The Chinaman

by Stephen Leather

  Nguyen smiled gratefully and told Woody the number, repeating it slowly and checking as he wrote it down. Woody didn’t know why but he had a sudden urge to help the old man, to make some sort of gesture to show that he really did care and wasn’t just making polite noises. He wrote down his home number on another sheet of paper and ripped it from the notebook. ‘Take this,’ he said. ‘Call me if . . .’ He didn’t know how to finish the sentence, because he knew there was nothing tangible he could offer. Nguyen bowed his head and thanked Woody and then left. Woody watched him walk down the road, a small man in a duffel coat with eleven thousand pounds in a plastic bag. ‘And I thought I’d seen everything,’ he said to himself.

  O’Reilly walked up the steps to the main entrance of the police station and turned round so that he could push open the door with his shoulder. He was using both hands to carry a large cardboard box. The box was new and the lettering on it said that it contained a Japanese video recorder. A housewife with a crying child in a pushchair held the door open for him and he smiled boyishly at her.

  He took the box over to the enquiries desk and placed it in front of an overweight uniformed constable who looked at him with bored eyes.

  ‘How can I help you, sir?’ the policeman asked unenthusiastically.

  ‘I found this in my back garden this morning,’ said O’Reilly, nodding at the box. ‘It’s a video recorder.’

  ‘You surprise me,’ said the policeman. He opened the flaps at the top of the box and looked inside. He saw a black video recorder, still in its polythene wrapping. There was a blank guarantee card and an instruction booklet.

  ‘You’ve no idea where it came from?’ the officer asked, and O’Reilly shook his head.

  ‘It looks new,’ said O’Reilly. ‘I thought of keeping it but my wife said no, it might belong to someone, and besides, you know, there might be a reward or something. So she said take it to the police, you know, and so here I am.’ O’Reilly smiled like an idiot. He was wearing horn-rimmed glasses with thick lenses, a flat cap and a sheepskin jacket. That was all the disguise he needed because even if they ever connected the delivery of the video recorder with the explosion, all the guy would remember would be the hat and the glasses. People’s memories were generally lousy when it came to describing faces, even with the latest computerised photofit systems.

  ‘Very public-spirited of you, sir,’ said the policeman. ‘Now, can you give me your name and address?’

  O’Reilly gave him a false name and an address in nearby Battersea and explained again how he’d found the video recorder while the policeman carefully wrote it all down.

  ‘Right, sir, that’s all. We’ll be in touch if it isn’t claimed,’ he said, and O’Reilly thanked him and left. He passed the housewife outside, kneeling by her child and wiping its face with a paper handkerchief. She looked up at him and smiled and he winked at her. ‘Lovely kid,’ he said.

  The policeman lifted the box, grunting as he did so, and carried it out of the office and down a white-tiled corridor to a windowless storage room. He found a space for it on one of the grey metal shelves, next to a set of fly-fishing tackle and a bundle of umbrellas. The room was full of abandoned or forgotten belongings, all waiting to be taken to one of the city’s lost property storage centres. The policeman walked back to the reception desk and forgot all about the video recorder and the man who’d delivered it.

  The bomb was similar in design to the one they’d used outside the Knightsbridge department store. The Bombmaker had stripped out most of the workings of the video recorder and replaced it with twenty pounds of Semtex explosive. There were no nuts and bolts in this bomb because the aim was to demolish a building rather than mutilate crowds of people but it used a similar detonator and timer. There were two anti-handling devices, though, just in case it didn’t go off for any reason. Any attempt to open the casing would set it off, and it was also primed to explode if it was connected to the mains, just in case any light-fingered copper decided to pop it into his car and take it home. The Bombmaker did not have a very high opinion of the police, be they in Belfast or London.

  O’Reilly delivered the bomb at four o’clock and it was set to explode an hour later, just as the shifts were changing at the station. He was back in the Wapping flat well before the timer clicked on and completed the circuit which detonated the bomb in a flash of light. The force of the explosion blew out the front and the back walls of the police station and the two floors above it collapsed down, trapping and killing dozens of men and women in an avalanche of masonry and timber and choking dust.

