TOM GRAHAM
Blood, Bullets and Blue Stratos

Table of Contents

Title Page

Chapter One: Out of the Ruins

Chapter Two: A Message in Red

Chapter Three: A Night at the Arms

Chapter Four: The Paddy Chain

Chapter Five: Handover

Chapter Six: An Audience with Gene Hunt

Chapter Seven: Letters of Blood

Chapter Eight: Test Card

Chapter Nine: Into the Lion’s Den

Chapter Ten: Captive

Chapter Eleven: Girl with a Gun

Chapter Twelve: Black & Decker

Chapter Thirteen: Empty Lair

Chapter Fourteen: Irish Eyes Aren’t Smiling

Chapter Fifteen: Interceptor

Chapter Sixteen: Sam Tyler, RIP

Chapter Seventeen: Together we Stand

Chapter Eighteen: Eat my Bullets

Chapter Nineteen: Showdown

Chapter Twenty: Mind Games

About the Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

CHAPTER ONE
OUT OF THE RUINS

The man in the black leather jacket picked his way across a bleak terrain of broken buildings and burnt-out cars. Reaching the top of a low hill that was all smashed rubble and pulverized concrete, he glanced for a moment at the pale disc of the sun, then stumbled his way down into a dead valley where overturned lorries smoked and smouldered. Brick dust kicked up and clogged his nostrils. An acrid wind gusted along the valley, stinging his eyes. Half blind and choking, he sought shelter in the skeletal remains of a building that rose ominously from the wreckage.

He found himself inside a roofless ruin, all broken walls and empty, gaping windows. And yet, something in the layout of this place stirred up memories. This building had once been familiar to him. It had buzzed and thrived with life. He recalled uniforms, and desks, mountains of paperwork, banter, and bullying, and a rough camaraderie. Had it once been his school?

A sharp voice suddenly cut through the silence. ‘What you standing around like that for? This ain’t a bleedin’ bus stop.’

The man jumped and spun round. Behind a pile of stone and timber that may once have been a desk, a woman was staring sourly at him. That expression – unimpressed, implacable, not-in-the-mood-for-any-of-your-bloody-nonsense – was shockingly familiar.

‘I know you …’ the man muttered. ‘I know your name.’

‘Well bully for you, luv! Award yourself ten points.’

‘Phyllis. Your name’s Phyllis! We knew each other.’

‘In the biblical sense? In your dreams, sonny. Now shift your arse before I stick you in cell 3 with Dirty Dougie Corrigan. There’s a puddle of old sick in cell 3, and I’ve been told Dirty Dougie’s just dropped a shit in the middle of it, so unless you fancy getting handy with a mop and bucket then sling ya hook!’

Phyllis impatiently ushered him through a smashed doorway into the gutted remains of a large room. The ghostly echo of a clacking typewriter drifted through the dead building, a long-gone telephone rang, and the man in the leather jacket said out loud, ‘I worked here. I worked right here.’

He imagined his desk, his telephone, his chair – and then, unbidden, the image came into his mind’s eye of other desks ranged nearby, steel cabinets bulging with files, and police mugshots of wanted men pinned to the walls, jostling for space amid the photos of Page 3 girls and bygone footballers.

Without warning, a young man appeared, spectre-like, seated at his desk, his dark hair parted above his pale, not-quite-mature face. He studied something on his desk, some piece of paperwork, his eyes narrowing and his brow furrowing like a studious schoolboy hard at work.

‘What do you think?’ the young man said suddenly. ‘Looks a bit rough, this one. Reckon you could handle it, Ray?’

Another figure appeared behind him – older, stouter, with a blond moustache, sharp blue eyes and the hard edge of a man well used to showdowns and violence. He cracked his knuckles and leant over the younger man’s desk to examine the paperwork.

‘There’s nowt so rough it puts the frighteners on me, Chrissie-boy,’ he said. ‘Let’s have a close-up.’

He swept up the paper from the young man’s desk and scrutinized it. It was a dog-eared copy of Soapy Knockers magazine.

‘Not so rough as all that, Chris – not with the lights out an’ all. Yeah, I reckon I’d have a little go on this one, if she were drippin’ for it an’ that.’

‘I know you two,’ said the man in the black leather jacket. The two ethereal figures looked round at him. ‘Chris Skelton. Ray Carling. I know you … both of you …’

‘Both of us?’ asked Chris.

‘Or both of these?’ asked Ray, turning the magazine to reveal a massive pair of soapy breasts.

‘We worked together,’ the man in the jacket insisted. ‘In this room. Your desks were here – right here – and mine was here, and just over there was a … there was a woman … dark hair … her name was … her name was … oh, dammit, you boys remember. She was one of us and her desk was right there and she was called …’

His mind reeled, but the name would not come.

‘Why can’t I remember her name? Why can’t I remember?’

Ray exchanged a knowing look with Chris, then tapped the side of his head with his finger.

The man in the jacket saw the gesture and shouted, ‘There’s nothing wrong with my sanity. I know who I am.’

‘If you say so, boss.’

‘I know what’s real and what’s not. And I know that woman’s name. She sat right there and here name was … her name was …’

Furiously, the man grabbed a brick and hurled it against the remains of a wall.

‘Got a temper on ’im, this lad,’ winked Ray.

‘P’raps he should go up against big ’Enry,’ said Chris.

‘That’s what you said before.’ The man in the leather jacket jabbed his finger at Chris. ‘When I first came here, you said – you said I looked like I’d gone ten rounds with big Henry. It’s what you said when I first walked through that door.’

‘What door, boss?’ asked Chris.

Where the door had once been there was now only a ragged hole and heaps of rubble.

‘Ain’t no door here,’ said Ray, chewing his gum. ‘Ain’t nothing no more.’

‘All broken,’ said Chris.

‘All gone.’

‘Busted.’

‘Like you, boss. Broken, and busted.’

The man in the jacket looked from Chris to Ray and back again. ‘What do you mean by that?

‘There’s nothing here for you,’ said Ray, fishing out a cigarette from his breast pocket and sparking it up. ‘You could have gone back where you belong. You had your chance. But you threw it away. You threw yourself away. Don’t you remember?’

Chris turned his fingers into a pair of walking legs and mimed them running, jumping, plummeting. He made a long, descending whistle that ended with a splat.

The man in the jacket backed away, his hands clutching the sides of his head. His mind was reeling. Memories were swilling wildly about inside his skull: of standing atop a high roof with the city laid out all around him; of making a decision, and then starting to run. He remembered sprinting, leaping, falling, an expanse of hard concrete rushing up to meet him.

‘Topped yourself, boss,’ said Chris, taking back his copy of Soapy Knockers and leafing through it. ‘Smashed yourself to pieces.’

‘And everything else along with you,’ put in Ray, letting smoke trail from between his lips. ‘Just look around. See what you done.’

‘I remember …’ the man stammered, trying to piece together the jostling fragments in his mind. ‘The year was … It was 2006. There was an accident. I got … I got shot …’

‘Run over,’ Chris corrected him. ‘Very nasty.’

‘Run over … yes, yes,’ the man said, starting to see the pattern of events forming. ‘And I woke up … But it wasn’t 2006 any more … It was nineteen … It was nineteen-seventy … nineteen-seventy …’

‘… three,’ Chris and Ray intoned together.

‘Nineteen seventy-three. Yes, that was it,’ said the man. ‘I didn’t know if I was mad, or dead, or in a coma …’

‘Or a mad, dead bloke in a coma,’ piped up Chris. ‘Three for the price of one.’

‘But I did know I had to get back home, back to my own time, back to 2006. And I did it. I got there. But then, it was like … It felt like …’

‘Being dead?’ suggested Ray.

‘Being in a coma?’ added Chris. ‘Being a mad dead bloke in a coma all over again?’

‘Yes,’ said the man in the jacket. ‘It did feel like being a mad dead bloke in a coma. And I realized then I didn’t belong there after all. I belonged here, in 1973.’

‘But this ain’t 1973, boss,’ said Ray, staring flatly at him. ‘It ain’t nowhere.’

‘Hell, maybe,’ shrugged Chris.

‘Same thing,’ said Ray.

‘No,’ said the man. ‘No, that’s not true. I came back to 1973. I jumped off a rooftop in 2006, and I landed here – in ’73 – where I belong.’

‘You landed nowhere,’ said Ray. ‘Sorry, boss – you ballsed it up. You should’ve stayed in your own time. There’s nothing here for you – no life, no future. Still … Too late now. Too late.’

The man in the jacket seemed about to faint. He reached out to a desk for support, found it was as insubstantial as a wisp of smoke, stumbled, and fell against a broken wall.

‘He’s done his head in, Chris,’ said Ray, a grin just beginning to flicker beneath his moustache. ‘Must have been when he hit the ground.’

Chris nodded sadly. ‘Bumped his noodle. Concussion.’

‘And then some.’

‘Skull would have shattered like a vase.’

‘Brains all over the place.’

‘Scrambled eggs.’

‘Stewed tomatoes.’

Ray winced. ‘And his dear old mum called in to identify the scrapings.’

‘Bet that did her head in,’ Chris suggested.

Ray nodded, drawing deeply on his cigarette, narrowed eyes fixed on the man in the jacket. ‘Bet it did. Still – he reckons he did the right thing.’

‘I … I did the right thing,’ the man in the jacket said, straightening up and trying to sound as if he believed it. ‘I had to come back here … I had to.’

‘If you say so, boss,’ shrugged Chris.

‘It was important to come back. I – I know it was important …’

Ray laughed. ‘You know nowt. Not even your own name.’

