The Chinaman

by Stephen Leather

  Geraghty had made his disapproval plain, but had also refused to interfere, knowing that his daughter was old enough to make her own mistakes. He figured that she’d realise what a hopeless situation she’d gotten herself into and that she’d come to her senses. He was right. It had been almost two months since she had seen him, though she was still at the stage where she had to keep fighting the urge to call him and jumped whenever the phone rang. She knew that if she saw him again she’d end up in bed with him. Geraghty sensed the pressure she was under and thought that perhaps she was right, a spell in Ireland might be just what she needed to get the man out of her system once and for all.

  ‘If you go, you’re going to have to be careful,’ he said.

  ‘I will be,’ she said earnestly.

  ‘I mean very careful,’ he said. ‘It’s not a game there, you know. It’s not too far from the border. It’s a war zone. You don’t carry a gun, under any circumstances. You track him, and that’s all. You don’t take any risks, understand?’

  She nodded furiously. ‘I promise. Can I go?’

  Geraghty smiled, but it was an uncertain smile. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘You can go.’

  She whooped, and grinned, and reached over the desk to hug him and kiss him on the cheek.

  ‘Go and get Morrison for me,’ he told her. ‘I want a word with him.’

  Geraghty watched her rush down the corridor. He wasn’t surprised at her keenness to return to Ireland, or to help the Provos. She’d put up a hell of a fight when he’d first decided to leave Ireland, and she’d come close to staying behind. Kerry had a stubborn streak, and he guessed that she’d got it from him. She had a hard side, too, a tendency to viciousness which went beyond simple devotion to the Cause. There had been times in Belfast when he’d felt she was actually enjoying taking on the army and the RUC, that she was getting some sort of kick out of the Troubles. Despite his apparent change of heart he was still reluctant to allow her to go back to Belfast and its violent influences, but he owed Liam Hennessy. He owed him a great deal. Besides, he knew that if she really set her mind on going back, he wouldn’t be able to stop her. He knew his daughter, and he knew that she wasn’t above telephoning Hennessy herself and offering her services. And if things were as bad as they sounded, he doubted if Hennessy would turn her down. And if Hennessy asked him if it was OK for Kerry to go back, could he refuse? Could he refuse any request of the man who held his life in his hands? No, he could not. And she knew that, his darling daughter. She knew that full well.

  Kerry found Morrison still watching television. ‘Dad wants to talk to you,’ she said. ‘He says I can come with you.’

  ‘You?’ said Morrison, surprised.

  ‘To help you track down the man who’s trying to hurt Uncle Liam.’

  A bemused Morrison followed her back down the corridor and into Geraghty’s study.

  ‘Leave us alone, Kerry, and shut the door this time,’ Geraghty told her. He waited until she’d gone before speaking. ‘She wants to help you, Sean,’ he said.

  ‘Can she do it?’ asked Morrison.

  ‘Oh yes, she’s a first-class tracker, I’ve taught her everything I know. She often comes with me out on to the moors after deer. She’s a good shot, too. That’s what I want to talk to you about. I don’t want her carrying a gun out there. Under any circumstances. I don’t want her put in any danger.’

  ‘I’ll take care of her. I promise.’

  ‘There’s something else.’ Geraghty scratched his chin and scrutinised Morrison. ‘I’m not sure how to put this, Sean. Kerry can be a bit, er, overenthusiastic sometimes. Do you know what I mean?’

  Morrison shook his head, mystified.

  ‘She’s always idolised Liam, and me, and ever since she was a kid she was on the fringes of the Organisation, running errands, taking messages, the sort of stuff we all went through, you know? Throwing stones at the troops, giving the RUC a hard time. But I never wanted her to get drawn into the real rough stuff, the sort of things I was involved in. I mean, she has a pretty good idea of what I did, and I think she wishes she could be more like me.’

  Morrison laughed. ‘Jesus, Micky, it’s hardly a secret, is it? There’s barely a pub in Derry where they don’t sing songs about you on a Saturday night when the beer’s flowing.’

