Sabbathman

by Hurley, Graham

  On the phone, Allder had been unconvinced. Like Arthur Sperring, he preferred to deal in hard facts, solid motivations, not something as subtle and complex as this. Why should Gifford go to so much trouble? And why should the settling of Ethne Feasey’s account extend to four more bodies? Kingdom, knowing Allder’s impatience with half-baked speculation, had admitted at once that he didn’t know. The son, Andy, had apparently suffered some trauma or other in the Falklands. He’d written about it since, though Kingdom had yet to lay hands on the piece. Maybe it was something overtly political. Maybe it was quite the reverse. But either way it was now beyond doubt that the man was perfectly qualified to undertake the Sabbathman killings.

  From Winchester, Kingdom had been able to check with the regimental depot in Aldershot. Back in 1981, Corporal Gifford had been on the NATO sniper’s course, down at the commando training base in Devon, and – according to the 3 Para adjutant – he’d done extremely well. On Gifford’s file, he’d found a copy of the Instructing Officer’s report. After six weeks, Gifford had passed all the badge tests with flying colours – observation, map reading, concealment, stalking, target work, the lot. Kingdom had interrupted at this point, asking the obvious question, wasn’t ’81 a long time ago? But the adjutant had said no, chuckling quietly on the phone. Snipers, he’d told Kingdom, were a breed apart. You had to be dispassionate. You had to be a loner. You had to have a taste for hardship and extreme conditions. And above all, you had to be able to kill, to take a man’s life, without any trace of remorse or emotion. The course taught certain skills, but what really mattered was temperament. If you had the right temperament, the skills – once mastered – would never go.

  The traffic began to move again, and Allder jerked awake. He rubbed his face, peering up at the lorry cab beside them, and Kingdom marvelled again at the way his guv’nor had so completely regained his nerve. Here was a man barely a week away from losing his job. Yet the deadline scarcely seemed to have touched him.

  ‘Thirsty?’ Allder said, stretching his tiny arms and yawning.

  They pulled in at the next services complex. Kingdom queued for a pot of tea and a plate of scones while Allder found a table by the window. When he sat down, Allder reached for the tiny plastic pots of strawberry jam. Kingdom had bought six, just in case.

  ‘I’m arranging for you to go to Scotland,’ he said at once, building a mountain of jam on the side of his plate.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Scotland. I’ve organised some discreet inquiries. They’ve got plenty of room, you can leave on Monday.’

  Kingdom frowned. ‘I’m not with you, sir.’

  Allder began to spoon the jam onto the first of his scones. He looked distracted for a moment, licking his fingers.

  ‘Arthur Sperring’s right,’ he said at last, ‘we have to crack the motivation. That means talking to the man. Being with him. Listening to what he has to say for himself.’

  ‘Easy. We pull him in.’

  ‘No.’ Allder shook his head. ‘It’s got to be better than that. It should be his place, not ours. I want the truth, not some bloody statement or other. Tape recorders. Attending solicitors. All that.’

  Kingdom was still frowning. A helping or two of Jo Hubbard’s kind of holiday was the last thing he wanted. Autumn would be like spring. Non-stop gales and rain every hour.

  ‘Why?’ he said. ‘Why dress it up? Why make it so hard for ourselves? Why not go in mob-handed, turn the place over, pull them both in?’

  Allder took another mouthful of scone and a tiny sip of tea. Then he gestured at a couple two tables away. They were sitting side by side, their heads together, engrossed in the front page of The Citizen. Kingdom recognised the photo on the front, the ’92 cabinet posed in the garden of Number 10, the same old faces digging in for yet another term of office.

  We have to get this right,’ Allder was saying, ‘and thanks to you we’re not far off. Five are in the shit. I don’t know what’s happened but it isn’t pretty. The buggers are there for the taking. They’re still talking Northern Ireland so that means we have to come up with the full story, every dot and comma of it. That’s you, son. Getting up there. Signing on. Getting to know the bloke. Getting to know what makes him tick. The thicker the file we hand the DPP, the more we shaft these Gower Street bastards.’

