Lynda La Plante: Civvies

I would like to thank the BBC for producing CIVVIES as well as the director, Karl Francis, the producer, Ruth Caleb, the co-producer, Ruth Kenley Letts, and the script editor, Sheryl Crown. My thanks must also go to the great crew, the make-up and costume department, the stunt arrangers and casting. Indeed, there was a dedication from everyone involved in the making of CIVVIES that I have never seen before in any other production. My deep gratitude also goes out to the superb team of actors and actresses whose professionalism and talent I cannot praise too highly. I thank you all sincerely and wish each and every one of you a successful future. You have held in your hands a piece of work that I had a deep and personal belief should be made and to have it enriched by your talent and produced with such loving care has touched my heart.

Thank you.

Lynda La Plante

I would like to acknowledge the talent of the writer Trevor Hoyle without whom this book could not have been published.

An alarm bell clanged through the haze in Dillon's head, faint yet nagging as toothache, the instant he laid eyes on the place, stuck out there in the middle of nowhere. Trouble was, by then his brain was half-pickled by the four pints of bitter and three Grolsch sloshing around his gut, making his head spin slightly and giving him that keyed-up flutter in his chest – Saturday night had started right and could only get better.

Yes!

And Jimmy Hammond, squashed against him in the front passenger seat of the jeep, can of lager in his hand, was yelling in his ear, 'Got the best beer for miles around – and there's a disco, Frank!'

There were ten of them in the jeep. The four in the front were seasoned veterans and old mates, while crammed in the back were six fresh-faced 'Toms', as the privates in the Parachute Regiment were called. After passing through the living hell of 'P' Company selection (twenty-seven had made the grade out of ninety-eight hopefuls), followed by months of intensive training, this was only their second week in Northern Ireland and their first chance to get tanked up.

Dillon had promised 'his lads' a barnstorming binge, and Sergeant Dillon always delivered.

The jeep swung into the parking area – little more than a patch of cindery earth bordered by concrete posts slapped with whitewash – and tried to find a spot amongst the thirty or more cars already there. Dillon got his first gander at Hennessey's Bar, and was none too impressed. Not much more than a two-storey barn tricked out with fairy lights, he reckoned, the shanty-like toilets housed in lean-to shacks at the side. And nothing for miles around except a few trees and the impenetrable darkness of fields, hedgerows and tilled farmland.

Harry 'Big Gut' Travers switched off the engine, and everybody piled out to avoid his thunderous fart. They groaned in union and threw a few choice curses as they extricated themselves from Harry's fumes. The six young lads jumped around, faces all aglow, trying to get the circulation going. The noise from the entrance, double doors flung wide, was horrendous – a thumping disco fighting it out with a live Irish folk band.

'Popular, isn't it?' Dillon looked around, tucking his shirt into his jeans, pulling his windcheater straight. All wore their scruffs, jeans, T-shirts, battered Puma trainers, outside the base. 'Sure it's got clearance?' That bloody persistent alarm bell.

Jimmy drained his lager, crumpled the can as if it was a paper cup and tossed it over his shoulder. He grinned and thumped Dillon's arm. 'Trust me, I've been coming here for months.' Leading the way, he waved them forward, tall, broad shoulders on a muscular frame, red hair cropped short. 'Right lads, get a move on!' he yelled. 'First round's on me!'

Crunching over the cinders and broken glass, Harry on one side, Steve Harris on the other, Dillon caught sight of Malone talking to another guy just outside the entrance. Tony Malone, plainclothes military police, six-foot-four, built like a brick shithouse with a personality to match. Dillon wasn't given to hating people, he didn't care to waste the emotional investment, but Malone made a career of being stagnant pond life and proud of it.

'Oi! Malone,' Dillon called out as they approached. 'This place given the all-clear, has it?'

Malone turned, eyes narrowing under the black bar of his eyebrows, Brylcreemed hair gleaming slickly in the fairy lights. He didn't like being addressed as if he were a common craphat, even by a staff sergeant in the Paras. He spat the words out, hardly moving his lips.

'You and your mob drinking, Dillon, no place is -'

No love lost between them, Dillon went straight to him, staring up past Malone's hairy nostrils, though he kept his voice low and neutral. 'I asked you a question, mate.'

Malone stared back, eyes like slits, as if seriously considering whether to have a go, right there and then. He'd taken on bigger guys and beaten them to a pulp, but there was something about Dillon, a kind of chilling stillness and brooding intensity about the man, that warned him off. And Dillon's face bore the marks of someone who'd been through the wars and lived to tell the tale. The NAAFI brawl in Belize that had slit his cheek wide open and left him with a thin cruel scar. Nearly losing an eye 'down south' on Mount Longdon, the sniper's bullet grazing his right eyebrow and leaving a pale puckered abrasion. The kind of face that could take punishment and come back for second helpings.

'Come on, Frank -' Jimmy pulled Dillon away from the simmering confrontation. 'We're wasting valuable drinking time…'

As the six young lads pushed past him, Malone vented his spite over their heads, twitching his size-seventeen neck. 'I checked it out personal, so screw you and…'

The rest of it was lost as noise, heat and smoke hit them like a solid wall. At the far end of the long, narrow room, beams and nicotined stucco plaster overhead, the live group was twanging away, and through an archway disco lights were strobing over a packed dance-floor. He'd been dead right, Dillon saw, following Jimmy's broad back. This was about as basic as you could get, a bar running almost its entire length, tables against the walls, bare floorboards, and a crowd into the serious business of getting pissed as farts in record-breaking time. They were all young, mostly soldiers, with a fair sprinkling of local girls sitting on laps, some openly necking. Dillon felt the tiny coiled spring of tension at the base of his spine unwind.

Odd how after three tours in the Province he was more wary now than he'd been on his first. What was it – creeping paranoia or just plain old senility? Jesus wept, past it at thirty-one.

Jimmy – Mr Fixit as usual – was doing the organising. He'd spotted a table round the corner from the main door vestibule with only a couple of young blokes sitting there, just finishing their pints, locals judging by the length of their hair and five o'clock shadows, and Jimmy was in before they'd put their glasses down. Harry Travers and Steve Harris were grabbing spare chairs and passing them over the heads of nearby crowded tables. Dillon and Jimmy started clearing the table of empties, pint glasses and bottles of Guinness, telling the six Toms to get sat down, first shout on them.

'Thanks, mate.' Harry plonked two more chairs down as the Irishmen got up to leave. Their table was filled with empty glasses and bottles. 'You had a good night's session by the look of it.'