The Psalm Killer

by Chris Petit

  This was the exact moment he had been looking for all his life. He saw that now.

  Sheehan started to say the Hail Mary, unwisely, given the company. Lenny stepped forward and kicked him in the head, saying that they wanted none of his idolatry. Sheehan groaned and asked for a priest and Lenny, who had taken over now that Candlestick was done, had a raucous time extracting a last confession.

  ‘You’re not going to heaven until you tell us everything, until you’ve puked it all up. What about wanking, have you been doing any of that? Mr Paddy Bogwog.’

  The rest of the men roared their approval, joining in with cheerful obscenities. Candlestick left them to their demented cabaret and slipped away.

  He knew that after Sheehan nothing would be the same again. He had found his vocation. He looked up at the velvet sky and, remembering his mother, who had been a nurse for a while, he whispered, ‘I am the contagion.’

  53

  WESTERBY took a day to transcribe Cross’s interview with Baker, which he had flown back to England for. Baker was in a low-security prison near Manchester and eager to air his grievances. But there had been a deal attached to the meeting. In exchange, Cross had to agree to write on his behalf to a politician with well publicized anti-establishment views. There was always a deal, Cross thought ruefully on the flight home.

  He went straight to Westerby’s flat from the airport. ‘I missed you,’ he said simply.

  His head was still reeling from Baker’s pedantic verbal barrage. No question had had a straight answer, so much so that by the time he was finished Cross had forgotten the question. Baker had also found God.

  Cross rolled his eyes when Westerby asked how it had gone. Later on, she listened to him on the phone trying to sort out someone to transcribe the interview.

  ‘Would you believe it?’ he said. ‘There’s no one free until Thursday. And this has priority!’

  It was then that she had offered to do it herself. In one way she didn’t mind because she thought she might catch something in Baker’s voice that would be missing in a transcript. But it struck her as pretty daft, given the pressure they were under, that no stenographer was available.

  She had missed Cross too. She was surprised at the speed of their intimacy, by its variety and by some of the things she had said in the heat of the moment, surprised too that she was not more shocked afterwards. ‘Kiss me there. Do it that way.’ She’d never talked like that to anyone before.

  It could not last, of course, but when he was there or thereabouts, she could put the hopelessness out of her mind.

  Cross sensed her depression. She insisted nothing was wrong. Eventually she told him that Martin had called and wanted the computer back.

  ‘We haven’t talked about Martin,’ said Westerby. ‘Martin’s my fiancé, technically.’

  ‘Does Martin know about us?’ asked Cross.

  ‘Yes and no. Yes, he knows I’m having doubts and I’ve met someone else. No, he doesn’t know who. I’ve just asked for time on my own.’

  ‘What’s the problem with the computer? We’ll get another.’

  ‘It’s a prototype. It shouldn’t even be here. I don’t know how seriously he needs it, but he knows I’m using it so asking for it back is a way of getting at me.’

  Cross laughed. ‘Well, we’ll requisition it.’

  Westerby sighed. ‘I’m serious. This whole thing is ridiculous. We’ve no back-up, whatever Moffat’s promised. A big murder case on the mainland would be drawing on up to two hundred and fifty officers and what have we got? The two of us now Hargreaves is on leave and we can’t get a secretary to do some fucking transcript that might be the difference between a life and a death.’ Westerby started to weep bitter tears of frustration. ‘Oh, it’s all so hopeless.’

  ‘No, it’s not,’ said Cross, taking her in his arms.

  ‘It’s all so fucking hopeless. This and that.’

  ’What’s this?’

  ‘This, us. I used to think about you so much, all the time, telling myself how stupid it was and no way was I going to get involved and all the same having these pathetic fantasies – like some schoolgirl crush – and telling myself that if I could just have a night, or two, then I’d be happy. Do you remember after Molly Connors, when we had to stay in the same room?’

  Cross smiled. ‘How could I forget?’

