Bandit Country

by Andrew Turpin

  Next to it lay her cell phone, her open handbag, and an array of lipsticks and tubes and tubs of makeup, brushes, and bottles. There was a radio and a Bluetooth music speaker.

  Johnson glanced at the cell phone. He took a paper tissue from a box on the table and used it to pick up the phone and press the call button to activate the screen. No password had been set, and the screen immediately showed a string of text messages. His hair prickled on the top of his head as he realized the message conversation showing was with him.

  Shit. Who’s seen this? Johnson stood rooted for a few seconds, his mind in a whirl.

  “What’s up?” Jayne asked.

  Johnson looked grim. “She’s got my text messages on her phone here, using my real name. Which means whoever killed her might well have read them. I should have told her to be careful and stay somewhere else. She was knocked around in the street by her father last Saturday when I was going to meet her, remember? I should’ve seen this coming, and she should have too. I should never have involved her.”

  “Don’t blame yourself, Joe,” Jayne said.

  Johnson put the phone down and picked up the yellow sticky note. “This is the guy she was taking us to see today, Ronnie Quinn.” Johnson pocketed the note and the tissue.

  “Joe, don’t touch anything. I really think we should get out of here, even if it goes against the grain. Any minute somebody could come home, and then we’re deep in it,” Jayne said.

  Johnson nodded. “I know, you’re right. Dammit. What a mess. Come on, let’s go.”

  He headed down the stairs, Jayne right behind him, and they went out the door. Jayne removed a handkerchief from her pocket and wiped the door handle.

  “I’m going to call the police from that phone booth at the bottom of the road, near where we parked the car,” Johnson said.

  “I’ll do it,” Jayne said. “A British accent’s more anonymous than an American around here.”

  She headed into the phone booth, her hand wrapped in her handkerchief, and dialed 999. She wanted to report gunshots heard on St. James Crescent, she told the call handler. She’d been walking past a house and heard them. She didn’t want to intervene. No, she’d rather not give her details, she didn’t feel safe. Then she hung up.

  They got into the Focus, and Johnson drove to the end of Donegall Road, then right onto Falls Road.

  A short distance in front of them, a police car was parked outside a pub. As they got nearer, its siren started up and its blue lights flashed. Then it did a quick U-turn and shot off in the direction Johnson and Jayne had just come from.

  Johnson pounded his hand on the steering wheel as he drove. “I’ll tell you what, that does it for me. I’m gonna nail the bastard who did this. And I know who did it. I think a good place to start would be this guy Moira was meant to take us to visit, Ronnie Quinn. I don’t want to waste any time.”

  Thursday, January 10, 2013

  Forkhill

  Ronnie Quinn’s house was one of many white-painted houses with gray slate roofs scattered across the countryside on the south side of Forkhill village. It had a view over the valley to the stony peak of Croslieve Hill and was tucked away next to a couple of other houses at the end of a gravel lane. Johnson felt grateful for the cover as he pulled up behind a row of conifer trees, out of sight of the road.

  Despite mentioning the fact that he’d been sent by Moira, Johnson was forced to parry a handful of penetrating questions, accompanied by a suspicious stare, before Ronnie finally let him and Jayne in through the back door.

  “We get hardly any Brits, let alone Americans, coming down this way. Not if they’ve got any sense,” said Ronnie, a slight but wiry man in his sixties. “Feelings are still running high around here. But if you know Moira, then that’s fine. A good girl. I’m surprised she didn’t call to let me know you were coming. And why’s she not with you?”

  “Ronnie, you’d better sit down. I need to tell you something, about Moira,” Johnson said.

  The older man stopped still and glanced at him. After a couple of seconds he said, “It’s bad news, isn’t it? We’re used to bad news around here.”

  Johnson told him quickly about events from that morning.

  Ronnie sank onto a wooden chair next to his kitchen table and ran his hand through his silver-gray hair. “She was always on the wrong side of that family. Her stepfather never liked her; she spoke her mind too much. She hated the violence.”