  ‘Sunday’s four days away,’ Kingdom pointed out. ‘What happens if Arthur’s right? What happens if they disappear and slot someone else? We’d look pretty silly, wouldn’t we? Not pulling them in?’

  Allder shook his head, reaching for another scone. ‘Won’t happen.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I’ve got blokes up there. Since early this morning. The place is the other side of Skye. There’s one road out, and we have it covered.’

  ‘Boat?’ Kingdom said bleakly.

  ‘Nothing there. Apart from some canoes.’

  ‘Not the motor cruiser? The Catherine May?’

  ‘No, definitely not. In fact I’ve ordered an all-marina alert. As of this morning.’

  Kingdom nodded, saying nothing, telling himself to look on the bright side. Allder, at the very least, appeared to have accepted his version of events: Dave Gifford, the man of action, exacting revenge for a woman who’d clearly come to obsess him. Kingdom swallowed a mouthful of tea. The story, he thought, belonged in some paperback or other. If he’d listened harder at school, it might even have made him a bob or two. He glanced up, thinking of Peter Weymes, and the price he was paying for his precious front-page lead.

  ‘This bloke Pelanski you mentioned,’ he began, ‘anyone talked to him yet?’

  Allder nodded. ‘Yes. Couple of Mac’s boys.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘He’s not talking, not so far, anyway, says it’s all a fit-up.’ He paused, frowning. ‘I’ve been onto the Serious Fraud Squad, though.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘Yes.’ He nodded. ‘Those bonds that Marcus Wolfe was flogging, they’ve got a full client list, the people who really got clobbered, the ones who lost everything.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘One of them was a woman called Dorothy Gifford.’ He reached for the last pot of jam. ‘Our friend’s mother.’

  Kingdom dropped Allder at New Scotland Yard, pausing long enough to check for messages. Before midday, everything had been rerouted down to Winchester and the afternoon had produced nothing new. Kingdom checked as well in the L-shaped administrative office one floor below Allder’s. The woman in charge had been one of the first to pick up the gossip from Belfast when Kingdom and Annie had originally met, and ever since then she’d appointed herself keeper of Kingdom’s secrets.

  ‘Nothing from Five?’ he inquired. ‘No calls?’

  ‘Afraid not.’ She glanced up. ‘The lady gone missing again?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘No postcards?’

  ‘Not one.’

  ‘Heartless cow.’

  Kingdom closed the door on the cackle of raucous laughter and walked down the corridor to the lifts. Allder had spent the last part of the drive back to London clarifying what he expected from Kingdom’s visit to Skye. The Monday course lasted until the following weekend. The enrolment forms were being completed in the name of Gordon Travis, and he’d be posing as a freelance journalist in need of a break. The course, by all accounts, was rugged and Kingdom might be wise to take a day or two off. Plenty of kip. Plenty of good, solid food. Easy on the fags. Not too much to drink.

  Kingdom had sat in the Wolseley, still wondering whether Allder could possibly be serious. Time was precious. Even if Dave Gifford turned out to be Sabbathman, there were a thousand loose ends to tie up but when he pointed this out, Allder seemed unconcerned. Kingdom, he’d said with sudden warmth, had cracked it. He’d come up with a couple of names and enough circumstantial evidence to fit the known facts. There were hundreds of other bodies on the Branch who could deal with the supplementary inquiries. What mattered now, he said again and again, was motive. Why would the Giffords
have done it? Why would they have launched this extraordinary conspiracy?

  Kingdom left the office at five. The traffic was solid down Victoria Street and he decided to leave the Wolseley in the underground car park at the Yard, taking the tube to Brixton. The walk to King’s College Hospital took less than five minutes, and when he asked for Ernie at the reception desk in the A and E Department, a woman directed him to a ward on the second floor.

  Kingdom took the lift. The ward was crowded, half a dozen or so beds down either side of the room, lines of blank old faces staring into space. There was a television on a shelf at the end of the ward but no one seemed to be taking very much notice. A young nurse spotted Kingdom by the door. She was holding a bedpan in one hand and a plate of uneaten food in the other. Kingdom asked her where he might find his father and she indicated a bed beside the window.

  ‘I might be wrong,’ she said, ‘but I think he’s asleep.’

