by John Steele
AUTHOR’S NOTE
The road to this novel began way back in the good-old-bad-old days of my youth in the Belfast of the seventies and eighties. The Ravenhill Road emerged relatively unscathed from the ‘Troubles’. There was no bomb on the lower part of the road, although there was a great video rental shop, sadly long gone. The road straddles East and South Belfast and has changed a lot since then, for good and bad. Both parts of the city saw their fair share of horrors and both have worked hard to put the past behind them.
The murders which form the backdrop to Jackie’s story in Ravenhill are fictional, but many are inspired by tragically true events. The La Mon bombing occurred as described and remains one of the most remembered atrocities in a long line of Northern Irish outrages. I have written the bombing into the novel with the utmost respect for the twelve dead and many injured. However, the hotel, like the majority of the people in our wee corner of the world, has moved on and prospers.
Half of Ravenhill is already an historical novel of sorts: it was a story which I wrote for very personal reasons, and to help my daughter understand the tangled, obstinate, warm, beautiful, passionate place that shaped her daddy. I hope, when she’s old enough to read it, the likes of Billy Tyrie, Rab Simpson and James Cochrane are well and truly gone, and Belfast and its people are as proud, irreverent and generous as ever.
Read on for a taster of
what comes next for Jackie Shaw …
The next Jackie Shaw thriller, Seven Skins, is available now
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CHAPTER 1
Saturday
Somewhere beyond the reaches of the Square Mile, at eleven-fifteen on a Saturday night, London rages, but the man and woman sit in the quiet seclusion of an eight-pounds-a-glass City wine bar, twitching with anticipation. The man is in his later years, a solid but unspectacular career behind him, and the woman is at least forty years his junior. She has an eager smile that verges on greedy and the man thinks she wants to be with him in the mistaken belief that he is worth something substantial.
He has refined the anecdotes and crafted the cues. Snippets tossed into conversation: ‘When I was in Zimbabwe – of course, it was Rhodesia back then …’ a rueful smile, ‘… or off the coast of North Korea …’ Then a few operational titbits and a shallow sigh. ‘But I shouldn’t go on: I signed the Act,’ and, for those too clueless to understand, ‘You know, the Official Secrets Act.’
He has the look, too: just enough calibrated dignity and the world-weary, careworn confidence of a man who has trod the darker roads of human existence and seen a world only glimpsed by others when the body of some foreign diplomat or oligarch washes up in the Thames, or lies broken in a Knightsbridge apartment. The whole package is good for a couple of free drinks from the younger City boys, and it reminds him that once he had, indeed, been a trusted operative with the British intelligence services.
The blank but polite look on the girl’s face reminds Len Parkinson-Naughton that she is too young to know what or where Rhodesia was, or to have any interest in Korea. She has finished her Prosecco after taking an age to sip it – he has finished three gins in the time – and is fingering the stalk of her glass with slim, spidery fingers. Her cheekbones and slim, angular nose say Slavic, possibly Serbian, making a mockery of the name she gave him: Beatrix. He can’t quite place her accent. The bar is striving for post-industrial chic and almost empty as the financial quarter slumbers between business days. The harsh fluorescent spotlighting, like the lamps in an old-school interrogation room, serve only to heighten the brilliant sheen of her coal-black hair. To all intents, despite her diminutive frame, she appears brittle and beautifully cruel, and he wants her with a restless desperation. The fact that this seems, somehow, all wrong enhances his desire all the more. After all, wrongdoing has been his forte for the last few years.
I’m a fool, he thinks. An old, proud fool who doesn’t know when he’s beaten. At this age, I should be gardening and building models of the North Atlantic Fleet in ’43.
The Rhodesian and North Korean cues are, like many of his conversational hooks, vicarious. Derek Reid, a HUMINT man in MI6, had met Mugabe back in the seventies and related the Rhodesian story at a conference in the States. In over thirty years with MI5, Parkinson-Naughton had never learned much of the tradecraft, even during his stint in Northern Ireland. He’d attended the lectures and heard the gossip in the canteen, but senior recruitment and HR officer at Thames House hadn’t been seen as a high-risk position in need of fieldcraft training. There was a brief spell of responsibility for running logistics in Ulster, but only because they were short-staffed and he was already in Lisburn doing performance evaluations. No, not much chance of being ‘spotted’ back in the old days, seduced by some GRU ‘swallow’ girl in a honey-trap, and even less now. This woman before him sees a lonely, older man in a good suit with the right accent, and smells money. And that is fine. He’s been paying for it since Pat left him and he’ll make sure Beatrix earns her fee.
