The South Lawn Plot

by Ray O'Hanlon

  Ah, Falsham thought, I was correct.

  More than once in the days since his arrival at Ayvebury, Cole had spoken of the many virtues possessed by the woman who shared his bed. Her name was Ann Rook and though Falsham had at first suspected a mere dalliance, Cole had revealed that the young woman was in fact his wife. She was a cousin of one of the London plotters and, for all the rest of the world, a passionate devotee of the new faith. She was, of course, a most ardent recusant, a devotee of the virgin mother, Saint Ann and, for good measure, the late Pope Clement.

  Cole smiled. “You have guessed John.”

  “You are a sly old fox,” Falsham said. It was one of the few moments of mirth that the two men had shared.

  “Yes, I have seen you cast your eye over Ann. And I take no offense. She is my wife now and for what time I have left. But that time is short. I must be assured that she and the child will be cared for after I am gone to God. Can you thus assure me, John Falsham?”

  Falsham waited a few moments before replying. He knew what his answer would be, but he wanted to accord Cole's proposal the full measure of respect it deserved.

  “It would be my honor,” he said simply.

  “Then it is settled,” replied Cole, his voice cracking slightly. But there was no mistaking his pleasure.

  Falsham said nothing. He knew there was more.

  “Of course,” said Cole, “it would do the honorable woman little good to be known as my wife. That is something that must remain secret between us.”

  Falsham glanced around the room and towards the various exits.

  “You fear the servants, John,” said Cole. “You need not. They are all of the faith, and their fate is bound with ours. Besides, they love their mistress greatly. She is nothing but kind.”

  “Nevertheless,” said Falsham. But Cole waved his hand dismissively.

  “Your marriage will be no secret. It is Ann's widowhood that must never be spoken of.”

  “So the child is mine, ours,” said Falsham.

  “A gift to both of you from God.”

  Forgive me,” said Falsham, “but this blissful vision does not, to my eyes, entirely match our other, greater purpose.”

  “No, not as you are imagining events, John. But trust me when I say that I have considered our every move. When the moment comes I will merely be a papist zealot, a madman foaming at his mouth. You, by contrast, will be an upstanding husband and loyal subject. All eyes will see what all eyes will be made to see.

  “And when it is done there will be mouths to speak, whisper and persuade. All will be well and our designs can follow at the speed of your choosing. I, God willing, will survey their execution from our savior's realm.”

  Falsham's eyes were fixed on his friend. Cole's precise plan was still a mystery, but that it would lead to at least one death and two new lives was plainly part of his intent.

  “I pray to God that you are right in all this,” he said.

  24

  THE HOUSE WAS QUIET. Pender stopped for a moment as he stood between what passed for the twin sentinels just inside the front door. The ancient Egyptians had used statues of their gods to ward off evil. Mrs. Leslie, the landlady, had opted for an umbrella stand topped by a framed photo of Princess Diana. On the other side was the potted aspidistra.

  Pender eyed the door leading into the ground floor flat. No sound from Mrs. Leslie or her yapping Yorkies. Blessedly, Pender thought, the Scottish scourge and her mutts were out.

  He took the stairs in a few quick strides, his hand gliding along the polished banisters. All seemed absolutely as it when he left for his meeting on Clapham Common. But of course it wasn't. Someone had been here.

  Perhaps, he thought, the visitor had been rumbled by Mrs. Leslie and had delivered the kind of coup de grace that he conjured up in his imagination every time she complained to him about leaking pipes, hissing gas stoves or dripping toilets.

  The front door of Pender's flat was at the end of the hallway, far from the other tenant, a taciturn middle-aged man named Poole who worked in an insurance office and received no visitors. The two men confined themselves to exchanging nods whenever their paths crossed.

  Pender's flat was at the front of the house, Poole's at the rear. It was an unremarkable hallway in an unremarkable row house. And that's how Pender liked it. The less attention he attracted the better. It was bad enough being one of the world's most famous news photographers. All else, he felt, had to be below the radar as best as possible, hence the bachelor pad in a street that looked like it was part of a studio lot version of London.

  Pender, in both of his occupations, had a habit of dwelling on contrast; contrast between light and shade when his eye was behind the shutter; contrast between life and death when it was a sniper scope, though that had been a one off.

  He had been standing at his front door for almost a minute, listening. Whoever had been in the flat was, he knew, long gone. There was no sign that force had been applied to the keyhole, no scratches on the wood. Pender inserted his key and turned it slowly. No friction, no resistance. The lock had been expertly picked.

  Pender sniffed when he entered the room. No telltale cologne or aftershave. No perfume for that matter. Good attention to detail, he thought. And as he did so he smiled. He had caught the whiff of another's presence in the hallway, and while it was less evident in his castle keep, he could just about smell it. He had left the windows closed with precisely such circumstances in mind.

  Just inside the door was a little alcove with hangars on the wall for hats and coats. Beyond this was the combined living and dining room, the table nestled against two windows that gave a view of the street below. Pender saw the brown envelope at once but made no move towards the table. Instead he walked the few paces to his favorite chair, a stuffed cloth affair with iffy springs. Pender sat and stared at the table and its addition. In it, he knew, would be the target, or targets, for his final operation.

