The Widow's Son

Chapter One-2

“You're all heart, Geoffrey, and so eloquent and persuasive.”

“Good, that's that then! Go find a phone box, Ezra, and call Adam, dear boy.”

“I'll go and wind the crankshaft of the old jalopy in a jiffy, just got to find my goggles and scarf. Both she, the car that is, and I hate the cold weather,” I replied caustically.

“Phone box, dear chap. Take some coinage with you and leave the sarcasm in your flat,” and with that the line went dead.

* * *

A few months on from my birth I was christened Patrick West by my parents, but over the thirty plus years I have been engaged in covert operations for Her Majesty's intelligence service I have used a few other names: Shaun Redden, Paddy O'Donnell, Frank Douglas and Terry Jeffries or, on the one that finished six months and a few days ago; Jack Webb. On that last tour in Ireland I was in charge of all operations against the Irish Republican Army and its spin-offs; by now, however, I'm a self-taught expert on daytime television. My operational name has been changed so many times by the hierarchy in charge of Group that it was becoming more and more difficult to remember the script and the role I was meant to be playing, whilst dodging the enemies' radar for the benefit of Kipling's Great Game for our great nation. During this last period of enforced leave I've been on the sick list but it's called a different name in the corridors of power that the likes of Geoffrey walk up and down. It's known as the surgeon's list. This is the second time in my career that my name has graced that assembly. Not bad I suppose, but nobody counts the negatives and gives away gold stars for not being sick, that's taken for granted.

In my case the surgeon has never been a surgeon, but he at first, and then she for the second time, had no need to explain the lack of scalpels. They tried coaxing the screaming voices from my head by sweet talking me, not cutting me open. They called it cognitive therapy. I called it meddling in memories that were never mine to give. On my last visits to the clinic the cognitive therapy was supposed to quieten the repetitive yelling that belonged to the girl of seventeen who had her eyes gouged out for the simple reason of dating a British soldier serving with the catering corps in Derry. A month after that attack I attended her funeral. Her constant screams of pain were permanently terminated by the serenity found in the blister strips of painkillers she was prescribed, only she emptied the whole packet of fifty pills in one go washed down by a cheap bottle of gin. For me, however, her screams will never die.

After a few days of sitting beside that girl, questioning her whilst she fiercely battled against the acceptance of her blindness, I went to see a man who told me of the whereabouts of an IRA bomber of a Belfast pub. That bomb killed three and maimed five fellow Irishmen and two women in the name of freedom from Protestant choice. By the time I got to him he had entertained some members of the Ulster Volunteer Force who had nailed his feet to the floor and his hands to a wooden beam above his head then set about removing his reproduction organs by savagely hacking them from his body and as that was not enough for their shared pleasure, they slowly peeled away his facial skin. I wonder how murder and mutilation can be justified in using such terms as freedom for the oppressed while suppressing those who disagree with the philosophy of force. I would have gladly asked the hierarchy of the IRA, if I had been given permission to go and find them. But I'm a man after all and none of what I've told you should have affected me, should it? That's what I'm supposed to do, isn't it? Be the hero that Geoffrey Harwood reveres. Bite the bullet and sing 'God Save the Queen'. After all people like me should be the first through the doors to count the bits of bodies hanging from the ceilings so that the reports in the daily newspapers get the sums right. That's what we're paid for, right? But there were times during that last tour that left me thinking I was getting slower through the door and laying the blame for that on having only half of one foot. The other half had been shot away, but I do try to keep swinging on door handles, after all, who would appreciating reading there were fifty-one dead when someone had missed a body or two?

The foot thing was one of the reasons for my first visit to the surgeon's rooms in the clinic in Harley Street. I lost three toes to a bullet when on the very first mission I undertook on behalf of the SIS, Secret Intelligence Service. It was meant for my head but in the wrestle for his gun the shot took my toes off. It was when I was recruited for that mission I met Jack Price and the ex-soldier I've mentioned by the given Biblical name of Job for the first time. That adventure, and all subsequent ones were of my choosing, losing toes was not. Another reason for my first visit to the clinic was because I killed the man who had shot my fictional twin; the girl who had become very dear to me. I watched her die from a bullet that took most of her head with it when she was sitting in the passenger seat of the car I was driving in New York. When all that happened I was a baby of twenty-three years of age. Time moved on and others died for other causes, three more at my hand, but any feelings I had for the death of others were depleted from any remorseful side I may have been born with. I watched death and destruction from the distance I constructed to keep myself safe, unconnected to anyone.

But not this last time. Not on the Green for my fourth tour— No one does four tours in that s**t hole of Ireland, Webby. So nobody will be looking for you.

Over the Irish Sea I went, not looking for anyone except the bastards who bomb the innocent for their version of freedom. But Ireland being Ireland, something beautiful will always emerge. Kerry found my weakness after I'd been there for less than a month. Hers were the latest and hopefully last screams the surgeon wanted to pull from my head. I played the man of courage, saying there were none, tucking them away in a place to find sleep, but everywhere was overcrowded. I awake to pictures of Kerry with her agony of both knees and hands shattered by hammers before being r***d and the word TART slashed across her breasts. So what's a little drive to a phone box compared to running from IRA cell to English cell, ducking the inquisitions at both ends by the grace of my two-toed right foot? Metaphorically speaking of course, because I never ran. All I was supposed to do was gather the intelligence, collate and make sense of it then decide what others could do in response. Nothing safer, eh! How about lying on the floor of a pub amongst the c*****e of desolation after the detonation of a nail bomb that kills the man I was speaking to only four foot away and leaves me with one kidney less to siphon the evil whisky through?

During that six months' idleness of mine I had managed to keep physically fit and in shape using the apparatus Job and I had added to a room in my apartment when he'd stayed for a few days. It had become part of my daily routine, but it wasn't my physical side that bothered me as I grabbed a hat and coat and waited for the lift from my top-floor apartment. It was that mental fight against the crashing waves of memories that flooded my head at times with no escape other than forming their own scream. But men aren't supposed to find bitterness in heartache, are they? I did though. When the lift door opened I shut the screams away and went in search of a new life-conquering telephone box.

* * *

The brief conversation I held with the normally gregarious and chummy Adam, who I hadn't spoken to since returning from Ireland, was concise and cold. The opposite to what I'd expected—“67 Lavington Street, Ezra. I know you know where that is. Jacob said to be as quick as you can,” and then silence apart from the sound of a replaced receiver. He could have just been having a bad hair day, he was that way inclined, although I thought I detected a hint of bitterness in his voice as though he resented my call for some reason.

Adam was the connection operatives such as I used for the verification of orders plus those things beyond the reach of ordinary soldiers. Ezra was my assigned Biblical label, while Jacob was the soubriquet of whoever sat in the chair overseeing Group. I never had enough of an interest to enquire into the motives or calculations for everyone who worked directly inside that secret organisation to have a biblical name. The 'point' of any decision is for others to justify and find a cause. It was not mine. There were a host of similarly constructed names; Job being one. Jack Price worked outside of Group for a separate party who held the shared interests of putting the British Isles above all else. I could, as a man on the spy as it was known, appreciated the need for covert arrangements, but asking me to visit an established, well-known company location would put a face to a name and was tantamount to declaring my decision to leave the service. Had I refused Geoffrey's 'invitation' my dissent would have brought about the same end result; resignation. Whereas by going to the appointment, I turned the word resignation into the phrase of retirement from street work, with one hand holding on just in case it hadn't completely disappeared as the yearly manure added to St Stephen's Green, in Dublin, Ireland no doubt had.