The cottage stood in the middle of an acre of flat, open land. It was nearly two o'clock in the morning, but light still blazed from the windows. At the front of the building, small spotlights were trained on a footbridge over a stream. I stared down at the water.
Voices drifted from the path that led to the back of the house. They got louder and the tip of a cigarette glowed red in the dark.
Two shapes emerged from the shadows and headed towards me.
I straightened. 'Halt. Who goes there?'
'One big nose, one ayatollah.'
'Advance and be recognized.'
I'd worked with both these guys many times, often undercover. In the old days we'd worn jeans and bomber jackets, whatever it took to blend in with the locals on the Shantello and Bogside estates. Tonight's disguises were something else again. Frank was got up like a refugee from The Sweeney, in a spear-point collared shirt, leather coat with big, fuck-off lapels, and stick-on ginger sideburns to match his hair. Nish, in a bright waistcoat and floppy golf hat, looked like he was auditioning for Showaddywaddy.
The muffled thump of music came from the back of the house. I'd set up a marquee with a big TV so the guests could sit and eat while they watched some of the worst numbers ever composed battling it out at the Eurovision Song Contest in Birmingham.
I'd come as a 1970s porn star, complete with a droopy moustache and a gold medallion – my next-door neighbour's brooch – on a lavatory chain. Almost everyone else had come as a member of Abba.
Frank and Nish came and leant on the rail alongside me.
'Together again.' Frank gave us both a nudge. 'The Three Musketeers.'
I laughed. 'Three Wise Men's more your style these days, ain't it?'
'Nah.' Nish sucked at his Silk Cut. 'Three Wise Monkeys. Or, here you go . . .' He gobbed into the water below. 'Three Coins in the Fountain.'
Frank smiled indulgently. They were trying hard. We all were. It should have been a fun night. Building works, mostly to divert the River Stour from my living room, had delayed the housewarming for a year, but now here we all were.
Or not quite all.
Of the eight former Ice Cream Boys on the invitation list, one hadn't turned up. He was in police custody.
'I keep thinking about him.' Frank pushed one of his cardboard sideburns back onto his jaw. 'What makes a man do such a thing?'
Nish studied the water. 'Maybe he's even madder than I am.'
Shanksy had already left Seven Troop by the time I arrived, but he was a legend in the Regiment. Dr Thomas Shanks was a veteran of the 'Secret War' in Oman in the mid-1970s – where he'd won the Military Medal for rescuing a mate under fire – and had gone on to become a hospital consultant. Two days ago, he'd pulled an AK47 from the boot of his car outside a pub in Leeds and gunned down the girl he'd said he loved.
Shanks had worked in hospitals in the Midlands and in 1995 had become a locum anaesthetist at Pontefract General Infirmary. Within a fortnight he'd met Vicky, a local girl training as a nurse. They began living together and got engaged. But things had turned sour: two weeks ago she'd called things off and started going out with a former patient.
Last Wednesday she'd found a letter from Shanks at her hospital flat; it contained the engagement ring she'd returned to him and told her he was miserable and depressed. The following day, he'd called her in a pub in nearby Castleford, where she was having a drink with her new boyfriend, his son and his son's girlfriend. Over and over again, Shanks demanded that she tell him she no longer loved him. He called her a selfish cow and a bitch. Vicky eventually put the phone down on him and moved with the rest of her party to a neighbouring bar.
When Shanks tracked her there she agreed to speak to him, but he became abusive and bundled her through the doors and out into the street. A fight broke out. Shanks grappled with the new boyfriend and kicked him as he lay on the ground.
The boyfriend's son held Shanks back while Vicky and the others went back to the first pub. At 9.50 p.m. they noticed him in the car park and Vicky went out to speak to him. Moments later she was seen running back, with Shanks in hot pursuit.
She only got as far as the edge of the car park. The first burst of 7.62mm hit her six times in the chest, elbow, abdomen and buttock, but she somehow found the strength to get to her feet. When she reached the pub doorway a second burst took her down for good.
The place was packed for the landlord's farewell. Everyone was watching videos of previous parties when the firing began. At first they thought someone had laid on some fire-crackers or was bursting balloons as some kind of surprise. Then a few rounds screamed through the room, splintering wood and smashing glasses and mirrors. It only lasted a few seconds, but no one dared move. When they got up, they saw the gunman walk casually to his car and drive off.
Vicky was lying in a pool of blood. She couldn't talk. They tried to stem the flow with bar towels and somebody got a quilt from upstairs to cover her until the ambulance arrived.
