Watchman (novel)

by Ian Rankin

  “I need your weight on the boot,” Miles said, feeling a sudden calm, the tranquility of the doomed. The other car stopped abruptly as Collins scrambled out of the back window frame and landed on the large boot, still firing off bullets like a man possessed. Miles was no race-car driver, no stock-car expert. This was instinct, nothing more. He put the car into reverse, waited until Collins had hammered the back wheels onto the dry clay soil, and let the engine go with everything it had. The unrestrained clamor of machinery filled the air, and the car jolted back, climbing onto the road again, sending Collins tumbling into the backseat, where he whooped and sent a shot through the roof of the car.

  Nothing to lose, thought Miles. In fact, it’s inspired. He kept his foot down hard on the accelerator, yelling to Collins to watch out, and sent the car screaming back into the Cortina, where it crumpled the bonnet. Collins, ready, sent four or five shots into the intact windscreen from a range of three feet, while Miles found first gear and prayed that their own car had not been damaged in the collision.

  They flew, while the wrecked Cortina let off steam, no bodies apparent in its interior. The windscreen was still intact.

  Reinforced glass. Very. He’d seen it before. The thing was a veritable tank.

  None of which worried Collins, who gave several more victory whoops as he climbed back into the passenger seat.

  “We showed them,” he said. “We showed the bastards where to get off.”

  But Miles doubted that.

  “What exactly,” said Miles, “did you mean back there?”

  The fields had opened into a lane, and the lane had opened into a two-lane highway. Miles, getting to know the car’s whims, had relaxed a little, but still felt queasy.

  “When?” Collins was reloading, picking bullets out of his pockets and pushing them into the ammunition clip. Cordite was all around.

  “When you said you’re not a Catholic.”

  “I’m not.”

  “Then why do you fight on their side?”

  “Jesus, you can ask that? When you just saw what the other side looks like?”

  The car coughed, reminding Miles that it was old and rusty, as unused to any of this as he was. It was the kind of car you would steal only if contemplating a one-way trip.

  “I’ve heard,” said Miles, “that even the Eire government isn’t in favor of the IRA or their methods.”

  “You’re not seeing, are you? You’re still blind. Those men back there have been hunting us for days, they’re madmen. And they’re the supposed security force. Now do you see? Your government’s put this country into the hands of the insane, and then gone and torn up the rules to boot.”

  “It doesn’t explain how you come to be in the IRA.”

  “Turn left here.” Collins slipped the gun back into his pocket and rested his feet on the dashboard. “When I was a teenager there was a big recruitment drive for the UDA and UVF. They were coming out of the woodwork like rot. I joined. Once you joined, though, it was hard to get out. I’d killed a man before I was twenty, Mr. Flint. I was a good soldier.” He turned to gauge Miles’s reaction. His teeth were bared, and the words came out like slashes from a bright blade. “I took my orders and I did what I was told to. For thirteen bloody years, working for men like those ones we just left.”

  “So what happened?”

  “You wouldn’t believe it. You’d laugh.”

  “Try me.”

  “I don’t see why I should.”

  “Because of what happened back there? Because you need to?”

  “Maybe.”

  “So what happened?”

  “What happened?” mimicked Collins. “I found myself crying for Bobby Sands, that’s what happened.”

  They needed petrol, and decided to eat at a café behind the pumps. Miles’s senses were sharp now, and he examined the lunchtime customers for gun-toting executioners while Will Collins wolfed down fried potatoes and eggs.

  “I’ve got something to tell you, too, Will,” he said.

  “Oh?”

  “But I’m not sure yet where to begin. Meantime, what about your story?”

  Collins patted his shirt, signifying this time that he had eaten well. He lifted the mug of tea to his lips, still chewing, and studied Miles over the discolored ceramic rim.

  “Where was I?”

  “Crying over Bobby Sands.”