  He looked up. “Is it him and his gang who’ve done it? Must be. Doubt she had any other enemies.”

  “Don’t know,” Johnson said, “but I saw him and another man give her a bit of a kicking in the street near the club she worked at a few nights ago. I’m struggling with that. I should’ve done something more.”

  “Another man? What did he look like?”

  “Thick-set, dark hair, had a mustache, wore a black leather jacket.”

  “That’s Martin Dennehy.” Ronnie said. “I’ve known Moira since she was about four. Her mother was a sound woman, married the wrong guy.”

  Ronnie leaned forward and tapped his fingers on the table. “Look, if your aim is to nail Dessie Duggan, I’ll help you as much as I can. Okay?”

  Johnson nodded. “Whatever you can do will be helpful. Especially if you’ve got any inside knowledge of Willows Farm.”

  Ronnie stood up and filled his kettle. While he was waiting for it to boil, he disappeared upstairs, then came back a few minutes later carrying a thin cardboard folder.

  He removed two folded sheets of paper, his hands shaking a little, and spread them out on the table. They were photocopies of a set of building plans, which had been drawn by an architect.

  “Nobody knows I’ve got this,” Ronnie said. “It’s a drawing of the project I worked on at the farm going back, what, twenty-five years. I did other work there after that, as recently as ten years ago. I was often down there, but this was the original one. All very hush-hush. No proper builders involved, just mates. Or mates as they were at the time. Mates no longer in some cases, not that we’ve argued or anything, just drifted. I used to feel a bit sorry for him because of the way his dad died, but never liked him.”

  Ronnie made three mugs of tea, without asking whether Johnson or Jayne actually wanted any, and piled a large spoon of sugar into each. Johnson knew that Jayne didn’t have sugar, but she didn’t say a word.

  Ronnie sat down again.

  “Just on the subject of his dad dying,” Johnson said. “What happened there?”

  Ronnie wrinkled his face. “A bad business. He got taken out in an ambush over in Coolderry Road, near Cross. Nobody ever knew for sure who’d done it, but probably one of the unionist gangs, the Prods.”

  “Yes, I heard that from Moira.”

  “A real mess, apparently. I never saw it myself, but I’ve heard the stories from Dessie and others.”

  Ronnie exhaled, then picked up a pencil and used it as a pointer to tap on the drawing in front of him. “Right, back to this. It’s not what you can see above ground that’s of interest. It’s the part below ground.”

  He stabbed at two oval-shaped outlines, each with a rectangle drawn around them, and a separate slightly smaller rectangle, all linked by parallel sets of lines.

  Ronnie explained that the oval shapes were two huge diesel tanks buried beneath the concrete farmyard floor. One was on the Republic side of the farmyard, one on the Northern Ireland side. He stabbed at the paper again. Linking them was a pipe through a small tunnel, with just about enough room to crawl through. He wasn’t sure if there was a pump or whether it was a gravity feed. But it allowed the diesel to flow from the Republic to the other side, or the other way.

  Then from both underground tanks there were pipes that led to other tanks above ground in the barns, from where the fuel could be pumped straight into vehicles or into large fuel tankers. The tanks above ground were in two barns, one north of the border, and one south.

  Ronnie took a deep breath. “What it means is that Dugg
an could make a mint from the differences in diesel duties north and south of the border. They’ve made millions from this, must have, over the years. Along with the cigarette smuggling, it’s funded their weapons and plenty more besides.”

  Johnson was skeptical. “But surely someone would have picked up on this and investigated it?” he asked. “I mean, if he’s making a fortune by smuggling diesel on his own farm property? Don’t the police or the local authorities or the customs people just come in and close the whole thing down?”

  Ronnie sighed. “There were lots of inquiries. The problem was, there was little proof. Duggan used to buy the diesel in the Republic, stick it into his tank on that side of the border, then move it to the tank on the Northern Ireland side. From there, he’d sell it, for cash, to people whom he trusted not to drop him in the shit with the police. Unless they caught him in the act, there was little they could do.”

