Unholy Ground imm-2

by John Brady

  "To which you'll say, or I'll say for you, 'Your Honour, it was our honest belief that only by watching Mr Moore could we establish the veracity of the allegations in this document,' " Minogue said.

  Corrigan shook his head.

  "And me toasted on the stand if and when it comes up that I authorized a tracker on Moore's car without consulting a soul?"

  "Initiative, Pat. What you're paid for. Would you have preferred to go begging for a warrant to toss his room in the hotel? As if he would keep the stuff there? We have to let him run with it."

  "I can tell you this," Corrigan waved a finger in the air. "The minute he strays near the outside range of the tracker, I'll see red. No messing then, boyo. I'll pull the plug."

  "What's the exact range of the thing?"

  "It lists five kilometers. About three miles. Less in the city. What if he has a way of detecting it stuck to his car?"

  Minogue shrugged.

  "I still say it's a bit thin," Corrigan said, stretching.

  "Tell them I'm Rasputin. That's how I conned you into squandering manpower and gadgetry from the Special Branch. Patience, Pat. There's time enough to tell them. Costello was murdered. Combs was murdered. This is a murder investigation-"

  "Get up the yard," Corrigan broke in. "Costello was bumped in the North so far as we're concerned. Even if he was abducted from here. Let the RUC worry about that. Not that they are, I can tell you."

  "Combs was murdered. Ball was murdered. Moore is nothing to us, as himself. He could just throw up his hands if we pounced now and say he hasn't a notion what's going on. It's what he does now that he has these photos. We don't need half the Gardai and the Branch to keep aft eye on him," Minogue said.

  "You don't think he'd just destroy the papers and be done with it?" Corrigan asked.

  "No, I doubt it. He's in no danger. Even if he's a bit suspicious, he'll be keen to bring back the spoils to whoever sent him here. His bosses would want to see it."

  "Who gave you the idea of having the postman deliver this to Combs' house?"

  "I got up early this morning and I decided to play this as if those papers were true. Once I had got that settled in me mind, it was easy enough to figure out some trick."

  "Trick, is it? It's not a game we're playing. Unless it's me in playing a game with my job. Or at least my credibility as a senior Garda officer," said Corrigan.

  "How true for you, now," Minogue said in a conciliatory whisper.

  "A bad choice of words."

  "Anyway. So you had Eilis phone your man and tell him there was stuff belonging to Combs coming in the post?"

  "And to say that, sorry, we couldn't spare the manpower to go out and collect it for him. He fairly leaped at the chance to go out there on his own. That's a point in our favour."

  "And there's always my own set of prints," Minogue reminded him. Corrigan yawned and took the photocopied pages from the seat.

  "So this is what the poor divil was done in for," Corrigan murmured.

  "It's not just the business about Costello. That's bad enough. But there's everything to suggest that it was Ball who had Combs killed. On orders, maybe, from his own boss. There's no name on Ball's boss, so he might still be attached to the embassy. All it says here about him is that he is a little bourgeois who likes to dress natty."

  Corrigan squirmed in his seat before lapsing into silence. Minogue was as happy not to hear any more of Corrigan's doubts. If Combs was telling the truth, he didn't need Pat Corrigan to remind him that they had a bomb in their laps. Minogue had spent nearly forty minutes persuading Corrigan to have two Special Branch detectives land themselves in a ditch within sight of Combs' house, armed with telephoto lenses and a video camera. They had snapped Moore going into the house at a quarter to eleven, but he had been out of sight somewhere in the house ever since. The two Branch radio-cars had been waiting an hour and a half to take up pursuit of Moore's Mini.

  "It'll take him time to read the stuff, Pat," Minogue said, more in answer to his own interior conversation than to Corrigan. "They're photos of handwritten notes, written under his real name, William Grimes, don't forget."

  Corrigan looked up from the prints, perplexed.

  "He started out planning to get his own story out about what happened forty odd years ago?"

  "At the beginning, yes. He probably put it as an ultimatum to Ball, but Ball suspected the worst. That he'd shop him for setting up Costello. And maybe even taking part in the killing."

