Vagabond (9 page)

The mobile was always switched off when Danny was travelling. Dusty had lectured him about it. ‘If your phone’s off, you’re out of contact. What happens if the trip gets cancelled?’ Often enough, Dusty had fielded the look that almost, still, frightened him. The phone would stay switched off. Danny Curnow could be reached at his hotel.

It had been a good day and he’d intended to get the grouting done that afternoon. The minibus was gone and he could smell lunch cooking in the kitchen. The phone had rung and Lisette had brought it to him. She’d shrugged when he’d asked who it was and passed it to him. He had wiped the sealant from his hands and . . . it was like a great dark cloud had killed the light. He’d known the voice.

He’d damn near stood with his heels together and back straight to answer him.

The clock turned back. The pages restored to a rip-off calendar. No introduction, just the crisp voice.

‘I’m assuming that’s Dusty. Am I right?’

He had not shown deference to any man in more than a dozen years. ‘Yes, sir, it is. Yes, Mr Bentinick, it’s Dusty Miller.’

Where was Desperate?

‘He won’t be answering his mobile, Mr Bentinick. Later he’ll be at his hotel, the Ibis in Dunkirk. Right now you won’t get him because he’ll be having his supper, on the place Jean Bart. In the morning, he’s on the move with clients. Would you like me to tell him you called, Mr Bentinick?’

‘Don’t bother, Dusty. It’ll be a nice surprise for him when I catch up with him.’

There was a pause on the line. Dusty could have sworn he heard gulls shrieking.

If Mr Bentinick had come into the Ready Room, Dusty had always gone to attention, as if at a drill sergeant’s instruction. If Mr Bentinick had offered praise he’d always gone weak at the knees.

‘Yes, sir. Right, sir.’

He thought the world had caved in.

The plane, twin-engine propeller, was at the Louis Blériot airport.

Matthew Bentinick told the pilot, pleasant young fellow – and he’d made a good fist of the cross winds coming in – how long he thought he would be. The tower had called for a taxi to take him into Dunkirk. He knew the pilot had the hours available and gave him a destination for when they took off again so that a routing could be prepared and the necessary fuel taken on.

A desolate place, and there was no cover as he waited outside the building for the car to pitch up. Birds screamed and flew low over the runway. He thought it would have taken any of the new intake who currently flooded Thames House around a week to locate his man, but the Dragon had warmed to the job. In three hours, she’d produced phone numbers and an address, a street view of a property in Caen, the names of the owners, and the cross reference to Sword Tours: closed for the evening, but their on-line brochure said the tour started the next day in Dunkirk. He drew euros and had authorisation for the aircraft hire, using a firm operating from Northolt to the west of London.

An idiot must have thrown some takeaway food onto the grass beside the step on which he waited. The gulls were like bats from hell, ferocious. He didn’t think he faced a problem. Bentinick never anticipated failure, didn’t countenance it – from himself or subordinates. Excitement flushed in him: he had set in motion a process that would draw in others, some he controlled, others who were allies and a few targets – some he knew and others he did not. It always bred in him a degree of exhilaration. The car came. He gave the address he wanted.

She could have turned heads but did not. She had been told by those who directed her that she should dress down and rarely be noticed. She wore jeans that were ragged at the ankles and knees, shapeless trainers, T-shirts that disguised the shape of her body, and her hair was dragged into a ponytail. The anorak could have come from a charity shop. No makeup, no jewellery. At her home, high up the Malone road, an artery coming into Belfast’s centre, she was a source of frustration to her parents: her father managed a bank branch and her mother exercised influence in the Department of the Environment, specialising in Heritage. They would have liked their only child to demonstrate greater ambition and hunt harder for a meaningful career. Frances McKinney, aged twenty-four and with a degree in modern history from Queen’s, should have challenged herself.

Her mobile trilled in her bag, which it shared with two MBA textbooks –
Legal Environments
and
Ethical Law
– a notepad and her laptop.

Frankie was with the four Enniskillen girls: Protestants by inherited faith. She would have called herself ‘lapsed Catholic’, and in the new Ireland – north and south – there were enough of them. Most nights they were out. It could be the Fly, the Sultan’s Grill, the Elms or the subsidised bar at the union: the Elms did a plate of food and a pint for five pounds. One girl’s father was an orthopaedic consultant and another’s had a string of Mercedes showrooms in Belfast and up the north-east coast. There was money, and Frankie rarely had to dig deep in her purse. The other girls had sucked in a story of family poverty and her scholarship to a grammar school on the Ligoneil Road. They were good kids, liked to party and enjoyed her company – she made them laugh and could drink with them without falling over. They knew so little about her.

Frankie had been a good catch because she was a ‘clean skin’, had never featured in police files.

Her family knew nothing of their daughter’s allegiance. They would have been classified by psephologists as in the catchment of moderate nationalists harbouring no sympathy for the Provisionals and the thirty-year war. They would have had, and shared with their social circles, a horror of violence, a refusal to consider that the ‘gun’ might influence the ‘path of politics’. The bigotry in the city was an affront to decency, they’d chorus, and sectarianism as repellent as black-shirt Fascism.

Frankie fooled her parents, living in the big brick detached home high up the Malone road, her friends, with whom she shared a terrace house, and her lecturers, who thought her a fair prospect for a master’s.

With her ‘clean skin’ she was confident, as were those who used her. Her contact messaged her.

