The Contract

When he had first come home to live here, a year and a half ago, he had tried to freshen and brighten the old house, to warm its walls with colour, and for months he had busied himself with his paintbrush and his electric drill and the ladder he stored in the yard.

A little paradise, his mother called it, the nicest house in Cherry Road, and didn't the neighbours admire the effort he had put in? Nothing more to do now at the weekends, and so Johnny could lie in his bed, lie on his back and brood.

His mother had adapted well to the changes of fortune that had cudgelled Johnny Donoghue. Few enough mothers could have acted out the pretence that a catastrophe had not struck at their lives. A tiny nest-fledgeling of a woman but with strength, and the bitter disappointment at Johnny's plunging fall had been carried in her short, scurrying stride. Tough as a boot, he thought her, and it was right that he should have come back home to live and find himself again.

Born in 1945, the only son of Herbert and Charlotte Donoghue. The first six years of his life eked out in married quarters of the British Army of Occupation in Germany. His father had been an officer, but made up from the ranks, and was promoted to Captain when aged 43 and two decades older than most of the other men in the mess. Just a small gratuity had been paid him when he left the army and then there was a hardware shop that was open six days a week in the centre of Lancaster and behind the Town Hall. The King's Commission was exchanged for trade, Saturday night drinks in the mess for glasses of beer in the British Legion, card games for dominoes. And with his only child reaching for his ninth birthday, Herbert Donoghue had without warning or previous illness fallen dead across the wide counter of the shop. Hard times for a widow. The business was sold up, the house purchased outright because Charlotte Donoghue said the home was the bedrock of the family, four mornings a week cleaning for a family that lived in a big house out on the Heysham road.

When he lay in bed of a morning at the weekend and gazed at the flower print curtains, Johnny Donoghue thought often of his childhood.

Johnny at eleven winning a scholarship to the Royal Grammar School and being given a new shirt as a reward. At fifteen collecting a Modern Languages prize for his German and mother sitting in the Great Hall of the school and beaming her unashamed pride. At eighteen leaving school with a clutch of examination passes and a glowing testimonial from his headmaster. At nineteen getting a scholarship to the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst and going away on the train from Lancaster station with his mother's waving handkerchief the last glimpse of home.

At twenty-two at Passing Out, and at the march past in front of the College, back straight, arms straight, and wondering how his mother was coping out there amongst all the other families who had come to watch their sons. A small woman in a green coat, with a hat she could not afford, and they had left The Academy by taxi queuing at the exit gate with the Daimlers and the Bentleys and the Jaguars.

With his knowledge of German, backed by good school French, he was just what they wanted, they said, in the Intelligence Corps. A fine future was predicted. Straight indulgence, that's what it was, even to think back, because those days were gone, obliterated.

Ten years after entering the army, ten years after winning his dress sword, Johnny Donoghue had walked from the station to Cherry Road, dressed in slacks and a sports jacket. Uniform sold, mess bill paid up, an engagement ring returned by a civil servant's daughter. An embarrassment to his friends, a wound to his mother. In his suitcase he brought his boots, and three plate silver mugs awarded for marksmanship the sole relics of a military career. Awkward in his disgrace, embittered by the treatment meted out to him, Johnny had come home.

After a full breakfast Adrian Pierce and Harry Smithson paid their bills and checked out of the Royal King's Arms Hotel. From the cut of their suits, the trim of their hair, the knot of their ties both were plainly southern creatures. Strangers in Castle Park and heading for Willow Lane.

'Do you think he'll be easy, Harry?'

'Not too easy I wouldn't have thought.'

'Not after what they did to him.'

'There are always casualties, bound to happen when you put troops in to do policemen's work.'

'A bit hard, to charge him with murder.'

'Bloody ridiculous.' They were crossing the railway bridge and Smithson paused to watch an express train rocketing beneath them.

'A dreadful place that Belfast. I go down on my knees each night and pray God I'm not sent there.'

'Keep your nose clean on the German Desk and the Lord will look pleasantly upon you. Not much of a place this, either.' Smithson sniffed unhappily at the air. They crossed Willow Lane and Smithson glanced at the scribbled directions given him by the hotel porter.