Unholy Ground imm-2

by John Brady

  A clear enemy then, ranting dictators and masses of goose-stepping fanatics. England had never been more united. Who was the enemy now? he remembered wondering as he had looked out through the rain at the regimental honour guard, the drizzle beading and dripping from their brims while they waited for the coffins to emerge from the plane. No Members of Parliament to welcome back these soldiers, to stand vigil and honour their dead. No Ministers or their Secretaries. No Kenyons either. Just the faint hum from the motorway in the distance, the families standing in puddles, the uniforms. Small sprays of lilies standing out against the greys. No, no hero's return, no medals pinned, no wife's embrace. He had watched from the car as Ball had walked behind his brother's coffin, hatless and pale. Who was the enemy now?

  Murray had waited for several weeks before contacting Ball. He had to wait for it to sink in with Mervyn Ball as it had sunk in with himself three years before. He waited for Ball to understand that his brother's funeral marked the end of it. There would be no public outrage, no questions in the Commons. Just another British officer's death sinking into history-not even history, mere numbers. And all for what? The sniper still crept over the rooftops of West Belfast, claiming more victims, the bombers still thumbed the buttons. A holding operation, governments too wary and timid to ask the army to do better than watch as parts of soldiers were shovelled into plastic bags amid the rubble.

  Months later, Ball at a Foreign Office reception, glass in hand, weighing Murray up as the party went on around them: Yes, Mervyn, we have something in common. Your brother was in the Royal Greenjackets, I think _

  While Minogue negotiated his way into the centre of Dublin, Kenyon was walking back to his office in Cadogan Gardens! Kenyon was finding it difficult to order things in his mind. Several times during his walk he resolved to wait until he reached his office before trying to run over the facts again.

  He was dimly aware of a threat lurking somewhere. It was contiguous with, but also hidden by his own anger and alarm. Back in his office, Kenyon listed plusses and minuses on a sheet of paper. Then he sat back in the chair and waited for the issues to announce themselves.

  The first thing Hugh Robertson, the Director of his section, would ask him would be if he was being as objective as he could be. No, maybe he'd ask if Kenyon wasn't overly sensitive in the atmosphere of publicity around the Service's operations. As for the objectivity question, Kenyon had to point out that there was too big a gap between what Murray was saying and what he himself was beginning to conclude about Arthur Combs. The Combs that Kenyon had read was still a younger man, rebellious and steely. Evaluation, objective evaluation, Kenyon echoed as he sat back in his chair.

  He unlocked his desk and removed a sheet from the top drawer. The sheet contained a list of names. Seven of the fifteen people whose names he had gleaned from Combs' file in the Registry were dead. Of the remaining eight only two were British. One of those two lived in Spain. None of these people was under seventy. As far as Kenyon knew, none on the list had any connections with security or intelligence organisations. Combs had been fluent in German, of course. Probably bits of Greek and Spanish, definitely French. So? Kenyon almost said aloud.

  Another possibility was local to where he had lived, near Dublin. Unlikely, he whispered aloud. Combs had resisted going there in the first place. Garrulous people, "the world's best grudge-keepers" had been quoted directly from an interview with Combs. Funny, but macabre now.

  Kenyon buzzed Bowers and sent him out for two cheese croissants. Then he stood by the window, not needing the paper or lists to command the issues now. Just before Bowers' return, Kenyon was brooding about the perennial injustice of other people's chickens coming home to roost with him. Injustice indeed: Combs would have known about that. Kenyon swore aloud at the impossible logistics he'd have to outline if he was going to go through with this operation.

  All at once Kenyon realised that if he was already thinking details, it meant that he had made a decision. He had assented to a plan, but he hadn't quite admitted it to himself yet. He'd stick with that decision. This insight provided a moment of relief, but when Bowers knocked, Kenyon was again worrying about an important detail he might have missed. Christ, there had to be someone significant in Combs' life. His family was gone years ago; there had to be someone he'd trust.

  "Sir."

  Bowers pushed the door open. Kenyon turned and glanced at the doctorate in political science who was five months into working for the greater good of the United Kingdom. Bowers' glasses reminded Kenyon of Carl Jung. Sex, anyone? No thanks. Bowers/Jung might reply, I must go for a bracing walk in the Alps.

