Bandit Country

by Andrew Turpin

  He was right. He had half of his cup left when Duggan moved through to the office. “Martin, we’ve got a problem. A shitty tout in the camp.”

  “The Lurgan job, you mean, the moped?”

  “Yeah, correct, but the two others before that as well. There were six who knew about Lurgan. Me, Liam, Kieran, those two in the Derry brigade—their OC and the moped rider—and you.”

  He paused and looked Dennehy straight in the eye. “I need to find out who leaked it.”

  Dennehy looked straight back. “You’re not accusing me, Dessie, are you?”

  “Should I be?”

  “You’re right to suspect anyone and everyone. I know that, given what’s been going on. But you can strike me off your list. Also, you need to remember there were more than six who knew about Lurgan. What about Marcus, when he came to that meeting last month to talk about cigarette disposals? He was hanging around outside the room for ages afterward waiting for his lift. And then Annie, remember, it was a long meet, and she brought in that plate of sandwiches and a pot of tea and probably waited outside for quite a while until we finished the agenda. Just saying, it wasn’t as watertight as you seem to remember.”

  Duggan scowled and tutted. “You may be right. Anyway, I want you to know. I like you and I’ve trusted you, and I’d like to keep on trusting you, but I’ve got to be careful.”

  Dennehy relaxed a little. “Sure, Dessie. We all need to be careful.”

  “I’ve been wondering whether we should get a full inquiry going,” Duggan said. “Bring in people from outside the brigade to handle it. That wouldn’t be fun for any of us.”

  That was the understatement of the year. An outside inquiry, involving hard men from one or two of the other dissident brigades, would be nasty. Dennehy nodded. “But if it clears things up, might be worth having at the back of your mind. Do you need me to work on anything?”

  “A couple of things,” Duggan said. “There’s a job coming up that I’m telling you about as you might be needed to help out. It’s a pipe bomb, two weeks from today, the Wednesday night, against a Prod copper at his home in Woodside. Plan is to stick it under his car before he goes off for night shift.”

  Dennehy nodded. Woodside was a neighborhood in the mainly Protestant—Prod—and nationalist Poleglass area of West Belfast. That would definitely cause a major stir.

  “Good. Let’s keep it tight, then,” Dennehy said.

  “Yeah, and I’ve got another job in mind that I’d like you to do. Just you and I are in on this. It’s a private one.”

  “What is it we’re looking at, then?” Dennehy asked.

  “Right, I’ll explain,” Duggan said. “It’s in upper Falls and needs to be done soon. I want to take a backseat on this. You’ve done a lot of admin jobs over the past few months but not much action. Don’t want you to get rusty, do we?”

  Dennehy nodded. There was something in the tone of voice. He knew Duggan of old. Was the OC about to put him to some sort of test or put him in the firing line? Or possibly both? It was hard to tell.

  “Okay, then,” Dennehy said. “What’s the detail?”

  Duggan started to run through a list of instructions and then gave the name.

  Dennehy recoiled. “You’re joking? Tell me you’re joking.”

  But it was immediately obvious that his boss wasn’t joking. He was deadly serious.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Wednesday, January 9, 2013

  Belfast

  Johnson looked up sharply from the three sheets of paper that Jayne had put down on the breakfast bar in front of him.

  “I was kind of hoping for a little more than this,” he said. “But I guess you’ve done well to get this much out of her, realistically.”

  Jayne had come back to the apartment on Falls Road just after ten o’clock following a breakfast meeting with her old friend at MI5, Noreen Wilson.

  “The girls in the basement wouldn’t let her see the file on the chief constable," Jayne said. "It’s restricted while they’re working out what to do following the shooting.”

  The sheet on Eric Simonson included his address and his wife’s name. The files on the other two were only slightly less thin, comprising only their wives’ name, brief work history, addresses, and a few other sketchy details.

  Jayne shrugged. “Noreen was a bit apologetic.”

  Johnson sighed. “Okay, in that case we need to do some legwork. I think we’ll go and visit the wives. I need a shave.”

