This is a direct sequel to Quis Separabit and does include references to that story. This was actually included in the original plot of QS, seeing as it's such a huge part of Harry's backstory, but I cut it out thinking the up-coming film was going to cover it. Since then, it appears the plotlines and character names have been changed, so I'm doing it instead!
The first part of this introduction takes place about two months before the second half.
Chapter One: Nobody's Child (Introduction)
Only the small things remained. Stained tea cups on the draining board; slanted sympathy cards propping each other up on the mantelpiece in the living room and spent toiletries in the bathroom. Clothes in plastic bags by the front door, ready for the charity shop. Relics of a life, boxed up and waiting for disposal. He moved through the rooms, silent and shrouded in his own subdued grief, checking for the final traces of his mother's existence. Long, slanting rays of early spring sunshine lit up the front room; the dust continued to settle in the long, draughty hall. The stairs creaked loudly, no matter how softly he trod on each step, the sound resonating through the empty house. Entering her bedroom felt indecent. Touching her underwear, bras and knickers, made him feel ashamed and tainted. There was little room for dignity where the dead were concerned and, as Lisa had told him, better her son doing it than a total stranger.
Although she had been ill for months, the end still seemed to take him by surprise. It was something he had been forewarned about, making his surprise even more paradoxical. Everyone had told him, too, that grief was like a roller-coaster of emotions. Up and down, then inside out and defying universal laws of gravity. True, he had been relieved at one point. Relief soon followed by crippling guilt that he could ever have felt anything but raw grief for her. Now, it felt more like grief was a hall of mirrors. Emotions distorted, bent out of shape and reflecting twisted falsehoods back at him. Which was real? Which was solid? None of them were.
Just last night, he had been making a cup of tea. In between fetching the cup and the kettle boiling, he had entirely forgotten what he was meant to be doing. Thoughts had crept up on him, small realisations and the implications of his mother's death, had come up and smacked him round the face. He was reaching for the sugar when he realised he is an orphan. Now, he is nobody's child. A man grown, thirty-three years old, he had curled up on the kitchen floor and wept like a wounded animal.
Jolting himself back into the here and now, he performed his grim duty with a firm set jaw and his dark, grey eyes almost closed. He didn't want to see it; he just wanted it done. Systematically, he opened each drawer and tipped the contents into a plastic bin liner without touching private garments. The secrets held in these most intimate of places would remain secrets. Only the occasional piece of jewellery, or her favourite reading glasses and keepsakes were saved from the yawning, plastic abyss. Once it was done, he knotted the bag and left it by the door.
He went to take down the old net curtains from the window, until the large dresser caught his eye. Her perfume was still there, the bottle half spent. It's sickly, sweet odour still lingered in the air, the same way it did when he was a little boy, and she had gone for one of her rare nights out. Just for a moment, he thought that was what she had done: gone down the pub for drinks with friends and, if he waited up long enough, she would come back. But she was gone now. It was something he had to repeatedly remind himself of.
Also on the dresser, photographs had been wedged into the edges of the mirror frame. He recognised his pudgy infant self. A schoolboy with a nervous smile on his face, also him. Skating over himself, his eye fell on two men clad in the unmistakable attire of the 1970s. It was a fuzzy, early colour photograph of two men with their arms round each other's shoulders, with two women reclining on a picnic blanket in the near background. He smiled as he looked over his father's face, but he did not recognise the other man: smaller than his father, with a wild shock of blonde curls that made him look as if he'd been wired up to the mains. One of the women was his mother, the other he did not know. But she looked up at the camera, timid and uncertain. Giving up on his guessing game, he flipped it over to see if his mother had marked their names:
"My Bill, with Harry and Jane Pearce," she had written in fading pencil.
"Harry Pearce," he murmured softly, tapping the picture against his forefinger.
The name resonated, jarring somewhere deep inside. So much so, he got to his feet and reached inside the pocket of his jeans, to where his phone was. He scrolled through the numbers so fast he missed her name and quickly backtracked. Thumbing the call button, he got up and paced the length of the room while the photo he had been holding drifted to the floor.
"Lisa, hey," he greeted her. "It's me."
"Hey you," she returned from other end of the line. "I'm glad you called, actually. I know we're not together anymore, but I still worry about you."
