Bren watched.
Hobbes blanched.
Cathy explained.
"It's what has to be done. There isn't another alternative…"
They were in Hobbes' house, they had driven to that privileged community on the north County Down coast. They were in the kitchen at the back of the house and through the picture window were the small lights of coastal freighters in the Belfast Lough. The sink was piled high with the plates and cooking dishes that would stay there until the
'daily' came in the next morning. The table was littered with used glasses from the dinner table and finished bottles and emptied ice boxes. The smell in the kitchen was that of vindaloo sauce. Hobbes' guests were still in the dining room, and Bren could hear their laughter.
Bren thought that Cathy cared not a damn that she had disturbed Hobbes' dinner party.
"It'll take the flak off him. It'll give him a breathing space. He was thinking on his feet, really well. If he hadn't been sharp then he was in for the hood and the bullet. It's just that he's too good to lose…"
It was where they all lived, the best and the brightest of the British administration seconded to Northern Ireland, in the big houses in the little lanes that led down to the beaches and rock shores of the Lough.
It was the area of the cruising R.U.C. cars and the security cameras and the multiple alarm systems. It was the territory of the Assistant Under-Secretaries and the Senior Principal Executive Officers, and it was reckoned to be beyond the reach of the arm of the Provisional Irish Republican Army. Where there were good golf courses and good squash complexes mid good restaurants, and good expenses to pick up the tabs. The drink was in them, the first and the finest, and their chatter and joking bayed from the dining room into the kitchen that was harsh lit by the neon strip.
"I think he's stronger now that Siobhan's alongside. If we can steer him through these next few days, if we can deflect them, then we've saved him. It's that important. I want to let it run, Mr Hobbes."
Bren watched.
Hobbes cleared the dregs at the bottom of each bottle on the kitchen table, poured them into a used glass, drank fast and the red wine dribbled from the side of his mouth.
Cathy stood solidly in the centre of the kitchen, arms folded across her chest, stared at him, dared him to refuse her.
He was rocking on his heels. Bren thought him in shock. It was Hobbes' decision. Bren thought he had the right to be in shock. The decision wouldn't wait on a carefully drafted paper, nor a committee, nor could the decision hang in the air for a week's reflection. There was none of the arrogance he had seen in Hobbes before. Hobbes was pale, breathing too fast, drinking too quickly. He thought Cathy had been brilliant, and he thanked God, which for him was not often, that he was just the bystander. He thought Cathy had been brilliant because she had simply, clearly, laid out the facts and then driven them home, a hammer on a nail head. There had been no panic, less emotion. The facts were so simple. It was Mossie Nugent's life, Song Bird's life
… it was Patsy Riordan's death, a nothing kid's death. There was no escape for Hobbes.
She played for life and she played for death. Bren did not know where she found the strength.
Hobbes said, "You give me no choice."
Cathy said, "Thank you."
Hobbes said, "I feel like I want to throw up."
Cathy said, "Please yourself, Mr Hobbes."
Hobbes said, "It's just a fucking awful job."
Cathy said, "And hand wringing won't make it a better job."
Hobbes swayed as he led them into the hall. Once he grasped the bottom of the banister rail. They passed the open dining-room door.
The laughter and the conversation cut. Bren saw the eyes peering at them through the doorway. The men wore suits, the women were dressed well. He thought that some of them round the dinner table would have known, in general terms, what was Hobbes' work, and they would have been curious. They would have allowed their imagination to let rip at the reason for the young man and the young woman, casual and scruffed, who had taken their host from the table and into the kitchen. It was a real war, that sort of crap, that intruded into a private dinner party, Bren thought it was that sort of shit. Hobbes let them stand in the hall, and he went into the living room that was well furnished by government procurement standards, and he pushed a small chest aside, near the fireplace, and exposed the wall safe. He took a key from his pocket and unlocked the safe and took out a thin envelope, passed it to Cathy. He relocked the safe and heaved the chest back, flush to the wall again.