  Kingdom sat beside his father’s bed for nearly an hour. In the last few days, Ernie had aged ten years. His face seemed to have shrunk to the shape of his skull and his scalp showed white through the thinning hair. There were cuts on his chin where someone had tried to shave him, and wisps of cotton wool clung to the scabs of clotted blood. Except for a glass of water, the cabinet beside the bed was quite bare – no flowers, no books, no cards – and Kingdom realised how empty his life had become. This old man had nothing. No peace, no dignity, not even the comfort of a memory or two. The one person who might have made a difference – Barry – was denied him and the best he could now expect was another bed like this in some Godforsaken nursing home or other until the big heart stopped altogether.

  Kingdom felt for his father’s hand. The nails were long and cleaner than he’d ever seen them, not Ernie’s nails at all. Kingdom reached out, touching his face, and the old man grunted, some private thought disturbed. He turned his head and a thin trickle of saliva found a path to the pillow. Kingdom wiped his mouth with a corner of the sheet, his lips close to his father’s ear.

  ‘Dad?’ he whispered.

  The old man’s eyes opened. They were filmy and moist and the pain showed at once, the way he screwed his face up.

  ‘You OK?’

  The old man blinked, not understanding the question, not understanding anything, only the pain. The consultant had warned that it might be this way. The anaesthetic, he’d said, could play havoc with the remaining brain cells.

  ‘Dad?’

  The eyes closed again and the mouth fell open. After a while, the breathing resumed, shallow, half-hearted, the chest barely rising under the cotton sheet. Kingdom stayed for a while, hoping his father would wake up. Finally, he tucked the hand underneath the blanket, and left. No point, he thought, walking away from the ward, trying to make sense of the blur of signs in the corridor outside.

  Kingdom walked back to Scotland Yard. Before he reached the river, he called at a pub near the Elephant and Castle. He drank three pints of Guinness, each with a chaser of Bells. By the time he was back beside the Wolseley, the alcohol was beginning to work. Anaesthetic, he thought, sliding in behind the wheel.

  He was halfway up the exit ramp before he spotted the note on the windscreen. It was tucked behind the wiper on the passenger side. He pulled up at once, leaving the engine on, getting out of the car, retrieving the fold of yellow paper. It was dark now, and he stood beside the Wolseley, oblivious of the patrol car stalled on the ramp behind him, the barp on the horn, the impatient frown beneath the uniformed cap.

  ‘Room 1807,’ the note said, ‘before you leave.’

  Kingdom got back in the car. Room 1807 was Allder’s office. The note was in Allder’s handwriting. What did the man want now?’

  Kingdom took the lift to the nineteenth floor. The door to Allder’s outer office was half-open. Inside, through the ribbed glass on the inner door, Kingdom could see the outline of his diminutive figure behind the big desk by the window. Allder was on the phone. He could hear the rasp of his voice. He hesitated a moment, then knocked and walked in. Allder peered across the room at him, bringing the conversation to an abrupt end. He put the phone down and stood up. He was in his shirtsleeves, his jacket over the chair by the cocktail cabinet.

  ‘Drink?’ he said at once.

  Kingdom sank into the chair in front of the desk. He could hear Allder behind him, pouring the drink. It sounded enormous.

  ‘Here.’

  He put the crystal goblet in Kingdom’s hands. Then he circled the desk and sat down. There was an inch or so of Scotch left in the bottom of the bottle. Most of it went into the glass at his elbow.

  ‘Cheers.’ he said.

  Kingdom raised his glass, echoing the toast, wondering whether the Commissioner had been on again, a new deadline, an even shorter piece of rope for Allder to hang himself with.

  Allder nodded at the telephone. ‘Belfast,’ he said.

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘Just now. Your mates from Knock. Just to say …’ He tried to end the sentence but couldn’t, turning his face away, revolving the chair towards the window, the glass to his lips again. Kingdom, watching him, felt a sudden chill, an icy hand inside him, encircling his heart. Annie, he thought numbly. It’s about Annie.

  ‘What’s happened?’ he said quietly. ‘Just tell me.’

