by Finn Óg
The point had been to send a message to the woman. Perhaps the message hadn’t been clear enough. “Send Meadow’s mother another email. Tell her to tell her daughter to back off or she and the old geezer go viral.”
“Will she know what you mean?”
The clerk hadn’t thought of that. Perhaps this Meadow woman blackmailed a new person every day.
“Sign the email ‘from the photocopier’.”
“What can you get from the Garda?” Libby asked. She had gone from nonchalant to quietly terrified. One more death and the superior might find a way to do more than sack her.
“Not a lot. It’s normally the detachment staff who monitor southern security force comms – I don’t have access. I can see what they’re logging on their computer systems but I can’t rip their phone calls.”
“Who’s at Greencastle?”
“Coastguard, lifeboat, ambulance, Guards, pathologist en route.”
The opso would have had a Garda contact – Libby just didn’t have the experience. “Who can we try?”
“For what?”
“To find out whose the body is – to find out if it’s an accident.”
“It’s not an accident,” chirped one of the male techs.
“How d’you know?”
“Local newspaper woman is tweeting about it. Says she’s got a source that says the man had an oar rammed down his gullet.”
“What?”
“An oar. I assume like a rowing boat has?”
“Would an oar fit down a throat?”
Nobody replied for a moment but the tapping intensified.
“Yes,” said the other male tech.
“Yes, what?” Libby snapped.
“An oar can fit down a throat.”
“How do you know?”
“Europol has a case in Italy where a man was killed by an oar forced into his airway.”
“Well, there you go,” said Libby, who all but slapped her thigh in amazement.
“Funny,” said the tech.
“How’s that funny?” asked Libby.
“Dead man was Irish.”
“Oh?”
“He’d been on trial for murder shortly before his death.”
“When did this happen?”
“Just a few months ago, actually.”
“Really?”
“The end of a paddle, or oar, from a Plastimo rubber dinghy was found lodged in the man’s airway. That’s all it says.”
“And he was Irish?”
“Yes. Let me look him up here—”
The woman tech was way ahead. “His name was Delaney. He’d been cleared of rape and murder in Dublin earlier in the year.”
“How weird is all this?” Libby said. “How far have the Italians got with it?”
“No arrests,” the tech said. “There was some sort of manhunt on the island of Lido, Venice, about a month before the body was found, but there’s no detail and no confirmed link. Europol is completely stumped, it seems.”
“Sounds like a rabbit hole for us.” Libby began to dismiss the coincidence.
“They had prints.”
“Fingerprints?”
“Yeah, but no match.”
“Can you get a copy?”
“Probably. Take a while, though.”
“Not sure it’s worth it,” said Libby.
“This reporter’s tweeting again. Claims a known dissident republican is believed to have died in a boat fire in Donegal.”
Libby stared, stunned.
“She’s not directly saying it’s the man with the oar down his throat, but it seems to add up that they’re the same.”
“Get the prints,” Libby said.
The boss stared at the radio.
Three dead. Greencastle.
“Jeannine!” he shouted.
His wife scuttled into the kitchen and waited. He pulled out a notepad and pencil and tore the first page off the pad and scrawled: Go next door and get on Facebook. Find out what’s going on in Greencastle.
Familiar with the need to keep their search history clear, the Gillens had an arrangement with the neighbours.
The boss made a cup of tea and sat down at the kitchen table, waiting. He rolled the dial on the wireless, seeking out other stations and more information. There was very little, but he knew what was happening. He gulped down the tea and went upstairs to pull on some clothes.
“Sean,” he heard his wife say from the hall below.
“We’re going for a dander,” he said.
Down by the lough she muffled her mouth and began to talk. “Two men and a woman are dead – one man on a fishing boat, he was burned, then a man and a woman at a farm, both found in a shed, both murdered.”
“Any names?”
“No, but the Independent says they’re known republicans.”
“It said dissidents, didn’t it?”
The wife nodded nervously, knowing how much he hated the phrase.
“I’m going to have to get offside for a while,” he said.
“Where will you go?”
“Sure, if I told you that, I wouldn’t be offside, would I?”
“Want me to get you a pack?”
“Aye. Plenty of cash and a burner. Tell one of the young fellas to get me a car.”
She went one way, he the other.
Sam watched the boss return to his house. Sam had left Donegal with one last job to do, then he would give it a rest.
The boss hadn’t been away long – a short stroll down by the water’s edge. His wife, Sam presumed, had a scarf around her face. They’d paused for a few moments under a copse of trees. The location was well chosen – the foliage protected them from watching eyes behind or at the sides. The only view was from the water. They parted and went separate ways – as if they had orders and were setting to it. Sam knew instinctively that they’d regroup.
Libby sighed with agitation at the third email in the space of a day. Her mother was proving to be a real distraction, and she was tiring of having to assure her that everything was ok and that, no, she wasn’t dating a much older man.
Meadow, this arrived for you just now. Not sure what it means, love.