She would finish her drink, then plead a headache and drift away. Her departure would not be noticed. Her contact was Maude, mother of three and supermarket check-out assistant, with no conviction for seventeen years. Maude had texted her and the code indicated urgency and a location. She felt warm under her anorak and her breathing came a little faster. She was on a road. At different stages she was tested and had not yet been found wanting. She had carried messages, minute writing on cigarette papers, and given them to men or women she had never seen before or since, passing them with brush contacts. She had done the difficult business of taking car-registration details from vehicles exiting Palace Barracks at Holywood, she had moved pistols from one side of the city to the other – west to east. She had switched money. Most recently she had been called up to the Sperrins, where she had met men and one woman, tramped in the bog while the rain had pelted them and fired four shots on single with an assault weapon. The impact of the recoil had been better, almost, than anything she’d experienced before. She had been lectured in the causes of blockages and the remedies, and afterwards had soothed the bruises on her shoulder with witch-hazel. Frankie had not failed at anything asked of her.

She knew that the next time they called her it would be for a mission of importance. ‘Sorry, guys. My mother hasn’t been well. I have to bug out. Don’t drink the place dry – well, not without me.’

Frankie left them in the crowded bar to talk of lecture schedules, job fairs and men they fancied. She went into the night to meet her contact.

She would never have complained. Bridie Riordan was Brennie Murphy’s niece. The relationships on the mountain slopes, in the small villages and among isolated farms, were tribal. Blood, and loyalty from fighting and suffering together, bound the families. She was the same age as Malachy and they had been married for nine years. In that time she had never argued with him over what he did. He would slip from the house when darkness had fallen and would sometimes drive away down the lane or head for the hedgerows and ditches in any direction from the farmhouse. She never reproached him when he returned – no explanation – in the small hours, smelling of strong soap and shampoo. She never took issue with him.

Explanations came with the dawn. Bridie Riordan, an uncomplicated woman with rich auburn hair and a solid frame from hard outdoors work, would hear the radio news at six thirty. A half-hour after the bulletin had announced an attack by gunfire or an explosion, the police would come: armoured Land Rovers from which they would spill with their guns. She’d the habit of opening the front door to remove their excuse for breaking it down. It happened each time, and Malachy was a principal target. She’d say quietly, at the door, to the first one in, ‘One of your cars with a wheel punctured, and it’s Malachy that did it?’ or ‘Angry, are you, that one of you’s alarm didn’t go off and that’s Malachy’s fault?’ One day they’d smack her, but they hadn’t yet.

The men from Serious Crime knew their way through the house, up the staircase and into the main bedroom, which had the view across the fields and down the slope towards the Pomeroy road, Donaghmore and Dungannon. He’d be out of bed by the time they came in, his hands would be on his head – no justification for them to belt him with their sticks. He’d be allowed to dress – taunted as ‘Fenian vermin’ – then cuffed, taken downstairs and out through the door. He never looked back at her, as if that might be seen as his weakness. He’d be driven to the crime suite at Antrim. Other officers would stay longer to bag up clothing and look for mobiles, pens and pads of paper, which they would check for the indentation of writing on the top blank sheets. She had to stay strong, and did. She had the impression that the detectives and the forensics teams harboured a degree of respect for her, maybe for Malachy too. They never abused Oisin, now seven, and she’d get him ready for school. They’d work around her and the boy as she dressed and fed him. A woman would search her before she was allowed to take him to the primary down the hill, but by then, each time, they’d seemed to know that – again – they would find no evidence. A year ago, Bridie had seen a big-built constable, sixteen stone or more, down on his knees in the boy’s bedroom doing Lego with him. It didn’t make her soften to them, never would, not while there was breath in her body. They’d only one question for her: had her husband been with her through that night? Her answer, each time: where else would he be?

They could hold him for seven days. He’d come home, flop in his chair, and the crime suite at Antrim was never mentioned, or what they’d asked him in interrogation. She was Brennie Murphy’s niece and understood the struggle, that the Five people from the Palace Barracks at Holywood could put in people to do a close target recce, then a detailed target recce: every phone in the house, every power socket and every light fitting, every item such as a TV or a toaster or the power points in the barns where the haulage trucks were, might have been used as the source for an audio bug. They lived with it.

Bridie had known Malachy Riordan all her life. She knew him as shy and reserved, seldom messing about as other kids did, but deep and distant – and at thirteen he had killed a man: her uncle had told her. She knew about ‘touts’ – any thirteen-year-old did, boy or girl. Years before, Mossie Nugent had touted on the mountain and been nutted; his wife still lived there, alone and shunned. She knew, and everyone knew, that the Loughgall Eight had been fingered by a tout before their murder at the hands of special forces. She knew, and everyone knew, that Malachy’s father, Padraig Riordan, had been killed because an informer had said where he would be and in which ditch the bomb was to be put. Her uncle, Brennie Murphy, had likely told thirteen-year-old Malachy who had given the information for cash. She knew: Aidan had driven a delivery van that took bread to the small stores in the villages either side of the Pomeroy road. He had been trusted and sometimes ferried weapons. It had been five years later that her uncle had told Malachy. He had gone to the buildings at the back, had taken a sledgehammer that had been his father’s, had walked across the fields for at least an hour to the man’s bungalow. He had waited in the shadows beyond the back door for Aidan to come out for a last cigarette, loosen his zip and piss in the grass, and had hit him with the sledgehammer in the back of the skull. Aidan had gone down and been hit again and again. He had been hit so often that his own wife had barely recognised him.

Malachy had gone home across the fields and along the trails in the bracken above the pastures that the cattle and sheep used. His mother had taken him in, stripped him bare, scrubbed him in hot water and burned his clothing in the incinerator. She had buried the killing weapon under several feet of rotting cattle manure. They had come to the house, which was now her home, the next morning. The incinerator was cold and the teenager’s body gave up no evidence. In the presence of an ‘appropriate adult’ he had claimed to the detectives questioning him that he had gone to bed early with a cold and had been there all night. They had known, of course, and he had been marked down as ‘significant’ and would be until he made the error that would convict him or laid himself open to the treachery of an informer or was shot dead.