  Most of the customers came at night, Ronnie explained, and in any case, Duggan’s network of informers meant they could just close down any diesel loading operation well before any police or customs people could get anywhere near the place. He just told them it was for his own use on the farm.

  “Is that sort of thing common around here, then?”

  “Frankly, he was a minor player. Others did the same thing on a much bigger scale.”

  Johnson shook his head. “Sounds like the Wild West.” As he said it, he realized he was echoing Donovan’s words to him a week or so earlier.

  “A few have been prosecuted over the years but not that many. There wasn’t much policing going on. They were too terrified—same with the customs authorities. They thought, quite rightly, they’d get beaten up or worse. So they often just let Duggan and the others get on with it.”

  Ronnie turned back to the drawing and stabbed at the other rectangle with his finger. “That was a storage room, a den, a guns and weapons cache, you name it, linked to the tanks by other small crawling tunnels. Dessie kept his secrets in there, in special hiding places.”

  He leaned back in his chair and folded his arms. “Word has it the brigade used it as a torture chamber. Anyone suspected of touting was hauled down there. When they came out—if they came out—they were never the same again. Most people didn’t come out, at least not alive.”

  “So you escaped that fate?” Johnson asked.

  “Who’s saying I was a tout?” Ronnie asked. He gave Johnson a hard look.

  “So how do you get in and out of this underground chamber thing?” Jayne asked swiftly, clearly trying to change the subject.

  “Not straightforward,” Ronnie said. “There’s a manhole cover in one of the barns—this one here.” He tapped on the plan, pointing to the outline of a building on the southern side of the site.

  “Then you have to climb down through the manhole into what looks at first glance like a big sewer. Then there’s a hidden tunnel that goes sideways. You crawl through, straight into the den. From there you can access the tanks via more tunnels.”

  He laughed. “It’s like a rabbit warren down there. But that’s where all the toys will be, and the secrets. It’s all wired up—proper power supply, lighting, water, taps, everything, even if it is like some sort of medieval underground dungeon. He had electric heaters in there because it was freezing in winter. It’s all made from breeze blocks.”

  Johnson nodded. “Cinder blocks, we call them. So there’s only one way in and out?”

  Ronnie drained his mug of tea.

  No, he said. It was also possible to get into the tunnel via the basement in the house, which meant another crawl, but it was an alternative to using the manhole cover in the barn. Going the other way, it was also possibly a way into the house.

  “There’s also an emergency exit from one of the diesel tank structures out into a field,” Ronnie said. “It used to come out through a drain cover in a concrete block underneath a cattle drinking trough.”

  However, he wasn’t sure if the trough exit was still functional. In fact, he would put money on the route not having been used since the tunnels complex was built, he said.

  Johnson took his phone from his pocket and carefully photographed the plans on the table.

  “What about security systems and dogs at the farm?” Johnson asked. “Do you know what he’s got there?”

  Ronnie tapped the table with his fingers. “He’s got a large Rottweiler named Rex, I know that. An aggressive beast. Security systems? Hmm. It’s funny, I remember having a conversation with him about that when he built the complex. I said I thought he should get it all wired up. But he said the best security system was his rifle; then he wouldn’t need cameras. And everyone knew he was handy with a rifle.”

  Johnson raised his eyebrows. “Yes, but that’s not much use if he’s out somewhere.”

  “No. And I think he does have some cameras, actually. But the word is that if he’s out, he arranges for someone else to be in. It might not be someone with his level of expertise, but it’s always someone who knows which end of a rifle to hold.”

  “And has it worked?”

  “There were two burglars in the early days, going back fifteen years, who I know for a fact didn’t make it out. Word got around after that, and I don’t think he’s had a problem since.”

  Johnson raised his eyebrows and opened his mouth, as if to say something.

  But before he could do so, Ronnie cut in. “It’s Northern Ireland, lad. Get used to it.”

