A Prospect of Vengeance

by Anthony Price

  But, otherwise … it had been damn-near perfect, with no tell-tale body (bodies also were a risk, however neatly killed; and with Philip Masson the autopsy would have been very thorough, for sure); but, for the rest, it had been utterly professional—plausible and detailed, but not too detailed … just basically ordinary.

  Those three hours hadn’t been wasted; the deceptive half of Philip Masson’s death would eventually make a good detailed chapter in the story—and if Elwyn Rhys-Lewis turned out to be as good-and-true a friend as he sounded; which, on mature reflection, he probably was; but even then he would supply more good copy, as he gnashed his teeth about the way he had innocently helped his friend’s murderers. So it was already shaping up nicely—it would make a fascinating contrast even … the false inquest, before the real one—

  And then the door had banged, and Reg Buller had made his entrance.

  ‘I’ve lost my bloody pipe.’ He patted all his bulging pockets, ignoring the ‘No Smoking’ notice, and the worried hovering of Ian’s favourite assistant librarian until she got round in front of him. ‘It’sh all right, love—I wasn’t going to smoke it. I was only going to suck it. An’ … I know how to work the machine—an’ how to wind the film back afterwards. Don’t worry, love.’

  ‘It’s all right, Miss Russell.’ Ian didn’t think it was ‘all right’. But Reg Buller had also been at work on 1978 elsewhere this afternoon, and he desperately wanted to know what had come out of that latest foray. And, in any event, since Reg was in no case to look after him, he must look after Reg. ‘I know this gentleman. And I’ll vouch for him, Miss Russell.’

  Miss Russell gave him a disappointed-fearful look. ‘Just so he doesn’t make any noise, Mr Robinson. You can talk here—‘ She could smell Reg now, and didn’t find him reassuring. ‘—but no noise, if you please.’

  ‘No noise!’ Buller put his finger to his lips. ‘If you hear a noise—it’s him, not me. Trust me!’ He almost knocked over a chair, watching it rock without trying to rescue it before he sat down in it. ‘No noise!’

  Miss Russell had fled then. And Reg Buller hadn’t made a sound, as he went about his business, after he had briefly explained where he’d been.

  But now his chair scraped back noisily.

  ‘Thish ish it. You mark my wordsh, Ian lad! Thish ish it!’

  Ian looked up from his notes, but past Buller, not at him, to make sure that Miss Russell (never mind her boss) was not within earshot of this over-loud pronouncement. His credit was good in this library, as it needed to be with all the work he did in it because of its excellent range of microfilmed newspapers; and, at a pinch, it might survive the brewery-fumes Reg was exhaling. But it would never survive that deadliest of sins, noise.

  Buller sat back, staring at him. ‘Well, c’mon an’ shee—‘

  ‘Sssh! For heaven’s sake, Reg!’

  Buller looked around. ‘It’s all right—‘ The slur disappeared magically but the voice was still far too loud. ‘—there’s nobody out there. I made sure of that. We’re okay.’

  ‘Nobody’, of course, excluded librarians in Reg Buller’s dramatis personae, and until John Tully came up with the answers, that was the best they could hope for. But he had worked too hard here to obtain his special privileges to let Buller queer his pitch. ‘I meant you, man—‘ He pointed at the other printed legend on the wall ‘—that means “No piss-artists and dossers-coming-in-from-the-cold”, Reg.’

  ‘There’s no call to be offensive. An’ inaccurate—‘ Buller adjusted his upper dentures with a calloused thumb and index finger ostentatiously ‘—I’ve been having trouble with this new set of choppers. And it isn’t cold. And anything I may have imbibed this fine Monday was strictly in the line of duty, as I carefully explained to you—‘ His voice fell nevertheless, from jubilant conversational to a penetrating stage-whisper. ‘—you just look at this, Ian lad. An’ then I may accept your apology.’

