by Iain Cameron
He didn’t need to go away for long. Sure, finding the guns would be big news in a small place like Westport. It would have the local cops drinking free beer for weeks, and be the only talk at the hairdressers and butcher for just as long. After a few days, a scandal about some members of Fine Gael, or the drinking exploits of an Irish rugby team tour abroad would take its place and the arms find would become another distant memory.
However, the Irish were better at remembering people than incidents, and might not forget about him so readily. He needed a hideaway to keep him undercover for at least a couple of months. He considered himself a man of foresight and had prepared a place for this very eventuality.
Chapter 20
Matt carried his dinner, tandoori chicken and rice – a Tesco Authentic Oriental Meal for One, into the lounge and placed it on the table beside the window overlooking Hamilton Road. Next to the plate, an unopened file bearing the name Patrick Doherty.
Gill wasn’t best pleased when he found out that the guy they’d lost overboard from the fishing boat in Westport, was the leader of the IRM, a guy they’d caught with his paws on a cache of weapons and no doubt with a gun or two to his name. It transpired that he was not only the group’s top man, he was also its major financial backer. Such information would have been useful to have at the time, because they would have put him in cuffs straight away and placed him under a stricter guard, not handing him to a couple of rookie constables, both of whom required hospital treatment. Matt would look at the file later. He was hungry.
Halfway through the meal, his hunger partially sated, Matt couldn’t resist and flicked open the file. Doherty grew up in the Falls Road area of Belfast and from the age of thirteen, associated himself with known terrorists. His parents, worried about their son’s activities, moved away to the relative safety of Enniskillen.
With money inherited from Doherty’s deceased grandfather, who had owned a pub and grocery store in the village of Doolin, County Clare, Doherty’s father bought a garage. A month after young Doherty’s twentieth birthday, his father collapsed and died of a heart attack. Young Doherty took over the business and, under the guidance of his strong-willed and business-savvy mother, they expanded one garage into twelve across the island of Ireland. The garages sold petrol and diesel, undertook servicing, MOT testing, and each had a mini-market attached. Three years later, they were awarded the franchise for a major Italian car manufacturer.
On the face of it, Doherty was a successful and respected businessman, but in reality, he had returned to the streets of Belfast to indulge in terrorist activities as often as he could. They had no evidence to suggest he was supplying funds to the IRA, but Matt believed there would be no way he could avoid it.
Not content at being one of the unsung back-room boys, his expertise in engineering, from fixing cars and bikes, was soon put to good use in repairing damaged weapons. He became such an expert in many types of armaments, he was instrumental in sourcing and supplying weapons to the IRA for many years.
In 1985, he was finally captured by the security forces, the passenger in a lorry carrying spare parts for his garage. In boxes marked ‘Drive Shafts’ they found fifty Armalite rifles, an earlier version of the M4 assault rifles discovered at Leicester and Westport. Doherty had been sentenced to fifteen years imprisonment.
In 1998, the Good Friday Agreement was signed, signalling the end to the Troubles in Northern Ireland. The Agreement set up a Northern Ireland Assembly at Stormont, convicted terrorists were released, and military border posts between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland were dismantled. Ironically, for a man now hell-bent on destroying the Good Friday Agreement, his current freedom to go out and import weapons was a product of it.
The file Matt was reading was light on the latter stages of Doherty’s career, perhaps suggesting he’d returned to the garage business, no longer engaged in terrorism. Spooling forward to the present day, sixty-one-year-old Doherty reappeared on the security services radar, trying to set up a new group to resist the Good Friday Agreement; the Irish Resistance Movement.
At first, they’d believed them to be merely a political pressure group, sending letters to MPs, the occasional rant on social media, and talks organised in village halls. The arrival of arms at Leicester and Westport changed this and added a new piece to the Doherty puzzle. The IRM, on paper at least, looked inconsequential, both from the leaflets they printed and reports produced by the Irish police, but behind the façade it was being led by a skilled terrorist still burning with a fire undimmed by age.
