Brothers' Tears

by J M Gregson

  They were away swiftly down the narrow little street, as Cafferty had planned. The road at the end of it was busy with traffic, so that they had to wait an agonising twenty seconds before they could swing left and be away. Twenty seconds which might prove crucial.

  Patrick Riordan had planned his own movements meticulously and executed them as intended. What you could never plan or control were the movements of the enemy. The very things which had made James Fitzpatrick a target for the IRA avenger Riordan had also made him a candidate for the state security services. He didn’t have a permanent bodyguard; resources didn’t run to that. It was reckoned now that only the fanatical rump of provisional IRA zealots would have any grievance against a man who had supported them steadily until the Sunningdale Agreement had brought the settlement which most Irishmen found acceptable.

  But fanatics existed. Indeed, the security services kept a note of the movements of Patrick Riordan, a declared avenger, who had never accepted the peace which most of his colleagues had welcomed. Riordan’s former commander, Dominic McGuiness, might now represent official Ireland and be about to shake the hand of the British queen. His former Sinn Fein inspiration Gerry Adams might now be encouraging the Irish Parliament to cooperate with the English. But men like Riordan were still killing, which meant that men like James Fitzpatrick still needed a degree of protection. When he spoke at public meetings, the system dictated that there would be a security man sited discreetly in the hall to protect him.

  Not a top man, perhaps: resources were inevitably spread thinly in this Olympic year. The man assigned to Fitzpatrick was young. He was certainly not incompetent, but neither was he experienced. He had chosen to sit at the table on the platform beside his charge, when he might have been better advised to move around and observe in the body of the hall. And because he was young, this would be the first time his services had ever been called upon. However much you told yourself that you must be perpetually alert, that sooner or later you would be needed, you were still shocked when terrorism suddenly blazed into ugly life and you were the sole force to deal with it.

  Booth leapt over the fallen target. The rules were that you didn’t stop to check on injuries, once your charge had been attacked. You went straight for the man with the gun and you shot to kill. The idea of downing a man by shooting at his legs was a ridiculous myth dreamed up by idealists. He was down the aisle between the rows of seats like a sprinter, pistol in hand, careless of his own safety as he had to be in the pursuit of an assassin.

  His quarry’s car was away already, reaching the end of the street as he wrenched open the door of the Mondeo. The grey VW was delayed mercifully by the main road traffic for a little while. He could hear its driver gunning his engine impatiently. The grey car disappeared as Booth moved after it. Then he had himself to wait for agonising seconds at the end of the cul-de-sac before he was able to swing into the line of traffic.

  The VW was a CC GT and could probably outdistance even his two-litre Mondeo on the open road. That was irrelevant here, for there was too much traffic around for anyone to make full use of an engine’s potential. That was one of the complications for security. One at least of the men in the VW was a desperate man with a lethal weapon. Unsuspecting citizens were in danger if he was cornered in the wrong place. If he should choose to shoot his way out and members of the public were killed or injured, the man who had trapped him would be subjected to the spotlight of an official enquiry.

  Booth tried to explain the safety issues as rapidly as he could to the Police Armed Response Unit he contacted as he drove. He yelled details frantically into his microphone as he twisted the wheel of the Mondeo to overtake startled city drivers. He wasn’t gaining much on his quarry; he could see the grey VW passing cars in front of him as horns blared in protest. He was trying not to use his own horn, in the probably futile hope that the driver and passenger in the VW wouldn’t realise that he had spotted them and was on their trail.

  The police came back to him. He was on the road to Oldham. Provided his quarry kept to this major road, the Armed Response Unit would head the VW off at a roundabout close to the entry to the town. They were closing access to other traffic at this moment. He was approximately 3.4 miles from this point at present. They would let Booth’s Mondeo through, but he should be prepared to find the VW stationary when he arrived at this point, with one and possibly two armed and hostile men within it. He should leave it to the armed security staff to make arrests; they were trained for situations like this and wearing body armour.

