Reaper

by Hurley, Graham

  “Qualitech.”

  “Good. See you tomorrow. Tiocfaidh Ar La.”

  Charlie rang off, and Mairead stood for a moment in the hall, holding the phone. So much for the listening ear, she thought bitterly, and the soft Irish eyes.

  Connolly joined Scullen for lunch at a café in Letterkenny, a small Irish town at the crossroads between Strabane and Rathmelton, just over the border from Londonderry.

  He’d been driven the hundred-odd miles from Belfast in a brand-new Ford. He’d rung the local number Scullen had given him, and explained where he wanted to go, and the car had arrived outside the flat off the Ormeau Road within the half-hour. He’d never met the driver before, a well-dressed young guy from Ballymurphy, but the man was pleasant enough and they’d spent the journey talking about the situation in the Falklands. There was talk of the Argies getting stroppy about British claims in the South Atlantic, and as a fellow Catholic, the driver thought they had a point.

  “Same old story,” he said, “the Brits only understand violence.”

  They crossed the border at Strabane. Connolly had half expected trouble, but the RUC and the Garda had waved them through with barely a second glance. As the car settled down to a steady sixty on the main road into Donegal, Connolly had relaxed. Working for Scullen, he’d concluded, was like working for a large multi-national. The back-up seemed limitless, the travel arrangements were a delight, and with luck there might even be a spot of complimentary lunch.

  Scullen was already in the café at Letterkenny when they arrived, occupying a small table by the window. The table was set for two. Scullen glanced up, his finger in a copy of The Times. Connolly nodded a greeting, looking at the paper. “Falklands tension grows,” ran the headline, “Carrington to issue statement”.

  Scullen folded the paper and the two men sat in silence for a moment while the woman behind the counter asked them what they wanted. Scullen ordered chicken soup. Connolly settled for a toasted cheese sandwich. The woman disappeared into a back room.

  Scullen leaned back in his chair and listened while Connolly told him about Mairead. The Brits, he said, had been screwing stuff out of her for months. They’d got to her through a counselling service, and before she’d realized the implications, they’d tucked her away. She had a single handler called Charlie, and Charlie was now tightening the screws. He wanted to know all about Connolly, about what he did, who he talked to, and he’d taken certain steps to make sure Mairead obliged. Mairead, thank God, didn’t know what Connolly was up to, but the situation was now critical. Charlie was threatening to expose Mairead as a tout, and if that happened, God knows where it might lead. Mairead had kids, as Scullen knew, and the last thing Connolly wanted was to see them hurt.

  Scullen listened carefully. When Connolly had finished, he looked away, gazing out of the window.

  “You say she’s not a tout?”

  Connolly shook his head. “No,” he said, “she’s meat. In the sandwich.”

  “That’s what all touts say.”

  “Not this one. Not her.”

  There was another pause. The woman arrived with the food. Scullen raised a spoonful of chicken soup to his lips and blew on it.

  “You’re talking about Danny’s wife,” he said at last. “We know her. Remember that. We know the way the woman thinks.” He paused. “She’s no friend of ours.”

  “I know.” Connolly nodded. “But that doesn’t make her a tout. Mother, yes. Widow, yes. But no tout.” He paused. “Political commitment’s a bit hard to come by when you’ve lost your husband.”

  “If we’re talking about loss,” Scullen said, “perhaps we should talk about Danny. They took his life. Remember?”

  “Danny was a Volunteer. That’s different.” Connolly paused again. “I’m telling you. She’s no tout.”

  Scullen nodded, swallowing the soup, appearing to accept the point. The two men ate in silence for a moment or two. Then Scullen looked up.

  “So you’re worried about her?” he said.

  “Yes.”

  “And you want me to do something about it?”

  “Yes.” He glanced across at the older man. “I thought it might be an opportunity, as well as a problem.”

  “Quite,” Scullen said drily, tipping the soup bowl back to trap the fleshy remains of the chicken.

  After lunch, they left the café, driving north, around the head of Lough Swilly, Scullen’s car in the lead. McParland at the wheel. Half an hour later, they arrived in Buncrana, parking outside a small timberyard. Scullen got out, wrapping his coat around him. There was a cold wind, north-west, off the lough. Gulls were wheeling over a distant dinghy. Two men with rods, one of them standing up.

