The Chinaman

by Stephen Leather

  O’Donnell appeared at his shoulder. ‘Anything?’ he said.

  ‘I think so,’ said Kavanagh. ‘I want O’Hara to see this.’

  Kavanagh put the bag into the boot of the car and the three men drove to O’Hara’s house, a two-up, two-down terrace in Springfield Road. He was in the kitchen eating bacon and eggs when they were shown in by his wife. His sharp eyes fixed on the bag by Kavanagh’s side.

  ‘What have ye got there, Jim?’ he asked, wiping a piece of bread across the plate and popping it into his mouth.

  ‘I’m hoping yer’ll tell me, Willie. When yez finished your breakfast, that is.’

  O’Hara took the hint, putting his knife and fork together on the remains of his meal. His wife took the plate and put it in the oven to keep warm and then left the room, knowing that it was IRA business and that the men would want to be left alone. O’Hara wiped his greasy hands on his grey trousers and cleared the rest of the table, a stainless steel cruet set, a bottle of Heinz ketchup and the morning paper.

  Kavanagh lifted the bag on to the table and O’Hara gingerly opened it. He took the contents out one at a time: the empty bag of fertilizer, the Pyrex pans, the measuring jug, sections of piping, a burnt-out flash-bulb, empty bottles, empty matchboxes, pieces of cut wire. He inspected each item closely before eagerly moving on to the next one like a schoolboy going through his presents at Christmas, hoping that each one would be better than the last. When the black bag was finally empty and all its contents lined up beside it, O’Hara looked at Kavanagh, a wicked grin on his weaselly face.

  ‘This is from the wee bugger that tried to blow up Liam’s car, isn’t it?’ he asked.

  Kavanagh wasn’t impressed by the small man’s insight – the flash-bulb was obviously the same type that they’d found in the Jaguar’s petrol tank. ‘He left it behind when he checked out of a guest-house this morning. What do yez make of it?’

  O’Hara waved his hand at the ragbag collection of items. ‘This is trouble, right enough,’ he said. ‘Big trouble.’

  Morrison checked his watch for the hundredth time and called the Anti-Terrorist Branch. This time Bromley was there. ‘I’m sorry to drag you in on a Saturday,’ said Morrison.

  ‘I’m always happy to speak to public-spirited citizens, Mr Morrison,’ said Bromley with more than a hint of sarcasm. ‘The last FBI report that passed over my desk had you alive and well and living in New York. What brings you back to these fair shores?’

  ‘I need to see you,’ answered Morrison.

  ‘Not thinking of changing sides and working alongside the forces of law and order, are we?’

  ‘Let’s just say that I want to make you an offer you won’t be able to refuse.’

  ‘In what context?’ asked Bromley, suddenly serious.

  ‘Not over the phone. I have to meet you.’

  Bromley snorted. ‘In a dark alley, I suppose. Come off it, Morrison, why the hell should I put myself at risk? Haven’t you been reading the papers in New York? The IRA has declared open season on us here. If you want to speak to me you can come here.’

  ‘And how long do you think I’d last if I was seen going into your office, Bromley? I’m not after a bullet in my mouth.’

  ‘I suppose that’s a Mexican stand-off, then,’ said Bromley.

  ‘Not necessarily. You can choose the venue, so long as you go alone. Somewhere with lots of people where you’ll feel safe and where I can blend into a crowd. Somewhere noisy so I know we won’t be recorded.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘This afternoon.’

  Bromley considered the offer for a few seconds. ‘I can’t today. It’ll have to be tomorrow. In Trafalgar Square. Be close to Nelson’s column at four o’clock.’

  ‘Make sure you come alone,’ said Morrison. ‘Don’t put me under any pressure. I’m not wanted for anything, and I won’t be carrying. I just want to talk.’

  ‘So you said.’

  ‘One other thing – I don’t know what you look like. How will I recognise you?’

  ‘Don’t worry, Mr Morrison. I’ve seen enough photographs of you, I’ll introduce myself.’

  ‘That’s maybe so, but don’t creep up on me. I startle easily.’

