by Tom Bradby
The man turned round slowly and pulled back the connecting window a little further. ‘You can do what you like, love.’
All right. I want to get out here.’
She heard him sigh as he turned back to face the road ahead. He edged over in the traffic and she had her hand on the door handle as he did so. It wouldn’t open.
‘It won’t open until I stop,’ he said.
As he came to a halt, she got out. She looked about her. There was no-one else on the pavement and no sign that anything was amiss.
She fumbled in her side pocket, but could find no change. She reached inside her jacket and felt the weight of the gun as she reached for her purse.
‘How much?’ she said.
‘Two pounds eighty.’
She only had ten. She wanted to get away from there fast, but couldn’t bring herself to let him keep the change. It was too much money. She waited while he counted out the cash and then began a fast walk, looking over her shoulder as she did so.
He was looking at her.
She broke into a run, slowly this time, as if trying to convince herself there was nothing to escape from.
She crossed the bridge. Sirens wailed further down the river, but they seemed a long way off. She jogged slowly through Battersea Park, keeping close to the river. She turned back onto the road by the south end of Albert Bridge and then stopped.
What to do?
She thought walking was easiest, and then public transport.
Which way?
She hesitated. So much at stake – and simply the thought of it led to a renewed sense of panic. So close to being caught.
She heard another group of sirens, closer this time, and she wanted to run, but forced herself to stay still. She needed to get as far away as possible as quickly as she could. She felt the gun in her pocket again and then walked forward decisively. She waved airily at the driver of a red Rover, opened his passenger door and climbed in.
‘Christ!’
‘It’s all right. Please, I need a lift, not far.’
The man was big. He seemed to fill the car, his sandy blond hair pressed against the roof and his huge hands covering the steering wheel.
‘What do you want?’ He sounded calm, his voice gentle and level.
Colette also spoke quietly. ‘I just want a lift a short distance.’
‘Why? What are … ?’
‘Somebody was chasing me. I’m sorry, I just want to get away.’
‘Somebody was chasing you? Who?’
‘Just somebody. I don’t know … I just ran … I need to get away.’
The man’s voice was still level. ‘I’ll take you to the nearest police stat––’
‘No.’
He looked at her sharply. They’d been moving forward gently, but he put his foot on the brake and brought the car to a halt. ‘Battersea Park can be dangerous. You ought to report…’
‘No. Please. I need to get away, please.’
She pointed forward, through the windscreen, as if indicating the direction she wished to go in. She could feel the panic returning. She could sense this man was not going to be hoodwinked. He had the feel of a … she didn’t want to think about it.
His voice was still steady. ‘I don’t understand what has happened to you – and perhaps it’s none of my business. But you’re in my car and I think I should take you to the police station, don’t you?’
‘I just want to get away.’ She was gesturing beyond the windscreen again, as if willing the car forwards. ‘Please. I want to get away.’
‘I’ll take you away – but I really think I should take you to a police station. I mean, I don’t know anything about you. I mean, I just think it would be best if––’
She snapped and pulled out the gun, pushing it into his side just above the belt on his trousers.
He exhaled deeply. ‘Fucking hell … now I see what this is all about.’
‘I asked you. I just want to get away.’
They were inching forward again now, but Colette could not still the tempest in her mind. She wasn’t sure what to do because the whole situation had spun rapidly out of control and she was desperate to save herself, but scared the odds were mounting against her.
She could sense the man beside her wasn’t frightened. What was he: a policeman? A soldier? She’d spent too much time with them not to sense something familiar.
It was his calmness that disturbed her.
She tried to think clearly.
‘You won’t escape, you know,’ he said. ‘They’re sealing off this area of London – it’s just been on the radio. Roadblocks, the works.’
Colette didn’t reply. He was a policeman. She cursed inwardly.
‘It’s because of the bomb scares.’ He looked over at her, his face calm and impassive. ‘You’re not one of them, are you?’
She turned towards him and pushed the gun into his ribs. ‘Shut up.’
‘I’m not frightened.’
‘Shut up.’ She could hear the desperation in her own voice and she could hear sirens again in the distance. They seemed to be getting closer.
She held the gun at waist level so it wouldn’t be seen by passers-by. The streets were busy with people who’d decided to walk home to avoid the chaos. The sirens grew louder, and up ahead she could see the cars moving onto the pavement to try to clear a way through.
She was peering anxiously out of the windscreen when she felt a blurring pain in her cheek as the man punched her. Her head smashed against the side window and she felt him grip her wrist, the pistol already pointing harmlessly towards the roof. She struggled, but he had his other hand on her throat and he was strong. She tried to yank her right hand down and fire, but the shot went through the roof, the noise deafening both of them. He pushed her hand back and smashed it repeatedly against the window behind her. She struggled, but the pain was intense and she couldn’t keep hold of the gun. When she sat up, she was looking down the barrel of her own pistol and the man was reversing slowly out of the door and gesticulating wildly to the approaching police car.
She closed her eyes and began to sob quietly, her body hunched over the dashboard.
