Woman of State

by Simon Berthon

  ‘You’re losing me again, Carne. All this stuff with a calculator. Never bothered with that in my day,’ said Brooks.

  ‘I’m surprised to hear that, Mr Brooks,’ replied Carne. ‘And also because it’s obvious, isn’t it? An operation like this could only work if, in addition to David Wallis, there was a second person that night working with the abductors. Wallis was there to keep watch and give the initial cue to the snatch car. But someone else had to provide whatever distraction might be needed to allow the snatch car to complete its task. An informer working with the British.’ Carne paused, scanning the eyes trained on him. ‘A file held in the Special Branch vaults of what was then the Royal Ulster Constabulary shows that, at the period, an informer, codename Salmon, existed in the highest echelons of the IRA.’

  ‘That file does not exist, Mr Carne,’ murmured Brooks.

  ‘But you have just called it “that file”, Mr Brooks,’ replied Carne. Donald glared at Brooks. ‘There was one man who ran off that night because he feared the IRA leadership had uncovered him. Who David Wallis, in his dying moments, realized was the betrayer.’

  ‘It couldn’t be Joseph,’ said Anne-Marie. ‘He was too committed.’

  ‘Once he had turned,’ continued Carne, ‘or been turned, he needed to appear more committed than ever. Let’s follow his life through. He escapes from the IRA that night and enters a nether world. There’s been no preparation for his informer’s afterlife and he finds himself fending for himself. Over the years, as he establishes a new identity, Joseph Kennedy has time to think.

  ‘He comes to realize that a trick has been played on him. After that night, he is an embarrassment to British intelligence, an informer who’s served his purpose. As he’s been involved in the disappearances of Black and O’Donnell as well as the capture of McCartney, he knows altogether too much. And he begins to see that what his British handlers have done is chuck him like a bone to the IRA wolves. We’ll never know exactly what Wallis meant by “the one who got away”. But the IRA leadership is capable of working it out for themselves. Joseph Kennedy isn’t the hardliner after all, he’s turned traitor. And is now as good as dead.

  ‘But one silver lining begins to appear in Joseph’s cloud – the ascent of his childhood friend, Maire McCartney, now Anne-Marie Gallagher. He’s tracked her progress over the years and is the only person who knows of her involvement. Indeed he may be the only person who fully recognizes her as having once been Maire McCartney.

  ‘The night she’s elected a Member of Parliament, an opportunity he could never have imagined opens up. And then she’s made a minister. He’s a dying man, he has nothing to lose. And what a story he has to tell! The murder by the British state of three unarmed, unconvicted men, his one-time comrades in the Gang of Four. His tool, his mouthpiece, will be the Minister. And, if she doesn’t comply, he will, to put it crudely, blackmail her.’

  ‘How will he do that,’ asked Brooks.

  ‘He will threaten to reveal her as the person who shot dead the long-disappeared British soldier and MI6 agent, David Wallis.’

  ‘There’s no evidence I did,’ protested Anne-Marie. All eyes were on her. ‘Nor, of course, did I.’

  ‘That doesn’t matter to Joseph,’ said Carne. ‘What happened that night is your word against his. It’s enough. Joseph’s telephone conversation with you would have set the wires burning. What happened then we shall probably never know. But Kennedy had to be silenced. Was it passed on to Mr Brooks to resolve as a private enterprise? Or was it a state responsibility? Did MI5 believe it had a duty to clear up the mess left behind by MI6, its distrusted rival? Perhaps Mr Donald, or Miss Sheffield, may know the answer.’

  Donald stifled a yawn and looked at his watch. ‘Well,’ he said, standing up and rubbing his hands, ‘thank you, Chief Inspector Carne, this has been a most interesting afternoon. But time is up and I hope you will accept my apologies if Miss Sheffield and I now leave. I shall report to my superiors in Whitehall that, however intriguing your speculations, you have unearthed no evidence which need cause us to revisit the case of David Wallis. Nor indeed further investigate the sad suicide of Joseph Kennedy. Come, Jemima.’

  She jumped to her feet, followed Donald through the room as he briskly shook hands, and marched towards the front door, followed by Brooks.

