Life on Mars: Blood, Bullets and Blue Stratos. Tom Graham

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