‘I know who I am.’

‘Tell us then. Who are you? Eh? Go on.’

The man in the jacket opened his mouth, but was silent. Ray snorted with derision, and then Chris began laughing too. And, as they laughed, a cold wind moaned, and, like pillars of sand, the figures of Chris and Ray evaporated, along with the desks and filing cabinets.

‘Don’t you go!’ the man in the jacket cried out. ‘I know who I am!’

‘You ain’t no one, not any more,’ grinned Ray, and with that he and Chris were gone.

‘I know who I am!’ the man yelled into the empty room. ‘We were a team. There were you two, and me, and the woman over there … And a fella. A big fella. The boss. Our boss. The guv’nor. That’s it! He was our guv. And we were all coppers. You remember. You remember me. My name’s … Oh, for God’s sake, you remember my name, it’s … My bloody name is …’

He stuttered, stammered, then punched the air in fury. What the hell had happened to him? Why couldn’t he remember? Was his mind as smashed and broken as everything else round here?

Smashed … Broken …

As if reading his thoughts, the roofless walls about him groaned and shifted. Great cracks shot across the bare plaster like zigzags of lightning, filling the air with choking clouds of dust. Masonry began to topple and crash. Even the floor heaved and fractured.

Covering his mouth and nose with one hand, and wildly fending off the cascades of shattered brickwork coming down about him, the man in the leather jacket stumbled his way back into the bleak valley. Throwing himself clear, he turned and watched the shell of the police station crumple in on itself, like the brittle remains of an Egyptian mummy crumbling away on exposure to the air. In seconds, there was nothing standing – just another mound of rubble amid many, wreathed in an aura of concrete dust that began slowly to settle.

As the man in the leather jacket got back on his feet, there came an unearthly noise, very different from the crack and blast of collapsing masonry. It was a weird, scraping, groaning sound that instantly released a flood of memories in the man’s mind: teatime; waiting for the telly to warm up; a whirling tunnel of light; a terrifying theme tune that sounded like the scream of a killer robot; a sofa behind which he felt compelled to hide.

The man glanced anxiously about, then clambered frantically to the crest of a heap of twisted girders to get a wider view. A blue police box slowly materialized in the flat base of a valley amid the wreckage. The sound ceased, and for some moments the box sat silent and inert. Then the door opened, and a woman emerged – the woman, the woman whose face he could see in his mind’s eye but whose name had completely eluded him.

‘Annie …’ The man breathed, and his heart leapt at the sight of her. ‘Annie Cartwright …’

But she was not quite as he remembered her. Her dark hair had turned mousy blonde; she was dressed in a drab pinafore dress and dull, floral-pattern blouse the man was sure he had never seen her wear before. Why? Why had she made herself look like Jo Grant from some old episode of Doctor Who?

‘Where are we?’ she said, speaking to somebody behind her. ‘Doctor?’

Like Annie, Jon Pertwee had changed too. The grey bouffant was the same, as was the velvet smoking jacket, ruffled shirt and floppy bowtie; but the gut was stouter, the chest more barrel-like, the stance more confrontational, the aftershave more potent. The hair and costume were the Doctor’s, but the man inside them was an altogether different animal.

The man in the leather jacket felt a sickening lurch of recognition. That was him, that was the fella – it was the guv.

‘What is this place, Doctor?’ Annie asked.

‘A chuffing shite-hole, luv,’ Doctor Hunt replied, scowling about at the bleak landscape. ‘Looks like I’m going to have reprogram the TARDIS’s intergalactic coordinator circuits with the toe of my size-twelve boot.’

‘We’re not staying, then?’

‘Not unless you fancy taking a slash in the gravel like a white-arsed collie. C’mon, luv – bounce your clout back in the box and get us a brew on the go.’

He smacked Annie’s backside as she disappeared back into the TARDIS, then jammed a half-smoked panatella into his gob as he took one last, unimpressed look around.

‘Gene!’ the man in the leather jacket cried out, the name coming to him in flash. ‘Gene Hunt! Guv. Wait. Don’t go.’

Gene sucked on the cigar, oblivious of the man’s cries.

‘Gene! Please! Don’t leave me here!’

Gene disappeared inside the TARDIS and slammed the door. A heartbeat later, the police box began to dematerialize.

‘No! Wait, Guv! It’s me! Don’t leave me here! We’re a team! We’re a team, you rotten bastard!’

Just before the TARDIS disappeared entirely, the doors opened enough to reveal Gene’s hand, two fingers flicking a ‘V’, before they and the blue police box evaporated entirely.

‘Don’t leave me here. I want to go home!’

All at once he was struggling against something that smothered and suffocated him, and in the next moment he found himself caught up in tangled bed sheets, his face sunk deep into a sweat-soaked pillow. He sat up, getting his breath back, and glared about him, momentarily shocked to find that the wasteland of rubble had been replaced with the familiar surroundings of his flat: beige and brown wallpaper, flower-patterned lampshades, a huge black-and-white TV with clunky buttons, a hot-water boiler that took forever to warm up. Beyond his nicotine-coloured curtains, a cold grey day was dawning over Manchester. From some distant street came the wail of a panda car. Somebody in a nearby flat was playing ‘Whiskey in the Jar’ on a tinny transistor radio.

Home.

The man clambered slowly from the tangled sheets, padded across the rough nylon carpet, and confronted himself in the bathroom mirror. What he saw was a face just the right side of forty, with narrow, thoughtful features starting to bear the lines of too many worries, too many unresolved dilemmas, too many restless nights.

‘It was just another bad dream,’ the face told him. ‘Don’t let it rattle you.’

He ran his hand across his close-trimmed hair, ruffled the jagged fringe running across his high forehead.

‘You know exactly who you are. Your name is Sam Tyler.’

Above his narrow, thoughtful eyes, the brows knotted anxiously. He rubbed at them to smooth out the lines.

‘You are Detective Inspector Sam Tyler of CID, A-Division.’

Detective Inspector. The rank still irked him. Back in 2006, he had been a fully fledged DCI – a detective chief inspector. It had been DCI Tyler who had pulled his car over to the side of the road, David Bowie blaring out of the dashboard MP3 player. It had been DCI Tyler who had stepped out of the car, trying to clear the tumultuous whirlwind of his thoughts, too preoccupied with his worries to even notice the other vehicle bearing down on him. It had been DCI Tyler who had felt the sudden impact of that vehicle, followed at once by the equally sudden impact of the tarmac. It had been DCI Tyler who had lain there, eyes unfocused, his consciousness ebbing away, the voice of Bowie penetrating the blankness that seemed to be overtaking him.

And her friend is nowhere to be seen

As she walks through a sunken dream

‘You know who you are and where you are,’ Sam told himself, looking his reflection firmly in the eye. ‘You are where you belong. Right here. This is your home.’

His home. Nineteen seventy-three. How strange and alien it had felt when he had first crash-landed here, alone and disoriented like a man from Mars. He had hunted through his pockets for the familiar props of the twenty-first century – the mobile, the BlackBerry, the sheaf of plastic debit cards – and found nothing but ten-pence pieces the size of doubloons and an ID card informing him that he was no longer a DCI but a detective inspector transferred down to Manchester from Hyde. He had tugged at his winged shirt collars and the tops of the Chelsea boots that he found himself wearing, and blundered like a zombie through the once-familiar police station that should have been buzzing with PC terminals and air-conditioning units but was now heavy with the clacking of typewriters and the sparking-up of cigarette lighters.

‘This is my office – here!’ he had bellowed, surrounded by blank, uncomprehending faces. ‘This is my department! What have you done with it?’

The answer had not come from the men staring at him. It had come in the form of a deep, phlegmy rumble, and the sound of heavy feet scraping across the floor. The man had turned, and there, lurking like an ogre in the smoke-filled den of his office, had been his new DCI – Gene Hunt, the guv – the shaven stubble of his neck red and inflamed from the raw alcohol that passed as aftershave, his belly bulging at the buttons of his nylon shirt, his stained fingers forever reaching for the next packet of fags, or the next glass of Scotch, or the next villain’s windpipe. He had introduced Sam to his new department with a breathtaking blow to the stomach – ‘Don’t you ever waltz into my kingdom acting king of the jungle!’ – and oriented him in Time and Space with a little less technical detail than Einstein or Hawking. ‘It’s 1973. Almost dinnertime. I’m ’avin’ hoops.’ And Sam, slowly but surely, had come to realize that he could be happy here. This place had life – hot, stinking, roaring, filthy, balls-to-the-wall life.

It also had Annie.

Sam ran water into the basin and splashed it across his face, thinking of Annie Cartwright. From the very moment he’d first met her, he had felt a connection, a conviction that, of all the strange characters populating his new world, she was the one he could trust the most. And in time she had become the bright heart of his universe around which everything else orbited. It was her as much as anything else in this place that he had missed so bitterly when he had returned to 2006, and it was her face that had been foremost in his mind when he had leapt so joyfully from the rooftop and plunged back into 1973. The future – his future – was with her. No question of that. He had thrown away his own time and his old life to ensure that.

And yet, night after night, the dreams battered away at him, always telling him the same thing: that he had no future, least of all with Annie; that coming back here had been a terrible mistake, far more catastrophic than he could imagine; that what life he had here in 1973 was destined to end in ruin and pain and utter despair.

‘Just dreams,’ he told his reflection. ‘Meaningless.’

But something deep within him seemed to say, Ah, but you know that’s not the case.

‘I have a future.’

You know that’s not true.

‘And it’s with Annie. We’ll be together. And we’ll be happy.’

