by Finn Óg
“Yeah,” Sal said, “I knew immediately. The whole thing was plain to me as soon as I opened my eyes. I looked at my husband, and I remembered the gust of wind, and I think I just knew it had been a bomb. I don’t know how.”
“Tell us about Molly if you feel able, Sal.”
“You can’t sum up seven years in a radio interview. You know, it’s every moment of a life that makes a person, and she was so quirky. And she loved to be around quirky people too. She was full of nonsense and ideas, and she was just so lovely.”
Sam could see Sal’s tears, her throat heavy with phlegm and the shake in her delivery threatening to shut her down.
“Take your time, Sal.”
“Every parent has the right to see their child grow up. I work in the Children’s Hospital and I see sick kids every day. And I see their parents. I thought I knew how hard it was for them to see the most precious thing in the world to them in pain and sometimes slipping away. But now I know. Now I know myself what it is to lose a child, and I am so sad, and I am so angry – what right had they to take my daughter from me? What put it in their heads that the death of my daughter was somehow worth something to them? I put – we put so much into raising her, and she was so lovely – she was so loving and kind, and they took all that from us, and I just don’t understand what they got out of it. I just don’t see how her death, how her obliteration – ’cos that’s what they did to her …”
Sam had to stop the playback as Sal convulsed. He held back his own tears and refused to look at Isla, who was shooting him tiny concerned looks over the top of her screen.
He decided he’d had enough, for now anyway. He didn’t need to hear any more to decide what needed to happen next.
15
Police requests for close observation were a pain in the arse for the opso; it meant that everything had to be done by the book. Day-to-day the DET’s role was to gather and prevent – gather information, prevent atrocities. Putting together evidence packs was usually not a priority.
Yet when the police came knocking to make surveillance requests, not only was the DET obliged to carry those out, but it needed to record the whole thing in a way that would be acceptable and irreproachable in a court of law, which meant second-guessing barristers, which meant doing everything utterly within the confines of the Investigatory Powers Act. If they strayed beyond that, they needed to make damn sure nobody could find out, which meant second-chairing all footage before it was handed over. This inevitably slowed everything up and made the opso even more irritable than usual.
Of course, his team didn’t stop intercepting calls and communications – regardless of whether the Secretary of State had signed them off – as was the legal requirement. They just wiped the transmissions after they had got what they needed. And they didn’t stop listening to all the cute little devices they had placed in the bathrooms and bedrooms and sheds and beds throughout their area – but they were careful about any transcriptions made and had to be sure that they couldn’t fall into the wrong hands – the police.
There was one convenience, though. Previously the DET wasn’t supposed to be watching Grim, his boss or the manager. The official request to do so, however, gave the opso a certain degree of cover to operate. Where before they’d had to dodge the cops as well as their targets, now at least one headache had been removed. For the moment they were official.
“Excuse me?”
“Your host has requested you leave your phone with me,” said Robert, who Sam remembered from last time.
“Have you got his phone too?” Sam wasn’t particularly happy about the arrangement because Isla was loose on the streets of Dublin and he wanted to be reachable.
“I do,” was all Robert said.
Sam began to wonder if Robert was more than a waiter but handed over the handset anyway.
“He has reserved a private room for you both.” Robert gestured to a heavy varnished door.
“Ok,” said Sam. “Do you want me to knock too?”
“That won’t be necessary, sir.”
“Sam’s fine.”
“Sam, he’s expecting you.”
Robert ducked and departed and Sam turned the hefty handle.
“Come in please, Sam,” said the father.
“How are you, John?”
“Very well, very well, but how are you?”
Sam tilted his head. “So-so.”
“Of course. And Isla?”
“Ehm, I don’t know, is the truth, John. She’s, well, she’s surprisingly good as it happens. Scratch the surface, though, who knows?”
“It will take time, lots of time, Sam.”
“What about, ehm, Kaitlin?”
“Heartbroken, thank God.”
“So you know?”
“Know what?”
“About Delaney?”
“What about Delaney?” The old man bristled, panic setting in immediately.
Sam just looked at him for a long while, deliberating. He hadn’t prepared for this conversation and he should have. “How much do you know about Venice?”
“I know what Kaitlin’s friends told me. I fund their extravagance, you see, and they fill me in on a few details.”
“Risky,” said Sam.
“Better than having no idea what’s going on,” the father replied.
“What did they tell you exactly?”
“That she had a date and that it went wrong – and that’s why she’s so contrary.”
“Did they know who the date was with?”
The father’s forehead creased. “I assumed it was someone she met out there.”
Sam shook his head slowly. “We’re confident this is private in here?”
“Yes,” said the father, increasingly agitated. “Absolutely.”
“She met Delaney.”
Sam couldn’t have done more damage if he’d punched the old man.
“How?”
“In a restaurant.”
