Hedley came in with tea things on a tray and put them down beside her on a low table. 'Leave the food,' she told him. 'Later, I think.'
'Be a good chap,' Emsworth said. 'There's a whiskey decanter on the sideboard. Pour me a large one and one for Lady Helen.'
'Will I need it?'
'I think so.'
She nodded. Hedley poured the drinks and'served them. 'I'll be in the kitchen if you need me.'
'Thank you. I think I might.'
Hedley looked grim, but retired to the kitchen. He stood there thinking about it, then noticed the two doors to the serving hatch and eased them ajar. It was underhanded, yes, but all that concerned him was her welfare. He sat down on a stool and listened.
'For years I lived a lie as far as my friends were concerned,' Emsworth said. 'Even Martha didn't know the truth. You all thought I was Foreign Office. Well, it wasn't true. I worked for the Secret Intelligence Service for years. Oh, not in the field. I was the kind of office man who sent brave men out to do the dirty work and who frequently died doing it. One of them was Major Peter Lang.'
There was that crawling feeling again. 'I see,' she said carefully.
'Let me explain. My office was responsible for black operations in Ireland. The people we were after were not only IRA, but Loyalist paramilitaries who, because of threats and intimidation of witnesses, escaped legal justice.'
'And what was your solution?'
'We had undercover groups, SAS in the main, who disposed of them.'
'Murdered, you mean?'
'No, I can't accept that word. We've been at war with these people for too many years.'
She didn't pour the tea, but reached for the whiskey and sipped some. 'Am I to understand that my son did such work?'
'Yes, he was one of our best operatives. Peter's ability to turn on a range of Irish accents was invaluable. He could sound like a building site worker from Derry if he wanted to. He was part of a group of five. Four men, plus a woman officer.'
'And?'
'They all came to an untimely end within the same week. Three men and the woman shot...'
'And Peter blown up?'
There was a pause as Emsworth swallowed the whiskey, then he got up and lurched to the sideboard and poured another with a shaking hand.
'Actually, no. That's just what you were told.' He swallowed the whiskey, spilling some down his chin.
She drank the rest of her whiskey, took out her silver case, selected a cigarette and lit it. 'Tell me.'
Emsworth reached the chair again and sank down. He nodded to the file. 'It's all in there. Everything you need to know. I'm breaking the Official Secrets Act, but why should I care? I could be dead tomorrow.'
'Tell me!' she said, her voice hard. 'I want to hear it from You.'
He took a deep breath. 'If you must. As you know, there are many splinter groups in Irish politics, both Catholic and Protestant. One of the worst is a nationalist outfit called the Sons of Erin. Years ago, it was run by a man called Frank Barry, a very bad article indeed, and almost unique - he was a Protestant Republican. He was eventually killed, but he had a nephew, named Jack Barry, who had an American mother. He'd been born in New York, then gone to Vietnam in 1970, when he was
eighteen, on a short-term commission. There was some kind of scandal - apparently he shot a lot of Vietcong prisoners, so they turfed him out quietly.'
'And then he joined the IRA?'
'That's about it. He took over where his uncle left off. He's a murdering psychopath who's been doing his own thing for years now. Oh, and another bizarre thing. Jack's great-uncle was Lord Barry. He had a place on the Down coast in Ulster called Spanish Head. It's part of the National Trust now. His father died when he was a child and Frank Barry was killed just before his old uncle died.'
'Which leaves Jack with the title?'
Emsworth nodded. 'But he's never attempted to claim it. He could be proscribed as a traitor to the Crown.'
'I wonder. I think executions on Tower Hill went out some years ago. But Tony, please, get to the point.'
He closed his eyes for a moment, then sighed and continued. 'There was a man called Doolin who used to drive for Barry. He ended up in the Maze Prison and we put an informer in his cell. Our man had an ample supply of cocaine and eventually had Doolin telling his life story from birth.' 'My God.' She was horrified.
'It's the name of the game, my dear. Doolin had not been with Barry during the time in question, but his story was that Barry was on a high as he drove him north to Stramore, on pills and whiskey. He told Doolin he'd just taken out an entire undercover British group thanks to the New York branch of the Sons of Erin, and with a little help from someone he called the Connection. Doolin asked who this Connection was, and Barry said no one knew, but that he was an American, and then he started acting all coy, and talking about the detectives who'd operated out of Dublin Castle for Mick Collins in the old days.'
'So the implication was that this Connection was someone very high up and on the inside? But where? How?'
'For years, British Intelligence has had a link with the White House, especially because of the developing peace process. Information has been passed to what were supposed to be friends on a need-to-know basis.'
'Including information on my son's group?'
'Yes. I thought that was going too far, but those more important than I, people such as Simon Carter, Deputy Director of the Security Services, ruled against me. And then Doolin was found hanged in his cell.'
She went and poured another whiskey and turned. 'It gets more like the Borgias every minute. And as you've avoided explaining your remark about Peter not being blown up, I think I'm going to need this.' She swallowed half the whiskey. 'Get on with it, Tony.'
'Yes, well, the Sons of Erin. They passed on information obtained from the Connection. They all had contacts in Dublin and London.' He was in agony and showed it. 'It's in the files. Everything's in there, all the players, photos, the lot. I copied the Top Secret file and..."
'Tell me about Peter.'
'They snatched him coming out of a pub in South Armagh, Barry and his men. They tortured him, and when he wouldn't talk, beat him to death. They were building a new bypass road nearby, down to the Irish Republic. It had one of those massive concrete mixers that works all night. They put his body through it.'