  As Donald was about to shut it, he said, ‘Do please thank Mrs Brooks for the delicious tea. Lovely china.’ With those parting words, they left the house, made for their BMW with almost indecent haste and accelerated away, showering gravel over one of Dorothy Brooks’s flowerbeds.

  Brooks rejoined Carne and Anne-Marie in the sitting room. ‘My apologies for the reptilians our service now harbours. A drink, perhaps?’

  ‘I’m not going to let it go, Jimmy,’ said Anne-Marie.

  ‘You have to,’ he replied. ‘For your own good. For your career. It’s the past.’

  ‘The state can’t go around killing people. Not then, not now.’

  Brooks turned to Carne. ‘You’re welcome to stay in this room or to leave. But you’ve done your performing today. And it was a good performance. Congratulations.’

  He walked over to Anne-Marie. ‘Maire, there’s someone you need to meet. Would you follow me?’ He shot Carne a warning glance. ‘Not you.’

  She looked to Carne for guidance. He nodded to her. Brooks was already out of the room, she jumped and followed him down a hallway. The house was longer than she had imagined from the outside, labyrinthine and deceptive. Just like its owner. At the end of a second passageway, they climbed a narrow staircase. At the top, they turned back on themselves and into a small sitting room overlooking a vegetable garden.

  A man with his back to them was watching television, a documentary on the first battle of Ypres, a century ago. Wisps of fair hair stretched back over his balding head, spectacles hanging forward from his ears. He rose and turned.

  She stopped with a stunned jerk, as if she’d walked into a brick wall. Or seen a ghost. He was older, plumper, balder, but little else had changed.

  ‘My God,’ she whispered. ‘Oh, my God. But they killed you.’

  ‘Hello, Maire,’ he said quietly, as if he was addressing a lost child.

  ‘Hello, Martin,’ she replied. And then she began to shake.

  CHAPTER 33

  Her shock was so violent that Martin found himself moving forward to put his arms round her and steady her. Unlike his sister, he knew this moment was coming. He had wondered what would happen, how she would cope, whether she would even recognize him. But he had not anticipated that the impact would be so severe. She must never have questioned that he was dead, killed on that same night as David Wallis.

  Slowly the shaking and tears ceased. She broke away from him and searched for a handkerchief in her handbag. Brooks handed her one and she wiped her eyes.

  ‘Sorry,’ she said.

  ‘It’s OK, Maire, you’re OK.’

  She looked at him through bloodshot eyes and tried to force a smile. ‘You were dead, Martin. It was one of the things I knew. Why didn’t you tell me? There’d have been ways.’

  ‘I couldn’t, Maire.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You’d better know everything.’ He turned to Brooks. ‘Jimmy, for fuck’s sake, get some drinks in here.’ The familiarity with which her brother addressed him alerted Anne-Marie to further shocks.

  ‘It began when you were arrested,’ said Martin.

  ‘What do you mean, it began with my arrest?’ asked Anne-Marie.

  ‘It’s a long story. You’d best prepare yourself.’ Martin rubbed his eyes beneath his spectacles, then took them off and wiped the glass. Dark circles beneath the irises revealed themselves; she was not sure whether it was his own ill-preparedness for the pain of remembering or just the passing of the years.

  ‘The police took me in. They usually did when something big went off. Killing Halliburton – Brit Special Branch – was big all right. They weren’t interested in fitting me
up for it. Knew they’d got nothing on me. They only wanted to tell me they’d got you. I couldn’t believe it, couldn’t believe my kid sister had got involved like that. With her brains, her looks, that’s never what we wanted for her.’

  He was addressing her in the third person, looking away. She wanted to see into his eyes but he would not, or could not, engage. ‘I’m sorry,’ she whispered, ‘not for me, but for you.’

  He rounded on her with an agonized despair. ‘How could you have done it, Maire? You of all people.’ She felt a childlike fearfulness, seized by memories of the big brother she had been in such awe of.

  ‘I told you at the time, Martin, I thought you wanted it. That you would approve. I’d never have got sucked in otherwise.’ She pleaded with him. ‘I believed Joseph. He lied to me.’