“I mean, how was he able to travel?”
“He’s a free man.”
“Yes, but—”
“He was clearly there by arrangement.”
“How the hell?” The father’s worry was morphing into anger.
“Let’s take a walk, John,” Sam said, gesturing to the air as if it were contaminated.
They left the Royal Dublin Society in silence, crossed the road outside and made their way to the river. Strolling along Beatty’s Avenue and onto a walkway towards the Liffey, the father’s desperation for information became apparent.
“What did you do?”
“I’m not going to get into that, John, but it’s over. They won’t meet again.”
“You’re sure?”
“As eggs are eggs.”
“She’s safe?”
“She’s safe from him. Hundred per cent.”
“Is he …?”
Sam nodded.
The father thought for a while. “Thank you.”
Sam said nothing.
“He had a terrible hold over her,” the father said, distant now, consumed by his thoughts.
“It was hypnotism, believe it or not.”
“What?”
“He had her hypnotised – that’s what he did to her in court. He locked her in. That’s why she turned in the witness box. I’d say he was good at it. He also killed another woman. I was hoping you’d take the name and, I dunno, maybe do something about it, but you need to keep me out of it entirely.”
Sam turned to look at the old gent and realised he was being too matter of fact with him, hitting him with too much rough information in one go.
The father looked distraught. “Who was she?”
“He said her name was Audrey Kavanagh.”
“You spoke to him – to Delaney?” the old man paused to look up at Sam.
“I’m really not going to elaborate on that, John – it’s of no use to anyone, but I believe the name of the girl is accurate.”
The father was bemused, which
turned to pensiveness. “I’ll … look into it, I suppose,” he said. “Sam, you said she was safe from him, but is she safe – generally?”
“Look, John, this isn’t my area of expertise but I have a daughter and if she were in the same position, I would want to know, so I’ll tell you what I know – only you’ll need someone smarter than me to work it out, ok?”
“Yes, Sam, please tell me all you can.”
“This is going to be hard to listen to.”
“Go on, Sam, please.” They began walking again, two swans puttered past.
“I think she had arranged for him to help her take her life.”
The father’s eyes began to swim. “Suicide?” he croaked.
“I think so. I assume he talked her into it – that he made her feel like he was helping her do it. That it was, like, a favour – or some bizarre act of love or something.”
The father remained silent for a long while before speaking again. “Does Kaitlin know what happened to him?”
“All she knows is that he took off. Far as I know, she thinks he got chased out of a hotel room.”
“Did she see you?”
“It was all pretty quick, but it’s entirely possible.”
“Her friends didn’t mention any of this.”
“They weren’t with her. They were probably off spending your money in an expensive champagne bar.”
“I want to know more but I don’t want to know more,” the father said.
“All you need to know is she needs help, and that she’s safe from Delaney. I can promise that absolutely.”
“Thank you, Sam.”
“You’re grand.”
“What about your daughter?”
“She needs help too. I’m working on that.”
“I hope you don’t mind but Sinead has filled me in on your background.”
Sam said nothing, unsure of how he felt about that.
The father pattered on. “If I can, if you would permit me, I would like to help you.”
“You’re paying me, sure – you’re paying me well. That’s a help.”
“I heard that lady’s interview.”
Sam nodded but said nothing.
“It was incredibly moving.”
“It was.”
“We all deserve to live our lives without fear of things like that happening, Sam.”
“Well, you’ll not find me disagreeing with that.”
“So what I’m trying to say is, you have a daughter, I have a daughter. You have kept my girl safe. If there is anything I can do to keep your girl safe, then I would gladly repay the debt – regardless of our financial arrangement.”
“I’m not really following you, John?” Sam turned to the old man.
“I’m saying, this country has had enough of that business – the violence, the killing.”
“You’re right about that.”
“I think I have some small insight, Sam. I think that if you were to need any assistance, financially, or, perhaps … logistically, then I am at your disposal – as it were.”
Sam strolled on for a while. “Might take you up on that, John.”
“Where did these come from?” Libby barked accusingly at the opso but knew it wasn’t his fault.
He peered at the iPad she was holding. “Before shots?”
“Before shots,” she repeated, then swiped through a series of images. “After shots.”
“The snapper,” said the opso.
“There was nobody else there – unless you’re selling our surveillance images to the press?”
The opso just gave her a look.
“Your operative was supposed to have destroyed the camera cards.”
“He did.”
“How do you know?”
“Because he does what I tell him to, and because he does what he says he’ll do.”
Libby knew that. The opso had his team’s back, their loyalty and their respect. They wouldn’t bullshit him.
“Well, we need to know where they came from.”
“From the angles, I can see that they came from that snapper. That was where he was standing.” The opso pointed at the screen. “And there – that’s the right angle for looking across at the café. It was him.”
“How?”
