‘The Branch boys said of you, “He was the best because he was the coldest, not a degree of warmth in his veins. The best because he’d no sense of mercy. A man wants to come out, but can’t. A man wants to back away, but the hooks are in him. A little man’s death may protect a bigger asset – so it’s time to book the hearse, the priest and the grave-digger. The best because he’d no feeling.” I think we can move.’
If Matthew Bentinick had been preparing a lecture for young officers on launching a mission, he might have said, ‘Those working under you do not need chapter and verse on aims and end games. What they need to know is what is expected of them in a field, however narrow. That way they are less likely to be confused with ethics – always a substantial enemy.’ But he did not lecture young officers.
The tourists would have arrived at Dunkirk. They would have been sobered over an early lunch in the bistro on Place Jean Bart. Stories of the town and the significance of the battle fought there, seventy-four years and a few months before, would have been etched in their minds. They’d be driven from the bistro up a narrow street named after a resistance fighter, Louis Herbeaux, who had been executed by firing squad in 1943: some of the men on the minibus would have wondered in silence how they might have been, or their fathers, if an army of occupation had moved into their town. The evacuation of Dunkirk, in the last days of May and the first days of June, had been controlled from a nineteenth-century fortress by a quayside, now a museum. They’d have been there in dull light and could hardly have failed to imagine the terror and confusion of the last stage of the retreat. A film played, black-and-white images, with a soundtrack at full volume relaying the scream of the diving Stuka bombers. They would see the rifles and machine-guns that old relatives might have handled in a desperate defence of the harbour, the dunes and the beaches. Within an hour of entering the museum, a few might have shivered. They would have felt better, already, to walk alongside the men who had suffered in that place, and a guide might have spoken of the nation’s debt.
Dusty had come by taxi. A cloud had gathered over him – like that moment of warning before disaster struck, when tyres lost their grip on black ice and roadside trees loomed in the windscreen.
He had gone, long past midnight, to Reception at the Ibis. A sleepy porter had passed him the envelope. He had travelled 380 kilometres from Caen to Dunkirk and escaped with a fare of four hundred euros, but the driver had been Algerian and he had done a good deal. He had found the keys to the minibus with the thousand-euro float left for him. He hadn’t slept.
It was 1998, the night the FRU team at Gough heard that a bakery delivery driver had been beaten to death. The driver was Aidan. Quite useful to the armed struggle. There had been another man who, it was felt, was facing growing suspicion, and was valuable to the FRU.
A discussion had been held. They might have been strangers, talking about putting down an old dog. Something had to be done. A way was found to pass the necessary information. The people on the mountain would be devastated that a trusted individual had betrayed a martyr of the status of Padraig Riordan and three others. A ‘useful’ man would be removed. Mistrust and suspicion would thrive.
The reports coming in to FRU said that Aidan, the bakery and weapons-delivery driver, had died slowly under a rain of blows from a lump hammer. He had not confessed, as demanded of him, between the frenzied attacks. He couldn’t confess because he knew nothing. It was said that half the mountain, an exaggeration but with some truth, had heard his screams.
That evening, Dusty Miller had gone to Desperate’s room and found him on the bed, silent and bowed, the bag packed at his feet. He had left an hour later. The shouts of Captain Bentinick would have been loud in his ears but went unanswered. He’d had moments to decide his future. Dusty had gone into his own room, stuffed what he owned into a rucksack, then hitched it as he’d run to the gate, Bentinick yelling at him, ‘Good man, just bring him back. We all feel the weight of it sometimes. Get him out and drink a bar dry, then bring him back.’
He’d caught him at the bus station on the far side of the Mall. They’d gone to Belfast docks and sailed with the night ferry to Heysham. He had never heard Matthew Bentinick’s voice again until that late afternoon. Now he sat in the minibus and waited for them to move on towards the sands above the Dunkirk beaches. He thought it cruel that his man had been recalled. And that it might break him.
