A 500-millimetre lens and doubler would give him facial detail. On the way into the abbey, the mourners had steadfastly looked forward, offering him only their rears. He prepared himself for their return. He was shooting with a camera but felt like an assassin.
The coffin, borne by two young and two much older men – a retirement job for Billy Poots, he had the perfect face – emerged. Immediately behind was the officiating monk, tall though stooped, thin, narrow-faced, and bespectacled. Well over seventy, guessed Carne. Then came Robert McNeil, whom he recognized from photographs at the time of his appointment. Beside him, presumably, his wife, Fiona, the dead man’s sister. There was a handful of others, more distant relatives perhaps, then the erect figure of General Bowman in a civilian suit.
Alongside was another man of military bearing, ten or so years older. He had crisply parted, silvery hair and a gold tiepin. Even to a camera lens two hundred yards away, it gleamed against the dark backdrop of his tie. One or two lone souls, less pristine, lagged behind – probably villagers for whom a funeral was a welcome distraction.
The coffin headed for what must be a small burial ground beyond the abbey. Carne allowed the procession out of sight. Having snapped his prey, he would copy the photographs onto his phone later, then email them to Poots and tell him to get an ID on the man next to Bowman. For now, he waited. After some twenty minutes, the party hove back into sight and disappeared into a boarding house.
Carne strolled carelessly towards the abbey. He pushed open the west door. A woman was tidying flowers by the pulpit; he smiled at her and she smiled back. Otherwise he was alone. A book of condolence was open. Bowman had signed it but immediately above and below his line were two women’s names. The man with the gold tiepin had not signed.
He heard a door creak and slam shut behind him. Instinctively he checked his rear and reached for his back pocket. A pointless reflex as he had brought no gun to this doleful place. He saw a hooded shadow retreating beyond a pillar. He rounded it and came face to face with the old monk who had presided over the funeral. Carne felt an involuntary guilt. The picture of David Wallis’s bullet-scarred skull and the collection of mourners watching the wooden box containing it unnerved him.
‘Can I help?’ asked the monk.
‘I was paying my respects,’ replied Carne.
‘I did not see you at the service.’
‘No . . .’ Carne hesitated. Why did this kindly man in his white collar and black vestments make him feel so awkward? ‘I did not wish to intrude.’ Faced by the monk’s gentle gaze of enquiry, he found deceit impossible. ‘I’m a policeman,’ he explained. ‘It’s my unfortunate task to investigate how this young man met his death.’ Carne showed his ID to the monk. He brushed it away.
‘This is God’s house. All are welcome. Even detectives.’ The monk smiled. ‘My name is Father Simon.’
‘Chief Inspector Carne.’ He stretched out his hand. The monk took it.
‘Hello, Mr Carne.’
‘May we chat? Informally.’
‘Let us walk to his grave.’ It was an instruction.
The monk led him to a small plot beyond the main group of buildings and invisible from them. The mist had lifted to clear the folds of moorland beyond, divided by straight lines of grey-stone walls, the sun bestowing an iridescent early summer green. It was a hidden cemetery, the only spectators a few chewing sheep. Modest headstones formed a pattern of remembrance. In one corner, the earth was freshly dug.
‘This is where we monks end up,’ said Father Simon.
‘So why him?’ asked Carne. ‘Don’t tell me he was a monk too.’
The monk laughed uproariously, out of all proportion to the frail body. ‘David Wallis a monk? Good heavens, perish the thought!’
‘So why, then?’
‘His sister rang me to ask. She knew David loved this place. After so many years in an anonymous field, I think she wanted to restore his identity. His humanity. And she wanted it done quietly and quickly. I could hardly say no, could I?’
‘How well did you know him?’
‘I loved him.’ Carne’s eyebrows rose. The monk noticed. ‘Oh for heaven’s sake, not like that. We weren’t all sinners here.’ He looked down at the churned earth and small temporary wooden cross. ‘I saw David as of another age. A romantic idealist in a cynical world. “I was sent to these Arabs as a stranger, unable to think their thoughts or subscribe their beliefs, but charged by duty to lead them forward.”’
