A Simple Act of Violence

by R.J. Ellory

  ‘So you were out there . . . in Nicaragua.’

  ‘We were all out there.’ Robey pointed at the faces in the photo. ‘James Killarney. His name was Dennis Powers. Judge Walter Thorne. When I met him he was a lecturer at Virginia State named Lawrence Matthews. Me, Catherine, and then Don Carvalho.’

  ‘This is something that you people really believe, isn’t it?’

  ‘Did believe. We did believe it . . . once. And then we saw it for what it was.’

  ‘So why did Don Carvalho have to kill Mosley and Rayner and Barbara Lee?’

  ‘Because he had no choice. Because if he hadn’t killed them he would have been terminated and someone else would have killed them . . . and he spoke to me and I told him what to do.’

  ‘Which was?’

  ‘Do something that would get your attention. The police, the newspapers . . . we gave them the Ribbon Killer.’

  ‘To make us aware that there was a connection between Mosley, Rayner and Lee?’

  ‘To show you there was a connection, to show the people who employed us that we had a voice, that we weren’t unthinking, unfeeling killing machines anymore . . . to try and do something about what was happening.’ Robey shifted awkwardly. He massaged his hands together as if they were cold.

  ‘But we fucked it up, right?’ Miller said.

  Robey laughed; he seemed to be in pain. ‘You fucked it up, yes. Never seen such an amazingly inept organization as the Washington Police Department. I was part of it remember, with Darryl King. I got inside the department five years ago. Tried to do something from within . . . wound up getting Darryl killed, getting myself wounded, and all for nothing.’

  ‘So when we missed the connections between the first three victims, someone else had to die . . . someone had to die to remind us that it was still there, that there was still a situation . . .’

  Robey nodded.

  ‘And that was Catherine Sheridan.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘And Don Carvalho didn’t kill her, did he?’

  ‘He refused.’

  ‘So you had to kill her.’

  ‘I did.’

  ‘Hence the fact that she was different from the others . . . the fact that she was not beaten before she died . . .’

  Robey raised his hand. ‘Enough . . . you have no idea . . .’

  ‘And you left the pictures of you and her beneath the bed . . .’

  ‘Everything,’ Robey said.

  ‘And Don Carvalho killed Natasha Joyce as well?’

  ‘No, that wasn’t Don.’ Robey lowered his head. He sighed deeply. ‘Natasha was killed by the man you know as James Killarney . . .’ Robey closed his eyes. ‘Killarney was also told to kill you. He would have done had it been you at my apartment instead of Detective Oliver. Anyway, it is not a matter of who killed Natasha Joyce, but the simple fact that they did it. They should not have done that . . . not to a mother with a child, but . . .’ Robey looked away towards the other side of the rink, and shook his head resignedly.

  ‘But what?’

  ‘What am I saying? They shouldn’t have killed a mother. That’s what they do . . . hell, that’s what we all did when we were out there, right? Mothers, fathers, even kids . . . if they got in the way they died. That was just the nature of the war. The necessary and expected casualties.’ Robey sighed. ‘I knew Darryl King. He was a good person. He wanted to help. He loved that woman . . . he really loved that woman, and they fucked him up so bad, made him a junkie . . .’

  ‘Thorne said you killed Don Carvalho and put him in the trunk of the car.’

  ‘No, I didn’t kill Don. They had Killarney deal with him. They could not afford to have any other victims with luggage tags, you know? It was too close to home. Too close a reminder. Thorne also told you that Don Carvalho killed Detective Oliver, right? Well, that was Killarney as well - Oliver was supposed to be you.’ Robey looked at Miller. There was still a light in his eyes, fierce and unforgiving. ‘We three . . . me and Catherine and Don . . . we were kids when we went out there. We swallowed the lie. We did the work we were asked to do. We killed . . . Jesus, we killed so many people . . . we killed so many fucking people . . .’

  ‘And five years ago, with Darryl King. This drugs raid. That was cocaine still coming in from Nicaragua? King was killed because of that?’

  ‘Yes . . . I have been trying to bring this to the attention of the world ever since I left Nicaragua.’