  Dunne elbowed out the door of the pub. He had no coffees with him. He checked in with the photo-surveillance team. Moore was still in the house.

  "Damn it to hell," said Corrigan from under a contorted forehead. "If this stuff is at all true, this Combs man should have had the hero treatment. The Russians were part of the bloody Allies, no matter what anyone says. Give the man a medal and a dinner at Buck Palace, thanks very much, that was great work you did for us, more champagne," Corrigan argued. "*'

  Minogue liked the indignant tone. He was pleased that Corrigan had been caught up in the drama, an advocate.

  "There's the rub, Pat," Minogue sighed. "But later on you find poor Combs wondering if it was more than just the fact that he shared information with the Soviets."

  He searched through the prints and handed one to Corrigan.

  "See there. There he is speculating that it was being gay did him in again as well. That they'd never trust him again because of it. Bitter. 'The sin of being a sodomite outweighed the virtue of saving what remains of civilization from people like Hilter.'"

  Corrigan looked up from the photo.

  "Did you memorise that?" whispered Corrigan.

  "No, it just stuck in me mind. There it is," Minogue's finger found the line.

  "God, but he was a bitter man to be talking like that."

  "It's around this part, too, I think… where he says that even if he had agreed to work for the Americans or the British in East Germany, they would have sold him out if the right opportunity had arisen. Like with Vogel, that poor divil he mentions, sold out to get something else going."

  "So they gave Combs a new name, a few shillings and told him to get lost and stay lost."

  Minogue nodded.

  "Because he wouldn't do the dirty on the Russians. He talks about how the Russians lost over twenty million of their people in the war. Do you know, but I think he must have had great feeling for people he probably never even met in real life."

  "What do you mean?"

  "Maybe he was a bit romantic about a Russian soul. I don't know. That they had been so badly done by with the so-called civilised races. Those Teutonic warrior-lunatics. Siding with victims, I wonder, this old man. That might have turned his head a bit here, too, I was thinking…" Minogue's thoughts broke away from his words. Words tumbled from his mind like dice from a hand: victim, soul, Ireland, empire, Reich, Russia.

  "What are you saying?"

  "It's just an impression. The remarks that Mrs Hartigan remembers. The drawings of the old stones he did, his-"

  "Do you think he became a convert, is it?" said Corrigan with a skeptical frown.

  Minogue suddenly remembered Mrs Hartigan's remark about the song on the radio-the Red Army Choir singing "It's a Long Way to Tipperary"-how Combs, or Grimes, had been amused by it.

  Minogue shrugged. Corrigan's eyes flicked up to Minogue. Minogue felt leaden and cramped in the seat.

  "So you guessed that the Brits could say all this stuff was rubbish?" said Corrigan.

  Minogue now knew that it was more than the hangover which was sapping his energy.

  "'Course they could."

  Corrigan pulled at an eyebrow. Minogue wondered if he'd ask him to go through the story again. The car swayed slightly as Dunne shifted his weight on the bonnet. The sun was out now. He heard Corrigan sucking in air through whistle lips. Corrigan gathered the pages and clapped them on their edges against his knee. Seagulls screeched overhead, heading inland. There'll be rain before the day is out, Mi
nogue thought vacantly.

  "This waiting," Corrigan groaned. "Madness. He might be flushing those negatives down the jacks."

  The levity was too strained for Minogue. He tried to divert Corrigan.

  "So your two followed Moore to a pub last night, you said?"

  "And he made a phone call there. He had a pint of beer and went back to the hotel. They don't know if the call was long-distance or not, but Morrissey-he was one of the tails-says there's more to Moore than meets the eye. Thinks that Moore knew he was under surveillance. Moore made a few checks on his way to the pub. 'Trained,' says Morrissey,'stinks of it.'"

  "Eilis phoned him at half nine with the yarn."

  "Volunteered to go and get it himself, did he?"

  "Cool customer. He said he'd look after it if he was out at the house today, thanks very much," replied Minogue.

  " If. I like that. He was on the road at a quarter to ten, the bugger, so he was," Corrigan remarked acidly.

  "So that was round one to convince you," Minogue said, unwilling to let the chance of a dig escape him now.