  Woody was reading the morning papers when the telephone rang. As usual he’d started going through the tabloids first, and on the desk in front of him he’d opened the Sun and the Daily Mirror. Both had used pictures of the aftermath of the police-station bombing. The Sun had the better photographs but the Mirror had the edge when it came to eye-witness accounts. He reached for Today as he answered the phone.

  ‘Mr Wood?’ asked a voice that Woody didn’t recognise.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘It is Nguyen Ngoc Minh. I came to your office three days ago.’

  ‘I remember,’ said Woody. The Chinaman. He flicked through Today. Same pictures as the Sun, more or less. Plus a line drawing of the inside of a booby-trapped bomb, a Blue Peter do-it-yourself guide for amateurs to follow. And here’s one I exploded earlier, thought Woody with a wry smile. ‘How can I help you?’

  ‘You have seen the newspapers today?’

  ‘The bombing?’

  ‘These people must be stopped, Mr Wood.’ Woody was only half listening to the man, he had a sickening feeling that he knew where the conversation was heading. Would the paper offer the reward? Would the paper put pressure on the police? The army? The Government? Woody didn’t want to be rude to the old man but he wasn’t prepared to be used as the paper’s agony aunt. Not on a freelance’s pay, anyway. He thought of giving The Chinaman the phone number for Today. He began turning the pages looking for the number.

  ‘Mr Wood?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘You said that you would help me.’

  ‘Well . . .’ said Woody, about to back-pedal while he hunted frantically for Today’s telephone number.

  ‘I want to speak to somebody at the IRA. Do you know anybody that would talk to me?’

  Woody stopped turning the pages of the newspaper.

  ‘What are you thinking of doing?’ he asked suspiciously, scenting a possible story.

  ‘I want to talk to somebody in the IRA, that is all.’

  ‘I don’t think they’ll help you, I really don’t. And it might backfire.’

  ‘Backfire? I do not understand.’

  ‘They are dangerous men, if they thought you were a threat to them, or even just a nuisance, there’s a good chance they’d hurt you.’

  ‘All I want to do is to talk to them.’

  Woody sighed. ‘OK, for a start you don’t want to talk to the IRA. You’d be better off trying Sinn Fein, that’s the political wing of the organisation. The Sinn Fein spokesmen are well-known.’

  ‘Could you give me some names, and tell me where I might find them?’

  Woody looked at the photographs of smashed brickwork, broken glass and misshapen metal. What the hell, he thought. Why not?

  ‘I’ll have to call you back, give me your number.’

  ‘I gave you before.’

  ‘I know, but I’m using a different notebook now.’

  Nguyen read out the figures slowly, and Woody promised to ring him back later in the day. He was about to go over to the cuttings library but had second thoughts and instead decided to call one of the paper’s Belfast stringers. Might as well get it from the horse’s mouth. For a change the stringer, Pat Quigley, was helpful, sober and in his office, a hell of an unusual combination and Woody took full advantage of it. He gave Woody three names, potted biographies, where they lived, and contact phone numbers, and told him a foul joke involving two nuns and a bar of so
ap from which Woody deduced that the man wasn’t a Catholic.

  When Woody called The Chinaman back the phone was answered with a guttural ‘Double Happiness Take-Away’.

  ‘This is Ian Wood,’ he said, suddenly realising he couldn’t remember The Chinaman’s name. He had just written ‘Chinaman’ in his notebook.

  ‘Double Happiness Take-Away,’ the voice repeated.

  Woody cursed under his breath, then he heard another voice and the sound of the phone being transferred.

  ‘Mr Wood?’ said Nguyen.

  ‘I have the information you wanted,’ Woody said. He read the notes from his notebook, spelling out the names and repeating the numbers several times until he was sure The Chinaman had got them down correctly.

  ‘Thank you, Mr Wood. I not bother you again.’ The phone went dead before Woody had the chance to ask The Chinaman for his name. There could be a story in this somewhere. ‘Heartbroken Father Pleads With IRA Killers’. ‘Bomb Mission Of Tragic Dad’. That sort of thing. Good Sunday-paper stuff. Woody was about to ring back when there was a shout from the far end of the office.