  Booth grinned, despite himself. They were teaching granny to suck eggs, but he didn’t mind that. He could look after himself, but if these men were asserting their superiority in what would be a highly publicised and highly dangerous arrest, he didn’t mind that. No doubt they’d spent long days preparing for life-and-death situations, but found they only rarely got the chance to be involved in one. Bit like him, really.

  There were three cars between him and the VW now. One of them obligingly turned left and deserted the drama. The terrorist driver was good, he thought dispassionately, watching him pass swiftly through a diminishing gap between parked vehicles and an approaching bus without even touching his brakes. He saw the white face of the gunman turned back towards him, looking for pursuers.

  The cars in front of him were more cautious about the narrow gap left by the approaching bus. They slowed, almost stopped. Booth wasn’t too frustrated by that, now that he knew that the VW was to be intercepted. Force of numbers would defeat the enemy, as it almost always did.

  At that moment, the VW turned off the appointed route. It swung at the last possible minute and without use of its indicator on to a road which forked left, away towards Royton and the trans-Pennine M62. Booth had to fling the Mondeo from the outside lane where he’d been overtaking sharply across the traffic on his left, accelerating hard to avoid contact but provoking blaring horns from his rear.

  He was immediately behind the VW, some forty yards back from it. Its driver and passenger knew now that they were being followed and knew that it was the Mondeo that bore their hunter. Booth radioed the change of route urgently to the Armed Response Unit, which was now waiting uselessly in the wrong place. He knew from the sound that an Armalite had been used in the assault upon James Fitzpatrick. Now his blood chilled as he saw the man in the passenger seat of the VW preparing to use it again, on him.

  The end was swift and decisive, as it usually was in counter-terrorist operations. Booth was amazed by the way time seemed suddenly to be suspended and things to happen in exceptionally vivid slow motion. Death came like this, whether to you or to the enemy, he supposed. You joined security for the excitement, yet in the crisis it was never exciting. Whatever was happening just seemed inevitable.

  The speeding VW suddenly screeched to an agonised halt, slewing half sideways across the road in front of Booth’s Mondeo. He would have hit it had he not had his forty yards of leeway. Then the men were out of it, with the man from the passenger seat firing a quick burst from the Armalite at the Mondeo as Booth stood on the brake pedal. He saw the windscreen to his left shatter as he flung himself sideways and downwards. It was a surprise to find that he had not been hit.

  As he half-scrambled and half-fell out of the car, trying to keep the cool metal of its body between him and the bullets from the Armalite, Booth realised what was happening. The men were leaving the stolen VW, deserting it in the middle of the road where it would cause traffic chaos and impede pursuit. They were transferring to a Ford Focus, which a third man was already driving out of the parking bay and on to the road ahead of the abandoned VW. Had it not been for Booth, they would have got clean away, leaving security and police services fruitlessly tracking down the stolen VW.

  The man with the Armalite could have seen him off; the firepower odds were overwhelmingly in his favour. But he had downed his target in a hall three miles away; he was intent now upon escape. Patrick Riordan snatched a look at Booth, but decided he was not a
percentage target as he crouched behind the wing of the Mondeo. Cafferty was already wrenching open the door of the Focus, yelling at him from ten yards away to be quick.

  It was good that these things happened in slow motion, thought Booth, as he pressed himself hard against the metal shield of his car. Your brain worked coolly and well when events were slowed down like this. He would get one chance of hitting the man with the Armalite, he reckoned, before he was in the car and away. This was the man he wanted. The other one was just his driver and probably not a killer at all.

  He was close enough to have a good chance of a hit, even with a pistol. He held it in both hands and rested it on the top of the Mondeo’s wing. It felt firm and steady in his hands, firmer even than the weapons they held in the controlled environment of the shooting gallery, where they did their regular shooting exercises and examined the targets afterwards.

  Riordan had almost reached the car when he was hit. He felt the enemy bullet in his body, didn’t know whether it was one slug or two, whirled with the impact, heard himself screaming as he had never thought he would scream as he hit the ground, felt the subsidiary blow of the tarmac upon the side of his face. The Armalite clattered down beside him, tantalisingly beyond his failing reach. He raised one arm hopelessly towards Cafferty, heard the car accelerate away from him and leave him to the enemy. It was the rule that they should get away. But he felt nevertheless deserted as he lay and waited for death.

