Vagabond

by Seymour, Gerald

  He winced at the crudity, wondered if the barbarians were now at the gate and whether, in the Service, a new medieval or even Dark Age beckoned. He reached his screen. Information, sparse, flickered on it.

  The previous day, a command cable had been located and neutralised. Antelope3B8 had come through with a categorical assurance that a device could not be fired. That morning, from the barracks in Dungannon, a search party had been prepared with enough personnel to secure a perimeter, dogs for tracking and the services of Felix – the bomb disposal man who needed a stack of lives – to dismantle the damn thing. A bit bloody late. A householder living adjacent to the explosion scene reported two cadavers. It was the hope of the generation of officers to which Sebastian belonged that a police operation, allied with class intelligence and forensics, would lead to ‘the dissidents’ being locked up and the movement withering. Deaths in the field fuelled them. They traded in martyrs.

  He remembered the man in the ditch who had possessed that awful certainty of purpose.

  The female voice was clear, not raised, through the partition wall. ‘Usually it’s the women who come, wives or mothers. It’s the same in so many areas. The women go to the doctor about their men. But if the women come, and keep regular appointments, there’s a chance the men will follow.’

  Two elderly women sat in the waiting room and couldn’t help hearing what was said. They knew each other by sight, were from the same community, but hadn’t spoken or exchanged a glance for close to twenty-five years. Sickness had brought them to the waiting room together for the first time. They had been there for fifteen minutes, had been told that their appointments were further delayed because the director was briefing a journalist from the International Herald Tribune. It was hoped they would not be inconvenienced.

  ‘You have to understand the scale of the Troubles. Quite apart from the thousands of dead, another fifty thousand suffered injuries. Everyone knew somebody who was killed or maimed. A time bomb is ticking – that’s what post-traumatic stress disorder is. We’re supposed to have had ten years of peace but the numbers coming through our doors continue to increase. For so many, the idea of putting it behind them is not a credible option. A dream but seldom fulfilled.’

  It was off a side-street. A stranger would have struggled to find it – the sign advertising its work was small and insignificant. Those who counselled there didn’t seek attention. One was the widow of Mossie Nugent; the other was the widow of Jon Jo Donnelly.

  ‘The mainland and the rest of the world have forgotten Northern Ireland. Never cared about us that much and got bored with our problems. The window of compassion for outsiders is long closed. The damage is widespread. Those who brought violence to our streets didn’t consider the aftermath. The equivalent of a dump of toxic waste. So many victims.’

  Mossie Nugent’s name was reviled. He had taken the money, had given the information that enabled the troops to wait in ambush and shoot dead Jon Jo Donnelly. Ten or fifteen had been at Nugent’s burial, and up to a thousand had escorted Donnelly to his grave. The widows faced each other. One kneaded a handkerchief and the other fidgeted with a magazine.

  ‘It takes great courage to come in here and sit down with us, either one to one or in a group. Very few are from the ranks of what they like to call the armed struggle, the “perpetrators”. So many of the gunmen and their families won’t accept that they’re victims of PTS. If they admitted it, they’d also have to accept that their efforts and sacrifices were for nothing. It’s a huge step for them to come through our door.’

  Both women were hurt. Both went, most days, to their husband’s grave. Both had seen the body with the marks of the shots, the broken skull and the burns. Their eyes met.

  ‘The traumas are desperate. A six-year-old child clings to his father’s hand as gunmen break into the house. Then they shoot the man. The child is still holding his father’s hand. That was thirty years ago. The child is now an adult and can’t work. He’s in bits and has no life.’

  An acknowledgement. An understanding that neither had worn well. An acceptance that the wives of the martyr and of the traitor had suffered.

  ‘There are the relatives of so many who were murdered. It’s hard for them to understand how a stranger could feel such hatred for their husband or brother or father, quite a different reaction from a road accident or death from disease. We avoid, like the plague, issuing pills. We have chance-to-chat groups, and we go on country walks together . . . So many have no relationships, no jobs, are in isolation, can’t even fill in a simple form.’

