The smell was momentarily forgotten as he stood gaping at it.
At ...
Lausard wanted to shake his head, wanted to register some gesture but it seemed as if every muscle in his body was frozen.
Thirty-Four
Callahan was half way up the stairs when he heard the phone ring again.
Callahan called that he would answer it, anxious that Laura should not retrieve the receiver. He snatched up one of the extensions in a spare room, pressing the phone to his ear, his hand shaking slightly.
‘Hello,’ he said.
The line was crackly, alive with static.
‘Who is it?’ Callahan repeated, trying to steady the quivering in his voice.
‘Callahan,’ the voice on the other end said. ‘It’s me. It’s Lausard.’
Callahan swallowed hard and his grip on the phone relaxed.
‘What do you want?’ he asked.
‘I might have something for you,’ the Frenchman said.
‘What is it?’
‘It should fit nicely into your collection,’ the Frenchman said.
‘Just stop pissing about and tell me what it is,’ Callahan said. ‘I don’t pay you to play games.’
‘It’s a stained-glass window.’
Callahan didn’t speak.
‘Did you hear what I said?’ Lausard repeated. ‘Probably commissioned by Gilles de Rais himself.’
‘Who else knows about it?’ Callahan wanted to know.
Lausard explained about Channing and Catherine Roberts.
‘I want it Lausard. Do you understand? No matter what, I want it.’
‘It’s going to cost you a lot of money.’
‘I don’t care how much it costs, I want it.’ There was a steely determination in his voice. ‘We’ll come over as soon as we can.’ He hung up.
Callahan smiled to himself.
Gilles de Rais.
The man had murdered over two hundred children, many of them in the church at Machecoul. Ritual killings, the children had been between the ages of four and ten, rarely older. De Rais himself had been burned at the stake as a witch. Again Callahan smiled. He climbed the rest of the stairs to the bedroom, where Laura lay naked on the bed glancing at a magazine.
‘Lausard’s found something in the church at Machecoul,’ he said quietly.
She turned to look at him.
‘To do with de Rais?’ she said.
He nodded.
‘Machecoul.’ She said the name softly, with something bordering on reverence.
They had visited it many years ago. Just as they had visited countless other places around the world where murders, and sometimes much worse, had taken place. They visited and they photographed and they studied.
Their interest had often taken them far afield but they had visited sites and soaked up atmospheres others would have shunned.
Auschwitz.
Belsen.
10050 Cielo Drive in Los Angeles, scene of the ritual murders of Sharon Tate and four others by Charles Manson’s family.
Dealey Plaza in Dallas. (They had stood on the spot in the road where the car had been when President Kennedy had been shot.)
Saddleworth Moor in Yorkshire. (Laura had been excited by the fact that she might actually be standing on the grave of one of the victims of Ian Brady and Myra Hindley. )
The German Embassy in Stockholm, fire-bombed by the Baader-Meinhof gang.
Cranley Gardens, Muswell Hill, London. (They had wanted to look inside the flat where Denis Nilsen had killed and mutilated his victims but had been turned away. Still, Laura had taken plenty of pictures of the outside of the building.)
Jeffrey Manor, Chicago. (Richard Speck had killed eight nurses there in one night of madness.)
Buhre Avenue, New York City. (David Berkowitz, known as ‘Son of Sam’, had shot his first victims there.)
The list was endless. They had travelled the world to sample these delights, bringing back with them souvenirs wherever possible. Pieces of wire from Auschwitz. Turf from Saddleworth Moor. Stones from Buhre Avenue. Usually, however, they were content with photos; they had hundreds in one of the rooms close to their bedroom. It was like a shrine.
Laura often sat in there alone, staring around at the walls, surrounded by images of death and pain, excited sometimes beyond endurance.
Sex in that room was beyond belief.
It was pleasure without measure, or equal.
‘How many did de Rais kill?’ she asked, letting one hand slide across the bed towards Callahan’s groin.
