by Tom Bradby
She didn’t respond.
‘You’ll be all right. It is for the best, though I’m sure it doesn’t feel like it now.’
Colette sat cross-legged, the smoke from her cigarette spiralling up towards the ceiling.
He looked down at the file in his hand. ‘I’m afraid I’ve got to take you through a few things. We’ll go through more tomorrow, but we need to get you home quickly.’
She looked up and nodded dumbly, so he went on. ‘I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you to remember a few things – code names, emergency numbers and so on.’
He relayed some of the points he had agreed with Jenkins. They’d decided her code name would be ‘Shadow Dancer’, which was his own idea. It had once, a long time ago, been the name of his parents’ boat. He also made her memorize the emergency number she would need to call in the event of a crisis, or if she had something to tell them and wanted to set up a meeting that had not been scheduled. He told her she would be provided with a small bleep, in case of a real emergency, which would, he said, sound an alarm at the local police station and prompt immediate action.
To everything he said, she nodded, but he wasn’t convinced she was concentrating. Once or twice, he asked her gently to repeat back what he’d just told her. She kept on stumbling uncertainly.
When he asked her to run through the emergency numbers again, she broke, putting her face in her hands and sobbing gently. He didn’t know what to do, but he edged forward on the bunk and put his hand on her shoulder. He said, ‘I’m sorry.’ He could feel the warmth of her body through her shirt and he could smell her; a strong, distinctive, feminine scent, mixed with the faint odour of stale sweat. She made no effort to shrug off his hand and he left it there. With a conscious effort, he forced himself to stand and knocked on the cell door. As he heard the guard turn the lock, he looked back at her, but she didn’t raise her head. He said quietly, ‘I’ll see you tomorrow.’
McIlhatton sat, slouched in the armchair, watching Neighbours.
The flat he was in had one bedroom, one table, one armchair and only one person. Himself.
In the beginning, he’d been pleased to have been selected by McVeigh, but that had worn off.
He stood up and walked to the window. The street outside was horribly familiar and he wondered how many boring, lonely minutes he’d spent standing here.
The handbag was by his feet and he’d delivered the pass to the man in Hammersmith, as instructed.
They’d always said it would be tough.
CHAPTER FIVE
THEY WALKED OUT OF PADDINGTON GREEN INTO THE WINTER sunshine.
The car was waiting and Colette clambered into the near side. She was wearing the same clothes, but she’d showered and applied some of the make-up a female police officer had given her.
She’d barely spoken, but he could sense her mood had altered. She seemed more confident and more buoyant.
It was 7.30 a.m. and Ryan knew that time was short.
They drove out of Paddington Green and down towards Oxford Street. The driver spotted an Italian café that looked open and pulled up outside it. Ryan turned and touched Colette’s arm.
‘I thought we might have some breakfast.’
She smiled. ‘OK.’
The owner of Mario’s was a tall, grey-haired man with a strong Italian accent. The cappuccinos, when they came, were frothy and thick. Ryan picked up his teaspoon and drew small patterns in the froth.
‘You seem to feel better this morning.’
‘A bit.’
‘Good.’
Silence – awkward. He sipped his coffee and was considering what to say – how to make conversation – when she said quietly, ‘I’m going to die, aren’t I?’
‘No.’
‘But you say that to everyone.’
‘Yes.’
Silence again.
‘Shouldn’t you be a bit more reassuring?’
‘Probably, but I sense that lying to you isn’t going to help.’
‘Do you always tell the truth?’
A pause. ‘As often as I can.’
‘That’s not terribly reassuring either.’
‘You’ll be all right.’
‘Oh yes. Like all the other touts.’
‘Well you agreed, so you must be confident.’
‘That’s what I thought, is it?’
He leaned forward. ‘You will be all right. You will be all right.’
She looked down. ‘I don’t know why I should believe you.’
‘Trust.’
‘Do you?’
‘Do I what?’
‘Trust me.’
‘Yes.’
‘Why? You have no reason to.’
‘No, that’s true. But I do.’
Colette leaned back in the seat. ‘So tell me about you.’
‘Me? Not much to say.’
‘There must be something. Married?’
‘No.’ He felt awkward. ‘I don’t think we should be talking about me.’
She smiled again. ‘Oh, come on. You seem to know all about me.’
‘I know very little about you.’
‘Would you like to know more?’
‘I don’t think this is a productive avenue of conversation.’
She looked irritated. ‘You’re to be my handler, right?’
He nodded.
‘So I’m not supposed to know anything about you?’
He nodded again. ‘That is the general idea.’
‘Right. So I’m supposed to trust you with my fucking life and yet I’m not allowed to know the slimmest details …’
‘All right. It’s not very interesting, that’s all. I’m twenty-nine years old. I’m not married.’
‘Would you like to be?’
‘No comment.’
‘I was married.’
‘I know.’
‘Aren’t you going to ask me what it was like?’
‘No.’
‘Your boys killed him.’
‘Not my boys.’
‘Sometimes I think they did me a favour.’
Silence again. A dangerous area, he thought. ‘Why do you think that?’
