The Riot Act Read online

  “So why was Walter interested in the bombing campaign?”

  “He thought that someone in MI5 knew who was behind the explosions and wasn’t saying anything. Maybe they were even supplying them with semtex.”

  “You’re shitting me,” I said. “Tell me you’re making this up.”

  “You’ve got to understand, Dutchie,” she said, glancing in her rear mirror. “Up until recently, MI5 were expecting the chop. Forty per cent of their budget was spent on Irish terrorism, but what for? The ceasefire was holding. So they turned to organised crime, drug busting. They had no choice. Nobody wanted to, particularly the older ones. It was demeaning. Special Branch territory. Police work. They hated it.”

  “Are you saying that MI5 were letting off these bombs themselves?”

  “No, not directly. They’re too clever for that.”

  “They got someone else to do their dirty work. Sounds about right.”

  “This was only Walter’s theory, remember. He had no evidence to back it up, nothing to show to the Home Secretary. But then you come along with your little discovery and it all begins to fit together.”

  “I can’t believe no one else noticed.”

  “No one else was looking. That’s the point.”

  I sat forward, propping my elbows on the front seats. “Whose hand is actually on the detonator, then?”

  “People who think Gerry Adams is selling out. Hardliners. MI5 knows who they are. If Walter’s right, Five arranged for them to come over to the mainland, fixed them up with jobs.”

  “In the City. People like Briggs, the chairman.”

  “Yes.”

  “Why use someone like him?"

  “MI5 blackmailed Briggs years ago. He’s no trouble, a soft touch, helps whenever anyone asks.”

  “How did they blackmail him?”

  “Caught him in bed with a horse, a Greek boy, I don’t know. Someone his wife wouldn’t have approved of.”

  “A black woman?”

  “Perhaps. Somebody in MI5 must have approached him and explained that Samantha West needed a job. He obliges. He has no choice.”

  “And then he sleeps with her.”

  “If you say so.”

  “Likes the idea of shagging a spy.”

  “But she wasn’t. She was a terrorist. He had no idea.”

  “Then along comes Walter, says he’s also from MI5, and asks for me to be given a job.”

  “He obliges again. He has no choice.”

  “Which is why he tells me how nice it is to help again.”

  “Exactly. Then when this bank, Kiruna Kredit, which must be operated in some way by MI5, suddenly receives your answer from JKA, they pay Briggs a visit. Ask him what’s going on. Rough him up a bit. He assumes they must already know but he tells them about his other visit from MI5, from Walter…”

  “… and tells them about me.”

  “… and you. MI5 realise they have a problem. The ombudsman is on to them.”

  “So they turn up at the office with a reception committee.”

  “They will go after Walter as well.”

  “And you.” She nodded, turning to me. Her face was close to mine and I could smell perfume on her neck. “But he’s the government’s official ombudsman,” I continued. “They can’t touch him. They can kill me. I don’t exist. I’m expendable. As everyone keeps telling me.”

  “Walter doesn’t exist either. Officially. Nor do I. Our existence would be an admission by the government that they didn’t trust the Security Services. There’s already a parliamentary select committee to look after them. Why have an ombudsman as well?”

  “What did I tell you?” I said, sitting back. “The state’s fucked.”

  “I’m more worried about Walter.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “His aunt’s. Neasden.”

  “Neasden? What’s she doing living there?”

  “No idea. He stays with her occasionally.”

  “And we’re living in his house?”

  “There was no budget for Walter’s little whims.”

  “So you used me. Cheap and expendable.”

  “I went back to Clapham after you called. The house had already been searched, turned over. I’ve grabbed a few things. We can’t stay there.”

  “So where are we going to live?”

  “I was wondering about your barge.”

  “You saw it last.”

  “It’s just down the river, nearer Woolwich. They’ll be looking everywhere. Sit back and keep your head away from the windows.”