  ‘Understood. Until four tomorrow, then.’

  Morrison hung up. Nothing to do now but wait. He switched on the television and rang down to room service to order a club sandwich and coffee.

  Hennessy was walking across Three Acre Pasture with Jackie at his heels when he heard the shrill whistle, two piercing blasts that made the dog jump. He shaded his eyes with his hands and saw Murphy standing by the kitchen door waving his arm high above his head. When Murphy realised he’d caught his attention, he made a miming action with his hand, holding it clenched to his ear. The phone.

  It took him a brisk five minutes to get back to the farmhouse, by which time Murphy had gone back inside the cool, oak-beamed kitchen. He held the receiver out to Hennessy, who was slightly out of breath. It was Kavanagh. He described the visit to the guest-house and what they’d found in the dustbin.

  ‘And what did O’Hara say?’ Hennessy asked.

  ‘Nitroglycerine,’ said Kavanagh. ‘The Chinaman made nitroglycerine in the bathroom. Willie reckons he mixed it with weedkiller and packed it into plastic pipes and is planning to use flash-bulb detonators, the sort of thing he stuck in the petrol tank of the Jag.’

  ‘How much damage could they do?’

  ‘Judging by the stuff he left behind, Willie says he could have made three or four devices, each big enough to blow up a car. It’s hard to say because a lot depends on the purity of the nitro he made, but Willie says the guy seems to know what he’s doing.’

  Hennessy felt a cold chill run up his spine because the sort of bombs Kavanagh was talking about didn’t sound like warnings. It looked as if The Chinaman was raising the stakes. ‘What are your plans now, Jim?’ he asked.

  ‘I reckon the van’s the best bet. The landlady said he’s driving a white delivery van with black writing on the side. I’ll have our lads scour the city. It shouldn’t be too hard to find, a Chinaman in a white van with English plates. We’ll get him, Liam. Don’t ye worry.’ Kavanagh tried to sound as optimistic as possible because he could sense how worried his boss was.

  ‘OK, keep at it, Jim. And let me know as soon as you get anything.’

  ‘Will do,’ said Kavanagh.

  Mary came into the kitchen as he replaced the receiver and asked him if he wanted a coffee. He declined and said he’d prefer something a little stronger. She sniffed, a noise that was loaded with disapproval. She was wearing tight Levi jeans, cowboy boots and a floppy pink pullover that he’d last seen their daughter wearing. He took a bottle of whiskey down from the Welsh dresser and poured himself a double measure.

  ‘I’m driving down to the village to get some bread,’ said Mary. ‘Do you want anything?’

  He sat down in an old rocking chair and rocked backwards and forwards, nursing the whiskey. ‘I’m fine,’ he said.

  She turned to look at him, standing with her hands on her hips. ‘I don’t think you should be moping like this, Liam.’

  ‘I’m not moping, I’m thinking. And you’re acting like my mother.’

  ‘And you, Liam Hennessy, are behaving like my grandfather. Now pull yourself together and stop feeling sorry for yourself.’ She turned on her heels and banged the kitchen door behind her. He heard the car start up and drive off and wondered what it was that was upsetting her so much.

  When he first met Mary all those years ago her temper and unpredictability were among her attractions. She was stimulating, she was fun, and there was never a dull moment with her. She’d quietened down after the birth of their children but now that they were at university she seemed to be behaving more and more like she did when she was in her early twenties. Some days she was so gentle and loving that she took his breath away and yet on others she was so cold that he felt sure she was about to leave him. Sexually, too, she had him in a s
tate of constant confusion. When they’d first married they seemed to spend all their time in bed, and it was hardly surprising that they’d had two children so quickly. He’d wanted more children but she’d said that two was enough though even then sex had been good and regular, albeit more calculated and careful. It had been when the children were in their teens, at school, that she had seemed to withdraw from him. She even went through a period when she’d slept in one of the spare bedrooms, claiming that she was having trouble getting to sleep. When he did approach her she would be friendly but insistent: she didn’t want to be touched. Eventually she moved back into the main bedroom. He never found out why, but even when she slept in his bed she only occasionally allowed him to make love to her and when she did it was usually quick and unenthusiastic.