Sam, Sam, you can’t kid yourself for ever.

‘We’ll make it, me and Annie – no one, and nothing, is going to stop us.’

Bash! Bash! Bash!

A fist pounded massively at the door like gunfire.

‘Who the hell is it?’ Sam shouted.

An all-too-familiar voice bellowed through the keyhole back at him. ‘Sorry to interrupt any intimate encounters you might be enjoying with Madam Palm and her five daughters, Sammy, but I just thought you might find the time to nick a few villains.’

Sam sighed, padded over to the front door and opened it. Filling the doorway loomed a barrel-chested grizzly bear dressed in a camelhair coat and off-white tasselled loafers. The reek of stale Woodbines and Blue Stratos shimmered about him like a heat haze. His black, string-backed driving gloves creaked as his implacable hands flexed and clenched. Peering down at Sam as if unsure whether to ignore him completely or batter him into the ground like a tent peg, this rock-solid, monstrous, nylon-clad Viking narrowed his cold eyes and jutted out his unbreakable chin.

This was him. This was the man. This was the guv. This was DCI Gene Hunt. Up close to him like this, eclipsed by his massive shadow, Sam felt vulnerable and absurd dressed in nothing but a T-shirt and shorts.

‘Fetchin’ little outfit, Sambo,’ Hunt intoned. ‘Are you trying to seduce me?’

‘Actually, Guv, I was contemplating a metaphysical dilemma.’

‘I hope you flushed afterwards.’ He swept past Sam and planted himself in the middle of the flat. The room seemed too small to contain him. He glared around him, his brooding glance seeming almost powerful enough to shatter windows. He rolled his shoulders, stuck out his chest and tilted his head, making the vertebrae of his neck give off an audible crack. ‘Excuse the early-morning house call, Tyler, but duty is calling. We got a shout. A to-do. A right bleedin’ incident.’

‘What sort of incident?’ asked Sam, hopping into his trousers.

‘Terrorists.’

‘IRA?’

‘No – disgruntled Avon ladies. Of course it’s the bloody IRA, Sam. Now zip your knickers up and get yourself decent.’

‘Any chance of you giving me a few details about what’s happening, Guv?’ asked Sam, shrugging on his black leather jacket. ‘Or have we got another couple of hours of sarcasm to get through first?’

‘Don’t get shirty, Mildred,’ said Gene, turning on his heel and leading the way out through the door. ‘I’ll fill you in on the way. It’ll take your mind off my driving.’

CHAPTER TWO
A MESSAGE IN RED

Tyres screamed. Grey, urban streets flashed past. Gene floored the gas as Sam floored an imaginary brake pedal.

‘Right, pay attention,’ Gene ordered, flinging the wheel recklessly back and forth as he weaved through the traffic. ‘We got a warning phoned through a little under an hour ago saying there was a pack of high explosives rigged up and ready to go pop in the local council records office.’

‘Was an IRA codeword given?’ asked Sam.

‘No, but we’re not taking any chances,’ said Gene. ‘There’s been a lot of angry Paddies on the move recently. We’ve been waiting for something like this to happen, so we’re assuming it’s the real thing.’

‘That makes sense,’ said Sam. ‘But what about Bomb Disposal?’

Gene shrugged.

‘And what does that shrug mean, Guv? We need Bomb Disposal down here. They should be dealing with this.’

‘We’re still waiting for them bone-idle bastards to get ’emselves out of bed,’ growled Gene, flagrantly roaring through a red light.

‘So what are we going to do?’

‘Well, until they deign to show up and start snipping wires, this is our shout.’

‘Guv, we’re not qualified to start messing about with explosives.’

‘And neither are they. You ever met any of them Bomb Disposal ’erberts? Half of ’em can’t even read.’

‘We need to cordon off the records office and keep the area secure until Bomb Disposal and Special Branch show up,’ said Sam. ‘It’s a terrorist incident. That’s their jurisdiction.’

‘Their “jurisdiction”? Nicking villains, Sammy-boy, that’s my jurisdiction, no matter what shape, size, colour or flavour they come in. Bombs and bastards and big blokes with shooters, it’s all the same to me. And I don’t plan sitting around on my pert and perfectly formed arse waiting for Special Branch to saunter over, not when things are kicking off right under my nose. So if you don’t mind, Tyler’ – the Cortina tilted noisily onto two wheels as Gene belted round a tight corner and Sam gripped the dashboard – ‘just remember which one of us two is the boss. You diddlin’?’

‘Guv, you can’t muck about, not where Special Branch are concer—’

Gene threw the Cortina ferociously around another tight bend, cutting Sam off in mid-sentence.

‘You didn’t answer my question, Tyler. I said are you diddlin’?’

Sam backed down. ‘I’m diddlin’, Guv.’

‘Lovely lad.’

The Cortina howled on, bouncing and veering at breakneck pace, until the drab, grey shape of the council records office appeared up ahead, standing out against the hard Manchester sky. Police cars were skewed across the road. Uniformed coppers were busy stringing up blue police cordons and trying to shepherd the already growing crowd of curious gawpers.

Gene gunned the engine, powering forward recklessly and sending people scattering out of the way like frightened rabbits. When he hit the brakes and brought the car to a lurching stop, Sam found that he had been holding his breath.

Gene shot him a glance. ‘Woken up now, have we?’

‘It still feels like a nightmare to me,’ said Sam, as he clambered out of the car.

Striding with Gene through the uniformed officers and rubbernecking sightseers, Sam spotted DS Ray Carling and DC Chris Skelton. Ray had wrenched his tie loose and flung open the top two buttons of his blue, wing-collared shirt to reveal a masculine flash of blond chest hair. He was in his element, barking orders at the uniformed coppers and snapping at the public to get their ruddy arses back, back, back! Beside him was the youthful Chris, his dark hair flopping anxiously across his left eye, his knitted tank-top already darkening with sweat as he rushed about assisting Ray. He looked overwhelmed and fretful, as if he was expecting the crowd to suddenly rise up and lynch him at any moment, or for the council offices to suddenly go nuclear and blow them all to kingdom come.

For a moment, Sam recalled how Chris and Ray had appeared to him in his nightmare. Their taunts echoed momentarily through his mind:

You’re not in 1973. You’re in hell.

And then he saw Chris struggling to stop a kid on a Chopper bike from getting under the police cordon, and Ray shovelling stick after stick of Juicy Fruit into his mouth as he strutted about aggressively jabbing his finger and bellowing orders, and all at once the menace they had possessed in the dream evaporated like morning dew.

Forget those damned dreams, Sam told himself. It’s just Chris and Ray, your old team. And you, Sam, you’re a copper, you’ve got a job to do.

Gene cruised forward, shoulders pushed back, belly sucked in. He back-handed the kid on the Chopper out of the way, ducked under the police tape, and surveyed the records office.

‘Speak to me, Ray. What’s the score? Anyone inside that place?’

‘The building’s evacuated, Guv,’ said Ray. ‘Leastways, it’s meant to be. Chris reckons he saw somebody up at one of the windows.’

‘I can’t swear to it,’ said Chris. ‘I thought I saw a bloke up there moving about, dead calm like.’

‘Could be one of the morning cleaners,’ said Sam.

‘Maybe,’ said Chris, frowning and looking confused. ‘Or it might just have been a reflection … You know, a seagull or summat like that.’

‘A seagull?’ snapped Ray. ‘You never said you thought it was a seagull.’

‘I didn’t think it was a seagull, not at the time.’

‘You said it were definitely a bloke, Chris.’

‘Yeah, I did. It were definitely a bloke – or a seagull.’

‘Can’t you tell the difference?’

‘Normally. But the more I try to remember, the less certain I am.’

‘Well, did it have a mop and bucket or a beak and bloody wings?’

‘I don’t know now, Ray. It’s doing my head in. I wish I hadn’t said anything.’

Sam peered hard at the rows of windows, and then, quite suddenly, he glimpsed something move.

‘You were quite right, Chris,’ he said, pointing. ‘There’s a fella up there. Second floor, three windows in from the edge of the building.’

Everybody looked. A man was moving about in a second-floor window, making no attempt to hide himself.

Chris’s expression went from one of screwed-up confusion to self-satisfaction in an instant. ‘See? See? I were right. I said it were a bloke, Guv. I said so. Dead observant, me – eagle-eyed, you know.’

‘Eagles, seagulls,’ muttered Gene. ‘Cancel Bomb Disposal and get Johnny Morris down here, pronto.’

Up on the second floor, a window opened and the figure leant out. It was a man, dressed in black overalls, his face completely hidden beneath a black balaclava. In the eyeholes of the balaclava glinted little circles of light – he was wearing a pair of wire-framed John Lennon glasses.

At the sight of him, Sam felt a cold shiver run up his spine. That was no cleaner, and it was certainly no early-morning council worker going through the files. It was a terrorist.

‘What the hell’s he still doing in the building?’ Sam said.

‘Planting a bomb?’ suggested Chris.

‘Well obviously, Chris – but the IRA prefer blowing up other people rather than themselves.’

‘The dopey Paddy must’ve ballsed it up,’ growled Ray.

‘Maybe he’s new,’ said Chris. ‘Hasn’t quite got the hang of it.’

‘And maybe you lot should shut up and take cover,’ Gene suddenly intoned. ‘Get your heads down!’

The man in the balaclava had suddenly thrust the long muzzle of an assault rifle out of the open window and was peering through the sight directly at them. Sam threw himself to the left; Ray and Chris threw themselves to the right. Gene stood motionless, unblinking, as bullets whined down and smacked into the pavement about his feet. Rounds slammed into the police patrol cars parked across the road; the titchy, mint-coloured police Austin 1300s rocked and shuddered as wing mirrors shattered and tyres blew out.

