Peter Guttridge - City of Dreadful Night

I don’t know why he left the service. When I asked him once, he changed the subject. Artfully. I thought he’d tell me when he was ready but he never did. Yet we were friends. I knew I could trust my life to him – and had. I believe he knew the same about me – though whether I now would be able to fulfil that trust as effectively as he, I somehow doubted.

I expected him at least to stay in government service after he left the army – become a spook of some sort – but he moved to Brighton and set up a security business. It wasn’t quite clear what some of the work was. Deep checks on companies and individuals, a little bit of industrial espionage, perhaps. He might still have been working for the intelligence services for all I knew.

We didn’t see each other much. He was away a lot – had been away during the Milldean mess. He’d called me when he got back and suggested we meet.

It was a bright morning. I left my car in the car park beneath the old Town Hall and walked up the steps, which as usual smelled of piss. I strolled across the road to look at the sea. Seagulls squawked, there was a salt tang in the air and the sun glittered on the shifting surface of the water.

I stood by the railings on the promenade and looked over at the West Pier, little more than a grey skeleton since the arson attacks a couple of years earlier.

Joggers and rollerbladers weaved their way through the people walking past me. The pebble beach was already crowded with sunbathers, although no one was foolhardy enough either to be in the water or to be windsurfing on it. It wasn’t by accident that Surfers Against Sewage was based in Brighton.

I was thinking about my father, who used to tell entertaining stories about what went on in Brighton on the seafront – and particularly on the West Pier – back in the thirties. But then entertaining stories were my father’s stock-in-trade. Truth was something else again.

I walked up Ship Street and past the Hotel du Vin, glancing through the windows to see if there was anyone inside that I knew. That would have been my preferred venue. The Cricketers, however, was one of Tingley’s regular watering holes. He liked his pubs cosy and a little gloomy.

I found him sitting – alone, naturally – in the covered courtyard of the pub. It was a sunny day and the warm light filtering through the tacky corrugated plastic above our heads made the scuffed yellow walls glow like honey.

It was over a year since I’d seen him but he looked the same – so neat as to be nondescript. He had regular features with well-cut black hair combed back from his forehead. As usual he wore an understated dark suit, white shirt and plain tie.

He was of medium height and slim, despite the amount of drink he seemed to consume. I could think of many occasions when I had been startled by the quantity he had put away, although I had never seen him act in a drunken way. Even overseas, in the forces, where there was little else to do off-duty but drink.

Tingley drank a disgusting concoction – rum and peppermint – that he called rum and pep.

He was sitting in the courtyard, his rum and pep, packet of cigarettes and lighter lined up in front of him. It wasn’t yet noon so I’d bought a cup of coffee. I pointed at his drink. He shook his head.

I sat down opposite him, held out my hand. He took it, gave it a little squeeze.

‘You’ve been better, I warrant,’ he said, inspecting my face. ‘You should have got hold of me. Let me help.’

‘I’d heard you were out of the country.’ It was an unspoken agreement that I never asked him where he’d been. Never pried at all, in fact. ‘Besides, I fight my own battles.’

‘But now…?’

I laughed.

‘Now I need your help.’

He nodded.

‘What exactly are you doing these days?’ I said.

He took a sip of his rum and pep.

‘Does it have to be exact?’

I smiled.

‘I hope you’re not risking your neck doing security in Iraq or Afghanistan.’

‘I’m mad but not that mad.’

‘Good money.’

‘If you live to spend it… Tell me,’ he said, putting his drink down. ‘Why’d you put your neck on the block?’

‘I did what I felt was right.’

Tingley laughed. For some little while. He saw my discomfort – OK, my mounting anger – and laughed some more. Then he pointed at me.

‘Your ego is your blessing and your curse. Gets you places because you can’t imagine you can’t get there. Fucks you because you don’t know when to stop.’

‘Thanks for the analysis, Dr Tingley,’ I said, smiling again. Or, at least, attempting to.

He tilted his head.

‘Actually, ego and obstinacy – are they the same thing? Because when you think you’re right, you’re outrageously obstinate.’

‘You think I was wrong?’

Tingley caught the heat in my voice, reared back, hands out.

‘Whoah, Bobby. I’m on your side, remember.’ He looked hard at me. ‘Remember?’

I remembered. The Gulf War – the first one. Pretty much of a turkey shoot, except my squadron had been sent out on reconnaissance with the wrong grid references. We’d strayed into friendly fire from the Yanks, who preferred to be sure rather than safe when it came to obliterating everything that got in their way.

Then we’d hit some Iraqis who were up for a fight and knew what they were doing.

A dozen of us survived but only with the weapons we had in our hands and what we stood up in. Our communications were buggered, we didn’t have so much as a compass and a map between us. We didn’t know where the hell we were.

Nothing but sand and blistering sunshine. We slept during the day in sweltering sand scoops, moved at night when the heat was only slightly less, navigating by the stars as best we could.

And then we stumbled across this man. One minute we were trudging across the dunes, sinking up to our thighs in the soft sand, the next a sandman was standing in front of us. We should have shot him but our reflexes were buggered. He peeled his balaclava off. Spoke to us in English.

He laughed like a drain when I told him where we were supposed to be.

‘I’ll take you there,’ he said.

As we waded through the sand, I asked him how long he’d been out here. He told me a couple of months, living off the land. Jesus – what was there to live off? We’d been out a week and were suffering big time. My respect for him was established there and then.

He got us to our destination. He got down and dirty with us when we met opposition on the way. He pointed us in the right direction then disappeared into the night.

That was the first of many encounters all over the world. He saved my neck more than once and, I modestly submit, I did the same for him on a couple of occasions. We kept in touch, met up pretty regularly when we were both in the same country and off-duty.

He was one of the few men I trusted absolutely.

I’d tried to get him talking many a time but he always turned the conversation back on me. And, well, like he said, I had an ego.

‘I want to find out what really happened in Milldean and what was behind it.’

‘What about the enquiry?’

‘They’ve got nowhere fast, as far as I can tell.’ I fiddled with my empty coffee cup. ‘And nobody in the police service is willing to talk to me. I’m outside the tent as far as my old associates are concerned.’

‘I don’t have an in there,’ Tingley said, looking past me and lowering his voice as a young couple came through from the public bar and sat at the far end of the courtyard.

‘No, but you’re well connected locally – and nationally.’

‘Locally is fair enough but – what? – you think there was some kind of conspiracy at a national level?’