Frankie had been a good catch because she was a ‘clean skin’, had never featured in police files.
Her family knew nothing of their daughter’s allegiance. They would have been classified by psephologists as in the catchment of moderate nationalists harbouring no sympathy for the Provisionals and the thirty-year war. They would have had, and shared with their social circles, a horror of violence, a refusal to consider that the ‘gun’ might influence the ‘path of politics’. The bigotry in the city was an affront to decency, they’d chorus, and sectarianism as repellent as black-shirt Fascism.
Frankie fooled her parents, living in the big brick detached home high up the Malone road, her friends, with whom she shared a terrace house, and her lecturers, who thought her a fair prospect for a master’s.
With her ‘clean skin’ she was confident, as were those who used her. Her contact messaged her.
She would finish her drink, then plead a headache and drift away. Her departure would not be noticed. Her contact was Maude, mother of three and supermarket check-out assistant, with no conviction for seventeen years. Maude had texted her and the code indicated urgency and a location. She felt warm under her anorak and her breathing came a little faster. She was on a road. At different stages she was tested and had not yet been found wanting. She had carried messages, minute writing on cigarette papers, and given them to men or women she had never seen before or since, passing them with brush contacts. She had done the difficult business of taking car-registration details from vehicles exiting Palace Barracks at Holywood, she had moved pistols from one side of the city to the other – west to east. She had switched money. Most recently she had been called up to the Sperrins, where she had met men and one woman, tramped in the bog while the rain had pelted them and fired four shots on single with an assault weapon. The impact of the recoil had been better, almost, than anything she’d experienced before. She had been lectured in the causes of blockages and the remedies, and afterwards had soothed the bruises on her shoulder with witch-hazel. Frankie had not failed at anything asked of her.
She knew that the next time they called her it would be for a mission of importance. ‘Sorry, guys. My mother hasn’t been well. I have to bug out. Don’t drink the place dry – well, not without me.’
Frankie left them in the crowded bar to talk of lecture schedules, job fairs and men they fancied. She went into the night to meet her contact.
She would never have complained. Bridie Riordan was Brennie Murphy’s niece. The relationships on the mountain slopes, in the small villages and among isolated farms, were tribal. Blood, and loyalty from fighting and suffering together, bound the families. She was the same age as Malachy and they had been married for nine years. In that time she had never argued with him over what he did. He would slip from the house when darkness had fallen and would sometimes drive away down the lane or head for the hedgerows and ditches in any direction from the farmhouse. She never reproached him when he returned – no explanation – in the small hours, smelling of strong soap and shampoo. She never took issue with him.
Explanations came with the dawn. Bridie Riordan, an uncomplicated woman with rich auburn hair and a solid frame from hard outdoors work, would hear the radio news at six thirty. A half-hour after the bulletin had announced an attack by gunfire or an explosion, the police would come: armoured Land Rovers from which they would spill with their guns. She’d the habit of opening the front door to remove their excuse for breaking it down. It happened each time, and Malachy was a principal target. She’d say quietly, at the door, to the first one in, ‘One of your cars with a wheel punctured, and it’s Malachy that did it?’ or ‘Angry, are you, that one of you’s alarm didn’t go off and that’s Malachy’s fault?’ One day they’d smack her, but they hadn’t yet.
The men from Serious Crime knew their way through the house, up the staircase and into the main bedroom, which had the view across the fields and down the slope towards the Pomeroy road, Donaghmore and Dungannon. He’d be out of bed by the time they came in, his hands would be on his head – no justification for them to belt him with their sticks. He’d be allowed to dress – taunted as ‘Fenian vermin’ – then cuffed, taken downstairs and out through the door. He never looked back at her, as if that might be seen as his weakness. He’d be driven to the crime suite at Antrim. Other officers would stay longer to bag up clothing and look for mobiles, pens and pads of paper, which they would check for the indentation of writing on the top blank sheets. She had to stay strong, and did. She had the impression that the detectives and the forensics teams harboured a degree of respect for her, maybe for Malachy too. They never abused Oisin, now seven, and she’d get him ready for school. They’d work around her and the boy as she dressed and fed him. A woman would search her before she was allowed to take him to the primary down the hill, but by then, each time, they’d seemed to know that – again – they would find no evidence. A year ago, Bridie had seen a big-built constable, sixteen stone or more, down on his knees in the boy’s bedroom doing Lego with him. It didn’t make her soften to them, never would, not while there was breath in her body. They’d only one question for her: had her husband been with her through that night? Her answer, each time: where else would he be?