‘T. E. Lawrence,’ interjected Carne.
‘Yes, Lawrence of Arabia. That was David. Change the world. A young man on a mission. “The dreams of waking men”. Schools like this tended to encourage that.’ The monk looked down again at the grave. ‘Not always with happy endings.’ Silent memories clouded his face. ‘I’m talking too much.’
Carne felt a rush of sympathy for the old man, consumed by a raw sadness. He turned to the business at hand. ‘Did you have any contact in the period leading up to his disappearance?’
The monk seemed grateful for the question. ‘As a matter of fact, I did. In the year before he . . . he left us, he came to see me twice. I was surprised. Delighted too. If you’d ever met him, you’d have seen how he could light up even this dank fortress.’
‘How did you find him?’
‘His first visit must have been in the autumn of 1993. We watched the boys’ boxing. He was a good boxer, David. Crude technique, but brave as a lion, too brave. I sometimes sensed a bloodthirsty streak in him. The sort of young man to glory in war. Like Churchill, another great British hero.’ The monk paused, allowing the reflection to float into the distant curve of hills. ‘Anyway,’ he resumed, ‘he seemed happy. He said he’d left the army – he sounded disillusioned with it but I didn’t want to probe – and was doing something truly worthwhile at last. He mentioned a girl he’d met in Dublin.’
‘And then?’
‘That was later, early 1994. The boys were on half term. It had snowed and he wanted one of his epic walks. Even then, I was becoming too old for it.’
The monk’s voice tailed off; Carne needed him to keep talking. The old man had something to say but a sense of protection, or perhaps fear, was obstructing him. A tear formed in his right eye. He took a white handkerchief from his black pocket, wiped it away, and blew his beaky nose.
‘I apologize,’ said the monk. ‘It does no good to think about mortality, does it? I once believed there was a heaven.’
His remark shocked Carne. The monk noticed. ‘I have surprised you. Perhaps I have offended you. I’m sorry.’ The monk straightened; he had made his decision. ‘I will tell you what I know,’ he said. ‘That happiness of the previous autumn had gone. David said something strange and striking. “I am caught between duty and love.” Those were his exact words. He asked me which he should opt for. I told him there could never be an absolute. I could only answer if he told me the circumstances. He replied that, even if we were in the confessional box, those were secrets he could not inflict on me. In that case, I told him, only his conscience could decide.’
The monk glanced down at the freshly dug grave and turned smartly on his heel. Carne followed him.
‘When I heard he had disappeared—’
‘How did you hear?’ Carne broke in.
‘I didn’t in that sense,’ he replied. ‘His friend, Rob McNeil – he was at the funeral – phoned me to ask if David had been in touch at all. I said not. Rob explained that no one had seen him for nearly a year and he hadn’t contacted anyone – mother, sister, friends.’
‘I see,’ said Carne. ‘Sorry, I interrupted.’
‘Don’t ask me why,’ he said with a curt finality, ‘but I knew instantly that David was dead.’ The monk gave Carne a distant look. ‘Now, if you’ll forgive me, I must go and join the mourners.’
Carne waited until the black cassock had disappeared through the schoolhouse gate. He returned to his car, drove slowly down the lane, parked, and prepared the camera. The funeral had giv
en him a list of witnesses worth staying over for. The departing number plates might give him something more.
He tried to imagine the optimistic face of the idealistic young man that had been described to him. All he could see was a recurring image of corrupted youth. As an image of David Wallis’s final moments floated in front of him, he sensed the menacing shadow of a murderous history.
CHAPTER 20
Post-election, Tuesday, 16 May
Rob McNeil’s answers were perfunctory. Yes, he had met David Wallis at Bowlby and they remained friends. Yes, he had met him once for a drink in Belfast in 1990 when he was a young reporter doing a stint there for The Times. No, there had seemed nothing unusual about his conduct. No, he was not aware of any ‘intelligence’ role. The last time he saw Wallis was in October 1993 at his godfather’s annual shoot in Devon. Yes, he had appeared as ‘chipper’ as ever. No, he had not seen him in Dublin. No, he only knew that Wallis was changing career and doing an MA.