  Sometimes, though, she would be totally different, she’d wait until he’d switched off the light and climbed into the bed and then she’d reach for him and it would be like it was in the old days, she’d hang on to him tight, biting his shoulder, making him lie on his back as she rode him on top. Those were the worst nights, because she’d close her eyes as she gasped and groaned and he knew deep inside that she was thinking about someone else, that he was being used, but while it was happening he didn’t care because her lovemaking was so energetic and sensual that he wanted to die. Only afterwards, when she flopped down on to the sheets and rolled away from him to curl up with her own thoughts, only then did the revulsion set in. He would lie awake with tears in his eyes, filled with self-loathing, and promise himself that next time she reached for him in the dark he’d refuse her and tell her that he wanted her to make love to him, not to use him as part of whatever fantasy she was enjoying. But he never did refuse her.

  Hennessy was genuinely confused by the way she acted in bed, because in every other respect she was a perfect wife and mother. She ran the house like a dream, their children were good-looking, intelligent and well-balanced, she took an interest in his work and his politics, she laughed at his jokes, she entertained their friends, she seemed to thrive in his company. Everyone who knew them said they were the perfect couple, and when they were with friends of their own age he took a particular pride in her apparent youth and vitality. She was stunning, and while her women friends had put on weight and had their hair permed and started to dress like their mothers, she had kept her figure, so much so that she would still go without a bra if the dress warranted it. Over the years Hennessy had tried to talk himself into accepting his wife as she was, to convince himself that the lack of sex was a small price to pay to have her in his life. Sometimes he believed it. He rocked himself backwards and forwards in the chair. The motion was reassuring and he closed his eyes.

  The drive from Belfast to the B8 between Castlewellan and Haltown took a little over ninety minutes, but it took another three hours for Nguyen to locate Hennessy’s farm. The two towns were about ten miles apart and there were many farms nestled among the patchwork of fields and hills. Eventually a bearded giant of a man in a tractor sent him in the general direction, to the north of the B8, away from the border, and some time later he came across a postman in a battered old van who pointed at a collection of weathered stone buildings and modern barns.

  Nguyen spent some time examining his large-scale map of the area. He circled the spot where the farm was. To the east was the Tollymore Forest Park, and to the southeast was a rocky ridge called the Mourne Mountains. Due south was a place called Warrenpoint, which rang a bell in Nguyen’s subconscious. He couldn’t remember exactly what it was, but he knew something bad had happened there in the past, an explosion or a massacre. The name had cropped up in a news programme on television, he was sure of that much. He’d regularly watched television news with his daughter as a way of helping her to improve her English.

  There was a wooded hill a mile or so behind the farm and according to the map he’d be able to get close to it if he took the road to the village of Rathfriland. He started the van and drove to within half a mile of the hill. He parked in a layby, slung the binoculars around his neck, took his compass from the glove compartment, pocketed the map and walked briskly up the hill, following a stony track that zig-zagged through the lush grass. The track was obviously used by a shepherd to round up his flock. There were dog droppings in several places and boot-prints of a man who walked with a stick and all around were sheep and young lambs.

  He reached the top of the hill and lay down in the grass, surveying the farmland and its buildings far below through the powerful binoculars. The farmhouse was an L-shaped building, stone with a steep, grey slate roof. Nguyen was looking at it from the rear, he could see the back door leading off the kitchen. The main part of the house was two-storeys high but the shorter section of the L was one-storey and seemed to be made up of outbuildings, the windows streaked with dirt. There was a square tarmac courtyard in the angle of the L where there were several cars parked: a Range Rover, a Jaguar, two Land-Rovers and a Ford Sierra. Nguyen recognised the Jaguar and smiled. He hadn’t expected Hennessy to be there. It was an added bonus. Bordering the courtyard, directly opposite the outbuildings, was another single-storey building and behind it was a grass paddock. In the paddock two horses stood nose to nose. At right angles to the stables was a two-storey cottage built in the same solid style as the main house which Nguyen guessed was the farm manager’s home.