‘I just want you to know that you shouldn’t worry about us. We’ll tidy up after you. However much shit you leave scattered around, we’ll clean it away. Have a good trip, Danny – or Vagabond – and we’ll be there to pick up the pieces.’ The sarcasm was rampant.
Danny Curnow went up the aircraft’s steps.
Chapter 5
He muttered something that was half of an apology. He was told it was nothing to worry about.
The pilot seemed exhausted and Danny Curnow felt the same, but he’d slept from the time the aircraft had left the runway and it was only the jolt of a good landing that had woken him. They had taxied and he’d blinked, and he’d seen the carpet under his feet, then retraced the drying mud on his way to the cabin door. He apologised again for the mess.
‘No worries, sir. I take people to some funny old corners for the Service, but I’m not at the sharp end. Look after yourself, sir.’
There was a brief handshake. It was unlikely they’d meet again, but he appreciated what had been said.
A car took him on. He had documentation ready but no one seemed to want to see it.
They came in on a big dual carriageway. He recognised nothing. He had not been in London since he’d moved to France. Dusty Miller and he had spent a year in digs outside Salisbury and there’d been some awful work for an agency that specialised in surveillance operatives: marriage break-ups, industrial espionage . . . Then he and Dusty had taken a ferry from Portsmouth to Caen.
He had no feeling now of coming home, or any sense of being alongside the people he served again. When his life might have been on the line – or Dusty’s, or those of any of the team working from the Portakabins at Gough, or those of the men he had squeezed dry and slipped money to – he’d never reckoned it was done in their name: they drove and walked around the car at traffic lights – none knew of him or had cause to thank him. He would have found it hard to justify what he had done, but it had seemed right then. It was his burden.
He had been a West Country small-town boy, and London didn’t appeal to him.
Tavistock was an old community, laden with history, on the south side of the moor. His father was a coach driver, his mother a school-dinners lady and he had gone to the local school. There was a big private place on the way towards Mary Tavy and Peter Tavy but his school had no contact with it. He had hated the kids who went there, spoke differently and thronged the town on a Saturday afternoon. He had hated pretty much everything. Until he had met Barnaby. A recluse living in a foul-smelling bungalow, Barnaby had been a corporal in 40 Commando. When Danny had first met him, the ex-marine was half starved, as was his dog. He’d come across the place wandering on a lane above the railway that had been closed eleven years before. Danny didn’t speak to strangers, but he was entranced by the old warrior. Barnaby had sprained an ankle: he took money from a biscuit tin under a bed and gave it to Danny, who had gone to a shop and brought back food for Barnaby and the dog. He had handed over the receipt and every penny of the change. He grew – almost – to love the man. He had listened in awe, spellbound, to the wry stories of going ashore at Suez, patrolling Cypriot streets and fire spats in the Steamer Point crescent of Aden. No teacher had ever roused such interest in him. He had listened and stayed at school. He had won a cross-country cup, to general astonishment, but had walked the course and learned where to skive off into woods and where to rejoin the route.
Barnaby had said he should not be a ‘bayonet-pusher’, that he was too intelligent for it. He had taken exams and done well, then joined an infantry regiment but with his future mapped out. He ha
d gone to see Barnaby in his uniform, with a shine on his boots, and the old guy had wet eyes. That had been the last time he had seen him.
In the regiment he had applied and been accepted for a sniper course, which signalled him as a man without sentiment, and had done a tour of four months in a sangar on the roof of Flax Street Mill, looking down into Ardoyne. He had never had occasion to fire and kill. A switch to Intelligence Corps, at an officer’s recommendation, then into FRU. He had gone to work for Matthew Bentinick.
They were in heavy traffic and inched their way south towards the river.
He had been back to Tavistock once since he’d joined up. The only time he had left Ireland to go on leave from the Province was after a call from a funeral director. There had been a sealed envelope on the ledge above the fireplace, along with the final demands. He hadn’t gone to see his parents but had been at the crematorium, with a representative of the Royal Marines Association and an ethnic Afro-Caribbean social worker. He had owed Barnaby so much. That was where he was rooted.