  Westerby picked at a lose thread in Cross’s jacket, to hide her embarrassment. ‘I remember thinking, “Now I’ve got you.” And when you came up I wasn’t asleep, of course. I was lying there paralysed, praying you’d come to my bed or that I’d have the courage to get into yours.’

  She sniffed and looked at him, trying to smile and make light of what she’d just said. ‘I wish I had because I can tell you that bloody put-u-up was as hard as hell.’

  He took her to bed, knowing, like her, that binding themselves together was their only fragile defence against their own doubt and the hostilities of the outside world. Sometimes her fierce intensity unnerved him. He had not encountered such physical directness before and nor had anyone taken such an open interest in his body. Jealousy of past lovers not yet talked about led him to ask where she had learned such frankness and she answered, ‘I didn’t. With you I know what to do.’

  Afterwards they got dressed and went through the Baker tape. Baker was in effect the first supergrass. He had tried to get himself an immunity deal by offering the RUC inside knowledge of loyalist paramilitary organizations and a list of killings carried out. He had later appeared in court, a Crown witness in a case against other loyalist assassins, but his evidence was dismissed as unreliable. Unreliable was the right word for Baker, Cross thought.

  ‘Have you noticed how he keeps trying to shift the blame?’ Westerby asked.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Well, he admits enough – he admits to killing – but it’s always somebody else’s fault. Everything gets turned into a conspiracy. The RUC provide the guns to the UDA that get used for assassinations. Dah-de-dah-de-dah. Was that how he struck you?’

  Cross shrugged. ‘At first he was just a man in grey overalls. Though, yes. When he started talking it was like he was holding all the cards, so at first you think, Christ, I’ve stumbled on it, here it all is. Look at what he said about Kincora.’

  Baker’s argument linked senior RUC officers with prominent loyalist officials through shared membership of the same Masonic Orange Lodges. The history of both organizations was therefore one of tangled involvement. According to Baker, the RUC investigation into the Kincora scandal had uncovered this collusion.

  Cross said, ‘Apparently the RUC turned up a lot of top names – loyalists and English civil servants – involved in a vice ring that used boys from the home.’

  ‘But no one’s been prosecuted.’ She looked at Cross in surprise. ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘Combining work and pleasure.’ He was undoing her shirt. ‘The findings were sat on and the file has conveniently disappeared, according to Baker. Another conspiracy.’

  ‘But if anyone starts dishing dirt on the RUC—’

  ‘The file’ll reappear, and either there’ll be another hushup or a lot more dirty linen washed in public.’

  ‘Do you believe Baker?’ asked Westerby.

  ‘The file’s gone, I checked that, and what he said may be true, but that’s not the point—’

  She trembled as Cross traced a line up the inside of her thigh with his nail until he reached the soft flesh at the join.

  ‘The point is,’ she said, ‘he could only have stitched this lot together through guesswork and gossip.’

  ‘A man like Baker was a fairly low-level operative. He would not have been in possession of hard information. He didn’t even really know who he was working for.’

  ‘So he needs to place himself in the centre of a large conspiracy to give some consequence to his own actions.’

  She squirmed into a better position, lifting one leg and draping it over Cross’s shoulder, and aban
doned herself to his tongue as it made its exploratory journey along the line of, and then worked its way past the elastic of – ‘What do you call these, knickers or panties?’ he asked, and she told him knickers. ‘Quite. Anyway, Baker’s found God, which rather colours what he says. Lots of technical remorse and a conspiracy that he’s had a dozen years to sit and dream up.’

  ‘You didn’t take much to our Mr Baker, then.’ She moaned as Cross’s mouth moved across the hard bone of her pubis and down.

  ‘I thought he was a waste of time.’

  Westerby grabbed his hair with both hands, no longer able to contain herself. ‘Lick me,’ she said.

  They stayed up too late talking. Westerby confided that she was increasingly sure Candlestick was acting alone, not killing to order. She thought so because of the overwhelming sense of isolation surrounding him.