  *

  Events were beginning to make more sense. There was little comfort in what Charlotte had said. I felt exposed. Walter no longer represented resources. He was on the outside, a loner, and so was Charlotte. We all were now. But the discovery that MI5 had helped to kill Annalese, so obvious somehow, chimed with my revenge. In an instant the bomber’s death had become my fate. Nothing else seemed to matter anymore. Terrorism was part of the state. It was official. I felt vindicated. I should have known.

  We drove fast through driving rain down to the North Circular. At Neasden we turned off and pulled into a car park in front of the IKEA superstore. Apparently, Walter’s aunt lived in a road off Drury Way, which we had just turned down. It seemed an increasingly unlikely place for a single old woman to live. I sat quietly in the back as Charlotte studied an A to Z, watching her fingers trace across the map. She started to bite a nail. It would be strange returning to the barge, and with someone else. She was right, though; it was the perfect bolt hole. We could slide along the river at night, stay moving.

  “It should be just at the end there, Lovett Way. It’s in that estate,” she said, looking up.

  “Shall we walk?”

  “No. You don’t understand what we’re up against, Dutchie. They could be here already.”

  She took the car out of the car park and down into the red-bricked estate. I couldn’t picture Walter coming here at night, let alone his aunt. The flats looked rough; there was graffiti on the walls, Tesco trolleys abandoned in alleyways, a burnt-out car in front of a row of rusted lock-ups. It was still raining and the tarmac was shiny. We slowed to a walking pace, following the road around a corner.

  “Number twenty-three,” she said.

  “In there, that’s nineteen.”

  She stopped the car and we got out. Charlotte checked around her. Her nervousness was making me feel edgy, unarmed. We walked across the uneven paving stones down a walkway. Either side of us walls rose five blocks up. We passed under a stairwell, puddled and smelling of urine.

  “Twenty-three’s up there,” I said.

  I went first, treading quietly. I didn’t know why. If anyone was here they would have seen us already. We went up three flights and walked along a balcony to twenty-three.

  “I don’t like this. There’s only one way out,” Charlotte said, looking over the edge at the car below.

  “Shall I knock?” I asked.

  “We don’t want to frighten her,” she said.

  “You knock then,” I said, then looked closer at the door’s dented metal edge. “Someone’s tried to force their way in.” I walked up to number twenty-four, and then on to twenty-five. “Nothing unusual,” I said, coming back. “Someone’s had a go at the whole block.”

  She knocked and froze as the door opened fractionally. I looked at her, pushed it open further and walked in. We stood in a tiny hallway, damp and musty. There was an old tweed overcoat hanging on a hook, and two fur hats. She nodded at the coat. It was Walter’s.

  “Hello? Anybody home?” Charlotte called.

  There was no answer.

  “Stay at the door, I’ll go in,” she said.

  “No, you stay here,” I said. She looked at me for a moment, then gave the faintest nod.

  I turned into the cramped kitchen. There was an ancient gas hob, and a hot water heater above a stained white plastic bowl in the sink. Beneath my feet the lino floor was sticky, unswept. A
n empty bottle of wine stood by a pedal bin, which was spilling over with potato peel. A half-eaten tin of tuna was on the sideboard, bothered by a fly.

  I turned around and went down the corridor, drawn towards the end door, open, ajar. On my left was a small sitting room. Briefly I looked in. A copy of The Daily Mail lay across a brown sofa, half-covered by a tartan rug. The TV in the corner was an old black and white with a Sputnik aerial on top, next to a photo of Walter looking much slimmer. I left and moved towards the open door at the end of the corridor. My mouth had gone dry. The carpet was yellow and black-patterned. Sixties, maybe earlier. I pushed the door open and swallowed hard, trying to reverse a sudden tightening in my stomach.