They could hold him for seven days. He’d come home, flop in his chair, and the crime suite at Antrim was never mentioned, or what they’d asked him in interrogation. She was Brennie Murphy’s niece and understood the struggle, that the Five people from the Palace Barracks at Holywood could put in people to do a close target recce, then a detailed target recce: every phone in the house, every power socket and every light fitting, every item such as a TV or a toaster or the power points in the barns where the haulage trucks were, might have been used as the source for an audio bug. They lived with it.
Bridie had known Malachy Riordan all her life. She knew him as shy and reserved, seldom messing about as other kids did, but deep and distant – and at thirteen he had killed a man: her uncle had told her. She knew about ‘touts’ – any thirteen-year-old did, boy or girl. Years before, Mossie Nugent had touted on the mountain and been nutted; his wife still lived there, alone and shunned. She knew, and everyone knew, that the Loughgall Eight had been fingered by a tout before their murder at the hands of special forces. She knew, and everyone knew, that Malachy’s father, Padraig Riordan, had been killed because an informer had said where he would be and in which ditch the bomb was to be put. Her uncle, Brennie Murphy, had likely told thirteen-year-old Malachy who had given the information for cash. She knew: Aidan had driven a delivery van that took bread to the small stores in the villages either side of the Pomeroy road. He had been trusted and sometimes ferried weapons. It had been five years later that her uncle had told Malachy. He had gone to the buildings at the back, had taken a sledgehammer that had been his father’s, had walked across the fields for at least an hour to the man’s bungalow. He had waited in the shadows beyond the back door for Aidan to come out for a last cigarette, loosen his zip and piss in the grass, and had hit him with the sledgehammer in the back of the skull. Aidan had gone down and been hit again and again. He had been hit so often that his own wife had barely recognised him.
Malachy had gone home across the fields and along the trails in the bracken above the pastures that the cattle and sheep used. His mother had taken him in, stripped him bare, scrubbed him in hot water and burned his clothing in the incinerator. She had buried the killing weapon under several feet of rotting cattle manure. They had come to the house, which was now her home, the next morning. The incinerator was cold and the teenager’s body gave up no evidence. In the presence of an ‘appropriate adult’ he had claimed to the detectives questioning him that he had gone to bed early with a cold and had been there all night. They had known, of course, and he had been marked down as ‘significant’ and would be until he made the error that would convict him or laid himself open to the treachery of an informer or was shot dead.
She never criticised what he did.
The boy she had known had filled out. He had been a fair pupil in the classroom and promising at football, good enough for a trial as a seventeen-year-old with a youth side in Armagh City, and she’d watched him. He had given it all up. He had gone to war – fitness training replaced with learning the mechanism of weapons.
After two miscarriages, Bridie Riordan had given birth to Oisin, a warrior in Irish mythology, a great fighter. The child had a weak chest, was diffident and quiet, but he was what God had given her. From the kitchen, she could hear him wheezing in his bedroom. It was her life to wonder where her man was, and what he faced, and she knew no other.
‘I don’t know the place, and I don’t know the people.’
‘You have to go, Malachy.’
‘I’ll be off my patch. They’re strangers.’
