The two UDR men were bleeding hard, both crying with pain and terror. Their mouths gaped, dripping red from shredded gums as their teeth lay scattered on the floor. They’d given up the little they knew an hour before, but Caffola kept going. He was kneeling on the floor, pulling out a toenail with his pliers when, suddenly, the foot he was working on kicked out, throwing him off balance. Caffola landed on his back, and the UDR man was on his feet, his bonds falling away. Caffola just lay there, staring up at the screaming soldier, unable to move. Fegan put a hole through the soldier’s head before he took his second step. The other, still fixed to the chair, squealed as his friend’s body hit the floor. Fegan silenced him with a shot to the temple. He looked down at Caffola, still sprawled in the blood and teeth, and told him to clean this fucking mess up.
Now Fegan considered his possibilities. If Caffola’s questioning became physical, Fegan was confident he could handle the big man. But there’d be no escaping. The boys would be after him. He decided to be still.
“I don’t know any foreigners,” he said.
“So you don’t know this cunt, then?” Caffola went to a cupboard door and opened it. A tall thin man was curled up inside, bound hand and foot, gagged. He stared out at them, shaking. Red blotches stained his grey suit.
The two UDR men moved back into the dark corners. Fegan lost them among the shadows, and the pain behind his eyes faded to a murmur.
“No,” he said. “I’ve never seen him before.”
Caffola reached down and pulled the gag away from the man’s mouth. He pointed to Fegan. “Do you know him?”
The man looked to Fegan, then back to Caffola. He shook his head.
“You sure?”
The man lifted his bound hands and began to plead in some Slavic language. Caffola placed a hand on either side of the door frame to brace himself and swung his boot into the cupboard, punctuating his words with the sound of leather on flesh. “Speak . . . fucking . . . English . . . you . . . dirty . . . bastard . . . or . . . I’ll . . . kick . . . your ... face . . . in.”
“Stop!” the man wailed. “Please, sir, stop!”
“Out you come,” Caffola said as he grabbed a handful of blond hair. He heaved and the man came screaming after. “I need the chair, Gerry.”
Fegan stood up and went to the edge of the room.
Caffola hoisted the man up onto the chair and indicated Fegan. “Do you know him?”
The man shook his head.
“He doesn’t know me and I don’t know him,” Fegan said.
Caffola held a hand up to silence his old comrade. “All right, I just wanted to be sure. Now let’s see what he does know.”
The man’s terrified eyes darted between Fegan and Caffola. His breath came in shallow rasps. A bitter, stale smell filled the room.
“Who is he?” Fegan asked.
“This is Petras Adamkus,” Caffola said. “Say hello, Petras.”
Petras looked from one man to the other.
Caffola gave him one hard slap across the cheek. “I told you to say hello.”
“Hello,” Petras said in a small, high voice.
“Better,” Caffola said. “Now, let’s get down to it. Why did you kill Michael McKenna?”
Petras gaped up at him.
Caffola slapped him again, harder. “Why did you kill Michael McKenna?”
Petras held his bound hands up. “No, no. Michael my friend. We make business. Good deal. Good girls. Young girls. No hurt him.”
Caffola drew back his heavy fist and launched it at the Lithuanian’s chin. It connected with a wet smacking sound, and Petras’s head rocked back, tipping the chair. He landed hard on the floor, blood dripping from his already swelling lip.
Caffola smiled at Fegan. “Brings it all back, doesn’t it?”
When he took a pair of pliers from his pocket, Fegan asked, “Can I go?”
“No stomach for it any more?”
“No.”
“All right,” Caffola said. “You say you had nothing to do with it, that’s good enough for me.”
Fegan opened the door to the corridor. A spark flared in his temple, and he looked back over his shoulder. The two UDR men raised their fingers to Caffola’s bald head.
“Another time,” Fegan said.
“Yeah,” Caffola said as he lifted the Lithuanian back onto the chair. “See you again, Gerry.”
Fegan turned his back on them and walked through the corridor and the bar beyond, out onto the street where Patsy Toner waited in his Jaguar.
5
The Minister of State for Northern Ireland, Edward Hargreaves MP, teed off in afternoon sunlight. He shaded his eyes as the ball soared up and away into the sky above the Old Course at St Andrews. It drifted, veering to the left, and began a slow descent. It bounced three times and disappeared into a patch of gorse.
“Bastard,” he said, and handed the club to the caddy without looking at him.
“Bad luck, Minister,” the third man present said as he placed his tee. A gun bulged at the small of Compton’s back as he bent over.
Hargreaves was glad his new Personal Protection Officer was reasonably affable, unlike the sour fellow he’d had before, but did they have to give him someone so good at golf? Compton’s perfect swing sent the ball off to land precisely between two bunkers, an easy chip away from the green.
Today had been rotten so far, and would likely worsen. The phone at Hargreaves’s hotel bedside had woken him at eight, bearing bad news. Hargreaves had found Michael McKenna to be entirely objectionable on the few occasions they’d met, so he felt no grief, but the trouble his killing would stir could derail years of hard work.
The hard work of Hargreaves and the Secretary of State’s predecessors, admittedly, but still.
God help him, he might even have to visit the forsaken place again this month. He’d just returned from a solid week there, and surely that was enough? Had it been up to Hargreaves he would have cut the hellish waste of land adrift years ago. But there were those in government, and in royalty, who felt some misguided sense of duty to the six counties across the sea, so it was his burden to carry.
Now Northern Ireland’s factions had finally agreed to share governance amongst themselves, Hargreaves’s role was largely a matter of passing papers on to the Secretary for signing, so it wasn’t altogether a disaster. Just as long as the natives behaved, that was.
The phone in his pocket vibrated. The call he dreaded. He answered it with a heavy heart.