She shrugged. ‘I think you’ll have to work that out for yourself.’ She took a sip of her coffee and went on without raising her head. ‘You’re not very experienced, are you?’
‘Experienced enough.’
‘And I’m supposed to have confidence in you?’
‘I think you’ll want to concentrate on whether I’m committed to you above all else.’
‘And are you?’
‘I think you know the answer to that.’
‘And what about your superiors – that other man … dick-features.’
Ryan couldn’t suppress a smile. ‘Mr Jenkins.’
‘I thought he said his name was Peters.’
Ryan cursed himself silently.
She looked at him directly with an amused, ironic grin on her face. ‘And what is your name, Mr Jones?’
He waited for a few seconds and then, slowly, smiled back at her. ‘My name is Ryan.’ He took a sip of coffee. ‘And I don’t think you need worry about Mr Jenkins or Mr Peters, because we will be working with people from the RUC.’ He watched the grin fade from her face.
‘The RUC?’
‘Yes. I’m sorry if you don’t like it. It was decided above me.’
‘I won’t do it.’
‘I’m afraid you have no choice.’
‘They’ll burn the likes of me just for the hell of it.’
‘No, they won’t. They’re very professional. I’ll be there to protect your interests.’
For a moment he thought she would argue further, but she picked up her teaspoon and began to stir her coffee. He could sense her confidence was slipping away.
‘If they catch me they’ll kill me.’
‘Possibly.’
She leaned forward again, suddenly animated. ‘For Christ’s sake, not possibly! There’s no fucking pos
sibly about it.’
He knew he’d made a mistake. He put up his hand, as if imploring her to keep her voice down. ‘They won’t catch you. I’ll make sure you’re all right. There’ll be no risks taken, I give you my word. You have to trust me. You’ve got no choice.’
She sat up and took a sip of her coffee. He tried to move the conversation away from potential consequences.
‘We need to go over some more ground—’
She interrupted. ‘I had a dream last night.’
He didn’t know if she expected him to reply, but he simply stirred the dregs of his coffee and left her to continue, unsure of where this was suddenly leading.
‘In it, I worked in an office in Belfast, sorting income-tax forms.’
She paused, but didn’t look up. ‘My boss was called John and he was an attractive-looking man with four kids and a very nice wife called Sheila.
‘I knew she was nice, because we always went to their house before Christmas – the whole load of us in the office and got drunk and …
‘And that’s how we knew he was an army reservist … because there was a photo on his bedside table and I had to go to the loo in his bathroom there one time.
‘His kids were great.
‘He kept it quiet, no-one knew about it.
‘He was shot outside the office one cold afternoon the following February. The police reckoned one of us must have called to say he was preparing to leave.
‘We all went to the funeral.’
Ryan stirred in his seat. ‘If that was a confession, I suggest you …’
‘It was a dream.’ She lifted her head and stared at him again. ‘There’s another. Can I tell you about the one with the horses?’
‘Can I ask you why you’re telling me this?’
‘You don’t know me.’
‘There are bits of you I don’t need to know.’
‘Let me go.’
He sighed deeply and shook his head. ‘There is a lot of ground to go over,’ he said.
She looked down and didn’t speak. Eventually, she said, quietly, ‘The first day will be the hardest.’
‘We’ll go through it now – again and again – and we’ll put you down at Heathrow this afternoon.’
She shook her head. ‘No, I think I should get the tube.’
‘Why?’
‘You never know … international airport. You just never know.’
Ryan nodded. ‘OK. We’ve dealt with what happens after you get back, but we need to go through exactly what you’ve been doing for the past forty-eight hours.’
Colette pulled herself up in her seat, as if consciously turning her mind to a practical problem. Ryan watched the emotion and uncertainty slowly disappear. She spoke deliberately, her story gathering steam. ‘I ran from the scene … down to Battersea Park … that much as it happened. Then … I heard the police sirens … lots of them. I was worried. It was dark. I decided to spend the night there – in a shed perhaps. That’s what I should have done … Then, perhaps, I made my way to the flat in Clapham and spent last night there. We’d have to go there to check.’
Ryan watched her as they drove down the Embankment towards Battersea Park a few minutes later. She didn’t acknowledge him. There was a coldness between them now.
They found the hut just next to the tennis courts, and she watched as he broke the lock and checked the inside. It was comfortable enough, they both agreed, the discarded netting made a reasonable bed.
By the time they reached Clapham, their moods had darkened further, but they found the keys to the flat and Colette spent twenty minutes making sure it looked as if it had been used. She assured him there was no possibility of someone else having been there. She said it never happened after an operation, just in case she’d been followed. She put the keys back and they made the last drive in tense silence. Ryan asked her once if she was all right, but she didn’t respond; it was as if she’d already gone. When they got to Baron’s Court tube she left without saying goodbye and without looking back.
Colette had never seen the man before and that surprised her. She couldn’t place the accent exactly, but she thought it was Cork or perhaps Kerry. He greeted her warmly and waited patiently as she paid the waitress for her coffee.
