Brute Force

18

It was weeks since I'd been near a gym or done any road work and I missed the endorphins. I poured water over a teabag and went and threw on my running gear. By the time I came back the brew was ready and it was just coming to first light. I drank it looking out of the window. The rain had done Avis a favour. The newly washed Merc gleamed like it was straight from the showroom.

I jogged down the drive in my usual steady rhythm. My ears and hands burned with cold, and my nose started to run as I breathed in freezing rain. I'd always liked running in winter. Maybe it was because I got wet and muddy, so the run felt a bit more gruelling, and I had accomplished more. How many thousands of miles had I run in my time as an infantryman and SAS trooper, then since? Eight years a soldier . . . Ten years in the Regiment . . . About twelve since I'd left. Thirty years, man and boy. I got to the bottom of the drive. Fifty weeks times thirty was one thousand five hundred. Left or right? Even Stevens. I turned left.

One thousand five hundred, times five for the number of runs per week . . . and an average of ten miles a run. Fuck me, seventy-five thousand miles. How many times round the earth was that? There might be a spot for me in the Guinness Book of Records.

Once over my first wind, my breathing became deep and regular and I was warm. I liked this. Running was when I got a lot of my best thinking done.

The sky was getting lighter, and the scenery around me was rugged. I passed a thatched cottage. They must have been early risers. Smoke curled from the chimney and I smelled burning turf. Probably not a second-homer like Dom; maybe a farmer or fisherman.

I pounded on methodically. At least Tallulah was talking about her grief. Not like some people who shoved it all deep down inside, slammed the lid and threw away the key. But hey, I liked it that way. Less to say and less to think about.

I hadn't known Pete well, but I missed him. It wasn't just because he'd saved my life during a fire-fight in Basra. It was because in a very short space of time I'd come to love him like a brother.

Pete and Dom – Poland's answer to Jeremy Bowen – had been embedded with British troops in Southern Iraq. It was my job to make sure each story they covered wasn't their last. Dom wasn't one of those bunker journos that gave their action-packed report from the safety of a Green Zone balcony. And that was my big problem. I spent every waking hour either pulling him down or away from something or someone that was trying to kill him.

Dom was one of those people who believed he could walk through a battle zone without a scratch. Pete had nicknamed him Platinum Bollocks; he said he was the sort of guy who seemed to walk into nothing but good.

He lived in Dublin with his wife and stepson. They also had a holiday cottage in Donegal, and when I phoned, he didn't hesitate to let us have it. He felt he owed me as much as I owed Pete, and he probably wasn't wrong.

I pounded into a neat, sleepy village – a handful of houses scattered around a crossroads. There was one shop that doubled as the post office and pub. The air was thick with the smell of the sea.

Tallulah and Ruby had never been far from Pete's thoughts.

'You got family, Nick?'

'I did have, once.'

I could still remember the sudden rush of pins and needles in my legs.

'A little girl that looked a lot like your Ruby, as a matter of fact. Her parents were killed; I was her guardian. I never really got the birthday thing right . . . in the end I had to ask someone more reliable to take over.'

Somebody once told me I lived that part of my life with the lid on, and I guessed they were right. It was the way it had to be.

I saw a sign for a nature walk. Pete had said Ruby and Tallulah were into all that stuff.

I remembered asking him if there'd be things he'd miss when he left the front line and started taking pictures of flowers and squirrels instead. I could still hear his reply. 'Sure. The camaraderie. The brotherhood. Even when you're up to your neck in shit, you're surrounded by mates.'

He'd been in Kabul when Ruby's mum had fucked off to Spain with the bloke who built their extension. It was Dom and all the other guys who kept him afloat.

I rounded a bend and the sea spread out in front of me. A huge, horseshoe-shaped bay with breakers the height of houses. The harbour looked like it had seen better days. Now the stocks had declined and the EU quotas had come in, it looked like tourism had taken the place of fishing. Every shabby little building seemed to be a scuba-diving or windsurfing school.

The road skirted the bay. I ran towards a cluster of disused huts and shacks on the headland.

It had taken me a long time to put all the pieces together, but I eventually discovered Pete had been killed by an operator in the Firm who'd been using it as a cover for a heroin-running operation. I knew him as the Yes Man. For years he'd been my boss. I killed him. I also killed his two Northern Ireland-born enforcers, Sundance and Trainers.

Tallulah knew none of this, and she'd never learn it from me. She had enough on her plate. Her husband of just a few months was dead, and he'd been an orphan. With no other family to hand Ruby over to, his daughter was now her responsibility.

I turned and headed back towards them.