  She caught Brooks in the corner of her eye, standing at the edge of the room. He noticed and left, closing the door softly behind him. Martin calmed and put his spectacles back on. ‘Joseph. It always comes back to Joseph, doesn’t it?’

  ‘What do you mean?’ she asked.

  ‘Let me tell you what happened first. The police started hinting at a deal. If I helped them, maybe they’d help you. I didn’t trust them. They were still sectarian, leaked like sieves. And they were local, part of the community. But, a couple of times before when I’d been pulled in, I’d met this Brit called Jimmy. He was obviously MI5 or 6. He’d left me a number to call if I ever had something to say. It’s weird. The Brits were the real enemy, on the other side of the line. But you can deal with the enemy, it’s clear where you both stand.’

  Brooks rejoined them. ‘We’re not being recorded, Maire, I was just checking none of our friends had lingered. This is a private meeting. Let’s say we’re keeping it a family secret.’ He eased into an armchair beside them.

  ‘Anyway,’ continued Martin, ‘I told them I’d think about it but I needed time – which they agreed. No hassle, no more interrogating. Maybe they saw something weakening in me. I phoned the number.’ He nodded towards Brooks. ‘He said he was somewhere else but he’d come right over. We met the next day at a service station just by the airport. I asked him what the deal would be. You tell her, Jimmy.’

  ‘I offered your brother a job,’ said Brooks, looking at her through narrowing eyes. ‘We needed inside information more than ever. We knew there were whispers in the air, talk of the political strategy taking over, more ballot than bullet. Tiny tremors, but you could feel them. But the IRA was showing signs of splits. We needed to figure out the potential peacemakers and the hardliners. Martin’s role was to play the most intractable of the extremists, so that we’d know every move they were trying to make.’

  ‘And the price,’ interrupted Maire, ‘was that I’d be allowed to go.’

  ‘Yes. More than that. The record of your arrest was expunged, your file destroyed. Your interrogators were told there had been an error. It never happened. There could be no stain.’

  ‘I see.’

  A silence fell. Finally, Brooks broke it. ‘There were benefits for Martin, too. An assurance of a new life.’

  She was staring at her brother, shaking her head. ‘You needn’t have done it, Martin. I was grown up, eighteen. I knew what I was doing. I deserved the consequences.’

  ‘Maire, you were still a child. To me, anyway. And it wasn’t just you. I couldn’t forgive Joseph, either.’

  She was alert, remembering something. ‘Now that I think of it, he never said you did approve, he only said you would approve. There’s a difference.’

  ‘There’s no difference. It compounds the deceit.’

  ‘But when you spoke to me . . . after what happened . . .’ She was digging into her memory. ‘What was it you said? “I won’t piss on Joseph. He’s important to the movement.”’

  ‘I know I said that, Maire. I was acting my new role. I had to deceive everyone. You included.’

  ‘You turned, became an informer. The most shameful thing an IRA man could be.’

  ‘Aye,’ said Martin.

  ‘For me.’ He did not reply.

  An atavistic, visceral, long-forgotten urge gripped her like the coil of snake, suffocating her. She turned to Brooks. ‘You turned him into a grass.’ Her voice was hoarse with the fury of historical remembrance.

  ‘Good men and women do what they think is right at the time,’ replied Brooks gently. ‘In my view your brother is a good man who acted honourably in near-impossible circumstances.’

  ‘So Joseph was never an informer,’ she said.

  ‘No,’ confirmed Brooks.

  ‘Well, that’s something, isn’t it?’ Her unstaunched anger implied a biblical judgement on her brother. ‘You’d better tell me the rest. Like why would David Wallis be using me to spy on my brother when he was already on your side?’ She paused, her face paled with scorn. ‘Unless there’s a happy ending, and you let my brother off grassing because you didn’t trust him any more.’

  ‘You’ve made your point, Maire,’ said Martin. He was drooping in his seat, crushed, a light within extinguished. A few minutes ago, she had been the guilty party; now, she was shifting that guilt to him. His voice enfeebled, he responded with devastating words. ‘Did you not change sides too?’

  As suddenly as she had felt the rage, she was overcome by shame. The shame that had allowed her, even for a moment, to succumb to ancestral prejudice. To be irrational. She went over and put her arms round his neck. ‘I’m sorry, Martin, I’m so, so sorry.’