  “Oh yes.” Collins turned his gaze to the greasy windows and the asphalt gathering of elderly trucks and cars beyond. “Well, I’d seen some things, maybe too much for my age, but I’d seen nothing like that hunger strike. So I decided to see how it would feel to go hungry. I locked myself in my room for a couple of days, survived on nothing but sips of water and my own company. I near went crazy, but it set me to thinking that to starve yourself slowly to death you’d have to be clinging to something worth dying for. Do you see? Dying with a gun was one thing, quick, a hero’s way to go, but a lonely starvation, well, that needed something more.” He paused to light two cigarettes, handing one to Miles. “There were two of them died that year on hunger strike, and each death made me feel worse. It was as if I was the one starving them.”

  “So you switched allegiances?”

  “It wasn’t as easy as that, so don’t think it was. I had to leave my family and friends behind, knowing I could never go home, knowing they’d be after my blood. And there was no telling what the other side would do to me anyway. I mean, would they believe me, or would they just shoot me dead? I was walking blindfolded into it.”

  Miles thought that he could see now why Will Collins had been so gentle with him, so willing to believe: his existence, too, depended upon belief.

  “But they did believe you?”

  “I’m not sure. I work hard and well for the cause, but there’s still a suspicion there, always the thought that if I can turn once, I can turn again.”

  Collins was staring out of the window again, toward where their car sat.

  “At any rate,” said Miles, “you’re still alive.”

  “Alive and kicking, no thanks to your friends. You know what I can’t understand? Why plan such a big operation to net a very small fish?”

  Why indeed. Miles had been thinking the very same thing.

  “And there’s something else bothering me.”

  “What’s that?”

  Collins nodded toward the window.

  “What does it say on that van just behind our car?”

  Miles looked. He had to screw up his eyes to find a focus, but the writing was clear enough: MURPHY’S MEAT & POULTRY.

  “Christ, they’ve found us,” he hissed, turning back toward Will Collins, but Collins was out of his seat and heading jauntily toward the toilets, leaving Miles on his own. He panicked: follow Collins or head out of the door? He chose the door, and stood beside it for several seconds staring out at the van. There were two faces behind its windscreen, but he did not recognize them, and they seemed not to recognize him. At least, their eyes glanced toward him and away again, intent on the car, the car with Champ’s blood on it.

  “Let’s go.” It was Collins, moving past him and out of the door. “Just follow me and try to look casual.”

  They were crossing the asphalt, passing right in front of the van and behind the crumpled boot of their car. Miles thought that Collins was about to stop there, but he merely paused while Miles caught up, then put his arm around his shoulders.

  “—and then he says to me, Mickey, he says—” Collins began loudly, going on to tell some garbled anecdote, all the while gently propelling Miles toward the far corner of the car park. He stopped beside a Land Rover. “Here we are now.” And then, to Miles’s astonishment, he produced a key from his pocket and opened the driver’s door. “Get in,” he whispered, walking around to the passenger side. Miles got in.

  “How the hell did you—”

  “An old boy having a pee back there. I just tapped him on the head and took his keys. Before that he’d been telling me about what a
fine jeep he had. Thank Christ there was only this one parked here. Our lucky day, Miles, is it not? Thanks be to sweet mother Mary.”

  Miles was grinning like a monkey as he turned the ignition and drove sedately back past the butcher’s van and out of the lot. Collins rested his feet on the dashboard again.

  “Just follow the signs for Drogheda,” he said. “Now, what was it you were going to tell me?”

  “You mean apart from telling you you’re a genius?”

  “Well, that’ll do for a start. Would it have been anything to do with our friends who seem so keen to see us again?”

  “In a way, yes.”

  “No subtlety, these people. That’s their problem.”

  “But they were right, weren’t they? I mean, you were supplying parts for bombs?”

  “Oh yes, but they could have cut our supplies at source. They must have known where the stuff was coming from. And they’d known about the factory for nearly a year to my knowledge.”

  “What have you been doing recently?”

  The question smacked too much of interrogation, and Collins gave him a hard look.

