Vagabond (12 page)

One of the police had said, ‘Hope you don’t fuck up like yesterday’s man.’

Another had said, ‘He was a pretty poor specimen.’

Danny Curnow hadn’t answered. He was given overalls, too large, and wellingtons. The rucksack was hoisted onto Sebastian’s shoulders. There was true darkness, no moon, and lights in the distance were pinpricks. There was only the wind in the trees for company. The dogs prowled, offspring probably of the ones he had been wary of years ago.

They had made good time, and first light would have been rising behind O’Neill’s fortress. If the fire had been lit then the door would open soon. He could picture the boy as he had been, and seemed to hear him now: a child’s voice, shrill with fury, which carried across the fields. Dusty had said to him,
He’ll be a problem
 . . . They waited for him to appear, for the target to show himself.

She met Bentinick at the coffee machine. He was senior enough to have a ‘woman Friday’ for paperwork, administration and hot drinks, but he preferred to do his own fetching and carrying. Gaby Davies had thought herself one of the first on the fourth floor to be in at that hour. She still had her coat on; he wore his suit trousers and waistcoat, his tie fractionally loose at the collar. She thought that more a statement than for comfort. It was difficult for Gaby to remember when she had been on that floor before him. She wondered how he would have been on a crowded commuter train, sardine tight, and how he would have been at his home – it was known that he had a wife but no one had met her. She managed a short smile. ‘Morning, Matthew.’

‘Good morning to you, Gabrielle.’

He did not have to look at his watch or allow an eyebrow to flicker. So obvious that he’d already achieved half a day’s work: why did he have to lord it over the rest of them? She hadn’t slept well: she’d gone to bed late and hungry because she’d been sorting out accommodation and liaison. Bentinick’s light had still been on when she’d gone along the corridor with its dimmed lights: she’d remembered reading in a biography of Mussolini that the Duce had ensured bulbs burned late in the government offices at Piazza Veneto so the gullible public would believe in the sincerity of Fascist endeavours.

‘We’ll fly out on the last scheduled one, the Joe and me, Czech Air. I’ve booked BA for you and the hired hand. Right?’

‘Thank you.’

‘When do I have the pleasure of meeting him?

‘A bit later – not sure.’

‘Where is he? In the building with his head in a file? Not much he needs to know, other than to do what he’s told. Sorry, when do I get him up to speed?’

‘Soon.’

The dispenser had finished the last of its dribble. The coffee was a disgrace.

‘Well, is he here?’

‘Putting himself in the picture nearby. The mocha is tolerable.’

He turned away. The corridor was quiet.

She said, ‘It’ll be a good one, Matthew.’

‘Of course it will. A big catch and a team led by a top player going for his throat.’

There was that brief smile again. He was one of those men who had iron tips on his shoes, and his footsteps echoed.

‘You can learn to love me, Mr Exton, or you can hate me. Your choice.’

The clothes he needed were laid out on the bed, with a plain envelope that contained the airline ticket. Ralph Exton always packed carefully.

‘You see, Mr Exton, because of what you’ve done – and the company you’re keeping – I can either be friendly or I metaphorically break every bone in your body.’

He was less likely, these days, to find his shirts ironed and folded in the airing cupboard. More likely he would return home and they’d be on wire hangers over a radiator. Four should be enough. Money was the problem – or lack of it. The world of successful deals seemed to have slipped past him. He was down to cigarettes. Few commodities were lower in the food chain. Didn’t everybody do it? Perhaps, but not everybody did it by the lorryload from the south of Spain to the Galician coast, and not everybody transhipped to a trawler at dead of night. He’d been down in Puerto Banús on the coast, and at the time he dealt in Transit-van loads. He’d had a drink with his local contact who dealt with the money and the transport, in an Irish bar, when the contact had introduced him to two Irishmen, decent enough fellows.

‘I don’t want any misunderstandings. You work for us, Mr Exton, or you rot in gaol. You can do yourself a favour or get to know the intricacies of prison life.’