  He stood up and stretched, then headed into his bedroom.

  An hour later, they were in the silver Toyota, edging cautiously along Union Street, Portadown. The Beretta and the Walther, which O’Neill had delivered to them the previous evening, were safely stashed in the glove compartment.

  A giant Ulster Volunteer Force mural, painted on a house end wall across the road from a Methodist church, underlined the area’s unionist and Protestant credentials.

  Johnson steered around the corner and parked fifty yards down from the house where the assassinated prison officer, Will Doyle, had lived prior to being shot at his golf course.

  They walked back and knocked. The man’s widow, Beth, was a fragile but well-groomed lady in her mid-fifties, with short gray hair and glasses. She was hesitant, but Johnson explained the reason for their visit, and eventually she agreed to make them a cup of tea.

  “We’ve had a very tough year,” she said. “First there was the burglary, not long after New Year’s last year, when my husband’s laptop and credit cards and some books and papers were stolen. Will was on edge after that, anxious and worried.”

  Then the shooting had come out of the blue in late October and had destroyed the family. Their adult children were still in shock, she said, and their six-year-old grandson couldn’t understand where his grandad had gone.

  “I still cry every day, many times a day,” Beth said. “It’s a sadness that won’t go away. The police have got nowhere with it, so we’ve no idea who did it. The dissidents, I guess, but why him?” The bags under her eyes and lined forehead told their own story.

  “They shot him from the top of a hill overlooking the golf course—high up, and must have been three-quarters of a mile away,” Beth continued. “The police think whoever did it got away down a country lane. I mean, nobody knew where to look because it was from so far away.” She put her head in her hands.

  As a prison officer, he saw himself at risk to some extent, but he’d done that job for eighteen years, ever since he left the army, she said, and had never had a problem previously.

  Johnson sipped the hot, sweet tea and leaned back on Beth’s sofa. He felt sorry for her but also slightly mystified.

  “Terrible. But you know, you’re living here, in County Armagh, which is republican territory. How risky did you think that was for an ex-army man?” he asked gently.

  She looked out the window. “We moved here a few years ago to be near our daughter and our grandson after he was born. Before that we were up in Antrim. Nobody around here knew he had been in the army. We never spoke about it.”

  Jayne leaned forward in her seat. “Which part of the army was he in?”

  “He worked in intelligence,” Beth said.

  “Army intelligence? Which unit was that?”

  “It was the 14th Company, the Det, they used to call it,” she said. “What do you know about them?”

  “I worked in Northern Ireland years ago,” Jayne said. “So I do know a bit. Did he talk much about it?”

  “No. Never.”

  “And that burglary you mentioned. What was the laptop they took?” Johnson asked.

  It was a MacBook Pro, Beth said, with a pale blue cover. “He’d been slowly typing up his journals, his old diaries, into it and had been annoyed because, stupidly, he had no backup, and he then had to start all over again.”

  “Do you know what was in the journals?”

  “No. I never read them," Beth said. "I think they went years back to his army days. He was t
hinking of writing a book or something eventually; that’s why he wanted to get them all on the computer. He’d nearly finished the job, actually. He told me he only had a few weeks of entries still to copy. There was a ton of material there. My son, Archie, has the journals now, in London where he lives, for safekeeping. He’s going to get them typed up as a keepsake for all the family.”

  Johnson moved forward and sat on the edge of his seat. “Do you think I might be able to see the journals? There could be some useful leads in there that could help with the background to this case.”

  Beth looked doubtful. But she eventually promised to ask Archie and see if he could get some photocopies or scans made. “I’ll find out and let you know,” she said.

  After that, Beth said little more. Johnson realized they were going to make no further progress.

  In the car afterward, as Johnson accelerated down the road, he glanced at Jayne. “The Det. Wasn’t that Special Forces?”

  “Yep. Tough bastards, would have made good prison officers, I guess,” Jayne said. “I had to deal with them quite a bit when I worked over here. Never could get anything out of them. They worked behind closed doors.”