He had no more to say.
Hobbes showed them to the door.
They walked off down the drive under the brightness of the security lights.
Cathy chuckled, "He's going to be a ball of fire the rest of the evening, the life and soul of the party."
Bren stopped at the car. It had welled in him. "What you do, don't you care?"
"Christ's sake, it's not a big decision. It's not strategic. It doesn't have to go to Curzon Street or up to Cabinet. It's just day in day.. listen, young man, you are just a little cog, so am I. East Tyrone, Song Bird, just one operation running here, and over each hill there's another.
What we do doesn't win the war, maybe it stops us losing it a little.
Learn, young man, that you're not the centre of the universe… That curry he'd done, smelt revolting.’’
There was just the wind in the roof and the singing at the telephone wire and the beat of the rain on the windows.
Her head was in the crook of his arm.
She whispered in his ear.
He lay rigid on his back and it was as if there was a coldness over his body.
"She was just wonderful. She was great. There's no side to her. She said that I wasn't to be worrying, that I was to leave everything to her.
Funny word she used, she said that 1 wasn't to 'fret'. 'I'll take care of everything,' that's what she said. She said that I was to trust her. She's a lovely way with words, that one. She said the children looked so good
…"
"What's she going to do?"
"Just said that you'd be safe, that was her promise."
"Did you give out to her?"
"I did not." Siobhan whispered, "I trust her."
She heard the bitter wheeze of his voice. "She hooked you, like she hooked me, the bitch."
To Rennie it was a madness. Anyone else, anyone who was not Cathy Parker, would have had short shrift from his tongue. He was on his doorstep and the wind blew leaves into the hallway behind him, and the rain spattered the legs of his pyjamas below his dressing gown. The bell had woken his wife, disturbed his daughters, and he had taken his pistol down the staircase with him and held it ready to shoot before he had identified her through his spyhole. She looked half drowned. The young fellow was behind her but with his shoulders turned away as if he guarded her back. It was a madness to come banging on doors when the clock in his hall showed past midnight. No one else, only Cathy. ..
He'd have had the skin off the back of any of his own men who had come and kept a finger on the bell until his whole family was shaken from sleep. He didn't argue. He wanted them gone. He agreed. A long time ago, before her nerve had gone, his wife had bred dogs for showing. Such a long time ago, before the present phase of the war had started, before he had gone into Special Branch, before it had become unsafe for him to walk alone in the fields and woodlands close to where they lived with their labradors. It would have been insane now, just as it had been for twenty years. It was the price he paid, that the dogs were gone. It was the price his wife had paid, ever since their home had been invaded by a scumbag with an automatic rifle. There was a phrase from those days, such a long time ago, when he walked the labradors and his wife took them to shows. The jet-black bitch, dead now, had been called by a vet their alpha female. The top bitch who could quieten a flood of puppies with a growl… He thought Cathy was the alpha female. He listened to her, and he saw the way that the young fellow watched her back, the one with the idiot name. She was top bitch and the way he looked at her, it was obvious that the silly bastard was soft on her.
Rennie said, "I will make the calls, I will go back to bed, I will try to get to sleep, and I will see you tomorrow. Now, please, piss off…"
If he had been the young fellow's age then he might have been soft himself on the alpha female, bloody nuisance woman.
He was still up when the message was received on the secure teleprinter line.
He was often up, prowling the barracks far into the morning's small hours.
When he had first come to the province, two decades earlier, as a young lieutenant, then it had been the day of military rule. Now, in his eighth tour of duty, the accent had shifted. It was the time now of police primacy. The message on the battalion teleprinter was not a request but a requirement that he provide back-up for an operation the following morning. His third and fourth tours had seen the change of emphasis and he could remember the resentment that all soldiers had felt then. By now, it was accepted.