  "Good. Still hot? Would you phone the Director's secretary, Gillian, and set up a meeting with him. ASAP. Tell her I can go meet him if he's out, all right?" spacebarthing

  Murray taxied to Knightsbridge. The telephone booth next to Mappins was empty. He stepped in and checked for a diartone. Hearing one, he looked at his watch. Two minutes to one. A woman struggling with shopping bags stopped outside the booth and opened her purse for change. Murray stuck his head out the door.

  "The phone's broken, I'm afraid. I'm just trying to get my money back out of the stupid thing."

  The shopper blinked at the well-groomed man leaning out of the door. She shrugged resignedly and took up her bags again. The phone rang a minute early.

  "All right," Murray began. "Five has launched an investigation."

  "I understand," said Ball slowly. Murray heard traffic from some Dublin street.

  "Hold on a minute," Ball muttered. "I have to plug more money in already…"

  Murray listened impatiently as the coins rang into the telephone.

  "I had a meeting with Five's man. He thinks our friend may have done something underhand. Wrote a bloody memoir. Left some documents, or told someone. They'll want you for a debriefing, too," said Murray. "And I expect they'll do a sweep of the house, too," he added.

  "I'm ninety-nine percent sure the place is clean. There was nothing."

  "They'll be thorough," Murray replied. "They're very tender about the border security conference here. Everybody's edgy."

  Ball read the rebuke between Murray's words. Couldn't have come at a worse time… was there no better way to fix it? Ball said nothing.

  "What exactly did he say to you when he called you on Thursday?" asked Murray.

  "He phoned me at the embassy. I met him in a pub that afternoon. He'd been drinking-"

  "But did he say how he'd do it?" Murray interrupted. "What did he say he could do? What would he use?"

  Ball paused before answering. This was his third time trying to reassure Murray.

  "He said he wanted out and that we had better listen to him this time around. I got him calmed down. He didn't say how but that he'd see to it somehow-"

  "Somehow," Murray repeated. "Somehow."

  "Exactly. He thought we had his mail opened and that we knew when he went to the toilet. He had no real plan, nothing. He went off at half-cock, without thinking it out. He said I should 'walk the plank' for it. You too."

  "He didn't know me," Murray said quickly.

  "I know. More bluff. He only met you once. He called you'the ringleader.' How do you like that title?"

  Murray did not care for Ball's grim humour one bit. There was a taunting edge to it: Ball, the action-man, chiding Murray, the desk-man. Murray thought back to the meeting in a seedy Dublin hotel. Combs had already been into his second-or was it third? — Scotch minutes after the hotel bar had opened, looking sullenly from Ball to Murray, hardly bothering to conceal his hostility.

  "But he had no inkling after you met him Thursday? That we wouldn't buy, I mean?"

  "Right." Ball said sharply. "I got him calmed down and I gave him what he wanted. I told him it would take a couple of days to get the passport through, so it'd be Monday at the earliest. But that we'd hurry things up…"

  "Yes," said Murray, distracted yet.

  "… Stroked his hand, cooed his ear about the work h
e had done. I sent him home happy. At least more sober than when he arrived at the pub. I told him we had been about to wrap the whole thing up soon."

  "You're certain he wasn't specific even then?"

  "Absolutely. He didn't say what he would do, or would have done. That's because he didn't have anything prepared," Ball added slowly for emphasis.

  Except his instincts, Murray almost added aloud. Kenyon's reading of the Combs' material… Would Combs have suspected something from the way Ball had behaved at that meeting, that he'd never be let go knowing what he knew? Was Combs really the boozy, truculent character that Ball had been dealing with, or had Kenyon scented something more basic in his make-up?

  "All right," Murray said finally, staying his own wandering. "Expect to be called in about Combs."

  Murray hung up and hailed a taxi. He tried to ignore the garrulous Cockney cabbie. Ball was experienced, dependable. His motivation was at least as high as Murray's own. Mervyn Ball had dealt with Combs for two years, babysitting him, humouring him-his had to be the more accurate assessment. Most of all, Ball had not flinched, even when Murray himself had thought it precipitate to silence the old man.