  The room was pale, light filtering through filigree net curtains, throwing delicate patterns across the bed. Apart from a wooden chair, it was the only piece of furniture in the room. Sitting upright in it, half covered by a sheet, was a teenager, smooth-chested, barely adolescent. His face was all wrong for his age, too grey, cheeks pallid and withdrawn like an old man’s. The eyes were closed and his forehead stained by a red mark, no bigger than a Smartie. Sprawled across him, half fallen out of the wooden chair, was Walter. His wound was not so neat. A corner of his head had been chipped away, shot from the back more than once, leaving a crenellated edge. His mouth was twisted as it lay pressed against the boy’s lap, the sheet drenched in lumpy blood.

  I walked quickly down the corridor, pressing my tongue hard against the back of my top front teeth. Charlotte was waiting outside, keeping an eye on our car. She turned as I came out of the door.

  “Quick. In the car,” I said, marrying the door gently to its frame.

  We shuffled down the stairs in tandem. “What was it?” she asked breathlessly.

  “Just drive. To Woolwich. They got there first.”

  23

  “I need to know what you saw,” Charlotte said, accelerating into the outside lane.

  “Are we being followed?”

  She glanced anxiously at me, then in the rear mirror.

  “Dutchie, was his aunt there?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “There was a young bloke lying in his bed, a teenager, ill-looking. Walter was sitting next to him. Someone had shot them both.” I was trying to say the words impassively, but it was difficult. “He didn’t even have time to turn around.”

  I noticed Charlotte’s knuckles tighten around the steering wheel. Her eyes were moistening at the edges, making the limpid whites look even clearer. The scene in the bedroom had been shocking; its stillness transfixing. But by the bottom of the stairs I had shoved the images to the back of my mind, storing them untidily. Now, as I heard Charlotte sniff, I saw the rough edges of the wound, the gap between his brain and the skullbone, the awkwardness of his position. Clumsy in death, too. I had never disliked Walter, never liked him much either; being American gave him a certain neutrality. There was nothing to kick against. Sometimes he spoke like my father, usually when he was drunk, but most often he was unjudgmental, liberal even. I didn’t understand him.

  “Would Walter have turned me over if I hadn’t cooperated?” I asked.

  “Yes. He didn’t want to. He liked you. You were a source of fascination to him. But he knew he couldn’t keep you out of trouble for ever.”

  “You’re not telling me he really altered my file?”

  “He doctored it almost every week. There was a lot of data. Someone didn’t like you.”

  I fell silent.

  “He didn’t have to blackmail me,” I said after a while. “If he had told me at the start, right, this is what I think, MI5 killed Annalese, I would have played ball.”

  “Would you?”

  “Fuck yes. Instead he lied to me. Wanted to make me think I was working for the State rather than against it. Like it was a challenge for him. Another slice of social correction for Dutchie.”

  “He needed to know how serious you were.”

  I looked out of the window, away from Charlotte.

  “The smile on his face when I turned up in a suit. You should have seen it. His face nearly split.”

  There was an awkward silence.

  “Will you miss him?” she asked.

  I didn’t know. I hadn’t seen him for seven years, then all of a sudden I was living in his house, arguing, fighting with him. I thought of him asleep on the sofa, snoring, half on the floor. There was something tragic about him moving out of his own house, living in a damp flat with a teenage lover.

  “He was an obese bastard, wasn’t he?” I said, countering my own emotions.

  “Christ, Dutchie.”

  “He never used to be that fat.”

  She looked across at me. I could feel my Adam’s apple rise, disappear, and push out lower down. She stared ahead again.

  “He believed in what he was doing,” she said. “MI5 had too much power. He didn’t think that was healthy.”

  “They still have. We’re going to die, aren’t we?”

  She didn’t answer, concentrating instead on joining the motorway. The rain had picked up. Diesel spray from lorries was testing the wipers, smearing the windscreen with flat islands of colour. We had decided to head out to the M25, go the long way round, and approach the barge from the east rather than cross the centre of London.

  “Our only hope is if we can get enough evidence,” she said. “Then we can contact Downing Street directly.”