A stab of guilt punctured his unthinking haste. "I know, I am sorry. I was meant to stay in touch, especially after what happened a few months ago…" he paused, drawing breath. "Well, actually, it's about that. Sort of."
"Will, why're you even worrying about that now?" asked Lisa. "That guy hasn't been back and you have bigger worries-"
"I know, but listen," he cut over her, not intending to be rude. "That man who came round the house, the note he gave you to give to me, who did he say killed my Dad? It was Harry Pearce, wasn't it?"
It was just before winter that the strange Irishman had called round their shared house, late in the night. He hadn't been there, and Lisa took the message. A note that had since been passed off as a cruel hoax and burned before their relationship ended and that house sold. However, Lisa sounded hesitant.
"Yes, it was Harry Pearce," she confirmed, before lapsing into a brief silence. "Have you found something out?"
"Yes, they knew each other. I found a photo of him and some woman. His wife, I think. Has the same name, but could be a sister I guess," he explained, stooping to collect the photo again. It was then he noticed that his mother and the other woman were sitting quite far apart, both looking stiff and uncomfortable. To him, it suggested that all they had in common was the friendship of their husbands. "It's definitely his wife. Harry and Jane Pearce, it says on the back. He and Dad are standing with their arms round each other's shoulders."
"So they were clearly friends then?" she asked. "Which only adds weight to that note being a lie and the messenger a cruel liar."
She was right. Both men were completely at ease in each other's company; soaking up the sun and enjoying a picnic with their respective wives, smiling broadly. Despite her sitting down, he could just see his mother's belly had started to swell, but not quite enough to warrant maternity wear. With a cold jolt of dread, he realised it must have been only weeks before his father was killed in Belfast.
"I read something in the papers a few weeks ago," he began. "Something about a missing soldier who was killed in the seventies, whose body was only recovered last month. It turns out he was set up by some other soldier who was secretly working for the terrorists. That person could have killed more than one man. He could have killed my father. It could have been Harry Pearce."
"Will, there's an awful lot of 'could have's' in that sentence," Lisa replied. "Look, you're grieving; I bet you haven't slept since Deborah died; I bet you aren't eating properly and I bet your head's a mess. I'll be there in a few hours and I'm taking you home. Okay?"
Suddenly dejected, he flopped down on the bare mattress and sighed. "Okay."
"You're not alone, William. So don't be," she added, with finality.
"Thanks," he replied, before hanging up the phone.
The messenger from Ireland had come a-calling back in November, just as his mother had started to grow sicker. His relationship with Lisa was just beginning to hit the rocks. With everything else going on, even late night callers bringing scurrilous rumours of his long dead father had been pushed out of his mind. The details now seemed sketchy. The only reason he remembered the timing of the caller was because of the talks happening in Northern Ireland a few days later. He had gone to Hillsborough in a last ditch attempt at finding out the truth about Bill Crombie, for the sake of his dying mother as much as himself.
Before he could sink into another morass, he rose from the bed and pocketed his phone again. There was still work to do before Lisa arrived to bring him home and there was one more thing he needed to check. Not only did Harry Pearce sound familiar, thanks to the note, but he looked familiar. Had they met before? He could no longer tell. But he found the photograph on top of the bedroom TV set. A group photo of his parent's wedding. For a second, his eyes scanned the row of beaming faces, until he found Harry Pearce once more. Stood right beside his father, acting as Best Man.
Will's eyes narrowed as he homed in on Pearce, raking over his suit and screening out all others. His mother clearly knew him, too. She never mentioned him. Not once. But then, there was a lot from back then that she did not talk about. Carefully, he unfastened the back of the photo and slipped it out of its frame. That and the picnic photo were stacked on top of each other, ready to be taken home with him. His mother was gone, there were no more feelings left to hurt; there was no more damage the truth could do. After all, he was nobody's child now.
"A letter for you, Sir Harry."
The Receptionist's voice chimed across the entrance hall as Harry swept past. Extending his left arm, he plucked it from her manicured fingers without breaking his step. "Thank you, Sara."
"You're welcome!"
She was so eager, so enthusiastic. You could tell she was new.
