The Contract

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

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

'We have to have a name, Johnny.'

'Charlotte Donoghue, number 14 Cherry Road,

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

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

'No-one else.'

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

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

' I promise you that, Johnny.'

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

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

'That's fine, thanks.'

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

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

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

' I can understand.'

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

' I understand, Johnny,' Carter whispered.

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

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

'Just the one girl, was there?'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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