  The wife of Jon Jo Donnelly, killed by the army, said that an English girl had targeted her man. The wife of Mossie Nugent, who had been tortured before he had made a confession of guilt to the security people of the Organisation, said that the same girl had gone after her husband, compromised and deluded him.

  ‘Draw your own conclusions. Don’t quote me. It was for nothing, and some want to return to it. Incomprehensible. Did you hear the news this morning? Anyway, I hope that was of help.’

  Attracta Donnelly said that her boy, now in his middle thirties, was broken and she missed her husband as if he had gone yesterday. The pain was ‘as bad today as the day he was killed’.

  Siobhan Nugent said that the damage had been done by the English woman, the recruiter who had handled her husband and forced money on him. ‘The English girl killed my husband and yours. God burn them, the handlers.’

  The journalist was American by his dress: he wore a bow-tie, with polka-dots, a heavy grey herringbone jacket and strong shoes. A big shoulder bag was slung at his hip. He thanked the counsellor for her time, and seemed not to notice the two women who sat on the hard chairs in the waiting area. He might have thought them irrelevant to the story he would write about the time-bomb. The counsellor carried out a tray of dirty cups and uneaten biscuits.

  Jon Jo’s widow said, ‘The informers – touts – destroyed the boys. They made the killings happen. And how do the handlers live with it on their consciences?’

  Mossie’s widow said, ‘They put claws into a man, never let go of him, exploit and manipulate. No one ever called by after his death. Pick a man up and drop him as if he’s nothing – except that he’s dropped into his grave. I might see you.’

  The counsellor, a neat, busy woman, came back and gestured for Attracta Donnelly to follow her. Attracta stood, allowed a thin smile, and might have surprised herself. Jon Jo’s widow said, ‘I could call by.’

  He’d done a turn of the square and was back at the top by the King’s statue, near to the place where the boy had burned himself to death. Few knew him. Not Lisette and Christine at the house in Caen, not Hanne in her studio.

  It might have been that Matthew Bentinick did not, quite, know Danny Curnow. It was possible that Dusty Miller did. He went past the shops that sold visitors’ tat, the coffee places, a bookshop, and turned back into the street where the hotel was. His own was behind him, on the far side of the square. He reflected that Dusty Miller, alone, might have read him well enough to know whether anger was genuine or an assumed tool. Dusty Miller would have been behind him, with the H&K across his chest, a live one in the breach, when Danny had broken all of the rules laid down in the Green Book or the Red Book – whatever colour the book was that day – and punched Aaron Hegarty. Hegarty, unemployed and unemployable, was on the bread-and-water rations of a hundred pounds in used notes each month. He did a bit of message-carrying, was useful for noting car registrations, who came to which house on the estate on the north side of Armagh and up beyond the Gaelic ground – and Hegarty’s conceit had gone too high. A problem with all of them: they thought they were invaluable. He had wanted a hundred a week, had stood defiant and been whacked. Hegarty had thought Danny’s anger real enough and had believed he might face ‘nutting’. He had crumpled.

  Dusty had told Danny Curnow afterwards that it had been a good act – or had it been an act? The result: Aaron Hegarty had feared his handler more than he had feared
the Organisation he betrayed, and his money had stayed at a hundred a month. It had gone into the account for a further eleven months, but had been cut the week of his funeral. A month later the widow had received a letter from a bank in the north of England, telling her that they’d been notified of her husband’s passing, that there was an account with £2,500 in it and she was listed as a beneficiary. What had she done? She had cleaned out the account and sent the money to the Shinners’ office in Cookstown. When Danny Curnow had hit her husband, the anger had seemed authentic.

  It had been about fear, not about friendship. He took a lift and aimed to prove it.

  Chapter 11

  He knocked on the door. There was a pause. Then he heard shuffling inside and the door opened. Danny Curnow faced the agent.

  ‘I’m Danny.’

  ‘Are you.’

  ‘I run the show.’

  ‘Do you.’

  ‘She answers to me.’

  ‘Does she.’

  He went in, used an elbow to push the door shut. An untidy room, bed not made, a dirty shirt and discarded socks on the floor. An ordinary looking man. Danny Curnow knew about the meeting on the hill above Dungannon, by Shane Bearnagh’s Seat. Ordinary enough, but with guts.