  Pender closed his eyes and allowed himself to doze. He needed a few more minutes of blissful ignorance.

  And so it was that he found himself back on Beresford Close at teatime on a late summer's day in the 1970s. The whir of hand-pushed lawnmowers and the chorus of protesting dogs could scarcely drown out the din of the pack of boys kicking a scuffed soccer ball up and down the street.

  Occasionally, the ball would hit a parked car with a thud and the posse would break for the other end of its world. When no irate owner emerged it would surge back down the street, its members pushing and shoving one another as they attempted to lay claim, if only for a few seconds, to the orange colored Wembley Special.

  Beresford Close was made up of two distinct categories of house. Though they looked exactly the same, each with a prominent bay window, more often than not protected from stray balls with a large bush, the street was split into old and new. Half the street had been flattened by a bomb that had fallen just to the rear of Number Fourteen during the blitz. But it had been restored after the war with an attention to detail that was more pedantic than loving. There was a subtle divide on the street between those who claimed to have shaken a defiant British fist at Hitler and his Luftwaffe, and the blow-ins who had shown up when the scrap was over.

  The Penders had been listed among the fist shakers, but the years having advanced, they were now part of a shrinking minority. Most of the neighbors now thought of war in terms of first division soccer teams. One or two, the more seriously minded, occasionally argued over the Middle East or a place called Vietnam.

  Pender's father, a career civil servant who had spent his working life wrestling with the intricacies of Britain's overburdened transport system, had died from a stroke shortly after retirement. There had been suggestions during his last days at the office of some honor from the palace. But it had never materialized. The failure to reward a lifetime's service had fallen heavily on Pender's mother, the former Dorothy Hollings. She had been quite giddy for a while at the thought of being married to R.A. Pender, CBE, or
letters along those lines.

  Dorothy was an energetic woman, but one who devoted herself to husband, son, home and little else. The failure to honor her husband had been a blow, and the hurt had festered through the years following his death. Once or twice, Pender heard his mother muttering to herself that her husband had been ignored because of his Catholicism. He had paid little attention.

  Dorothy's heart had given out as much from the perceived social slap as it had from corroded arteries. Her death certificate did not state it, but she had died from anonymity, hers and her husband's, as much as a blocked cardiovascular system.

  Shortly before her death, Dorothy had made her son promise to work hard, do his best but not to expect too much in life. She had made it as plain as she could that she did not think photography, or the news business, to be entirely respectable.

  Perhaps, she said, he might make a late run at a civil service posting. The Foreign and Commonwealth Office would be perfect. She had a cousin who knew someone at King Charles Street.

  In the final days, she had pulled her lines in tighter, closer to home. Look after the garden and potting shed she had instructed Pender the day before she finally gave up.

  After her death, Pender sold the house on Beresford Close and stashed most of the money in a bank. He wanted to travel and take pictures. One or two friends from university had managed to land themselves in respectable Fleet Street dailies. One had even ended up in a tabloid but claimed he was having such a bloody marvelous time he wouldn't think for a minute of graduating to one of “those snotty broadsheets,” as he put it.

  Pender avoided the London papers in their entirety and headed first for India. His father had never been, but a small collection of books on the Indian railway system had been his pride and joy. Pender Senior had dreams that had never come to pass. The son decided he would live some of the dreams for the old man.

  Pender Senior had been a man who gave off an air of holding great secrets. He had been quite talkative when he had wanted to be, or when the subject was to his liking. But there had also been long periods of brooding. Occasionally, other broody-looking types would turn up at the house, and his father would close the living room door.

  From the age of thirteen or so, Pender, with the raised consciousness that sometimes comes with being an only child, had an inkling that unseen hands were at work in his life. His father's apparent income never seemed up to the level of his son's education that, by the time he was fifteen, had taken something of a leap from a local secondary modern to a fairly posh Catholic boarding school. Pender managed to do well in his final exams and found himself on his way to Cambridge.

  He didn't give his good fortune too much thought. His father had vaguely alluded once to some kind of church-based group that helped out the parents of bright young Catholic men. Stephen had never been able to squeeze out the full story. “Kind of Masons, only Catholic,” the older Pender had said in the shed one Saturday afternoon as he shuffled his pots of geraniums. Pender had half-heartedly pressed his father for more details, but he had merely grunted in reply and followed up with a sharp instruction to find the trowel.

  His father's death had occurred in the second term of Pender's year at Cambridge.

  Disaster seemingly loomed, but his mother had contacted him quickly to say that he need not worry about money matters. Things were being taken care of by friends, she had assured him. He had never discovered who the mysterious benefactors were. He graduated with his bachelor's degree and proceeded to make travel plans. First, however, he had to make funeral plans for his mother who gave up the ghost as soon as he was conferred with his parchment.

  The day after Dorothy was laid to rest with the old man, Pender spun a globe to pick a destination but deliberately stopped it with his forefinger poised over India. Madhya Pradesh to be precise. He was on a British Airways flight to New Delhi within a fortnight.