They leave the bar and he catches her gazing at the glowing steel and glass bullet of 30 St Mary’s Axe, all forty-one storeys. He lights a cigar, the tip flaring in the dim light, and glances at Mitre House directly opposite. There are no lights in the cramped offices of the consultancy where he works two days a week as a favour to an old Oxbridge friend. A former intelligence agency officer is worth the salary of a non-executive director when it comes to tenders for Home Office or military contracts. The fact that Parkinson-Naughton had been an administrative manager for most of his career is immaterial. He talks a good game. To be seen on the street with an unknown young woman in heels and short skirt, however, would never do.
Then there is the handsome civil service pension and the savings from some other, secretive dealings. For a moment his eyelids flutter at the thought of that third income, what he considers his retirement fund, and he wets his lips with a booze-coated tongue. Then his eyes widen at the thought of Pat discovering the money, how she would revel in ruining him with the undisclosed cash, and he determines to work the delicate girl beside him that little bit harder in lieu of his poisonous ex-wife.
The girl, Beatrix, takes his arm and steers him towards the larger thoroughfare of Aldgate and a taxi to his home in Twickenham. But after a couple of yards she edges him to the left past Mitre Square, where Jack the Ripper eviscerated Catherine Eddowes, and into the narrow alleyway of St James’s Passage. He lets her lead him and feels a vague spark kindle in his belly. The passage is a dim trench at this time and, like much of the financial district at this hour, devoid of life. She stops him twenty yards from the far entrance of the passage, the empty avenue of Duke’s Place beyond, with a gentle shove against the alleyway’s wall.
She’ll pay for that later, he thinks, and feels the flame below his gut burn a little brighter.
Her kiss is strong and frantic. He feels a flicker of disappointment at the clumsiness in her embrace and surprise at how angry her tongue feels in his mouth. But he draws her to him nonetheless, crushing her small body hard against his, stooping, his shoulders still broad despite his years, to lock his mouth onto hers. He feels her bony knees stab at him as he closes his eyes and her muffled, ‘No. Not like this,’ only serves to goad him on. He is so inflamed, so lost in the struggle for a few seconds, that it takes him a moment to register that she’s been wrenched from him and that his hands are left clawing the musty air. He hears a short, stifled cry and then his world is filled by white heat and the angry bite of stinging fragments of brick. He sees a young man, pale and terrified, holding a pistol with a long, cigar-like suppressor. He smells the heavy musk of brick-dust and hears, distorted and far away, a hiss, ‘Get out of the way, youngster.’ Disorientated, he barely registers the harsh Irish accent.
A wiry, bearded man, perhaps in his late forties, takes the gun from the younger man and aims at the left side of Len Parkinson-Naughton’s head. The ex-MI5 man feels the beginning of a dull, excruciating ache and real
ises that part of his ear has been shot off. Then he hears the tinny clack of the suppressor doing its job, a sound cut off as abruptly as if someone had slammed a door. It is the last conscious moment of his life.
#
The three of them had been waiting long enough for the kid, Padraig Macrossan, to get a bad case of the jitters, and for the veteran, Harris, to get bored. Alex Morgan knew what could happen when men with guns had too much time on their hands and that’s why he’d insisted that only he carried; he’d give Macrossan the pistol when the time came. Besides, he’d already decided Harris was enjoying himself a little too much to be given a gun.
The girl was taking her sweet time but they’d been assured she was the older man’s type: short, scrawny and young.
Each to his own, thought Morgan. He preferred a woman with some meat on her bones but if the whore could get the old man where they wanted him, he had no complaints.