*
On the other side of the Irish Sea, Trevor Long was driving fast. It was raining, it was dark and the roads were narrow and slippery. He knew he was pushing it.
There had been no fuss, just a single bleep, followed by a telephone call. He felt hollow, tired and dirty. At times like this he always felt dirty. And, if he was really honest, he felt sad and bloody disappointed. He had lost players before, but never one who’d been going for so long and risen so high.
Assistant Chief Constable Trevor Long rarely had dealings with the man now, but the officers who handled him on a week-to-week basis still acknowledged that, ultimately, he was his man. They told Long to his face that, as head of the RUC Special Branch, and thus the man responsible for all intelligence operations, he was far too senior to be taking risks. Long told them bluntly he still believed in coming to the coalface. He’d lost men before and he was determined not to lose this one. He couldn’t afford to. Gingy Hughes was the best agent they had. Or had been.
Long felt awful. Over the years this hadn’t got much easier. He thought of his man, with his gawky teeth and ginger moustache and he could picture him exactly in his mind, his hands shaking with nervousness and fear. He’d been a difficult bastard to handle, all arrogance and insecurity by turns, and Long had had to use all his powers to control and keep him, his manner sometimes encouraging, sometimes cold and cruel and ruthless. Their relationship had resulted in a range of feelings, from hatred to grudging respect. It had been a peculiar kind of friendship.
He stopped for a minute and studied the map again. He knew he was lost.
He tried the road ahead, but realized he was going nowhere, turned round and came back to the crossroads. Two hundred yards down the road to the left he saw the thin red light of a soldier’s torch and pulled the car gently to a halt. He wound
down the window as the soldier approached and pulled out his wallet. ‘Trevor Long, E Department.’
‘Up ahead on the left, sir.’ The soldier’s accent was raw Glaswegian.
There were three men at the gate in civilian dress. They recognized him immediately and the tallest one came forward. He seemed surprised by the sight of the hooded, angry eyes and appeared to recognize Long’s mood. He stretched out his hand, pointing into the darkness. ‘The other side of the field, sir, by the light. The Army have checked. There’s no booby trap. We thought you’d want to be the first to look.’
Long grunted his thanks.
It had been raining for days and the field was like a bog. Long was still wearing his neatly polished office shoes, but he didn’t care. Through the darkness, he could just make out the hedgerows, and he walked steadily towards the light in the corner where they met. Normally he would have made this journey during the day, after a lone farmer or walker had discovered the body, but tonight they’d received a call, a tip-off from the IRA – that fact alone suggesting the man in the ditch was important.
The men by the light recognized Long and made way for him. He knelt down. ‘Hold up the light,’ he said sharply.
The man was on his front, his hands tied tightly behind his back. He was wearing jeans and a jumper – scant protection against the bitter cold. He was barefoot, the removal of shoes the final indignity. For the tout, there was no sympathy and no warmth, not even at the end.
They’d have forced him to walk, barefoot and blindfolded, to this point. He might have stumbled, or cried, but there would have been nobody there to hear him. They’d have made him kneel on the side of the ditch and then placed the gun against the back of his head. Long thought they might have enjoyed his desperation and walked home to dinner feeling a good day’s work had been done. His man would have stumbled and cried and begged. In his final moments he would have been a coward; pathetic, frightened, alone, his arrogance long since beaten from him by the IRA’s feared Internal Security Unit. Long thought of the split-second when a finger squeezed on a trigger and a life was ended.
The body beneath him had a grey hood, the cord pulled tight around the neck. Long gripped him and tried to turn him over, struggling to pull him round in the mud. He looked up briefly. ‘Give me a hand, for Christ’s sake.’
Long knelt over the man’s head and tried to loosen the cord. He didn’t have a knife to cut it and his hands quickly grew cold as he fumbled with the knot. It was frozen solid. He looked up again. ‘Has anyone got a knife?’
The man holding the light produced a Swiss army penknife and Long eventually managed to cut through the cord. He felt bitter and angry.
The blood from the wound had stuck to the sack and he had to pull it up from the front. Finally he looked at the man’s face. He felt weak with relief.
Whoever the poor bastard was, it wasn’t Gingy Hughes.
CHAPTER TWO
COLETTE CURLED UP INTO THE FOETAL POSITION AND ROCKED SLOWLY to and fro on the bunk. She stared straight ahead of her, oblivious of her surroundings, her mind numb with shock. She clutched her knees closer to her chest and gently rested the side of her face on them in a childlike gesture of despair.
She tried to blot out the images of Mark and Catherine, but their faces kept on shining through; bright, happy faces, imploring her to come home. She could hear Catherine crying out, ‘Mammy, I love you,’ and the words reverberated round her head.
For the last number of hours – she’d lost all sense of time – everything had been noise and aggression and hostility. First she’d been taken to Battersea police station and then pushed into a van and driven at high speed to the secure cells here at Paddington Green. At least she assumed that was where she was, though she’d not been able to see anything as they arrived.
