The Chinaman

by Stephen Leather

  ‘Tell them ten pounds of Semtex,’ said Fisher. ‘And tell them there will be more bombings until the British Government withdraws its armed forces from Ulster. They’ll believe you.’

  O’Reilly frowned. ‘Why aren’t we using the codeword?’

  Fisher waved his can of Guinness in the air. ‘Change of strategy,’ he said. ‘I had a phone call from Ireland while you were out. No codewords from now on.’

  ‘Did they say why?’

  ‘Does it matter?’ asked Fisher.

  O’Reilly grinned. ‘Not really.’ He picked up the London street atlas. ‘Where shall I make the call from this time? How about Barking? I’ve never been to Barking.’

  Fisher shook his head. ‘There are times, O’Reilly, when I wonder if you’re quite right in the head.’

  Hennessy heard the Range Rover crunching down the track and went to the front door to meet it. He was too late, the car had gone round the back to park in the courtyard so he went back through the house and out of the kitchen door. By the time he reached the car Kerry had already got out. She rushed up to him and hugged him.

  ‘Uncle Liam,’ she said, holding him tightly.

  ‘Kerry, thanks for coming.’ Over her shoulder he greeted Morrison. ‘Was your flight OK?’ he asked Kerry.

  She released him from the hug and stood back, still holding his shoulders. ‘Uncle Liam, I’m so sorry about Jackie. She was a lovely dog.’

  ‘She was that,’ agreed Hennessy. He’d buried Jackie himself in a patch of rough ground just beyond the vegetable garden. He helped Kerry in with her bag while Morrison carried his own and O’Hara held the ski-poles. Morrison saw the curious look that Hennessy gave the poles and he shrugged. ‘Don’t ask,’ he said.

  Hennessy took Kerry up and showed her the bedroom he’d prepared for her. She’d stayed there many times, especially when she was a teenager. It was a small, pretty room, with pink curtains and pine furniture. She put her case at the foot of the bed and looked out of the tiny window. ‘Is Auntie Mary here?’ she asked.

  ‘No, she’s gone to visit Marie in London.’

  ‘That’s a pity,’ she said.

  ‘We thought it best. Why don’t you freshen up and join Sean and me downstairs,’ said Hennessy. ‘I’ve put some clean towels in the bathroom for you. And you know where everything is.’

  He went downstairs. Morrison had put his bag in the lounge. ‘There’s a bedroom upstairs ready for you, Sean,’ Hennessy told him. ‘Second on the left at the head of the stairs, when you’re ready.’

  ‘Great, thanks, Liam.’

  ‘You know there’s been another bombing?’

  ‘Yeah, Willie said on the way in. Blew up your barn, he said.’

  Hennessy sat down. ‘No, I mean another bombing on the mainland. At Ascot. Today. Eight killed.’

  ‘Has Bromley phoned?’ Morrison asked, dropping into an easy chair opposite Hennessy.

  Hennessy shook his head. ‘Not yet.’

  ‘I wonder what he’s playing at.’

  ‘He definitely said he’d go for it?’

  ‘No question about it.’

  ‘Then we just have to wait.’

  ‘Yeah. I gather The Chinaman was in the house last night. Willie said he was in your room with a bomb.’

  ‘Unbelievable, isn’t it. Got in and out of the house without anyone seeing him.’

  ‘So the fire in the barn was a diversion?’

  ‘I think so, right enough. He said he wanted to talk.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And he’s given me three days to find out who’s behind the bombings. Then he’s going to kill me.’ The dispassionate way Hennessy described the threat belied his true feelings. ‘Do you want a drink?’

  Morrison shook his head. ‘No, Kerry says she wants to have a look around while the light is still good. I’d better keep a clear head.’

  Kerry appeared at the door and the two men got to their feet. She’d changed into jeans and a dark-blue sweatshirt. ‘You’re starting already?’ asked Hennessy. ‘Are you sure you don’t want a bite to eat?’

  ‘It’s the light, Uncle Liam. The best times to see tracks are early in the morning and late in the afternoon. It’s to do with the angle of the sun and the shadows it casts. We’ve only got an hour or so. Is there someone who can show me where they saw him?’

  ‘Jim Kavanagh knows where the car bomb was triggered. And he can show you where one of our men was attacked.’

