Sepulchre (25 page)

He received no response.

'The captain spent as much time as possible with his wife and son, but their marriage had created a rift between Siobhan and other members of her family. You see, she had cousins who had links - strong links, as it turned out - with the IRA, and they suspected that her husband was no more than a British plant„ put there to seek out information on rebel activities in the area. It was sheer nonsense, of course, but fanatics can rarely be bound by common sense. And who knows? Perhaps over the years, Captain Halloran did innocently hear of certain nefarious goings on that he felt duty-bound to report to his superiors. Whatever, suspicion alone was enough for the terrorists.

'Liam, just eight years old, had gone fishing with his father, who had been home on leave for only a few days while serving in that bloody, if discreet, war in South Arabia. God knows, the man needed the rest.'

Cora regarded Mather curiously.

'They were both standing in the middle of a shallow stream, father and son, no doubt enjoying each other's company after so many months apart, when the gunmen struck. Liam saw his father shot dead before him. He told the Garda later that his father had struggled to the bank and had tried to crawl from the water. The boy was frozen with fear and could only watch when one of the masked gunmen kicked his father down into the stream again, then stood with one foot on the dying man's back holding him beneath the water. The boy said the stream had already turned crimson with blood when the man pointed his revolver into the water and shot Captain Halloran in the back of the head.'

Cora closed her eyes, but the ghastly image became sharper in her mind. She quickly opened them again.

'Siobhan knew her cousins had been involved, otherwise Liam would have been murdered, too, as a witness. That's why the assassins had taken the trouble to wear masks, so the boy wouldn't recognise any of them. But there was nothing she could do. If she were to voice her suspicions, not only would she be at risk, but so too would her son, and possibly the grandfather. It's my opinion that her silence partly contributed to her eventual breakdown. Grief did the rest.'

The girl was staring at him. 'How . . . how do you know all this? Did Liam tell you?'

'Pieces,' he replied. 'Even as a youth, Liam was never one to reveal his inner feelings. I made enquiries, I talked to his grandfather. You see, I was Captain Halloran's commanding officer in Aden. He was an excellent soldier, one I had a high regard for, and his death was a great loss for my unit so early in the campaign. I took a personal interest in the family he'd left behind, and that's how I learned of the boy.'

Mather finished the tea and again placed the cup on the floor. When he straightened, his hand began to soothe the ache in his knee. Talk of the war in Aden somehow always revived that pain.

'As Liam grew older, it seemed he was always in some kind of trouble, as though a wildness in him had been unleashed. Perhaps that was his way of smothering the sorrow, disguising it with anger. I've no idea, to be honest. The wildness grew out of hand when his mother, unhappy and unstable for all those years, finally committed suicide. I'd kept track of them both since the death of Captain Halloran, made sure the widow received full financial compensation from the British Army, but lost touch for some time when I had difficulties of my own.' He tapped his aching knee to indicate the precise nature of those 'difficulties'. "Thought I was going to lose it, but managed to convince the medics the leg would come good again after a little tinkering with their scalpels. Nowadays, I wonder if I did the right thing,' he added as if to himself. 'Anyway, I received a letter from the grandfather informing me of Siobhan's death, and when I was yell enough, I travelled to Ireland myself to see what could be done for the boy.' He smiled wryly. 'I believe I arrived just in time.'

It was difficult for Cora to picture Liam as a boy, angry, probably frightened, grief-stricken again with the loss of his mother, her death a direct consequence of his father's murder. How could she equate that image with the man who had come to her room the night before, had taken her against her will, that very act of ravishment stirring the familiar pleasure such defilement had for her, so that she could not help but respond? But then the quieter passion afterwards, the lovemaking that was gentle, so tender, arousing purer emotions that eclipsed mere desire. It had left her stunned, unsure, as though he had deliberately enacted both sides of passion with her, the cold harshness lacking any caring, and then the simple joy which came without abuse or pain, a fulfilment she'd almost forgotten. But then Cora had to wonder if Halloran was someone on whose actions others put their own interpretations. Was she presuming too much of him? Was he really only a man of violence?