The crowd of gawpers now screamed and surged back; coppers lost their helmets in the crush; the police cordon was ripped and went trailing away like fallen bunting.

‘Get everybody back!’ yelled Sam, scrambling behind a police car for cover. ‘Gene! For God’s sake, get down!’

Unhurriedly, Gene strode over to the car and crouched behind it; all the time, he kept his eyes fixed on the man with the rifle.

‘Stinking Paddy bastard,’ he said. ‘There’s no bomb in that building. It was just a trap to get us in close so he could take pot shots.’

Already his black-gloved hand had reached beneath the folds of his coat to grasp the solid stock and trigger of his Magnum .45. He straightened up, steadied his aim on the roof of the patrol car, and squeezed off two shots in rapid succession. The Magnum roared and kicked. Glass exploded from the open window. The man in the balaclava ducked away.

‘I’m taking control of this situation,’ intoned Gene. ‘Right now.’

Holding aloft the smoking Magnum, he went to rush forward, but Sam grabbed his arm and hauled him back.

‘Guv, wait.’

‘Mitts off the camelhair, Tyler.’

‘We need to keep everything contained and under control,’ Sam urged him. ‘We need to clear the area of civilians, ensure the gunman remains inside the building, set up a cordon and sit tight until Bomb Disposal and armed backup arrive.’

‘Cobblers, you faggot. All we need is this’ – Gene waved the Magnum in Sam’s face – ‘and a little of that ol’ Genie black magic.’

‘Guv, stop behaving like a bloody—’

But Hunt had heard enough. He tore free of Sam and went racing forward, his camelhair coat billowing after him like a huge set of nicotine-stained wings.

‘Gene, don’t be a bloody hero,’ Sam cried after him. ‘Wait for Special Branch. Guv! Guv!’

But even as he called out, he knew that he had no choice, that there was only one thing he could do. Cursing his guv’nor under his breath, he grabbed a state-of-the-art, police-issue radio from Ray. It was bigger than a house brick. Sam wedged the cumbersome contraption into his belt.

‘Wait here,’ he ordered. ‘Be on standby. And keep everybody back.’

And before he could change his mind, he broke cover, sprinting after Gene.

As he ran he saw Gene up ahead, charging like a bull elephant, the Magnum raised and straining for action. The guv slammed into the front doors of the record office and disappeared inside. Sam pounded in after him, drawing his own pistol and tensing for trouble. He darted through the doors and skidded to a halt in the deserted hallway. From outside came the sounds of panic and screaming and bellowing policemen.

Gene gave Sam a sour look. ‘If you think I’m gonna stand here listening to yet more of your Mary, Mungo and Midge about waiting for backup, you’re even dopier than the front of your head suggests, Tyler. I’m going right up them stairs to nail me a Paddy bastard, and that, Samuel, is called law enforcement.’

‘I know I can’t stop you, Guv,’ said Sam. ‘But I can’t let you deal with this alone.’

‘Very neighbourly. But if you’re going to tag along, Sammy-boy, you’re going to have to try keeping your cakehole zipped, you read me?’

‘I read you, Guv.’

‘I don’t want no messing about, Sam,’ hissed Gene, suddenly leaning close. ‘No warnings, no orders to freeze. We find that murdering Bogside bastard, we blag him, we go for a pint. Got it?’

‘We can’t do that,’ Sam said.

‘You told me you’d keep it zipped, so zip it!’

‘We can’t open fire without giving due warning, Guv. That’s procedure.’

‘We’re CID, you milky tit. We’ll do what we have to.’

‘No, Gene – unlike the IRA, we play by the rules. That’s what makes them the bad guys and us the law.’

‘I am the law, Bo Peep, and you’ll damn well play this my way.’

‘But Guv, there’s a bomb in this building, primed to explode.’

Gene puffed out his chest and said, ‘You bet your bollocks there is, and he ain’t in the mood to argue. Now – cover me.’

He strode to the staircase and bounded up it two steps at a time. Sam raced up after him, his nervous system tight and jangling, alert for any hint of the man in the balaclava.

On the first-floor landing they found empty corridors and silent offices. Gene edged forward, past desks cluttered with bulky typewriters and heaped in-trays of paperwork. He slipped past a set of pneumatic tubes for the ferrying of internal mail and tucked himself against a row of metal filing cabinets. He tilted his head and tasted the air like a jungle cat, his eyes narrowing, his gloved finger tensing on the steel trigger of the Magnum. Then, without warning, he rushed on up the staircase, making barely a sound in his tasselled loafers.

By the time Sam caught up with him on the second floor, his heart was hammering in his chest. He found Gene striding about boldly, peering into offices, sticking his nose round doors, swinging the Magnum in all directions as if it were an extension of his body.

Something moved, and Sam and Gene both reacted instantly. They spun round, aiming their weapons along the length of the corridor, just as Balaclava Man appeared, round-lensed glasses glinting blankly, his assault rifle raised military-style with its stock nestling high against his shoulder.

‘Freeze! Police!’ yelled Sam, years of police training kicking in automatically.

Gunfire raked the walls. Gene answered with a shot powerful enough to punch a hole the size of a dinner plate through a door panel. A second shot flung what was left of the door entirely off its hinges. Balaclava Man vanished from sight.

‘I said no warnings, Tyler,’ Gene snarled.

‘We’re coppers,’ Sam spat back. ‘This is no time to start playing Charles flamin’ Bronson.’

Gene slammed fresh rounds into the hot breech of the Magnum in a way that suggested that he thought otherwise, then strode briskly through the drifting layers of blue gun smoke. He kicked away the shattered remains of the door, smacked the gun barrel back into the housing and took aim – but the room was empty.

‘The four-eyed Murphy’s legged it,’ he whispered back at Sam. ‘Head through them offices and try and cut him off. I’ll go after him this way.’

‘Guv, I don’t think splitting up is such a g—’

‘For Christ’s sake, Tyler, do you want to play cops and robbers or not?

And, with that, Gene was gone, striding off in pursuit of his quarry.

‘Damn you, Hunt!’ hissed Sam, dashing back along the corridor and through a series of empty offices, trying to keep his bearings as to where Gene and Balaclava Man might be.

Silently, he slipped into a long, drab office and saw the shattered window from which the gunman had first opened fire on them. On the floor, he saw a splattered line of blood leading across the room. But, as he followed it, Sam saw that it wasn’t blood at all but paint – thick, shiny, blood-red paint. The trail led to a far wall, where the crude image of a hand had been daubed, the palm outwards, the fingers spread. The letters ‘RHF’ were sloppily scrawled beneath it.

We’re meant to see this, thought Sam. That’s why he lured us in here. He wanted us to see this emblem. But what the hell does it mean? What the hell is the RHF? Is it some IRA splinter group?

Whatever the truth was, now was not the time to start puzzling it out. Sam heard the harsh clatter of the assault rifle, and the shuddering, cannon-like reply of the Magnum. A door crashed open, and Sam dropped behind a desk, aiming his pistol and preparing to fire. But his trigger finger relaxed at the sight of Gene lumbering into sight, Magnum raised.

‘Where’d he go? Sam, where the hell did he go?’

Gene glared all about him, anger rising like bile at the realization that he had been cheated of his quarry, that Balaclava Man had given him the slip.

‘Bastard!’ he spat, and punched a Britt Ekland calendar off the wall.

Sam stood up from the desk and fished out his police radio. ‘Ray? Are you reading me? The gunman’s got away from us – my guess is he’ll try to make a break for it. Keep the entire building cordoned off. Seal off every street. Set up a “ring of steel”. I don’t want so much as a cockroach being able to make it out of here without being picked up, you got that? … Ray? Ray, are you there? Speak to me, Ray!’

‘I’m here, boss,’ came Ray’s voice at last.

‘Did you hear what I just said?’ asked Sam.

‘Um … Kind of,’ muttered Ray. ‘I weren’t really listening.’

‘Why the hell not?’

‘Because I’m … sort of … looking at Chris.’

‘And what’s Chris doing?’

‘Sitting on a bomb. As in, right on it. Right on it, boss. With his arse.’

Sam and Gene exchanged a blank look, then Gene grabbed the radio.

‘Speak, Raymondo – and this time, start making some chuffing sense.’

They found Ray down on the ground floor, hovering about in a corridor and anxiously chewing his Juicy Fruits.

‘We thought you might need a spot of backup,’ he said, ‘so we followed you in here. And then Chris got nervous – said he needed the khazi …’

‘The khazi? You mean this one here?’ asked Gene. Ray nodded. Gene said, ‘It’s the ladies.’

‘I know. I think he found the idea … exciting.’

Sam opened the door and went in. Chris was in one of the cubicles, sitting on the toilet seat, staring at him with a face sweaty and bloodless from terror. His bare knees were shaking.

Gene pushed his way in, loomed over Chris, and, after a few silent moments said flatly, ‘Explain.’

‘I got caught short,’ Chris stammered. ‘All this running about, it went to me guts. So I came in here for a … you know.’

‘Get on with it.’

‘I’d just sat down, Guv – I didn’t even get a chance to start ’coz, like, I suddenly realized …’

He looked down. So did everyone else. There were wires visible just under the rim of the toilet seat, one black and one red, running away into the bowl.

‘I heard a click,’ said Chris, ‘and then I saw the wires, and that’s when I knew …’

‘Looks like we’ve found our explosive device, folks,’ said Gene. ‘Chris – I never want to have say these words to you ever again, but open your legs for me, nice and slowly.’