  ‘Right,’ she said, rubbing her hands together, ‘let’s get started. Sean, where are the poles and stuff?’

  ‘Willie put them in the kitchen.’

  ‘Come on then.’ She led the way to the kitchen leaving Hennessy and Morrison smiling at each other.

  ‘Looks like she’s taken charge,’ said Hennessy. ‘I think you might have to watch yourself there.’

  They walked into the kitchen to find Kerry putting the two poles on the table. She slipped off the discs from the end of each of the poles, the bits that stopped the poles from sinking too deep into the snow. ‘I forgot to get some binoculars, do you have some?’ she asked Hennessy, and he produced a pair in an old leather case from the hall. She opened the case and slotted in a notebook and pencil and the tape measure. She took one of the torches and handed the other, and a notebook and pencil, to Morrison. ‘Right,’ she said. ‘Let’s go.’

  Morrison found Kavanagh at the front of the house and he asked him to show them where The Chinaman had been when the bomb had destroyed the Jaguar. Of the Jaguar there was now no sign, Ryan had towed the wreckage away with one of the tractors and put it in one of the barns, away from the prying eyes of army patrols and low-flying helicopters. The crater had been filled in with soil but was still obvious, like a gaping wound.

  ‘Your hat,’ said Kerry, holding it out to Morrison as they walked down the track. He took it and put it on.

  ‘Cute,’ she said.

  ‘That’s not a word we normally use to describe Sean Morrison,’ said Kavanagh, grinning. ‘But yez right, he does look cute.’

  ‘Thanks guys,’ said Morrison dryly. ‘Can we just get on with the business at hand.’

  Kavanagh took them up to the filled-in crater and then led them through the grass. It was trampled down in many places and even to Morrison’s untutored eyes it was obvious that a number of men had been there, presumably chasing The Chinaman. Morrison couldn’t stop thinking of Nguyen as The Chinaman, even though he knew he was from Vietnam.

  ‘We found a battery here,’ said Kavanagh, indicating a flattened-down area. ‘And it’s where the wires ended. He lay here until he saw that the car was over the bomb, detonated it, and then ran that way.’ He pointed towards the hedgerow.

  ‘Ran?’ asked Kerry. ‘You saw him?’

  ‘Well, crawled, I suppose. We didn’t see him, not then, but we were too busy trying to get Jimmy out of the wreckage. We saw the wires and guessed that he’d gone that way.’

  ‘Where did you first see him?’

  ‘I didn’t. We saw some tracks leading to that copse,’ he pointed again, ‘but we didn’t know if he’d gone into the trees or run by and gone through the fields. We split up, I went that way, three of the men went into the woods. He attacked one of them and stole his gun, the other two saw him running away, then they lost him again.’

  ‘OK, show me which way he went.’

  Kavanagh led the way, following the trampled grass to the hedge and showing her where the gap was. She examined the broken twigs and the mud by the hedge’s roots. ‘It looks like an army went this way,’ she said. ‘They’ve obliterated any tracks there might have been.’

  ‘Hey, we were chasing the bastard, not tracking him!’ said Kavanagh angrily. ‘We’d just seen Jimmy get blown apart, we weren’t too concerned about where we were putting our feet.’

  Morrison put his hand on Kavanagh’s shoulder. ‘OK, Jim, cool down. She wasn’t getting at you, she’s just trying to help.’

  ‘I only meant that it’s easier whe
n there’s one set of tracks, Jim,’ she said.

  Kavanagh shrugged off Morrison’s hand. ‘Yeah, OK, I’m sorry I snapped at yez. We’re all under a lot of pressure, and we didn’t get a lot of sleep last night.’

  ‘Forget it,’ said Morrison. ‘Show us which way he went.’

  Kavanagh took them through another field, towards the copse he’d pointed at earlier. ‘I went that way, but three of the men went in to check out the woods.’ He pushed through some waist-high bushes until they were standing on a pathway that wound through the trees. ‘The way they tell it, the three of them split up, and one of them, the one that got stabbed, went down the path.’

  Kerry knelt down and looked at the ground. It was crisscrossed with a multitude of footprints, but she said nothing.

  ‘Where was he stabbed?’ asked Morrison.

  ‘In the leg,’ answered Kavanagh.