  It took Riordan a second or two to feel the severity of the pain. He surely couldn’t stand this for long. In the same instant, he realised that his hunter was standing over him, kicking the Armalite even further away, pointing the pistol steadily at his stricken head, uttering words he could not hear and did not want to understand.

  The ambulance was there within twelve minutes. The crumpled assassin was lifted gently and stowed carefully within its protecting womb, treated as tenderly as if he had been a pregnant woman. The paramedics fought to save the life of the man who had come to their city to kill.

  Patrick Riordan was but dimly conscious of these things. The last noise he heard before he drifted out of consciousness was someone in the ambulance saying that he thought James Fitzpatrick was wounded, not dead. It was the most grievous blow of all.

  EIGHTEEN

  It was a flat in a block which contained thirty similar residences. This one was on the ground floor, scarcely twenty yards from the main entrance. Peach and Northcott inspected the red Audi in Brian Jacobs’ allotted parking space as they moved the twenty yards from their police Focus to the entrance. They noted that it was as clean inside as it was gleaming outside, that it looked as if it had been recently valeted. That was the kind of detail CID men note automatically.

  Brian Jacobs met them at the door of the flat before they had time to knock. He was in casual gear, which looked as if it had been as carefully chosen as the blue suit he had worn when he had met them at his place of work four days previously. The attractive but slightly untidy black hair had been cut and styled since Tuesday. His hands were as clean and well-groomed as if they had been professionally manicured. He settled his visitors on the sofa opposite the big window and the bright morning light. There was a smell of coffee from the kitchen adjacent to this square, pleasant living area.

  The man was more nervous in his home on Saturday morning than he had been in his office at work.

  Peach wasn’t going to say anything to put him at his ease. The DCI took his time, looked for a moment at the picture of Derwentwater with the fells of Catbells behind it, accepted the offer of coffee and biscuits. He sniffed the coffee, then sipped it appreciatively. He began his questioning obliquely, because he sensed that Jacobs wanted them to be direct and get this over with quickly. ‘You haven’t any children, Mr Jacobs?’

  ‘I have one boy. He lives with my ex-wife. That’s when he’s at home. He’s in his second year at Warwick University.’

  Peach nodded. ‘This place is far too neat and tidy to have kids around it, whatever their age might be.’

  Brian Jacobs took a sudden gulp of his coffee. Too large and too impulsive a gulp: it almost scalded his tongue, causing him to gasp and down his cup hastily on to the low table between them. Peach looked at the liquid spilt into the saucer for a moment, as if it had great significance. ‘Thank you for agreeing to see us this morning. We need to ask you some more questions.’

  ‘I’m willing to help, though I can’t think I’ll be able to tell you anything which will push things forward.’

  ‘Push things forward, yes. Well, let’s see, shall we? DS Northcott?’ Peach settled more comfortably and raised his black and expressive eyebrows towards the big black man, who was sitting uncomfortably beside him on the very edge of the sofa.

  DS Northcott looked somehow even more threatening with the small notebook clasped in his huge hands. ‘Could you clarify the nature of your relationship with Mrs Jean Parker for us, please?’

  ‘That has nothing to do with the death of Dominic O’Connor.’

  ‘Then why did you choose to conceal it when we spoke on Tuesday?’

  ‘I didn’t “choose to conceal it”. It had nothing to do with your case and it still has nothing to do with it. It is a private matter between Jean and me and I simply chose to let it remain so.’

  Peach was suddenly animated by one of his eager smiles. ‘A most unwise decision, as things have turned out. Concealment always excites suspicion, in cynical chaps like us.’

  ‘It wasn’t concealed. Jean told you all about it when you first spoke to her.’

  ‘Correction. She told us nothing about your association with her. She merely gave us your name as a known enemy of Dominic O’Connor.’

  ‘Which was clearly very frank of her.’