  "Sure amn't I in, Matt? They'll not look good trying to say it's all rubbish if Moore treats it like the crown jewels, now that he has it. Only I wish he'd get a bloody move-on. I don't like this slow-motion stuff."

  "Time and patience," Minogue said. "Patience and time. This is what Moore came to find. And then we can get onto the big business, won't we?"

  Corrigan raised an interrogative eyebrow at Minogue. The grey eyes fixed Minogue with a stare.

  "Who Moore's boss is, who Ball's boss is at the embassy…"

  Corrigan rolled his eyes and turned to stare out the window.

  Moore hesitated by the phone again. He had found tape and was ready to reseal the envelope. The postmark was smudged. He could not tell whether the handwritten address in block letters was from Combs' hand. He had put his suspicions on hold while he scrutinised the photos. Although the tally of negatives matched the number of photographs, he could not match each negative to the prints until he had a means of magnifying them.

  Moore noticed the envelope shaking in his hand. Ball had played for keeps, it seemed. But he had underestimated Arthur Combs by a long shot. When Combs thought it was kill or be killed, he had set the INLA on Ball. And Kenyon, for all his dusty manner, had had the right instincts, too: Combs didn't lack for determination when push came to shove, booze or no booze.

  What would Kenyon do when they found out that Ball had been carrying on a private war, to the extent of ripping Costello's throat out? Moore tried to stay the trembling. He realised that he didn't know what to do.

  There had been no other letters delivered. He looked about the hallway. The house unnerved him with the shambles and the sense that it would soon be closed, like a tomb. It smelled like stale bread, moulding, and Moore felt a sense of something he could not put one word on, despair maybe, loss, abandon. The contractor had said that he couldn't sent the lorry with the shutters and the tradesmen to nail the windows until this afternoon at the earliest. A tap dripped somewhere. Even the birdsong from the hedges didn't lift the gloom. Moore almost wished that that garrulous detective, Murtagh, was with him again today.

  He looked down at the envelope again. The manila was a garish cofbur now, almost luminescent. It felt oddly heavier, too. He grasped it tighter between his fingers as if to control the information it contained. Seven photographs with four pages on each photo. The negatives had been cut singly, stacked wrapped in plastic. Each page on each photograph was almost completely legible without magnification.

  Moore thought of Kenyon's description of Combs and what he had done forty years ago. But had Kenyon wilfully kept him in ignorance about what Combs had been up to here in Ireland? Following a strict need-to-know, using one Edward Moore as a pick-up man?

  Damn, Moore's thoughts fled: to be used like this. But did Kenyon know about Ball's sorties? Costello? But the irony of that, Combs' protest that it was not because he had much sympathy for Costello or his likes. At least Kenyon had read Combs pretty accurately. So what was Moore doing in the house with this, safe in his grasp? Safe? It was like someone had handed it to him.

  Moore found matches in a kitchen drawer. He brought the papers to the sink and took a match out. He looked out the window at the hedges and fields beyond. He did not strike the match but stepped over the chalked outline on the floor and went upstairs. He kept back from each window as he surveyed the fields and the lane leading up to the house. Nothing. His car alone looked out of place.

  He took the photographs and negatives downstairs, put them back in the envelope and sealed it. He glanced at the telephone but dismissed the idea. His heart started to beat stronger when he paused in front of the hall door. Again he thought about the matches in the kitchen. He imagined the charred photos peeling away from one another as they burned, the negatives melting. He turned abruptly on his heel and opened the door.

  Outside, Moore pulled the door closed behind him and walked down the lane. He heard no sounds save the sighing of trees caught with the first breeze of the day. The air smelled of honeysuckle. Moore started the engine and drove toward the city.

  Corrigan called the second car immediately.

  "— Did you copy, Chestnut Two? Our man is out of the house and looks to be headed into the city. What's your signal strength on it? Over."

  "— Well within range. Over."

  Corrigan turned wary eyes on Minogue. Then he tapped on the back of Dunne's seat.

  "Wait'til both of them are by us," he said. "They have the know-how as regards staying with Moore."

  Dunne nodded vigorously.

