Thunder in the Blood (6 page)

‘Tell me,’ he said, ‘what did he want to know?’

‘You mean out of bed? When we weren’t being taped?’ Stollmann didn’t answer, just nodded. ‘Nothing. I told you. It was purely social.’

‘So what did
you
want to know?’

‘I…’ I hesitated, only too aware that the interview wasn’t
about Priddy’s sex life at all, or mine, but something far closer to home. Lately, before Christmas, the top floor had been running checks on computer usage. I knew that because a colleague in the office had told me so. He’d been interested in county court judgements against his landlord, and they’d caught him poking around in DHSS files. Doubtless the checks extended to my computer terminal, too. Which explained a great deal about Stollmann’s interest in Priddy.

‘He gave me access codes,’ I said simply, ‘DTI codes.’

‘Why?’

‘Because I asked for them.’

‘Why?’

‘Because …’ I shrugged, ‘I needed a little information.’

‘For Alloway?’

‘About Alloway. I’m a curious girl. I want to know things, find out things. I thought it was part of my job.’

Stollmann nodded, his eyes still on the pad. Then he looked up. ‘And Priddy? What did he want in return?’

‘Me.’

‘What else?’

‘Some stuff about Customs.’

‘What stuff?’

‘Whether or not they’re investigating certain firms. About export orders. To Iraq.’

‘And did you get it for him?’

‘No.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because I couldn’t get into their system.’

‘Did you try?’

‘Of course I did.’ I looked at him. ‘As you probably know.’

Stollmann nodded and permitted himself a small, private smile, and I wondered again about the circumstances surrounding his transfer to MI5. He’d worked for Customs. He’d come to us. Had he preserved the old friendships? Were the channels in good working order? Could he still lift the phone and plug straight in? Or had he folded his tent and stolen away, leaving nothing behind but enemies?

Stollmann got up and went to the window. In all our exchanges, something had been bothering me, something I’d never quite
managed to define, but suddenly I knew what it was. Despite the frustrations of talking to the man – his brusqueness, the way he rationed out information in tiny little parcels, his sheer lack of response – I sensed he liked me. The evidence for this was, I admit, pretty sparse but it was definitely there. He was gauche, and wary, and anti-social to the point of near silence, but he did care. I knew it.

‘About Priddy,’ I began. ‘The least you owe me is a clue or two.’

‘About what?’

‘About how you found out.’

I waited for an answer. He was still at the window, his hands in his pockets, staring out. The seat of his trousers was very shiny. At last he shrugged, part of some private dialogue, and turned back into the room. His face, like his desk, was quite empty.

‘Sorry,’ he mumbled, ‘but it wouldn’t be helpful.’

The conversation, in any important sense, ended there. It left me more frustrated than ever, my usual ignorance compounded by the unanswered questions about my private life. MI5 was entitled to a great deal of my time and loyalty, but I drew the line at the bedroom door. Whatever I chose to do with Lawrence Priddy, or anyone else for that matter, was no concern of theirs.

I thought about the conversation for a couple of days. Then I decided – at last – that playing the system was a waste of time. Stollmann, unchallenged, wouldn’t tell me anything. What the situation needed was a dollop or two of direct action. Time, in my father’s favourite phrase, to seize the initiative.

Stollmann, I knew, left the office two or three times a week, always at half past twelve, always on foot, always carrying a plastic shopping bag. Quite where he went I hadn’t a clue, but my marks on the surveillance course had been way above average, and I saw every point in putting a little of that talent to practical use.

The first lunchtime I staked out the Curzon Street entrance, he failed to appear. Next day, prompt at twelve-thirty, he pushed through the big plate-glass doors and walked briskly south, towards Green Park. I followed on the other side of the street, fifty yards behind, nicely buffered by half a dozen lunchtime strollers. The park itself was trickier, Stollmann picking up speed,
a stiff black figure in the big green spaces, his head down, the beige Sainsbury’s carrier bag swinging at his side. I let the gap between us widen, knowing I couldn’t possibly lose him here, only quickening my step when he got to the Mall, pausing for a second or two before darting into a gap in the traffic. I followed, cheating death at the hands of passing cabbies, and spotted Stollmann heading for the bridge across the lake in St James’s Park. By now I was beginning to wonder exactly where he was headed. Beyond St James was Westminster and Whitehall. Both were plausible destinations for middle-ranking MI5 officers using their spare time for personal advantage, though in Stollmann’s case I somehow doubted it. Everything about the man told me that he was a genuine outsider: no chums, no alliances, no time for the barbed pleasantries that pass, in Curzon House, for conversation.