  ‘Very frank indeed. So much so that we believe that it was what was agreed between the two of you beforehand, as evidence of that frankness. We believe that Mrs Parker gave us your name as an enemy of the murder victim to try to convince us of her good faith, whilst at the same time electing to conceal the fact that she had a close relationship with you. We have to ask ourselves why she chose to do that.’

  ‘Because it was private. Because it was our own business and no one else’s.’

  ‘It makes you into a couple with both motive and opportunity for the murder of Dominic O’Connor. A man whom you hated and whom you now plan to replace as Financial Director at Morton Industries.’

  ‘That situation is a fact of life. It’s not something we contrived. Motive and opportunity don’t mean that either of us chose to kill O’Connor. I’m even prepared to admit that I’m glad that he’s dead and if there’s the opportunity to obtain the position I should have had years ago I’ll take it. That doesn’t make me a murderer.’

  ‘No. But the fact that you chose to conceal as much as you could of this makes you a strong suspect. Just as the fact that Mrs Parker concealed how close she was to you until yesterday and then only admitted it because she had no alternative also excites our interest. Concealment is never a good idea, even for the innocent, Mr Jacobs.’ His tone implied that he would need much convincing before he accepted the innocence of this particular pair.

  ‘Jean told me that she’d informed you all about us yesterday.’

  Peach’s smile this time comprehended the fact that he expected the pair to compare notes after each meeting with him. ‘That was only when she realised that there was no alternative, Mr Jacobs. As the only one of our suspects who combines a declared hatred of the victim with a known history of violence, you are now almost our prime suspect, I’d say. Would you agree, DS Northcott?’

  ‘Indeed I would, sir. Not our only suspect – we have to bear in mind that a woman could easily have killed Dominic O’Connor – but perhaps our prime suspect, as you say.’

  ‘Jean didn’t kill O’Connor.’

  ‘And why would you seem so certain of that, sir? You’re not confessing to the crime yourself, are you?’

  ‘Of course I’m not! I’m
just certain that it isn’t in Jean’s nature to steal in and kill anyone like that.’

  Peach shook his head with one of his sadder smiles. ‘Ah, if only you knew how often we’ve heard thoughts like that, Mr Jacobs. We never know what lurks in the hearts of even those we think we know quite intimately. I only hope that we don’t have to listen to Mrs Parker voicing that notion about you. Does she know about your previous history of violence?’

  ‘It was in 1989, for God’s sake! It feels as if it was a different person in a different life.’

  ‘I’ll take that as a no, then.’ Peach’s voice hardened suddenly. ‘Unfortunately for you, it was the same person in the same life. A person who attacked and almost killed someone with a knife. Have you come up with anyone who can support your story that you were nowhere near Dominic O’Connor’s house last Friday night?’

  ‘No. But the innocent sometimes don’t have alibis.’

  ‘True. And the guilty never have them.’

  ‘I was here from around eight o’clock on Friday night. I didn’t kill the bloody man, any more than Jean did.’

  ‘You were unbalanced about him.’

  Brian recognised that word. It had come from Jean. She had used it to him when she’d been exasperated by the extremes of his hatred of Dominic O’Connor. He felt a sense of betrayal that she should also have told these calm and relentless bastions of the law that he was ‘unbalanced’. He said as calmly as he could, ‘Dominic O’Connor had given me good cause to be unbalanced. I didn’t kill him, though. Someone else did that for me.’

  ‘You could have twisted that cable round his neck. You could have wound it tight and watched him die. You’d have enjoyed that.’

  Peach was pushing hard, harder than his normal code allowed, searching for some sort of reaction, some flicker of the face which might reveal even for a split second that the man was guilty. He got nothing. Brian Jacobs said harshly, ‘Your forensic people have examined my car. You’ve no doubt questioned people in the area around O’Connor’s house to try to place me in that area on Friday night. You’ve come up with nothing. That’s because there is nothing. I left the golf club at around half past seven as I told you and drove straight home, without going near the O’Connor house. I didn’t kill the sod, and neither did my Jean.’