Outside, the early summer sun was shining; it was six o'clock and it was Friday. He was out of Thames House so fast that, had they not had such thorough cleaners, they wouldn't have been able to see him go for choking on the dust cloud billowing in his wake. After allowing himself a moment to savour his freedom, he stepped into the back of his car, the driver already getting into gear to bear him home. While he reclined in the backseat, he directed his gaze out of the window, watching the public slipping past.
"No Lady Pearce today, Sir?" asked the driver.
"It's our wedding anniversary," he replied, smiling brightly. "I'm not to see her until I reach the restaurant. It's bad luck, or something like that. Anyway, she left early to get all done up before I got home."
"Very good, sir."
Settling into a comfortable silence, Harry suddenly remembered the letter. He had stuffed it into his inside jacket pocket for safekeeping. But, once he retrieved it again, he looked at it suspiciously, inspecting the corners for the envelope for signs of tampering. There were none, but the mark of Whitehall did nothing to ease his flickering worry as he wondered what it was. A sudden demand to return to the office; a red alert that surely wouldn't normally come through the snail mail. It could be any number of things lurking in wait, ruining his weekend.
Just get it over with, he inwardly chided himself.
Accordingly, he slipped his middle finger under the fold of the envelope and tore it open. The first thing he found inside was a hand-written note from William Towers. "Damn you, Harry," he began, magnanimously. "I know this isn't exactly your sort of thing. But you helped bring this Truth and Reconciliation Process to pass, the least you could do now is bloody well take part in it. Do this for me, and I swear I'll never make you share your toy chest with the Russians, ever again."
After that came the exact same invitation he had received a few weeks previously. An invitation to 'tell his story' of conflict in Northern Ireland. He would be anonymous, alone and free to unburden himself of decades of trauma to a sympathetic outside audience. It was the presumption of it that irked him. They assumed he would be traumatised. They assumed he would embrace the opportunity to open his chest and pour out the secrets of his heart. They had even assigned a name to him; he would be known only as 'Soldier B'. Even if he was talking about his MI5 work, he would still be 'Soldier B'. He would appear on screen as nothing more than a talking shadow, a haze of darkness with a voice actor speaking his words. Then what? The tapes would be relayed at a hearing in Derry's Guildhall and then be buried in a vault somewhere.
It's your wedding anniversary, he had to remind himself as his buoyant mood started to evaporate.
It wasn't for at least another two hours, when he saw her again, that his mood finally lifted. Ruth was waiting for him outside the restaurant, elegant in a navy blue, full length gown and several inches taller in heeled shoes. The gown's low neckline showed off the understated diamonds he had gifted her that morning and her hair had been swept up behind her head, showing her slender neck. She turned to him with a shy smile on her face, blushing like a debutante as they greeted one another with a kiss.
"You look beautiful," he told her. "So incredibly beautiful."
And so she did.
Their table was a discreet one, tucked away on the first floor of the building and almost out of sight at the back. An empty wine bottle with a candle wedged in the open neck and encrusted with years of wax formed a centrepiece and Harry watched her fruitlessly resist picking at it.
"Go on," he said, "you know you want to."
She looked troubled. "What will I do with the wax, though? They'll know it was me if I just leave it here."
"You vandal!" he laughed. "Anyway, wine. Real wine, I mean."
"I hope that's your meaning. We'll not get much out of that one," she said, nodding to their waxy table decoration.
Meeting like this reminded Harry of the early days. As time passed since their wedding, their relationship's troubled beginnings began to recede in his memory, leaving room only for the good times. Rose tinted, he knew that. But there was no use dwelling on the painful past, not when she had gifted him a future he never could have imagined, or felt less that he would ever deserve. Every so often, he remembered her years of exile when he had no idea where she was, or even if she was still alive. But even those occasions became fewer and fewer, if no less painful.
So, when their wine came and they had placed their orders, they let the waitress go and drank a toast to themselves. One year ago. Just one year.
"I'm so happy," she said, expression softening as her gaze met his. "I never thought it would be possible."
She was almost echoing his own musings.
"Something changed back there," he said. "I don't know what, but I'm glad it did."
Ruth's smile broadened briefly, before she turned peculiarly serious. He thought she was about to say something, but she only sipped her wine before giving it a swirl round her glass.
"The thing is, Harry," she began, ominously.
It felt as though the temperature had suddenly dropped. "What?"
