Revenge

at the forefront of tackling terrorism and upsetting the occasional person was the least of his worries.
He was a methodical man with an eye for detail. He had little time for politicians and their desire for instant answers. You could get instant coffee and most other things nowadays but not police work. It was painstaking attention to detail that produced results and it usually took time and lots of manpower, everything politicians loathed. Do more with less he was repeatedly being told. The problem was that no one had bothered to tell the terrorists there was a financial crisis. His budget had been slashed but at the same time the threat from terrorism both abroad and internally was increasing.
He tried to remain phlegmatic. He was in his fifties and not too long until he could retire with a decent pension and take a lucrative job consulting in the private sector. He was already being wooed by a couple of large companies. Both had taken him out for a very expensive dinner in elegant surroundings, which were meant to impress and succeeded. He knew a couple of ex coppers working at one of the companies and they were both doing well and spoke highly of their new life. Apart from a shiny new office with a secretary, it had been explained to him he would be able to work half the time for more than twice the money. He didn’t need a degree to work out that was a good deal. So soon he would hand over the reins to some unlucky bugger who would inherit a world Miller barely recognized any longer.
Mary, his wife, deserved to know he would be home at the same time each day from work and they could plan an evening at the theatre, without the worry he would suddenly be called to some urgent matter. He had messed her around for the twenty five years they were married but she had rarely complained and brought up two children almost single handed at times. Victoria and Cassandra were now both at University and it would soon be time to take the round the world cruise, he had been promising Mary for many years. She was desperate to see all the great historical sites of the world from the pyramids of Egypt to the Great Wall of China. They had seen most things in Europe but the rest of the world was still unchartered territory.
He considered Mary to be the intellectual half of their relationship. She read proper literature as he liked to call it and watched documentaries on a wide variety of subjects, while he mostly preferred a crime drama or gangster film. Despite their differences or maybe because of them, they had enjoyed a good marriage and he was well aware he had leaned very heavily on her support over the years.
Perhaps, closer to home, retirement would also allow him to get to see the end of some of those gangster movies he so liked watching but which were so frequently interrupted before the end by an urgent phone call. His favourite was The Godfather but anything with De Niro or Jimmy Cagney, was also high on his watch list. In his time he had made more than a few criminals an offer they couldn’t refuse! He would have liked to be an old fashioned policeman fighting gangsters alongside Eliot Ness in the thirties in America. A much less complicated world where there were good guys and bad guys. Today the lines between good and bad were far more blurred.
In all honesty though, he didn’t have too many regrets about the direction his life had taken. He recognized most successful careers were built on sacrifices in other areas of your life and that was true not just within the police force. At times he had struggled to maintain the balance between work and the rest of his life but it had also brought its rewards. He had been able to wake up each day looking forward to the day ahead. There had been no boredom from repetition. Every day was different. Sure there was stress and he was challenged sometimes to his limits but that was because he cared about what he did. And at the end of each day he knew he had really made a difference.
He recognized he lived a privileged life. Through his job he had often been exposed to the darker side of life. Many people were struggling just to exist, often through no fault of their own but because of where they were born or who had brought them into the world. He was one of the lucky ones. He had a nice house in a beautiful part of Surrey. He had a great family and the knowledge his pension would be significantly better than most people had to get by on, in their retirement. The knowledge of how fortunate he was drove him even harder in his work.
Miller had been notified of the bungled kidnap attempt as soon as fingerprint checks identified Maguire and Murphy as known IRA terrorists. They both had long arrest records and even longer lists of probable crimes, which had never been proved. Miller felt almost nostalgic as he read the dossiers from Belfast. It had been quite a while since Irish terrorism had been a part of his daily life. They had been difficult times but friendships had been formed in adversity, which were still as strong all these years later.
His views on Ireland had changed a little over the years as he learned more about the problems and role England had played in their history. Mary had pointed him to a history book written by an Oxford professor, which explained the potato famine of 1845 and how the landed English gentry had been largely responsible for the death of a million men, women and children, and caused another million to have to flee the country. It was the Catholic farmers who had suffered