‘Shut up.’ I knew exactly what he was talking about. I’d been back at college retaking my O levels when Mary Whitehouse had taken Gay News to court for blasphemy over a poem about Jesus and a gay Roman centurion. The magazine had appealed for support to fight the case, and I didn’t have any cash to spare from my part-time job at the hospital, but in a moment of pretension I really ought to have got out of my system when I was still a teenager, I had sent in a poem of my own, not realising until well after they’d actually printed the thing how awful it was. Because it was about my days on the Dilly, I’d put it in under the name I’d been using then, just for old times’ sake. Unbidden, the first lines came into my head: The old men/ The cold men/ The ought-to-be told men. I squirmed.

  ‘No, honestly.’ Liam was actually enjoying this, the bastard. ‘I liked the bit about the streets being ‘paved with cold, cold stone’. Very clever, I thought.’

  ‘Shut up,’ I told him. ‘Seriously, shut up.’

  He grinned. ‘Anyway, that was it, as far as everyone was concerned you were missing, presumed dead. And it wasn’t for want of looking. The headbangers were obsessed with you. Still are.’

  ‘Headbangers?’

  ‘Oh, there’s a whole bunch of old guys in the service convinced Harold Wilson was a Russian spy,’ he said blithely. ‘They reckon that must be what you confronted him about that night, and that’s why he went. There’s a good number of them that think he must have murdered you there and then.’

  ‘No, he was going to, but he didn’t,’ I said weakly. What had actually ended up happening was much weirder.

  ‘Sure. I know that now,’ said Liam matter-of-factly. ‘I’ve been able to fill in the gaps and bring your file up to date.’

  ‘What?’ The anger came flooding back again, stronger than before. I had told him everything that day when we walked round the Serpentine, but in confidence. And at a very vulnerable moment.

  He held up his hands, placatingly. ‘I know, I’m sorry, but honestly, Tommy, I was doing you a favour. These guys were never going to stop looking for you while your file was still open. Better for me to dot the ‘i’s and cross the ‘t’s, and stop that hanging over you. All that stuff’s historic now. It just means the paperwork gets signed off and goes into the archive and you can get on with the rest of your life.’

  ‘Oh, yeah!’ I protested. ‘I’m supposed to just relax now I know I’ve had spies snooping into me for years!’ I couldn’t take it in. If they’d finally made the connection between Tommy and Alex, that meant they’d got their grubby fingers into every aspect of my life: even the parts I’d tried so hard for years to keep separate – the people I’d tried to keep protected. It was one thing for them to know about the dirty business I’d got myself involved in on the Dilly, quite another for them to go digging into my childhood, my family, my parents who were innocent of anything.

  A horrible thought struck me. ‘Wait a minute, did you have something to do with my dad not getting security clearance for his new job?’

  Liam had the grace to look embarrassed. ‘Not directly. But obviously I’d made the connection between you and him, and…well, security vetting covers all family members. It has to, that’s the point.’

  ‘You bastard.’ If Dad ever found out about this he would kill me.

  ‘I’m sorry.’ Liam – or the person I still couldn’t stop thinking of as Liam – looked down at his hands, ashamed. Or maybe just pretending to be ashamed, how could I tell now?

  My mind was racing, going through everything that had happened when we’d first met each other. ‘How did you even know we were related? Just because you heard my name at the police station? There must be plenty of people with the same surname as me. It’s not exactly rare.’

  He was still avoiding my gaze. ‘I snuck a look at your driving licence and copied down the details. While you were getting the coffees at the cafeteria.’

  Of course. I’d left him to look after my stuff so I could carry the cups. He had been spying on me right from the very first minute we met.

  ‘You shit.’ I could barely speak.

  Now he was actually holding his head in his hands. ‘I know. I know. But you can’t blame me for having my suspicions about you.’

  I bloody could. ‘Why?’ I demanded.

  He emerged from behind his hands and gave a theatrical sigh. ‘Look, Tommy, when I met you you were selling papers on behalf of the Workers’ Revolutionary Party. You offered to get me in to their College of Marxist Education.’