  ‘I’ve a problem.’

  ‘Have you.’

  ‘And you’re going to solve it, Ralph.’

  ‘Am I.’

  Danny felt as though he carried the plague. If he ‘touched’ Ralph Exton he would pass on the virus. He had touched men, and a woman, and they now lay in graves. Not in the ornate plots reserved for the paramilitaries, the black marble with the inscriptions in gold leaf. The ones allocated to them were unlikely to have a backdrop of a scenic lough or a mountainside, more likely had a view of the graveyard’s compost heap. He had walked away into the night. One more pace forward, now, across a worn hotel carpet, and he would ‘touch’ Exton. He had run from it, had cleansed himself. For nothing. He had returned.

  ‘You will. Yes.’

  There had been the cringing ones, who had needed to get down on their knees and snivel about the loneliness, the risks; there were those who did it like a business transaction, expected to pocket or bank the funds, give the report and fade into the night. Last, there were the cocky little beggars, who were doing ‘Vagabond’ a favour. They reckoned to walk tall, grin and be what Dusty called ‘piss-takers’. Ralph Exton was in the category of . . . He had slipped into the old routines effortlessly.

  Danny Curnow slapped him – he did it with a smile: a sharp slap across the cheek and chin, hard enough to make his palm tingle and redden the skin. The man rocked. Surprise flared on his face. Some thought the system depended on their contribution, that they deserved red-carpet treatment, that they were continually owed compliments. In the case of Ralph Exton, that was likely to be true. Danny saw the shock spread.

  He slapped him again. It was about authority. Danny would have said, in the old-speak of a former life, that it was necessary to create authority. The man was not a friend. He was not grateful to Exton. The man’s heroics and the odds stacked against him were unimportant. The agent was the key. He sought to dominate.

  A third slap. He had brought the plague with him. Why had he come back and why had he neutralised all the years of convalescing from the pain? He was a lemming, speeding towards the cliff edge. He re-created the hotel room from memories of the Portakabin at Gough, the dark car parks behind pubs and woodland walks where no tourists came. They had all cowered when he struck them. He had done it with his fists and his tongue and he reckoned he could make an agent pliable again. He was unsure, at that moment, whether Exton needed a fourth slap, a kick or a punch – and he didn’t have Dusty Miller behind him with an H&K hung across his chest and a Glock at his waist.

  ‘If you think you can play games with us, you are so, so, mistaken.’

  The curtains were back. Sunlight spilled into the room.

  ‘Fucking us about, chummy, holding back on your Russian friend, that’s just not acceptable.’

  Ralph Exton’s head was in front of the light. He had missed the trick of reading the face.

  ‘Good on the Irish end and crap on the—’

  It hadn’t happened before. Not just a couple of flailed blows but the anger of a street-fighter’s attack.

  The weight of Ralph Exton hit Danny Curnow. The sun had been in his face and he hadn’t seen the response welling. A man possessed. He went down.

  What would Dusty have done? Dusty would have powered forward, the shoulder stock of the H&K raised. He would have brought it down – required force – on the back of Ralph Exton’s head. He would have flattened him. Then he would have levered Danny up, with that world-weary look on his face: ‘What would you do without me to pick up the pieces, Desperate?’ Dusty wasn’t there.

  The fingers were rearing towards his eyes. The weight was on him. Surprise first, then control, last the response. Unequal. He had the fingers out of his face, and the weight off him. He pitched Ralph Exton, the star agent, used to coddling, onto his stomach. Danny had a knee in the small of the agent’s back, and he had the fingers and one arm against his knee, twisted round. He turned the fingers some more, and the cry was of agony.

  Submission.

  ‘You listening to me?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You frightened of them?’ Danny asked it lightly: as if real and total fear was everyday stuff.

  ‘Do you know anything?’

  ‘Telling you what I know.’

  He kept the pain constant. Felt no pride in it.

