Present Danger

by Stella Rimington

  ‘He’s out then?’ Piggott asked.

  ‘Like a baby,’ said Gonzales.

  ‘Let’s keep him that way,’ said Piggott. He turned to Dermot, and said, ‘We’ve had a visitor staying. Name of Simon Willis. Ring any bells?’

  Dermot shook his head. Too fast, he told himself; he should have looked like he was thinking about it.

  But Piggott didn’t seem to notice, saying, ‘Not very talkative at first, but it’s remarkable what modern pharmaceuticals can do.’

  While Dermot digested this, Piggott went on, ‘He wasn’t meant to be here – some signals got crossed – but he’s already been useful. While I was figuring out what to do with him, we had a little chat. Funnily enough, your name came up in our conversation.’

  Dermot tried not to show fear; he told himself again that MI5 didn’t know his name. ‘Why was that?’ he managed to ask.

  ‘Because I brought it up.’ Piggott watched his reactions, then added, ‘Along with a lot of others. I was trying to understand why this Willis guy had made an approach to Antoine just after someone had tried to stitch him up. Not a coincidence, I think you’ll agree. So someone in the organisation must have talked to Willis.’

  ‘I don’t know the man, I’m telling you.’ In spite of himself, his voice was rising in panic.

  Piggott nodded, but it was not reassuring. ‘It’s only fair to say he didn’t seem to react to your name – or anyone else’s for that matter.’

  Thank God, thought Dermot. Piggott added, ‘Then we tried showing him some photographs. And I have to say, yours was the only one he reacted to. What do you make of that?’

  Jolted, Dermot exclaimed, ‘For the love of God, Mr Piggott, I don’t know the man you’re talking about, and I don’t know anyone from MI5. You say someone’s been trying to stitch up Milraud here. Well, it looks as though someone has stitched me up, good and proper.’

  There was silence in the room. Dermot sensed Piggott was considering his appeal. After all, what evidence did he really have to go on? A drugged member of British intelligence nodding at a photograph? You couldn’t kill a man for that. Could you?

  Piggott suddenly said, ‘How did you know Antoine was in Belfast?’

  ‘The boys were talking about it.’

  ‘I see,’ said Piggott neutrally, and he sat down in another of the chintz chairs, directly across from Dermot. ‘Loose talk risks lives, they used to say. I would have thought you knew the truth of that expression.’

  ‘I do, boss. It wasn’t me who was doing the talking.’ He felt his mouth drying, and he wanted to wet his lips with his tongue, only that would betray his nerves. It seemed important to look calm.

  ‘I suppose it was “the boys” then. Which one in particular?’ asked Piggott. He dipped his chin a notch, and Malone moved into the room.

  ‘I think it was Sean McCarthy,’ said Dermot carefully, picking the first name he could think of.

  ‘You sure?’

  He paused. He had nothing against young Sean: he was feckless, but then so were all these young kids Piggott had brought in. It didn’t seem right to land McCarthy in it, but what else could he do? With luck, Sean would get away with a good kicking, he told himself.

  He nodded emphatically. ‘That’s right, Mr Piggott. I remember it clear as a bell. It was the day before yesterday – I saw him at Paddy O’Brien’s saloon. Why, he even bought me a drink – that’s rare enough not to forget.’ He tried to smile at his weak joke.

  Piggott seemed to understand; you could tell the man’s mind was churning over the news of who had been talking. He said, ‘I tell you what, Dermot. Why don’t you go with these two –’ and he jabbed a long finger at Malone and Gonzales – ‘and walk down to the cove. There are some cases on the speedboat that need unloading. Put them on the pier, and Antoine and I will bring the cars down in a little while so you can load them up. I’ve got some calls to make first.’ And with a wave of his hand, he dismissed them.

  Outside it was dark. In the cold, fresh air, Dermot breathed an enormous sigh of relief. He felt a little bad about Sean McCarthy, but his regret was dwarfed by his exhilaration at getting away with it himself.

