Vagabond (55 page)

He shook his head, declined a top-up from her flask, grimaced and left. She would have bet he’d be back later and that the Spartan single bed would be in use adjacent to his office that night. She had been there at the start and would be there at the end. There were always two bottles of a cheap French bubbly in her floor fridge, likely to be long past a drinkable date, but they lived in hope. An agent doing routine deals with Irish dissidents had been propositioned to broker a weapons deal. He had thrown up a name and bells had rung. The formidable persuasive powers of Matthew Bentinick – God knew he had reason to hate – had fashioned the mission with the care of a sculptor working with clay, and had dragged a man from obscurity. It would not only be George who took early retirement if it ended in disaster: Matthew Bentinick would follow him out through the door, and so would she. A life without Thames House, for Jocelyn, was not worth contemplating. They were all in Vagabond’s hands.

Young Gaby Davies might go in an avalanche of recrimination, if there was blood on the ground. She didn’t even know the target at issue. Jocelyn knew, and her future would rise or plummet on that knowledge. She swigged from the flask and spluttered. Many remained in blissful ignorance.

A meeting was in progress, one of those at which the following month’s diary was explored. The operations area at Palace Barracks’ Five compound seemed deserted. He’d been with a detective from the police service. The old stager, his boss, was in his corner, screen on, low light, nibbling a sandwich. It was the end of a bizarre week. It had started with him escorting a stranger on an expedition to a hedgerow and an exercise in nostalgia for past methods, and seemed to be ending in a confusion that he hesitated to understand. He did not particularly care to. He said, ‘I just heard—’

A soft voice: ‘What?’

‘About the boys who died in the explosion on the mountain.’

‘The “own goal”. You heard what?’

‘A cop told me – from Serious Crime. He has a brother working from Dungannon. He told me that the command wire was cut.’

‘Really?’

‘When the kids tried to fire it, the device was certain to malfunction.’

‘Nothing certain in this world.’

‘The threat to the target never existed.’

‘I’m wrong. The only certainties are death and taxes.’

‘May I correct you, boss?’

‘Feel free, Sebastian.’

‘Advance knowledge of a command cable laid, then cut. The only certainties are death, taxation
and
a tout on the mountain.’

‘Nothing is as it seems – be dull if it was.’

Sebastian could have added more, but did not. He left the older man to finish his sandwich and went to his own desk. Life returned to the operations area as his colleagues spilled in from their briefing. He could have said he’d had word of the absence from the community of Malachy Riordan, kingpin of the high ground, whom he had seen last Monday from a ditch. Perhaps it was known at a different level from his own. He muttered, ‘They also serve who only stand and wait.’ He assumed that, abroad, an arrest operation was in preparation, evidence gathered and a smoking gun for provenance. The man who had been in the ditch with him would be at the heart of it. He would be outside the loop and the broadsheet crossword would claim his attention. He was not new to the Province and the Palace complex yet had accepted that he knew little. Soon after the transfer of all Five personnel to the purpose-built fortress in the barracks, a wag had typed the truism: ‘Anyone who believes they know the answer to Northern Ireland’s problems is ill-informed.’ Another had typed: ‘Every time we find the answer to NI’s problems, they change the question.’ They’d both been on the wall for twenty-four hours, then were deemed ‘inappropriate’ and had been removed. He knew so little of the way the bloody place ticked. A secretary of state had demanded after a first visit: ‘For God’s sake get me a large Scotch. What a bloody awful country.’ Maybe, but he knew too little to judge, except that death, the Revenue and touts were abroad on the mountain.

She was coming from Dungannon and had the boy with her. Bridie Riordan would not have wished to take Oisin to the doctor’s surgery but had no option. It was hard at the best of times to find someone she trusted, or liked, who would take her child for an afternoon or early evening. A litany of excuses, but most involved the hackneyed ‘My Dermot/Sean/Fergus has the flu, and I’d not be wanting it given to your Oisin. Another time.’

Headlights from an oncoming car picked them up. Attracta Donnelly was the widow of a proud patriot of the mountain, now resting in the village’s Republican plot. Siobhan Nugent was the widow of a tout who had been rightly executed for the betrayal of the community’s finest fighter. He was in the same cemetery as Jon Jo Donnelly, but Mossie Nugent’s grave was against a wall. Bridie Riordan saw the two women walking from the shop. She knew where they lived. They were walking towards the Nugent house, and the arm of Attracta Donnelly was in the elbow of Siobhan Nugent. She drove past them. They were in conversation, like old friends. She swerved and the boy squealed. She told him to shut up and he started to cry. She slapped his leg and braked.

Brennie Murphy’s hand was shielding his eyes from her lights. He knew her car well, and came forward. How was she doing?

She was fine, but no thanks to the Donnelly and Nugent women, close and confiding. She felt a great weariness. Was Brennie going to the funeral in the morning?

‘Have to be there, but not prominent.’

She would go too.

‘I can’t not be there, but there’s hostility towards us – directed at Malachy. God knows they were grown boys and not coerced. Are you asking me whether this is over, missus? Not while there’s blood in our veins and breath in our lungs. We won’t bend the knee. We’re not for compromising our principles. Not Malachy, not you, missus, and not me. We go on.’

Could there be touts again on the mountain? Had touts killed the boys?

‘If there are, I’ll find them. If there are, they’ll wish they’d never been born. I think not. Safe back to your home, and I think he’ll be back with us by another evening.’

She wound up her window and drove home.