  Connolly followed Scullen into the timberyard. They mounted a narrow flight of steps beside the racks of newly sawn deal and pine, and Scullen unlocked a door at the top. Inside was an office. There was a large metal desk by the window and a couple of filing cabinets. Scullen sat down behind the desk. Through the window, Connolly could see the lough again. The dinghy was still there. Both men were now sitting down and the gulls had gone.

  Scullen reached for a piece of paper and scribbled a number from memory. Then he opened a drawer in the desk and took out a gun. The gun was an automatic. Connolly looked at it. It was big. It was wrapped in a dirty piece of cloth. Scullen put it on the blotter and searched in the drawer again. After a while, he produced a box. Inside the box, there were two dozen bullets, brass jackets, snub nose. He counted the bullets, and then looked up at Connolly. Connolly couldn’t take his eyes off the gun.

  “Have you ever used one of these?” Scullen said.

  Connolly shook his head. “No.”

  “The boy outside will take you to the coast. He’ll show you the way it goes. Use both hands.” He looked up at Connolly again. “Do you have a pair of gloves?”

  “Yes.”

  “Wear them. Never handle the gun without gloves.”

  Connolly nodded. “No,’ he said, “of course not.”

  There was a silence. Scullen pushed the gun across the desk. Connolly felt in the anorak for the gloves he always carried. He put them on. He picked up the gun. The gun was heavy. Oil glinted on the breech mechanism. He put the gun in his pocket and picked up the box of bullets. They, too, were heavier than he’d expected. He cleared his throat, looked at Scullen again, nodded at the gun.

  “Tell me,” he said, “what am I supposed to do with it?”

  Scullen leaned back in his chair, hands clasped behind his neck, his face quite impassive. “Mairead’s worried about …?” he paused, pretending to be hunting for the name.

  “Charlie.”

  “Charlie.” He nodded. “Charlie will doubtless get in touch.” He leaned forward, picking up the piece of paper with the number on it. “When he does so, you phone this number. Tell them the time of the rendezvous. Arrange for them to pick you up. They’ll know what to do.”

  Connolly nodded. “I give them the gun?”

  Scullen shook his head. “No,” he said. “The gun’s yours. They drive the car.”

  Connolly frowned. “So what do I do?”

  Scullen looked at him for a moment. Then he stood up, turning to the window, gazing out at the view. The dinghy on the lough was back on the move at last, the two men in the stern, bent against the wind. Scullen yawned, a hand to his mouth.

  “You kill Charlie,” he said, glancing over his shoulder, “and then we talk again.”

  EIGHTEEN

  Buddy Little was back in England by ten that night. The Mercedes had taken him on, across Ireland, to Shannon Airport. Joe had given him a ticket for the eight o’clock flight to Heathrow, and had wished him luck. Buddy had refused the proffered handshake, and the murmur of reassurance about Jude, and had turned his back and walked away. His ticket, when he presented it, entitled him to Club Class travel. He drank free Scotch most of the way home but refused the plate of fresh salmon. His appetite had quite gone. Only the anger remained.

  N
ow, back home, nearly midnight, Buddy stepped out of the taxi, paid the driver, and walked the last ten yards to his own front door. Coaxing the key into the lock, his eyes beginning to adjust to the darkness, he noticed the car. It was parked beside the stable block. It looked like a small Volkswagen. There was someone sitting behind the wheel.

  Buddy let himself into the house and switched on the hall lights. He closed the front door, and drew the curtain in the adjoining window. Then he switched on the lights in the living room, stepped back into the hall, and through to the kitchen. The kitchen was still in darkness. He felt his way to the back door, eased the bolts, and stepped out into the stable yard.

  The back of the car was visible across the yard. Hugging the shadows, Buddy skirted the yard until he was only yards from the car. He paused a moment, then peered carefully round the corner. The car was empty.