Colonel Johnny spent much of the night drifting between his Operations Room and his office and the Mess where there was coffee on tap. So much of his operational work was carried out under the cover of darkness. More patrols, more roadblocks, more surveillance teams at night than during the day. He lived in a twilight world of dozed sleep and catnapped rest. Because the tasking for the morning was a requirement and not a request, he immediately set about the orders. He noted the name of the suspect and where he was to be arrested. He studied the police plan. He was to provide protection. Even in daylight there was the need for great vigilance. Colonel Johnny had learned that of Altmore, always to take every possible care. Two sections to be in position before dawn. The first section that would be to the north of the pick-up block would have the heavy machine gun, the second section on the lower ground to the south would have the 66 mm anti-tank missile launcher. He had the Night Duty Officer bring him the photographs of the crossroads where the arrest would be made.
He was always thorough. Colonel Johnny could not tolerate the military funerals that were the mark of commanders who were not thorough.
When the two sections had gone, tramped out of the barracks into the darkness laden with their weaponry and their signals equipment, he could wonder why an operation was to be mounted at such short notice to lift a kid who hardly figured on his Intelligence Officer's files. But within ten minutes of his two sections disappearing from the barracks' lights he was asleep in his office, splayed out on the sofa dreaming of deer to be stalked, grouse to be driven, peace.
"I'm dead," she said.
Bren thought that he ought to have offered to drive. There was little traffic on the road, but he turned to look at her face when the next car approached them. She was pale as marble in the lights of the oncoming car.
"Where are we?"
"Near to my place…"
"I'll get a taxi."
She stifled her yawn. "Taxis take for ever this time of night."
"Then I'll…"
"Bed down at mine," Cathy said.
The next car rushing towards them, and he looked at her again. She was expressionless, impassive. And the light was gone fast from her face. He shifted in his seat, awkward. She drove fast. There were no police roadblocks, no military checkpoints. He wondered if it had been like this for his predecessor, the man who had been compromised and withdrawn. She had the heating on in the car and the all-night radio station was playing quietly. It was Jim Reeves on the radio and that was about right for Ulster in its time warp. Wondering all the time that she drove, wondering whether she was just lonely, wondering whether he would just be a fix or a different hypodermic. She turned off a side road. She headed through the opened gates and pulled up outside a two-storey block of modern flats. She leaned across him and her elbow brushed his knee and she took her personal radio from the glove compartment and tucked the pistol from under her thighs into her jeans.
Bren fumbled the door handle before he could get the lever in his fingers. He hurried round the back of the car and opened her door for her. When she was out of the car and locking her door then it was so obvious that she was vulnerable. So small, so huddled in the vastness of her anorak. He walked into the building a pace behind her. The gold of her hair was in front of him. He thought she was so precious and he was afraid to touch her. It was a smart block, well decorated. Up a flight of stairs. Her door had a spyhole that was too low for him, right for her height. He didn't know when he should touch her. Two locks, two keys.
The lights flooded on in front of her after she opened the heavy door.
She walked inside and Bren followed her.
"It's not bad…"
She pointed to the wide, three-seat sofa.
"… I'll get you a pillow and a blanket."
Cathy was away across the room and a door closed behind her. He sat on the sofa. He could have laughed and he could have wept. She wasn't lonely, didn't need a fix from him. She was just too tired to drive all the way down the bloody Malone Road and drop him off. His head was in his hands. He might have kissed the back of her head while she was opening the door… He might have slipped his arms round her in the moment before she had switched on the lights. What would she have done, if he had touched her? Probably she'd have kicked his kneecaps off.
Bren sat on the sofa and took off his shoes, and he slipped off his anorak and dragged off his sweater.
He reached into the pocket of his anorak and took out his Browning pistol and detached the magazine from the stock and cleared the breech.
He waited, good little patient boy, for MissPaker to bring him his pillow and blanket.
She came through the internal door with a pillow and a tartan blanket.
She wore a blue towelling dressing gown.
"You alright…?"
"I'm fine…"
"Sorry, did you want something to eat?"
"No."
"Sorry again, did you want the bathroom?"