  “Sorry,” said Miles. “I shouldn’t have asked.”

  “Let’s see…” Collins checked his watch. “It’s half past three. Well, I suppose I can tell you now, since it was due to go off at quarter past.”

  “What was?”

  “Our biggest job yet, a nice big bomb due to explode at three-fifteen in Kew Gardens, just as the Home Secretary was planting a tree for some new trust or whatever.”

  “Jesus Christ,” muttered Miles, and then it hit him, that was why they had needed a gardener! Harvest had borne its bitter fruit all right, but the final clue had eluded them. They needed to plant the bomb. They needed a groundskeeper. “I was part of that surveillance.”

  “What?”

  “Watching the cell in London, the cell responsible. We were called off a week ago. A woman and three men, one of the men a groundskeeper.”

  “Somebody slipped up, then,” said Collins.

  “More death.” Miles wiped at his forehead, then stared at his hand, seeing the dull stain of Champ’s blood still upon it. His back hurt and he felt a little dizzy. In fact he was tingling all over. The road was rising and falling, and his stomach heaved like a sea squall. “So much needless death,” he said. “Why?”

  “I don’t know, Mr. Flint,” answered Collins. “As time goes on I find it harder to explain. To myself as well as to others.” His voice had become very quiet. “To myself especially. I’ve seen it from both sides. And do you want to know something? They’re both the same.”

  Miles nodded. He knew that now, too.

  “Can we stop for a breather?” he asked, already slowing the Land Rover, signaling left, ready to explode into the fresh air.

  “They could be onto us at any moment,” warned Collins.

  “Yes, I know, but we have to talk. There’s nothing else for it.”

  Somehow, it was easier after that. They sat on a five-barred gate at the side of the road, facing in toward the fields, the Land Rover behind them on the verge, and the traffic roaring past beyond it.

  Miles knew where to begin now, right at the beginning, smiling Cheshire cats and all. His initial fears, the disappearance of Phillips and the warning of Sinclair, and Billy’s warning, too. But he was surprised by the immediate interest of Collins, by the way he frowned, his face a mask of concentration.

  And when he had finished, Collins jumped down from the gate into the field and began to walk away from him. He seemed, to Miles, to walk the length of the field, a good hundred yards. It was the farthest they had been apart since they had met. What was more, the car key had been left in the ignition. He could make his escape! He would not be caught; he could be away before Collins, running full pelt, was halfway back up the field.

  But he didn’t; he sat there and watched Collins walking back toward him. His eyes were bright, and there was a wry smile on his lips, as if to say, I knew you would not go.

  He heaved himself back onto the gate, which rattled ominously but held firm.

  “So that’s it,” he said quietly.

  “It’s as much as I know,” said Miles, while another lorry clattered past, pouring out rich, choking fumes.

  “Maybe,” said Collins, “you know more than you think.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, since we’re in a mood for stories, how would you like to hear another one?”

  Miles nodded, watching while Collins lit another two cigarettes, then jumped down from the gate again, leaning against it while he watched the traffic.

  “It makes me nervous, all this traffic. Everything moving so fast while I’m standing still. We’re targets.”

  He stared intently at the traffic, using up the burning tobacco as though it were oxygen and he a drowning man.

  “I did a job once, rather a strange one, when I was very young. An assassination, you could call it, no questions asked. I’d been told that this man was a spy, something like that, and that he was dangerous to us. My job was to get to know him, then eliminate him. But then I found out that it wasn’t quite as straightforward as I’d thought.”

  How straightforward is the murder of a stranger? Miles wanted to ask.

  “Go on,” he said instead.

  “Oh, the man was a spy all right, just like you, Mr. Flint. But he wasn’t any danger to us. No, there was payment involved. A hundred rifles, as I recall. I’d been used as a hired assassin. There was nothing political in it, nothing to do with the cause, just plain payment of some guns in exchange for my services. I couldn’t do anything about it, of course. That would have been dangerous. So I played it by the book, their book, and I looked for a way to burn the pages. But I found a martyr instead.” He rested for a moment, stubbing out the cigarette and lighting another. “The weapon I used, and the rifles, were delivered by an Israeli gentleman.”

