‘How long did it take him and who did he kill?’ Brond asked.
Briody blinked at him.
‘You’ve worked it out. The last day I saw him I met him in the street. I wasn’t sure if I should speak with him for he and my brother had had hard words. I asked after his father – poor man, he was dead within the month, and I wouldn’t say Michael’s trouble wasn’t the larger part of it. Two days later the news was all over Ireland. Michael Dart and two others had raided a bank in Dublin. Something went wrong. The chief of them – an old fellow the boy looked up to – got into a panic. He made a hash of it somehow and they couldn’t get to the car and then he took a bullet in the leg. The third fellow threw down his weapon and ran for it. Michael stood over the old fellow and fought it out. He got to the car – God knows how for he had to carry the old one. Before night they’d recovered the car – with the old one sitting up dead in it for he must have taken another wound while the boy was carrying him. Michael Dart was away and one Garda dead and another fit for nothing after that with a bullet in his lung. I’ve heard tell the third fellow, the one who ran for it, was found dead later and that might have been Michael’s work too.
‘It must all have been planned the day I spoke to him, yet you would never have known for he was so merry and talkative. He was a reckless boy who could call birds down from the trees with the charm of him.’
He looked at us puzzled.
‘I knew him at once. Though he looked forty years older if the truth were known.’
‘Twenty years on the run will have rubbed off his charm,’ Brond said.
‘I’ve no doubt that’s true.’
After Briody we sat not talking. Brond seemed content to wait. Primo stood behind him – every so often he half turned to look out of the window. I was watching him when he leaned forward to check outside and then back so as not to be seen. I knew that someone must be at the back door. A minute later I thought I could hear voices and then that I was imagining them.
‘Was that what you wanted?’ Briody asked. His voice trembled, which upset me for he was a fine solid man, who had done nothing to have Brond set against him.
The noise of voices came loud, one dominant, a woman’s voice sharp and angry yet with that timbre so right it could be no one but Margaret. Next moment she was in the open door and looking at me as if I was alone in the room. Her face was full of hate.
‘Why aren’t you in prison? Oh, it’s not fair that you should be here.’
‘What’s he done?’ Briody asked, alarmed. What’s he done to you? was what he meant. And I almost shouted out, We only slept in the same bed. Nothing happened.
‘You killed him,’ she said, never taking her eyes from me. I had never seen such loathing. ‘Oh, I can’t understand or imagine it.’
But I was innocent of the death of the old politician. They had not needed to tell me it was his bony skull and noble skeleton that had been murdered in the hotel bed. Who else would cause such excitement? Even my father when he heard of it, though he would not be capable for any reason of tearing a human being to pieces, might manage a moment of hatred.
‘How could anybody do that?’ Margaret wondered. ‘To leave him out in the cold place to die.’
Then I knew she was talking about poor Kilpatrick and had been told that I had killed him.
FOURTEEN
When we came to Jackie’s house, Brond dealt brutally with her.
‘He has no right,’ I said, without believing it since Brond seemed to have the power to do whatever he wanted, ‘he has no right at all to go tramping round your house.’
Jackie huddled in a chair that seemed too large for her, and Primo gave less sign of having heard me than a rock in the Trow burn at home. He was not watching us but was simply there, while overhead Brond’s limping step passed from room to room.
She had been puzzled to see us on her doorstep. She started to ask me some question but Brond laid his hand on the door and with a steady pressure took it back out of her hand. Without haste he crowded her back and, Primo behind me, I had no choice but to follow him. It must have seemed to her like an assault of men. We filled the hall. Brond walked through into the front room and she followed him as if mesmerised.
‘Is your husband in the house?’
She shook her head.
‘He’s in serious trouble. Did you know that?’
‘Trouble?’
‘You know he’s done something. What’s the point of lying about it? Are you a political activist as well?’
‘Politics?’ She said it like a word in a foreign language and then stupidly, touchingly, said, ‘But he works for a bookmaker.’
‘Well, he’s miscalculated the odds this time,’ Brond said with the heavy humour of the dullest, most brutal of policemen, and Primo smiled.
Now, returned from searching upstairs, he began again, ‘Where is he? Out planting a bomb somewhere?’
She was astonished but behind that something else as well; as if, perhaps because she was Irish, only the mention of that word in this nightmare began a nightmarish possibility of sense.
‘Bomb,’ Brond repeated, making a thick pat with his lips, ‘poof! Pop! Like that,’ and he splayed his fingers, and then picked at the grey cloth tight over his thighs as if lifting off tiny seeds he had shaken from his finger tips: ‘and then a body here, a leg, a finger perhaps . . . what would this be?’ He lifted nothing between a careful thumb and forefinger. ‘Too pulped to tell.’
And he opened his fingers making us look down as if some horrible fragment would lie on the carpet she swept so clean each morning.
‘My husband?’ The absurdity of the idea released her. ‘My husband! He’s not fond of . . . I mean, he’s a Loyalist all right. But never to go further than a grumble over the papers. Oh, I mean if you knew him. If you only knew him.’