  Ian steeled himself against disappointment as he got up. It was just conceivably possible that he had done Buller an injustice, but unlikely—at least, so far as the imbibing was concerned. What he had remembered from previous occasions was that Reg’s ‘necessary disbursements to contacts’, which figured substantially in his expense account, chiefly related to alcohol, rather than to old-fashioned back-handers (although these figured also, in nicely round multiples of five in sterling, and of tens and hundreds in foreign monopoly currencies). But then, of course, ‘contacts’—‘contacts’ back-handed when necessary, but alcoholically-oiled invariably—were the very stuff of Reg’s modus operandi. And in this case it had been ‘a bloke I know in the Street, who’s a sub on The People now—but he was a young reporter on the Northern Gazette back in ‘78, and he’s doing shifts now, to keep his ex-wife in gin-an’-tonic’, and ‘I had to fill him up in the Stab before I could get him to talk, and not remember what I’d asked him about afterwards’. And because of all of that, it had seemed quite depressingly possible that Reg had been enjoying himself at Fielding and Robinson’s expense, just for starters.

  ‘All right, Reg—‘ But then he remembered also that Reg got results. And that Reg, in spite of his warnings, seemed to be excited by this one (false teeth or alcohol notwithstanding) ‘—let’s have a look, then.’

  Buller shifted obligingly, to allow him to peer under the canopy at the magnified projection of the reel of microfilm.

  ‘I can’t see a bloody thing, Reg—it’s all out of focus.’ It occurred to him insanely that Buller, seeing everything out of focus already, had had to de-focus it in order actually to see it. But, even out of focus, the main headline was still just readable.

  ‘Oh—sorry!’ Reg adjusted the focus, first swimming it into pale grey infinity, and then sharpening it into readability. ‘There—eh?”

  DEATH OF A MAD DOG, Ian read again obediently. And was again repelled by the crude simplicity of the message in its tabloid form, however eye-catchingly true it might have been (he remembered also reading similar proclamations of this same event, in smaller type and more sober words, in The Times and the Guardian and the Daily Telegraph, not an hour ago, on this same machine; but Reg had naturally chosen his favourite newspaper).

  ‘So—?’ Twisting back towards Buller, he caught the full reek of Reg’s share of those ‘necessary disbursements’.

  ‘”Mad Dog O’Leary”—?’ At close quarters Reg Buller’s eyes were like nothing so much as two halves of the same blood-orange. ‘Christ! I suppose you were a fucking student at the time, demonstrating because your grant didn’t keep you in beer-money! Or what was it—Rhodesia? Or bleeding Watergate, an’ poor old Tricky-Dickie—?’

  ‘Watergate wasn’t ‘78.’ Having just been all through the papers of the time, Ian felt safe now: he could even place Michael ‘Mad Dog’ O’Leary in his brief nine-days’ horror context. And he was not about to admit how little of what he had read had struck any chord of memory, even though he had lived through that November and had presumably read in the original what he and Reg Buller had now re-read on this machine. Truthfully, except for a vague recollection that those had been The Last Days of Labour, Before Thatcher, with threatened bakers’ strikes, nurses’ strikes and car workers’ strikes, he could remember very little of that ‘Winter of Discontent’, in which ‘Mad Dog’ had been just another horror story among many. ‘Actually, I was just beginning to panic before my final examinations, Reg. But I do remember we weren’t doing too well in Australia.’

  ‘Australia?’

  ‘In the cricket, Reg.’ Knowing that Buller despised all sports, he felt he was somehow reasserting himself. ‘It was rather depressing, as I recall.’

  ‘You can say that again! That whole bloody winter was depressing—‘

  ‘I meant the cricket.’ Quite deliberately, he decided to keep the man in his place by ignoring ‘Mad Dog’ for the moment. ‘What did your chap on The People have to tell you, then?’

  ‘Huh!’ Buller licked his lips, as though he had just remembered th
at the pubs were open again (in so far as they ever closed in Fleet Street). ‘He’d just seen his gaffer—Robert Maxwell in person—comin’ down from on high en route to his helicopter pad … An’ ‘e looks around—Captain Bob looks around—an’ sez: “Ah! probably the largest electronic newsroom in Europe!”’ He grinned at Ian. ‘Which is what he always says, apparently. An’ no one takes the slightest notice of ‘im—‘ The grin congealed suddenly, as he realized what was happening. ‘You don’t remember “Mad Dog” O’Leary, then?’

  ‘Of course I do.’ Ian attempted a superior Tully-expression. ‘He tried to blow up the Northern Ireland Secretary in Yorkshire, at some university ceremony. And then they cornered him, and shot him. So what?’

  ‘So what? So what—?’ Reg Buller spluttered slightly. Then he pointed at the brightly projected headlines. ‘It’s all there, damn it!’