  Miles felt his fingers go limp, the cigarette threatening to fall to the ground.

  “Coincidence?” he said.

  “Maybe. But you say that this Israeli who died in London was a gunrunner?”

  “A suspected gunrunner, yes.”

  Collins nodded. “A couple of years ago,” he said, “an old friend, still active in the north, sent me a message. It was brave of him. If he’d been caught, Christ knows what would have happened. He told me that there was a man asking questions about me. A funny guy, my friend said, spoke like an Englishman but carried an American passport.”

  “Did he have a name?” asked Miles, thinking of Richard Mowbray, his heart beating wildly.

  “Yes, Gray. Andy Gray. I remember because it’s the name of a footballer, too.”

  “Andy Gray,” Miles repeated, thinking hard. But he was thinking through great wads of cotton, his head like a dispensary. The name meant something to him. Andy Gray, yes, a footballer. Andrew Gray. An anagram of Mowbray? No, not even close.

  Then he remembered: Billy Monmouth’s friend.

  I’ve been in France. A company-funded shopping trip.

  Billy hadn’t mentioned that he was American, though. What was it Richard Mowbray suspected? That there might be CIA moles within the firm. Billy Monmouth and his American friend. The “company” being slang for the CIA itself. Well, well, well. Was it all coming together at last? Or was it exploding into too many fragments, like Kew Gardens this last half hour?

  “Does the name mean anything to you?”

  “I’m not sure,” said Miles, “not yet.” Here perhaps was the trump card that would save his life: Collins was curious, and Miles held all the answers.

  “What about the assassination?” he asked now. “Did you learn the victim’s name?”

  “Yes,” replied Collins, staring into a distance of his own, “and I’ll never forget it. His name was Philip Hayton.”

  “Philip Hayton?”

  “Did you know him?”

  “I know of him, yes.” And Billy had brought him into th
e conversation only a few weeks before. There was no coincidence.

  “Did he have a family? A wife and kids?”

  “No, I’m sure he didn’t,” said Miles generously, unsure of the facts.

  Collins nodded. He seemed almost soporific now, while Miles’s thoughts were moving faster and faster, trying to identify the terrain through which they traveled. Billy. Andrew Gray. The Israeli. And now Philip Hayton. Where was the connection?

  There had to be one. There had to be.

  “What happened to this Gray?”

  Collins shrugged, as though trying to heave a great weight from his back.

  “He asked around, flashed around quite a bit of money according to my friend, but what could anyone tell him? I was a traitor as far as they were concerned in Belfast, and no one wants to advertise their traitors, do they? Not unless they’re dead. I’d have thought you’d know about that.”

  “I’m not a traitor.”

  “Then why the hell are they after you?”

  “It’s not me they’re after, it’s us. I couldn’t see it until now, but the Israeli is the connection. He’s the lowest common denominator. What’s more, I know where we can find out more about this man Gray.”

  “Where?”

  “From a friend of mine.”

  Collins gave him a steady look, his next question a formality.

  “I don’t suppose this friend lives in London, by any chance?”

  “Yes, he does.”

  Collins shook his head.

  “No way,” he said. “There’s no way on God’s earth that I’m going to let you go to London.”

  “Then come with me.”

  “It would be suicide.”

  “And if you stay here? Do you think they’ll stop coming at you?”

  “There’s a chance.”

  “Sure there’s a chance. A chance that you’ll be blindfolded and shot in some field, dropped into the sea like so much dead meat.” Collins shivered, and Miles knew that he had hit another nerve. Of course: Hayton had been dumped at sea. It had been called a sailing accident, hadn’t it? A sailing accident with a great big bullet hole in the victim’s skull. The firm had covered that one up nicely, but why?