  Morrison laughed sharply. ‘I meant where in the woods was he attacked.’

  ‘Oh right, I see what yez mean. This way.’ He took them along the path and showed them. The soil had been flattened and there was a rusty discoloration. Dried blood, Morrison realised.

  ‘Right,’ said Kerry. ‘Can you two gentlemen please get the hell off the path?’

  Morrison and Kavanagh stepped to one side while she scrutinised the tracks. She walked back down the path a few paces and then squatted down and squinted, moving her head from side to side as she scrutinised the footprints and the place where the man had lain on the ground. She switched on her torch and shone it along the path, altering its angle as she played the light over the soil.

  ‘Any good?’ asked Morrison.

  She shook her head and stood up. ‘What happened then?’ she asked Kavanagh.

  He nodded down the path. ‘He went that way. One of the others saw him and fired a couple of shots but didn’t hear anything. They chased him down the path until one of them got caught in a trap.’

  ‘A trap?’

  ‘A hole in the ground with small stakes in it. Smeared with shit, believe it or not.’

  ‘How far?’

  ‘A hundred yards or so. But be careful, there could be others. Yez wouldn’t want to put yez foot in one of them.’

  She motioned for them to stay where they were and went down the trail, prodding carefully in front of her with the stick. She came upon the trap and crouched down beside it. There were still too many footprints to be able to tell which belonged to The Chinaman. She continued along the path but found nothing to help her. She did find another trap, though, and she cleared the soil away from it so that nobody would step in it.

  She went back to Kavanagh and Morrison and began examining the vegetation either side of the path, using the ski-pole to move brambles aside. ‘He must have hidden somewhere to have caught your man by surprise,’ she murmured. ‘Somewhere where he couldn’t be seen but from where he could reach the path quickly – and quietly.’

  ‘What are you looking for?’ asked Morrison.

  ‘Bruised stems, broken twigs, pebbles that have been moved. It’s hard to say, I’ll know it when I see it. Problem is, he was here two days ago which means a lot of the traces will have gone. We’re lucky that it hasn’t rained, but the wind obliterates a lot of stuff and any soil he kicked up will have dried out long ago.’

  She bent down and looked at the brambles. ‘Come on, Chinaman, where were you hiding? Where would you feel safe?’ She was talking to herself and Morrison could only half hear. She turned round and began searching the opposite side of the path. There was a large spreading oak tree and she scrutinised the brambles at its base.

  ‘Sean, come and look at this.’

  He stood next to her and looked down at the tangle of thorny strands.

  ‘What am I looking at?’ he asked.

  She pointed with the end of her pole. ‘See that bit there, see how it’s stuck under that thorn?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said hesitantly, not sure what she was getting at.

  ‘See how it’s under tension,’ she continued. ‘It’s slightly distorted, it’s been pushed into that position and the prickles on that bit are holding it down.’

  ‘Which means what?’

  She sighed and gave him a withering look. ‘It means, Sean, that something, or somebody, pushed it into that position. Watch.’ She used the ski-pole to push the bent strand and it sprang free and wavered in the air like the antenna of a huge insect. Kerry began pushing more of the brambles to the side. ‘Help me, Sean,’ she said.

  Together they cleared a section of the undergrowth away from the earth. ‘There! See?’ she said. There were two smudges in the soil. ‘He was walking on the balls of his feet.’ She held the torch down and shone the light at an angle to the impressions, the shadows highlighting the marks.

  ‘Yes, I see it now. God, you’re right. He must have been hiding behind the tree, and attacked our man from behind.’

  ‘Come on, we’ll go round the tree in the opposite direction, see if there are any better footprints there.’

  She and Morrison pushed the brambles apart and followed the curve of the tree around. She found the crack in the trunk and moved aside to show Morrison. In the soft earth were clear signs that The Chinaman had waited there, a number of footprints and a circular indentation which Kerry explained was probably made by his knee. She showed him places on the trunk where he had leaned against it and scraped away parts of the lichen on the bark. She pointed at the best example of a print with her pole. ‘Now we use our notebooks,’ she said, opening the binoculars case. She took out her notebook and pencil and with painstaking concentration made a drawing of the print, using the tape measure to ensure that it was an exact copy. She watched as Morrison did the same, correcting him over the shape of the heel of the boot and the pattern of the sole. ‘We do this so that we’ll always know from now on if it’s his footprint that we’re looking at,’ she explained. ‘And when we’ve finished this we’ll draw a print of him walking on the ball of his foot.’