  That wasn’t fair. ‘You asked!’

  ‘And you said you knew the people to call.’

  I did; I couldn’t deny that. Nor, for reasons of personal pride, could I bring myself to point out that I had just been showing off. ‘But I didn’t know anything about them!’ I protested.

  ‘No, that was pretty obvious once we got there.’ He grinned again. I’d missed that smile, not that I was anywhere close to being willing to admit it. ‘I think you probably turned that into the least successful infiltration attempt in history.’

  I suddenly flashed back to him padding downstairs in the middle of the night. ‘That’s what you were doing?’

  He shrugged. ‘You have to take advantage of every opportunity in my job.’ Misinterpreting my look of dismay, he added: ‘Don’t worry, we’ve got other people on the inside.’ He gave a rueful smirk. ‘What, you think the pair of us are such a crack fighting team we got out of there all by ourselves?’

  It struck me later that he could only be talking about one of Healy’s henchmen, the pair that had been holding on to my arms. I’d have liked nothing more than for Healy to get his just desserts, but at that moment I was so furious I was even prepared to be outraged on the dirty old man’s behalf. ‘So who else have you filed reports on?’ I demanded. ‘Paud? Derek? Clarrie?’

  ‘Look, Icebreakers are totally open about their politics,’ he protested. ‘They’re dedicated to revolution! They’re open about it!’

  ‘It’s a JOKE!’ I thundered. I knew it wasn’t – not entirely – but I wasn’t going to let that get in the way of my righteous fury. ‘They’re my friends.’ Friends I had completely abandoned in recent months – but that was down to him, too. Something else he had poisoned.

  ‘I know.’ He gave me a wretched look. ‘And I’m sure they’re really nice guys. But I had a job to do, Tommy. They gave me some really useful leads.’

  ‘What, like Sean?’ He looked slightly taken aback that I knew the name. ‘Oh yeah,’ I sneered. ‘I know all about you and him taking the war to England.’

  ‘Ach, him? He’s just a big talker when he’s steaming. But there are plenty of others who actually put their words into action. There are some seriously nasty people out there, Tommy.’

  My hand went up involuntarily to the side of my head where I’d been punched. ‘Yeah. I met a couple of them.’

  Liam looked at me with what seemed like genuine shock and concern. ‘Who?’

  I shrugged. ‘I don’t know their names. I asked after you in The Harp, that pub on the Holloway Road. A couple of guys came in and warned me off. Told me if I wasn’t careful they’d break both my legs.’

  ‘Jesus! What were you thinking?’ He looked properly anguished now.

  I hardened myself against it. ‘I was thinking I wanted to find my boyfriend. I was thinking something terrible might have happened to him. Only then, of course, I started thinking maybe it was him who had sent them after me.’ That hadn’t actually occurred to me at the time, but it struck me as something good to throw at him now.

  ‘Of course I didn’t! You’ve got to believe me, Tommy. I got told there was someone asking questions about me, and I wondered… But you really shouldn’t have got involved, Tommy.’

  ‘Yeah, well what choice did I have?’ I exploded. ‘You pissed off and left me without a word! I wanted to know what had happened to you! I was worried! How was I supposed to know you’d been hanging out with nutters from the IRA?’

  He sounded nearly as angry as I felt. ‘It was my job, Tommy! I’m not going to apologise to you for that. Believe me, if I hadn’t been doing what I was doing, things would be a whole lot worse right now than they are.’

  ‘Oh, like how?’ I demanded scornfully. ‘They’ve just nearly blown up the entire government! You didn’t manage to stop that, did you!’

  He deflated visibly at that, and for a moment I felt a twinge of guilt, but I managed to stifle it.

  ‘No,’ he said quietly. ‘Like they said, we were unlucky this time. But they’ve found what’s left of the bomb now, Tommy. Do you know what sort it was?’

  ‘Of course I don’t,’ I snapped.

  ‘No.’ He pinched his nose again, spreading his fingers down and out across the deep bags beneath his eyes. ‘Of course you don’t. Well it was gelignite. Not Semtex.’

  ‘So?’