We were in Victoria Street now, London at its busiest, an endless queue of buses and delivery vans, the air blue with exhaust fumes. Stollmann crossed the road. I was close behind him, invisible in a scrum of shoppers, watching him plunge into the maze of tiny streets behind Westminster Abbey where the wealthier politicians pitch their tents. For the first time, it occurred to me that I could have been wrong about Stollmann’s isolation. Maybe, after all, he had friends in high places, a top politician, someone hungry for the kind of information we’re paid to file away. Maybe he’d been brokering some deal on the side. Maybe that’s why he was so obsessed by Lawrence Priddy. I paused for a moment, wondering which address he’d knock at and whether or not I’d recognize the face at the door. Instead, at the end of Great Smith Street, Stollmann hurried across the road and disappeared into a large, civic-looking building. I hesitated a moment, fifty yards behind, one foot off the pavement. Over the entrance, it said ‘Public Baths’.

I gave him a minute or two to buy his ticket, then went into the reception area. Most public baths have a supply of spare bathing costumes, left by accident, and the Westminster Baths were no exception. For £1.30, I got a swimming ticket and a low-cut little number in electric blue.

The changing rooms were busy, mostly secretaries. I wriggled into the one-piece and examined myself at the full-length mirror
by the showers. The costume was at least a size too small and left absolutely nothing to the imagination, and I knew already that Stollmann, despite his efforts to play the monk, wasn’t blind. Once or twice I’d caught him looking at me in a way that had absolutely nothing to do with my professional skills. Within the security of his office, on home turf, that had meant very little, but meeting semi-naked in a public swimming pool was a very different proposition, and I sensed that if I wanted something even half-candid from him, then now was the time to try. That, at least, was the theory.

The pool, like the changing rooms, was busy. I spotted Stollmann at once in the poolside lane, his head bobbing up and down as he fought to keep up with the rest of the action. He had an awkward breaststroke, more effort than grace, the long thin arms hauling the water past his body, his legs not quite coordinated with the rest of him. His hair was flattened against his skull and he had an odd expression on his face, a grimace, almost a snarl, pure determination. I watched him for a minute or two, wondering how long he kept it up, how many lengths he set himself, not quite sure how to play it. People who swim like Stollmann have a daily target and hate interruptions. Maybe, after all, this wasn’t such a good idea.

In the end, still undecided, I plunged in, joining the swimmers in the lane next to Stollmann. I had a seaside childhood – Devon again – and I’ve been at home in the water for most of my life, and I caught up with him on my second length, slowing as I surged past. His body was a foot or two from mine, strangely vertical in the water, his arms chopping back, his breath coming in hard gasps, the big veins in his neck standing out with the effort he was making. We swam side by side for perhaps ten yards. Then he glanced sideways, frowning, and his eyes met mine. Unlike most of the other swimmers, neither of us were wearing goggles or bathing caps and I knew at once that he’d recognized me. For a second or two, his rhythm broke. Then we were at the end of the lane, the shallow end, my feet finding the bottom, my arms draping over the rope that divided us. Stollmann stopped. He had no option.

‘Surprise, surprise,’ he muttered.

‘Yes.’ I grinned, standing up now, brushing the hair out of my eyes, the water barely waist-deep.

Stollmann said nothing. He was squatting on his haunches, trying to make room for the queue of swimmers coming up for the turn. I levered myself on to the edge of the pool, out of the way, and gestured for him to do the same. He looked up at me, plainly reluctant, and when I extended a hand, helping him out, I understood why. His back and shoulders were purpled with the burned-out remains of a savage attack of acne. Adolescence, for Eric Stollmann, must have been a misery.

He sat beside me, his feet in the water, hopelessly vulnerable. His body was thin, what my mother would call ‘skinny’.

‘Nice style,’ he said.

‘Who?’

‘You.’ He glanced sideways at me. ‘You go swimming a lot?’

I looked at him a moment, knowing that I’d been right, knowing that for a few precious seconds I’d stolen the advantage.

‘I’m surprised you have to ask,’ I said lightly, ‘I’m surprised you don’t know already. All those sources of yours.’

Stollmann stared at the water, then permitted himself a small, shamefaced smile.

‘Don’t get the wrong idea,’ he said at last. ‘It’s not as bad as it looks.’

