that he could kill them? We could give him their addresses.’

‘There’s more to this than meets the eye.’

‘What?’

‘Need to know.’

But nothing happened. The man went to prison for possession of a firearm and was not heard of again. The leaders of the Provisionals continued to come and go as they pleased.

Meanwhile the deal with Beazely continued to work well. Charles and Van Horne regularly wrote his reports and he paid just as regularly. They did not even have to see him very often as most
business was conducted over the phone. This suited Beazely particularly well as he became ever more reluctant to leave his hotel. ‘They’re going to get me,’ he said in his cups
one day. ‘I know they are. I can feel it in my bones, or wherever you’re supposed to feel these things. They’re coming for me.’

‘Why you? They don’t even know you.’

‘Why not? They don’t need to. It happens to other people. A bloke walks to work and a tile falls off a roof and kills him. Why him? you say. Why not? I say. It has to be someone. And
I’m in a city where people are actually trying to kill each other and succeeding too bloody well for my liking. Well, one fine day it’s going to be me. I just have this feeling
it’s going to happen.’

‘It needn’t be you. It could be me or Van Horne.’

‘It’s a comforting thought, Charlie, and kind of you to say so, and if it had to be one or the other I’d be a little happier. But it’s more likely to be as well as, you
see. You and me and Van Horne, but most likely just me.’

Meanwhile, the money mounted up, and Charles, with three weeks left in Northern Ireland, was within one hundred and thirty of his five hundred pounds. He needed a couple of big stories to
supplement the continuing trickle of small ones.

One evening he was writing the minutes of the latest community relations committee meeting, which had lasted twelve minutes and had been chaired as usual by Anthony Hamilton-Smith, who had had
to leave early, when he was summoned downstairs to deal with a complaint. The complaints desk was on the ground floor of the police station, just off the entrance hall. It was a chore which he
shared with the adjutant. Complaints were either vivid and obviously false, or exaggerated and based on an uncheckable truth, or true and checkable but impossible to do anything about. There had
been two cases where soldiers had been reprimanded, once for damage to property and once for brutality, and the victims had been compensated; but the issues were rarely clear-cut, and the truth of
the matter was invariably unclear. On this occasion the complainant was Mary Magdalene, a girl from the Falls area whose nickname, origin unknown, had been passed on by the previous unit. She was
unusual in that she was young, attractive and a graduate of Queen’s University. Her complaints were detailed, literate and always minor, but nevertheless demanding extensive and
time-consuming investigation. Despite this Charles and Colin Wood competed for her, a battle which Colin was winning as he held the complaints file to which, with her, reference always had to be
made. The affair of the V-sign and the invitation allegedly delivered to her by a soldier from the back of a Land-Rover had provoked a lengthy and dignified correspondence between her and Colin
which was the outstanding feature of the file. It finally petered out because of an inability to agree whether the intention behind such gestures and invitations was to flatter and compliment or to
shock, degrade and terrorise.

She was already seated at the desk when Charles got there. There was no need to go through the preliminaries with her and so he pushed an empty form across. Though it was one of the unwritten
rules with her that neither side ever smiled or indicated friendship, it was clear that she enjoyed the process, and manners were kept at all times. ‘Would you please get me a pen,’ she
said.

‘Of course.’ This was a new development. He had left his upstairs and looked about for one, noticing her long, carelessly crossed legs and trying not to stare at them.

‘On second thoughts, I believe I’m permitted to dictate my complaint, am I not?’

‘You are, yes, but I still need a pen.’ In the end he borrowed one from the RUC man at the desk in the entrance hall. Mary Magdalene got a light for her cigarette from a grinning
corporal of the regimental police. She uncrossed and recrossed her legs. She had Irish looks of the best sort – dark hair, blue eyes, pale complexion and a gentle directness of expression
that, for dealings with the Army, hardened into a provocative determination. ‘Are you ready?’ she asked.

Charles held his pen poised. ‘Carry on.’ She set off at great speed and he had to ask her to slow down, which was one up to her. The complaint concerned the searching of a car in
which she and her parents were travelling. They had signed the clearance certificate to say that nothing had been damaged but when they had asked the soldiers under what authority they were acting
they had been foully abused. Worse, her father had been propped up against the car and searched, his feet kicked apart, and he had then been pushed roughly back into the car when he protested. She
dictated fluently and several times spelt words aloud, unnecessarily. Charles was able to get even on this by asking her to repeat them. When every last detail had been completed to her
satisfaction, and she had read it, she signed and Charles took the form back upstairs. A telephone call would confirm whether or not there had been a VCP at the time and place she had said.

The adjutant had turned his back on his overflowing in tray and was leaning against the window, smoking. He was gazing at the shattered lamp-post on the other side of the road, another victim of
urban guerrilla warfare. About half a pound of gelignite had been strapped to it one night the previous week, for no apparent purpose. A few yards away stood the telephone junction box which
controlled all the police station’s telecommunications.

‘Mary Magdalene,’ said Charles. ‘All legs this evening.’

‘Bitch.’

‘She claims that she and her mummy and daddy were abused at a VCP last night.’

Colin grinned. ‘Ah. We’ve got her this time. I know about it. The soldiers concerned were bright enough to report it and C company rang through this morning. They must’ve known
who she was. Their version is that the old man took a swing at one of them. I think it’s probably true otherwise they’d have kept quiet about it.’ He stubbed out his cigarette and
picked up the rest of the packet. ‘Give me the form and I’ll go and suggest that her statement be broadened to include all the facts. She must’ve had enough of you, anyway.
She’ll be wanting the real thing now.’

He went out with the form and Charles sat down at his desk. It occurred to him that no one would notice if he fabricated the minutes of the community relations committee. He balanced on the rear
two legs of his chair, resting the back of his head against the wall. Someone shouted something from the ground floor. He decided to do a trial run. He would invent a project which had come to
nothing and see if it was commented on. If it were he could always say it was a hangover from the previous unit. He would start with a detailed description of what it was and then go on to show why
it was impossible for it ever to have worked and record the committee’s unanimous decision. He sat the chair down on four legs again and bent forward over his desk, his elbows resting upon
it. His pen had almost completed the T of ‘also’ when a sheet of redness leapt up from the floor in front of his desk. Simultaneously, a tremendous shock whipped up through the seat of
his chair and the soles of his feet, stinging his calves and thighs. He felt himself rising, along with his desk and chair, and suddenly was near the ceiling. He brought his hands up to protect his
face and then toppled backwards and half right. He landed on his right side in a foetal position, his knees up to his chest and his head in his arms. He felt he was enveloped in a continuous roar
as in a great sea. After he hit the ground there was the sound of things falling and smashing all around him.