  He sighed. ‘So it wasn’t the stuff they were trying to bring in to the country last month. The stuff we managed to intercept, after months of work by me personally, by the way. That’s what they were hoping to use. If they’d managed it, we’d probably be looking at dozens, maybe even hundreds of deaths, not just five. That hotel would just be a smoking hole in the ground.’

  I wasn’t ready to compute this, couldn’t take it in. I still saw that ragged hole in the hotel building, just yards away from where the pair of us had been standing, every time I closed my eyes. Still heard the screams. Was he actually congratulating himself? I jumped up from the futon, furious again. ‘You lot still let it happen though, didn’t you?’

  Instead of shouting back at me, he just slumped in his seat. ‘Yes, we did, Tommy. And I’ve been torturing myself about that ever since. Because until today I thought the bomb might have been smuggled in past me while I was supposed to be keeping a lookout, only I’d abandoned my post to drag you into a linen cupboard and tell you how much I love you. Can you imagine how that made me feel, Tommy? How guilty I’ve been?’

  That took the wind out of my sails a bit. I sat back down.

  And then my brain caught up with what he was saying. ‘So what changed today?’

  He shook his head as if it didn’t matter. ‘They discovered the remains of a timer. Whoever put the bomb there, they did it days, maybe even weeks before it went off.’

  ‘Right,’ I said slowly.

  He looked up, and spread his arms wide again, like he was appealing to me to recognise that this in some way concluded matters. But it didn’t. In fact it did quite the opposite.

  ‘That’s why you’re here now, isn’t it? Because if it happened long before, that means…that means you’ve finally worked out I couldn’t have had anything to do with it. That’s it, isn’t it! You thought it might have been me.’

  FOUR

  ‘I had to be certain,’ he stuttered, avoiding my eye. ‘I mean, I thought… I knew it in my gut straight away, or I’d never have let you go. I’d never have let you get out of the damn cupboard, let alone anywhere near… But Tommy, you’ve got to understand. The things I saw after you went. The injuries, the stuff that’s come out since. I had to be certain.’

  I stood up. I thought I’d been angry before, but it was nothing compared to this. ‘Get out! How dare you come here…’

  ‘Tommy, you can see how it looked,’ he protested. ‘You study at a place that’s on an official watchlist, you hang out in a bookshop that’s being prosecuted for smuggling subversive literature into the country, you boasted about your friends in the WRP.’

  ‘I’ve explained all that!’ I yelled, but he wasn’t listening.

  ‘…You’ve got a file tying you to a whole bunch of murders…’

  ‘…Because your lot tried to frame me!’

  ‘…And the resignation of another prime minister, and then you turn up on the scene when someone tries to assassinate Mrs Thatcher…’

  ‘I VOTED FOR HER!’ I roared.

  That shut him up. It made me pause, too. That was the one secret I’d never told anyone.

  ‘Don’t look at me like that,’ I muttered, sitting back down on the futon and furiously twisting one of the cloth buttons round and round on its thread. ‘It was only once – the first time.’ I’d regretted it ever since, from the moment she’d stood in Downing Street and used that sickly-sweet voice to talk about bringing harmony where there is discord and then set about doing the exact opposite the very second she went inside. But what else was I going to do? It wasn’t long after I’d discovered one Liberal leader was a murderer and another a paedophile, and the Labour prime minister had been doing everything he could, up to and including having me killed, to cover it all up. Who did you expect me to vote for in the circumstances? It had been a hell of a relief when the SDP arrived as a clean pair of hands before the 1983 election. Although I’d kept my vote for them just as secret from most of the people I’d been hanging out with recently too.

  ‘Well, I’ll say this for you, Tommy Wildeblood: you’re full of surprises.’

  ‘What, did it not say that on my file?’ I sneered.

  ‘No, it didn’t.’ He was speaking so calmly that I was embarrassed by my outburst. ‘That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you, Tommy. None of it – the man in the file, the man I thought I was spying on – none of it tallied with the man I fell in love with.’ He put his hand back over his face, rubbed his eyes. And I realised it wasn’t just tiredness he was trying to brush away.