  "— Coming onto the Dundrum Road, Control. Over," a broad Kerry accent intoned from the radio-speaker.

  "— Copy, Chestnut One. Signal still good?"

  "— Clear as a bell. Over."

  "— Chestnut Two?" Corrigan said.

  Minogue eased back in his seat and looked up at Two Rock Mountain while the roadside hedges skimmed by. They drew into Stepaside and slowed for the bends which marked the centre of the Village.

  "— In sight, four cars ahead. Over," said the Kerry accent.

  Moore seemed to be taking the same route back into the city. Corrigan's car stayed ahead until Dundrum. Corrigan told Dunne to pull over into a petrol station. The three policemen watched Moore's yellow Mini pass and, five cars back, the first of the pursuit cars, a blue Nissan.

  "The hotel, five to four on," Corrigan murmured. "Just the way he went out. Like a yo-yo."

  Dunne leaned an elbow on the door, waiting for a direction. The three policemen watched the second pursuit car go by, less than a minute behind the first.

  "Away, so," Corrigan said.

  "What's with the bloody traffic this heavy now?" Dunne muttered as he worked through the gears.

  Moore had not noticed the blue car until after he had gone through a half-dozen bends. The second time he spotted it, he felt his stomach tighten. He heard his breath whistle in his nostrils. The cars snaking and turning behind him always had the blue Nissan at least three cars back. Coincidence? He had caught a glimpse of the silhouettes of two men. The Nissan let in cars twice to fill any changing tally between itself and his Mini. He recognised the villages which he had passed on the way out. The roads were too narrow for the traffic at any time of the day. Cars and lorries had overrun the streets and clogged them. These suburbs, with their once-separate villages now fused into a monotonous alley for motoring commuters, were little different from the tawdry outer suburbs of London. Moore began to look for the junction he'd need if he had to make a move, a crossroads with heavy traffic and traffic-lights.

  He found what he required just beyond a sprawl which bore the sign "Dundrum Shopping Centre." The phone-box was on the far side of the crossroads. Moore did not signal until the last minute. As he waited for a gap in the oncoming traffic, he saw the Nissan drift by, carried along on the inside lane of city-bound traffic. When he turned the wheel at last, he was suddenly awa
re that his jaws were clenched tight.

  He parked, blocking two cars which had themselves taken over the footpath next to the phone. Inside the phone-box, Moore felt the tug of doubt drawing at his stomach again. Minogue: that odd mixture of irony and indulgence in his manner.

  "— He's stopping," came the Kerry accent on the radio.

  "Stopped. Crossroads with Taney Road. Just beyond the Shopping Centre. Oh-oh…"

  "— What's up there?" Corrigan said.

  The three heard the roar of a bus passing close to the detectives at the other end.

  "— We're through the… we had to go through with the lights… Pulling in on the city side. Over."

  "— All right, all right. One. Give him lots of room. Chestnut Two, are you copying this?" Corrigan said.

  "— We are. In sight of the crossroads now. We have visual with Chestnut One."

  Corrigan frowned. The first car was badly placed if Moore decided to double back, but the second should be able to take over easily. Corrigan's own car was within a mile of the junction, he guessed. He told Dunne to hurry it up. Minogue watched Corrigan's pulse tick in his neck as he waited for the transmission to resume.

  "— May be checking for a tail. Over."

  The words had rushed out before the abrupt click of the transmission out. Corrigan waited, his thumb wavering over the button. The two in the car might have to go by Moore.

  "— Still in the car. Over."

  Still Corrigan said nothing. Dunne had edged himself sideways in his seat. He was looking from Corrigan to Minogue.

  "— He's out of the car. Heading for a telephone-box. I'm getting out, hold on-"

  "— Making a call, by the looks of things…"

  The Kerry accent sounded winded. Minogue guessed he had run through the traffic to keep Moore in sight.

  Corrigan nodded to Dunne.

  "Move it, Dunner. Quick, man. What's the go-slow here?" spacebarthing

  Moore placed two ten-penny pieces on the chute and dialled. The insistent beeping told him that he had guessed right, a non-existent telephone number. He began talking into the receiver and nodded his head several times for effect.