Mather's voice broke into her thoughts. 'Liam had been getting into scrapes. No, more than that - his mischievousness went beyond the bounds of natural boyhood hooliganism. From what I heard on my arrival, he was in serious danger of being taken into youth custody. Several incidents around the small town where he lived with his grandfather had been attributed to him, although on the worst occasions no damning evidence of his involvement could be laid absolutely on his doorstep. There were particular problems with the local priest. Whether or not it was because the Church represented the nearest authority against which he could rebel, I've no way of knowing. One particular incident . . . but no, as I say, there was no definite proof, it would he wrong for me to speculate.'

The Shield Planner interlocked his fingers, his elbows resting on the arms of the char. He pressed his forefingers against his lip, momentarily lost in thought. 'I felt it was time to take Liam away from that environment; Ireland held too many tragic memories for him. So I arranged for him to board at a school in England, the least I could do in honour of his late father. The school had close connections with the army, turned out many fine cadets. I'm afraid I was rather preoccupied with my own career, which was starting afresh after my leg injury, but I tried to keep an eye on things as much as I could. The boy appeared to settle down perhaps a strict regime was what he needed all along - eventually I suppose because of what his father had been, the type of school that had educated him, and the fact that his grandfather had passed away and that there really was no other place to go, Liam decided that soldiering was the profession for him.'

Mather's face wrinkled with pleasure. 'Damn good at it, too, by all accounts. Oh, he was still somewhat reckless, never quite losing that touch of Irish wildness; but the army has ways of channelling that kind of spirit. Liam took to that way of life as if ordained for it, and was good enough to make the SAS.

'Unfortunately, he was involved in an incident in 1972 that I believe was the root cause of Liam's later cynicism. Still not into his twenties, he was stationed with a small British Army training team at Mirbat in Oman - about ten of 'em in all. A civil war was going on between the monarchy of Oman and its left-wing opponents, and the SAS unit had spent three months in that dreary little town of Mirbat attempting to drill some kind of order into the loyalists. They held two forts, thirty Askaris in one, around twenty-five Dhofar Gendarmerie in the other, with an unruly bunch of counter-guerrilla irregulars billeted in the town itself. The only artillery of any real weight they had was a Second World War 25-pounder, a .50-inch Browning and an 81mm mortar.

'One morning, just after dawn, they were attacked by nearly three hundred rebels armed with machine guns, mortars, anti-tank rifles and a Russian rocket-launcher. It should have been an outright massacre, but the SAS commanding officer, an absolutely fearless individual, and only a few years older than Liam himself, organised his own men and their Arab allies into a fighting force to be reckoned with.

'I won't bore you with all the battle details, m'dear, but the officer, a captain, was here, there and everywhere, screaming orders, directing what meagre artillery they had, shaping his defence so that the attackers couldn't take a hold. Under enemy fire, he crossed four hundred yards of open ground with a medical orderly to reach the fort where the Gendarmerie was holed up. He'd already radioed his HQ for a helicopter to evacuate casualties, but enemy fire-power was so fierce the damn thing couldn't even land. The captain took over the second fort's gun position, the guerrillas no more than thirty yards away, and nearly had his head chopped off by machine-gun fire. Men were being cut down around him, but not for one moment did the captain

consider giving the order for surrender. No, no chance of that. From his position, he was able to site targets for two Strikemaster jets that had arrived to lend support, but still the battle raged.

'At last, a relief squadron flew in from Salalah to assist, and the rebels, already stopped in their tracks and their numbers considerably depleted, gave up the ghost and fled. A quite remarkable resistance by the commanding officer and his men, and the rebel forces never really recovered from the defeat, although it took another four years for the war to end.