Better than most, Brennie Murphy – one-time strategist and one-time Maze cage leader – understood the nerves of fighting men. His arm was around Malachy Riordan’s shoulders. They sat in the middle of a field on a plastic bag, which had contained cattle cake, to keep the damp from their trousers. The nearest hedgerow was more than forty yards away. The cattle tramped close to them and sniffed at the cake’s scent. Brennie Murphy could soothe.
‘Me go? How can I?’
‘You have experience. You’d know the questions to ask.’
‘I suppose so.’
The fingers, like claws, worked at Malachy’s shoulders, at the tension there, easing it. ‘We’re busting our bank to pay for this. We’re going to the edge and beyond of our finance. Hear me, Malachy. We’re taking money from what we pay the prisoners’ wives. We aren’t doing organisers’ fuel. It’s all going in this pot. Malachy, tell me it’s true. We need it.’
‘We have to get better stuff.’
‘And we’re not paying for shit.’
‘I don’t trust any man I don’t know.’
‘Malachy, you have to test-fire it. You have to see each item. There’ll be no going back if it’s shit. It’s different, not like it was. We don’t have a Libya. We don’t have those east-coast morons passing buckets round bars for dollars and sending us Armalites. It doesn’t happen any more and we have to look for it. We haven’t the explosives, the detonators or the firepower. We get a big shipment in, Malachy, or we could be looking at winding up the whole fuckin’ business. Got me?’
A reluctant agreement.
‘I can’t ask boys to go out with stuff we can’t guarantee. It has to be you.’
‘But I’ve never been there.’
‘Which of us has?’
Brennie Murphy, who had groomed his man from childhood, fed him the stories of war and trained him in the black art of low-intensity combat, reckoned he was close to the result he wanted. If the man stopped moaning, he might even get back to the village and into the pub before the lights went off.
‘You’ll be fine. Clever people are putting this together. I think I’d trust that Englishman. Why? Because he’s a crazy bastard. And you’ll have a good kid, streetwise and travelled, to look after you. It’ll be a small team, and we’re doing it fast because that’s the secure way. You worry too much, Malachy.’
Brennie Murphy’s joints creaked as he pushed himself up. It was like a bad dream that Malachy Riordan, the one man that all the volunteers would follow, was nervous of going abroad and doing business with people he didn’t know. There was no one else he could have sent.
‘When’ll I go?’
‘Tomorrow. Watch yourself and you’ll be fine. A kid’ll call by with your details, where to be and when. We’re depending on you.’
They came down the field and split near the barns. The dogs came forward and nuzzled his hand, then Brennie Murphy was gone into the darkness, slipping in the mud. He had gone beyond his normal caution: I think I’d trust that Englishman. Not like Brennie to commit to his opinion but Malachy Riordan’s spine had needed stiffening.
The BMW 5 series that Ralph Exton drove appeared, at a distance, to belong to a man of substance. It fitted in well in a village of almost royal connections. Two problems: it was seven years old, and had 189,000 miles on the clock – his skills didn’t run to fiddling the figures. He was living a few hundred yards outside the famous community’s parish boundary. The text had come through on his second, under-used mobile, the Samsung. He did business on the Nokia. The Samsung had been provided by his handlers. There was a code for meeting-place locations, in digits, then more digits telling him a time. Never a request, but an instruction. No recognition of how tired he was or what he had been through that day – but they tweaked him and he jumped.
Ralph Exton came out of the empty house. He had switched off all the lights, leaving it dark: he paid the bills. Usually Toria glared at him if he suggested that money didn’t grow on trees, that wasted electricity cost money.
The fuel gauge showed the need for a refill. The handlers didn’t pay more than basic expenses, the Irish were always late settling, a furniture deal with some Indonesian-manufactured bankruptcy stock had gone down the pan and there was a delay – bloody German form-filling – on fire-damaged Leica lenses out of a warehouse in Chemnitz. He was ‘running fast to stand still’, as he liked to say. And he could hear that drill, and smell the cigarettes that had been lit close to him. He pulled away and towards the road.
An oncoming car had an indicator flashing, then the headlights.