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ I moved a little closer, aware of other swimmers looking our way. ‘You mind telling me?’

Stollmann shook his head. ‘Nothing to tell,’ he said.

‘I don’t believe you.’

‘I’m sure you don’t.’

‘Then why don’t you trust me? Explain a bit more about Priddy? Why the interest? Why the tape? God knows, I might even be able to help instead of sitting on my backside all day. Or is that being naïve?’

Stollmann studied me briefly and then looked away again, down the pool, towards the deep end. I have perfect recall of the next ten seconds because they’ve shaped my life ever since and changed it in ways too numerous to list. My dealings with Wesley, some way down the line, are one consequence. This book, oddly enough, is another. Stollmann was sitting on his hands now, the way kids do when they get cold.

‘We’re sending you to Northern Ireland,’ he said. ‘It’s got nothing to do with Priddy, but it’s the closest you’ll get to active duty.’

6

I spent two years in and out of Northern Ireland. It’s not a part of my life that I can write about in any real detail, nor do I want to, but it was certainly a world away from the numbing routines of PO Box 500.

Most of the time I was based in Belfast. In its own way, the place was as dense a puzzle as Curzon House, riddled with ambiguities and contradictions, but the people I worked with, mostly men, often army, couldn’t have been more different. The way you got on with it mattered there. With each other, you had to be straight. You had to be honest. And quite often you had to be very brave. The older hands, battle-tested, had a phrase for it. ‘Three parts tradecraft,’ they’d say, ‘to one part Jamieson’s.’ I never bothered with the whiskey, but the other bit they’d got about right. Unless you did your homework, unless you took a great deal of care about the small print, you’d quite possibly end up dead. In this respect, it’s wise not to rely too heavily on the media. Ireland was a dangerous place. A number of my ex-colleagues are buried there, way out of sight, not a single column inch to tell the tale.

Before I flew to Belfast, I attended a two-week course at an MOD facility in Hereford. For the first three days I commuted from a small boarding house near by and sat through a series of lectures on self-defence. The lectures included the use of small arms and afterwards we practised with various weapons, sometimes on a range with targets, sometimes in a specially built complex ringed with razor wire. The building included a number of rooms we were required to ‘sanitize’. The latter meant kicking open the door and responding to whatever you found on the other side. The guys who ran the place would have made a
fortune in Disneyland. They had a real talent for mixing high explosive with a certain black humour. The ear defenders we had to wear were wired to a Walkman. The Walkman had been programmed to play rock music at critical moments in the exercise. The theory had something to do with disorientation, but to this day I can’t listen to the Pogues without seeing the room plunged into darkness and smelling the hot sweet chemical smell of freshly expended cordite.

After the ranges and the killing rooms, we took to the hills. So far, life outdoors had never offered me anything but immense pleasure. I’d always been physically fit and in London I’d been running three or four times a week, sometimes more, but here the routines were brutal – deliberately so – and until you worked out exactly what they were trying to do, it was extremely hard to take.

As a climax to the course, they sent you out on your own for two long days, completing a huge fifty-mile circuit of the Brecon Beacons, and you carried everything you needed to survive except water. That was hidden in special caches every ten miles or so and if you didn’t find it you went thirsty. That put a premium on keeping your wits, which was doubtless the point of the exercise, but the instructors spiced our days with a series of sick jokes designed to make you lose faith – first in them and latterly in yourself.

A favourite happened at the end of the course. A Land Rover would be sent to pick you up. It would be waiting for you at the last R/V (rendezvous), normally the end of a long, straight track. Exhausted, but aware of the watching NCOs, you’d put everything into that last quarter of a mile, only to watch the Land Rover drive slowly away, leaving you totally spent, close to tears, sick at heart. That, of course, was the intention, and once you’d recognized them for the bastards they really were, then it became infinitely simpler and more personal. One of you would prevail. And, you told yourself, it wouldn’t be them.

After Hereford, I had a week’s leave. I went home, to Devon. I was fitter than I’d ever been in my life, an astonishing combination of appetite, self-confidence and sheer physical zest that my father must have recognized at first glance. He sat me down in front of the fire and fussed around me in a way that he’d never
done before. At first, I put all this down to senility, or the cloudy, farm-bottled cider that he used to drink. Only later did it occur to me that it was simple pride. His girl. Young Sarah. Out in the mountains with a Bergen on her back for a taste of the real thing.