  In front of the cottage was what looked to be a vegetable garden, with tidy rows of cabbages and other green vegetables, and beyond it a small orchard of mature fruit trees. A gravel driveway led from the courtyard, between the farmhouse and the stables, and curved around the front. The fourth side of the courtyard was bordered by two open-sided barns, one full of bales of hay, the other stacked high with sacks at one end, the rest of the space being used as a shelter for farm equipment. Behind the barns were three gleaming white towering silos, like rockets awaiting lift-off.

  The driveway led to a single-track road which wound between the fields, linking up with several farms before disappearing to the north where, according to the map, it linked up with the B7. There were passing places every few hundred yards and hedgerows both sides. The fields were mainly devoted to the raising of cattle and sheep but there were crops, too; several of the patchwork squares were yellow with rape-seed and there were green plants growing in a field behind the barns that could have been potatoes or turnips. The area undulated like a down quilt that had been thrown untidily on to a bed and the places that were steep or inaccessible had been left wooded.

  Nguyen laid the map on the grass and took his bearings with the compass. With a pencil he drew several routes to Hennessy’s farm, from the B180, the B8, the B25 and the B7, following the contours through woodland wherever possible or alongside hedgerows and ditches where there was no tree cover. There was a stream trickling through Hennessy’s land, too small to be shown on the map, and with great care Nguyen traced its route as a thin pencil line. He also carefully drew a sketch map of the farm buildings, showing their positions relative to each other, and made a sketch drawing of the farmhouse, including the drainpipes. The soil-pipe was next to the middle of five upstairs windows and the glass was frosted and there was a circular ventilator fan in the right-hand corner so Nguyen marked it as the bathroom. In the distance a twin-rotor helicopter, a Chinook, flew close to the ground, heading towards border country. He waited until it had passed out of sight before walking back down the hill.

  His first priority now was to find somewhere to hide the van, because he’d soon be spotted if he kept driving around in the vicinity of the farm. There were very few vehicles around and most of the ones he came across were tractors or army Land-Rovers. Farmers and soldiers both gave him curious looks but neither seemed to regard him as a threat. He could see, though, that they read the signs on the side of his van and he knew that an Oriental landscape gardener would not be easily forgotten. He dismissed the idea of leaving the Renault in one of the nearby villages or towns because being so near the border any strange pa
rked vehicle was bound to attract attention. He needed a place a good distance from the farm, but close enough that he could get to and fro within a few hours. Five or six miles or so would be about right, and ideally with a route that offered some cover from the army patrols and the helicopters which occasionally buzzed overhead. Looking at the map, it seemed as if Tollymore Forest Park offered the best prospects. He drove east along the B8 and then turned left on to the B180 which cut the woods neatly in half on the way to the village of Maghera. He eased the van along the road looking left and right for places to turn off and spotted several possibilities. When he emerged from the forest he clunked the gears through a three-point turn and headed back towards Haltown. He ignored the first three tracks as being too obvious from the road. The first path he’d identified as being suitable went deep into the trees but the Land-Rover tracks in the mud were too fresh and there were too many of them, suggesting that it was used regularly by foresters or possibly by the army. He turned the van round and drove back to the main road. The second track was more what he’d hoped for, a single pathway that was overgrown by ferns and brambles. He drove the van far enough into the trees so that he couldn’t be seen from the road and then got out of the car and checked the ground and the overhanging vegetation. The tyre prints in the dried mud were old and flaking and there were fresh green shoots growing through them. The ferns that had encroached on to the track were unbroken and there were no smears of dirt or grease. No one had driven a vehicle down the path for at least a week, and probably much longer, and there were no footprints, none that were human, anyway. He saw where foxes had crossed the path, and rabbits, but that was all.

  Satisfied, he got back into the van and slowly drove it down the track, gripping the steering wheel tightly as it jerked like a wild thing. When he’d gone a hundred yards or so further, he turned off the track and guided the van carefully between the trees. When he was sure that anyone driving down the track would not be able to see the van he switched off the engine.