  ‘You came back from Nicaragua and Catherine got pregnant, didn’t she?’

  Robey smiled weakly.

  ‘Sarah Bishop, right?’

  ‘You are not as dumb as you look, Detective Miller, but you have taken a wrong step there . . .’

  ‘Sarah Bishop is your daughter . . . isn’t she?’

  Robey shook his head. ‘No,’ he said, his voice almost a whisper. ‘Sarah Bishop was not our daughter. She was our conscience.’

  ‘Your conscience . . . I don’t understand? What d’you mean, your conscience?’

  ‘Managua. 1984. I killed a man. His name was Francisco Sotelo. He was a lawyer. I was told he was passing information to the Sandinistas. I was told to kill him and find some documents. I killed him, of course, but when I searched his offices there were no documents. So I went to his house. I broke in, and as I was searching the place his wife surprised me.’

  ‘And you killed her too?’

  ‘Yes . . . I killed her too. But I didn’t anticipate one thing . . . I didn’t anticipate that there would be a child. A month and a half old, right there in one of the bedrooms, and I had just murdered both parents . . .’

  ‘You took her? You and Catherine took the child?’

  Robey smiled. ‘We took her, yes. We took the child and we brought her here. We found a family for her.’

  Miller began to understand the significance of what they had done. ‘So you and Catherine and Don Carvalho decided to tell the world what had happened, but James Killarney and Judge Thorne . . .’

  ‘It is hard for me to think of them as anything other than Dennis Powers and Lawrence Matthews.’

  ‘But they were still working—’

  ‘They were still defending the world from the truth. Sarah was our proof. She was our conscience. She was evidence of what we had done in Nicaragua.’

  ‘It’s unbelievable . . . all of this. It’s too much. I don’t understand how this has changed anything . . . this is a nightmare. It has gone on so long, so many years, and here we are . . . people are dead, Catherine is dead, Natasha Joyce is dead, and what will change? And why didn’t they just kill you? They could have killed you and Catherine and Sarah and that would have been the end of it.’

  ‘I was far too dangerous just to dismiss out of hand. Between me and Catherine . . . between us we knew everything. They knew we had information. They knew that the information would find its way into the hands of the newspapers, other government offices, if they just had us killed. With us, it was not merely a matter of making us disappear. We were never that simple.’ Robey paused, breathed deeply, tried to smile. ‘Have spent all these years using everything they taught me to protect myself. Hell, I even taught school and wrote some books, you know? Some places I was John Robey, other places . . . I can’t even remember how many names I’ve had, how many histories I’ve created. John Robey and Michael McCullough were the very least of who I was, believe me.’ He shifted forward slowly as if something was pushing him. ‘But they threatened Catherine after we came back. She wanted out, but it doesn’t work that way. They didn’t know about Sarah at that point, and we didn’t tell anyone. We had to make a decision about the child . . .’ Robey leaned back again, looked directly at Miller. ‘We had to make a decision to have her cared for by another family. We gave her up. We decided to do that. To protect her. To take away the one thing they could use against us. That was the most important decision of our lives, and then when she reached her teens we asked Don Carvalho to help us. He became very close to her . . . he helped her. He tol
d us what she was like. I came down here and watched her train . . .’

  ‘And she never knew who you were?’

  Robey shook his head. ‘She never believed herself to be anyone but Sarah Bishop. She was six weeks old when we brought her to the U.S.’

  ‘And Catherine?’

  ‘Catherine saw her. We would come down here together sometimes. Catherine would hide in the car, watch her leave with her parents. They never spoke. To tell Sarah the truth would have been too risky. Whoever kept an eye on me knew that I came here. To have Catherine seen here with me, or to have Catherine meet with Sarah . . . that would have been too much of a coincidence. They would have figured that out in a second . . .’

  ‘They didn’t know she was this lawyer’s daughter?’

  ‘They didn’t know . . . not as far as we could tell, not for years, and then they figured that there was a connection between me and Sarah, but they didn’t know who her real parents were. They may even have believed she was our daughter. Her adoption was unofficial. There were no records. But they knew that I cared for her . . . they knew that threatening her was enough.’