In other words, concluded Carne from the twenty minutes he had been allowed, nothing. Except everything he was holding back. The poacher-journalist turned Number 10’s gamekeeper. He passed the gates of Downing Street and headed towards the dull, grey, rectangular façade of the Ministry of Defence for his desultory day’s second appointment.
His phone rang – McNeil’s private number.
‘Carne here.’
‘It’s Rob McNeil again, Mr Carne.’
‘Hello, Mr McNeil.’
‘There was one matter I’d been thinking of raising with you. I’ve now decided to do so.’
‘I’m listening.’
‘But in confidence.’
‘All right.’
‘When he was in Dublin, David Wallis had a girlfriend. I did in fact visit him once there and met her. I apologize for not mentioning. It didn’t seem relevant to his disappearance.’
‘That’s for me to decide, Mr McNeil. If you’re telling the truth now, I’ll overlook it.’
‘Thank you.’ McNeil paused. Carne held the silence, his brain buzzing as he thought of the lock of hair. ‘That girl is now a senior figure in British public life.’
‘I see,’ said Carne.
‘There’s no suggestion that she was in any way involved in the disappearance of David Wallis. Or would know anything about it.’
‘Her name?’
‘Instead of giving you her name, I’m going to give her yours. She should not be dragged into this by anyone except herself. As for me, I’d like to know the truth about my friend’s death. I don’t see any point in your investigation extending beyond that to his life. I shall have nothing further to add.’
‘Goodbye, Mr McNeil.’ A man who has shed a burden, thought Carne, and also drawn his line in the sand. Even so, it felt like the first crack in the veneer of denial. Perhaps the soulless corridors of the Ministry of Defence would provide a second.
General Bowman greeted him with a geniality in marked contrast to his demeanour at the cemetery. ‘I thought I’d stay over and network in this ghastly place for a day or two,’ he began, waving him to a sofa. ‘What more can I do for you?’
‘You mentioned David Wallis’s intelligence secondment in 1990. In border country.’
‘Yes, as I understand it, he spent time there.’
‘Do the South Armagh snipers mean anything to you?’
‘You’ll have to remind me,’ replied Bowman warily.
‘Expert IRA assassins armed with Barrett M82s and M90s.’ Carne waited for Bowman’s acknowledgement of facts he must have known. ‘Come on, General, you know what happened. Some kind of operation was mounted and they disappeared. Never to return. No bodies found.’
‘If that was so, we were thankful.’
‘If David Wallis was involved, that could have made him a long-term IRA target.’
‘For heaven’s sake, Mr Carne, this is a blind alley.’
Carne could see Bowman’s impatience – and a value in testing it. ‘Why?’ he asked simply.
‘If you really want to know,’ Bowman replied testily, ‘Wallis was seconded to a unit run by a man known as Jimmy. Jimmy Snu, actually. Stands for surname unknown. A little joke. And I can assure you of two things. Firstly, I have zero knowledge of this unit’s activities. Secondly, they were faceless men, invisible to the IRA enemy.’
‘Thank you, General,’ said Carne. He paused to open his briefcase and locate a folder. ‘Just one further matter.’
‘Oh?’
Carne pulled from the folder the photograph of the man with the tiepin at the funeral. ‘Is this Jimmy?’
Bowman affected to examine it carefully. ‘I’m afraid I wouldn’t know.’
Carne pulled out a second photograph of the man with the tiepin talking to Bowman.
‘Is this the real reason you came to see me, Chief Inspector?’ asked Bowman coldly.
Carne stayed silent, his eyes fixed on Bowman looking down at the picture. He could see the general was unnerved, wrong-footed both by the question itself and the trick played on him.
‘The funeral was the first time I met him,’ he began.
‘Really?’
‘How would you know, Mr Carne? Were you ever of that world?’
Carne resisted the challenge. ‘Perhaps you could tell me how he introduced himself.’