A woman’s voice said, “The Chief Constable is ready to speak with you now, Minister. It’s a secure line. Go ahead.”
“Good afternoon, Geoff,” Hargreaves said. “What have you got?”
“Not a great deal,” Pilkington said.
Hargreaves didn’t like the Chief Constable, but he respected him. Geoff Pilkington was a hard man who had worked the streets of Manchester before climbing the ranks. He was one of the few Chief Constables who had done any real police work in his career, rather than using a public school and Oxbridge education to grease his way into the position. He took grief from no one, but had a keen political savvy that belied his rough exterior. He knew when to shout, and when to whisper. If Pilkington had aimed for Parliament instead of the senior ranks of the force, Hargreaves was sure he’d have been in the Cabinet by now. He had taken the top job in the Police Service of Northern Ireland as it completed its transition from the Royal Ulster Constabulary, and it had been a testing time. But he had weathered it, achieving the impossible by earning the respect of the whole of Northern Ireland society, albeit begrudgingly from some quarters.
“Who was it?” Hargreaves asked. “Loyalists? Dissidents?”
“Neither, we think. It was done at close range, no sign of a struggle. We’re pretty sure it was someone he knew.”
“His own people?” Hargreaves walked after his ball, Compton and the caddy following.
“Unlikely,” Pilkington said. “There’s been no indication of a split. Even if there was, they wouldn’t want to rock the boat. Not now they’ve got their feet under the table at Stormont.”
“Then who? I have to tell the Secretary something.”
“We know he was doing business with some Lithuanians, bringing illegals up over the border from Dublin. Girls, mostly, for the sex trade.”
“I didn’t think McKenna’s lot were into all that. More the Loyalists’ forte.”
“The official line from the party is no criminal activity at all, but they don’t control what individuals choose to do. Leaves people like McKenna with a little more freedom to operate. If there’s money in it, they’ll do it. And whatever the party says, the money still flows uphill.”
It never ceased to amaze Hargreaves that people would vote for criminals in full knowledge of their nature. He doubted there was a more cynical electorate in the world. The average Northern Irish pleb could read between the lines of a speech better than any professional political analyst, disbelieving every treacherous word. Yet still they voted as predictably, election after election. He wondered why they didn’t just have a sectarian headcount every four years and be done with it.
He’d desperately hoped for a Cabinet spot, anything, in the last reshuffle. As it turned out, he didn’t even get Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, the job no one wanted. No, he was the fucking
assistant
to the job no one wanted. He ground his teeth as he walked.
“So, do you have anything to link them?” Hargreaves asked.
“Not directly. We’ve very little solid information to go on at the minute.”
“What
do
you have?” Hargreaves stopped to allow Compton and the caddy to catch up. He would bring Compton jogging in the morning, get him match fit.
“We’ve got his last movements. He owned a bar on the Springfield Road. His brother’s name’s on the licence, but it was his. He gave a drunk a lift home from there, then the barman received a call from him thirty to forty-five minutes later. He said he’d left the drunk home, then gone to the docks to meet someone on a matter of business. We’re still checking CCTV footage from the route, but what we’ve got so far shows him driving alone. The last camera caught him on York Street, turning under the M3 flyover and into the docks. We reckon whoever did it met him there. Forensics are still going over the car, but I doubt they’ll get much. It was a clean job. Professional.”
Hargreaves felt a small trickle of relief. “So, we don’t think it was political, then? I don’t need to tell you how troublesome it would be otherwise.”
“No, Minister, you don’t. Early indications are a business deal gone sour. We’ve already questioned the drunk, but he didn’t know much, despite who he is.”
The trickle of relief halted, and Hargreaves set off towards his ball again. “What do you mean? Who is he?”
“Gerald Fegan. He’s suspected of as many as twelve murders, two while he was on compassionate leave from prison for his mother’s funeral. He was convicted of the butcher’s shop bombing on the Shankill in 1988. Three died in that, including a mother and her baby. He was a foot soldier, and one of their best, or worst, depending on your point of view. A killer, plain and simple.”
“And he isn’t a suspect?”
“Not at the moment. He’s been quiet as a mouse since he got early release in . . .”
Hargreaves heard the shuffling of paper.
“At the start of 2000. From what I understand, he’d been suffering some psychological problems before his release, and he’s taken to drink in recent times.”
The trickle of relief started again. “I see,” Hargreaves said as he neared the gorse patch that had devoured his ball. “So, it’s not political. Let’s try and keep it that way, shall we?”
“Of course, Minister. The politicians on all sides are gearing up to make the most of it, but that’s only to be expected. Don’t worry, we’ll keep a lid on it.”
“Good man,” Hargreaves said. He hung up and returned the phone to his pocket as he kicked at the gorse. “Now, where’s that bastard ball?”
6
The whetstone glided along the guitar’s neck, skimming the frets. Fegan loved the sensation it sent through his hand, his wrist, on into his forearm and up to his shoulder: the feeling of oiled stone sliding on metal. As the boat-shaped block swept from one end of the fingerboard to the other, it ground away years of wear. Too much pressure would destroy the frets. Not enough would leave the finish uneven, and the guitar unplayable. It was a question of balance and patience.
Ronnie Lennox had taught him that.
Fegan had spent hours in the Maze Prison’s workshop, watching the old man at his craft. Ronnie hated being penned up with the rest of the Loyalists, so the guards let him pass the time in his own corner of the woodwork room. The Republican prisoners tolerated his presence when they had the use of the place, thinking him harmless, and even let him teach them a thing or two. Fegan always paid close attention. Ronnie’s delicate hands bore a myriad of scars, decades of cuts and abrasions earned at the shipyard. He’d been a ship’s carpenter before he did the awful thing that sent him to prison. Like so many men who worked there, he had been left with the wheezy rattle of asbestosis in his chest.