She was coming home. It had been a lengthy appointment at the dentist – as good a fiction as any and he didn’t argue with it. Not a bad chap, when Ralph was in the chair. He made small-talk while he was scratching around at Ralph’s molars. He didn’t mention Fliss, just prattled on about the stock market. He didn’t know if they did it in the chair, set to horizontal, or in the back of his car – or in the high street in Reading in front of Marks & Spencer. He pulled out into the road and lowered his window – the system needed fixing, it was running slow, but that was an arm-and-a-leg job at the dealership. ‘Sorry to miss you, sunshine. Off to a meeting . . .’
‘How was your trip?’
‘Not bad.’
‘Anything concrete?’
Was her allowance going to increase or would she have to wheedle the dentist for some new clothes? And what about Toria’s pocket-money hike?
‘Early days. Anyway, I’ll see you.’
‘Did you find some supper?’
‘Had something out of the fridge – thanks.’
He didn’t know whether the dentist fed his wife first or afterwards, or whether he economised on that end of it. It had been good once, between Ralph and Fliss, when he had been starting out in the early nineties and had made his first million. She was a leggy secretary and he was a ‘disappointment’ to his skimping parents because he hadn’t a real job with a career plan. He had lost that first million, gone to the edge of the crevasse but computers had lent a helping hand and another million had soon been in the biscuit tin. It hadn’t lasted, but they’d been good times.
He accelerated up the road and saw her swing into the drive. Sometimes she had a shower afterwards and sometimes she didn’t bother, but they still shared a bed.
Off the Pangbourne road, among the old gravel pits that had been filled with water and were leisure places for anglers, bird-watchers, sailors and dog-walkers, there was a turn-off to a car park. It was a regular meeting place – after dark it was a favourite for gays and doggers – a fifteen-minute drive from his house. He had long enough to reflect that life was not simple and that the people on each side of the fence he was astride had him by the short and curlies.
He was slowing and his headlights raked over a line of cars. Some occupants ducked their heads and others used their hands to cover their faces.
She was parked on the other side, near to the exit. It was a small car and she was in the back, two big bastards in front. He had first met her five years before when she would have been just off probation. She had been with a man Ralph Exton had met once – in a back room at Reading’s main police s
tation – and the situation had been explained. He’d had about five minutes to decide whether to co-operate or be taken to a custody desk, fingerprinted, photographed and swabbed for DNA. He’d have been charged under Customs and Excise counts and with a shedload of terrorism offences. It would have been a long one. He had bent under the pressure. Who wouldn’t have done?
She slipped out of the car, with one of her minders. Cigarettes were lit. He thought she showed signs of tiredness.
‘Just to bring you up to speed, Ralph.’
‘Thank you, appreciated.’
‘They want you in Prague tomorrow?’
‘Yes.’
‘My usual companion won’t be with me. Sadly, he’s not well enough.’
The minder’s lighter was out, but enough traffic passed on the road above them, heading for the motorway, for him to see flickered moments of her expression. Triumph and satisfaction writ large. Ralph could do insincerity pretty well. ‘I’m sorry to hear that.’
‘I’ll be there, and you’ll answer to me. We rate it important, national security. It’s imperative that we close down any possible upgrade in their capability of returning to widespread terrorism, and we need evidence. With evidence we can go before the courts. Ralph, my colleague might not have said this to you, but I will. You’re a key player for us and we appreciate what you do.’
‘Thanks.’
‘And the risks you take.’
‘Thanks again, and . . .’ No, not the time or the place. Trouble was, it was seldom ever the right time or the right place to start hammering on about the exit strategy, identity change and relocation. Or to raise the business of cash up front. He shifted on his feet. A lorry came up the road slowly, probably pulling a trailer. Its lights caught her face, hit the left cheek at the right angle. She was good to look at. She had a pretty mouth, no lipstick, nice eyes, no makeup. Something attractive, too, about the trainers, the jeans, the fleece and the anorak with the brand name covered.
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