  ‘Aye, Sean, that’s right enough. And I’m not ashamed of what I did, far from it. We’re at war with the fucking British and I’d do it all over again, the killing and everything. But my family has given enough. I don’t want Kerry to get any more involved. I didn’t then and I don’t now. I promised my wife, God rest her soul, I promised her before she died that I’d take Kerry away from Belfast before she got in too deep. I don’t want her to go back.’

  ‘You’re going to stop her?’ said Morrison, frowning.

  ‘No. No, I can’t stop her. But you must make sure she realises that this is a one-off. Don’t romanticise it for her, don’t pull her back. Just use her this one time, then send her back to me.’

  ‘I understand,’ said Morrison.

  ‘Then good luck, and God bless. And take care of her. She’s all the family I’ve got left.’ He swung his plaster cast off the desk and it thudded on to the floor. ‘It’s late. You should stay here tonight and make an early start tomorrow. I’ll get Kerry to cook us a meal. You might want to telephone Liam and let him know what’s happening, if Kerry hasn’t done so already.’ He reached for a set of metal crutches leaning against the wall and used them to clump out of the room.

  Maggie linked her arm through Woody’s as they stepped out of the cinema.

  ‘Good film,’ she said. ‘Bit violent, but fun.’

  ‘Yeah, I’ve always liked a bit of mindless violence,’ laughed Woody. ‘You hungry?’

  ‘Mmmm. Sure.’

  ‘Italian?’

  ‘Italian would be great.’

  Woody suggested a place in Covent Garden and they walked together out of Leicester Square and down Long Acre. Maggie asked him how he was getting on at work and he told her about the stories he was working on. She was always interested in what he was doing at the paper and seemed to hang on every word. He told her about the phone call from Pat Quigley and the mysterious Chinaman. She raised her eyebrows when she heard about the money in the carrier bag.

  ‘What do you think’s going on?’ she asked.

  Woody shrugged. ‘I was thinking that maybe this Chinaman had paid someone to go after Liam Hennessy, some sort of hit-man.’

  ‘Wow!’ she said.

  ‘Yeah, wow is right. It’d be one hell of a story, if only I can nail it down.’

  They stood at the roadside and waited for a gap in the traffic before crossing.

  ‘So what’s the problem?’ she asked.

  ‘He’s gone. Vanished. I went round to where he lives and he’d moved. No forwarding address. I don’t even have his full name.’

  ‘You don’t think that perhaps he’s gone to Ireland himself?’

  ‘Seems unlikely, doesn’t it? I mean, a Chinaman in Belfast on the trail of an IRA leader. It’s a bit unbelievable, even for our paper.’

  ‘I suppose so.’

  They walked in silence through the evening crowds, and then stopped to watch a man in a clown’s suit juggling five flaming torches.

  ‘Do you get to write much about the IRA?’ she asked.

  ‘Depends,’ said Woody. ‘I covered the Knightsbridge bombing, remember? The night I met you. Depends when it happens, you know.’

  ‘The Sunday World usually takes the Government line, doesn’t it?’ she said.

  Woody nodded. ‘Slightly to the right of Attila the Hun, we are.’

  ‘What about you? What do you think?’

  ‘Hell, Maggie, I don’t know. I’m a reporter, not a politician.’ The juggler put down three of his torches to scattered applause and then began fire-eating. ‘I guess I take the view that we should just pull the troops out and let the Irish sort it out themselves. You know the troops went to Northern Irel
and in the first place to look after the Catholics. To protect them from the Protestants. And now it’s the IRA who want them out. It doesn’t make sense. It isn’t something the British Government can sort out, that much I’m sure. It’s an Irish problem. What about you?’

  ‘I suppose you’re right. At the end of the day whatever the MPs in Westminster say isn’t going to make the slightest difference. Maybe your paper should say that.’

  Woody laughed. ‘I don’t think many MPs would take any notice of what appears in the Sunday World. The Times maybe, or the Telegraph.’ Something tingled at the back of Woody’s mind. Something to do with an MP. He watched the clown blow flaming liquid up into the night sky, a glistening bluish stream which flared into orange and yellow. Of course, thought Woody. S. J. Brownlow, the name in the notebook. Sir John Brownlow. The Chinaman’s MP. He’d said he’d written to his Member of Parliament and been to see him. With any luck he’d have The Chinaman’s letter on file.