She looked at me for confirmation. That dull stick Kennedy – Oh, I should confirm it. But I had listened to Briody’s story.
I remembered as her smile faded, that strange thing she had told me: how he had got up from among the young men on a beach and done contemptuously what they had been afraid to do, being daring only in talk.
‘Not Loyalist,’ Brond said. ‘The other lot.’
Any doubts I had felt about her vanished. She showed no smallest sign of understanding; it was beyond anything she could have contemplated.
‘Your husband’s a terrorist,’ Brond said impatiently, ‘with a list of Protestant dead notched on his shillelagh.’ He looked at her sharply. ‘And you, what do you want to be taken for? A good Ulster girl of Loyalist stock . . . Yes. Well, if that’s so, some of those dead may be yours. Think about that.’
I had known her for a winter without seeing that she was admirable. When she spoke, it was with a firmness there would be no shaking.
‘I don’t understand any of this,’ she said, ‘but there’s only one person I want to explain it to me.’
‘You want him, I want him. Our interests seem to be identical. Where is he?’
‘I don’t know.’ She made a gesture to stop him from saying anything. ‘Not exactly. I really don’t know. He got a few days’ holiday and went away fishing. He went up north, but I don’t know where.’
‘Alone?’
‘Yes. He likes to be on his own.’
‘Well, he would,’ Brond said and gave her a sweet smile. ‘It must be a strain to live a lie every waking hour. Even with the one closest to you.’
She bent at that but would not break.
Outside the house, I was put into the car by Primo’s hand. Even in the interrogation room, I had not felt so entirely at someone else’s disposal. Brond said something to him and then got into the driver’s seat.
We drove off leaving him on the pavement.
‘What is he going to do?’ I asked. The sound of my own voice surprised me. I found in myself a feeling for Jackie which I did not want. There was no future for that feeling; not any real future of the kind my mother would understand.
‘Why have you left him behind? He won’t hurt her?’
We climbed the circling ramp that led to the bridge over the Clyde. Across pouring ranks of cars I saw dock cranes and a glitter of light from the big river.
‘If you went into that water,’ Brond said, ‘jumped, pushed or driven off the edge in a car, first requirement when they fished you out – if they fished you out – would be a stomach pump. Look there!’ I caught a glimpse of a racing boat, young men pulling back on the oars. ‘Jolly boating weather! When they lift it out the hull will be plastered with swabs of used toilet paper.’
We curled down and back on earth were held at traffic lights.
‘Primo won’t hurt her?’ I repeated stubbornly.
‘ “Primo”. That’s rather splendid.’
I had never thought of him as anything else, but it was only a joke, a malicious joke by the removal driver Andy.
‘Primo.’ He rolled the name between his lips like a cigar. ‘It’s not a bit like his real name, which is redolent of glens, swinging kilts and dawn trumpets at Kandahar. Hurt her? You’re a poor judge of human nature. Primo is a chivalrous man, another of the world’s idealists.’
‘I had the impression,’ I said with a sense of danger, ‘that he would do anything you told him to do.’
‘Did you?’ Brond stole a glance at me and then turned his attention to the traffic. We left the main road and went along beside tenements of black scabbed stone. ‘Was that the impression you had?’
He sounded childishly pleased.
The front shop had Licensed Bookmaker and the usual kind of name beside it. I thought it must be the place where Kennedy worked. Brond got out and left me. There was nothing to prevent me from opening the door and walking away. He had left the key in the ignition and I could drive. I could drive up any road until the petrol ran out. When Brond came limping back I was still there.
‘He had a phone call,’ he said, putting the car into gear, ‘from his wife.’ I thought for a moment that Jackie had managed to deceive him. Afraid for her, I searched his face for a sign of anger. He did not look angry; but then he did not look surprised either. I did not believe in the possibility that Jackie could trick Brond.
When I recognised the route, though, and realised we were going back to Kennedy’s house, I grew afraid again for her sake.
Primo was standing where we had left him, talking to someone. When I saw it was Muldoon, I wondered if everyone in the world belonged to Brond; but, as the car stopped, he turned away abruptly as if to go into the house then changed his mind. I understood why as a change of angle showed me Primo’s hand covering Muldoon’s arm like a rockslide.
‘Open the door,’ Brond suggested and I stretched back and put down the handle.
Muldoon came into the car half lifted on Primo’s grip.
‘What’s the game?’
He was close to blubbering; the narrow face fragmented by fright and ratty anger. That was what I would have expected of him, so why did I feel he was acting? Acting as he asked what was going on, what kind of mistake had been made, who they were.
‘My name is Brond.’
Perhaps very special actors have bodily control that will let them drain colour out of flesh and leave a face grey and sick. I didn’t believe Muldoon was that kind of actor.
I wondered what the name Brond meant to him.
In Glasgow you can drive out of a slum street into one beside it that looks like an Adam terrace in Edinburgh. It is a city of contrasts. The house Brond stopped the car at was handsome. It was like the house some friends lived in; five students in a ground floor flat; they ate in a room that had a carved wood mantelpiece thirteen feet high. It was the kind of house the merchants and the shipping barons built for themselves when the city was rich. Now in my friends’ flat holes like woodworm in the mantelpiece showed where the lads played darts after they had been drinking. This house, however, was Brond’s. He said so when Muldoon, trembling, asked where he was.
