A Prospect of Vengeance

— it's him, not me. Trust me!' He almost knocked over a chair, watching it rock without trying to rescue it before he sat down in it. 'No noise!'

Miss Russell had fled then. And Reg Buller hadn't made a sound, as he went about his business, after he had briefly explained where he'd been.

But now his chair scraped back noisily.

'Thish ish it. You mark my wordsh, Ian lad! Thish ish it!'

Ian looked up from his notes, but past Buller, not at him, to make sure that Miss Russell (never mind her boss) was not within earshot of this over-loud pronouncement. His credit was good in this library, as it needed to be with all the work he did in it because of its excellent range of microfilmed newspapers; and, at a pinch, it might survive the brewery-fumes Reg was exhaling. But it would never survive that deadliest of sins, noise.

Buller sat back, staring at him. 'Well, c'mon an' shee — '

' Sssh! For heaven's sake, Reg!'

Buller looked around. 'It's all right — ' The slur disappeared magically but the voice was still far too loud. ' — there's nobody out there. I made sure of that. We're okay.'

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'Nobody', of course, excluded librarians in Reg Buller's dramatis personae, and until John Tully came up with the answers, that was the best they could hope for. But he had worked too hard here to obtain his special privileges to let Buller queer his pitch. 'I meant you, man — ' He pointed at the other printed legend on the wall ' — that means 'No piss-artists and dossers-coming-in-from-the- cold', Reg.'

'There's no call to be offensive. An' inaccurate — ' Buller adjusted his upper dentures with a calloused thumb and index finger ostentatiously ' — I've been having trouble with this new set of choppers. And it isn't cold. And anything I may have imbibed this fine Monday was strictly in the line of duty, as I carefully explained to you — ' His voice fell nevertheless, from jubilant conversational to a penetrating stage-whisper. ' — you just look at this, Ian lad. An' then I may accept your apology.'

Ian steeled himself against disappointment as he got up. It was just conceivably possible that he had done Buller an injustice, but unlikely — at least, so far as the imbibing was concerned. What he had remembered from previous occasions was that Reg's 'necessary disbursements to contacts', which figured substantially in his expense account, chiefly related to alcohol, rather than to old-fashioned back-handers (although these figured also, in nicely round multiples of five in sterling, and of tens and hundreds in foreign monopoly currencies). But then, of course, 'contacts'

— 'contacts' back-handed when necessary, but alcoholically-dummy2

oiled invariably — were the very stuff of Reg's modus operandi. And in this case it had been 'a bloke I know in the Street, who's a sub on The People now — but he was a young reporter on the Northern Gazette back in '78, and he's doing shifts now, to keep his ex-wife in gin-an'-tonic', and 'I had to fill him up in the Stab before I could get him to talk, and not remember what I'd asked him about afterwards'. And because of all of that, it had seemed quite depressingly possible that Reg had been enjoying himself at Fielding and Robinson's expense, just for starters.

'All right, Reg — ' But then he remembered also that Reg got results. And that Reg, in spite of his warnings, seemed to be excited by this one (false teeth or alcohol notwithstanding) '

— let's have a look, then.'

Buller shifted obligingly, to allow him to peer under the canopy at the magnified projection of the reel of microfilm.

'I can't see a bloody thing, Reg — it's all out of focus.' It occurred to him insanely that Buller, seeing everything out of focus already, had had to de-focus it in order actually to see it. But, even out of focus, the main headline was still just readable.

'Oh — sorry!' Reg adjusted the focus, first swimming it into pale grey infinity, and then sharpening it into readability.

' There—eh?'

DEATH OF A MAD DOG, Ian read again obediently. And was again repelled by the crude simplicity of the message in its tabloid form, however eye-catchingly true it might have dummy2

been (he remembered also reading similar proclamations of this same event, in smaller type and more sober words, in The Times and the Guardian and the Daily Telegraph, not an hour ago, on this same machine; but Reg had naturally chosen his favourite newspaper).

'So — ?' Twisting back towards Buller, he caught the full reek of Reg's share of those 'necessary disbursements'.

''Mad Dog O'Leary' — ?' At close quarters Reg Buller's eyes were like nothing so much as two halves of the same blood-orange. 'Christ! I suppose you were a fucking student at the time, demonstrating because your grant didn't keep you in beer-money! Or what was it — Rhodesia? Or bleeding Watergate, an' poor old Tricky-Dickie — ?'

'Watergate wasn't '78.' Having just been all through the papers of the time, Ian felt safe now: he could even place Michael 'Mad Dog' O'Leary in his brief nine-days' horror context. And he was not about to admit how little of what he had read had struck any chord of memory, even though he had lived through that November and had presumably read in the original what he and Reg Buller had now re-read on this machine. Truthfully, except for a vague recollection that those had been The Last Days of Labour, Before Thatcher, with threatened bakers' strikes, nurses' strikes and car workers' strikes, he could remember very little of that

'Winter of Discontent', in which 'Mad Dog' had been just another horror story among many. 'Actually, I was just beginning to panic before my final examinations, Reg. But I dummy2

do remember we weren't doing too well in Australia.'

'Australia?'