"After you."
And he hated himself because it was just bloody, bloody, obvious that she was tired. He stood. She put the pillow in place. She bent to arrange the blanket for him. She made it into a sleeve. She was bent over the sofa and the dressing gown gaped and he could see the white bulge of her breasts and he thought she was naked under the dressing gown. She might have only slapped his face, if he had touched her, she might have softened into his arms. No way of knowing…
"Thank you," Bren said.
There was an envelope in her hand, the one that Hobbes had taken from his wall safe.
"Let me know what you think of that," Cathy said.
Before her door closed behind her, she had shown him the bathroom and told him where in the kitchen he could find a drink.
He forced himself to read what was in the envelope.
Should have kissed the back of her head… The paper was from Ernest Wilkins. The paper was headed DONNELLY J. The paper was the minute of a meeting in London and called for input from Belfast.
Should have been kissing the tiredness from her… but in his mind was the view of a farmhouse, seen from the ground with the magnification of binoculars, seen from the height of Altmore mountain.
He was woken by the street-cleaning wagon. Still dark in his room except for the slash of orange light between the curtains from the high sodium lamps on the pavement. Jon Jo had not been asleep more than two hours. It was always difficult for him to sleep at the London house. The bastard was that the sleep was broken and had been so long in coming. After the street-cleaning wagon had gone, moved on, he lay on his back and stared at the ceiling light. When he could not sleep, when he was in London, then his thoughts of the country and the mountain that was his were at their keenest. Little Kevin and Attracta should have been in his picture. But they swam around him. They wore their work-day suits, they carried rolled umbrellas and bags of tools and attache cases. They were decked out in their school uniforms, they gripped their lunch boxes, and their satchels were slung from their shoulders. They were all round him in the brightness of their frocks for the shop floor and their severer skirts and coats for the office. They were the school children, they were the girls and the men and women heading into the capital city. He could see clearly the railway station that was around them. He could not see their faces.
They were the faces of the enemy, and they were hidden from him. He saw what they wore and what they carried and they were always beside the rubbish bin at the end of the ticket windows. Each man was beside the rubbish bin, each child, each girl or woman. They were his enemy… He was in London because those in Dublin believed he could hate the men and the children and the girls and the women who swam past the red rubbish bin. Holy God, a flash of light, a rumble of thunder… a torrent of shrapnel and glass splinters… a screaming, crying, calling… Holy God… He lay on his back, there was the sound of the night street in his ears, there were the shapes without faces of the men and the children and the girls and the women in his eyes.
He had never wondered it before, whether he could hate enough.
The foxes fled from the dawn and sought the safety of their dens.
The owls took shelter in the wind-racked barns.
The crows flew high to find what carrion was left abandoned in the fields by predators for whom the dawn had come too soon.
In cover, under the groundsheets camouflaged by quickly pulled bracken, down in the ditches that skirted the sodden fields, two sections of troops watched the ground behind them for danger and a crossroads ahead of them for the arrival of a young man who would be waiting for a lift into Dungannon. In three cars, and in a van, were the men who had not slept through the gone night, and they hacked their cigarettes' muck from their throats, and swore at the cold, and watched the bungalow and the house as they had been told, and talked quietly of their homes in Lurgan town and Armagh city and south County Down and north County Antrim and west Tyrone and east Derry.
It was the man who brought the milk who told the priest. Pius Blaney told the priest that there were strangers in cars and a van on the mountain lanes. Pius Blaney told the priest, as he checked his bill and paid it in cash, that there were strangers, not soldiers and not police, out on Altmore. He took the change that was pecked from Pius Blaney's old leather purse, he pocketed the receipt, he closed the door on Pius Blaney. It was what he had expected, that there would be a tout hunt through his parish, that strangers would come in to ferret out a victim.