  Thursday, January 10, 2013

  Forkhill

  “Well, that was useful,” Johnson said after they left Ronnie’s house. “I wonder if he’d have been so forthcoming if Moira hadn’t been killed the way she was.”

  He shifted into fifth gear and accelerated down the on-ramp onto the divided highway back to Belfast.

  “I’d like to keep a close eye on what Duggan’s doing in that house and underground bunker,” Johnson said. “Speaking of which, you know that box of toys you keep under your bed?”

  Jayne grinned. “Yeah, the one you have fantasies about, you mean?”

  “Yep. That’s the one,” Johnson said with a straight face. “I think we might need a few items out of it. Like some computer monitoring software, a few wireless microcameras, and so on. I want to watch it closely. It sounds like his center of operations.”

  “Good idea in theory,” Jayne said. “But then there’s the small matter of installing them. Are you happy to take that job on?”

  Johnson shrugged. “I guess so. That’s where I’ve got an advantage over official investigators. I’m not exactly going to be applying for a warrant before going in there. Given what happened to Moira, I’m feeling fairly fired up about this job. I want to get stuck in and sort it out.”

  “That’s a dangerous way of thinking,” Jayne said.

  “What?”

  “Letting your feelings rule the roost.”

  “Yes, but it’s not just that.”

  “What is it, then?” Jayne asked.

  “Everything going on here. It’s just another pointless, inward-looking sectarian clash. These people can’t see the bigger picture.”

  Jayne didn’t disagree. She folded her arms and gazed out the side window as the Armagh countryside flashed past.

  “I’ve just remembered,” she said. “There’s a guy I know who used to work for the SVR until a couple of years ago and before that for the KGB—a guy called Vladimir Timmer. I met him at an arms conference and we kind of clicked.”

  The SVR—Russia’s foreign intelligence service and successor organization to the KGB—had been the focus of Jayne’s attention for years. She described how she and Vladimir had both been thinking of going freelance, ended up in a deep conversation about it, and agreed to keep in touch on the basis that they might be able to help each other at some point.

  “A Russian? And you kind of clicked?” Johnson threw Jayne a sideways glance.

  “Not clicked in that kind of way, you idiot. Professionally, I mean. And no—he wasn’t tryi
ng to recruit me. At least I don’t think so.”

  “He probably was. And how did you click, exactly?”

  “He wasn’t. It’s like how I help you out. But he’s got good sources for the kind of kit we need. He might even have some in stock himself. I can get in touch. How does that sound?”

  Johnson chuckled. “Fantasticheskiye, bol’shoy.”

  Jayne turned in the passenger seat and narrowed her eyes. “Good to hear you haven’t forgotten your Russian, but I think you need to do something about that accent.”

  “Really? I thought it was still quite authentic.”

  Johnson paused. If Jayne was going to request some equipment from her Russian friend, then she could add a few other items to the order, he told her. He gave her a short list, including a pair of infrared night vision goggles, a handheld thermal imager, and some microchip GPS tracking devices.

  For what he had planned, all of them might be useful. He suspected that getting into the underground complex might not be a straightforward task.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Friday, January 11, 2013

  Belfast

  Duggan nosed his white Volkswagen Transporter van into the yard of a plastics and specialist vinyl manufacturing company on a small industrial park in West Belfast.

  Among its best-selling lines was a range of thin vinyl wraps, superimposed with computer-designed artwork, which car enthusiasts used to transform the look of their vehicles.

  On his last visit, Duggan had watched, fascinated, as a brand-new Ford van was transformed into a highly convincing rust bucket, with realistic orange and brown streaks and holes all over the body, in the space of a few hours.

  His requirements had nothing to do with his van, however, but with a Yamaha Grizzly quad bike, stolen from a dealership on a country road halfway between Omagh and Ballygawley, and also with something of a more personal nature.

  Duggan knew the business owner, Francis Conaghy, a staunch republican activist now in his early fifties. He had several British army scalps to his credit, dating back to the 1970s, but had long since retired from active service. Nevertheless, he remained supportive of the cause.