  Ian had to study the words again—

  Cornered at last in a remote Yorkshire beauty spot, ‘Mad Dog’ O’Leary died as he lived yesterday afternoon: in a hail of gunfire—

  The only thing odd about that, it seemed to him, was there were too many words in the first sentence, including a subordinate clause, for good tabloid journalism.

  Tipped off by informants, British Secret Service agents gunned him down without mercy. But he killed an innocent girl before he died—

  Nothing odd about that, either. Except another subordinate clause, anyway. ‘I don’t see what’s all there, Reg. You tell me—?’

  ‘Christ, man!’ Reg Buller started rewinding the microfilm at break-neck pace, stopping and starting with other arresting headlines—BREAD: PANIC BUYING—HOME LOANS SHOCK … and OLIVIA NEWTON-JOHN SPEAKS OUT—swearing all the while. Then he stopped rewinding and swearing, and adjusted the focus. ‘There, then!’

  They were back to the abortive bombing of the University of North Yorkshire, when the Mad Dog had failed to kill the Northern Ireland Secretary, and half the university faculty with him, ‘thanks to the selfless heroism of a British Secret Service agent masquerading as a professor, in mortar-board and gown’.

  ‘So—?’ For a guess, it was the same reporter—or the same rewrite man, and the same sub-editor, acting on the same instructions from an editor or proprietor who had either decided that the Security Service needed a bit of favourable PR, or had been successfully lobbied to the same effect; but, either way, that repetition of the legendary ‘British Secret Service’, with all its nuances of James Bond, was a dead give-away. Because no one on the spot would ever have used that description. And now, in the post-Peter Wright era, it wouldn’t have been fashionable: most likely, it would have been ‘SAS marksmen’, if not the Special Branch’s anti-terrorist squad.

  Buller was shaking his head, though. ‘You haven’t really looked—have you?’

  ‘At the papers?’ He had read more responsible accounts than this one, of the same event. There’s more in the Guardian, Reg—‘

  ‘This is the one that matters. This is my man, who was there before any of the big ones.’ Buller grimaced at him. ‘But you’re also forgetting what I told you yesterday, before Johnny and the Lady disturbed us—an’ afterwards, when they’d gone off.’

  More accurately, when Buller had ordered them off, thought Ian: Jenny through the front door, to take off one watcher; and then John Tully, through the back way, to draw away his comrade. And then, after Reg had lunched on bread-and-cheese and a bottle of Pere Patriach (the Cologne beer being exhausted), Ian himself had been ordered into the rain (‘although I don’t reckon they’ll have put anyone on you, seeing as you don’t do much at the sharp end anymore … But, just in case, anyway—?’); and, although that had been insulting, he had obeyed; but now he must remember what had passed between them before he had done so.

  ‘About David Audley, you mean, Reg?’ Buller had talked with ‘a bloke I know’, was what he remembered: with Reg Buller there was an inevitable succession of ‘blokes’, from dukes to dustmen, via policemen and journalists, all of whom seemed to owe him one favour for another; but in this instance it had been almost certainly (‘No names—right?’) one of his old Special Branch mukkers—

  Buller nodded, only half mollified by such a simple correct answer. ‘Look how it stacks up: “masquerading as a professor”, eh? And “mortar-board an’ gown”—? Who’d they choose for that—that’s got the balls to do it, as well, in cold blood?’

  There was more here than either Reg himself or his favourite newspaper had said. ‘In cold blood?’

  Another nod. ‘Somebody carried O’Leary’s bomb out of that building—the new library they were opening, or whatever it was … When they didn’t reckon they could get the people away from it, before the bugger pressed his remote control button.’ Buller tapped the ‘selfless heroism’ passage. ‘Who better than Audley? One of his mates was running that show, on the security side, apparently. An’ Audley’s the professor-type—looks the part. Wouldn’t need to play it, though. Because he’s already a visiting fellow at that Oxford college, see.’ Buller gave him a sidelong look. ‘Wouldn’t need a cover story to be there, either … An’ no shortage of guts, so they say.’

  It was all hypothetical, thought Ian. Or, alternatively, Buller knew more than he was saying. ‘Who’s “they”, Reg?’

  ‘Friend of mine.’ Buller grinned.

  ‘The one on The People?’

  ‘No. The one I told you about yesterday—the one that tipped me off about him being tricky—Audley … remember?’