  Buddy blinked, and checked again, and then slipped round the corner. He was now back at the front of the house. The distance between the car and the house was perhaps twenty yards. Keeping his body low, following the line of the hedge, Buddy began to approach the house. He’d covered half the distance when a voice came out of the darkness. It was a woman’s voice, low, the English faintly accented.

  “Mr Little?”

  Buddy froze. The voice again, closer.

  “Buddy?”

  Buddy stood up, feeling faintly ridiculous. A figure stepped out of the shadows, not tall. He saw teeth in the darkness, the middle of a smile. The figure stooped quickly and picked up a rucksack. He saw a hand outstretched and wondered briefly whether it was holding a gun. The figure advanced, the hand still outstretched, into the pool of light from the door. A woman of about thirty. Small. Black hair. Denim jacket. Jeans.

  “My name’s Eva,” she said, “you’re supposed to be expecting me.”

  Buddy looked at her, remembering Scullen’s departing words. Someone, he’d said, someone will make contact, sooner rather than later. At the time, Buddy had assumed he’d get a call over the next day or two. An invitation to meet some place, to find out about the next bit of the jigsaw. The last thing he’d expected was this, some woman, nearly midnight, in his own front garden.

  Buddy shook the hand briefly and gestured towards the house. “I was looking for you,” he said gruffly, “I didn’t know who was in the car.”

  The woman nodded. “I know,” she said. “That’s why I went to the back door.”

  “You followed me?”

  “No,” she smiled, “I was waiting for you. The house has only two doors. You were bound to use the other one.”

  They went inside. Buddy closed the front door. The woman put the rucksack beside the stairs. Buddy looked at it.

  “What’s that for?” he said.

  “I’m staying the night. We have to talk. It’s better we take our time.” She paused. “No?”

  Buddy hesitated a moment, wondering whether to throw the woman out, to bolt the door behind her and start the day all over again, no Dublin, no ambulance, no stranger in a dark suit offering him impossible deals. Then he glanced down the hall, and into the living room, and knew that he couldn’t. Jude’s bed was still there, the sheets rumpled, the night dress over the pillow. This strange woman, the jeans, the jacket, was all part of it, the package deal, the price he had to pay to get Jude back, to get them both to Boston. He shrugged, and walked into the kitchen, flicking on the lights.

  “Tea?” he said. “Or coffee?”

  The woman was a step behind him.

  “Coffee,” she said, “and I’ll make it.”

  They stayed in the kitchen for an hour, the woman effectively in charge, Buddy too exhausted to argue. They drank coffee and ate the last of the flapjacks Buddy had made the previous week. The woman said she was German. She’d studied for her degree in Southampton, and now she had a house of her own there. She worked part-time at the University, taking conversation classes in German, and she gave extra lessons on the side to make ends meet. Nights and weekends, she worked on her doctoral thesis, something to do with a German writer called Günter Grass. She said he was German literature’s sole remaining hope in an increasingly bourgeois world, and hoped one day to meet him. She had his telephone number and his home address, and had written him a number of letters. To date, he had yet to reply, but she lived in hope.

  Buddy half listened to her, chewing his way through the flapjacks. She had a plain, round face, and a snub nose, and short black hair. She talked non-stop, with her whole body, arms, hands, the lot. She swayed and bent on the kitchen stool, going on and on about herself, that single-minded preoccupation with the small print of her own life that Buddy had met – occasionally – in others. It meant she was probably single. It meant she was serious about more or less everything. And it meant that, deep down, she’d be impossible to touch.

  The flapjacks gone, Eva pausing to drain her coffee, Buddy yawned.

  “You with them, then?” he said.

  Eva looked at him over the rim of her cup. She’d found the best china in minutes.

  “With who?” she said.

  “This lot. The lot I met today.”

  Buddy gestured over his shoulder with his thumb. Ireland, the thumb said. The Provos. The men with the guns, and the bags of apples, and the big ideas. Eva smiled, balancing the cup and saucer on her lap.

  “Yes,” she said, “when they need me.”

  Buddy frowned. “How does it work then?” he said. “You freelance? A freelance terrorist? Yellow Pages?”

  Eva got off the stool and ran the dirty cups under the tap. She didn’t answer his question for a moment and he knew why. He had, after all, touched a nerve in her. He’d questioned her faith. He’d caused her offence. He yawned again.