  The taxi joined a traffic jam near Oxford Circus. The cabbie's eyes sought out Murray in the mirror.

  "Bloody bomb scare, I shouldn't wonder," said the Cockney. "Who's it this time, I wonder? The bloody Arabs or the Irish, eh?"

  Murray ignored the question. Combs' "Somehow": it was very telling, all right. A loose threat, stillborn. He wondered if Ball had felt much pity for the old man. Hardly. Ball had been tough from the start. Perhaps not tough-more like firm, uncompromising-but still able to coax the old man. Did Combs wonder how Ball could cave in so readily to his demand last Thursday, though? Combs might have sobered up and then wondered why, after years of the cold shoulder, he was suddenly being granted what he had been asking for at least thirty years…

  Murray recalled the black-and-white framed snapshot which he kept in his desk. The confident, boyish face and the haircut they had laughed about. It was 1971, of course, and even Murray himself had grown sideburns. "Passing out at Sandhurst" had been the joke when Ian Murray had his arm around his younger brother's neck in a chokehold, laughing into the camera. Ian the doer, Ian the adventurer. A ham, a litany of broken arms and legs through youth, the ebullient extrovert. The same Ian Murray on a greasy footpath in Belfast three years later, dead before he hit the pavement, the dumdum spraying his brains and teeth twenty feet further down the path.

  Did Mervyn Ball have a photo like that, too? One of his own brother, one he looked at before he went to Combs' house that night? Donald Ball had been a Royal Greenjacket, Ian Murray a Para. Ball told him that he had a letter from Donald describing the mountains outside Belfast-"once you're out of bloody Belfast, it's a marvellous country, believe it or not". Three days later, his brother was dismembered by a bomb in a roadside culvert… believe it or not.

  The taxi inched forward.

  "It's the silly season, in'nit then?" said the cabbie.

  Murray took out his wallet and looked at the meter. He handed three pounds to the driver and opened the door himself.

  "Ta, mate. Bloody bombers are probably back safe in bloody Ireland by now, sitting in a pub laughing. The bastards."

  Murray paused before slamming the door.

  "Safe in Ireland?" Murray echoed with a sneer. "No such thing."

  CHAPTER 5

  Minogue had finished a jumble of cauliflower, potatoes and stringy mutton. The vegetables were barely tolerable and he had little relish for the mutton'. For his pains, the waitress could only offer him the choice of jelly or ice cream.

  "I'll go jelly then," he said.

  "Tea or coffee?"

  "Neither thanks. I'm saving myself for Bewley's later on. Don't tell anyone or I'll be in trouble."

  When Minogue saw the cubes of jelly shivering on the bowl under him, he knew that he didn't have the heart for it. Still, he trapped a cube under the edge of the spoon, cut it and tasted it. Wicked. Was jelly the kind of thing that old people living on their own would eat? Like in America with the TV dinners you bought and could just sling into the oven and eat right out of the package? Old people living alone… Maybe Mrs Hartigan had fed Combs right. Minogue felt his thoughts slump. Damn and damn again. There had to be something she'd know to get this moving.

  When Minogue reached the Squad HQ in St John's Road, the smell of Turkish tobacco stopped him in his tracks. Yes, Paris, Minogue remembered, with his wife giggling at his French: the smell of Gauloises, piss and diesel in the early morning streets by Mont-martre.

  Eilis nodded at him. Her air of impatience served to keep groundlings at bay. She had had enough of humans, it seemed, but not enough that she did not entertain a Trinity College professor as her lover. So the rumour went anyway. The ones who raised their eyebrows the most were the policemen who were about the same age as Eilis, married men.

  "It's yourself that's in it, is it?" she breathed. Wisps of her dark red hair had escaped the clasp gathering her hair over the collar of her blouse.

  "And how's our Inspector?" she continued in Irish.

  "Fine and well," Minogue replied in her vernacular. "He says hello to all and sundry here."

  Eilis sat down. She almost smiled at Minogue's pun. On the surface, "fine and well" in her vernacular of Munster Irish meant that the party so described was happily drunk.

  "I have reams of stuff to give you, you'll be thrilled to hear," Eilis muttered around her cigarette. The smoke was irritating her eyes, the more so as she leaned over to unlock a cabinet.