  ‘This way,’ said Malone, and they crossed the small square of lawn that slanted downwards towards the beach. A line of low lights marked the narrow path to the cove. It led through a small copse of trees – alder, a few birches, some scrubby young oak that had managed to survive exposure to so much harsh salt air. Dermot found himself sandwiched between his companions. They were halfway through the copse when he saw the low mound at the edge of a tiny clearing on one side of the path. The earth had been freshly turned, piled not much more than twelve inches high, yellow from the sand in the soil. Malone just ahead of him stopped, and Dermot almost bumped into him.

  ‘What’s that?’ Dermot asked, pointing to the low mound.

  Malone turned around to face him, and his head was so close that Dermot could feel his breath when he spoke. ‘You said back there that you’d been speaking to Sean McCarthy the day before yesterday. But you couldn’t have been.’

  ‘Perhaps I got that wrong,’ he said, as weakness began to flow through his limbs. He sensed that behind him Gonzales had taken a step back.

  ‘You did, Dermot. And it wasn’t a wise mistake to make.’

  Behind him Gonzales gave a harsh laugh. ‘Cheer up, señor. Soon you can talk to Sean McCarthy for as long as you like.’ Dermot looked again at the mound, and realised it was a grave.

  His eyes turned to Malone beseechingly, but Malone wouldn’t catch his eye.

  There was a metallic noise behind him; Dermot knew it was Gonzales clearing the chamber of an automatic.

  Malone said, ‘Sorry, Dermot.’

  32

  By nine-thirty the next morning Binding had changed his tune. His dismissive cool of the night before had gone and he seemed to be operating in a kind of frenzied overdrive, constantly on the phone, making increasingly tense calls.

  By eleven, when there was still no sign of Dave, he strode into Liz’s office, his face a map of panic, his suit of thick grey pinstripes making him look heavy and sombre.

  ‘I’ve spoken to DG. He’s very concerned. As am I,’ he added, conveniently wiping the slate clean of the previous evening’s conversation. ‘I’m going to ask DG to send an investigative team over asap,’ he announced.

  Liz nodded. She was glad to see that Binding was taking the situation seriously but was alarmed by how far he’d now swung the other way. What she would give for the calm command of Charles Wetherby …

  ‘I wonder if it might be better to wait a little for that?’ Liz kept her own voice mild, knowing how much Binding disliked dissent – he could go ballistic at the slightest demurral.

  ‘Don’t you realise time is of the essence? We need all the help we can get. DG will be informing the home secretary shortly.’

  That was more than Liz could take. ‘If you remember,’ she replied icily, ‘I wanted to inform the police last night. It was you who told me I was overreacting and should wait. In my opinion an investigative team getting involved now would just complicate things. There’s nothing they can do at the moment that we can’t – except get in our way. Even twenty-four hours should make things a bit clearer.’

  Binding had gone red in the face, but Liz could see he was considering what she’d said. Whatever his faults – and to Liz they were legion – he was good at seeing where his best interests lay. He knew he needed to get this right. He said slowly, ‘We can’t be sure Dave’s absence has anything to do with this Frenchman Milraud, can we?’

  ‘Are you saying you think Dave’s gone AWOL?’ she asked, worried that he was going to flip-flop all over again.

  ‘I don’t know what to think. A4 went to his flat – no sign that he’s been there since yesterday morning.’

  ‘We should check at Milraud’s shop,’ said Liz, looking at her watch impatiently. ‘Our source at the airport is looking to see if he caught his flight to France yester
day, but we need to confirm that Dave did actually meet the man.’

  ‘The CCTV in the area will show if he went to the shop.’

  ‘There’s no camera on the street where Milraud has his place. We’ve got someone going through all the CCTV in the area, but that’s going to take some time.’ She stood up to go, already thinking of what she’d say at the Milraud shop.

  But Binding had other ideas. ‘Send someone else,’ he said sharply. ‘I need you close by. Things are getting tense.’ You mean you are, thought Liz.