Enough socks for a week, a pair of stout shoes, and some handkerchiefs . . . She was at a coffee party where plastic kitchen boxes, underwear or time shares were being flogged . . . It had gone rather well for a year. He had begun to believe that the sun shone on him, and there was a bit more money in his wallet, and Fliss’s purse, and a bit more of the debt was paid off. Then he’d been summoned to a police station: he didn’t recall going through a red light and was usually careful about speed limits. He hadn’t connected it with the monthly runs of cigarettes to the south of Ireland, and hadn’t been told to bring a solicitor. He had gone with a child’s innocence to the enquiries desk and given his name.

‘Ignorance, Mr Exton, is no defence in a court of law. You would find that both the judiciary and the public would have minimal sympathy for a cheap little crook who lines his pockets with a percentage of the profits used to subsidise terrorism. That is having blood on your hands.’

He had been left to cool his heels in a reception area, among vandals and wife-beaters, and was there long enough to become apprehensive. Then his name had been called. He’d been led through doors, most of them locked and needing punch codes, to an interview room. It stank – disinfectant, urine, vomit – and the windows were clouded glass in concrete fittings. The table was Formica-covered, and the light was protected with a grille. He had sat on a hard chair facing the table and another chair in front of him was empty. He was watched from the door. Eventually he’d heard the approach of steel-shod shoes. A mobile had rung. A crisp answer:
Yes, it’s Matthew. Speak, please
. A half-minute later, the footsteps had reached the door and the constable watching him had stood aside.

The man who came in wore a suit, with a gold watch chain draped across the waistcoat. A young woman had followed him. When the man, Matthew, had realised they were short of a chair he had flicked his fingers in annoyance and the constable had reacted. They’d sat and faced him. The girl had rooted in a bag and produced the file with the pictures – guys he used to meet in Puerto Banús, others he did business with in London, in a pub north of the Emirates stadium, and some he hooked up with in a bar off Galway’s Flood Street. She laid the police mug shots on top of the covert pictures, then a sheet detailing allegiances and criminal convictions. Matthew had let her outline their membership of Real IRA, and the time they’d done. Ralph Exton could remember to this day how the shabby little interview room had seemed cold and dark. Nothing to say, and there hadn’t seemed much point in denying what was on the table.

‘They pay you a percentage. With the rest they keep their murderous campaign from collapse. What’s it to be, Mr Exton? Are you on board or jumping ship?’

His washbag went into the case. His pyjamas followed.

He had numbly nodded agreement. She had produced a sheet of paper with two lines committing him to co-operation: he had signed and dated it on 1 April 2009. He was the ‘fool’. He’d said to Fliss he’d be in Reading for a meeting then might do some shopping – he needed a couple of shirts. She’d known he’d be out all afternoon. Next morning, when she’d gone early to the supermarket, he had been at home, still shaken from the previous afternoon’s experience and twitching with tension. He had made their bed and a condom wrapper had fallen to the carpet. She often seemed to forget to take her pill and kept a supply of condoms in the drawer on her side, but they hadn’t done it for a fortnight, or three weeks. It hadn’t seemed important at the time. He hadn’t seen Matthew again, but the woman had been Gaby and they’d met at least once a month for the past five years. He reckoned he could run rings round her, if he had to.

‘Don’t think to play fast and loose with me, Mr Exton, or you’ll find I have a short temper and am not pleasant when crossed.’

He threw in a couple of ties because that was Timofey Simonov’s image of an Englishman. Who terrorised him most? Gaby, or the people up the hill when there had been deep fog and no back-up? He zipped the case and heard the drill whine. Hard bastards: they’d have used the drill, might have enjoyed it.

