Gerald Seymour - The Contract

Carter fumbled onwards.

'You didn't write any letters when you were at the house, Johnny. You know we didn't even do a blood chit form What are you at, Carter? There has to be a blood chit form, there has to be a next of kin procedure.

Should have been wrapped up on the last night at Holmbury, over drinks and with suitable ribaldry, should have been done then, not when the next stop is Platform Eleven on Hannover Station. Should have been, but it hadn't. 'You didn't get in touch with anyone?'

Johnny looked quizzically across the table. 'You wouldn't have expected me to send out a rash of postcards.'

'Let's put it formally. If there's any… trouble, an accident, something like that… well, who we do we notify?'

Johnny let him sweat. The girl came with the drinks. Carter paid and she reached in the leather purse she wore behind her apron for the change. She left the menu on the table.

'We have to have a name, Johnny.'

'Charlotte Donoghue, number 14 Cherry Road,

Lancaster,'Johnny rapped. 'You'd better write it down.'

A notebook was produced and a Biro pen. Carter wrote the name and address carefully. 'Anyone else?'

'No-one else.'

'It won't happen, of course, but it's part of the paperwork. I'd get my balls chewed if I hadn't looked after it.'

A tremble at Johnny's eyelids, a quick half smile. 'If it happened you'd go easy with her… Promise me that.'

' I promise you that, Johnny.'

'She's an old woman, and alone. She doesn't know about this sort of thing.'

' I'd make it my business to do it myself. Does that help?'

'That's fine, thanks.'

Johnny's hand snaked across the table, gripped at Carter's, squeezed it.

The gesture of affection and gratitude. Carter blinked. Christ he was too old and the thread too worn and the steel too rusted, too old to be sending young men across frontiers.

'She hasn't understood anything for years,' said Johnny quietly. 'It's a fair old time since she had anything to cheer about… She was very proud in the Sandhurst days, each time I went home in the kit she always seemed to be about to head for the shops because she wanted me to go with her down the street and hold her bag and have everyone see how well her kid had done… The trial crucified her.'

' I can understand.'

'You can, perhaps, but try and tell a pensioner widow how it is. Little Johnny's across the Irish Sea fighting terrorists. Little Johnny's away and trying to save the lives and property of decent people from the forces of evil. Little Johnny's on hush work but it's very important. Little Johnny may be in line for a medal, a bravery gong… That was all right for her, that was simple enough, and then it changed, didn't it?… Little Johnny's charged with murder, he's under arrest in army custody, he's before the Lord Chief Justice, he's accused of handing down "untrustworthy evidence", he's slated for bungling. He's a bloody failure… That's a hard meal for an old woman to swallow. It's shame that hurts the old people.'

' I understand, Johnny,' Carter whispered.

' I was engaged, you'll know that from the file. You'll have read that.

The bitch treated me as if I had the scabs. Just a bloody letter. Didn't come to Belfast, had her father answer the telephone when I called from the airport to say it was "Not Guilty"

'Just the one girl, was there?'

'Just the one,' the savagery bit in Johnny's words. ' I bloody near smashed my mother… It's not the English way, is it? A man close to bloody middle age and living with his mother and talking about her. Get type-cast, don't you? Into the realms of the pansies.. She was crippled, really cut about. I owed her something. You know that? We're both bloody owed something…'

'We'd better have something to eat,' Carter said.

He would remember Johnny for the rest of his life, remember the hand that had held his in the vice grip, remember the tremble of the hard man.

They had soup, and a schnitzel each with fried potatoes and sauerkraut and a litre of sweet wine from a carafe and watched the bar filling and the fluent noise of people who had no care, no sense of crisis. Pretty girls and young comfortable men and a random affluence and no attention paid to the two outsiders who sat at the far table and slowly cleared their plates. A cup of thick dark coffee, and then Carter went to the bar and the girl wrote quickly on the receipt slip and added for him, and Carter thanked her, and they edged their way through the throng and the silky warmth, and went out into the night.

The noise of the cafe Augusten dogged them as they walked away along the narrow pavement. They alone with work to be accomplished, they alone set aside from the noisy happiness of a bar in the centre of Hannover. There was nothing more to be said that was relevant, they went in silence.

First to the 'Left Luggage' and the collection of the bags. They stood then in the middle of the walkway that runs underneath the platform and track and solemnly checked Johnny's wallet and inside pockets. The identity of Johnny Donoghue was erased. No envelopes, no bills, no driving licence, no credit cards. John Dawson supreme. Around them the station shops were closed down, darkened and locked. The tourists' place, the flower stall, the sex cinema, the newspaper and book stand.

Hours still to wait, but not in this place of the whores and the pimps and the police in pairs.

Johnny in fawn slacks, and his anorak zipped over his sports shirt and trainers on his feet and the boots bulky in his bag — as it should be for a tourist. They walked up the staircase to Platform Eleven. Like a bloody morgue, Carter thought. Midnight on any station in Europe, home for creeps and queers and misfits, like a bloody desert because only the parasites have business on a station when the clock shows past midnight.

Carter shuddered, held his arms across his chest. A few of the platform benches were occupied, there was the tramp of the feet of the military police patrol of the Bundeswehr, the trilling clatter of a kicked soft drink can, but overall a great quiet in shadowed light. Carter took the mood of Johnny, noticed the tightness of the skin on his cheeks and the way that he fidgeted with his hands. He kept his peace.

The Warsaw express came and went, east to west. Johnny hardly seemed to notice it, didn't turn his shoulders to watch the disembarking passengers and the surveillance of the Bundesgrenzschutz on those who had crossed through and now smiled with an ebullience as if the grey life was however temporarily behind them. Into the early, soft hours of Wednesday morning. Just a few days, Johnny, you'll be fine… Fussing like an old woman, Henry Carter, and Johnny was on the bench beside him and his eyes were closed now and his breathing regular and his face gentle. Not a gentle creature, though, was he? Pulled the bloody trigger on the Armalite, hadn't he? Dropped the kid, killed the girl, slaughtered her. And his mother would have been proud to have known him, proud with her chest swollen at the dosage. Her Johnny in a hedgerow with a high velocity rifle at his shoulder and a round in the breach and his finger curled on a cold trigger. Well, somebody has to bloody well do it, someone has to scrape the dog shit off the pavements, someone has to make life clean and sweet smelling for the wife of Henry Carter, and the daughter of Henry Carter…

The loudspeaker announcements came fierce and sharp.

Just before two o'clock and Carter could have done with the pullover folded in his bag.

The impending arrival of the express from Cologne. Service D441.

For Wolfsburg, Obeisfelde, Magdeburg and Zwickau. Carter shook Johnny's arm lightly, saw him start into wakefulness and brush a hand across his eyes as if to clear a veil.

The big engine edged towards them. The coaches with the livery paint of the railway system of the Federal Republic. The scraping of brakes and steam hissing from between carriages.