  33

  It was the smell that made him stop. Every three days or so, Constable Frederick Hughes drove along this lane as part of his shift. He was used to a variety of pungent odours as he passed the farms, from pigs’ slurry to freshly cut hay and the woody smoke of smouldering piles of leaves. But not in midwinter. And anyway, this smoke was acrid. Whatever was being burned, it certainly wasn’t leaves.

  He pulled over just past Docherty’s farm, once a notorious haven for IRA men on the run, heading for the border. A decade ago he would not have been patrolling here at all. What patrolling there was in South Armagh in those days was done by the military in helicopters or armoured cars.

  But that was the past. Now he and his colleagues were far more likely to be hurt in a car accident than in an assassination attempt. Though maybe things were getting bad again – just days before, someone had tried to kill a half-retired officer outside his house in Belfast. No one knew yet who’d done it, or why. Perhaps it was some longstanding grudge, an ex-con avenging himself on the officer who’d brought him down. Hughes certainly hoped it was that. He liked the new comparative calm, the fact he didn’t feel the need to keep his holster unbuttoned when he drove out on patrol.

  He rolled his window down, and as cold air filled the inside of the car, he sat sniffing like a gun dog. There – he smelled it again. He got out of the car.

  The smell was stronger still outside. Turning round, he felt the wind sting his cheeks and he shivered slightly. It was blowing from the north-east, across the unploughed dun-coloured fields. So he got back into his car and drove towards the source of the smell, taking the first right turn he came to, along an old track he didn’t recognise. He drove slowly on, half-excited by the pursuit, half-scared of what might be around the next corner.

  The track climbed gradually around Davitt’s Hill, the highest point in this small stretch of valley. From here you could almost see the border with the Republic, the safety line for so many fleeing the law in the North. Once across the border the Provos had a habit of disappearing into thin air. It wasn’t the Garda’s fault. They’d never had any more use for the IRA than the RUC had. But unless you built an Irish equivalent of the Berlin Wall along every foot of the 220-mile border, you had a refuge route for terrorists that was virtually impossible to police.

  The track suddenly stopped in a small lay-by in front of what had been a crofter’s cottage. From behind the decayed ruins smoke rose in a twisty wisp, before dispersing in the wintry winds. It was only when he walked behind the cottage that he saw the remains of the white van. One of its tyres was still smouldering.

  The forensic team moved fast – everyone did when a policeman had been shot. They checked for prints, but none had survived the fire, which was so hot that the steering wheel had been reduced to a metal spoke. A few fibres were found, miraculously untouched in a corner of the van’s back compartment; they looked like wisps from a blanket.

  Then one of the team discovered a big piece of metal about six inches long lying under the skeletal frame of the driver’s seat. It retained enough of its original shape to be recognisable as a handgun.

  ‘Old,’ said the forensic team leader, when he was shown the find. ‘Better get it to the lab right away. I doubt they’ll be able to tell if it’s been fired, but they might work out what make it is.’

  And while the remains of the handgun were driven at speed to the PSNI laboratory, the team focused on the van itself. Over the course of the next two hours, they carefully extracted what remained of the engine from the vehicle’s charred carcass. After applying acetic acid with a paintbrush they could make out enough of the chassis number to allow a technician at the lab to run a software programme used for identifying stolen vehicles. Its algorithm came up with four possibilities, of which only one was a vehicle large enough to be the burnt-out van found in South Armagh.

  It had been a laundry van belonging to O’Neill’s Laundry and Linen Service, a cleaning business run out of Sydenham in East Belfast by a family named – to no one’s surprise – O’Neill. It had been reported stolen a couple of days ago. Twenty minutes later, two officers had driven to the home of the company’s managing director, where they found Patrick O’Neill still irate at the theft of a van from his fleet of nine vehicles.