He’d done the fire. In most houses the woman did it, but Malachy Riordan had made the fire for his mother, and when he’d married Bridie he had continued to lay and light it. The house then would be quiet around him, and he’d listen as the boy, Oisin, struggled for breath. He was relied upon. Brennie Murphy, Bridie’s uncle, talked of strategies but had no idea how a mercury tilt switch should be handled and didn’t understand the way a bullet travelled across four hundred metres of open moorland and how the wind affected its trajectory. He would think and plan. He would try to imagine where the surveillance would be, where there was weakness, and how to use what he had.

The fire burned well and the peat smelt sickly sweet and raw.

There were two boys, Kevin and Pearse, aged twenty and eighteen. Kevin’s father had been a volunteer in the eighties, had done time, then gone to England and was last heard of on building sites in Glasgow. He sent no money to his family. Pearse had a child’s face and a child’s body, and seemed so anxious to demonstrate commitment. There were others who lived in Coalisland, and in the villages north of Castlecaulfield, and men in Stewartstown and Cookstown, but the pressure on the Organisation was fierce. Most men that he could call out spent half of every day looking over their shoulders for police tails. He liked the boys, accepted their youth and inexperience. There was a pipe bomb in the barn, a target and an opportunity. Could he give it to them? Could they do it if he wasn’t there? There was an opportunity to hit the O’Kane house on the Pomeroy road on Wednesday, because it was the mother’s birthday and her Catholic policeman son, Eamonn, would be down from Belfast. His car could be hit. Were Kevin and Pearse capable? Should the opportunity be let go?

She brought him tea. He smelt cooking. He heard her go up the stairs to wake and dress the boy. Oisin would never be a fighter, as his father was, as his grandfather had been. Oisin would not match him at that age. Neither were those boys equal to how he had been. Was either Kevin or Pearse able enough? They were the future, not the old bastards who stayed in the bar, talking of great days – and had capitulated.

He would not be there. He would be on foreign territory with people he didn’t know. The knot was back in his shoulders. He stood, stretched, and went to fetch more peat blocks. The dogs greeted him.

Sebastian said, in Danny Curnow’s ear, ‘He’s the most capable they have in East Tyrone and Mid-Ulster. Each of the active areas requires a strong leadership personality. That matters more than the ideology. When the full weight of the Provisionals had mobilised in their day they had an internal structure of discipline, which was rarely challenged.’

He allowed the man to talk. Patronising, but well meant.

‘What counts now is charisma. I’m told he has it. Of course, we’ve contacts among men who killed and bombed before the ceasefire, and who’ve taken another path. Now we throw money at them to keep them on it, but they all speak well of him. There are men in the former Special Branch who knew and respected him before his twenty-first birthday.’

He wasn’t a big man, but he had the strong shoulders Danny would have expected of a young man growing up on a farm; his mother had been widowed when he was a child so he’d have heaved bales, sacks, buckets and jerry cans. Mousy hair, inclining to fair, a tanned face.

‘I’ve studied him, he’s in my sector, but I’ve never been in a position to linger on him. I’ve seen camera work, from the last gear we put in – that tree-trunk in the hedge by the lane gate. It ran for three days and we saw him a couple of times. The last day there was a view of him striding towards it with a chain-saw – God knows how he knew. He cut down the tree at the ground. You were at Gough so you’ll remember the wall round it. He parked on the pavement, close to the security cameras, near the gatehouse sentry bunker, and lobbed the camera over the wall, as if he was giving it back to us. We had that on camera too. Some in the county detest the agreement and the way the old IRA has gone into government, but they say they’re not ready to resume armed struggle. He’s trying to locate those in the community who don’t buy into that. He has to find the ones who’ll put life and liberty on the line. Nobody wants to come out of the shadows and hook up with a loser, but if there are new rifles, armour-piercing stuff, explosives and detonators, the recruits will show. Just so you understand where we are, Danny, it’s not like the old days here. I can’t sign up a hairy-arsed lunatic, with a big mouth, and put a rifle in his hand. We’d be charged with conspiracy to murder. It just doesn’t happen . . . We have five hundred people from Five living here and we’re on the back foot. We regard him as a prime enemy.’