Shaking and sweating, Chris nervously obliged. Gene peered into the toilet bowl.

‘What can you see down there, Guv?’ asked Ray.

‘Shipyard confetti,’ Gene replied.

‘That ain’t true, Guv,’ whined Chris. ‘I haven’t dropped anything yet, I’ve kept it all in.’

‘That’s not a euphemism, you pillock – that’s the kind of bomb you’re sitting on,’ said Gene. ‘There’s a wad of explosives down there the size of a house brick; it’s been packed with nails and metal splinters and ball bearings – a little concoction the IRA call “shipyard confetti”. You’ve primed the detonator by plonking your cheeks on the seat, Chris.’

‘Oh my God! Get me out of here, Guv! Please!’

‘You’ll just have to wait for Bomb Disposal,’ said Gene. ‘If you try to stand up you’ll trigger the mechanism and next thing you know you’ll get half a ton of metalwork shooting right up your Fray Bentos.’

‘I really needed to go when I came in here,’ grizzled Chris, ‘and now I really, really need to go, like, urgent, like.’

‘Shit on it, you might defuse it,’ said Gene. ‘Ray, stop standing about like a spare prannet and get this place sealed off. Our gunman’s probably a mile away by now but have the whole area shut down just in case.’

‘Will do, Guv.’

‘And get onto those lazy sods at Bomb Disposal and tell ’em to get their arses down here double pronto!’ Gene called after Ray as he hurried away. ‘I do not intend to lose one of my officers today, even if it is just this dopey doughnut.’

‘Sit tight, Chris,’ said Sam. ‘You’ll be okay as long as you don’t move.’

‘You’re not going to leave me here, are you?’ Chris cried.

‘And give up spending time with you in the ladies’ bogs?’ asked Gene. ‘After all the years I’ve dreamt of this moment?’

‘We’ll stay with you, Chris, don’t worry,’ said Sam, patting Chris’s shoulder. ‘Gene, I don’t get it. This doesn’t feel like the IRA.’

‘It bloody does to me,’ put in Chris.

‘Not their usual way of operating, I’ll grant you that,’ said Gene.

‘We’ve been lured in here on purpose,’ said Sam. ‘This booby trap here, it’s meant to make a point. And that gunman, he wanted us to see what I found upstairs – a red hand, Gene, painted on the wall, and the letters RHF. Mean anything to you?’

‘Sam, as your superior officer, may I suggest that we discuss the finer details of this situation at a more conducive moment? Right now, I’m more worried about the ruddy great bomb primed to explode under our colleague’s rear quarters.’

‘Don’t keep mentioning it,’ Chris wailed.

‘Hard not to, Christopher, it does rather dominate.’

Chris buried his face in his hands and started to rock backwards and forwards.

‘Chris, sit still,’ said Sam. ‘You’re safe as long as you don’t move.’

Peering at the two visible wires, Gene mused, ‘Red wire … black wire …’

‘Don’t even think about it, Gene,’ said Sam.

‘It’s fifty–fifty. Worth a punt, you reckon?’

‘Leave it to Bomb Disposal. That’s what they do.’

‘Bomb Disposal!’ Gene scoffed. ‘If them nobbers can defuse one of these things then how hard can it be?’

‘Gene, don’t start tampering. I mean it.’

‘I can’t stay here,’ Chris was moaning into his hands.

‘Keep calm, Chris,’ said Sam, trying to sound calm himself. Gene was eenie-meenie-miney-mowing between the red wire and the black one.

‘I don’t want to die like this,’ Chris cried.

‘Nobody’s going to die, Chris! Gene, leave them bloody wires! Chris, keep still!’

But panic was starting to set in. Chris was shaking, rocking, staring out through his fingers with wild eyes. Sam planted his hands on Chris’s shoulders to keep him where he was, but that just seemed to make things worse, as Chris howled that he was too young to die and began fighting to get out. He clawed at Sam and shoved him away, leaping up from the seat and instantly tripping over the trousers that were coiled around his ankles.

Sam heard himself cry out, ‘Chris, no!’ and instinctively threw himself backwards, covering his face with his arms, bracing his body for the shattering impact of the explosion, the agony of a thousand nails ripping into his flesh at high speed.

But no explosion came. There was just silence, and the sound of Chris stumbling and tripping frantically away along the corridor outside.

Lowering his arms, Sam found himself looking up at Gene, who was holding the snapped end of the red wire in his gloved hand.

‘If only I had the same luck with the gee-gees,’ Gene said.

CHAPTER THREE
A NIGHT AT THE ARMS

‘Bombs, bullets, and bogs that go bang in the night,’ intoned Gene. ‘It’s a tough ol’ world out there. But somehow, ladies, we’ve made it through another day. Time to get hammered.’

No arguments there.

Gene, Sam, Ray and Chris bundled out of the hard Manchester night and in through the swing doors of the Railway Arms. The moment he crossed the threshold, Sam felt the familiar warmth and stink of the place enclosing him, reassuring him, like a boozy, nicotine-saturated placenta. The cold, grey world outside was held firmly at bay. He glanced about at the crumpled dog ends smouldering in the heaped ashtrays, filling the air with the rich and manly incense of Senior Service, Embassy Gold, Player’s No. 6. The bar glittered with its array of welcoming poisons – the friendly faces of Courage, Whitbread and Flowers on draught; the rich, dusky promise of Guinness, Mackeson and Watney’s Cream Label; and there, primping and preening in that foul hinterland of pissy lagers, stood the shameless nonce drinks, off-limits to real men: Harp and Skol and the androgynous abomination of Double Diamond. All the world seemed to be contained in that wondrous selection of kegs and bottles.

And, stationed as ever behind the bar, like a skipper at the helm of his ship, was Nelson, all gleaming teeth and proud dreadlocks and overflowing Jamaican charm. He looked up as Gene, Sam, Ray and Chris bundled noisily into his pub, and, like an actor on cue, he immediately fell into his regular routine. He grinned like a big, black Cheshire cat, planted his heavily bejewelled hands in readiness on the beer pumps, and sang out, ‘Well, here dey are again, da boys in blue. You must really love dis place.’

‘Home from home,’ growled Gene, planting himself at the bar. ‘You got four horribly sober coppers on your premises, Nelson. Remedy the situation – pronto.’

‘Sober coppers?’ said Nelson from behind the bar, rubbing his chin and raising his eyes in a mime of deep thinking. ‘Sober coppers? Now dare’s a thought.’

Ray lounged casually beside Gene, fishing an untipped Woodbine from behind his ear and sparking it up. Chris hovered uncertainly nearby, still quiet and withdrawn after his morning of undignified trouserless adventures.

But Sam felt distant. He had no heart for drinking with the boys tonight, not even after the deadly events of that morning. Cheating death had pumped Gene and Ray up nicely, leaving them feeling indestructible, like a couple of fag-stained Mancunian James Bonds. Chris had been badly shaken up, but was stronger and more resilient than even he himself believed, and would soon be back to his usual youthful self. But for Sam, the whole business with the shootout and the bomb had heightened his sense of vulnerability. It had stirred up deep and yet nameless feelings that he could not share with the boys. Annie was the one who would understand him. And, if she didn’t understand, then she would at least listen to him without constantly interrupting and taking the piss.

He had tried to make his excuses and avoid coming out with the lads tonight, but his presence at the Railway Arms this evening had proved to be non-negotiable. In the end, it was easier just to give in than keep arguing.

‘You go ahead and join them for a drink, Sam,’ Annie had told him, leaning across his desk in CID. ‘I’ll drop by the Arms later, once you boys have wetted your whistles.’

The sudden close proximity to her had made Sam’s heart turn over. She was fetchingly turned out in a salmon-pink waistcoat neatly buttoned over a cream turtleneck sweater; nothing showy, nothing sexy – practical work clothes for a day at CID – and yet somehow all the more alluring for their ordinariness.

‘But I want to talk to you, Annie,’ Sam had said.

‘Then talk to me.’

She subtly flicked her chestnut hair and the abundant curls above her shoulders bounced gracefully. Sam swallowed.

‘I can’t talk here,’ he said.

‘Okay. We’ll talk later, at the pub.’

‘At the pub? With Gene and Ray looking over our shoulders? And Chris banging on about his near-death experience in the toilet?’

‘I see what you mean.’

‘We need some real time, Annie. You-and-me time.’

‘Then we’ll make time, Sam – one way or another.’

At that moment, Annie had looked up at him with such a sweet and serious expression that Sam had felt the sudden reckless compulsion to lean forward and kiss her. And, if the boys in the department shrieked and wolf-whistled like a pack of adolescent schoolboys, so what?

But his nerve failed him and he hesitated. By then the moment had passed and Annie had turned and headed back to her desk, the opportunity – as ever – lost. As she walked away from him, Sam had felt that same pang of loss he always experienced when she was away from him. To be apart from her was far harder than being apart from the world he’d once come from – the yet-to-be world of 2006 that existed only in his memory, the world he had striven so painfully to return to, believing it to be home, only to find when he got back there that it was a foreign country, devoid of feeling and vitality, a place without meaning, without colour, without life. The shoddy, backward, nicotine-stained world of 1973, for all its faults and flaws, was at least alive – and, what was more, it had Annie in it, the bright, steady light at the centre of his strange and dislocated life.

But, even so, something was troubling him. It was a feeling he could not put into words, a vague but persistent sense that something was calling to him, summoning him, urging him to move on. It continually preyed on his mind. In the thick of his police work he could forget all about it, focus solely on his job – but the moment he glimpsed Annie the feeling would return.

