Walker now works as a computer programmer for a national insurance company that omitted by oversight to ask him to fill in an application form. He has not married and still lives with his parents. He has no friends and he devotes all his spare time to a model railway layout that he has built up in a small shed in the garden.
Debbie Shaw is in an asylum for the incurably insane. She owes her survival to being the thirty-first item on an SIS policy-making agenda on the hottest autumn day since records were kept. The item was to discuss whether she represented a security risk if left alive. The meeting had only got to item twenty-five by eleven o’clock in the evening. The DUS had been called away to the House at ten to see the Prime Minister, the man from the Joint Intelligence Committee had never heard of Debbie Shaw, and the new man from Berlin had suggested that item thirty-one should be dealt with at Cartwright’s discretion. Cartwright would be the last person to admit that he had been moved by Boyd’s words or thoughts, but he came down in favour of Miss Shaw being moved to a place of permanent care and treatment.
Debbie Shaw wears a threadbare towelling bath-robe, several sizes too big for her because it was once the property of Steve Randall. She doesn’t remember him and she has no visitors.
She gives little trouble to the staff, sitting most days in the same wicker chair. She knits a scarf that the nurses have to unravel from time to time when its length exceeds twelve feet. She sometimes sings to herself quietly as she knits, and one of the young doctors once said amiably that she ought to be a singer.
About once a year she is a problem. A passive problem, refusing to eat or drink. Sitting silently, not knitting, in her own small cubicle. Refusing to talk. It never lasts more than a week and force feeding every other day keeps her alive. She is still pretty, apart from her pale face and the purple shadows under her eyes. Male patients proposition her from time to time but she just smiles.
Steve Randall gave up his act and lives now in one room in Pimlico. He has been arrested several times on drunkenness and vagrancy charges. He goes to see Dr. Zhivago whenever it’s on and sheds tears when it comes to the bit where the man and the woman sit on the bench under the trees and the leaves blow along the street.
He appeared once on a TV show called Where are they now? and was congratulated by the producer on a gallant performance. He goes irregularly to meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous and despite being an obvious backslider he is well liked by everyone in the group. He survives on Social Security payments and small hand-outs from a show-biz charity.
Grabowski retired a year after his visit to Northumberland and lives on the outskirts of Kansas City. He receives a good pension and is popular in the neighbourhood. He tells tall stories of foreign parts to the young kids, and tends his garden with love but no skill. He spends his spare cash on a fine collection of foreign stamps, and is visited from time to time by men in Lincolns and foreign sports cars. Rumour has it that he had been a sports writer before he retired. He neither denies nor confirms it, but it is held as significant that on the only occasion when he was co-opted as anchorman on the tug-of-war team for High School fathers they achieved the only win in the history of the event. Only he and a doctor in Washington know that he is dying slowly of cancer. Petersen, who now teaches Psychiatry at a well-respected college in North Dakota, visited Grabowski once, but the meeting wasn’t a success. As Petersen afterwards reflected, there was not what he would call a meeting of minds.
At a meeting in a private room at The Travellers four men considered at some length what they should do about Carter, Maclaren and Sturgiss. One of them, in the early stages of the meeting, had said a few words on the lines of “only doing their duty and should not be disadvantaged for so doing.” Nobody picked up the ball because they all knew only too well that they were not there to consider the pros and cons of the three men but how to dispose of a potential embarrassment. They had a replacement for Carter already in mind and Maclaren and Sturgiss were neither here nor there. All the meeting wanted was to make sure that whatever arrangements were made they satisfied the three men so that there was no possibility of any come-back in the future.
One of SIS’s legal advisers drew up suitable documents for the three men to sign. Carter was paid £57,000 and a tax free pension of £2,500 a year. Maclaren and Sturgiss were each paid £17,000 cash, tax free. Sums arrived at as being capable of withstanding future criticism on the grounds that there were redundant steel-workers and miners receiving similar redundancy payments.
Carter lives in Bradford, his home town, and has shares in a north-east fun-fair, a Scarborough holiday camp and a small chain of betting shops. His wife of twenty-five years, a stout, jolly woman, speaks proudly of his long service in the Merchant Navy. A cover story she always believed.
Maclaren owns fifty per cent of a drinking club not far from Debbie Shaw’s old