  What Ian remembered was that Buller had been characteristically vague about his Audley-source. But what was more immediately important was to uncover the foundations on which this hypothesis was built. And those seemed to involve his other friend, the sub-editor on The People, rather than the Audley-source.

  ‘So what was it that your chap on the newspaper told you, Reg?’

  Buller tapped his nose. ‘He was there. That’s what.’

  Ian looked down at the Yorkshire university bomb story. At a ceremony like that—a routine academic event until ‘Mad Dog’ O’Leary had singled it out for attention—there might or might not have been one or two education correspondents from the London papers, depending on whether they’d been tipped off that an important speech was going to be made. There would certainly have been reporters from all the local Yorkshire papers, taking down all the speeches whether they were important or not, and probably taking down the names of all the local dignitaries too—that was to be expected anywhere, and especially in Yorkshire, with its fierce local pride. And as Buller’s Fleet Street friend had then been a reporter on one of those papers—which was it? But it hardly mattered, anyway—his presence at the ceremony was quite unremarkable. So why was Buller looking as though he’d made some great discovery?

  Suddenly the light dawned. ‘You mean … he was at—the other place—where O’Leary was shot—?’

  ‘My man was there before any of the big ones’ he remembered belatedly.

  ‘Your chap … who’s on The People now?’

  ‘That’s right.’ Buller stared at him. ‘He was at Thornervaulx.’

  So there was more. ‘And—?’ He tried to look intelligent.

  That’s right.’ For once Buller was deceived. ‘He was there—right?’

  ‘He—‘ This time the light was blinding. ‘Audley—you’re sure—?’

  ‘Near enough. “Big ugly fellow—bit like a boxer … or a rugger player. Broken nose—that sort of thing.” Pretty accurate description, actually. Because he did break his nose playing rugger, as it happens.’

  ‘I thought you said he looked like a professor.’

  ‘That’s when he opens his mouth.’ Buller amended his own description without shame. ‘Take it from me, that’s him right enough. No mistake.’

  And that, of course, validated the bombed-university hypothesis, via the O’Leary connection. The security service must have been tipped off that O’Leary intended to assassinate the Northern Ireland Minister at the opening of the new
library and the degree ceremony. They had foiled the bomb attempt, but it had been a close shave. And O’Leary himself had also escaped, only it had been a damn close shave for him, too: in fact, he hadn’t really escaped—he’d simply broken out of the inner ring—?

  ‘How far is Thornervaulx from the University of Yorkshire, Reg?’ He couldn’t place Thornervaulx on his mental map: it was one of that famous concentration of ruined abbeys in the North … Rievaulx, Jervaux, Byland, Fountains, Kirkstall and Thornervaulx: originally they’d all been in the wilds, and most of them still were, including Thornervaulx no doubt.

  ‘Not far, as the crow flies. But you’ve got to go round the little roads, and up over the dale to reach it.’ Buller had the facts at his finger-tips, as usual. ‘Takes a bit of finding.’

  That fitted, too. With all the main roads blocked, O’Leary would have been forced off the beaten track, and had then been hunted down like the wild animal he was in the wilds. ‘And your man was actually there.’

  ‘Not at the shoot-out.’ Buller nodded nevertheless. ‘But within minutes of it—aye.’

  Again, that wasn’t impossible: a smart local reporter (and Reg Buller’s contacts were always the smart ones) would have his friends in the Police, and could often be so well in with them as to be just behind them. ‘And he saw Audley there—actually saw him?’

  ‘He saw more than that.’ Buller started winding the film forward again from the North Yorkshire bomb to the Thornervaulx gun battle, compressing the last long hunted hours of the ‘Mad Dog’ to ten blurred seconds. ‘Or, rather, there were things that he didn’t see, you might say.’

  ‘What d’you mean—“didn’t see”?’

  Buller stopped the microfilm, and then adjusted the focus with maddening slowness until DEATH OF A MAD DOG shouted at them again. Only then did he turn to Ian. ‘It wasn’t like that. That’s not what happened.’ He shook his head. Terry—let’s call him “Terry”. Because that’s his name—Terry didn’t write it like that. He flogged ‘em the story—and for a small fortune too. Because he was the only one that was there. So all the other stories are based on his—or, rather, what was made of his … and the official statements, of course.’ The big mouth twisted cynically. ‘Which just happened to tally exactly, you see—the official statement … and his edited story.’ An eyebrow lifted in support of the mouth. ‘Is that plain enough for you?’