We went to the pub one night, just the two of us. I demolished a huge plate of pasty and chips while my father sat in the snug beside me, one leg crossed over the other, plugging and replugging his pipe. We talked about life in London and about his recent return to a Brigade HQ desk in Plymouth. He told me how glad he’d been, and how lucky, to have made it to the Falklands in 1982. Wars, real wars, were getting hard to come by, especially if you were as strapped for cash as the Brits appeared to be. I humoured him and called him an old war horse, Budleigh’s answer to Genghis Khan, and he smiled and patted me on the knee, and quietly recommended the rhubarb crumble, a shyer, nicer, gentler man than I’d ever, somehow, been led to expect.

Towards the end of the evening, in passing, he mentioned Rory. ‘Seen anything of him?’

‘A bit. A while ago. To begin with.’ I paused. ‘Why?’

‘Just wondered. He was asking after you. Last week, as a matter of fact.’

‘Oh?’

I glanced up. It must have been something in my voice that made him look at me rather harder than usual. He nodded.

‘He was back for the weekend. Collecting some bits and pieces.’

‘Back?’

‘Yes. He and Ruth have rented a flat in London. I thought you knew.’

I shook my head, remembering the riverside pub at Putney and the lone sculler in the half-darkness and the lurch inside me when Rory told me he thought he was in love. I’d done the right thing. I knew I had. I’d told him to think about his wife, his family. Since then, though, I hadn’t heard a word. Until now. I was still gazing at my father.

‘What about the kids?’ I said carefully. ‘What’s happened to them?’

‘Emma’s started at Norton Grange. Giles went to Fernside. Been there two years now.’

‘Both away then?’

‘Yes.’ My father nodded. ‘That’s why Ruth’s up in town.’ He smiled. ‘Keeping the boy on the straight and narrow.’

‘Good for her,’ I said automatically, wondering where they lived, what the place looked like inside and whether or not – after all – it was what Rory really wanted. Ruth, to be honest, I’d never been really sure about. I knew her socially, a thin, slightly gaunt woman with a long, fine-boned face and an interest in bereavement counselling. They’d been married for more than eight years, but for someone with Rory’s appetites, she’d always struck me as a bit of a surprise: too serious, too intense, too introvert. My father was still looking at me. Behind the bar, the landlord’s wife was hosing my crumble with whipped cream.

‘He told me you’d saved him from the funny farm,’ my father said, ‘those first few months in town. He said he was going barmy until you turned up.’

‘Really?’

‘Yes. Apparently you cheered him up no end. Turned the lights back on was the phrase he used.’ He smiled again. ‘That sound like the Rory you know?’

I nodded, watching the steaming plate of crumble, glad of the interruption. ‘Yes,’ I said, reaching for my spoon, ‘it does.’

In Belfast, after a brief spell in barracks, I moved into a rented flat off the Ormeau Road. No one ever bothered me with anything as formal as a job description and after a couple of months I realized why. At some exalted level, my bosses had decided to push for something called ‘primacy’ in UK mainland dealings with the Provisional IRA. Primacy meant MI5 taking a lead in the war against the terrorists. If the plan worked, then the police would be the losers, and my bosses – never ones to underestimate a challenge – had accordingly dug themselves in for a long struggle.

To make a credible case in Whitehall, they had to argue from a position of strength. They had to know a great deal about the Provos. They had to fatten their intelligence files, improve their strike rate and demonstrate to the Home Office that their knowledge of the enemy was second to none. That meant extra assets on the ground, agents who would bed down in Belfast, touching base occasionally with the RUC, with Army Intelligence and with MI6. Most of all, it meant building a stable of informants, men
and women from deep within the Republican command structures, people whom, for one reason or another, you’d turn and nourish and put to good account. The latter job, amongst one or two others, was mine.

The logic wasn’t difficult to follow. I had youth on my side. I had the right academic background. And some judicious arm-twisting gave me credible cover as a research student at Queen’s University. The fact that I was single entitled me to a half-decent social life, and from my bosses’ point of view I thus acquired the most precious asset of all: I could plausibly mix in most company.