  ‘Yeah, well,’ I muttered. I’d twisted the button so much it felt like it was about to come off in my hand. I let go of it.

  ‘Anyway, you thought it was me,’ he pointed out, sounding like the old Liam again. ‘You straight-out accused me at the hotel!’

  It was a fair point. I shrugged. ‘I suppose it’s pretty unlikely either of us would have planted a bomb and then stuck around waiting for it to go off.’

  ‘Now Tommy, I hope that’s not you thinking of making an Irish joke. You know how racist that would be,’ he grinned, and I couldn’t help smiling.

  ‘What was it made you think it was me?’ he asked, now he was sure it was safe.

  I snorted. ‘What, apart from all the evidence that you were in the IRA?’

  He looked bewildered. ‘But what evidence? I tried so hard to keep you separate from all of it. That’s the only reason I didn’t tell you about going to the Irish gays group, you know.’

  I gave a hollow laugh as I remembered that argument. ‘Yeah, I think I’m probably over that, thanks. Had a few bigger bones to pick with you since then.’ That he might be seeing someone else behind my back: what a pathetic, pedestrian sort of anxiety that seemed in retrospect.

  ‘It’s true, though,’ muttered Liam, staring down at the table top again.

  ‘Well you’ve made it pretty hard for me to believe anything,’ I said wearily. Then a suspicion struck me. ‘God, are you even actually from Belfast?’

  ‘C’mon Tommy, you think I could fake this accent?’ He gave a sad smile. ‘Born and bred. Grew up in Clonnard, just off the Falls Road. I was an altar boy at the monastery there; I went creeping off to Dubarry’s that night; my friend was shot when he stole a car – everything I told you about all that was true.’

  I refused to give him the satisfaction of acknowledging this. ‘So how d’you end up in the police over here?’

  ‘Because the police over there wouldn’t have me,’ he said bitterly. ‘I’d wanted to join the police ever since I was a wee wane. And don’t give me that look, Tommy. If you’ve had your mammy and daddy pick youse up out of bed and run out into the street in their pyjamas because one side have decided to set the house on fire, and then the other side come calling wanting them to hide a rifle under your wee sister’s cot and not ask any questions, you somehow get to be quite keen on the idea of law and order, wherever you think you might find it. Only when I rocked up at the local police barracks on the day after I left school, it turned out the RUC didn’t want lads like me. The man on the desk called me a Taig; said the only place there would ever be for me there was the cells, and sent me on my way.’

  ‘So you came to London.’

  ‘Where they welcomed me with open arms for pretty much the same reason, and knew exactly what to do with me.’ He sniffed; shrugged. ‘Besides, it made life a lot easier for my mammy and daddy if the neighbours didn’t know what I was up to.’

  ‘Right.’ I’d told myself the same thing after I ran away, too.

  ‘You’ve not answered my question, Tom. What made you think it was me that put the bomb in the hotel?’

  ‘I found some stuff.’ I straightened up and crossed to the desk, squatting down to slide out the box with the computer in from underneath it.

  His eyes widened in shock. ‘Jesus, Tommy! How did you get that!’ He practically tumbled off the chair so he could rifle through the stuff in the box, pulling out the disk drive and running his fingers over the computer keyboard. It brought us closer than I was comfortable with right now, so I stood up again.

  ‘They had my landlady’s daughter in a cell for a whole day thinking she’d nicked it! They got a search warrant for her flat, had the floorboards up and everything!’

  I felt a pang of guilt at this. ‘No, it was me.’

  He looked up at me, delighted. ‘We thought that was just a cock-and-bull story she’d come up with. We thought she must have sold it. Christ, Tommy – we’ve had MI5 guys trying to track this down for weeks!’

  ‘Well, they’re not very good then, are they?’ I was allowing myself to feel smug.

  He looked up at me in wonder. ‘So it was all you!’

  ‘How d’you mean?’

  He shook his head in something like admiration. ‘I got a call from my OC. He said an Englishman had been poking around asking questions about me, but they’d seen him off. And it turns out that was you.’

  I nodded.

 

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