Dusty had parked on the main road and allowed the group, with their guide, to go past an old farmhouse, where smoke billowed from a chimney, to what had been a charnel house. He enjoyed a cigarette, and a wide grin spread across his face, accentuating the gap between his front teeth. He laughed. He had his phone out and read the text for the fourth or fifth time. He did a little jig. He was in his fifty-ninth year and thought he might have achieved a bit of matchmaking. He started to tap in the reply. His fingers were big and could be clumsy on the small keys. It took him as long to compose the message as it did to smoke the cigarette. He read back his message:
Dear Miss Hanne, With respect, not before time, and I promise I will give Danny Curnow a good kicking to make sure he gets to H’fleur to thank you in person for your kind gift. Sincerely, Dusty Miller.

He’d miss him. He’d miss the taciturn quiet, the far-away look, the silences when his mood darkened. He deserved some happiness, did Desperate. They wouldn’t stay, of course not. Too much baggage on the Atlantic coast of Normandy for them. Maybe they’d go to those islands way up off Norway in the Arctic Circle. She’d fill canvases for idiots to buy and he could do odd jobs, lose the chill in his body and the memories. Fuck it all: no one now bothered to raise a glass to what they had done – sort of written out of history, weren’t they? He’d stay, but he’d miss him.

Dusty sent it. Might be the last trip he did, now that the big anniversary was past and the folks were getting older. The world might move on – might.

The river was almost the last stop in the tour. After the slaughter at Villers-Bocage, the tide seemed irreversible and the issue was the closing of the Gap. Falaise was a historic town with good churches, a fine medieval castle and a statue of William the Conqueror in front of the
mairie.
The Gap had been closed, which ensured a significant victory for Montgomery. It was a decent way to round off the trip
.

The guide would have talked about tensions between British and American commanders, the Americans saying their allies went too slowly and without commitment, the British sneering about PYBs – Pushy Yankee Bitches. A visitor might have asked, ‘But weren’t they all allies?’

One or two would have raised the vexed issue of collaboration, and the impromptu firing squads greeting those who chose the wrong horse to put a shirt on, or plain women having their heads shaved. The guide would have responded quietly that we as a people were indeed fortunate to escape occupation and the temptation to find love, or food, wherever it came from. They would have been through the village of St Lambert-sur-Dives and stood where Major David Currie, of the South Alberta Regiment, blocked the road, pushed aside the fleeing German remnants and won the Victoria Cross. Such a pleasant place and so desirable for a summer holiday cottage.

They would have gone on along what the guide called the ‘Corridor of Death’. They were by a river. The guide sat on one side of the slow-flowing shallow water, where cattle came in the evening to drink, and they would have been opposite him on a farm track. He would have talked of the greatest German defeat since Stalingrad. Little of it made sense to the visitors, and they wondered now why they were there. Memories of the cemeteries were consigned to their cameras, and perhaps they had begun to talk of dinner – their final meal together.

The guide would have attempted to interest them in the statistics of the closing of the Gap, twenty thousand prisoners taken and many thousands killed and wounded in the incessant air attacks at the choke point before the 1st Polish Armoured snapped it shut. It had been a killing zone.

On the way back towards the hotel in Caen the minibus would have stopped beside a Tiger tank, freshly painted, on a concrete base. The visitors would have piled out and had their photographs taken by the gun barrel. It was the same model as Wittman used at Villers-Bocage, and the fittest would have scrambled up beside the turret and sat astride the 88mm gun. Time for glad rags and a last supper.

Matthew Bentinick stood at Jocelyn’s door. He chuckled.

‘All the players are moving into place. You know any of the old Afghan sayings? I don’t suppose you do. Try this one. “A pashtun can wait his entire life for his revenge, then curse himself for his impatience.” Good, isn’t it? Apposite. It’ll come for him out of a clear blue sky – or, rather, come from the moon’s beams. All up to speed?’

She said that the last reports on the link had put them at the edge of the base, about to enter old territory. She told him what had been readied in anticipation of a conclusion, and where, and that unequivocal directions should soon reach Gabrielle Davies.

‘It’s as clear as mother’s ruin. She can’t dispute it. We just have to wait and hope. Wait, hope and trust that the unexpected doesn’t shove its oar in. It never applied to me, but my mother used to say that men in Maternity were a nuisance and best in the pub, out of sight and mind. You might try it.’

A maid wanted to replace the towels. There was a smell. A master key was used. The body was found. The police were called.

Karol Pilar said, ‘We’re about to enter the perimeter line of the camp. Go back three decades. There were continuous fences with tumbler wires for alarms and razor wire at the top. It made a continuous encirclement of the whole complex. It would have been patrolled by armed troops and dogs. And the area close to it, where we are now, was a closed zone. Local people could be arrested and shot for entering it. It was the central command headquarters for the Soviet forces: they numbered fifty-five thousand. It was a place of huge significance in the Cold War and would have been a prized intelligence target to your agencies, the Americans or the Germans. The principal operations room is deep underground, with reinforced concrete roofing and walls. From there the start or end of the Third World War would have been directed. There were squadrons of tanks here, artillery experts and the Soviet Union’s finest attack aircraft. Tactical nukes were stored here. The equipment was first class and for European battle conditions it was at least as good as that of the Americans, maybe better. It came at a price. The civilian population, at home in the Motherland, was left in penury while resources went to the military. There was a joke, a Russian one. ‘‘In 2020 we’re going to put a man on the moon. In 2050 we’ll put a man on Mars. In 2100, we’ll provide boots for everyone.’’ The cost buckled the regime. They went home, took what they could carry and left the rest to be looted by my people. Inside and on the walls of a building, there’s a slogan, ‘‘The Soviet Union for ever, and it will never be Different.’’ I don’t laugh. My mother liked poetry, and in particular that of the British nineteenth century. She used to read to me, and I remember everything.