She died two hours later, after emergency surgery in the hospital where she'd worked.
Shanks bought half a pint of bitter at another local, phoned his ex-wife in Birmingham to tell her what he'd done and headed there to see his nine-year-old daughter. He wanted to see her before the police caught up with him. Then he changed his mind and made for Scotland. He went to see his brother in Glasgow, maybe to get cash and gear before heading into the hills. He gave himself up the next day, after a nationwide manhunt.
'He probably just couldn't decide on his costume,' Nish said.
Tommy Shanks was a legend, not just for his soldiering skills, but also for being a total anal-retentive. He would spend hours working out what to wear for a night on the town. Most people just threw on a pair of jeans and a polo shirt. Not Tommy. It had to be a proper shirt, pressed so you could cut your fingers on the sleeves.
'Don't take it personally.' Nish slapped me on the back. 'Your party ain't that bad.'
Frank gave him one of those despairing looks parents give their kids. He'd been the first through the skylight when the SAS had broken the Iranian Embassy siege in 1980. He'd always been rock steady. If he was covering your back, you were in good hands. But now he was even more off his trolley than Nish: he'd become a vicar.
One of his favourite sayings was: 'I just show them the door to the kingdom of heaven and they can walk through it if they want to.'
I still hadn't opened it. I was pretty sure God would throw the bolts before I turned the handle.
'Cheer up, Frank.' I tugged at one of his sideburns.
'You'll burn in hell, McNab.' He gave me the same disapproving look he'd given Nish. His brow furrowed. 'Why? Why kill her?'
In all the years I'd known him I'd rarely heard him raise his soft Geordie voice at anything or anyone, and now was no exception.
'What's that shit you always say?' Nish grinned. ' "Better to spend one day as a tiger than a thousand years as a sheep"? Well, fuck it, why not?'
Frank wasn't biting. 'I mean, here's a guy who's a hospital consultant one minute, and he drops a girl in a car park the next. What makes a man throw two lives away, after all he's been through?'
Tommy was one of six brothers and two sisters brought up in working-class Glasgow. His father was an epileptic sawmill labourer, and Tommy was only ten when he came home from school one day and found him dead. Five years later, after his mother began drinking heavily and became aggressive towards the children, he went to live with an uncle.
He left school then and became an engineering apprentice, then joined the army two years later. He was posted to Bahrain as a signaller, from where he applied to join the SAS. Within eighteen months of first joining up, Tommy Shanks became one of the youngest ever to pass Selection.
He served for ten years, then worked for a security company specializing in VIP protection. He was stabbed seven times by a gang and very nearly died.
After he'd recovered he went back to the classroom and gained a place at Birmingham University medical school. He and his wife Julie, a teacher, set up home in the Midlands and had a daughter. He graduated in 1986 as a Bachelor of Medicine and Master of Surgery.
He joined the Royal Army Medical Corps as a reservist captain, but resigned in 1989. When Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1991 he joined the medical team at 32 Field Hospital in Saudi Arabia and was given a cocktail of about twenty undisclosed inoculations to offset the effects of chemical warfare.
When his marriage faltered on his return, he took a job as an anaesthetist at New Cross Hospital in Wolverhampton, where colleagues described him as a typical tough Scot, who didn't suffer fools gladly. He ended up at Pontefract Royal Infirmary, but all wasn't well on the work front. He flew into rages when other medics didn't match his high standards.
'What was he doing with an AK anyway?'
He shrugged. Guys often had the odd weapon stashed away as a souvenir. Our first task if a mate got killed was to clear up before his family was allowed into his house. One had had enough PE4, rifles and ammunition in his loft to start the next world war. The MoD didn't have to worry about budget cuts: they could have popped round to his place.
There were already mutterings in the media about Gulf War syndrome, but however horrendous GWS was for the sufferers, it was a world away from post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). It was a medical issue rather than a mental-health one.
Three guys who served with Shanks in the Gulf, two of them doctors, had already committed suicide – apparently because of the strain of their military experiences. The sight of casualties carried in with limbs missing, horrifically scarred, most of them young men in their prime, must have taken its toll.
After he returned from the Gulf, Shanks had difficulty concentrating and remembering things, and suffered increasingly severe mood swings, irritability and depression – which were consistent with symptoms experienced by others who returned from the Gulf. I wondered if he'd been suffering from PTSD when he'd shot Vicky Fletcher.
From a professional soldier's point of view, two erratic bursts were a sign of a disturbed man. If he'd been in control, he would just have put two rounds into her head.