‘Over two hundred,’ he said, feeling his own excitement growing as she rubbed his penis, feeling it stiffen.
‘All children,’ he continued.
He was fully erect now.
She leant over and took him in her mouth, allowing her saliva to coat his purple glans, licking down the length of the hard shaft to his testicles.
‘He killed them slowly,’ Callahan said, feeling urgently between her legs, smiling as he felt the hot wetness there.
‘How did he kill them?’ she asked, swinging herself around, lowering her dripping sex onto his organ with infinite slowness, allowing just the tip to penetrate her, teasing both herself and her husband.
‘He cut them at the base of the skull, then he’d masturbate over their bodies,’ Callahan said.
She lowered herself sharply, allowing him to slide up inside her. The glorious insertion ripped the breath from her and she moaned loudly, pausing only a second before beginning to move up and down on his rigid erection.
‘He timed it so that his own climax would arrive as they died,’ she gasped, perspiration beginning to form on her forehead. Machecoul.
The window.
He had to have it.
Had to possess it. To put it alongside the pieces of masonry he and Laura had taken from the building on their last visit.
Laura began to come.
Callahan was close behind her.
The window.
He would have it.
Thirty-Five
STRABANE, COUNTY TYRONE, NORTHERN IRELAND:
‘It’s a fucking disgrace.’
Joseph Hagen spat the words out as if they were poison, aware that all other eyes in the room were upon him but revelling in that knowledge.
‘These bastards have put back the name of the IRA twenty years,’ he continued. ‘Arid after all we’ve done. All the sacrifices. All the compromises. Something has to be done and done fast.’
There was a babble of agreement from the other men in the room.
It was a small room over the top of a bar called ‘The Mean Fiddler’. The pub stood about twenty miles from the border with Donegal. It had been used countless times by the men who sat in it now and by their fathers and grandfathers before them. It was perfect, the location, the surroundings. Jobs had been planned here for as long as anyone could remember. Any hint of police or army interference and they could be back across the border into the Republic within twenty minutes.
But now the members of the IRA high command were meeting for a very different reason. The target was not to be an RUC outpost or an army border patrol.
It was much closer to home in all respects.
Joe Hagen took a hefty swig from the glass of Jameson’s and shook his head. He looked down at his large hands.
‘I agree with Joe,’ said another man, a smaller man with thin, pinched features and the beginnings of a beard. ‘We all know who’s to blame for what’s been going on. The longer we leave the problem, the worse it’s going to get.’
Another babble of agreement.
‘Jerry, make a decision now. It can’t be that hard, especially for you,’ Eamonn Rice said. ‘Christ, you were at Stormont, you could have been killed along with the others. We all know what has to be done.’
The words were directed at the man who sat in one corner of the room, head down, the collar of his flying jacket pulled up high so that he looked like an owl. When he glanced around the roo
m he saw expectation in the faces of his colleagues.
Gerard Coogan clasped his hands together on the table in front of him and tapped his thumbs together. Mention of Stormont brought pictures flooding back into his mind like forgotten photos dredged up from an unwanted album. The gunmen. The bodies. The blood. Coogan had seen it all before but he’d never been on the receiving end before. He was thirty-five, dark-haired, sallow-faced. The most striking thing about him were his eyes, a blue so vivid they glowed as if lit from within his skull. He moved his gaze over the men in the room, those eyes roving like sapphiric searchlights.
‘You’re right,’ he said finally, his voice deep and rumbling. ‘I do know what has to be done but that doesn’t make it any easier. For as long as I can remember the British Government have been our enemy. It’s their soldiers who patrol our streets, it’s their policies that govern the six counties. But now, all that’s different. The enemy doesn’t wear a khaki uniform anymore. We’ve got no fuss with the British now, or the fucking Protestants. For all I know there are British agents in Ireland already. If there are I don’t really care. This is our problem and we’ll solve it our way.’ He cleared his throat, using the back of one hand to mask the cough. ‘We know Maguire and his men did the shootings at Stormont. We know they killed Pithers and his wife. What we don’t know is why.’ He glanced around the room. ‘We need to know who paid them. Joe’s right; what they’ve done, what they might do has damaged the image of the IRA badly. That’s why we need to catch them. Catch them and destroy them.’ He smiled thinly. ‘We’re not fighting the British anymore. We’re fighting ourselves.’