At around 11.45 they heard the couple in the passageway, her stilettos telegraphing their approach. The empty stone tunnel of the passage was an echo chamber and he worried for a moment about the noise of the shot, knowing the suppressor would mask only around 30 per cent of the report. He hoped that Macrossan would get the job done with one bullet.
They stood on Duke’s Place at the entrance to St James’s Passage, glancing up and down the thoroughfare for traffic or pedestrians. It was deserted. Not even a taxi. Harris smoked beside him as he took the Beretta M9 from his pocket and screwed the suppressor in place. The kid, Macrossan, stared at the weapon. The silhouettes of the couple, when they appeared, were almost comical, one tall and lanky, the other petite beside him.
The shadows merged and he heard muffled grunting as he handed the gun to Macrossan and followed him into the alleyway. Morgan grabbed the girl, slapping a hand over her mouth to smother her cry and for a moment it looked as though the kid would do as he’d been told. Stride up to the target and adopt the Weaver Stance: double-handed grip with forward pressure on the drawing hand and slight rearward pressure on the second hand to control recoil. But Macrossan stopped too close to the target and Morgan realised that the kid was holding his breath. Macrossan’s hand trembled as he fired and the bullet clipped the side of the old man’s head, ripping part of his ear off. The round tore into the brick behind and struck like steel on flint, sending a shower of fragments into the bloodied conch shell of the ruined ear and hurling the ricochet at a crazy angle, forcing Morgan to duck on instinct and hurl the girl behind him. The old man stood wild-eyed, his hands beginning to tremble, while Macrossan cowered against the wall. Then Harris appeared, wrenched the Beretta from the kid, clouted him behind the head as he said something in an irritated tone, and shot the target twice in the head, just below and to the right of the shredded left ear.
The old man folded in on himself. He hadn’t hit the ground as they caught his body and made their way back out of St James’s Passage, Harris unscrewing the suppressor from the pistol-barrel and Morgan and Macrossan dragging the corpse. The girl had already fled into the dark, vacant heart of the City.
#
It is one of a row of unremarkable, well-tended semi-detached houses on the dark street in West Belfast. Even the twenty-five-foot Peace Line wall, separating the street from its parallel neighbour, tapers off a few yards from the row of semis. Instead, the corrugated iron fence of a small industrial complex stands opposite number 85, albeit with a stencil of a gun sprayed on it with the scrawled legend, You are here, with an arrow pointing from the muzzle to the angry lettering.
But number 85 is distinguished from its neighbours thanks to the store of three Glock 17 handguns, an SA80 assault rifle, two Mossberg 500 shotguns, and ammunition wrapped in sacking and hidden in the loft insulation. Behind the closed curtains, the three men sitting in the small living room watching reality TV and drinking strong, bitter tea, are hard men with prison records and blood on their hands. They don’t know each other. If lifted by the police, they’ll have minimal information to give under questioning, should they break. All three have been diligent in maintaining a low profile in order to keep the house and its residents in good stead with the locals: the area is close knit and gossip spreads fast, particularly when strangers move in, so a minimum of attention is vital.
The street is silent and empty. It is almost midnight and most people are at home, drinking in one of the bars on the larger road nearby, in an illegal shebeen, or in one of the city centre clubs. A thick veil of cloud hangs over Belfast, as though someone has stretched a blanket from the Black Mountains in the west to the Castlereagh Hills in the east, and the sodium streetlights of the city below lend a flame-like glow to the overcast sky.
The three tea-drinkers don’t hear the low grumbling as ten Police Service of Northern Ireland Land Rovers cough to life at the rear of the industrial complex opposite. The sound, and the whine of the PSNI helicopter hovering three miles away, is drowned by the wail of a mannequin-like celebrity wife in conflict with a glamour model over a pad of eyeshadow on the TV. One of the men rises to stretch and another lights up his fourth chained cigarette.
‘Turn that down, Marty,’ he says. ‘We don’t want the neighbours giving off.’
‘Sure, the walls are thick.’
‘Not as thick as your head. Turn it down, will you. I saw the woman next door with a wee child yesterday. You’ll be waking it up.’