  When they’d finished the drawings to Kerry’s satisfaction, she took the two men along the edge of the path, following the prints of running men past the two exposed traps. After a hundred yards or so the trees thinned out and they were standing in a large field, lush, green grass peppered with daisies and dandelions.

  ‘Question now is which way did he go when he left the woods?’ she mused. She pulled the peak of her cap down and scanned the horizon. ‘Come on, Chinaman, which way would you go? You’d be pretty exposed crossing the field wouldn’t you, even if you waited until it was dark. So you’d look for cover, wouldn’t you?’ She turned to Kavanagh. ‘Did your men go after him, across the field?’

  ‘No, we reckoned he went to ground somewhere in the copse, but we couldn’t find him. We didn’t have enough men.’

  ‘And were there any animals in the field?’

  Kavanagh scratched his head. ‘I don’t think so.’

  Kerry dropped down low and scanned the field, moving her head slowly but keeping her eyes fixed ahead.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Morrison asked curiously. She kept turning her head left and right as she answered. ‘Changes in colour,’ she said. ‘Easier to spot when your eyes are moving. If he went through the grass he’d alter the way the blades lie. The underside of a blade of grass is a bit lighter than the part that faces the sun. You won’t notice one or two but you can spot a trail through long grass. That’s one of the ways we track deer. Trouble is the grass reorientates itself fairly quickly, just a few hours if it isn’t too badly damaged. It depends how tall it is. This is quite long so it could take a while before it reverts to the way it was. Damn, I can’t see anything. Come on, walk over here.’

  She took him a few paces to the left and tried again. She slapped her thigh in frustration. ‘Damn,’ she said. She stood up and arched her back, her hands on her hips. ‘The light’s starting to go,’ she said. ‘Let me just check the edge of the wood and then we’ll call it a day.’

  She began walki
ng slowly along the perimeter of the copse with Kavanagh and Morrison following behind. She scrutinised the ground and the vegetation overhanging the grass. Several times she stopped and bent down to examine a fallen leaf or a twig, causing the two men to pull up short, but she found nothing to give an indication that The Chinaman had passed that way. Then, just as she was about to give up, she saw a large leaf that had been pressed into the ground. She picked it up and held it out to Morrison. ‘Yes!’ she exclaimed. ‘See how it’s bruised, how it’s been crushed across the middle?’ she said. ‘That’s a sure sign that it’s been trodden on.’ She turned it over. There were several grains of soil pressed into it. ‘See that? You can tell by the state the leaf’s in that it happened within the last day or two. See how it’s still fairly fresh?’

  Morrison nodded. ‘But couldn’t it have been an animal?’

  ‘It would have had to have been a fairly large animal, I mean the bruising couldn’t have been done by a rabbit or a fox. I reckon this is where The Chinaman came out of the wood. Now, did he go across the field, or did he walk along the edge to that hedgerow?’ She scanned the field again with her strange fixed stare. ‘No, not that way,’ she murmured. She continued along the side of the copse, pushing straggling vegetation to the side with her pole.

  ‘Got him!’ she cried, and waved the two men to come and stand beside her. She grinned and pointed down. At some point in the past a tree stump had been poisoned to kill its roots and the earth for some distance around it was devoid of grass. There, in the soil, were two prints, a left foot and a right foot, less than a metre apart. She took her notebook out and compared the prints to her drawing. They matched.

  She slipped two elastic bands on the ski-pole, twisting them around so that they gripped tightly, then held it above the two footprints, parallel to the ground and an inch or so above the soil. She put the tip of the pole above the back of the heel of the front print and slid one of the bands to mark the position of the tip of the toe of the rear print. Morrison watched her, enthralled. Kerry moved the pole so that it ran through the centre of the rear print and she slid the second elastic band down to mark the position corresponding to the rear of the heel, so marking the length of the stride. She stood up and showed her pole to Morrison. ‘Did you follow that?’ she asked, and he nodded. ‘OK, you have a go then.’ She watched over his shoulder as he positioned two elastic bands on his own pole.