  ‘So what changed? What made you and Don Carvalho decide to do these things?’

  ‘We found out that Catherine was dying . . . that’s what changed everything,’ Robey said. ‘She didn’t want to die in some hospice. She didn’t want to spend the last few months of her life breathing through tubes and pissing into a bag. She wanted out, you know? She wanted out of this life . . . she wanted to feel as though she had done something to right the wrongs.’

  ‘So she let you kill her?’

  Robey’s eyes were filled with tears. ‘You have any idea what it would be like to kill the woman you love . . . to hold her in your arms and know that you killed her?’

  Miller shook his head. ‘I have no idea,’ he said quietly.

  ‘I do,’ Robey said, ‘and so did my father. Ironic that the only two women I ever really loved were killed by the people that loved them the most.’

  ‘What? Your father?’

  Robey ignored the question. ‘Loving someone enough to kill them? Be grateful that you know nothing of how something like that feels,’ he said quietly.

  ‘That afternoon . . . the day she died, she was with you.’

  Robey, closed his eyes. ‘In a hotel. We were in a hotel for some hours. We watched that movie . . . that stupid damned movie that she loved so much. That’s what she wanted to do . . . God, she even had it playing in the house . . .’

  ‘And you had to kill her to get us looking again? To try and get us to see the connections?’

  ‘Yes . . . so that someone else could understand what had happened.’

  For a while Miller did not speak, and then he looked up at Robey. ‘And you know it was Killarney who killed Natasha Joyce?’

  ‘Killarney, yes. He killed Natasha Joyce. She was looking into what happened with Darryl. She spoke to someone at the Police Department Administrations Unit. That file was flagged. Darryl King’s. It would have come up on the Agency system. I imagine they had someone there within minutes.’

  ‘They did,’ Miller said. ‘A woman named Frances Gray.’

  ‘They knew what was happening by then. Those reports you gave to James Killarney were going straight to Walter Thorne and the Washington section chief. Killarney was the one who killed Natasha Joyce. He also killed Don Carvalho and Carl Oliver. He was assigned the task of ensuring that this thing never went public. That was his job, his and his alone . . . and he was the one who requested it.’

  ‘Why?’ Miller asked. ‘Was there some particular reason?’

  ‘Me and James Killarney go back an awful long time . . . there were things that happened in Nicaragua, things that I did . . . and he never—’ Robey coughed sharply and held his hand to his chest.

  Miller frowned. He leaned closer to Robey. ‘You okay?’ he asked.

  Robey nodded, closed his eyes for a moment. A single tear made its way down his left cheek.

  ‘There was a history,’ Robey said. ‘That’s all I need to say.’

  ‘Until?’

  ‘Until Don was drafted back into operation . . . until the nightmare started all over again. As soon as he was called back we knew that we couldn’t protect Sarah the way we wanted to. Don had been there for her, and once he was active again it became impossible . . .’

  ‘And so you had to figure out a way to make any possible threat on her life unimportant?’

  ‘When Catherine got sick, you know? When she got sick we knew . . .’ Robey gripped the arms of the chair. His forehead glistened with sweat. ‘If Catherine was dead . . . if Catherine’s death led the authorities to investigate what was going on . . .’ Robey took a deep breath. He screwed up his eyes as if he was in intense pain, and then he hesitated before speaking. ‘With Catherine dead . . . and then if documentation was made available . . . a lot of documentation was made available to a lot of people simultaneously . . .’ Robey’s breath caught in his lungs and he coughed again.

  ‘What’s happening?’ Miller said. ‘Are you okay?’

  ‘It’s alright,’ Robey said, his voice weakening. ‘And if a lot of documentation was made available to a lot of people at the same time, and if Catherine was already dead, and if they could not get to me, then there would be no reason for them to go after Sarah . . . there would be no threat to hold over us . . . nothing to make anybody afraid of . . .’

  Robey coughed again, this time louder, the sound sharp and painful. He withdrew a handkerchief from his pocket and held it to his mouth. He stayed silent for a while, trying to breathe, and when he took his hand away there was blood on the handkerchief.