  Allder got up, his back still turned to Kingdom. ‘The army people found a body. This morning. Down in Armagh somewhere. Crossmaglen.’

  ‘Annie’s? Annie Meredith’s?’

  ‘Yes.’ He nodded. ‘They think so.’

  ‘Think so?’ Kingdom stared at him. Lisburn had photographs, fingerprints, everything. It was standard procedure, positive ID in case the army ended up shooting the wrong people. ‘Sir?’

  Allder turned round at last. The glass was empty, his face quite expressionless. ‘They have a problem. They’re saying the body’s incomplete. They’re saying …’ He made a vague circular movement in the air with the empty glass. ‘You’re the one who’d know best.’

  SIXTEEN

  Kingdom read Andy Gifford’s book on the plane. In a way, as he quickly realised, it was better than alcohol or tranquillisers. Here was a pain as deep as his own, and an anger no less savage.

  Andy Gifford, as Kingdom already knew, had served in 3 Para. As a nineteen-year-old, he’d been shipped south to the Falklands with the rest of the Task Force, and found himself walking across ninety miles of sodden, windswept bog. Every bone in his body had ached from the weight he was carrying. He’d suffered trench foot and periodic bouts of dysentery. But by the eve of battle, in his heart, he’d known that he was ready for it. After three weeks in the open, the men were like animals. They’d shed their excess weight. They’d hardened themselves to the cold and the wet. Battle would now be an overwhelming release. ‘Swift and hard,’ Gifford wrote, ‘that was our mantra.’

  Three Para were assigned a feature called Mount Longdon, a long ridge of rocky outcrops guarding one flank of the road to Stanley. On top of Longdon sat a large number of Argentinian troops, some of them highly trained special forces. They had radar, mortars, 106 mm rifles, heavy machine guns and limitless ammunition. Most important of all, they’d had the time to bed themselves in, to dig their trenches, to site their heavy weapons. Geography and sheer weight of numbers piled the odds against the Paras. In technical terms, they were crazy even to plan an attack. But insanity, as Gifford acknowledged, was part of the contract. ‘We came from the Planet Zilch,’ he wrote, ‘though none of us yet knew what deep space really meant.’

  The attack on Mount Longdon started at half-past midnight. The Paras attacked from two directions. Andy Gifford, as part of ‘B’ company, went up the long forward slope of the mountain. Men around him were dying in some numbers, the work of snipers hidden in the rocks above. Life on the receiving end, as Gifford drily noted, could be ‘fucking unpleasant’.

  It got worse. ‘B’ company fought its way to the top of the mountain. Amongst the crags and gullies, the carnage started in ear
nest. There were bodies everywhere, both British and Argentinian, and seeing people they knew blown away stung the Paras to yet greater violence. Fuelled by fear and the primitive drive for revenge, they pushed on through the rocks, clearing bunker after bunker. Much of the fighting was hand to hand. The Argentinians were wearing heavy winter clothing. To kill with the bayonet, you went in through the eye. There was little time to take prisoners.

  By daybreak, half the mountain had fallen but the battle for the rest was still in progress. By now, Argentinian gunners in Stanley had the range of the Paras. The incoming artillery shells screamed towards them, sucking the air from the mountain top. Gifford, crouched behind a rock, saw one of his closest mates caught in the open. The shell exploded, red-hot fragments of shrapnel everywhere. Covered in earth, trembling uncontrollably, Gifford lifted his head. The lower half of his mate’s body lay in a heap beside the charred edges of the shell hole. Blue smoke was curling from his combat trousers. The left-hand side of his face clung to a nearby rock. The rest had gone.

  Later, the battle over, the Paras tidied up. The smell was appalling. There was shit and bodies everywhere. Many of the surviving Argentinians were kids, teenagers. In their pockets, the Paras found letters from home, photos of their mothers, rosary beads. Occasionally, the big guns in Stanley would open up again and a round or two would rasp towards the mountain and the cry ‘Incoming!’ would send men diving for cover. On one such occasion, curled in a shell scrape, Andy Gifford watched two injured men sitting with their backs against a wall of rock. One was Argentinian, the other a Para. Both just sat there, helpless, unable to move, like spectators at some insane international.