They came past Parliament.
He didn’t know the issues that troubled Britain. In Caen, Danny Curnow never tuned a radio to the BBC and did not buy British newspapers. If they were left in the minibus by clients he treated them as rubbish. Now he saw the Rodin statue, the burghers whose lives had been saved by an English queen in 1347. They had offered themselves to the English forces so that their town, Calais, might escape the sack and pillage. He had learned French history. They came to Horseferry Road. He expected to be dropped at the front entrance but they pulled up and the driver leaned back to open the rear door. ‘This is where I was told to drop you off.’
He saw, in a side-street at the back of the building, two armed police patrolling with machine-guns and kit sagging on their belts. He saw the park, the tall, leaf-heavy trees, and a side door to the building. The driver pointed to the café further along the street. He climbed out and heaved his rucksack after him.
He went inside, sat down, asked for a glass of water and waited to be granted an audience.
Time wouldn’t wait for him, and Brennie Murphy hadn’t helped. He felt pressure building on his shoulders, weighing him down.
Brennie Murphy had hugged him, wished him well. The car door had slammed and Brennie had driven it out of the field gate and up the hill. Should the kids be allowed to lay it? Malachy Riordan was uncertain, and Brennie Murphy had only shrugged.
It was called EFP. It had been a long time coming to Ireland. An Explosive Force Projectile was standard for Hezbollah in south Lebanon as a defence against Israeli armour; it had been big in Iraq when the Iranians had flooded the country with them, driving the Yanks and the Brits off the roads; it had been refined for Afghanistan. At school in Dungannon, he had not got far with physics, engineering and chemistry, but he had made two – used precious resources in putting them together – and had test-fired them on the crest of the mountain by Shane Bearnagh’s Seat, where the wind was hard and diffused the sound of the blasts. Each had been aimed at a sheet of metal, a yard square, a quarter of an inch thick, and five yards away. Each time it was punctured. It had come in a pack from a man in the south – Brennie had known of him. There had been enough PE4 explosive in each of the rinsed-out baked-beans tins to bring down an airliner.
The first time he had followed the handwritten instruction on a sheet of paper. The second time, after he had burned the paper, he did it from memory. The device was in a shoebox. When fired, it would penetrate with ease a car or Land Rover reinforced with plates against conventional bullets, kill the driver and passenger. It was new, the best. It was right for use against Eamonn O’Kane, policeman, visiting his mother. But the boys who would fire it were raw and untried. Brennie said that the explosive was ‘sensitive’, to be handled with care – which meant it was fuckin’ dangerous. He had been sweating when he’d put the thing together for the test by Shane Bearnagh’s Seat.
He went to see them.
Pearse was grinding out his fag and Kevin was smoking. They were in trees and a beat-up car was off the road. He came, parked and walked towards them. Kevin threw down his cigarette, let it smoulder. Malachy’s phone, of course, was off.
He told Pearse to pick up his cigarette end, Kevin the same. Their faces fell. They would have understood the simple mistake they had made – they had been told often enough about DNA, how places where they met could be bugged and . . . They were in awe of him. In their eyes he had star quality and they were gutted when they realised he had caught them out in something so small. He pointed to the car. Kevin nodded and made a sweeping gesture. Malachy had to trust that it was clean of bugs and of an audio system.
Could they do it? They talked together. They could. Didn’t he trust them?
What to believe? He saw the defiance in their eyes. They were three years out of school and unemployed. Both – he recognised it – lived for the Organisation and for the chance to be volunteers under his control. He knew their wider families, and Bridie would have known their mothers well.
He needed to be gone, but the opportunity to take down a policeman was huge. The effect on morale on the mountain would be massive, but he didn’t know if the boys were capable of it. Time was short.
‘And I’m not here myself, I’m away. Do it for me, and make it count.’