Wherever she was, she knew what to expect. It was always the same: the bullying detectives seeking an easy confession, and then the weasels from Special Branch. In Belfast, indeed all over Northern Ireland for all she knew, it was the detective constables from Special Branch who were considered to be the real enemy. Just thinking about them stiffened her resolve. They inspired fear and hatred in equal measure and she shivered involuntarily as she remembered some of their tactics. The worst had come after she’d left prison. They’d brought her into the interrogation centre in Castlereagh and placed a brown envelope on the table in front of her. She hadn’t moved and they’d opened it for her, gleefully spreading out the photos. She’d wanted to close her eyes, but shock and horror had got the better of her and she’d stared wildly at the pictures of her husband Davey in bed – in every position – with the slut from the other end of the street.
Apart from anything else, she couldn’t believe the quality of the pictures.
The episode had left her with a corrosive bitterness that had dragged on for years and poisoned her relationship with Davey, her anger amplified by the knowledge that, if their situations had been reversed, she’d have been expected to behave impeccably. If Davey had been in gaol and she’d been on the outside, people would have watched her and they would have talked, but they excused Davey as they excused the other men who strayed whilst their wives were locked away in prison.
But, in the end, she’d been lucky. A friend in the same street had strayed – ‘Only the once, for Christ’s sake,’ she told Colette – whilst her husband was inside, and she’d got pregnant. Special Branch watched her go to England to get an abortion and threatened to present her husband in the Maze with evidence of her infidelity unless she agreed to become an informer.
The woman knew it would kill him, but she held out. Colette sometimes wondered where she found the strength.
Colette thought of her own years in prison and shivered again. It was not so much the hardship of it, though it had been hard. It was simply the isolation. She’d enjoyed the friendship and comradeship of the other women on the Republican wing, but she’d found it almost impossible to maintain her relationships with Davey and her family. After a while, she’d come close to asking them to stop visiting, because it was so hard after they left. She used to lie on her bunk and look at the ceiling for hours, trying to remember what it was like to be free.
She thought that going back in there was more than she could bear.
She thought about how you tell two children that you’re going to prison for the rest of your life.
She wondered how you explain why.
She heard a loud bang outside the door and looked up to see two scruffily dressed detectives of opposite sizes filing into the cell. They looked tired and hostile, and for a brief moment anger displaced her despair. She tried to follow her training and concentrate on every detail of her incarceration and interrogation. She knew that afterwards, after it was all over, the IRA debriefing would be extensive.
The men took her to a small interview room down the corridor – armed guards in the corridor, she noted, at least three of them – and sat her down on the opposite side of a sturdy table with a Formica top.
The thin man spoke first. ‘Life for attempted murder, I would say, and twenty years for conspiracy to cause an explosion.’ His tone was matter-of-fact and he sounded tired.
She looked down, determined not to catch his eye.
‘You can listen to this or not, we don’t give a shit, but you are going to go down for a twenty-year stretch – I mean serve twenty years – and you’re going to serve it in an English gaol.’
The words crushed her defiance.
‘Twenty years in a gaol in England. None of this cushy life in the Maze or Maghaberry, where you run your own show and control your own wings. And English gaols with English criminals are not noted for their love of the IRA – but, then, I’m sure your bosses will have gone out of their way to warn you of the consequences of your actions. Anyway, you were caught red-handed and that’s the reality.’
He leaned forward on the table, but she did not look up.
‘I know what you’re told, but you’re old e
nough to understand what makes sense. The IRA can’t help you now. It’s over for you. If you help us, if you make it easy on yourself, I give you my word it’ll not be forgotten. Maybe it will ease your transition to a gaol in Northern Ireland, help you get back to where your children can see you.’
He lowered his voice and spoke softly. ‘You’ll want that, won’t you? You’ll want your kids to be able to see you? Maybe you’re tough, but you wouldn’t want to hurt your kids any more than you have to, would you? You’d want to make it easy on them, wouldn’t you?’
She kept her head down and tried to shut out the noise. She thought it was the sound of the devil and she searched deep within herself to try to find the strength to remain silent, as the IRA demanded.
Trevor Long found it hard to push the image from his mind. He could feel himself cutting, ripping and tearing. When the sack came off, he saw a white face, curiously expressionless in death, the skin cold to the touch.
He tapped the steering wheel with one hand and fondled the bleeper between his legs with the other. The rhythmic beat of the windscreen wipers should have been comforting, but wasn’t. He had the engine on and the lights off. He couldn’t see a thing.
He could hear the wind in the trees above him and occasionally a strong gust would gently rock the car, lashing the rain against the windows. He was worried at the mud and wet. In a hurry, the drive out would be slippery.
He waited. He could feel his mood souring further. If the little bastard hadn’t been getting difficult, he wouldn’t be here. Insecurity and arrogance; a bloody awful combination, but perfect too.
Not for the first time, he wondered what he would do without Gingy Hughes.
He caught the first flash of headlights in the distance and felt his chest tighten slightly. He breathed in deeply.
The car was coming fast. He turned on the lights, picked up the Heckler & Koch machine-gun with his left hand and, on instinct – he hadn’t planned this – opened the door and got out.