  Did he have any idea who might have stolen the van? No, he replied; he’d assumed it was local villains who’d taken it out of the office yard. Had anyone recently left his employ? Well yes, a guy called Sean McCarthy had quit a few days before. He was a laundry collection and delivery driver, who’d never settled in the business. Was this before the van was stolen? Yes, come to think of it, it was just before the van was stolen …

  The PSNI had a suspect now, and they soon discovered from their own database that Sean McCarthy had a string of minor convictions as a juvenile, including illegal possession of a firearm. By now, too, the lab had come back and reported that the charred handgun found in the burnt-out van had been a .25 calibre pistol, probably more than twenty-five years old. Unfortunately, there was no description in the file of the kind of gun Sean McCarthy had been charged with possessing four years before.

  McCarthy’s file also showed that he had been an associate of several members of the Provisional IRA. There was no recent information about that strand of his life and one recent informant had opined ‘the boy’s gone straight’, though his evidence for that appeared to be confined to McCarthy’s being in full-time employment – at O’Neill’s laundry service.

  He was said to live in the house he’d been brought up in on the edge of Andersonstown – but a visit to his home found only his mother in residence. She seemed unconcerned about the absence of her son, and didn’t seem to know anything about his friends or associates. The interviewing PC believed her – probably because he found her too drunk, at ten-thirty in the morning, to lie convincingly. This was her usual condition, according to a neighbour, who also had seen no sign of Sean McCarthy in the last few days.

  34

  Judith Spratt stopped for a coffee at a Starbucks two streets away from Milraud’s shop. This was a part of the city she did not know well, a small oasis of galleries, restaurants and boutiques in what had once been a commercial area of small factories and warehouses.

  She needed to collect her thoughts before she went into the shop. It had been decided that no publicity was to be given yet to Dave’s disappearance, so Judith had to find some excuse for enquiring about him at the shop. She had been taken aback when Liz had asked her to do this job; she was not used to direct contact with the public and role playing was not her strength. Her job, at which she excelled, was the processing and analysis of information once it had been collected; when the pieces came streaming in she liked nothing better than to use her mind like a prospector’s sieve, throwing out the dross and making sense of the few gold nuggets that remained.

  Before she had joined the service she had been an analyst at an investment bank. That was where she had met her ex-husband Ravi. She had enjoyed the intellectual challenge of that job, but had found it ultimately unsatisfying; it had served no real purpose, other than to line the pockets of the firm’s partners and sometimes to help a distant client somewhere to make a killing. With her husband’s encouragement, and the knowledge that his fat salary made the reduction in her pay tolerable, she’d jumped at the chance of working in Thames House. Her subsequent divorce meant that money was now much more of an issue, but she never regretted her change of career.
At MI5 the purpose of her work was always important, and sometimes frighteningly urgent.

  She finished her coffee and walked down the narrow street to the door of Milraud’s shop. She was wearing an ankle-length knitted coat with a fringed shawl draped round her shoulders, and flat shoes. The look she was aiming at was arty, bohemian, slightly ditzy but definitely genteel. As far away as could be imagined from an intelligence officer. She stood outside the shop for a moment and took a deep breath to calm her nerves, then she opened the door and went in. A bell tinkled discreetly.

  ‘Good afternoon.’ A woman stood up from a chair behind a low glass cabinet. She was middle-aged, smartly turned out, with elegantly coiffed grey hair and wearing a dark wool dress with a choker of pearls. She eyed Judith cautiously.

  ‘Is Mr Milraud in?’ Judith began, walking towards her and giving an eager, slightly goofy smile.

  ‘Monsieur Milraud is not available, I am afraid. He is out of the country in fact.’ Judith adopted a frown of disappointment. ‘Did you have an appointment?’

  ‘That’s the thing. I don’t know, and I’m not sure if I have the right day in any case. My cousin Simon asked me to join him here. He collects little guns, you see, and he said he was coming to see Mr Milraud about buying one. He asked me to meet him here this afternoon because we have to go down to the country after Simon has finished here. At least I think it was this afternoon, but if he’s not here, perhaps I’ve got the wrong day – or the wrong time.’ She gave a small sigh, and went on talking. ‘But I know it was here we said we’d meet. He wants me to hold his hand while he negotiates with Mr Milraud. You know, to stop him spending too much money. Not that I’m an expert on guns …’ Her voice trailed off.