She followed him across the road with her heart in her mouth. So far, it had been the strangest of homecomings. She’d felt a rush of affection for Dublin. There was a certain comfort in the anonymity of a big city. So many strange faces. She thought none of them would ever have even begun to guess and, initially, she had found herself almost enjoying her secret. That feeling hadn’t lasted.
The pavements and streets were crowded and she followed the man into St Stephen’s Green with a growing sense of dread. She remembered waiting outside Sister Theresa’s office at school before she’d reached the greater self-confidence of puberty. It was the same feeling, only a thousand times worse. She knew this man could sign her death warrant. There were quite a few people in the park, some feeding the ducks, some ambling, all enjoying the brief afternoon sunshine. They walked past a couple arguing on a park bench and watched as a young man got up from another, his lunch apparently finished. They sat down.
Colette struggled to control her nerves.
The man started gently and that helped her. She found reserves of strength she didn’t know were there and she told herself she was a volunteer back from the front. He had no right to question her loyalty or commitment. He was a back-room soldier. Nothing to be worried about.
As he talked, she looked at him. He was unremarkable in every sense. He stood just under 6 feet, was clean-shaven, softly spoken and wore a padded peaked cap with flaps at the side.
Gradually, he probed deeper, though he didn’t seem to be trying to catch her out. Why had she aborted the operation, he asked. Why had it gone wrong? Why had she disposed of the bomb? How had she got away? Where had she gone to? Where had she spent the first night – and the second? Why had she not called in? Why had she not requested assistance?
She stumbled over her answers and tried to muddle through with studied vagueness. He didn’t let anything drop. When she said she’d spent the first night inside Battersea Park, inside a small wooden hut, he’d wanted to know where the hut was, how it was locked and how she broke in.
She felt grateful to Ryan for the thoroughness of their preparation.
How long it went on she’d have found it hard to say, but eventually he let her go with an affectionate pat on the shoulder.
She didn’t know his name and didn’t know if he was convinced.
Later, she woke as the train shuddered to a halt. Outside the window, she noticed the red paint and hanging flower baskets of Belfast’s Central Station. On the journey back, she’d thought of Catherine and Mark and little else, now with foreboding. The encounter in Dublin had given her back a degree of self-confidence, but the man was a stranger. She didn’t dare ask herself whether her family would be convinced.
She turned left out of the station, away from the great yellow Harland and Wolff cranes towering over Protestant east Belfast. It had been raining and the water was running in rivulets by the side of the road, but the sky was clearing now, the sun sinking down towards the mountain ahead of her. She wanted to feel happy at the familiarity of that view and just couldn’t. It was a horrible sensation.
She cut through the city centre and tried to think of the joy of being reunited with Mark and Catherine. She thought they, at least, would not suspect her.
As she passed the city hall she saw a newspaper stand. The headline on the billboard caught her eye and she froze. It read, LOYALIST ATTACK ON FALLS. The banner line underneath added, MCVEIGH HOME TARGETED AGAIN.
For a moment she didn’t move, then the impact of the words hit her and she began to run – fast, as if demented.
Up Grosvenor Road, crashing into somebody, but not looking back. She felt the impact of the pavement through her shoes. She felt short of breath, but kept running. She slowed as she approa
ched the roundabout. The traffic on the other side was waiting for the light to go green and she ran out just as it did. They honked, but didn’t hit her. She turned right. Past people she knew now. She recognized Cathy – from next door – but didn’t acknowledge her. She turned left into the street and saw the white tape and the soldiers. She slowed. She could see the one in the middle was a head taller than his colleagues. She tried to brush past him, but he grabbed her roughly and forced her back.
As he began to ask questions, she saw Paddy, her middle brother, detach himself from the crowd in front of the house and come running towards them. He hit the soldier powerfully from behind and sent him sprawling towards the pavement. The others moved to close in, but Paddy pointed at Colette and began shouting.
‘Just fuckin’ keep your hands off her.’
Before the soldiers could react, their officer arrived. ‘Mr McVeigh.’
‘She’s my sister – just keep your bloody hands off her.’
The threat was unmistakable. A large crowd had gathered and the officer was painfully aware that the situation could deteriorate quickly. ‘She was running towards us. It could easily have been Loyalists.’
Paddy looked at him with contempt. ‘Sure you’se would know if they were coming back.’
He took Colette’s arm and led her gently forward, leaning to whisper in her ear. ‘Pipe bomb through the window, but it’s OK, the kids were at Auntie Margaret’s. Nobody’s hurt. Ma’s frightened, but they didn’t get us.’
Colette felt dazed. It was like a dream now. With each step, she was assaulted by the familiar: the street itself, with the rubbish swept up against the pavement, the stray dogs, the crowd outside, the soldiers, the new wooden front door – replaced after the last police raid – with the number six written roughly in white paint at the top.
The door seemed to open automatically as they approached and she was conscious of several men grunting a greeting. Paddy released her arm. She stopped dead. She saw Mark’s striped T-shirt hanging at the bottom of the stairs and felt her stomach lurch. She saw the carpet – dark purple swirls – and the poorly framed landscape of a view she had never placed but knew to be somewhere on the west coast.
It was home.
But there was no warmth here today – nothing safe or comforting or secure. It was sordid.