Two young faces stared back at him. To doubt them was to insult them. He left them and drove away. In his mind he saw his father’s grave, the bold lettering in gold. When he left the mountain to go on ‘active service,’ he would go through the villages to the west where the big memorials were for the martyrs. He went to put together a bag at home, then hold her, kiss her and leave her. He’d blow another kiss, and see, perhaps, a moment of shy affection from her.
She was in Berlin, at Tegel, and took a taxi the few kilometres into the city, to the Charlottenburg district. She was no longer Frankie McKinney, and that passport was lodged in the lining of the wheelie-case. The bank was on Kaiserdamm, where it merged with Bismarckstrasse. She went in confidently. She wore a headscarf, tinted clear glasses and a lightweight raincoat that had been tightly folded in her bag. On presentation of the second passport she was permitted to transfer the monies, now almost half a million euro, to a bank in Prague. Her confidence came from the trust invested in her.
Her life had veered onto a different track three years ago, towards the end of her second term at Queen’s University.
She had gone with the Enniskillen girls to a party up by Finaghy, close to the motorway, near also to Andersonstown. She had never been to the sprawled estate in West Belfast because a girl from the Malone road, though sharing Andersonstown’s faith, had no reason to be there. Looking back, she had been targeted and identified, it would have been known she was a Catholic, with Protestant friends – but they’d gone. She’d been left behind. Drink had flowed, the music had pounded and the air was heavy with smoke. She had felt a rare excitement, sucking in the music and the mood. A woman had been close to her elbow. ‘You said your name was Frankie? Well, Frankie, what have you ever done in your life?’ Nothing. ‘Enjoy the emptiness, do you, Frankie, of doing nothing?’ There might have been a thrust in her chin or a flash of her eyes. Others watched as she answered. The music dinned in her head, smoke was in her nose and the place had taken on a heady wildness. The woman, the interrogator, looked hard into her eyes, challenging, then half turned and beckoned a man, older than her. The woman murmured that he’d done time in the Maze as an eighteen-year-old – ‘Which was doing something, not nothing.’ She’d spoken to him, then disappeared.
He was a full inch shorter than Frankie and wore just a T-shirt, jeans and open sandals. She saw on his bare right forearm a tattoo of a pistol. Frankie was against a wall and he said in her ear – and she bent to hear him better, ‘How would you describe your life, Miss Frances?’
‘It’s Frankie. My life, if you must know, is fucking boring.’ She had had two boyfriends in her fifteen weeks at the university: a boy who was in the
hockey second team, who thought she should stand on a touchline and watch him; another who was second-year English and wanted to be an actor. A bit of sex, not much . . .
They’d gone upstairs. He’d said on the landing, ‘Could you handle something, Miss Frances, that’s not fucking boring?’
She hadn’t needed to reply. There was a couple in a room and he told them to go. They grabbed their clothing and bolted. He’d closed the door and undressed her. She’d thought it was adult sex – amazing and sweaty, quite unlike the actor and the hockey boy. She reckoned she grew up. There was no curtain and a streetlight shone across the bed. They dressed. He had a biro wedged in his wallet, and asked her to write on his palm her mobile number. They’d gone down the stairs and into the music. All eyes were on him and her, and he manoeuvred a way through the crowd. They went together out into the night. He smacked her buttock roughly and half smiled, then went right towards Andersonstown. She turned left towards Finaghy and a bus for the Malone road.
She had never seen him again in the flesh. A month later she had been called and contact with Maude established – a good name: Maude Gonne McBride had been the wife of a patriot executed by the Crown, firing squad, in 1916 after the Rising. She had seen his picture, though, on television: the police called his arrest ‘significant’. He was Tomas Doherty, held on remand at Maghaberry. He’d chosen her and she had passed the initial tests. She had no regrets.
She told the clerk at the Dresdner Bank, showing him her passport, her account number, and gave him the details of the bank in Prague to which the monies should be transferred. She spoke briskly, as if the movement of funds on that scale was not unusual.
Then Frankie took another taxi, back to Tegel, and checked in on the Prague flight under a different name.
Vagabond Page 11