  ‘What’s happening here?’ Miller said. ‘What’s going on? Are you sick or something?’

  Robey shook his head. ‘This is why I had to have someone else,’ he said, his voice barely a whisper. ‘Someone else had to see what was happening . . . someone else had to know the truth. I knew they’d get to Don . . . I knew Killarney would get to everyone . . . even you, eh? He even tried to kill you but he killed Oliver instead . . .’

  Robey closed his eyes.

  Miller gripped the man’s shoulder and shook him. ‘What’s happening with you? What—’

  Robey opened his eyes. ‘I’m sorry it had to be you,’ he said. ‘Hell, you know it had to be someone . . . I wanted someone without a family, I really did. I wanted someone without a family who could piece this thing together and understand enough of what happened . . .’

  ‘You said that there’s a lot of documentation—’

  ‘Already on its way,’ Robey said. ‘It’s already on its way, Detective Miller . . .’ Robey’s breathing was shallow. He reached out his hand to take Miller’s and he pulled Miller toward him. ‘And Walter Thorne . . . there’s a rifle in a bag . . . follow the trajectory of the shot back to . . . back to the building across the street . . . in a room there’s a bag with a rifle . . . prints on it . . .’

  Robey’s breathing was labored, painful to hear, painful to watch.

  ‘Do something for me . . .’ he said through gritted teeth. ‘Do something for me . . .’

  Miller looked back at Robey, held his breath, waiting . . .

  ‘Need someone left behind to see she’s okay . . . make sure they don’t get her. That’s the most important reason I needed you . . . with me and Catherine gone there is no reason to threaten her, but they are vindictive, you know? They can be vindictive and unthinking and I need someone to help her.’

  Robey seemed incapable of holding his head up straight. He struggled to look at Miller. A thin line of blood and saliva crept from the corner of his mouth and descended slowly to the lapel of his jacket.

  ‘You can do that for me?’ he slurred. ‘That much you can do for me . . . keep an eye on her . . . make sure they don’t kill her out of spite . . .’

  ‘Yes,’ Miller said. ‘I can do that . . . I can do that much.’

  Robey smiled weakly, and from his coat pocket
he took a white envelope, and he pressed it into Miller’s hand. Miller looked at it, and printed neatly across the front was a single word, the same lettering as the words on the back of the photograph he had found in the United Trust office.

  SARAH.

  And then there was something in Robey’s eyes that said everything was done, and there was little else to say, and what else there might have been didn’t matter now because the play was over, the thing had run its course, and there was nothing else to keep him in the theater . . .

  John Robey sort of slid sideways in the chair until the weight of his head was resting against Miller’s shoulder.

  Miller didn’t move. He closed his eyes, and then opened them once more when music suddenly filled the auditorium.

  The sound of a piano through the speakers above Miller’s head, and he watched as Sarah Bishop glided out and across the ice as if from nowhere, and Miller sat motionless as she crouched down low, almost pressed into nothing, and then opened up like a flower growing from nowhere . . .

  Strings came in behind the piano, and then a woman’s voice:C’est l’amour qui fait qu’on aime

  C’est l’amour qui fait rêver

  C’est l’amour qui veut qu’on s’aime

  C’est l’amour qui fait pleurer . . .

  Each time she swept toward the edge of the rink his heart almost stopped.

  And he watched Sarah Bishop, and his eyes filled with tears, and he wondered whether there would ever be a chance that she could understand what had happened . . .

  And then she saw them - Detective Robert Miller and John Robey, a new acquaintance and a very old friend, watching from the gods as she practised.

  She raised her hand and waved, and Miller waved his hand in response, and she paused for a moment before facing the outside of the rink and gliding backwards, picking with the left toe and leaping off the right leg . . .

  The singing once more, a plaintive and heartfelt language that Miller did not understand . . .Et ceux qui n’ont pas de larmes

  Ne pourrons jamais aimer

  Il faut tant, et tant de larmes

  Pour avoir le droit d’aimer . . .