The tap of Marty’s finger on the remote control seems to amplify as the soft clatter of men and equipment running towards the front door drifts in from the street. The third man, sitting nearest the living-room door, spills his tea at the first shout of ‘Armed police! Armed police!’, punctuated by the heavy thump of a battering ram on the front door. Light floods the room despite the closed curtains, infused with blue flashes, throwing bogeyman shadows of the three men on the living-room walls. The thin, insect-chatter of the helicopter above fills the air like the whine of a migraine.
Marty and his companions hear the dull explosion as the front door gives way. The men drop to their knees and place their hands behind their heads before the first officers enter the room, Heckler & Koch submachine guns at the ready. The man on Marty’s right takes a look at the PSNI men in full body armour, wearing balaclavas and goggles, helmet-mounted cameras and mics, and clutching the ubiquitous H&K MP5s, and says, ‘Sorry, lads, we finished playing Call of Duty a couple of hours ago.’
The boot on his neck keeps him quiet while he is cuffed along with his companions, and one of the forced entry team reads their names.
‘Philip Cross. Robert “Sav” Savage. Marty Catterick.’
Twenty minutes later they are separated, Philip Cross in the back of a Land Rover on the street, Robert Savage in the forensic tent which has been set up in the front garden, and Marty Catterick in the living room, face down and kept company by two officers wearing chequered baseball caps and their enmity on their sleeves.
A tall sergeant, his face slick with sweat after finally peeling off his fire-retardant balaclava, enters the cramped space clutching a shotgun and sits on the sofa.
‘Mr Martin Catterick. So, what’s on the shopping list, eh?’ says the sergeant. Another policeman enters the room and gives him an official-looking form then exits again. ‘Three Glocks. Not any of ours, I hope.’
Marty says, ‘Fuck you.’
‘No thanks, I’m on duty. One SA80.’ The sergeant winks at one of the other officers as he writes something on the form and says, ‘Take the paperwork up to McMahon. He’s in the loft going through the ammunition now.’
The officer leaves with the document. His companion shifts position slightly, getting a better grip on his submachine gun.
The sergeant says, ‘And, finally, two Mossbergs: check.’ He pats the shotgun. ‘I believe the Yanks were fond of using these, although that’s changing now. We prefer the Remington 870 ourselves. Still, I suppose a shotgun’s a shotgun, at the end of the day.’
He smiles at Marty and stands, lifting the black, murderous Mossbe
rg. Behind his back, Marty Catterick’s hands fidget. He needs to piss.
The sergeant says, ‘Unless they have one of these in the barrel.’ The tall policeman tips the shotgun muzzle-down and a small, plastic, rectangular object falls out, landing on the beer and fag ash-stained carpet. The cop drops to his haunches in front of Marty and picks up the black and green memory stick. As Marty stares at the device, held between the tall sergeant’s thumb and index finger, the policeman leans closer to him, his Kevlar flak jacket straining against his chest.
‘Let’s you and me go up to Serious Crime in Antrim, Marty, and have a wee chat about this.’ The sergeant sniffs, like a bloodhound, his nose in the air. ‘And we’ll give you a change of clothes to wear, seeing as your jeans are covered in piss.’
CHAPTER 2
Monday
Jackie Shaw scratches his arse, places the shotgun in the back of the Range Rover and straps in for a bumpy ride. He starts the vehicle and begins the drive down the stubbled lane leading to an eight-furlong grass gallop that will be pummelled by several thoroughbreds later in the morning.
Neither the gun, nor the car, is his. Nor is the land he now crosses or the bed he woke up in twenty minutes ago. Jackie doesn’t own much at all, but the bad dreams are his and his alone. Sometimes he wakes moaning to the dim, sparse contours of the stone-walled room and functional wooden furnishings in his small flat, the loft of a converted barn on the farm. At others, the upper half of his body springs forward, like the blade of a flick-knife. The flat is his cocoon, his solace. It contains a large wooden wardrobe with a mirror on the door, kitchenette, shower cubicle, sofa and wooden coffee table. There are two photographs propped on top of the chest of drawers: his mother and father, both buried back home in Northern Ireland, and his sister with her husband and kids. The quiet purity and solitude of the bare, whitewashed walls calms him and there are no curtains on the windows. He doesn’t want to feel entrapped: there should be no veil over the world outside.