The priest knew of no help that he could find. He could have walked or driven to the home of the O.C. or the Quartermaster or the Intelligence Officer. He knew them all, and knew also that his capacity to intervene was negligible. They would all be beyond argument, beyond faith, all except the one who was doomed to die for informing. In the fair isle, in Ireland, it had never been different. He could pray, and his prayers would be uttered in the certainty that a tout's life would not be saved.
Mossie drove away from the bungalow.
In the back of his car were his ladders and tins and dust sheets and brushes.
He did not see it at first. He was halfway to Dungannon before he could be certain that the car twenty yards behind him was tailing him.
He had pulled into a lay-by where the council workers stored grit for the frosts, and the car had not come past him.
He was uncomfortable in his seat. The bleeper was strapped with tape to the inside of his thigh.
A cold sweat on him as he drove, each time he looked into his mirror and saw the tailing car. He was afraid, but always with the fear was the coursing excitement. He could live with the fear, he could not live without the excitement. The excitement was his fuel.. . Mossie Nugent was the big man. Mossie Nugent was important. The bitch she needed him… The car followed him down into Dungannon town.
Beyond her land, climbing the slope, were the Mahoneys' fields. They were the old couple that Attracta hardly saw. They ran sheep and a few beef cattle. They went once a week to the shop. Their lives were for themselves. Their kids were gone, married and working on the mainland. The Mahoneys were a part of the land, but they had cut themselves off from the community. The bracken was creeping back onto their land and the gorse clumps were thicker.
She walked up the lane with an apple pie and a loaf of soda bread that she had baked for herself and little Kevin.
The Mahoneys would have known that her Jon Jo was away with the Organisation, and they had to have seen the military helicopters that had brought the troops and police to her home. She didn't know whether they would welcome her in, the wife of a Provo fighter, or whether they would slam the door in her face.
She walked up the lane to ask the Mahoneys if it were possible that she could graze her bullocks on their upper fields for perhaps a month She had not enough fodder to last her through the winter. Little enough grass in their fields, but enough for a month.
Attracta would not have needed to ask the favour of the Mahoneys if Jon Jo had been home, if the leaking barn roof had been repaired, if he had not lost a quarter of her winter fodder, rotted under the leak, if she had not been sharp enough to believe that her Jon Jo would never now come home.
When he had his own place, whenever, when he was allowed to move out of the bedsitter in the Malone Road, then there would be flowering bulbs in pots, herbs growing on the kitchen windowsill. There would be bookcases, piles of newspapers, pictures on the wall. One wall all cork for his "memory board": all the Marilyn pictures and especially the poster of La Monroe swathed in towels on a winter beach that he had seen in the shop behind Royal Avenue, and a thousand postcards of Old Masters, a mosaic of himself. His weights, maybe. A cat – he was certainly going to need company. When he had his own place he would engrave his mark on it. His rooms would be him. Just in case he got lost in this God-forsaken job and needed to remind himself who he had been. This room said nothing of her… if it hadn't been for Mr Wilkins' memorandum and the questions that it posed then the frustration of knowing so little about her might just have had him searching every last inch of the flat for clues. Mr Wilkins preserved his sanity.
The geography made it so obvious. A farmhouse on a hillside, and further down the whitewashed bungalow.
A farmhouse belonging to a P.I.R.A. activist and close to it was a bungalow that was the home of a P.I.R.A. activist turned informer. He didn't need a 2.1 in Modern History to sink that one in a corner pocket.
Bren folded the tartan rug. Her bedroom door was still closed. Song Bird was the solution. Mr Wilkins had to be a very great simpleton not to have cottoned on. Hobbes… well, presumably he had put it together. A little academic problem, nothing more, taking the heat off Mossie Nugent.
A little brain teaser, how to divert the pressure to Patsy Riordan.
Christ…
Nothing that Bren had done in London had prepared him for it. He had pushed paper. He had worked on the surveillance teams for the Arab desk and for the Irish desk. He had never played God. Never been detailed for that one. But he was heading that way, racing up t he ladder, volunteering for Belfast because that way lay the bright prospect of Senior Executive Officer rank. He wondered how he would have explained to his mother and father what his real world was. He might not know much about Cathy Parker, but by heaven he knew that she was strong enough for the real world..,
Christ…
He tapped on her door. No answer. More firmly. Still no answer. He thought that if he opened it, then he might just get his head blown away.