  ‘What are you smiling at?’ Maggie asked.

  ‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘Come on, let’s go eat. I’m starving.’

  As the darkness crept through the forest, Nguyen opened one of the containers of chicken and ate it slowly, along with a container of boiled rice. When he’d finished he scraped leaves away from the forest floor and buried the remains in the soil. He drank from one of his canteens and put it in the rucksack alongside the components of his firebomb detonator and the stolen gun. The can of petrol was too bulky to fit into the rucksack so he was forced to carry it. He waited until the sun had gone down before moving through the forest. The can slowed him, not because it was heavy but because it was awkward and forever catching in the undergrowth, but once he left the trees and was out in open fields he picked up speed.

  He varied his route slightly this time, cutting through different fields and crossing the B8 further north than he’d crossed the previous night. Once he almost stumbled into an army patrol, half a dozen teenage soldiers walking along a narrow country lane, their faces blackened and their rubber-soled boots making almost no noise. They were strung out over fifty feet, walking in two lines. Nguyen was heading in the opposite direction, on the other side of a hedgerow looking for a gap so that he could cut across the track, when he heard one of the men sniff. Nguyen froze and as he did the petrol slapped against the side of the can. The field he was in had recently been ploughed and offered little in the way of cover but there was nowhere else for him to go so he dropped and rolled into a deep furrow and flattened himself down. He was invisible. He heard them go by, and heard the man sniff again. He stayed where he was for a full thirty minutes just in case they retraced their steps.

  It was after midnight when he eventually reached the hill overlooking Hennessy’s farm. He lay down close to the summit, careful that he didn’t break the skyline, and studied the farm buildings through his binoculars for more than an hour until he was satisfied that he had spotted all the guards. The starlight wasn’t strong enough to illuminate their faces but he could see that they were carrying shotguns. There was one in front of the cottage, another close by in the gap between the barns and the stables and three standing guard close to the farmhouse. One of them was smoking a cigarette, he could see the small red dot hovering in the air. He sniffed but could smell nothing. There had been times, Nguyen remembered, when he could smell a campfire two days’ march away in the jungle, or smell the toothpaste or chewing gum or tobacco of an American who had passed by three hours before, but he was younger then and his senses were more acute.

  During the hour he watched, the men walked up and down, occasionally talking to each other, but they did not bother patrolling the perimeter of the farm. Static sentries, thought Nguyen. The easiest to deal with.

  He moved slowly down the hill and then crawled across the fields towards the barns, giving a wide berth to the stables and the cottage. He lay in the grass about a hundred yards from the barns and concentrated on them, checking that he hadn’t missed a guard, and then began to crawl towards them. He moved only one limb at a time, left arm, right leg, right arm, left leg, keeping his body an inch off the ground to minimise noise while at the same time reducing his silhouette. It took him half an hour to cover the hundred yards to the nearest barn. He hugged the wall and slipped inside among the tractors and farm equipment. The barn was the furthest away from the farm but it would have been his first choice anyway because the other contained nothing but hay and the idea was to cause a diversion not to start a huge blaze that would have fire engines rushing over from the nearest town.

  He put the can of petrol under a blue tractor and took off his rucksack. He knelt down and carefully removed the clock, the matchbox and its wire, and from his pocket he took out a fresh battery. He connected short lengths of wire to the hands of the clock and set them at quarter to and quarter past and then connected the battery and the matchbox and its match heads into a continuous circuit. He unscrewed the cap of the petrol can and poured half of it on the floor around the tractor then stood it under the cab. He lowered the matchbox into the can so that it was suspended above the liquid. It was important that the match heads were ignited in the vapour and not swamped with petrol or there would be no explosion. He wound the wire around the handle of the can so that the matchbox couldn’t accidentally slip lower. He had thirty minutes to get into position. Plenty of time. He put his rucksack back on and eased himself out of the barn and slithered slowly along the ground, back the way he’d come, and then he crawled clockwise around the barns until he could see the side of the farmhouse and the gap that led to the courtyard.