‘I don’t see why not. I only half caught the name. Something like Brock. He rather mumbled it.’ He stopped to remember; Carne allowed him whatever time he needed. ‘As a matter of fact, I began to think he was there more to see who else had turned up than anything else.’ Bowman looked up at Carne. ‘Like you, Chief Inspector.’
Carne rolled with the punch. ‘What did he say about Wallis?’
‘I’m afraid I can’t remember.’
‘Funerals are to exchange memories of the deceased, General Bowman. I’ll ask you again. What did he say about Wallis?’
‘He wasn’t forthcoming.’
‘Why did Wallis leave the army?’
‘Mr Carne, I really can’t see—’
‘There must be something in the records.’
‘The records will show,’ stated Bowman icily, ‘that Wallis satisfactorily completed the short-term commission which he signed up to in return for funding through university.’
‘General, you told me when we met before that Wallis had to leave the army.’
‘If that is your recollection, Mr Carne, I must have unwittingly misled you. Now, your questions are becoming irrelevant and I have work to do.’
Carne retrieved the photographs, slowly inserted them in their folders, rearranged with great deliberation the papers in his briefcase and quietly closed it. The whole exercise took well over thirty seconds during which no word was spoken. At its end, Carne looked up at Bowman with a just perceptible raise of his eyebrows and rose from his chair.
‘Goodbye, General.’
‘Goodbye, Chief Inspector.’
‘The Sundays are after you for profiles,’ said McNeil.
‘Can’t I settle in first?’ asked Anne-Marie.
‘They’ve said they only want the personal angle. They understand it’s too early for the political. Makes it hard to refuse.’ He smiled ruefully.
‘Whatever once happened, I’ve nothing to hide.’ It came out more stridently than she meant. ‘And nothing of any interest, either.’
McNeil was presiding over a photoshoot of the new Prime Minister and the women he had fast-tracked into his government. ‘Lionel’s Ladies’ or ‘Lionel’s Lovelies’, according to media taste. Anne-Marie had been asked to sit next to Buller – lovely was not the word for Lionel’s other ladies.
She saw Steve Whalley step through the French windows onto the terrace. She thought about the opportunistic rise that had brought him to this garden of power. Young trade union militant in the late 1970s; ruthless organizer of flying pickets; leading light in the Trotskyite ‘entryist’ tendency that made the party unelectable in the late 1980s. Then the lurch to the right, which had been so de
structive of his former ‘comrades’, rewarded with a rising ministerial career in his party’s last term of office. He had served his masters with brutal efficiency and now, in his sixties, was a player whom the leader had to accommodate.
Buller headed towards him and the two men buried their heads together. She spotted them turn towards her. Who’s watching whom now? she asked herself.
Buller, Whalley, Jupp, McNeil – even her private secretary, Alan – all men, all in the real rungs of power with women packaged neatly around them, from ministers in less significant departments to the junior girls in her office. Despite two women prime ministers, it seemed that in her party male bonding still held sway and she was just part of the window dressing.
‘You make a good story,’ continued McNeil. ‘A woman who’s risen from humble beginnings to the epicentre of power.’
‘You know fuck all about my womanly beginnings, Rob,’ retorted Anne-Marie. ‘Nothing. My life starts on the day I graduate.’
‘Whoa, sorry!’
‘I shouldn’t have reacted. It’s just that all this,’ she waved her hand around the garden, ‘it’s rubbish. You know that.’
‘It’s politics, Anne-Marie. We both decided to join the game.’
‘OK,’ she relented. ‘You can give them Kieron. Kieron Carnegie.’
‘Yes, I know of him.’
‘He can tell them I’m a selfish, ambitious workaholic. He’d have every right to. He won’t, of course.’ She paused. ‘And they can have a couple of men I’ve had relationships with who’ll know how to play your game. Will that do?’
She looked around at Lionel Buller, who had left Whalley and was awkwardly working his women. McNeil noticed. ‘Don’t underestimate him. And don’t cross him. He’s got you marked for the top.’ They watched him together, both feeling the tension between them. Seeing the evasion in his eyes, she decided to challenge it.
‘What you said on the phone . . . blowback . . .’
Woman of State Page 17