'That's us two off the hook, Father Frank. We're Gulf War-free.' Nish took a drag on his cigarette. 'Dunno about McNab, though. Reckon he's a walking time-bomb.'
GWS was about the only thing I knew I wouldn't be suffering from later in life. In the SAS we had some control over our lives. The drugs did turn up, but unlike the rest of the army we weren't ordered to take them. We binned ours, working on the principle that if we were attacked with a blood or nerve agent that could kill in seconds, a daily handful of capsules wasn't going to make much difference.
Frank was still brooding. 'Maybe he's just another lad who lost his head. There are enough of us.'
I put a hand on Nish's shoulder and poked a finger at Frank. 'You're the vicar, mate – you're supposed to have the answers. PTSD? Or maybe he really is just mad, like this fucker.'
Nish burst out laughing. 'I'm not mad – not this week, anyway.' He flicked his cigarette into the stream and immediately lit another. 'I wonder if Shanksy wishes he'd saved a couple of rounds for himself. I would have.'
Frank was in Sunday-sermon mode. 'When taking a life has been sanctioned by the state, that's one thing.' He paused to allow the weight of his statement to sink in. It didn't. 'But taking a life out of anger, well, that's quite another.'
Nish turned and grabbed him in a huge bear hug. He beamed from ear to ear. 'Awww, Frank still thinks we're shining knights, agents of wrath to bring God's punishment on the evil-doer. Not just mad fuckers who get pissed off and kill people . . .'
Frank had had years of us taking the piss out of his beliefs. It was like water off a duck's back. He kept on-message. 'Is any of us less guilty than Tommy? I've seen enough killers to know one when I see one.'
I grinned at the pair of them. 'You're both as deranged as each other. Nish, you have regular conversations with your fridge . . .'
Nish nodded.
'. . . and you, Frank, you've got God telling you what to do, haven't you?'
There was a long pause. 'I thought I did, mate. I thought I did.'
Nish and I exchanged a look, and then he followed Frank back to the party.
I watched them fade into the darkness. One of those loonies kept dreaming about freefalling from the edge of space. The other believed there was an old man with a white beard who lived up there. I couldn't help wondering whether the jungle punch we'd all drunk fourteen years ago had had some mad potion in it, and I was next on the list.
For all that, they were two of the best friends a person could ever hope for. We'd been through a lot together, the three of us and the handful of others from Seven Troop. We had killed and some of us had been killed, and the outcome was a closeness that outsiders might find hard to understand and impossible to share. We scoffed at the notion of brotherhood, but that's what we were: brothers in arms. My ten years in Seven Troop were the most awesome of my life. Since I'd left in 1993 there hadn't been a day when I didn't thank my lucky stars that I'd had the chance to be associated with the most highly skilled and inspirational bunch of guys I've ever come across.
The trust between Frank, Nish, me and the others had been total. It had had to be. Would we have died for each other? Yes. But brotherhood forged under extreme danger comes at a price. Some had already gone mad; others were well on the way.
If only I'd known then that Tommy Shanks murdering his ex-girlfriend and Nish trying to kill his a year earlier wasn't going to be the end of the story. Could I have prevented what happened next? Probably not. But that couldn't stop me lying awake asking myself the same questions over and over.
I remembered a mate from A Squadron coming up against the RAF shrink after my release from Baghdad's Abu Ghraib prison at the end of the '91 Gulf War. Mugger had been in overall charge of the SAS recovery mission: he went into Riyadh to organize a few videos for our entertainment while the B Squadron sergeant-major turned up with a hospital trolley loaded with beer. We were smuggled out of the ward and down to the library, where we set about getting blitzed.
Dr Gordon Turnbull had arrived in Cyprus to oversee the recuperative phase. 'What have you got there?' he asked Mugger, when he spotted his shopping bags.
'Videos for the lads.'
'Mind if I have a look?'
Turnbull nearly had a heart-attack. Mugger had bought us Terminator, Driller Killer and Nightmare on Elm Street. 'You can't do this! Those men are all traumatized!'
'Traumatized?' Mugger laughed. 'They were all fucking barking to start with.'
What had sent Shanks, Nish and others to the dark side?
What was it about the landscape we'd crossed and the things we'd had to do that had brought them to this point? Why had I been spared?
And perhaps the biggest question of all: should I have seen it coming? Were the clues there all along?
I didn't often look back. In our line of work, reflection isn't healthy.
But if I was going to find the answers, maybe it was time to revisit the journeys taken by this united but disparate band of men.
I leant back on the rail. A lot of water had flowed under the bridge since 1984.