  “Don’t believe it all, do you?” he said.

  “All what?”

  She didn’t look at him. She washed the cups with fierce energy. Lots of water. Lots of suds.

  “All this Provo crap. One country. Brits out. All that.”

  She wiped the last cup and put them carefully back on the shelf.

  “Yes,” she said, “but I wouldn’t expect you to understand.”

  She reached up to the shelf, her face inches from his, confronting him, urging him on. Buddy obliged.

  “So why’s that, then?”

  “Because you’re English. Being English, you don’t have a point of view. You don’t think yes, and you don’t think no. You just think everything goes on for ever, the same old way. You have your weather. Your dogs. And if something goes wrong, really wrong, you just grin and bear it.” She smiled. “Isn’t that the way it goes?”

  Buddy frowned. Now, against his better judgement, the woman was engaging him, joining battle, getting under his skin.

  “Bollocks,” he said briefly.

  “Oh?” She folded the dishcloth and laid it carefully on the side. ‘So what makes you so different?”

  “I don’t grin and I don’t bear it,” he said. “If I think something’s wrong, I say so.”

  “Like what?”

  Buddy looked at her. Jude, he thought. Jude on her back, numb from the neck down.

  “My wife’s a cripple,” he said. “But that’s their word, not mine.”

  “Whose word?”

  “The doctors. They say she’s incurable. They’re wrong.”

  The woman looked at him for a long time. Then she nodded, very slowly.

  “I know,” she said, “I read the article in the paper.” She paused. “They say she’ll never get better. Never be whole again. Isn’t that what they say?”

  “Yes.”

  “So …” she shrugged, “it’s the same with us. The Brits tell us we’re crazy. They say we’re lunatics. They tell us no one else sees it our way. They say we’re …” she paused, frowning, looking for the right phrase, finding it, “flogging a dead horse.”

  Buddy nodded. “They might be right,” he said, “have you thought of that?”

  She shook her head. “No.”

/>   “Why not?”

  “Because we can’t afford to think of the alternative …” She paused again, her eyes going to the tiny framed picture of Jude, propped amongst the jars of beans. “And neither can you.”

  Connolly and Mairead finally got to bed past midnight. They lay together, the light off, the cat from next door yowling at the tom across the road.

  Connolly put his arm around Mairead’s shoulders, kissed the soft triangle of skin at the base of her neck.

  “When will you meet him?” he said. “This Charlie?”

  Mairead was silent for a while. Connolly could feel the blood in her veins, her pulse quickening slightly.

  “Tomorrow afternoon,” she said at last.

  “Where?”

  She opened one eye and looked at him in the darkness.

  “Why?” she said. “Why do you want to know?”

  “I might come too.” He paused. “Wouldn’t that help?”

  He could sense her thinking about it, weighing the proposition up. Finally, she nodded. “It might,” she said.

  “I could tell him whatever he wants to know,” Connolly said, “get him off your back.”

  “Would you?” She frowned. “Would that do it?”

  “Yes.”

  She nodded, falling silent. The cats across the road were at it again. Full moon, Connolly thought. Mairead stirred beside him.

  “He’d never come back?” she said. “Never again?”

  Connolly smiled at her. “No,” he said. “Never.”

  She thought about it a bit more. Then she nodded.

  “There’s a travel agency in town,” she said. “Great Victoria Street. It’s called Pegasus. He’s to pick me up outside. He has a car.” She paused. “I’ve told him one o’clock.”

  Buddy Little woke late, with a headache and the memory of a dream. In the dream, a door had opened and a figure had stolen across the room and bent low over the bed and gone away again. He opened one eye, wondering about the time. In front of the alarm clock was a cup of tea. He reached for the tea. The clock said ten to eight.

  Downstairs, he found Eva back in the kitchen. She’d spent the night in a sleeping bag on the floor in the living room, but the bag was back inside her rucksack, and there was no other sign of her presence in the room. Now, she was cooking bacon and eggs. Buddy warmed to the smell, reaching for the cupboard where he stored the aspirin.