"Well," she began again, before stammering into silence. With a great sigh, she gave up beating him around the bush mercifully quickly. "Towers wanted me to talk to you about this Reconciliation thing. I did say today wasn't the best day for it, but you know Towers, Harry."
"I know Towers," he replied. "But does Towers know me?"
Now that she had her secret mission off her chest, she relaxed. Her smile came more naturally and her demeanour softened. "I can understand why you don't want to do it," she said. "But don't you think you should?"
It had been six months since they returned from Belfast and its meandering talks. While there, he had faced up to more ghosts than he dared believe existed. A thread of his life that had been hanging loose had been snipped and tied, after thirty long years. Why pick at the holes again now?
"I know my identity won't be revealed," he began, attempting to vocalise his reticence. "But I feel like I'm being asked to divulge painful episodes for the entertainment of others. Ruth, these are things I haven't even told you."
"Good to know we've reached a stage where we can be totally honest with each other," she replied, drily.
"It's in the past, Ruth," he retorted. "I don't need to –"
"But it's not in the past, is it?" she cut over him. "Harry, only a few months ago you asked Tariq to hack into the database of an estate agent's and fix things so that Will Crombie definitely got an apartment he put an offer on, shaving a few grand off the price in the process. Is that because you feel obligated? Do you still blame yourself for his father's death?"
Nervously, he fidgeted with the knot of his tie. "So, you know about that-"
"I know everything that goes on on the Grid," she pointed out. "But that's not the point, Harry. What else have you done to ease that boy's way through life? Would you have done had you not blamed yourself for his father's death?"
"Bill was my closest, oldest friend Ruth," he replied, keeping his voice low as the subject heated. "Of course I have watched over his son. How could I, in all conscience, walk away and leave him to his fate with almost no one to protect him?"
It was nothing. Harry couldn't understand why Ruth was making such a big deal. He had checked up on Will Crombie, made sure he got into the school his mother wanted, made sure he got into the University he chose and, once or twice, made sure he got a job he wanted. It wasn't as if he'd fixed the boy's grades or took it upon himself to top up his bank balance at will. It was only force of circumstance that had prevented Harry ever openly identifying himself to Will Crombie.
"Maybe it is guilt?" he said, throwing the question back at her. "But so what? He would have been my godson anyway. If his father had lived, I would have been part of his life."
"Oh, like you have been for your own children, you mean?" she retorted, brow raised in scepticism.
He walked into that with his eyes open, and the knowledge that he did so only made him even more angry and ashamed.
"My children- ," he began, before faltering. "That's not the point, Ruth."
So many feelings erupted inside him, so many years of buried guilt, that he needed to get out into the open. If he stayed, he knew they would soon be in open conflict.
"Where are you going?" she asked as he pushed back his chair.
"Outside," he replied, tersely.
"Harry, sit down," she sighed. "I didn't mean it like that. All I meant was…"
But her justifications faded into the background noise as he walked out, leaving her flapping in his slipstream. Once outside, he slipped into the crowds of revellers just hitting the bars for the night. At that hour, it was effortlessly done. Blending in, fading into the background. Alone with his memories, with the past rising up inside him. So far up he almost felt like he was two-hundred feet in the air, back on a tower block in West Belfast. He could see Bill now, pale and clammy as he fixed the radio antennae on the roof to pick up the dodgy seventies bugs in the Felon's Club just up the road. A road two hundred feet below them.
"Harry, I'm gonna puke. I'm gonna puke, then I'm gonna fall. I'll fall and puke at the same time."
He had sighed. "Here, let me do it."
And he had. He had been brave then, stepping in to fix the damn antennae. He shifted its position while Bill staggered down and vomited copiously over a republican mural that had been erected over the rooftop's dormer windows. Far, far below the drums pounded and pounded. A tribal rhythm as Black Saturday got underway and the Orangemen were out in force. If the breeze died down, he could hear the pipes too. But always the Lambeg drums. Boom, boom, boom; all around the city. From the ground, you could feel the earth tremble. On the Falls Road far below, you could feel the burn of the petrol bombs sailing through the air.
Jolted out of his reverie, Harry came to a rest beside the Thames, somewhere on a bridge. Even outside, he could feel invisible walls closing in. The past, once more, was coming to get him and there was nowhere left to run.
Thank you for reading. Reviews would be very welcome, if you have a moment.
