The Discourtesy of Death

by William Brodrick

‘Who?’

  ‘The IRA. They came for their guns sooner than expected.’ The priest’s eyes were burning with a strange white heat. ‘One of them was missing. A Browning automatic. Fourteen rounds. And a silencer. Do you know where they are?’

  Michael seemed to feel the heavy wire netting against his skin, pressing hard as the walls continued to advance inwards, bringing more darkness. The burly, ragged priest read the silence as a ‘No’.

  ‘Well, that’s fine, so,’ soothed Father Doyle. ‘Because, thankfully, Liam did. And he told ’em what they wanted to know.’

  The unkempt priest, still in his hat, coat and scarf – all a shabby black, save for the snip of white plastic at the neck – leaned forward, pressing his finger heavily on the PLAY button.

  ‘Listen for yourself.’

  The tape whirred for a few seconds. Someone walked away from the microphone. Seconds later there was a ‘ding’ … the strike of a spoon on the base of a pan … the signal for Liam to start talking; to repeat what he’d told them since he’d come to Armagh.

  ‘I’m … err … Liam Finnerty and I make this confession freely.’ He gave his address as if he were watching a clerk fill in a form. ‘I’ve been workin’ for British Intelligence since last November, eight months. They approached me, like, after I’d been nicked for shoplifting. I told ’em to run ’n’ jump but they follerred me around for weeks. Kept pullin’ me in. Said they could make the theft charge go away and help me ma. Offered me a few quid for the meter. That was that, like.’

  Michael listened, head down, feeling the immense presence of Father Doyle. He was staring at him from an inner conflagration of rage and distress.

  Liam had an extraordinary memory. He told them everything. He handed back every scrap of information he’d stolen for the Brits. It was all humdrum. Names and car registration numbers. Who knew whom. The building blocks of sound intelligence. Then, after two months (confessed Liam), he’d got a new handler. A man called ‘Frank’. A jock from Dundee. Michael shuddered, listening to the flow of invention. The physical description, the strong accent, the mannerisms. The invented conversations, the apparent slip-ups by the handler that revealed telling personal details. But Liam made no reference to Michael. Michael was safe. The IRA’s intelligence units would never track him down. They could just look for Frank, who only existed in Liam’s terrified mind. Shortly he came to the guns. The heart of the matter.

  ‘I never told him,’ pleaded Liam. ‘If I ’ad a done, he’d a taken the rifles, wouldn’t he? Thing is, I wanted to fire a gun for real. See what it felt like. So I just borrowed it and went out on me own to have a go. But I didn’t get the chance because I came across a patrol and I panicked and chucked the thing in a bin.’

  Liam gave the exact location. And the number painted on the lid. And the time of day. He’d picked half an hour before the rubbish trucks lurched down the streets, stopping and starting. The boy was utterly convincing.

  ‘I’m sorry for what I’ve done,’ breathed Liam in a monotone. ‘A tout’s a tout. I know. I just want to go home. See me ma. An’ tell Frank to leave us alone.’

  Father Doyle pressed STOP. Just as deliberately, he pressed REWIND as if Michael might want to listen again. The tape whirred, spinning backwards while Michael watched the spools turn, thinking of Liam’s boyish features. The eruption of adolescence hadn’t gone yet. He was still awkward. Still a dreamer. Impressionable. The Nutting Squad would have let him go.

  ‘He’s dead,’ said Father Doyle.

  Michael looked up.

  ‘Didn’t you know? Hasn’t the paperwork filtered through?’

  Michael shoved back his chair, stepping away from the low hum of the machine. He found himself retreating to the far wall, not daring to meet the priest’s accusing gaze.

  ‘I warned you,’ said the priest, banging the table with his white knuckles. ‘I told you what would happen.’

  Bang.

  ‘I said let the boy go.’

  Bang.

  ‘I said you’d played on his vulnerability.’

  Bang.

  ‘And now … now there’s going to be another funeral in Belfast. There’ll be a handful at the side of the grave, no more. And if his mother, poor woman, ever comes downstairs afterwards, people will turn the other way. All that … for what? Nothing? You did nothing?’

  Father Doyle tapped the table lightly a few times and then stood up as if he’d heard enough.