'I believe that battle affected Liam in two ways, the first being that he was involved in a carnage of mindless ferocity, and he, himself, had dealt out much of it; and the second was that he was shown an example of outstanding courage by his commanding officer - a captain, don't forget - which I'm sure he imagined his own father had been capable of. Yet the battle was never "officially" recognised by his own government, even though he was awarded a Military Medal for his actions, and the captain a DSO. That and the fact that he was unclear in his own mind as to whether he was on the side of the "goodies" or the "baddies" made him rather cynical about war itself. Worse was to follow.

'Seven years later, that same captain, a man he had come to admire and respect, by then promoted to major, died from exposure during an SAS exercise on the Brecon Beacons. A totally wasteful death which so filled Liam with disgust that he resigned from the army shortly after.

'He became a mercenary, using conflict for his own ends, which were purely financial, rather than allowing it to use him. I observed from a great distance, learning of his activities through contacts I had in various countries and, it must be confessed, I was saddened, appalled even, by what I heard. Although it was never said that he killed indiscriminately, or ever used violence when it could be avoided, he had a reputation for being utterly ruthless as far as his enemies were concerned - and enemies were defined as those being on the side of those not paying his wages.'

Mather noticed that Cora did not appear shocked, nor even surprised; it was as though he had merely confirmed her own suspicions about Halloran.

'A few years ago I began recruiting for Achilles' Shield,' he went on. 'Ex-SAS officers make extremely good operatives, so they were my prime targets. I'd lost all contact with Liam by then - it may be that I was afraid of what he'd become - but something inside urged me to seek him out, a niggling guilt perhaps, a feeling that it was I who had let him down. It may possibly have been nothing more than a nagging curiosity.

'I eventually located him in Moshupa, a small township in Botswana, very close to the border of South Africa. lie was training ANC guerrillas for incursions into their homeland where they would wreak as much destruction as possible before stealing back across the border to the neighbouring state. But Liam was a far different person from the young man I had come to know. He seemed . . . empty. As though what he was doing, the killers and saboteurs he was training, the awful conditions he was living in, meant nothing at all to him. He didn't even register surprise when I turned up, only a chilly kind of amusement. When I spoke with Liam it was like talking to someone drained of emotion; but gradually I began to realise he possessed an inner seething that frightened me more than anything else about him. God knows what he'd been involved in after resigning from the British Army, but its mark had been left. No, he hadn't been brutalised; it was as though he'd become immunised against outrage, wickedness, against caring. As I said, that was on the surface: inside, emotions were being stifled, held so firmly in check that I suspect even he was unaware they were there. Or perhaps he glimpsed them now and again, yet refused to let them rise, refused to be influenced by them. I was sure I'd come at exactly the right time, couldn't help but feel I'd been nudged by some inner instinct of my own, because I could tell that Liam had had enough, he was ready to break. Those suppressed emotions - his own selfhatred - were about to erupt.

'He wouldn't admit it, not even to himself, but I think he saw me as some kind of lifeline, a means of dragging himself from that moral squalor he'd sunk into. As for me, I was only too happy to throw down the rope.

'Liam told me he had discovered there were no absolutes. No absolute right or wrong, no absolute good or evil. There were degrees of everything. Once you accepted that - truly accepted it, he insisted - you were able to set your own balance, you understood the bounds within which you could function without guilt clawing at you, tainting your thoughts and so hindering your actions. And he said that virtue, righteousness, whatever you like to call it, often held little sway over evil, because its own rules inhibited. Sometimes only evil could defeat another evil. Degrees, he kept repeating, the lesser against the greater.

'None of it made much sense to me, but it indicated the slough of despair he was wallowing in. No, perhaps despair suggests self-pity, and the man I spoke to was too hardened for that. Pessimism might be a more appropriate word, cynicism even better. Anyway, he agreed to return to England with me and work for Achilles' Shield, protecting lives instead of the opposite.

In my opinion, that change was vital for Liam, because it pulled him back from the brink.'

Cora, who had been listening quietly throughout, finally ;poke. 'He was that close . . . ?'

'In my opinion,' Mather reasserted. 'It may be an oldfashioned notion on my part, but when all probity is lost, total degradation is swift to follow. It seemed to me at the time that Liam had almost lost all reasonable values.'