  Pender's eyes were open, all memories of Beresford Close banished. He stood up and walked to the table, pulled out a dining chair and sat down. He looked at the envelope for a few seconds, picked it up and sensed its weight. He gently opened the sealed flap and tipped out the contents. Inside were two popular news magazines. He didn't flip through the pages looking for notes or photographs. He knew he didn't have to.

  One of the magazines had landed cover up. The photo was of a grim faced Leonard Spencer.

  “Well you can't kill the bugger twice,” Pender said softly.

  He was impressed with his absolute lack of either excitement or emotion. His clients had only ever sent him after totally evil bastards. Spencer wasn't quite up there with some of the nastier dictators and warlords that he had seen off but there were rumors about the man. Pender had always thought the prime minister to be a nasty piece of work. Presumably, he was even worse than he had imagined. Bumping the prime minister off would be difficult, but not impossible. Much depended on his paymasters and whether or not they wanted it to look like a natural death.

  Pender's hand slowly turned over the second magazine. He was smiling because the rear cover had an ad for a well-known brand of digital camera.

  But the smile vanished when he saw the beaming face on the magazine's cover.

  “Jesus,” Pender hissed.

  He was looking straight into the eyes of Billy ‘Bud’ Packer, the President of the United States.

  25

  THE DREAM NEVER VARIED and was as precise in its detail as the event that inspired it. Still, Manning had made it through his entire Irish sojourn without a recurrence. Georgetown, however, was another matter. It had come to him on his first night back at the house.

  He was, as usual, in the driver's seat of the car. Dinny sat in the passenger seat and Rob was in the back, biting his fingernails. The three combined to make up all but one of the Irish Freedom Force's top four-man active service unit.

  The other car was just in front. It, too, had three in it though not all of them were men. The woman in the passenger seat was Maeve. She was twenty-four, pretty and a knockout in tight jeans. She would be first into the bank on the west side of the street.

  The three-member units were each to be joined by a fourth volunteer once the two trucks had been placed in position.

  Group One, Maeve in command, would take out the west side bank while the other bank, right across on the east side of the street, was the responsibility of Group Two, Manning's unit.

  The cars were to be parked at the end of the street, just as it began to give way to the farming country that provided most of the town's income. It was the end of the week, and banks were flush with money to cash the checks for the county's agricultural workers.

  As cover, in case a Garda officer came walking by, both units had maps and brochures detailing the area's better trout fishing spots. But there had been no sign of any police, no sign of anybody in fact. It was an unusually warm day, and locals were staying indoors.

  The scene reminded Manning of a spaghetti western in which a sleepy Mexican town was about to be hit by a band of gringos from north of the border. This was not an entirely far-fetched analogy. Rob was from Belfast, and Joe, in the front car, hailed from Tyrone.

  Most of the group was, however, from south of the border. They represented just about all of the fighting power of the Irish Freedom Force, a hitherto unheard of republican paramilitary group, but one that was now poised to make its entry into the world with a big bang, indeed two.

  Manning glanced at his watch. He looked at Dinny and nodded. Dinny said nothing, just leaned slightly forward in his seat belt. They were not going to be stopped for something trivial, and Dinny, who did not like wearing a safety belt, had been warned that this was one time that he would, at least until the two units were making their getaway.

  “Then you can fly through the windscreen and get there before us,” was how Rob had put it.

  Dinny had said nothing in response. Indeed, he said very little as a rule and that made some of the IFF's people nervous. There were stories about
Dinny, rumors, they had hoped.

  It was said that he had been rejected by the Provos because he was seen as being too much of a headbanger, too violent for even their hard men. Dinny had denied any involvement at any point with the IRA. His word had been accepted. But Manning wasn't the only one who kept a wary eye on their newest recruit.

  The order for the job had been simple. Speed and coordination would preclude the need for any violence. The money would not be in any locked safe when the units hit the banks. If all went to plan, the active service members would be miles clear of the town before the police could mount a pursuit.

  That would be because of the trucks. But where were they?

  Manning glanced at his watch again. He was almost willing the big hand backwards. Liam was late with the truck. Liam the Loser, Dinny called him. Perhaps he was right.

  The safety and success of the operation depended on the synchronized arrival in town of both trucks, one of them, with Liam behind the wheel, piled high with bales of hay, the other an empty cattle transporter driven by a man named Dermot who had been assigned to the operation at the last minute by the IFF's central leadership.

  At least, Manning thought, Liam and Dermot were in radio communication. If they were late by just a few minutes it would be okay, so long as they were tardy in tandem.

  His anxiety was relieved just a fraction when the side mirror was filled with the hay truck.

  “Let's go,” he said even as his foot eased gently onto the gas pedal. The car ahead had seen the truck also and was already pulling into the street, its signal light flashing pedantically. The two cars drove slowly, the truck just behind Manning's vehicle. Rob was humming a tune to himself, some patriotic ditty.

  The town had a simple layout. There were three roads leading into a square that was adorned at its center by a statue of a pike-wielding rebel from the rebellion of 1798. The banks faced each other across the square. It was well known that the customers of each were split along political party lines.