Gerald Seymour - The Contract

When the Member had entered the Mother of Parliaments he had believed that after a shortish apprenticeship he would be invited to the Despatch Box to argue with the authority of ministerial responsibility behind him. But the party had fallen on barren years, long rejected. A team of hard fisted, abrasive tongued men and women now soared in the new order. Time had slipped by the Member for Guildford. The back benches of the House of Commons were his fate. He found a solace now in aspish criticism of his youthful but more senior party colleagues, and prided himself that this was useful to democracy.

The snake sting of his tongue had acquired him a certain notoriety that to be maintained must find frequent replenishment from cause and case history. He was a very suitable candidate for Dennis Tweedle's complaint. 'He repeated it again and again, the boy, the allegation that his father was to be murdered in the German Democratic Republic by members of the British Secret Intelligence Service. They showed intolerable rudeness, these people, just barged into the house, not a word of thanks for what my wife had done, stripped the clothes she'd given him right off the lad and took him out half naked when what he needed was warmth and kindliness.'

He had endured two more of his constituents, fought to concentrate on their worries, and hurried them away. Left to himself he telephoned the headquarters of Surrey County Police and requested an appointment with the Chief Constable.

He reflected afterwards that many would have warned him that this was not a fit matter for his concern. Any number of his colleagues at the Palace of Westminster would have offered that advice.

But such an attitude would have marked the betrayal of the true role of the backbencher. That was the opinion of Sir Charles Spottiswoode, Member for Guildford.

In the sitting room Carter broached the whisky bottle, handed a generous glass to Johnny. The two men alone.

Willi and George away upstairs. Smithson and Pierce not back from a day with their families.

' I think we deserve it, but the day was fine, the pictures will be just right.'

'They'll stir the old man up,'Johnny said thoughtfully.

'Mawby rang while you were in the bath. He's coming down tomorrow, early. He's having dinner with the DUS tonight.'

'That's nice for him…'Johnny looked up, away from his drink and saw the uncertainty in Carter. '… Do we have a problem?'

'Mawby says the DUS is a fraction nervous. The Prime Minister called him in, gave him the acid about not having heard of Willi, the D notice did that for us. He was going on about the need for more consultation between the Service and Downing Street…'

'Will he get that?'

'Shouldn't think so,' said Carter cheerfully. 'The DUS regards politicians as passing ships. But there was a bit more than that. The PM was jittery about the defector damaging trade negotiations between us and the DDR. Mawby says that all this bloody government thinks about is export statistics.'

'What does the PM say about DIPPER?'

' I fancy the DUS told him the truth, and nothing but the truth, but I get the impression that the bit about the whole truth might have been mislaid. The PM wouldn't have said anything about DIPPER for the very simple reason that he's rather in the dark about it.'

'What does that mean?'Johnny swigged at his glass.

' It means that it's a bloody good plan, and one that's getting better, and it's not going to be screwed for a turbine engine order.'

' It's a hell of a way to carry on.'

'That's what I was thinking, but it's the usual way.'

Johnny pondered, head resting in his hands, cheeks enveloped. He sat very still, thoughtful, wrapped in himself. Carter stared out of the window into the cloaking darkness.

'I'll want a gun,'Johnny said.

'What do you say, Johnny?' Carter murmured, his attention distanced.

' I said that I'll want a gun.'

Carter swivelled towards him. 'That's not on, Johnny, you know that.'

'Not to carry through the frontier, but to pick up there. I want one.'

' It's not cops and robbers, you know.'

'When we go for the autobahn, I'll want to carry a gun.'

' It'll never be agreed to, you know that. If anything happened..'

'Exactly right, if anything happened… if one idiot stands in the way. If one Schutzpolizei holds his hand up… What do you do? You won't be there to tell me. Not you, not Mawby.'

Because that was the crucible, and Carter wasn't travelling. He'd be at Helmstedt and waiting. Kicking his heels at Checkpoint Alpha and thinking of the restaurant they'd take over when Johnny came through.

Carter was the blunt end man. And Carter couldn't read this young man, young enough to be his son, young enough to have had the small front room of his home, young enough to have earned in Northern Ireland the mauve and green ribbon of active service, young enough to have killed there… How do you love a young man, offer yourself as parental substitute, when he's slaughtered a child, shown no public remorse?

And Carter didn't know him, could not search a path into the mind of the man they would send to Magdeburg. And he would only be waiting for him, waiting with a restaurant reservation.

'I'll see what I can do.'

'We wouldn't want a little thing to stymie us.'

Carter showed a beleaguered, tired sympathy. 'I'll argue the case for a gun with Mawby. Don't worry at it.'

He carried the bottle to Johnny. Something terrible in those watchful, clear lit eyes, something that frightened him, that made him want to turn his back on the man who had shot a teenage girl and wept no tears.

'You're a cold bugger, Johnny.'

' I'm a contract man,' Johnny said, and his eyes blinked and the brightness had fled.

Ulf Becker jumped easily down from the lorry's tailboard. He didn't look back to see how Heini Schalke coped with the drop. He held his pack lightly with one hand, trailed his rifle in the other. Dirty, hot, bathed in his sweat he stopped in front of Company Orders, the board on which duty rosters were posted. Becker sniggered, pointed out the carbon typed sheet to those who followed him.

Battalion at Seggerde directed company at Weferlingen to provide two sections in the morning in support of company at Walbeck. An epidemic of measles was responsible. Much laughter, much ribaldry.

And welcome… Becker's name on the list of those to be sent the eight kilometres south from Weferlingen to Walbeck.

Anything for variety, anything to change the outlook of the sugar beet fields across the wire, and the farm houses, and the road junctions, and the viewing platforms where the British troops and the Bundesgrenzschutz and the Zoll Customs men came to peer across at them

… and there was no hope of breaching the fence at Weferlingen, no justification there for writing a letter to a girl in Berlin.

Carter opened the door silently, and walked on his toes towards the bed.

Johnny sleeping and lit by the early morning sunshine. Carter intruding, as if creeping into the room of his daughter when she had been small.

And this one had a child's face too. Relaxed and easy breathing, a calm set mouth, the legs drawn up and silhouetted under the bedclothes. The defenceless, vulnerable posture of sleep. Carter carried a china mug of tea to the bedside table and grimaced at the street map of Magdeburg that had been left crudely folded beside the lamp. Bloody awful bedside reading. Switch yourself off from the day's work with a street map of a ghastly city of chimneys and furnaces in the German bloody Democratic Republic. Poor bastard. Everything so neat in the room. As if Johnny infiltrated himself between the furnishings and fittings, disturbed nothing, moved nothing. Clothes all in the wardrobe, or folded on the chair. Shoes together and slippers beside, as if for kit inspection. Means more than that, doesn't it? If his possessions aren't strewn on the floor, if he doesn't leave his mark in the nest, then he's a stranger here. He doesn't believe that he belongs. The return of the thought, the thought that came many times to Carter… They did not know this man.