  ‘But that would have always been the case to some extent,’ said Cross.

  ‘I think he slipped his collar.’

  ‘When he blew up the car making it look like he was in it?’

  ‘Perhaps all those years of secrecy grew too much – always having to pretend, always having to remember to pretend. Think of the weight of that. Wouldn’t most of us buckle?’

  Cross couldn’t help applying her remark to them. Reluctantly he found himself wondering what the damage of their affair would be. There was no question of it being anything other than secret.

  ‘So you think he’s the only free agent in all of this, the only independent operator?’

  Westerby, puzzled by his tone, said, ‘You sound very bitter.’

  ‘I don’t mean to. It’s just – I don’t know – to do with kidding myself.’

  ‘About us.’

  ‘No, not about us.’ Yes, that too, he thought, before hurrying on. ‘About what I used to believe, about how things worked and how it was possible to do your job properly, and how there were still distinctions between right and wrong. Now I wonder if there isn’t anyone who isn’t cutting deals with the other side. Are we the only ones not in on it?’

  He told her about Moffat’s deal with Willcox.

  ‘So there’s this pretty little daisy chain of deals and they look at you in astonishment if you express any surprise. And somewhere in the middle is this solitary beast, waiting at the centre of the maze and pretending to be both God and the devil, and I’m frightened for the whole thing and I’m scared for us.’

  In spite of his tiredness, Cross woke early, his mind full of the case. He watched Westerby sleeping. She lay on her front, face towards him, lips parted. Her hair looked blown about. He admired the plane of her back, the creaminess of her skin and tried to remember what had disturbed him, but lulled by the steady rhythm of her breathing he found himself drifting off again, until some half-thought jerked him back. After it had happened several times, Cross identified what it was.

  Back in January during his trip to the Republic the Garda officer McCarthy had described how the Dublin bombings of 1974 had led to the collapse of an agreement between Westminster and Dublin over the North. Eleven years on, he wondered, and what had changed? They were still trying to come to another version of the same agreement.

  What puzzled him was the dual role of the British. The British had been a party to the agreement but also had wrecked it with the bombings – if McCarthy’s claim was to be believed. Did that mean the Brits were playing Dublin for suckers?

  Cross had always assumed that the British – for all their surface rivalry – ultimately co-operated and worked towards the same end.

  He frowned. But what if they didn’t, just as McMahon had once told him? What if the whole thing were more complicated than anyone would admit? He remembered someone saying that the problem with the Ulster Protestants was that they’d become Irishized, which he took to mean a grand inability to sort out one’s own problems; muddled, in a word. Perhaps the Brits that came over became muddled too. God knows, everything else was a mess.

  Let’s say, for the sake of argument, thought Cross, that the Brits are just as riven with factions and splinter groups as the republicans or loyalists. You only had to look at the RUC’s often troubled alliance with the army and the security forces for evidence of that. What he had not yet done was apply that knowledge to this case.

  The next question he asked required a leap of the imagination and he wasn’t sure whether to feel pleased or afraid by it. What if the secret war going on in Northern Ireland – and it was largely secret – was mirrored by another, even more secret one, involving different British factions in a struggle that went beyond accepted rivalry?

  Cross had no idea who precisely these people were. There was the army with its several intelligence networks and Special Branch, and somewhere out in the murk beyond them were MI5 and MI6, with whom Cross had had no dealings, unless Moffat was MI5.

  Go back to May 1974, he told himself.

  There had been an agreement between the governments of Britain and the Irish Republic in the making and it had been broken by force, and the Brits had had a hand in both. This agreement had angered Ulster Protestants and a general strike, which the British had secretly orchestrated, was the effective response.

  Left hand. Right hand. Does the left hand know what the right is doing and vice versa?

  So there had to be at least two British factions: one pro-Dublin (Left Hand) an another pro-loyalist with paramilitary connections (Right Hand).