  Minogue took the folder and decamped to his desk and chair. Combs passport number along with a black-and-white snap-one taken in a Woolworth's box, by the cut of it-clipped onto a sheet was on top of the sheaf of papers. Combs had been looking back at the lens as if to challenge it, to make sure it reported a true picture of him. He looked older than seventy-three even then. Froggy, tired eyes on him, loose skin bundled under his chin. Sick-looking? Fleshy-looking anyway. How often did UK citizens have to renew their passport photos?

  The photocopies of the visa pages from his passport showed a stamp from Malaga declaring that Combs had been a turista when he went there two years ago. Could have been over and back to Britain a million times, too; no passport needed. A poorly typed summary-a reluctant Hoey clattering on the keys on late Sunday night-listed names: Mrs Hartigan, James Molloy (barman), Joey Murphy (wit. in Fox's pub), Jackie Burke (do.), Larry O'Toole (do.), Mulvaneys (Barnacullia).

  "Somebody phone the embassy of next-of-kin?"

  "Master Keating did," replied Eilis.

  Minogue returned to his papers. Copies of car insurance, an Irish driver's license and, handwritten below, two account numbers for the Bank of Ireland, College Green. Minogue called the bank and asked for Bill Hogan, another Clare expatriate.

  "You'll phone me then, Bill, will you? Here's my number. I'll follow up with the paperwork later on in the week. What's the story on any safety deposit boxes or use of a big bank safe, will you find out about that?"

  Hogan would. Unasked, Hogan would also offer Minogue twenty quid at four to one against Offaly making it all the way to the hurling final. Minogue asked if Hogan could perhaps effect a loan on his behalf for that amount. Hogan barked a laugh and hung up. Minogue then phoned Keating at Stepaside Garda station.

  "What about your three divine persons?" Minogue inquired.

  Keating couldn't keep a touch of disappointment from his voice.

  "You were right,' sir. They're bad articles, but they're all blather."

  Minogue heard the pages of Keating's notebook turning slowly.

  "… Moved a few hot cars along and delivered the odd shotgun no questions asked. Shag was convicted three years ago for fencing stuff. He did six months… We questioned them separately but they came up clean so far. They're no strangers here. They want to know what we're holding them under."

  "And is there anything ye can lean on th
em with? Anything around the house?"

  "No, sir. A few dirty books and a new set of mechanic's tools that the likes of the Mulvaneys can't afford. And they have an independent alibi, all three of them, up'til five o'clock in the morning. Sort of tears the arse out of things," Keating spoke slowly.

  "Well, they weren't saying the rosary all night. They were playing cards and drinking at a house in the village."

  "All of them?" Minogue interjected.

  "All of them. One of them, let me see… Shag, yes, Shag. He was put out of the game because he was blackguarding with the cards. But he sat in the kitchen, drinking with another fella."

  Keating filled in more details from the interviews. Minogue was half-listening. The other half of him was thinking of the drawings in Combs' house. The whorls in the granite had been rendered in all their stark softness in his drawings: stone gnawed over by centuries of wind sun and rain. How many hands had caressed those stones? These extraordinarily ordinary images in a house that was empty of any trappings of family life, those other artefacts from which Minogue had fashioned bits of his own religion. Trappings, perhaps that was a word for it, all right. Maybe Combs never wanted to be entrapped by a family, and these drawings could only be produced by a man outside the rag-and-bone comforts of a family, those things which had brought Minogue back to life. Combs a transient? For two years? A man who couldn't conceal his feeling for such stones and signs was hardly a transient. It looked like he had found something.

  Minogue gathered himself from his wool-collecting and took leave of Keating, but not before trying to buoy him up.

  "Tell you what. Give it a rest. Shea can tidy up bits there, do you follow me? Get yourself a cup of something, polish up a summary of those three brothers. Get here for the four o'clock powwow here with me. Can you do that?"

  "I think so, sir."

  Bill Hogan phoned as Minogue was replacing the receiver. Hogan liked doing favours which showed his acumen and authority in the bank, Minogue remembered as he listened to Hogan's flamboyant greeting.