“Wi-Fi, or data. He must have been sending the images back in real time – immediately.”
“A commercial photographer? I thought it was just the press pack and the paparazzi who carried on like that.”
“Can’t see any other explanation.”
“Me either,” she said.
“Does it matter? I mean, I can’t see any of our team in shot.”
“Well, we don’t know what other shots he took,” Libby said. “There could be a whole slate of them being emailed to media outlets all over the world.”
“It’s probably too late for a break-in.”
“If he reports a break-in, that will get the police interested and make things a whole lot worse. Who knows what they’ll find on his hard drives.”
“You might just need to let it play out. That’s the problem with this gig, Libby. You can control a lot – but not everything. When something really is beyond your control, it really is.”
“Beyond control,” Libby repeated the phrase. She’d heard it before but had never felt it quite so keenly.
Sinead had walked the little legs off Isla, from which were now dangling two sparkling white new trainers. They were a brand, apparently. Sam didn’t know which, but he suspected they had been very expensive, and that Sinead had blown a week’s wages on his daughter. Her enormous seat was swamped by glossy-looking paper bags with unnecessarily elaborate handles. He watched her try to stay awake as the train gently sprang and swayed her asleep.
Sam was distracted by what the father had said, his determination to assist. It occurred to Sam that while it had been rooted in what had happened to Isla, it also had something to do with what the father had heard Sal say on the radio. He knew he had no choice. He lifted his phone and pressed play.
“Please don’t feel you need to describe—” the reporter said.
“I want to,” Sal said. “People need to know what they did to her tiny body. They need to know that as long as these brave freedom fighters are out there, anybody’s child could be next. They need to know that the doctors tried to refuse my husband see his child because of what they did to her, what that device did to her. They need to know that my husband was determined to see his baby girl, and that he wanted to hold her – he wanted to hug her, and I wish so very much that I was able to hug her. But what he hugged were just bits of her. What they left of our beautiful baby were laid out on a table. He couldn’t even hold her hand—”
“Sal, Sal, you really don’t need to—”
“People won’t want to hear this, I know. I know. But I believe with all my heart that they should, and then – for those who might have an inkling of regard for what those heroes did, they might think again. For my child – our child, was buried in bits.”
“Would you like to take a break, Sal?”
“No, I’d like you to broadcast what I’ve said. I’d like you to have the courage that the people who took Molly from us did not have – to face the people of Ireland, of Northern Ireland, and to say to them this is the price. It’s not those mighty men who made that bomb that were carried to their graves in pieces – it was our beautiful child – and it has achieved absolutely nothing. And if they have children, maybe they’ll look at them and think, what in all sense was I doing? Now, I don’t expect them to hand themselves in – I don’t expect that they’ll ever be caught, but, please God, will they think before they plan anything like that again, for whatever their intention – whatever purpose they set out with, all they did was massacre children.”
The reporter was silent for a second, evidently wavering as to how to manage this powerful, eloquent, grieving woman.
“You yourself were really badly injured.”
“So were a
dozen others.” Sal dismissed the deviation.
“You may not walk again,” the reporter pressed, which came as news to Sam.
“Honestly, I don’t care,” Sal said, and Sam knew she meant it. “They took Molly, and with Molly everything else has gone. Nothing can come to any good now, you see. They removed all the point of life, of living, of working.”
“In time—” tried the reporter.
“In time nothing,” whispered Sal, with an almost-silent conviction. “You may think, ‘She is grieving,’ and you would be right, but I know – I know with all my heart that our lives are finished now. There is no good. They tore our child to pieces, they extinguished such a beautiful life, and, in a way, we will die with her.”
And Sam felt everything the father had felt, and probably more.
Eventually Grim was bailed. But not before he got the visit from a bloke making a half-arsed attempt to sign him up.
“Your comrades appear to be abandoning you. Why are they all at home when you’re still here?”
Grim just stared at the spook, in his suit, in his cell.
“The big boss, he’s drinking tea with his wife. The manager, he’s having a wee holiday by the sea. And you’re here. Why is that now?”
Grim knew not to reply. To say anything was to give them an in. He knew he needed to bide his time and wait for the spook to accept the inevitable: Grim wasn’t for turning. Not just because of his commitment to the cause. Everything the suit said had a certain resonance, the begrudgery, the confusion. When you’re on your own in a cell for days all sorts of notions and contortions enter the head, all sorts of mysteries and fantasies. The lack of outside makes the inside quite a murky place to inhabit. No, Grim was not for turning because Grim didn’t want to be shot in the back of the head and have his naked body dumped on waste ground, with his skinny white legs on show for everyone to see.
The opso watched the manager on the monitor.
“Range is amazing,” Libby commented absently.
“Camera’s on a boat.”
“Really?”
“Our friends in east DET, they’re getting him from Carlingford Lough. To him it just looks like a fishing boat.”