Matt picked up the report issued by Westport Garda which dealt with the search for the missing fugitive. According to it, they had swept the coastline a half-a-mile on either side of the dock, and could find no trace of the missing man. Details had been passed to the coastguard and local fishermen, the assumption being they should be on the look-out for a body.
Matt threw the report down; it didn’t require a second reading. The fishing boat had arrived in Westport on a still night in the middle of summer and, while the sea would not be enticing, even to a wild swimmer, it would have been a strong swimmer’s best chance of escape. Mitigating against his chances of survival was Doherty’s age. At sixty-one, most men would be thinking of retirement rather than starting a new terrorist group, and most of them would have been in bed when the fishing boat arrived at the dock.
At Westport, Matt hadn’t had an opportunity to assess Doherty in any detail, as he’d only seen him for a minute or so in poor lighting conditions. What he had seen was a lean man with muscles on his arms and brightness in his eyes. At first glance, he looked to be an older geezer with a light appetite, or perhaps a keen fitness fanatic. If in the first category, he wouldn’t survive long in the water and Matt doubted he could swim any distance. In which case, they were now looking for a body. If in the second category, he could have survived longer in the water, and if also a strong swimmer, it wasn’t beyond the bounds of possibility that he’d made it to land and escaped.
Matt finished the last vestiges of his meal. He put his fork down and stared into the dark shadows of Hamilton Road, cradling a bottle of beer. It was near the end of July and, despite the late hour, the night wasn’t dark and the street wasn’t quiet. People were walking to and from the pubs and clubs on Ealing Broadway, and others were sitting on the steps outside their houses and flats, smoking, drinking, talking.
Matt tried to put himself in Patrick Doherty’s shoes. He’d jumped overboard from the fishing vessel and swam where? Towards the town of Westport, or the other way in the direction of its beaches? If Doherty knew the area reasonably well and wasn’t swimming blindly, Matt reckoned he would choose the beaches.
Why? Because when he got there, the place would be deserted with less chance of any late-night walkers or revellers who might spot a fully-clothed man emerging from the water. Next, he needed a change of clothes or at least a source of heat, without which he would die of hypothermia. With all the pubs and restaurants closed, there was no opportunity to disappear inside the toilets and sit under the hot air drier for twenty minutes.
It was possible he’d established a bolt-hole nearby, a place to store the guns, where the terrorists could break up the consignment into smaller packages to enable them to be transported less conspicuously. What seemed unlikely was this bolt-hole being within walking distance of the cold and wet man. No, it would be out of town, on an industrial estate, or a town a few miles distant. Not far, as two non-descript vans travelling in tandem at two or three in the morning might pique the interest of a bored squad car crew parked in a country lay-by.
Without a sanctuary close by, Doherty needed to break into a shed or a house. Dried off and possibly wearing ill-fitting clothes, he had two choices: steal a car, or call one of his mates in Belfast and ask them to come and pick him up. Either way, he could be back in his old stomping ground of the Ardoyne in only a few hours. However, he would know pictures of his ugly mug would appear in every newspaper the follow
ing morning, and Belfast patrol officers would be under instructions to be on the look-out.
Doherty would know the whole armaments purchase activity was risky. Aside from leaks within his own organisation, he was dealing with an unknown quantity: a rag-bag army of Syrian insurgents. For all he knew, the rebels could’ve been negotiating with his Irish colleagues one day, and the next asking the CIA to investigate missing shipments. With odds like that, Doherty needed a place to run if the whole thing went belly-up.
Matt believed Doherty would have equipped a house, not a flat with neighbours, for this very eventuality. He would be heading there now to keep out of sight for a few weeks, months or more, while directing operations back in Belfast from a mobile. An alternative scenario might see him holing-up at the house of a friend or relative. Weighing the options, Matt favoured the first; all the information on Doherty pointed to a single-minded man who wanted things done his way.
If he was right, and Doherty had survived the night-time swim, Matt had an idea on how to find him. He was about to fire off an email to the research department, when his phone rang.