"Cathy," he said. No answer. He opened the door.
The light from the window was on her. It was another anonymous room. One bed, one wardrobe, one chest of drawers, one chair, clothes on the floor. The bed was a mattress on the floor. She had tossed the sheet and the blankets off her body. She held the pillow in her arms.
Her breasts were against the pillow, the white of her arms was around the pillow. Total calm on her face. He wanted to kneel beside the mattress and kiss the face of the woman who slept with the peace of a child. Her pistol was beside the bed on the carpet, within easy reach if she had loosed her hold on the pillow.
He left a note for her, a page torn from his notebook, on the folded tartan rug.
He was the outsider and the thought was seldom far from Detective Sergeant Joseph Browne's mind, and each time he drove towards Altmore the thought was closer. It was the same country as his home.
He was from County Derry, what D.C. McDonald would have called County Londonderry. The farmers on Altmore were the same kind as his family. On Altmore the people loathed the R.U. C
He drove up through Donaghmore and away past the old Celtic cross, the symbol of his culture.
There was a mountain behind his parents’ land with the bracken and the gorse and the heather and the wind bent trees. Being on Altmore twisted the wound. It was more than four years since he had spoken to his father. To his mother he was a cross of agony because he could no longer come home in safety, and their meetings could only be in Belfast. To his brothers he was a traitor.
D.S. Joseph Browne was the rarity in the force because he had been reared at home and educated at school as a Roman catholic. His point of contact with the man beside him, eight years older, was the job.
When they were together, when they were a car team or an interrogation pair, then the work was the only factor that linked them.
He believed himself, as the token Catholic in the Dungannon R.U.C. station Special Branch unit, to be widely resented by the Protestants and Presbyterians with whom he served. He assumed it was thought that his promotion owed as much to his religion as to his competence.
The car was armour-plated in the hope that its doors and windows could withstand an attack from high-velocity weapons, and the chassis was reinforced to protect the crew from culvert bombs. They wore their own clothes, he and D.C. McDonald, and he had a pistol in his anorak pocket and D.C. McDonald nursed a loaded Sterling under a raincoat across his knees. They had been told at what time they should reach the pick-up point. They had been shown the exact place on the map. They had been shown the photograph of the youth they were to lift. The number-plates were fresh on the day before, but that was small comfort because the way the armour weighted down the car on its tyres said more than a new set of number-plates.
It was what he had wanted to do.
Bloody-minded, opinionated, stubborn, he knew himself to be all of those when he had told his family that he was accepted into the R.U.C., and his father had left the room, and his mother had cried, and his brothers had thrown their abuse at him.
He had made a frightened misery of their lives, and that he had not intended.
He slowed the car. It was a feck-awful place to be hanging about.
They were at the crossroads, where the lanes running between the high hedges met. The relief sighed in D.C. McDonald's teeth. The youth had appeared, had walked round the corner, ambling without a care, his work tools in the bag on his shoulder. He had been told the area around the crossroads was stiff with army; if they were there he couldn't see them. He reversed hard into a side lane, and then as the youth came past him he pulled out again facing the way that he had come.
"Patsy Riordan?"
"Who wants to know?"
D.C. McDonald flashed his card and there was the barrel ol the Sterling to reinforce it.
"It's R.U.C."
The fear glowing.
D.S. Browne saw it.
"So?"
"So get in," McDonald growled.
Joseph Mullins was a detective sergeant and on the force to show there was no discrimination against Catholics in the Royal Ulster Constabulary.
"No problem, lad, just get in," he said quietly.
He heard the door close behind him. He pulled away.
He glanced up at his mirror… Down the lane, behind them, a car was stopped.