‘My place,’ Brond said. ‘Come on.’
There were patches of green grass cut close on either side of the path. I noted every detail as if we were moving very slowly, even the dry yellow circles where cat piss had burned the lawn. When we went up the stone steps to the front door, I thought Brond would ring and that one of those smooth young men, like the ones who had whispered to him in the corridors at police headquarters and later in the hotel, would open the door to us.
Instead he took out keys and turned one, then another, and a third lock. The hall was dirty and shabby. The air smelled stale. The only furnishing was a low table with a telephone, but as we passed I saw there was no cord to connect the instrument to the wall. Our feet beat on the uncarpeted staircase. On the landing, we were faced by an open door. I glimpsed a sofa and a table with papers but we walked on down a crooked strip of matting until Brond stopped at the last door in the corridor.
‘My parlour,’ he said to Muldoon. ‘Walk into my parlour. You’ll know the verse.’
It was black until he reached inside and touched a switch. One unshaded bulb stirring in the draught threw a hard light on peeling walls, bare boards, heavy wood shutters sealing the windows.
The room was empty except for a kitchen chair under the light.
I understood the function of the room. There was a quality Sunday paper that condemned examples of torment with dates and details until the sufferings flowed together, even the ages and jobs of the victims seemed identical, and only the names of the continents changed. Stories of torture were the pornography of the middle classes on this island.
Muldoon sat down where he was told. That was strange too, since he knew what the function of the room was.
‘I want you to tell me about a young man – a boy really – called Peter Kilpatrick,’ Brond said. ‘I want you to tell me when you saw him last. I want you to tell me about Michael Dart.’
‘Michael who? I don’t know that name,’ Muldoon said.
There might have been a signal or maybe it was time, but Primo leaned down and hurt him. I waited and did not throw myself to his defence.
‘I’ll speak more clearly this time,’ Brond said.
‘I won’t stay here,’ and I turned for the door sure that they would try to stop me and then I would have to act.
Brond glanced round.
‘Wait along there,’ he said. ‘Don’t be foolish about going off.’
I sat behind the table of papers in the room at the head of the stair. From the sofa that once had been expensive, tears leaked dirty brown wadding. I remembered a night when I had been ill with bad wine and fever, how I had lain on the steps trying to grab Muldoon by the crotch. I had never liked him. And then I sat forward and put my hands over my ears and pretended I could hear only the shell sighs of my blood. Staring at the desk, I had a stupid idea. I imagined that everywhere over the whole world where people were being abused – political victims, children, frightened women – at this very moment the thumb of God would appear out of the air to crush each tormentor out of existence. I imagined that over and over again until a light touch fell on my shoulder.
It was Primo.
The touch of his hand was a horror to me but, as I flinched from it, he pulled it away as if my shoulder burned.
‘I never thought I’d sympathise with the IRA,’ I said. ‘You’ve done that for me.’
His face was shiny with sweat and he looked unwell.
‘Not ordinary policemen, Briody said that to you. By Christ, he was right!’
I took courage from the sound of my own voice and his silence.
‘I don’t think Brond’s a policeman. I don’t think anybody knows what he really is. Has he been pretending to the IRA that he’s one of them?’
‘Damn the IRA,’ Primo said in a slurred voice like drink, so that I could hardly make out the words. ‘What country do you think you’re in?’
Then I saw among the papers scattered across the table an old newspaper clipping. There had been rumours of Scotti
sh republican movements, secret societies, but no one took them seriously. There had been a trial though. I remembered the headline. The government had set it up as a propaganda exercise and the papers were ready to play along; but it had crumbled under their fingers in court into a farce of blundering amateurs and comic opera robbery. Only the sentences had been serious. I held up the scrap of newsprint towards Primo.
‘Something new,’ he said. ‘Not like anything before.’
‘And Brond is part of it – a government spy.’
Primo lifted his clenched fist quivering above my face.
‘Because of him,’ he said, ‘this time things will be different.’
Beyond his arm, I saw Brond appear in the doorway. At the same instant, Primo felt his presence. His arm fell to his side.
‘Our friend next door is sleeping,’ Brond said. ‘Would you make sure that he is comfortable?’
When Primo went out, Brond closed the door.
‘Like the cavalry again,’ he said.
Appearing over the hill to rescue me; and like before I was glad that he had come.
‘You shouldn’t upset him,’ he said looking towards the closed door. ‘He’s like a soldier. A good soldier.’
‘I know. Kilts and trumpets at dawn. You told me before.’
‘It’s quite true,’ Brond said, sounding serious, even indignant, until he spoiled it by beginning to laugh. ‘He went off to fight in Malaya – a mere schoolboy furious with the Communists for trying to subvert the British Empire. The first time he tried to volunteer his father chased after him and fetched him home because he was under-age. He got there though, and did splendidly well.’
Brond Page 16