‘Hi Matt.’
‘Oh, hi Rosie,’ Matt said as he stretched. ‘How’re you doing?’
‘I’m starting to calm down after being subjected to Gill’s rant this afternoon. A cool bottle of Sauvignon Blanc always helps. How the fuck were we to know Patrick Doherty was the top-dog in the IRM when nobody said a dickey-bird?’
Matt laughed. ‘It doesn’t sound to me like you’re calming down. You need to take more medicine.’
‘I can take crap as well as the next woman when I’ve done something wrong, but not when it’s down to bad intel. For Chrissakes, we met enough cops in Westport to start a ceilidh. Why didn’t one of them mention it?’
‘I dunno, maybe they didn’t know either.’
‘Doesn’t seem likely, does it?’
‘I’ve been looking through the Doherty file,’ Matt said, keen to change the subject. He went on to tell Rosie about the conclusions he’d reached and how he believed they could find him.
‘If this is your plan, there are more holes in it than a lump of Swiss cheese.’
‘I can see we have a hard audience in tonight, but just relating the whole thing back to you convinces me more.’
‘To start with,’ Rosie said, ‘we don’t know for sure he survived. He could have drowned or smacked his head on something when he went overboard.’
‘If he did, the problem goes away, and all we’ll be doing is wasting time and effort, but right at this moment, we don’t know for sure. You know what I always say–’
‘Hope for the best, plan for the worst.’
‘Exactly.’
‘It’s a fair point. We wouldn’t be doing our jobs if we didn’t,’ Rosie said, sounding more sober than she deserved after downing a sizeable quantity of wine. ‘Let’s assume Doherty did make it to the shore. What makes you think he isn’t bunking down with a few of his spotty mates in Belfast? If so, we can let the PSNI deal with it.’
‘Look at his file. He’s a loner. Ran the gun repair service for the IRA as a private fiefdom and did the same in the garage business.’
‘I picked that up too.’
‘Now, as a kid, he spent a lot of time with his grandfather at a pub and general store he owned in a place called Doolin. In summer, he went there most weekends and during school holidays.’
‘Where’s that?’
‘In County Clare, on the mainland opposite the Aran Islands.’
‘Where exactly are we talking about?’
‘Remember Westport?’
‘How could I forget?’
‘South of there, on the same coast, still facing the Atlantic.’
‘Got it.’
‘As I said, he spent a lot of time there as a kid, I suppose his parent’s attempt to keep him away from the Troubles in Belfast.’
‘It didn’t work, did it?’
‘It’s unlikely he’s got any connections in Doolin now. The pub and general store were sold forty-odd years ago when the old fella died. Doherty’s father took the money and ploughed it into the garage business.’
‘So, we agree he’s a loner and he knows the area well. You think he’ll hole up there?’
‘Correction, I don’t think he knows the area well, I know he does. You never forget the place you spent your childhood. There must be dozens, if not hundreds of places he could use: a disused barn, a moored boat, a house he bought years ago.’
‘Okay, let’s say I’m convinced, which I’m not. If he is hiding out somewhere in the area and not back in Belfast, how the hell do we find him?’
‘I’ve got an idea how we do it, but there’s another call coming in, I better take it. Can we talk about this in the morning?’
‘What’s this? You butter me up, feed me with a tasty morsel, then leave me hanging? Come the morning, you’ll quietly slip in the fact that you’ve suddenly realised the whole thing is horrendously expensive.’
‘It’s nothing of the kind. You never know, this might be Gill calling to apologise.’
‘Fat chance,’ Rosie replied. ‘See you tomorrow.’
Matt connected to the other call. ‘Hi, Matt Flynn.’
‘Matt, it’s Jack Harris.’
‘Hi, Jack,’ Matt said. Just the sound of the man’s voice put him instantly on guard. ‘Any news?’
‘Yeah, there’s been a development. You wanna meet so we can talk about it?’