And now, in the aftermath of their brush with death, those same feelings had returned with a vengeance. Here in the smoky confines of the Railway Arms, with Nelson grinning knowingly at him from behind the bar, he felt that sense of longing deep within him, a feeling like homesickness, or nostalgia, but at the same time unlike them. Indescribable. Unfathomable.

Sam’s reverie was shattered as Nelson slammed down four pints of bitter.

‘Here ya go, gentlemen,’ he grinned. ‘That’ll put hair on ya chest.’

‘Hear that, boys?’ said Gene, lifting his pint. ‘I’ll make a man of you all yet.’

‘Not if you get us shot first,’ Sam said, looking wearily into the froth of his beer. ‘You’re a liability, Guv, the way you carry on.’

‘Oh, do put a sock in it, Samuel. If I’d listened to you this morning, we’d all still be sitting around waiting for Bomb Disposal to show their faces.’

‘You’re not the sheriff of Dodge City, Guv. You can’t just go running in, blazing away, whenever you feel like it.’

Gene glugged his pint, licked away a beer moustache, thought for a moment, and said, ‘Actually, Sam – I can.’

‘No, you can’t. Running around like Clint Eastwood puts everyone in danger. You’ve got a duty of care to fellow officers as well as the public.’

‘I sometimes wonder why you got into this job, boss,’ Ray put in, halfway through his pint already. ‘It’s almost like you don’t enjoy it.’

‘I know I’m banging my head against a brick wall with you guys, but things have got to change in this department,’ Sam said. ‘You understand what I’m saying, Chris, surely.’

‘Why me, boss?’ Chris frowned.

‘Because you nearly died today.’

‘Don’t remind me!’

‘But that’s the point,’ Sam ploughed on. ‘This job, it ain’t a joke. It’s serious. People get hurt – and not always the ones that deserve it.’

‘I think we’ve all had enough of your speeches for one day, Tyler,’ Gene put in. ‘This is a pub, not a bloody pulpit. Save the sermons for that soppy bird Cartwright you’re always sniffing after. Nelson, we need chasers with these pints. Doubles – on the double!’

Nelson reached towards the optic holding an upturned bottle of Irish whiskey.

‘I ain’t touching that stuff!’ pouted Chris. ‘I ain’t touching anything Irish, not never again – whiskey, spuds, leeks …’

‘Leeks are Welsh,’ said Sam.

‘Don’t care. I’m not taking any chances.’

‘And I’m not dying of thirst just because you tripped over your own knickers this morning,’ declared Gene. ‘Nelson – four Scotches. Scotches, Chris, you listening? Jock water, not Paddy piss.’

Nelson obliged with four shot glasses of Scotch whisky.

‘Scots are as bad as the Irish,’ muttered Chris, but he grudgingly agreed to join the others in knocking them back.

‘Your prospective bit of leg-over Annie’s been earning her pennies today,’ said Gene, blowing smoke at Sam through his nostrils. ‘She’s been doing some productive police work – unlike some, Christopher.’ Again, Chris averted his face. ‘Looks like she’s come up with a juicy lead, a possible link in the Paddy chain.’

‘The what chain?’ frowned Ray.

‘I’ll show you,’ said Gene, and he planted an empty whisky glass on the bar. ‘This glass is a bunch of Paddies over in Ireland, stashing up guns and explosives. And over here’ – he plonked down another glass, twelve inches from the first – ‘is another bunch of Paddies, but this lot’s on the mainland, all Guinnessed up and looking to blow eight barrels of shite out of anything with a Union Jack fluttering out the top of it. What links this bunch of Paddies to this one is this’ – he placed a smouldering dog end between the two glasses – ‘the link in the chain, the couriers fetching the goodies from over the water and supplying the terrorist cells on the mainland. Now, Annie’s dug up a likely ID for that middle link, a husband-and-wife double act, and – no surprises here – Paddies an’ all. Looks like they might have been involved in supplying the fireworks for this morning’s fun and games.’

‘If it was the IRA,’ said Sam. ‘I’m not so sure it was anything to do with them.’

Gene threw his head back and rolled his eyes to the fag-stained ceiling. ‘Oh, Christ, not all this again.’

‘Think about it, Guv,’ Sam pressed on. ‘The hand painted on the wall – the letters RHF …’

Gene exhaled smoke like a bored and rather tetchy dragon. Sam looked to Chris and Ray for support, but neither of them looked much impressed.

‘I’m sticking to my guns on this,’ Sam insisted. ‘We’re dealing with some kind of terrorist organization, but it’s not the IRA. Even the way the explosives were rigged up – in a toilet for God’s sake! It doesn’t smell of the Provos to me.’

‘Chris was certainly smelling of the Provos when he jumped off that khazi,’ grinned Ray.

‘That ain’t fair, I was keeping it in,’ protested Chris.

‘We all saw the inside of your drawers this morning, Christopher,’ put in Gene. ‘Barry Sheene don’t leave so many skid marks.’

Nelson leant close to Sam’s ear and whispered, ‘I’d not be botherin’ tryin’ to talk sense to these boys, Sam – not tonight I wouldn’t. They ain’t in da mood.’

‘You’ve got that right, Nelson,’ said Sam, and he took a slug of bitter.

It was at that moment that Annie appeared, stepping out of the night into the warm glow of the pub. She had wrapped herself in a brown leather coat, pulling the wide collar up around her neck to keep out the cold. As if to greet her, the Rolling Stones’ ‘Angie’ sobbed from the loudspeakers behind the bar:

Seeing her round face, with its Harmony hairsprayed curls and warm, mischievous eyes, Sam once again felt a sudden stirring of his heart. He told himself to stop being so adolescent, that he was too old for such gushing, seething emotions.

But then Annie glanced across at the bar, caught his eye, and at once her face lit up. It made Sam’s heart beat a little faster – for a brief second, he felt he was the king of the world – and he forgave himself such a schoolboy response to her. It felt too good to feel bad about.

Annie clip-clopped over in her heeled boots and examined the four pints and four empty shot glasses crowding the bar.

‘Taking it easy tonight, are we?’ she said.

‘Nelson – another round of pints!’ ordered Gene. ‘And some sort of poofy squash for the bird.’ Turning to Sam he said, ‘Don’t let us stop you taking your pint and totty to another corner, Sam.’

‘Why’d you say that?’

‘A lifetime in the force, Sammy – it’s made me sensitive to picking up vibes. And I’m picking up vibes right now – ones that say you and her would rather be alone just now.’

‘Well, Guv, I would like a chance to be with Annie in private. You know, for a little tête-à-tête.’

‘I’ve never heard it called that,’ muttered Ray. Chris sniggered.

‘Here you go,’ grinned Nelson, passing over drinks. ‘A rum and Coke for the lady of my dreams, and a fresh pint o’ me finest for me good friend Samuel.’

‘Clear off with her and have your chinwag – you’re bugger all company tonight,’ Gene ordered. ‘Just make sure you’re both bright-eyed and bushy-tailed in the morning – we’ve got an IRA arms-smuggling chain to break.’

‘The incident this morning, Guv – it wasn’t the IRA,’ said Sam.

‘Discuss it with WPC Crumpet,’ Gene replied flatly. ‘I’ve got a liver to abuse.’

And, as Sam and Annie carried their drinks away, he lifted his glass in a toast to them, growled, ‘Cheerio, amigos,’ and tossed three fingers of neat whisky down his gullet.

‘Sometimes,’ Sam whispered as they walked away, ‘sometimes, Annie, I really do think seriously about killing him.’

‘The guv?’ Annie smiled back. ‘You’d have your work cut out. I reckon you’d need a silver bullet. Or a stake through the heart.’

‘Or an atom bomb,’ said Sam. ‘Come to think of it, he’d probably survive – him and the cockroaches.’

‘And he’d be radioactive. He might go all big like Godzilla.’

‘Oh, God, Annie, not even in jest …’

They settled themselves into a corner, the Rolling Stones still weeping from the speaker on the wall above them.

‘Well then,’ said Annie, ‘here we are, having our moment, just the two of us.’

‘I was hoping for something a little bit more … A little less …’

They both glanced briefly at Gene, Ray and Chris sharing a filthy joke only feet away. Ray was using his hands to describe the shape of some sort of enormous saveloy in the air.

‘Just carry on like they’re not there,’ said Annie. ‘Believe me, Sam, that’s what I do. Every day. You think I’d have stuck this job so long if I didn’t?’

Sam played agitatedly with his pint glass. ‘It’s crazy, isn’t it? I’ve been going on and on about us two finding the time to sit and talk – and now we’re here, I don’t know how to say what’s on my mind.’

‘The job getting you down?’

‘It’s not the job, Annie. It’s … It’s like … Ach, I don’t know how to put this without sounding like an idiot.’

‘Well, say it anyway. You can’t sound more like an idiot than some people I can think of.’

‘I’ve been dreaming,’ said Sam at last.

‘Oh, aye?’

‘No, not like that. Stupid dreams. I’m always alone. I’m always lost, stuck somewhere I shouldn’t be, unable to get home. Everything’s broken … Like the world’s come to an end and I’m lost, and …’ He shrugged and threw up his hands. ‘I told you I’d make myself sound like an idiot.’

‘These dreams you keep having,’ said Annie, ‘the way they make you feel. Does that feeling stay with you, even when you wake up?’

‘Yes. Yes, it does.’

‘Is it the feeling that you ought to be somewhere else? Somewhere really important?’

‘Yes.’