  ‘Woody! Call for you. What extension are you on?’

  ‘4553,’ he yelled back, and waited until the call was put through.

  ‘Woody?’ said a girl’s voice, soft and with a Scottish burr.

  ‘Yeah, speaking,’ he answered, groping for a pen.

  ‘It’s Maggie.’ Maggie? His mind raced, frantically trying to put a face to the name and the voice. ‘How are you?’ she asked.

  ‘Me? I’m fine, fine.’ He closed his eyes and began banging the palm of his hand against his forehead as if trying to jolt his memory.

  ‘You do remember?’ she asked, sounding hurt.

  ‘Of course I do.’ He began flicking through the images in his head, searching for a Maggie.

  ‘The Coach and Horses,’ she prompted.

  Maggie! The girl with red hair and grey eyes and the earthy sense of humour. He remembered how much he’d enjoyed being with her, though for the life of him he couldn’t recall what they’d talked about, other than the fact that she’d told him a couple of fairly risqué jokes. Would she appreciate the one about the nuns and the soap? Probably not.

  ‘Of course I remember, how are you?’ He tried to recall the name of her partner. Todd? Rob? Ross? It bobbed away on the outer fringes of his memory, just out of reach. Most of that evening was a blank, though he vaguely remembered putting away the best part of a bottle of a very civilised malt whisky. Had he kissed her? He couldn’t remember. There was something else as well, something sad, very, very sad. Woody’s eyes glanced at the photographs in the Sun and it all flooded back as if a dam had burst. It had been the day of the big bombing in Knightsbridge. He’d locked away the sickening images of that day, the pictures that had been too horrific to use in the paper, the twisted bodies, the severed limbs, the blood, the Retriever with its jaws clamped on its gory prize. He didn’t want to think about that day, but Maggie had been part of it and recalling her brought everything back into focus. He breathed deeply, trying to clear his head.

  ‘I’m fine, too. Isn’t it a lovely day?’

  ‘Is it? We’ve no way of knowing, here. All the blinds are down so that we can use the terminals.’ That’s what management claimed, but Woody reckoned it was just to stop them looking out of the windows and daydreaming.

  ‘Well, take it from me, the sun is shining and the birds are singing. I was wondering if you fancied going out for a drink again one day this week.’

  ‘Sure, that’d be great. What about tomorrow night?’

  She agreed, and they arranged to meet at the same pub.

  ‘Woody, are you OK?’ she asked. ‘You sound a bit distant.’

  ‘Yeah, somebody walked over my grave, that’s all. Nothing to worry about. I’ll be fine by tomorrow.’

  When she’d gone Woody put his head in his hands and closed his eyes, but he couldn’t block out the images of death and destruction. He needed a drink. Badly.

  The function room had been booked in the name of the Belfast Overseas Investors Club but the dozen men sitting at the long mahogany table had little interest in investment. The man standing at the head of the table in a green tweed jacket and black woollen trousers could have passed as a mildly eccentric provincial stockbroker with his greying hair and slightly flushed cheeks. He was in his fifties and looked like a rugby player gone to seed, which is exactly what Liam Hennessy was. But after playing for his country he’d gone on to become a political adviser to Sinn Fein. Married with two children, Liam Hennessy was one of the most powerful men in the Republican movement.

  The eleven listening to him were all high-ranking Provisional IRA officials and they had all been called to the hotel in Belfast at short notice. On the table in front of them were jugs of iced water and upturned glasses, but none had been touched. Each man also had a notepad in a red leather folder and a ballpoint pen.

  Hennessy stood with his arms folded across his chest and spoke in a soft Irish brogue. He first thanked them for coming, though a summons from Liam Hennessy was not something that any of them could ignore. The group met regularly, always in different venues and under different names so that the security forces wouldn’t be able to eavesdrop, usually to discuss financing or strategy or matters of discipline, but today’s gathering was special. They had all seen the television reports of the south London police-station bombing and the pictures of ambulancemen and firemen hauling the rubble away with their bare hands, and they had heard that the IRA had claimed responsibility.