Chapter 21
The Yamaha engine purred with the sound of a well-fed cat as he leaned the bike into the turn. The 250cc motorcycle could break the motorway speed limit without catching its breath, but the meandering country roads of western Ireland provided no real test of its capabilities. The rider, Patrick Doherty, didn’t mind one bit; he was happy.
Under the full-face helmet he could be anyone: a top American actor back in Ireland to claim his birth-right, or the Taoiseach, the Prime Minister of the Irish Republic, on a tour of the provinces to prove he was in touch with ‘ordinary’ people. He could wave at farmers in the field, motorists who allowed him across a narrow bridge before them, or a bunch of women on a sight-seeing bus, without them scrabbling for their phones and calling the Garda.
He was also happy because it was his favourite time of day: dusk. The heat and drizzle of the day had long gone, leaving a soft, misted light that lay on the heather and bracken at the side of the road. The hills in the distance were soaked in red and orange, gleaming for a few seconds then fading as fast-moving clouds blocked the fading light, before allowing it to pass through once again.
After leaving the house in Westport, he’d cycled through the back streets of the town looking for more suitable transport. He’d passed the showroom of Liam Maloney Motorcycles, a man he’d known for over twenty years, often meeting him at car shows and trade fairs, but this was the first time he’d been to the place where he traded. It was a grand showroom with a huge range of new and second-hand bikes. He was tempted to break in and nick one, but he liked Liam, and anyway, modern bikes were almost as hard to steal as cars. Instead, he’d roused the owner.
Mr Maloney wasn’t best pleased to be woken up in the middle of the night. ‘I need all the beauty sleep I can get, Pat,’ he’d said, and it would have been churlish of Doherty to say he agreed with him.
In fact, Liam not only allowed him to borrow the motorbike, he gave him a place to sleep, the use of his house for most of the following day, and food to eat. Late afternoon, he’d borrowed the bike, a helmet, plus two hundred Euros which he’d initially refused to take but Liam had insisted. The money would be returned in a day or two, double the amount, as soon as he could contact the lads in Belfast. The bike he would leave at his destination for one of Liam’s boys to retrieve.
He arrived in the village of Doolin around twelve-thirty in the morning. If earlier, he would have needed to be more careful, as pubs in most rural places closed whenever the last customer departed. However, it being Saturda
y, he imagined there was still enough reverence in this part of Ireland for them to close before midnight and the beginning of the Sabbath.
He knew this place as well as his stomping ground of Belfast and, even in the dark, memories came flooding back: the hill where he and his mates used to run, the house where the old lady made them scones, Fitzpatrick’s bar where his grandfather bought him his first pint. He’d been tempted to stop and take a look at his grandfather’s old shop, now a restaurant, but he wasn’t here for a nostalgia trip. He turned towards Doolin Pier.
The last time he’d been back, five years ago it must have been, he’d still recognised a few of the old fellas, but most of the young people had moved to the cities, tempted by the lure of secure office jobs and regular salaries. Many of the local businesses, hotels and guest houses, were owned by incomers, rich city people in search of a quieter way of life. For many, the change in lifestyle would be a cultural shock. Tourists could be as demanding as any banker in contract discussions, and it took a deep reservoir of negotiating skills to ease the last drinkers out of a bar at two in the morning without gaining a reputation as a curmudgeonly old bugger.
He drove away from the pier to a bay nearby where he knew many of the locals berthed their boats. He parked the bike and clipped the helmet to its side. Feeling underdressed and underequipped, he approached the bay. He walked among the boats, ignoring those owned by fishermen or used to take tourists out, and looked for a weekend run-around. He soon found it, a wooden rowing boat with an outboard.
He checked the fuel level: half-full. It was enough to take him to where he wanted to go, which was just as well as he hadn’t syphoned fuel from a tank for many a year and didn’t fancy having breath like a circus fire-eater. The tricky part now was getting the heavy beast down to the shore. He grabbed hold of the bow and pulled, and to his surprise, the boat moved faster than he expected over the damp sand. When he reached the water’s edge, he changed positions and pushed from the stern.