  He waited. The petrol bomb exploded with a whooshing noise followed by the crackle and hiss of the tractor burning. There were shouts and yells and the men at the front of the farmhouse ran towards the barn. Lights went on in the farmhouse and the door to the cottage flew open. When the guards had run through into the courtyard Nguyen made his way to the outbuildings and lay down in the shadows. Hennessy came out of the back door along with two other men, he in his dressing-gown, they in pullovers and jeans and holding handguns. Nguyen had planned to climb the drainpipe and get in through the bathroom window but he saw that Hennessy had left the back door open. The kitchen light hadn’t been switched on so the doorway was in darkness. He waited until he was sure that no one else was coming out of the farmhouse and he moved along the wall, hugging the shadows like a cockroach, and then slipped through the door into the kitchen, listening carefully.

  He moved on the balls of his feet, knees slightly bent, ready to move quickly if he had to, but it was all clear and he crept into the hall and up the stairs. The stairs turned to the left and he reorientated the map of the farmhouse that he held in his head and when the stairs opened into the first-floor hallway he knew immediately which way to move so that he would pass the bathroom and find Hennessy’s bedroom. He unclipped the hunting knife from its scabbard on the strap of the rucksack and held it blade up as he put his hand on the bedroom door and pressed his ear to the warm wood. He hadn’t seen the woman leave the house. She might have left during the day but there was a chance she was still in the room. He turned the doorknob slowly and smoothly and eased the door open. The light was on and the bed was empty. He pushed the door and stepped into the room. At the foot of the bed was a wicker dog basket and a brown dog growled at him and then began to bark. Nguyen closed the door as the dog got to its feet and moved towards him, barking and snapping, its tail down between its legs and the fur standing up along the back of its neck.

  ‘Good dog,’ said Nguyen, holding the knife to his side.

  Hennessy stood with his hands on his hips as he watched two of his men spray the burning tractor with fire extinguishers, the foam hissing and bubbling on the hot metal. Joe Ryan had run a hosepipe from the stables and he yelled over his shoulder for his daughter to turn the water on. The hosepipe squirmed and kicked and then water burst from the nozzle and he played it over the walls of the barn.

  The rest of the men were busy moving e
quipment away from the fire, either to the far side of the barn or out into the courtyard. Kavanagh stood at Hennessy’s shoulder. In the distance Hennessy heard Jackie bark. ‘Still think I’ve got enough guards, Jim?’ he asked. Kavanagh remained silent, not sure if Hennessy was getting at him or not. ‘Any idea what caused it?’ Hennessy asked.

  ‘There’s a can under the tractor and some melted plastic. It’s The Chinaman, right enough. We were lucky that the can didn’t explode, it could’ve been a lot worse. By the look of it the flames came shooting out of the top of the can like a jet engine, spraying fire across the wall and setting light to the tractor’s tyres. It’s a lot worse than it looks.’

  ‘He cocked it up?’

  ‘Looks like it.’

  ‘Thank God he didn’t set fire to the other barn. If the hay had gone up we’d have never got it under control.’

  The men with the fire extinguishers put out the burning tractor and moved to help Ryan douse the burning side of the barn. The tractor’s tyres had melted and warped and the tractor was blackened and burnt and smeared with bubbly white foam. The smell of burnt rubber was choking and Hennessy and Kavanagh moved back into the courtyard. Hennessy looked up at his bedroom window. Jackie had stopped barking. ‘Still think we should go back to Belfast?’ asked Hennessy.

  ‘No question about it, Liam.’

  ‘And if he sets fire to my house? Could you stop him doing that?’

  Kavanagh realised that whatever he said he’d be in the wrong, so he said nothing. They stood together and watched the men douse the final flames.

  ‘Morrison should be back tomorrow,’ said Hennessy eventually. ‘He’s bringing someone with him who might be able to help. Kerry Geraghty.’