  May was also the month of the Heatherington sting. If Cross had to guess whether the pro- or anti-republican faction was behind it he would have to opt for the former (Left Hand). Although the operation was designed to destabilize the Provisionals, it also, according to McMahon, softened them up for negotiation. And somewhere, at a tangent and in the margins, his own investigation shaded into that story because in the same month Candlestick made his move, at someone’s bidding (Left or Right Hand?), crossing the divide from the loyalist side to the republican.

  Cross sighed and got up and busied himself making coffee. Outside was a clear day with a brilliant blue sky. It would be autumn soon. Perhaps it was already. Westerby’s coffee pot was unfamiliar and he wasn’t sure how many spoons to use and made it too strong and had to dilute it. He thought: why have anyone defect to the Officials by 1974? They were almost dead in the water by then. The Officials had called a ceasefire since 1972.

  Cross turned his attention to the coffee. Foul. He decided to start over again. Who benefits? he wondered.

  There was condensation on the window from the kettle and on it he wrote a quick résumé under the headings Left and Right Hand. The strike went in the second column, the 1975 ceasefire in the first.

  Cross was drawn again to the coincidence and convenience of the Officials splitting, just as a ceasefire was being negotiated with the Provisionals, then being drawn into a debilitating civil war that eventually involved the Provisionals too. For most of 1975 it seemed that the republicans had nothing better to do than fight each other. Who benefited from that?

  Before he could answer, Westerby came into the kitchen. She was wearing a thin dressing gown and hugged him for warmth. Noticing his doodlings in the condensation, she asked what he was doing. Cross buried his face in her hair. She still smelled of sleep.

  ‘It’s a game,’ he said. ‘It’s all a game.’

  He explained what he had been doing. Westerby listened, nodding solemnly.

  ‘If you ask who gains, the answer in some cases is quite straightforward, at other times more difficult. Take McKeague. An embarrassment for all number of reasons to the security forces. Conveniently killed just before he’s about to testify on Kincora. Who gains?’

  ‘The Brits, of course, because they’re saved any embarrassment.’

  ‘So you’d suspect them of at least a hand in it.’

  Westerby turned her head from side to side while she thought about it. ‘Yes, absolutely.’

  ‘Except McKeague was killed by the INLA. McMahon confirmed that and I’ve no reason not to
believe him.’

  ‘Lucky Brits in that case. Is that coffee ready?’

  They stayed in the kitchen. Westerby was clearly preoccupied so Cross said nothing. She suddenly put her coffee down and said in a tight voice, ‘What if both are true?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You’ve taught me to look round the back of everything, so I’m asking about McKeague. What if it’s true that both the Brits and the INLA killed him?’

  Cross snorted. ‘Come on! That’s the one combination that’s impossible. The two are completely – what’s the word?’

  ‘Antithetical?’ suggested Westerby, smiling, and he nodded. ‘But what if they’re not? Say the Brits had a hand in his death and the INLA carried it out.’

  ‘You mean the Brits and the INLA did a deal? Bullshit!’ Cross laughed in disbelief.

  ‘Everyone else seems to do them.’

  ‘They’d never get away with it.’

  ‘Yes, but suppose they did.’

  Cross shook his head. ‘I can see the Brits dealing with anyone else. But the INLA is completely beyond the pale. Rabid. Everyone knows that.’

  Westerby laughed. ‘So are the Brits.’

  He watched her laughing and she watched him watching her, then, catching the look in his eye, she put her coffee down with a smile and said, ‘I haven’t cleaned my teeth yet.’

  ‘Who cares?’

  The party was a great success. Cross thought it deadly. Gub and Barbara O’Neill had invited about sixty of the Province’s great and good to cocktails and, as it was a fine evening, they had drifted out on to the lawn. The security contingent of armed chauffeurs hanging round the kitchen and back door area almost matched the number of guests. These were men in cheap grey suits with watchful eyes who smoked their cigarettes cupped in the palms of their hands. As most of the guests had drivers they didn’t hold back on the drink.