Libby scrolled down the forwarded email, taking note of the delivery time and date: Tell your daughter to back off or the old geezer goes viral. The photocopier.
Libby crawled with realisation. The clerk. Clever – little – bitch. She’s used her brother, thought Libby. Fuck.
“Concentrate on the Greencastle thing,” she barked at the techs. “The photograph issue is solved, so you can drop that.”
The techs didn’t even turn around. They just stared at their banks of monitors and hammered away on their keyboards.
The clerk would need cauterised, and so would her brother.
Sam placed his head on the steering wheel and forced himself to think. He was tired – it had been a log sail to get the boat back to the yard and he hadn't stopped since. Now that he had located the boss – on the shore of a land locked Lough Neagh, Sam was sure the man would run. Too many of his team had been wiped out, he would be worried for his own safety. Time was short and Sam had to act quickly.
He began to drive, unsure of what to do, staying off major routes with their cameras and sticking instead to winding country lanes.
That’s how he saw it. In the garden of a run-down cottage was a long lake boat. Perched on the thwart was a car dealer’s sign: For Sale £350.
Sam turned, pulled in and looked at it from a distance. It was a timber clinker-built boat, traditional on inland waters. The trailer looked fine and there was a small outboard, 2-horsepower, old but presumably functional – there would be no point in having it on the boat otherwise.
He walked to the door of the house and knocked with his foot.
No answer. No car in the driveway.
In the van he lifted the passenger bench seat and retrieved the envelope of cash he kept wedged behind the leisure battery. He counted out three hundred and fifty pou
nds, rolled the money tight and bound it with tape. Did he need to worry about prints? Not if the boat wasn’t linked to anything, he thought.
The bundle went through the letter box, and Sam hooked the boat to the back of the van and drove off.
“I can’t officially obtain the prints without making a formal request,” said the woman tech.
“Can you get them unofficially?” Libby asked, tiring.
“Of course,” said the tech.
“Let’s do that, then,” Libby said sarcastically.
“Do you want them directly or shall I run them?”
Libby sighed in exasperation, then heard the rumble of a convoy outside. She stood and walked to the window. Three large unmarked vans had pulled up outside. She turned to the lead tech.
“Send the prints to me right now then delete everything you’ve been doing. Everything!” Panic filled her. She gave the tech a small card drive. “Put the prints on that. This is between us,” she said. “Understood? This is a murderer we’re looking for.”
“Ok,” said the tech, clearly not giving one fuck.
The door burst open as the card slipped into the coin pocket on Libby’s Levi’s.
“Step away from your workstations,” barked a butch woman in military-police uniform. “Now!”
The techs rolled back in their seats.
“Done?” Libby whispered to the woman tech.
She nodded.
Four men began unplugging the computers and carrying them outside. To Libby’s surprise, they appeared to be taking machines at random – no screens, just drives and keyboards. More men arrived and led the techs out. Libby turned to see them being escorted to one of the vans.
“What’s going on?” Libby asked the woman.
“Shut down. All military staff are being withdrawn to Palace Barracks.”
“Why?” Libby asked.
“Not at liberty.”
“Come on,” Libby growled. “I’ve worked with this team for two years.”
“Investigation. Civil authorities want to know what’s been going on, so we’ve been drafted to do a first comb through.”
“And what about me?” she asked.
“You aren’t military staff. I have no jurisdiction.”
“I see,” said Libby.
“But you will have to vacate your quarters and leave the base.”
“Ok,” said Libby, relieved to be relieved.
Sam drove as far as he could bear to given the time constraints. North-east of Lurgan he came off a minor road and rattled onto a track with grass sprouting through the middle of the tarmac. The only eyes on him belonged to cows. Two miles in, he took a chance and drove the van across a field, turning by the shore before unhitching the boat. He pushed her hard over ruck and mud, eventually getting the transom to lift as she slipped into Lough Neagh.
From the back of the van he retrieved a spinnaker and an old tarpaulin, a spare petrol can and the only oil he possessed – for the diesel van’s engine. Not ideal, but still a lubricant. He gently set a little lunch box onto the soft spinnaker, then drove the van and trailer under a thicket of hedge and trees in the hope that any farmer would mind his own business. Back at the boat he settled his toys, shoved off and drifted for a while. The breeze was taking him gently west, so he took the oars and began to pull, correcting his track south. Round a headland he shipped the oars and lowered the small engine.
There is no way this will work, he told himself. He took off the petrol cap and was happy to find the tank empty – nothing worse than old fuel. He had no idea what mix was required, so he bet on a ratio of fifty to one and deposited very rough estimates of oil and fuel. Choke and air open, he tentatively pulled the cord. Nothing. Again. Nothing, not a croak. He tried to warm her with a frenzy of pulls, then resigned himself to a series of checks: spark plugs, carb, fuel filter. He worked fast and convinced himself that nothing would bring the motor to life – the plug was dirty, the carb was grimy, the filter full of crap. Fifteen minutes later and all reassembled, he gave it another stroke and the little engine coughed, growled and almost turned over. Two more hauls on the cord and she began to hum. Sam put the wind at his back and headed for the southern shore.