  ‘You’re no different to them,’ he said at the door. ‘The sooner you get your backside off this island the better.’

  The priest had gone. The tape was whirring faster and faster, the sound rising to a crescendo until, finally, there was a soft, slow click. A report came through later that afternoon. Liam had been found naked by the side of a quiet country lane in South Armagh. His hands had been tied behind his back with brown tape and his head had been covered with a black bin liner. He’d been shot from behind with a high-velocity rifle. There’d been no signs of torture on the body. The next day, his mother told the Belfast Telegraph he’d always wanted to be a train driver.

  Michael’s breakdown probably started at the moment he picked up the tape recorder. It was as heavy as a dead body. He stopped speaking, eating and caring for himself. He neglected his work. His colonel, recognising a certain fragility of character, transferred him back to Templar Barracks in Ashford, Kent. There, while sitting in the small garden of Repton Manor staring at an old oak tree, he was approached by a nice guy, a major, who introduced himself as Danny Carpenter. ‘I’m a sort of joiner,’ he joked. ‘I help put the tongue back into the groove. No nails or glue. Fancy a beer?’

  Michael’s career with the Intelligence Corps had come to an end. After a mere six months. For the appraisal writers, he’d been a diligent operative better suited to desk work. Analysis, not action. Danny tried all sorts to bring the planks of Michael’s life back into line, only once asking a direct question, when all else had failed.

  ‘What did you do, Michael?’

  And Michael had gazed at the ancient oak tree, once used to hang so-called witches while Cromwell brought the scourge to Ireland.

  ‘I did nothing,’ he’d murmured, enigmatically. ‘Absolutely nothing.’

  Michael pressed REWIND.

  The tape began its trip home, whirring softly. Michael looked at the hand that would hold the gun. There was a very faint dying tremor. Journey’s end was in sight. All he had to do was cross the border in his mind and walk to a cottage lit by a summer moon, sneaking between the mauve shadows of ling and bell heather. He’d told Danny that he’d done nothing. That wasn’t true. He’d made the biggest mistake of his life.

  40

  Anselm seemed to park, pull the handbrake and snatch the keys from the ignition in one fierce movement. He ran across the gravel towards Morning Light. Opening the door without so much as a knock or a call, he strode down a corridor and into the sitting room, fearing that he may be too late, spilling out a command with as much relief as panic:

  ‘Peter, you have to leave at once.’

  Peter Henderson was standing near an armchair by a fire, half-moon glasses on the end of his nose and a book in one hand. He was about to remonstrate when Anselm spoke again.

  ‘Trust me, you must get away from here.’

  Peter Henderson had shaved. He looked smart in loose jeans and a baggy woollen jumper. His face remained a field of devastation – deep ruts in the skin and shadows like potholes on his sunken cheeks. He stepped back, and sat down again, saying, ‘Still charging around things you don’t fully understand, I see.’

  He nodded towards a facing chair as if it were time to go over that very confused essay on Charles Stevenson.

  ‘Peter, I know how Jenny was killed,’ said Anselm, pointing anxiously towards the door.

  ‘My confession wasn’t sufficiently compelling?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because I found a witness.’

  Pet
er Henderson slowly closed the book and placed it on the armrest. He seemed to have died.

  ‘You must leave now,’ said Anselm. ‘Instantly.’

  ‘Why?’ His voice was low and dark, shocked and spare.

  ‘Let me take control of what is happening, Peter,’ replied Anselm. ‘Let me handle this crisis. For once in your life, don’t ask so many questions. Accept that sometimes you have to wait for an answer. And that time is not now. So please, leave at once.’

  Anselm wanted Peter Henderson safe out of the building because he wanted to be alone when Michael Goodwin arrived. He wanted to speak to him: this quiet man of so many secrets. But Peter Henderson wasn’t moving. He sat like a punctured life-sized doll, sagging to one side.

  ‘Leave now,’ ordered Anselm.

  ‘No,’ he said, as with a last breath. ‘I’m going nowhere until you explain yourself.’

  Anselm strode forward.

  ‘Okay, have it your way,’ he said. ‘Michael intends to kill you tonight.’

  The smile vanished.