‘But you don’t know where it is, or why you need to be there. And that feeling doesn’t go away, even when you ignore it and tell yourself it’s just the job or you’re having an off day. It keeps coming back, creeping up on you, all the time.’

Sam leant forward, looking intently into her face. ‘Annie, it’s like you’re reading my mind.’

‘It’s like you’re reading mine, Sam. I know the feeling you’re talking about. I have it too.’

‘You do? Annie, you never said.’

‘Yes I did. Just now.’

‘But … Why didn’t you tell me this before?’

‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

Sam squeezed her hand, and she squeezed back. He could feel the warmth of her skin, catch the hint of her Yardley perfume, see the light reflecting from her eyes as she looked intently at him. It was a quietly intense moment – a real moment, more real by far than anything he could recall from his old life amid the laptops and iPods, satellite channels and Bluetooths.

‘What does it mean, Annie? Why do we feel like this?’

He could feel it right now, and he supposed that Annie could, too. A restlessness. A deep feeling of a job to do, a train to catch, an appointment to be met, important business to be concluded. Holding Annie’s hand, he looked back across the pub towards the bar. There was Ray, grinning and joking, the empty glasses piling up in front of him; and there was Chris, looking youthful and uncertain as he squirmed from the good-humoured bullying. And, looming over them, there stood Gene – solid, rocklike, wreathed in blue fag smoke that caught the light and glowed all about him like an aura.

But now Sam become acutely aware of Nelson standing just beyond them, pumping bitter into a pint glass and grinning at some inane comment from his CID regulars. Without changing his expression, Nelson glanced slowly up at Sam and Annie; knowingly, he tipped them both a wink.

For a brief moment, Sam felt the sudden conviction that everything here in this crappy, filthy pub was alive with meaning – the bar, the ashtrays, the rings of sticky beer on the tables, and, even more so, the people: Chris and Ray and Gene. Annie too, and Sam himself. And Nelson most of all.

We’re all here for a reason, Sam thought. There’s a plan at work here – and we are all part of it.

And in the next heartbeat, everything faded back into drab normality, the sense of imminent revelation gone. Gene, Ray and Chris were just three mouthy coppers sharing a drink. Nelson was just Nelson. The pub was just yet another reeking Manchester boozer.

‘What’s going on in that noggin of yours, mm?’ Annie asked, leaning closer to him.

‘I was thinking,’ Sam breathed softly. ‘I was thinking that I thought I was here to stay. This place. This life. I thought it was home. But now I’m starting to suspect home’s somewhere else.’

‘Me too,’ murmured Annie.

‘I can’t explain it better than that.’

‘Me neither.’

‘But I do know one thing,’ said Sam, and he looked into Annie’s eyes. ‘Wherever I go, I won’t be able to call it home without y—’

But, before he could say anything more, Ray’s boozy voice cut across them, ‘Look out, lads, it’s Brief En-bloody-counter over there.’

Chris placed a limp hand to his heart, fluttered his eyelids, and gave his best Celia Johnson impression. ‘Oh, dahling, I do so frightfully love you and all that. Merry meh – at once. Oh, do say you’ll merry meh.’

Gene shut him up with a clout to the back of the head, like a headmaster cuffing an unruly schoolboy. For a moment, he seemed unsure why he’d done it – then he turned his back on Sam and Annie and complained to Nelson that he wasn’t drunk enough. Not half drunk enough!

‘Is this a conversation for another day?’ Annie asked, very quietly.

Sam sighed and nodded. The moment was broken. He would have to wait for another.

CHAPTER FOUR
THE PADDY CHAIN

More fag smoke, more unshaven coppers, more testosterone hanging in the air like the scent of musk – but it wasn’t the Railway Arms this time, it was A-Division at Greater Manchester CID. Harsh strip lights burned in the ceiling, casting their unblinking glare over the criminal mugshots and Page 3 pinups Sellotaped over the drab grey walls. Telephones chimed, typewriters clacked, mountainous heaps of paperwork leaned perilously from trays.

Hung over and bleary-eyed, Chris propped himself up at his desk, not even pretending to be fit for work. Across from him, Ray chewed gum and lounged about.

‘Feeling a bit ropy this morning, Chrissie-boy?’

‘I can handle it,’ murmured Chris.

‘Had half a sherbet too many, eh?’

‘I just copped a dirty glass, that’s all.’

Ray grinned and stretched in his chair, flexing his arms and pushing out his chest. ‘Me – I’m laffin’. Fit as a flea. And I matched you drink for drink last night, Chris, which only goes to show …’

‘Lay off, will ya,’ Chris muttered.

‘You gotta learn to manage your drinking,’ Ray went on. ‘You can’t call yourself a bloke, not a real bloke, until you can confidently down it, absorb it, and piss it up a wall like a pro. You think Richard Harris poofs it up like you after a couple of swift ones?’

‘He might do if had my metabolism,’ muttered Chris. ‘Anyway, he’s Irish. I don’t want no mention of anything Irish.’

‘Take my advice, young ’un – stay well within your limits, and leave the heavy stuff to us grown-ups.’

‘I’ll admit it, I might have had one or two more than was good for me,’ said Chris. ‘But I’m a man in trauma. I can’t get that image out of my head – the khazi of doom, all set to blow half a ton of Semtex up me Rotherhithe. It’s haunting me, Ray. Just imagine if that lot had gone off.’

‘You’d’ve ended up feeling no worse than you do right now,’ suggested Ray.

‘God, ain’t that the truth?’ Chris groaned, and slowly sank forward until his ashen forehead rested against his desk.

Without warning, the door to Gene Hunt’s office slammed open, and the guv himself appeared, glaring and brooding like a grizzly bear with a right monk on.

‘DI Tyler, Brenda Bristols, the pleasure of your company, if you please.’

Exchanging looks, Sam and Annie stepped into Gene’s office and shut the door behind them. Gene prowled about behind his desk, not even bothering to conceal the glass of Scotch amid the paperwork. Hair of the dog. His morning pick-me-up. It may be wrecking his liver, but it didn’t seem to be impairing his police work.

‘As you know,’ he intoned, ‘the gunman we so valiantly risked our arses trying to apprehend yesterday managed to elude us. Not only that, he also managed to elude the Keystone Kops outside and their impenetrable “ring of steel”, all of which means I’ve been getting it in the neck from Special Branch for not leaving the operation to them. They’re saying – and I quote – that we made a “right pigging balls-up”. Black mark for A-Division. Black mark for me. And me not well pleased, children, me not well pleased at all.’

He stopped pacing and glowered intensely at Sam for a moment, daring him to come out with an ‘I told you so, Guv’. But Sam knew when to keep it buttoned.

After a few moments, Gene resumed pacing and said, ‘On the plus side, however, our keen cub reporter Annie Cartwright has supplied us with a useful lead. Go on, luv, tell us what you got.’

On cue, Annie produced some typewritten pages and read from them: ‘Michael and Cait Deery. Husband and wife. Irish nationals residing somewhere in Manchester. There’s been a Home Office file on them for months now. It seems pretty certain they’re acting as couriers between Ireland and the mainland, shipping in firearms, ammunition and plastic explosives to supply IRA cells.’

‘If the Home Office know about them, why haven’t they been arrested?’ asked Sam.

‘Because they’re more valuable left alone to do their thing,’ said Gene. ‘The contacts they meet, the people they deal with. It might all just reveal the whole chain, connecting bomb factories in Dublin to attacks being planned on the mainland.’

‘How sure are we that they were anything to do with what happened at the council records office?’

‘For want of anything better to go on I’m working on the assumption that the Deerys are involved,’ said Gene. ‘If there’s an IRA unit at work on our patch, we’ll find it through them. And bagging an IRA unit might just make up for yesterday’s fiasco. Um, excuse me, DI Tyler, but did somebody drop the marmalade in your pants this morning? What’s that gormless face for?’

‘You’re working on the assumption that what happened yesterday was the work of the IRA,’ said Sam.

Gene sighed. ‘Oh, God, Sam, not this Old Mother ’Ubbard again!’

‘I know you’re resistant to my line of reasoning …’

‘To put it poncily.’

‘But I’m telling you, Guv, we’re going to find out sooner or later that what kicked off yesterday had precious little to do with the IRA.’

‘A bomb, a bloke in a balaclava and a certain negativity expressed towards the British constabulary – now, I’m the first to admit I’m not Sherlock bloody Holmes, but—’

‘I’ve already told you, Guv, I’m not convinced,’ said Sam. ‘That bomb in the toilet – it was a message of some kind. It meant something. It was more symbolic than a genuine threat.’

‘Unlike this,’ snapped Gene, raising a balled fist in front of Sam’s face.

Sam ignored him and carried on: ‘And what about the red hand painted on the wall, and the letters RHF?’

‘And what about the report I found on my desk this morning from Bomb Disposal?’ countered Gene. ‘They’ve examined the explosives from the khazi and confirmed it’s a classic bit of IRA kit.’

‘Maybe it is,’ said Sam, shrugging. ‘But I’m still sceptical.’

‘I don’t care what you are,’ barked Gene. ‘I’m still head honcho round here and until you convince me otherwise I’m going to pursue this investigation on the not unreasonable assumption that it’s the Paddies we’re after and not the bloody RHF. What is the bloody RHF anyway, for God’s sake? Royal Horticultural Faggots?’

‘Red Hand something?’ suggested Annie, suddenly. ‘Just a guess. What do you reckon?’

‘Red Hand something – of course!’ cried Sam. ‘Of course!’

‘Red Hand something?’ said Gene, looking unimpressed. ‘So what’s the F stand for?’