It was a strange life, me and my other self, and if I felt anything at all it was a kind of lingering guilt at enjoying it so much. Raw intelligence is a commodity unlike any other. It doesn’t respond to fixed hours and a five-day week. You can’t manufacture it on an assembly line, behind a set of factory gates. On the contrary, the best bits are often wholly unpredictable, big juicy windfalls that drop off the tree without the faintest stir of breeze, a phone call or a meeting or a note through the door that seems, at the time, pure chance. In reality, of course, that’s not the case at all. Nothing happens without months of careful preparation, of friendships carefully nurtured, of pressures oh-so-subtly applied, of dance steps so intricate and so deft that it’s hard, often, to even be aware of the music. But the music is there, and as time goes by it becomes slowly but unmistakably addictive.

‘Off-duty’ isn’t a meaningful word in this context because it never happens, but there were times when the sheer beauty of the place very nearly got the better of me. I used to go to the Republic a lot, trips south over the border. Most of these excursions took me no further than Dundalk or Donegal, places of considerable interest to people like us, but occasionally I could justify going way down, past Dublin, across the Midlands, to the wild, empty coasts of Kerry and Galway. These were landscapes I’d never seen in my life, the mountains shouldering down to the sea, the weather ever-changing, the fine soft drizzle drifting in from the Atlantic, the abrupt squalls of wind, the heaving ocean puddled a sudden, brilliant blue. I loved it, the taste of it, the smell of the peat fires, the curls of smoke around the tiny cottages, the dogs chained to the milk urns, the way the hill farmers worked their stony fields, their jackets buttoned tight against the wind,
one finger raised, a passing salute. Sometimes alone, sometimes not, I marvelled at it all, brief interludes, simple pleasures, buried in an otherwise complicated life.

Throughout my time in Belfast, I kept one eye on the newspapers, thinking more often than not about Beth Alloway. The Iran-Iraq War had finally come to an end and there was a flurry of press speculation about arms and related sales in its aftermath. As far as I knew, the embargo still applied, but the reports about sanctions-busting UK firms never made the front page, and if I thought anything at all, it was strictly in connection with Beth.

Once, and once only, I tried to talk to her on the phone. She answered almost at once, a flat, worn voice, a child crying in the background, and after a brief series of awkward pleasantries, I knew that the conversation was going nowhere. She wasn’t pleased to hear from me. Her husband was ‘away’. Life, to no one’s surprise, was going on much as before. After a minute or so, I apologized for interrupting her from whatever she’d been doing, knowing that the gap between our separate worlds was probably unbridgeable. Sympathy, alas, wasn’t enough. All Beth Alloway wanted was her privacy. That, and some vestige of the life that we, and the Iraqis, had taken away from her.

My life in Northern Ireland came to an abrupt halt one December night in 1989. A complicated set of events had taken me west, across the province, to a modern hotel on the banks of the River Foyle a couple of miles downstream from Londonderry. There I was to meet a young Catholic businessman called Padraig MacElwaine. He ran a local chain of builder’s merchants. Like everyone else in the construction business, he paid a sizeable monthly sum to the local IRA godfathers, but his eldest son had recently been beaten up in a carefully laid ambush in the city centre, and gruff Provo regrets about mistaken identity had done nothing to temper his rage. Evidently, the man was incandescent. He had debts to settle. He had names to impart, information to pass on and – most important of all – he said he was in a position to make an informed guess or two about what we in Five always referred to as ‘forthcoming attractions’.

This kind of intelligence was exactly the collateral that my bosses needed to make their case in Whitehall. I was therefore ordered to Londonderry post-haste for a rendezvous at the riverside
hotel. I was to pose as a visiting businesswoman from the UK, order a drink in the bar and await developments. The hotel was way off the local Provo circuit – too classy, too expensive – and I was assured that the usual cover arrangements, unspecified, would be in place.

I drove to Londonderry. By the time I found the hotel, it had been dark for nearly three hours. I parked outside reception in a well-lit bay and left a spare key on top of the front wheel. The meet in the bar went according to plan. Padraig turned out to be a beefy, thick-set man with tight curly black hair and a shirt collar one size too small for his neck. He was attentive and courteous and made a beautiful job of picking me up.

After the meal, we were to adjourn to Padraig’s room. There he’d give me chapter and verse: names, addresses, dates, forthcoming attractions, the kind of priceless operational data that I’d haul back to Belfast for onward transmission to London. That’s what the plan said. That’s what I expected. Instead, Padraig leaned forward over the table, slightly comical, the corner of his mouth blobbed with cream from the second helping of cheesecake.

‘I haven’t got a room,’ he said.

‘Why not?’

‘They’re full.’

I laughed, offering him a napkin. He wiped his mouth with it, reddening with embarrassment. I was still laughing.