  ‘That’s right, Peter. No Moral Maze. No wondering which way to turn. He’s armed. He’s resolved. He trained with the SAS. He’s on his way here. Now get out. Go to Larkwood. Ask for Wilf. Speak to no one. Wait.’

  For a while Anselm paced around the room as if he might get somewhere in bringing matters to a close. It was almost dark outside and the fire’s reflection flickered on the crooked windows. As he turned to the grate, Anselm’s eye caught the title of the book Peter had been reading, an intrepid study by Geoffrey Bannon: Killing, Ethics and the Law. Sitting down in the armchair, Anselm opened the book randomly. His gaze instantly fell on a passage that made him smile. To illustrate a point, the author had imagined an atheist tormented by a stutter with his foot trapped in a hatch on the sinking Titanic.

  41

  Michael parked in the lane that ran to Morning Light. Very slowly, he opened the door. Minutes later, he was walking calmly towards Jennifer’s cottage as if it were that farm in the Blue Stack Mountains. He reached the gate and quietly lifted the latch. To avoid the crunch of gravel he stepped on the lawn he’d raked ten days earlier and moved swiftly around the building towards the back door. A light was on in the sitting room, shining softly through pale green curtains. The rest of the house was in darkness. Peter, hopefully, was by the fire enjoying a good book. Something to make him think.

  It had been like this in Donegal. Only the light had been stronger from a bright moon. He’d crossed three gates, not one. He’d moved on tiptoe towards a silver strand of light, a rippling stream on the far side of Néall Ó Mórdha’s bolthole. He’d seen smoke like a thread from a needle, dangling from the stars into a squat chimney.

  There was smoke rising now from the fire by Peter’s armchair.

  Standing by the wheelbarrow near the back door, Michael placed his thumb on the latch and quietly opened the door …

  In Donegal, he’d opted for a knock. It had been a last-minute decision, a strange nervousness, as if he needed Ó Mórdha’s permission to kill him. A surviving decency that had tracked him from Edinburgh where he’d left his better half.

  He’d heard footsteps fall soft upon the wooden floor inside.

  He’d seen the handle turn.

  The door had creaked open all the way as Ó Mórdha peered into the darkness, a hand shielding his eyes from the shocking power of the moon.

  Michael stepped into Morning Light. The gun, with silencer attached, was in his hand. His finger was on the trigger. The safety catch was off. He was in the kitchen. After a few seconds he walked with slow, silent steps to the fuse cupboard and tugged open the door. There was a slight thunk. Michael listened intently. A page turned.

  Ó Mórdha’s eyes had got accustomed, too. Michael should have fired before then, but time had slowed as if it were concrete passing through a sieve. Michael had stood, legs apart, arms extended, the Browning absolutely still in his hands. There’d been a low light in the hall. A dog had watched from the end of a musty corridor. A grandfather clock had ticked. The kettle had rattled on a stove. Michael had noted all these details even before the expression on Ó Mórdha’s face had been able to change from curiosity to terror. Finally, the IRA commander had seen the gun.

  ‘Can I help you?’ he’d said, in that child-like voice.

  For a brief second their eyes had met; and Michael had seen a flicker of naked supplication. He’d come to put it out.

  ‘You’re dead,’ he’d explained.

  But just as Michael had squeezed the trigger, he’d heard a very quiet voice within himself … very quiet indeed: ‘Michael, Michael, Michael …’ and he’d fired a millisecond later, to drown out whatever might come next.

  BAM-BAM, BAM-BAM.

  Only Michael had closed his eyes. On opening them he’d seen Ó Mórdha standing to one side, looking down the corridor, aghast. There, by an open bedroom door, lay man’s best friend. Michael had shot the dog. It hadn’t even barked back.

  ‘What the—’

  Michael had turned and run. Under the light of the moon he’d scaled three gates, tripped and fallen twice and had finally stumbled into the driver’s seat of his car. He’d never forgotten Ó Mórdha’s look of astonishment, any more than he’d forgotten the sound of Liam’s confession. Eugene and Liam had both taken a bullet so that Michael could remove Néall Ó Mórdha from the Army Council and tilt the balance in favour of peace. And he’d shot a pedigree dog. A man and a boy had died so that he could put down an Irish water spaniel.