‘Who do you think was behind it, Jerry?’ Rice asked.
‘Probably the fucking Protestants,’ Hagen snapped.
‘Why should they be?’ Coogan said challengingly. ‘They wanted peace here more than most.’ He shook his head. ‘I haven’t got a clue. I really haven’t. Whoever set it up knew what they were doing, though. We’re all at the stage of not trusting one another again. If something isn’t done quickly then relations will break down and we’ll be back to square one.’
‘Maybe that wouldn’t be such a bad thing,’ Hagen rumbled.
‘Don’t talk shite, Joe,’ Coogan said. ‘We couldn’t fight this war against the British indefinitely and, besides, our demands had been met. We’ve all fought too long to get where we are now. Not just us but our fathers and grandfathers too. We’d won.’ He looked icily at Hagen, fixing the man with the full ferocity of his stare. ‘If we get Maguire then all the suffering over the years will have been worthwhile. But we have to get him fast.’
‘How many men has he got with him?’ Rice asked.
‘Four or five,’ said Hagen. ‘We have their names.’
Coogan nodded and Hagen reeled them off like a roll-call.
‘Billy Dolan. Damien Flynn. Paul MacConnell and Michael Black. And Maguire himself of course. There could be a couple more but I doubt it.’ Hagen drained what was left in his glass.
‘Like I said, the British have probably got someone on their trail too,’ Coogan said. ‘But it’s important that we find them first.’ His gaze travelled in the direction of the man in the far corner of the room. So far he hadn’t spoken, merely sat listening, his face impassive. His features looked as if they’d been carved from granite. He regarded Coogan from beneath heavy-lidded eyes. The lines across his forehead looked as if someone had drawn a fork through the flesh. There were deep creases around his eye corners, too. He looked older than his twenty-seven years.
‘We’ll get them,’ Simon Peters said quietly. ‘I’ve got men checking them out now; their homes, where they were last seen. We’ll get them.’
‘And whoever paid them,’ Coogan reminded him.
Peters nodded.
‘What about the British?’ he said. ‘You think they’ve already got men chasing Maguire. What if they get in the way?’
Coogan stroked his chin thoughtfully for a moment.
‘Kill them too,’ he said, flatly.
Thirty-Six
The crack of pool balls was scarcely audible above the noise coming from the juke-box.
Sean Doyle sat at the bar of ‘The Standing Stones’, alternately gazing around at the other drinkers and staring into the bottom of his glass.
To his right two men were playing darts. Behind them one of the two pool tables was in use. The men playing looked like father and son. Both had bright red hair. The pub was relatively busy, most of the booths taken and many of the bar stools occupied. A concentrated buzz of chatter filled the air, competing with the juke-box. There was a television set at one end of the bar, set high up on a shelf, and that too was on but the sound was turned down and images appeared in silence.
The air smelt of smoke and alcohol.
It was a smell Doyle had grown accustomed to during the past two days. Ever since arriving in Belfast it seemed that he’d spent all his time drifting from pub to pub. From the Ardoyne to New Lodge. From the Lower Falls across to Short Strand. Now he found himself in Ballymurphy.
His procedure, such as it was, had been simple and unwavering in every place. Order a couple of drinks, sit at the bar or close to any large group of drinkers. Just observe and listen.
He was like a gull following a trawler, waiting for any tit-bit to fall in front of him. The talk was the usual pub talk, had been in every one of the places he’d visited so far. Sport. Politics. Women.
Never religion.
Each pub, each face had seemed to blur into one as he’d ceaselessly trekked around the city in search of that elusive piece of information he sought. If any of the locals knew anything about Maguire and his renegades they weren’t saying. In fact, they weren’t even voicing opinions about it. Not as far as he knew, anyway.