‘I know what F stands for,’ put in Ray suddenly, sticking his head round the door and winking at Annie. He flapped a sheet of paper onto Gene’s desk. ‘Here you go, Guv. The Deerys’ address. Dowell Road on the other side of town.’

‘Nice work, Raymondo,’ said Gene. ‘Right, playmates, let’s start proving to Special Branch that we know how to behave like proper grown-up coppers. Annie, see if you can find out what the letter F stands for. It sounds like a task of about your level. Use Chris’s wooden bricks with the letters on ’em if it helps. Sam, you’re coming with me. We’re going to pop round the Deerys’ place and see if anything’s cooking.’

‘Want me to drive, Guv?’ Sam asked.

Gene looked blankly at him and said, ‘And why the hell would I want you to drive?’

‘Well, you know, seeing as you’ve … You’ve had a couple of, um …’

Sam was going to say something about the Scotch glass on Gene’s desk, then reminded himself that nobody gave a toss about that sort of thing, not here. There was some part of him, some corner of his brain, that would always be 2006, no matter how long he lived in 1973.

‘Sorry, Guv. Forget I said anything.’

‘I always do,’ said Gene, jangling his car keys and grabbing his coat.

They sat in the Cortina at the end of Dowell Road. Number 14, the home of Michael and Cait Deery, was a just another unremarkable semidetached among many, with a trim little garden and a Vauxhall Cresta parked in the driveway.

‘Are we going in?’ asked Sam.

Gene flexed his hand on the wheel, making the leather of his driving glove creak ominously.

‘Nope, we’re staying put,’ he said. ‘If the Deerys are middlemen in the IRA chain, let’s sit back and observe, just like the Home Office recommended. Sooner or later they’ll lead us to the terrorist cell they’re supplying.’

‘Guv, I know you’re not interested in this, but I don’t think what happened yesterday—’

‘—was the work of the IRA. I know, Sam. You think it was part of the Pinky Palm Brigade’s campaign against khazis. Maybe it was. Fact remains, our boys across the water have pissed rather too heavily in the hornets’ nest and stirred up trouble. If we can blag an IRA unit by trailing the Deerys, that scores me and my department a handful of much-needed Brownie points.’

‘Um, Guv, I didn’t quite follow all that. What did you mean about “pissing in the hornets’ nest”?’

Gene turned his head and stared at him, and then said, as if speaking to a deaf idiot, ‘Bloody. Sunday. You. Dozy. Pillock.’

Bloody Sunday. Of course. For Sam, Bloody Sunday was something very much from the past, like the Apollo moon landing or Blue Peter in black and white. But here, in the world of Gene Hunt, it was fresh news, a raw and open wound. In 1972 – only last year – the British Paras opened fire on a civil-rights march in … Belfast, was it? Or Ulster? Or Derry? Damn it, he couldn’t remember. Wherever it had taken place, it had left a dozen or more dead and brought the IRA right out on the offensive. The repercussions of ‘pissing in the hornets’ nest’ would still be reverberating in the far future – even in 2006, when a young detective from CID, recently recovered from a life-threatening accident that had left him in a coma, would inexplicably jump from a rooftop to his death.

Sam shook these thoughts from his head. He was here now – in 1973 – with a job to do, a duty to fulfil, a life to lead. The future was history. All that mattered was the here and now.

‘You know, Sam,’ said Gene, ‘now we’ve got a cosy moment together, just the two of us, I’d like to have a little chat with you about summat.’

‘Yes, Guv?’

‘I was thinking about what you said the other day in the pub, about the way I handle cases. You said I was irresponsible. You said I treated the job like a game.’

‘What I said, Guv … What I meant was that I was brought up with a very different approach to policing than you. I was taught – and I’ve always believed – that the rules of conduct and behaviour laid down for us aren’t there to make our job difficult or give villains the opportunity to get off the hook. Those rules are there because they’re right, and they’re fair, and they stop people getting killed.’

‘Go on, Tyler, I’m listening.’

‘I know it sounds poncy to you, Guv, but if the police don’t play by the rules what’s the point? We might as well bring back lynch mobs and string fellas up in the street just because they come across as wrong ’uns.’

‘And you wouldn’t go for that, then?’

‘Would you?’

Gene thought for a moment, then said, ‘Depends on whose feet end up dangling. I can think of some right naughty boys I wouldn’t shed no tears over.’

‘You’re just saying that, Guv. You don’t really believe it. Look, the point I was making is that I don’t want to end up dead, any more than you do, or Chris or Ray or any of us. And, as much as it offends your freewheeling sensibilities, Gene, I think that sticking to the rules – at least, to the spirit of the rules – is the best way of keeping us alive. We’re not here to take undue risks, we’re not here to dish out justice from the end of a gun, and we’re certainly not here to make ourselves feel more like real men.’

‘That’s what you think I’m about, is it?’ Gene asked, without sarcasm. He seemed to genuinely want to know. ‘You think I’m trying to prove something?’

‘Sometimes, Guv, yes.’

Gene thought about this, nodded to himself, and said, ‘I was right about you Tyler. You do talk and think a right load of shite.’

Sam sat back in his seat. He’d tried. He really had.

‘Right, boyo, let’s get our minds back on the job,’ said Gene. ‘Keep your eyes fixed on the Deerys’ gaff. Let me know the moment you see anything.’

‘Why? Where are you going?’

‘Nowhere,’ said Gene, fishing out a folded copy of the Mirror and flicking it open. ‘I want to catch up on me paperwork.’

He disappeared into the sports pages. Sam shook his head – then his eye was caught by the front page of Gene’s paper.

TUC CALLS FOR MASS STRIKE ACTION IN PROTEST AGAINST PRICE RISES AND PAY RESTRAINTS – OVER 1.5 MILLION WORKERS CALLED OUT

MASSIVE DISRUPTION TO RAIL SERVICES DUE TO INDUSTRIAL ACTION – ASLEF CALLS FOR DRIVERS AND STATION STAFF NOT TO CROSS PICKET LINES

Protests, mass unrests, trains up the spout. Some things don’t ever change, thought Sam. He continued to skim-read:

CAR PLANTS, COAL MINES, AND SHIPPING YARDS BROUGHT TO A HALT

FIRE BRIGADE UNIONS THREATEN MASS INDUSTRIAL ACTION

ARMY ON STANDBY TO MAN FIRE STATIONS

COUNTRY ON THE BRINK OF CHAOS

I vaguely remember all this, he thought: the strikes, the power cuts. I was only four years old – it all seemed like a world away from me back then. I never realized just how bad things got.

HEATH ADMINISTRATION IN CRISIS TALKS WITH UNIONS

JACK JONES, LEADER OF THE TRANSPORT AND GENERAL WORKERS’ UNION, WARNS THAT GOVERNMENT WOULD BE ‘FOOLISH TO IGNORE NOT ONLY THOSE PROTESTING TODAY BUT THOSE MILLIONS WHO ARE FED UP WITH THE CONTINUING PRICE RISES’

‘Stop reading my bloody paper,’ Gene growled from behind his Mirror.

Sam obediently fixed his attention on the Deerys’ house. Moments later, he saw the front door open.

‘Eh up, Guv, we’ve got movement.’

A young couple were emerging from the door of Number 14. Michael Deery was a nondescript-looking man – dark-haired, clean-shaven, dressed in a checked, wing-collared shirt and corduroys; his wife Cait had hair like a young Cher – very dark and straight – and wore a beige corduroy pinafore dress that made Sam think of Play School presenters.

‘They look so ordinary,’ said Sam. ‘Hard to believe they’re gunrunners for the IRA.’

‘What were you expecting? T-shirts with “Bugger the British” printed across ’em?’

Together, the Deerys hauled a heavily taped-up package from the house and stowed it in the boot of the Cresta.

‘What do you reckon that is, Guv?’

‘It’s not meals on wheels, Sammy-boy, I’ll put money on that,’ muttered Gene.

The Deerys glanced about, got into their car, and reversed out into the road. Gene chucked his paper into the back seat and started the Cortina.

‘Don’t make it obvious we’re tailing them,’ said Sam. ‘Keep it low-key.’

‘Is that the way it’s done, is it? Oh, thank you for informing me, Samuel, I was just about to put the blue light on and start beeping me horn.’

‘I just meant-’

‘I know what you meant, Doxon of Dick Green. Now zip your cakehole and let me drive.’

They followed the Deerys out of Dowell Road and soon found themselves heading west. Gene trailed them from a distance, at times allowing cars to get between the Cresta and the Cortina, but he never lost sight of them. Once, he jumped a red light to ensure that he didn’t lag behind, and, when a man in a sporty MG blared his horn and yelled at him to watch where he was bloody going, Gene replied with a one-handed gesture.

‘We’re heading out of town,’ said Sam.

‘Open country – moorland – somewhere deserted away from prying eyes,’ growled Gene. ‘It’s a handover, Sammy, you mark my words.’

‘But not necessarily a handover with the IRA.’

‘You just won’t drop it, will you, Tyler?’

‘As a police officer, I’m obliged to inform my superior officer of my feelings about a given case,’ said Sam.

Gene shot him a sideways glance. ‘You can’t half be an uptight little twonk, Samuel.’

They were leaving the grey suburbs of the city and approaching a desolate, flat landscape of drab grass and wind-flattened trees.

‘There are fewer cars on the road,’ warned Sam. ‘If we’re going to be spotted it’ll be out here. Ease off, Gene.’

‘And risk losing them? No way.’

‘We’ll lose them anyway if they realize we’re following them.’

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