  “Downing Street?” I laughed. It represented such different things for both of us. “You have such faith, don’t you? It amazes me. What do you think the government will do? They’ve probably all been photographed porking horses too. I might as well get out now. Walk down the middle of the motorway. I’ll have a longer life.”

  “What do you suggest, then?”

  “We’ve got no option. We should find out who the other bombers are and then kill them. What happens after that doesn’t really matter, does it?”

  “It might not to you.”

  Neither of us had changed since we’d met each other. We hadn’t conceded an inch. I wouldn’t have had it any other way, but it suddenly struck me as sad.

  “Okay, we’ll compromise,” she said, glancing nervously in the rear mirror again. I turned around to look. There was a blue Astra sitting close behind us. Charlotte moved over to the inside lane to let it pass. It slowed, drifted across too.

  “We’ll compromise,” she continued, drawing strength from repeating the words. “Let’s try to find out who the other bombers are. If we do, I’ll go to Number Ten and you can do what you like. It won’t affect the evidence against MI5 if the bombers are dead or alive. Do you know where JKA’s back-up dealing room is?”

  “Isle of Dogs. Near the Docklands Arena”

  “Too central.”

  “It’s near the barge.”

  “We’ll just have to risk it,” she said, sitting more upright in her seat. “We’ve got company.”

  I turned around again. The Astra was still there, further back now. I could just make out two figures through the spray.

  “What do we do now?” I asked.

  “Sit tight.”

  I wondered what she was going to do. A turn-off was approaching. The Astra was thirty yards behind us and we were going sixty miles an hour, in the inside lane. The hard shoulder, its smooth surface scraped away, had been coned off, and the lanes were narrower than normal. There wasn’t much traffic around. In the distance a juggernaut was driving in the middle lane, a row of white pea lights lining the roof of the cab like a Christmas porch.

  “Face the front,” she said and a moment later she was standing on the brake, throwing us both forward. We skidded, beginning to veer towards the cones. The front left wheel clipped several. I could feel the rubber buckling underneath, smacking the underside of the car. As we slowed, Charlotte pulled down on the steering wheel sharply, taking the car over another cone and on to the rough hard shoulder. I turned to see the blue Astra, also braking hard, s
kid to a halt in the middle lane where it had swerved to avoid our car. In the same moment, the juggernaut, horn blasting, ploughed into the back of it, shunting the car forty yards along the road. The noise of twisting metal was deafening. Meanwhile, Charlotte now had our car facing in the opposite direction to the flow of traffic. Without hesitating, she accelerated down the bumpy track and turned right up the slip road.

  We both sat there in silence, breathing hard as we approached the roundabout.

  “Have you done that before?” I asked, trying to piece together exactly what had happened. She didn’t answer. At the roundabout we turned right over the bridge, crossing the motorway. I looked out at the accident below us. The juggernaut was jack-knifed across two lanes and another car, a Mini perhaps, had hit the back of it. The Astra had turned over and was lying on its side. Four or five people were standing around, two were lying on the tarmac. Cars had started to queue back, one or two slowly passing the accident in the outside lane. Charlotte’s gaze was still fixed on the road in front of us.

  “I don’t want to know,” she said, taking the car back down the slip road and rejoining the motorway, clockwise this time.

  *

  We found the barge close to the Thames Barrier, moored on the south side. It had taken us two hours to get to South-East London, coming off the motorway at several junctions, using smaller roads, returning to the motorway again. On balance we had decided it was worth the risk of staying with the car until we got close to the barge. I knew a lock-up in Charlton where we could leave it. The lock-up belonged to Leggit and I figured he wouldn’t be using it for a while. It was a short walk from there to the river and we moved swiftly along the tow path, past the cement works, through the refinery, and on until we found the barge.

  I felt strange as it came into sight. It was good to see it again – it looked much smaller than I remembered, dark and subdued against the water – but I expected to see Annalese in a window. And then I saw her, smiling out from under her tangled hair. My heart skipped a beat. It was the newspaper photo I had stuck above our bed.