She sat there, staring, silent, then suddenly swallowed the rest of the whiskey.
He carried on. 'They blew up his car with the heavy charge to make it look as if he'd gone that way. I mean, they needed
us to know he'd gone, but couldn't send us a postcard saying how.'
He was a little drunk now. She cried out and put a hand to her mouth as she stood and ran for the door. She made it to the toilet in the hall and vomited into the basin again and again. When she finally wiped her face and came out, Hedley was there.
'You heard?'
'I'm afraid so. Are you okay?'
'I've been better. Tea, Hedley, hot and strong.'
She went back into the sitting room and sat down. 'What happened? Why was nothing done?' ,
'They decided to keep it black, which was why you weren't told the truth. We had operatives check Republican circles in New York and Washington. We discovered there was indeed a New York dining club called the Sons of Erin. The names of the members are all in the file, along with their photos. They're prominent businessmen, one's even a US Senator. It all fits. There had already been examples of privileged information from London to Washington ending up in IRA hands.'
'But why was nothing done?'
Emsworth shrugged. 'Politics. The President, the Prime Minister - no one wanted to rock the boat. Let me tell you something about intelligence work. You think the CIA and the FBI keep the President informed about everything? Hell, no.'
'So?'
'It's just the same in the UK. MI5 and MI6 have their own dark secrets and they not only hate each other, but also Scotland Yard's Anti-Terrorist Unit and Military Intelligence. For proof of that, you'll find two interesting entries in the file, one American, the other Brit.'
'And what do they refer to?'
'There's a man called Blake Johnson at the White House, around fifty, a Vietnam veteran, lawyer, ex-FBI. He's Director
of the General Affairs Department at the White House. Because it's downstairs, it's known as the Basement. It's one of the most closely guarded secrets of the administration, passed from one President to another. It's totally separate from the FBI, the CIA, the Secret Service. Answers only to the President. The whispers are so faint people don't believe it exists.'
'But it does?'
'Oh, yes, and the British Prime Minister has his own version. It's there in the file. Brigadier Charles Ferguson runs it.'
'Charles Ferguson? But I've known him for yean.'
'Well, I don't know what you thought he was, but his outfit is known in the trade as the Prime Minister's private army. It's given the IRA a bad time for years. Ferguson has a sizeable setup at the Ministry of Defence and is responsible only to the PM, which is why the other intelligence outfits loathe him. His nght hand is an ex-IRA enforcer named Sean Dillon; his left, a Detective Chief Inspector named Hannah Bernstein, granddaughter of a rabbi, if you can believe it. Quite a bunch, huh?'
'But what has this to do with anything?'
'Simply, that the Secret Intelligence Service didn't want Ferguson and company involved, because Ferguson might have told the Prime Minister, and Ferguson has a private contact with Blake Johnson, which meant the President would have been informed and SIS couldn't have that.'
'So what happened?'
'SIS started to send the White House mild and useless information and disinformation. There was no way of implicating the members of the Sons of Erin. And then the file was lost.' He reached for the folder and held it up. 'Except for my copy. I don't know why I took it at the time. Self-disgust, I suppose. Now, I think you should have it.'
He started to cough; she passed him a napkin. He spat into it and she saw blood. 'Should I get the doctor?'
'He's calling in later. Not that it'll make any difference.' He gave her a ghastly smile. 'That's it then, now you know. I'd better lie down.'
He rose, picked up the stick and walked slowly into the hall. 'I'm sorry, Helen, desperately sorry.'
'It's not your fault, Tony.'
He heaved himself up the stairs and she watched him go. Hedley appeared behind her, holding the file. 'I figured you'd want this.'
'I surely do.' She took it from him. 'Let's move on, Hedley. There's only death here.'
Back in the Mercedes, as they drove through the narrow lanes, she read through the file, every detail, every photo. Strangely enough, she dwelt on Sean Dillon longer than anyone: the fair hair, the self-containment, the look of a man who had found life a bad joke. She closed the file and leaned back.
'You okay, Lady Helen?' Hedley asked.
'Oh, fine. You can read the file yourself when we're back at South Audley Street.'
She felt a flutter in her chest, opened her purse, shook two pills into her hand, and swallowed them. 'Whiskey, please, Hedley,' she said.
He passed back the silver flask. 'What's going on? Are you okay?'
'Just some pills the doctor gave me.' She leaned back and closed her eyes. 'No big deal. Just get me to South Audley Street.'
But Hedley didn't believe her for a moment and drove on, his face troubled.
TWO
At South Audley Street, she sat in the study and worked her way through the file again, studying the text, the photos.
The composition of the Sons of Erin was interesting. There was Senator Michael Cohan, aged fifty, a family fortune behind him derived from supermarkets and shopping malls; Martin Brady, fifty-two, an important official in the Teamsters' Union; Patrick Kelly, forty-eight, a construction millionaire; and Thomas Cassidy, forty-five, who had made a fortune from Irish theme pubs. All Irish-Americans, but there was one surprise, a well-known London gangster named Tim Pat Ryan.
She passed the file to Hedley in the kitchen, got a pot of tea, returned to the study and started on her computer, a recent acquisition and something with which she'd become surprisingly expert, thanks to help from an unexpected source.
She'd asked for advice from the London office of her corporation, and their computer department had jumped to attention and recommended the best. She'd mastered the basics quickly, but soon wanted more and had consulted the corporation again. The result was the arrival in South Audley Street of a strange young man in a very high-tech electric wheelchair. She'd seen him from the drawing-room window, but when she went into the hall, Hedley already had the door open.