  The next stop, back up the M1, was the home of the deceased security company owner, Gary Joyce, who had lived in a substantial 1960s-style brick home in Upper Road, in Greenisland, a mainly Protestant village just east of Belfast.

  Johnson and Jayne drove through the village, which overlooked the waters of Belfast Lough, where ferries to England and Scotland were cruising past in the distance.

  The house was on the main road.

  Joyce’s widow, Susan, was a robust, stocky Scotswoman. She sat them down in a chilly glass conservatory at the back of the house, with views over the garden.

  “It was in September when it happened. He had only just left the house with the dogs,” she said, nodding toward two mongrel-looking animals who lay, ears pricked, on beanbags behind them in the living room. “He was taking them for his usual walk after work. It was routine. Got shot from somewhere right up there at the Knockagh war memorial. That’s what the police told me when they’d worked out the angles and everything.”

  She pointed through the conservatory window to the top of a cliff that rose up high over the fields at the rear of the house. “You can see it up there,” she said, referring to the silhouette of a pointed obelisk that was visible against the skyline.

  “The monument’s at least two-thirds of a mile away from here, and high up, over 1,200 feet,” she said. “Some bloody gunman that was, if they’re right. The police said it was the routine that did it for him. They tell you not to do the same things at the same time every day, don’t they? They always say vary it, but—”

  “Yes, easier said than done, I guess,” Johnson said. He went through a similar set of questions to those he had put to Beth Doyle earlier in the day.

  However, Susan was far more forthright than Beth had been.

  “He was thirteen years out of the army,” Susan said. “He left after the Good Friday agreement when it became obvious they were going to downscale his team. Since then he’d kept his head down and had built his security company from scratch. I was proud of him. He had no trouble.”

  “What army unit was he in?” Jayne asked.

  “It was the 14th Company, the intelligence detachment. He hated it, couldn’t wait to leave. He never said why, but I can guess it wasn’t easy work.” Susan shook her head.

  But after a few more questions, it became obvious she knew little about the work her husband had done. The Official Secrets Act meant he wasn’t able to discuss much of it, even with his family.

  After a while, Johnson glanced at Jayne and raised an eyebrow. She nodded, signifying they might as well leave.

  How many widows were there like Susan, he thought, as they walked down the garden path. Republicans, British army, nationalists, Catholics, Protestants. Hundreds. Thousands, even? In every city and town across the province, in many villages too. The human, living and breathing flotsam and jetsam of the conflict that seemed to have no end.

  Johnson lit a cigarette before getting back into the car and took a couple of deep drags. He leaned against the side of the Toyota.

  Jayne stood next to him, her arms folded as protection against the stiff breeze.

  “So, do we go for the hat trick?” Jayne asked.

  “The chief constable’s wife?”

  Jayne nodded.

  He took another deep drag. “She won’t talk. Of course she won’t.”

  It was obvious she wouldn’t. The place would be crawling with detectives, intelligence officers, minders, bodyguards, you name it.

  But what was it his old boss at the Office of Special Investigations, Mickey Ralph, always used to say? Never die wondering, son . . .

  “We’ll give her a try,” Johnson said.

  Jayne walked around and got into the passenger seat.

  Thirty-five minutes later Johnson parked the car on a side road that led off Whinney Hill in the upmarket Cultra suburb of East Belfast, just down the road from Holywood, and with views across to the northern side of Belfast Lough, where they had just come from their meeting with Susan Joyce.

  They walked a hundred yards or so around the corner and Johnson pressed the button on a security communication device built into a brick gatepost at the end of a secluded driveway.

  There were no police cars in sight. All was quiet but for the distorted sound of a refined female Ulster accent crackling at them from the loudspeaker.

  It took several minutes of explanations, showing passports to the security camera and passing over phone numbers and addresses, before Norma Simonson felt confident enough to let them in. They were lucky to catch her at home, she said. Her life had been spinning out of control since the shooting.