  To Hennessy’s left was a large flat-screen television on a matte black stand, and underneath it was a video recorder. He took a videocassette off the table and slotted it into the recorder. The screen flickered and then there were shots of the Kensington bombing recorded from the BBC news. It was followed by a report of the Woolwich bombing, the explosion in Bank Tube station and the crop of car bombs that had killed or injured judges, police and army officers. Then the screen dissolved into black and white static and Hennessy bent down and switched the machine off.

  ‘This must stop,’ said Hennessy quietly. He was not a man who needed to raise his voice or bang his fist on the table to make his anger felt. ‘Never in the history of the Cause have we been closer to getting a political solution. Look at South Africa. The Government there is now talking to the ANC and that would have been unthinkable a few years ago. The ANC’s acts of terrorism go way beyond anything the IRA has ever done. With the Americans withdrawing their troops from Europe and the opening up of Eastern Europe, this Government is finding it harder and harder to justify its armed presence in Northern Ireland. This Government is getting tired, politically and economically, and it is through the ballot-box and by lobbying in Westminster that this war will be won.’

  There were grumblings from several of the men at the table and Hennessy held up his hand to silence them. ‘I am not saying that we give up the struggle, nor that we release the pressure here. What I am saying is that it does us no good at all to take the conflict to the mainland. We have tried in the past and the backlash, both political and from the public, has done us more harm than good. That is why what is happening in England now is so detrimental to our cause.’

  A few of the men nodded in agreement, but Hennessy could see that others were still not convinced.

  ‘We cannot succeed in our political struggle by using violence in English cities. It must stop. Which brings us to our second problem. Who in God’s name is behind this bombing campaign?’ He looked at the men around the table but was met with a wall of shaking heads. Over the previous four months Hennessy or one of his associates from the upper echelons of Sinn Fein had met with all of the top IRA organisers in Belfast and in Dublin in an attempt to identify the team behind the bombings. When they’d first been told that the terror campaign was an unsanctioned one they had been astonished – most had assumed that it had been ordered on a ‘need to know’ basis. It was inconceivable, they thought,
that a campaign of such ferocity and technical sophistication could be masterminded from outside the organisation. The bombs were all variations of IRA designs and explosives, and whenever the bombers claimed responsibility they always gave the current identifying codeword, but as far as Hennessy could determine they were most definitely not acting under IRA authority. Unless one of the men around the table had been lying.

  He studied their faces, most of them in their fifties and sixties, hard men whose eyes looked back at him levelly. Most of them had killed, and the few who hadn’t had arranged or ordered assassinations, yet to the outsider they would have looked no more sinister than a group of pigeon fanciers gathered to discuss their annual show.

  ‘After an extensive investigation, we have come to the conclusion that we are dealing with a rogue group, a group that we are sure must have been within the organisation until recently, who are now operating on their own,’ said Hennessy. He saw one or two frowns. ‘The fact that they know the codewords, even after they are changed, suggests that they still have connections, and high level connections at that. And the type of explosive devices would indicate that they are IRA trained. It could even be that they passed through one of the Libyan training schools.’

  One of the older members of the group, white-haired and with rosy cheeks from years on the hills around his farm, cracked his knuckles under the table to catch Hennessy’s attention. ‘If what you say is true, Liam, then it should not be too hard to pin these people down.’

  Hennessy nodded. ‘In theory that’s so, Patrick. But it will require a hell of a lot of legwork. We are going to have to speak to everyone within the organisation who has bomb-making skills, to find out where they are and if they have been out of the country. Or if they have instructed anyone else. And it cannot be one man, so we’ll also be looking for any other IRA members who are unaccounted for. In short, gentlemen, we will have to interview every single member of the organisation.’

  Patrick Sewell leant back in his chair and cracked his knuckles again. ‘That could cause some resentment, Liam, especially when many of our younger people are actually in favour of what has been happening. The bombing campaign has its supporters, you know. And it wasn’t all that many years ago that you yourself weren’t averse to taking the struggle over the water.’