  Throughout the years that followed his return to civilian life, Michael had watched the unfolding of history with horror. One atrocity followed the other: the Brighton bomb that nearly wiped out the British Cabinet, the mortar attack on Newry police station, the Remembrance Day bombing in Enniskillen … the ‘spectaculars’ didn’t end. And behind them all, Michael saw the dumbfounded face of Néall Ó Mórdha looking at his dog. Michael had missed his chance – his obligation – to act decisively. Of course, he wasn’t so simple-minded to think that killing Ó Mórdha would have prevented the Brighton attack, all the way to Canary Wharf and beyond. But he couldn’t escape the nagging doubt that it might have brought forward the peace process, if only by a year, six months even, and that would have been lives saved. Innocent lives. People who’d done nothing wrong except get out of bed and go to the wrong shopping centre. It would have given some purpose to Eugene’s secret confession and Liam’s later silence. Those two meaningless deaths and the vague, long list of casualties that might have been prevented lay on Michael’s conscience … something Nigel would never understand. They accused him now, every time he saw Ó Mórdha on the television. He’d come round to the idea of peace eventually: once it was clear that the long war would never be won.

  Michael reached out and put a finger on the trip switch below the fuse box.

  Another page turned. Peter cleared his throat.

  But there’d been another presence throughout the years. The echo of that voice. The echo of his own name. Beyond all thought and feeling, choice or argument, this sound had remained strangely insistent, uncomfortably present … only Michael had refused to acknowledge it was there; refused to open the ear of his heart. And when he’d tried, tentatively, on his long journey here, to Polstead, he’d heard absolutely nothing. So this was where his past and future came together: the failure in Northern Ireland would be redeemed now. He was going to kill Peter, not because he’d done a great wrong – this was not about vengeance – but to make a difference for everyone else’s tomorrow.

  Michael breathed in slowly. There was no panic. No shake to the hand. There were four rounds in the Browning: one up the spout and three ready to go.

  Michael flicked up the switch. Then he was off. Counting the cost: one, two, three, four …

  42

  The problem was this: the atheist with his foot caught in the hatch – Albert – was shot by Ernest because he, Ernest, couldn’t imagine a worse way to go than drowning. And Albert
was in one hell of a flap. What Ernest didn’t know was that Albert (terrified by the gun) would have preferred to drown, but he couldn’t get the words out. What neither of them could have known was that, first, Albert’s foot would have come free an instant later. But, second, irony of ironies, when they’d finally got near a lifeboat, Albert would have met his end anyway, injured horribly by the whip of a snapped cable, dying in agony before the ship could sink and let him drown. Now, if Albert and Ernest could have shared a cocktail afterwards and talked things through amicably, Albert would have said he’d have preferred the bullet after all. And thank God he had a stutter. So, in the end, everyone was happy.

  Except the author.

  According to Professor Bannon, Albert’s preferences were—

  Suddenly, the lights went out.

  There’d been a click from down the corridor but that sound was overtaken by the stamp of feet sweeping forward. Anselm rose in a panic, dropping the book to the floor. Soft light from the fire picked out some objects in the room. A clock ticked against the wall – he hadn’t noticed the mark of time until now, when it was about to be halted, once and for all – and he could hear the thumping dread of his heart.

  Oh God, I’m finished, he thought, numbed.

  Each second slowed, opening up space for one last-ditch reflection, something charged with high meaning and importance. In the popular imagination, Anselm was meant to see his life pass before his eyes – his infancy, parents, loved ones, a kite in the wind – but something else came to the fore … a man with a flushed, perspiring face. He appeared like an overweight angel to insulate Anselm from the banality of what was about to happen.

  It was Bede. He’d come to say, ‘I told you so.’

  It was that kind of case after all.

  A dark shape appeared at the mouth of the corridor. Anselm tried to call out but his voice jammed. His final deliberation came like a weak sigh:

  ‘God … I’m not ready.’

  Anselm had always imagined that death might be like falling under a general anaesthetic: giving in to the sudden, overwhelming pull of darkness … followed by a burst of light and the great answer to the great question: had the fifties jazz revival reached heaven?