  They sat quietly, stunned by the mutual confessions and frailties they had induced from each other.

  She broke the silence. ‘Surely you could have made contact. Let me know you were alive.’

  ‘If you’d been carrying that knowledge, it could have killed you. It was better I’d died. For Ma and Da, too. It was too big a secret to carry. Too much disgrace on the family if it ever got out.’ He paused. ‘Better for me too.’

  Brooks, like a party host attempting to move beyond his guests’ shared distress, resumed his story. ‘Deploying David Wallis, or Vallely as we called him, was my idea.’ He turned from brother to sister. ‘The IRA leadership had begun to suspect there was a mole right at the heart of the organization. And they were right. “Salmon” did indeed exist. We knew from Martin himself and other rumours that he was under their microscope. Kennedy in particular was behaving oddly towards him. Maybe he was genuinely suspicious, maybe it was a power play to usurp Martin as leader of the hardliners.’

  ‘He was always ambitious,’ said Anne-Marie, her calm restored. ‘We needed to protect Martin,’ continued Brooks. ‘I had, and please forgive the word, an inspiration. I’d kept an eye on you after the Halliburton incident and knew you were in Dublin. I also knew David Wallis was kicking his heels, itching for a new adventure. Why not put the two of you together and let the rumour river flow? If whispers started circulating that a British agent was using Martin McCartney’s sister as a means of getting intelligence on him, what surer guarantee could there be that Martin was not an informer?’

  Anne-Marie slowly shook her head. ‘Twisted minds, evil schemes.’

  ‘You can think that,’ said Brooks. ‘But it offered Martin an element of safety and, eventually, his new life . . .’

  ‘A life that was a living death.’

  ‘. . . as well as helping towards peace.’

  ‘That’s no excuse for what you did to me.’

  ‘Is it not? In the same way that Martin had helped you, were you now not helping him? Even if you didn’t know it?’

  ‘You can find so many reasons, can’t you?’ She sighed. ‘What about David? What you did to him.’

  ‘David wanted it,’ protested Brooks. ‘Soldiering had gone sour on him. It gave him a new purpose. A new way to serve his country.’

  ‘He ended up with a bullet in his head in a field.’

  ‘Yes. Sadly there were factors I did not foresee.’ Brooks rose from his seat, stretched and walked over to a drinks cabinet. He waved the Scotch bott
le at Martin, who nodded his head and held out his glass. He topped it up, refilled his own and, pacing up and down the room, continued his narrative.

  ‘For a while, it was the perfect operation. I didn’t consult Martin in advance because I suspected he would never go along with it. He never stopped loving and caring about you.’ Brooks smiled fondly at Martin. ‘Wallis, of course, never knew that his real purpose – at the outset, anyway – was to protect Martin. It was knowledge he didn’t need and would have made his part too difficult to play. But, after David succeeded in persuading you to take him to Belfast, Martin did have to know. That visit was the crowning coup. Martin, the leader who alerted his comrades that David might be connected to the hated British military machine.’

  ‘And you’d laid the seed with David telling me his father was a soldier,’ said Anne-Marie.

  For once, Brooks seemed almost embarrassed. ‘Yes. I’m afraid I had. But,’ he resumed, regaining his bonhomie, ‘the potential bonus was that Joseph’s failure to remember it could possibly release a drip of suspicion against him. And there was a further advantage.’ He paused for effect.

  ‘Get on with it,’ said Anne-Marie. ‘You’re not on stage.’

  ‘We didn’t know which way you would jump. The beauty was that it did not matter. If you went against David and reported the military connection, that would further reinforce Martin’s position. In retrospect, that might have been the better outcome. The operation would have served its purpose and I would have had to pull David out.’

  ‘You could have done that, anyway.’

  ‘Yes, perhaps. But, given the delicate state of the peace feelers and the IRA split, it was too tempting to leave him in Dublin.’ He paused. ‘Mind if I smoke?’ Without awaiting a reply, he removed a silver case from an inside breast pocket. He was about to take one for himself but, halted by a sudden memory, offered it to Anne-Marie. ‘I seem to remember one occasion—’