“They were hot, now they’re not,” said the brother.
“Translate,” the clerk scolded.
“They were looking, and close – they’re good. Then they just stopped.”
“Who?”
“The people you upset. Threatening intelligence people isn’t smart.”
“How would you know?”
“My friends. If you get close to intelligence agencies, you vanish.”
“Your friends have vanished?”
“Yes.”
“How do you know? Just because they’re not online any more, doesn’t necessarily mean they’re in jail.”
“I don’t think they’re in jail. If they were in jail, we’d be able to find them.”
“Online?” said the clerk sceptically.
“Yes.”
“By hacking?”
“Yes.”
“So where are they?”
“Yes.”
“Yes, what?”
“Yes, where are they.”
“It’s like talking to a rubber duck.”
Ignored.
“So you think it was a mistake sending the message to Meadow?”
“Yes.”
“And you’re only telling me that now.”
“You’re the client. I do what you ask.”
“I’m your sister.”
“I’m just a rubber duck.”
“What does it mean that they’ve stopped looking.”
“Either they stopped caring or they’ve finished.”
“Finished what?”
“Finished looking.”
“Why would they do that?”
“Maybe they lost interest.”
“Or?”
“Maybe they found you.”
Libby stood in the holding cells and stared at the computers. She had no idea where to start and she had little time.
This was the hardware graveyard where machines were sent to be wiped then destroyed. What she needed was a very old machine, pre-networking. One with information on the drive itself rather than a remote server. One that wouldn’t betray her interest or tell someone somewhere that she was still on post in a base she was supposed to have vacated.
They were heavy, huge, stacked in tens and unmarked. There was no way to begin with logic, so she pulled in a desk, got a power cable, a monitor, a keyboard and a mouse. Then she took the first from the top and fired it up.
The engine’s drone was soothing. Sam dozed on the pleasant putter south, the autumn sun on his face. What he was doing on Lough Neagh didn’t stand out. He was involved in the same pastime as thousands of others – fishing in a lake boat. Except he didn’t have a fishing rod.
The whiff of unleaded petrol was pleasant as the wind whipped it across his upturned face. The bow rose with his weight aft, and he looked at the tarpaulin under which his tools lay. He didn’t give the next steps a great amount of thought – so much depended on the unpredictable. He put his trust in the breeze and relaxed for the first time in days.
The clerk reckoned she’d got lucky once, so she was incredibly unlikely to get lucky again. But she had no idea what else to do. She drove to the only place she thought might provide an opening.
Most of the former army base had been turned into an affordable housing site. Old billets had been replaced by semis, each with a strip of garden. But the telltale was Google – that spot on the satellite shot that was mandatorily blurred. An edict from the Ministry of Defence, the clerk wagered. The place where all that fibre was pointing. The place from where emails were sent from a Meadow to her mother.
Libby’s superior read the briefing note and wondered what to do with his wayward protégé.
Gillen was on the cusp of fleeing but was surrounded by special reconnaissance operatives. The superio
r had insisted they be drawn from the Lisburn headquarters rather than north DET. His plan was to discredit all that happened there to make it the military’s problem: their fuck-up, their tidy-up.
But that left Libby. A problem. The one woman who knew the truth.
The opso would be discredited, jailed and when eventually released would wither in a council house. By that time nobody would care about events in Ballycastle. No journalist or statutory agency would put stock in the word of a convicted criminal.
Libby, though, what to do, what to do? Not only did she know about the bomb, he’d chosen her to manage the clerk’s destruction of the files. She may not have known the reasons behind that operation, but she was smart enough to join the dots. Libby also now knew that Deirdre Rushe had been an asset, which was surmountable but unhelpful. Worst of all, she appeared to have been compromised.
The simplest solution, as ever, was not the easiest solution.
He made a call for unofficial close-quarter surveillance. This time the X-ray was one of his own.
Libby restacked the first few computers as meticulously as they had been stored, but her patience was quickly wearing thin. By the twelfth hard drive, she began to wonder whether any of the disk memories held the information she was seeking.
She knew it was only be a matter of time before someone came looking for her. She’d cleared her quarters and forced everything she owned into two waterproof roll-top bags. To anyone taking a cursory look, she was gone, but her tally at the gate wasn’t through and if they checked, they’d discover she was still on-base.
Computer thirteen was sure to bring bad luck. She was no software developer, but she knew how to crack a frame built on the old Windows 95. She got in quickly and started hunting the drive. Nothing. Well, nothing of use.
And then a zip file, without a name.
She clicked it and opened a series of file names. They were listed under familiar themes: spanners, techs, ops. She looked at the dates, well old. What she really wanted was a hard copy of a fingerprint database. She was about to zip up and unplug when a thought entered her head. If this was a staff manifest from times gone by, perhaps the opso was there as a younger man. Curiosity compelled her to look for a photo. Had he been handsome back in the day?