  Danny told it like he thought it was. ‘I reckon it’s about loyalties. You don’t have any to me. Why would you? A nice life, pulling in the cigarette money, but the idyll ends when you get called into a police station. You’re trapped, coerced, compromised. You work for the Irish and they’re heavy with threat and could put a drill bit through your kneecap. You have your friend and you can see that the mistake you made was in involving him. Would he get angry if crossed? A mobster. A broker in arms deals. How angry? Who can inflict the pain? Who has the longest arm? I can, Ralph, and I have.’

  He twisted the fingers. The unarmed-combat people had taught it. They were weathered old birds: tracksuit bottoms, white vests, stubble on their chins, hair cropped tight. They smelt of cigarettes, and knew about pain, the creation of fear. The trend, as he had seen on the local TV talk shows in Bagram interrogation centre outside Kabul and at Guantánamo, was to say that pain did not produce reliable results. Hurting people let them cough up any shit to halt the pain. They’d say anything. Not the way Danny Curnow knew it. Alongside the unarmed-combat instructors, there had been the guys who did the heavy interrogations at Castlereagh and Gough. Water, sleep deprivation or punches to the stomach where the soft flesh doesn’t bruise. They’d talked. Not too much weight given to human rights or any Amnesty report. Good stuff spilled out. It was all about fear. His mouth was close to the agent’s ear. He whispered, ‘I am certainty. My arm is long and the pain I can inflict is guaranteed. No escape from it. You hear me?’ The barest movement – enough to bring on the agony. ‘Glad of that. The arrangements?’ He loosed the hold. The agent gasped. Then Danny heard the hissed schedule for Ralph Exton’s movements, when the pick-up would be and where he would be taken. Pretty much what he needed. He thought he could justify what he had done. Into the ear, ‘I’ll tell you what I’m not. I am not your good friend.’

  He let it sink in.

  ‘I am your last, best – and only – hope. Last hope, best hope, only hope.’

  The door closed. Ralph lay on the floor.

  He did not know where Gaby was. He thought he deserved a bit of her but was too drained to crawl to the bedside table where the telephone was. He had attempted to juggle loyalties and failed.

  It was early afternoon. He rolled onto his back and tried to flex his hand, then massaged it until the feeling returned.

  He believed. The long arm existed for the Irish on the mountain and for his
friend, whose driver was due that evening. He did not doubt that the man who had inflicted pure pain on him had a long arm. The words sang in his ears: last hope, best hope, only hope. He crossed the floor, pushed himself up, took the phone. God, he needed comfort. Where to find it? He dialled for an outside line, fed in the international code and the digits.

  She didn’t answer. Neither did his daughter. A man answered. He recognised the voice.

  ‘Hello . . . Yes? Hello.’

  His own voice was stifled.

  He heard, ‘Don’t know who it is.’

  He imagined his wife reaching across the bed. An arm would have stroked a path across the dentist’s chest – a bare arm – and the fingers would have cancelled the call. The whine rang in his ear. Where else to look? Only one place.

  He vomited. Danny Curnow hadn’t trusted himself to get from Exton’s hotel on Stepanska to his own. He wouldn’t have made it that far, then up the stairs, along a corridor and into his room.

  Sick as a dog, a parrot or a squaddie first night on leave.

  He heaved. By keeping his head low he minimised the mess. But the squaddie, the parrot or the dog did not throw up because of acute shame. He did.

  He flushed it three times to leave it acceptable. He swilled out his mouth, but couldn’t touch the shame.

  He came out of the hotel door onto the street and hardly saw where he was going. He would have cannoned into her if she hadn’t pulled aside.

  ‘Where are you going? Where have you been?’

  He looked into the face of Gaby Davies. A good-looking kid. Didn’t wear any rings. He walked past her. Just at that moment he had no wish to mouth excuses, shed half-truths and fight his corner. His back was to her.

  She called after him, ‘What the hell have you done?’

  He hurried, and the bile was climbing again in his throat. The shame outweighed the pride that he had extracted more of the necessary information, going hard, than she had by going soft. He texted Matthew Bentinick. The shame was for his self-inflicted wound. Of course it was dirty – whoever said it wouldn’t be?