  As they reached the end of the driveway, a heavy wooden front door opened, and there stood a well-coiffured silver-haired woman wearing a maroon silk scarf and a navy blue jacket.

  She shook hands with Johnson and Jayne, without smiling, as she looked them up and down from beneath lowered eyebrows and a furrowed forehead.

  “Thank you very much for seeing us,” Johnson said. “I know this has been a very difficult time, and you would have been well within your rights not to talk to us. I’m sure your husband’s police colleagues have been taking up a lot of your time too.”

  Norma led them through into a sitting room, talking as she went. “I don’t mind telling you this whole thing has been handled in a most appalling way. I was initially minded to tell you to go away when you rang the bell, but frankly, somebody definitely needs to look into it,” she said. “Eric should never have been put in that dangerous situation. I asked him the night before the helicopter trip whether he was sure it was safe to take a cabinet minister down there, and he reassured me. He said things were under control and it would be fine.”

  The sitting room was lined with bookcases, and a sofa, two armchairs, and a hi-fi stood in the corner. “Eric always read his books in here with his music on, when he had the time. I’m sorry, I don’t want to criticize Eric’s force publicly,” she said, “but . . .”

  “It’s fine, Mrs. Simonson,” Jayne said. She sat down on the sofa while Johnson sat on the settee, and the chief constable’s widow on the other armchair. “We’re not really delving into what happened at the PSNI end—that’s somebody else’s job. We’re more interested in who killed him and why they did so. He was the third person to be shot by a sniper from long range in the past few months.”

  “Well, it’s obvious, isn’t it?” Norma said. “The top policeman in Northern Ireland, he’s bound to be a target. I’d been afraid of something happening ever since he was promoted into that job. It’s like being a lightning conductor for those dissidents.” Her face crumpled a little, and Johnson thought she was going to cry.

  Johnson let her recover before he continued with his questions. Her husband had originally been in the army, then joined the police in the late �
��80s, he understood.

  “Yes, that’s right,” she said, recovering herself. “That was just as nerve-racking a time for me as now is, if not more so. We got married while he was in the army, and every day I worried he wouldn’t come home. It was at the peak of the Troubles, and there was a lot of pressure, worse than now.”

  Norma gazed up at the ceiling for a couple of seconds, then back at Johnson. “That’s why this came as a shock. Things are meant to be better than back then, but it’s been obvious for some time that that’s not completely true.”

  The questioning routine with Jayne by now felt well rehearsed.

  “Which army unit was he in back then?” Jayne asked.

  “Oh, it was intelligence. That’s where he cut his teeth.”

  “Was it the 14th Company, by any chance?” Johnson asked.

  “Yes, that’s the one. It was tough going. Seems a long time ago now, a very long time.” She spoke a little about how the strain of working for the 14th had made her husband less communicative and more withdrawn than he had ever been, before or since. She thought that was why he had decided to leave the army and join the police.

  “It really was a relief when he moved across to the police, which I think must have been 1987. He was based at Carrickfergus, at the secure police facility there, along with one or two of his other army friends who also joined the Royal Ulster Constabulary. Those were much more relaxed times, before he started getting promotions in the police. Then the stress level went up again.”

  She looked at her watch. “I’m sorry, we’ve got the funeral on Friday, and I need to get to the church to speak to the vicar before four-thirty.”

  Johnson’s phone pinged as a message arrived, but he quickly silenced the device and put it into his pocket. He needed to concentrate on what Norma was telling him.

  “That’s fine, Mrs. Simonson. Look, we’ll let you go. I might like to get back in touch though, if that’s okay?” Johnson asked.

  She nodded and gave him a cell phone number and an email address. “I’m sorry to cut you short,” she said, “but there’s so much to get through. It’s going to be a huge funeral. All the political people will be there, from both Stormont and Westminster, as well as the media and all the paraphernalia they’ll bring. It’s going to be an ordeal—me and my two children are dreading it all, frankly.”