He ordered himself another drink and swivelled around on his stool to watch the two men who were playing darts, but his gaze darted around the bar constantly, alighting on each new face as it entered the bar.
How beautifully simple it would be, he thought, if Maguire were to walk in now.
Doyle smiled to himself.
So simple.
The counter terrorist had a.38 special strapped to his leg in an ankle holster, hidden by his jeans and boots. Yet, if Maguire walked in, how easy it would be to retrieve the pistol. The weapon was loaded with Blazer .357 rounds. Hollow tips to ensure that one or two shots at the most would be enough to stop his quarry. The .44 which he usually carried was too bulky for the ankle holster. It lay back at the hotel along with the CZ automatic and the extra special little item he’d brought along.
Back at the hotel.
Donaldson had fixed both him and Georgie up with jobs at the Excelsior hotel in Belfast city centre, Doyle as a night-porter, Georgie as a bar-maid. They were posing as an engaged couple.
Since the relaxation of hostilities between the IRA and the British in the last few months, the curiosity and mistrust which newcomers usually faced was not so apparent. Doyle had been able to move unhindered through areas where, twelve months before, he would have been risking his life travelling.
Ballymurphy was one such place. The Catholic stronghold had been, infiltrated a number of times in the past by Secret Service men but, more often than not, they were discovered. Their fate was invariably a savage beating and torture; then they were bagged and dumped on waste ground.
Doyle had been working undercover in the same way when he’d been so badly injured in Londonderry two years earlier.
Now he sipped at his drink and continued looking around the bar. Darts continued to thud into the board. Pool balls cracked loudly against each other. The cacophony of conversation grew in volume.
The man next to him had a newspaper laid out on the bar and he was running his index finger down a list of horses, looking vainly for a winner. He picked out a couple of possibles, then folded the paper up and dropped it down, front page up.
MORE MURDERS AS PEACE PLAN FACES CRISIS
proclaimed the headline of the Ev
ening Herald. There was a photo of Reverend Brian Pithers’ house with an ambulance outside and several police cars. Doyle pulled the paper towards him.
‘Do you mind?’ he asked the owner of the paper, his Irish accent unfaltering.
‘Help yourself,’ the man replied, smiling amiably.
Doyle scanned the headline again then quickly read the report on the clergyman’s death and that of his wife.
‘Terrible business,’ said the man next to him, nodding in the direction of the paper.
‘He had it coming,’ said Doyle flatly, smiling at the man. ‘He’s been doing nothing but putting down the Cause for the last five or six years.’
‘You’ll be telling me his wife had it coming too,’ said the man irritably.
Doyle shrugged and pretended to look at the paper.
Pick your words. Play it carefully.
‘Maybe she did,’ he said indifferently. ‘Her and those fellas at Stormont. Why did they have to interfere, anyway? What makes them think they can put the bloody world to rights?’
‘Ah, you’re bloody crazy,’ said the man dismissively.
‘What’s wrong, George?’
Another voice joined the conversation. It belonged to a tall, brown-haired man who was leaning against the bar as if for support. Doyle could tell from the slight slur on his words that the man had had too much to drink.
Perfect, he thought.
‘Your man here,’ said the first drinker, hooking a thumb in Doyle’s direction. ‘He reckons that old Pithers had it coming.’
‘Him and the others,’ Doyle said loudly. ‘Who the fuck do they think they are, anyway? A peace plan. To hell with it. It’s a pity the IRA ever sat down at the same table with the bloody Brits and the Proddies. They should have carried on as they were.’
‘How long have you lived in this city, man?’ said the drunken individual, pushing past his companion. ‘Long enough to see the fucking bombs going off and people being shot down? There was a chance of peace and these fucking rebels or whatever they call themselves might have ruined that chance.’
Come on, sunshine. The bait’s laid, you’ve picked it up, now I’ve just got to reel you in.
Renegades Page 13
