Woman of State

by Simon Berthon

  ‘Don’t fucking do that! You wanna advertise we’re here?’ says the driver.

  ‘Sorry,’ she says, ‘didn’t mean to.’ Though she did, however futile it might be. She runs back to the car behind and bangs on Joseph’s window. He sits there, immobile, not acknowledging her. She bangs again, louder. This time he winds down the window, its unoiled squeak the only sound in the night.

  ‘Whaddya gonna do, Joseph?’

  ‘Whaddya mean, what am I gonna do?’

  ‘This is your chance. You can take those two on, ’course you can. I’ll help. Then I’ll take David. Whatever he’s done to me, I’ll do that for him. Then you can run.’

  ‘They took my gun. Before you came. It’s over, Maire.’

  ‘If you do nothing, you’ll be damned.’ She delivers the sentence like a black-capped judge.

  ‘We’re all damned, Maire. He’s dead meat, it’s about me now.’ He winds the window back up and turns his head to stare blankly at the darkness in front. She lets go a sigh of contempt, kicks his door with her heel and stalks off.

  They pull David to a corner of the field some thirty yards from the jeep. The rain is now a steady seeping blanket of mist casting a thin film of moisture on her face and clothes. She is enveloped in dampness, her short-heeled boots casting faint impressions on the grass as she catches up with them. They’re beside a shallow grave, crudely dug out of the earth, but deep enough to house a man’s body and cover it. Another contributor to this mournful ritual must have been sent ahead to prepare it. David was right: they were never going to spare him.

  They prop him up on the edge of the grave, his broken legs dangling inside it. She drops to the ground beside him, putting both arms round him. He murmurs something, his voice muffled by the wounds to his mouth and teeth.

  ‘What did you say, David?’ she asks.

  ‘I . . . need . . . absolution.’ He forces out the words one by one.

  ‘Do you want me to ask for a priest?’ He nods his head and then looks hard into her eyes. ‘Maire, it wasn’t planned. I just met you.’ A tear appears at the corner of an eye. ‘And then they made me do it.’

  ‘Do what, David?’ she whispers.

  ‘I didn’t want it.’ His voice ebbs and his head droops.

  She stays silent for a few seconds, then says only, ‘I loved you, David.’ She sees more tears in his eyes.

  ‘I need a priest,’ he whispers. There is a pathetic urgency in his plea. ‘And Maire . . . I want you to do it.’

  She stands up and approaches the driver and the ‘man’. ‘You heard, him, he needs a priest. You’re not going to deny him that, are you?’

  ‘Give me your bottle of water,’ the man says. They’re the first words she hears him speak. A soft, gentle voice, the south of the island, she thinks, a voice to comply with. She hands him the bottle.

  He kneels down beside David. ‘Are you Catholic, David?’ His eyes flickering open and shut, David nods his head once.

  ‘David, are you sorrowful for your past sins? Do you trust in God and resign yourself to His will?’

  ‘Yes.’ It is barely more than a movement of his lips.

  The ‘man’ drips water from the bottle onto David’s forehead and slowly rubs it in circles. ‘Through this holy unction may the Lord pardon you whatever sins or faults you have committed. May the Lord who frees you from sin save you and raise you up.’

  David turns his head to him. ‘Thank you.’

  The ‘man’ stands up and the driver turns to Maire. ‘Time for you to leave, Maire.’

  ‘Just one more minute,’ she says, ‘no more, I promise.’ She looks from one to the other.

  ‘OK,’ says the man. She whispers to him and he hands her an object.

  ‘No tricks,’ says the driver. ‘I’ve got one pointing at him. And you.’

  She crouches beside him again. ‘I bought a ring for you, David,’ she whispers. ‘I’m gonna put it in your pocket.’ He raises his eyes to her and manages to form the trace of a smile. She produces a box from the inside sleeve of her jacket, removes a gold ring, holds it close to his eyes, puts it back in the box and places it deep in his jacket pocket.

  Then she puts her arms around him and holds him close for a few seconds. The muffled crack of a single shot echoes like a dog’s bark. She stands and walks away. After she’s gone some twenty yards or so, there’s a second shot. She reaches the car, sits down on the passenger seat, and breathes slowly and deeply.

  The sound of an engine firing startles her. She jerks upright and looks around to see the second car, Joseph Kennedy at the wheel, heading out of the field and back down the farm track.

  The driver sprints towards her, shouting.

  ‘What the fuck’s happened?’

  ‘I dunno.’

  ‘Couldn’t you see?’

  ‘Do you think I was looking?’

  ‘For fuck’s sake!’ He sounds desperate.

  ‘You won’t catch him now,’ she says. ‘Leave it.’

  ‘They’ll fucking have me for this.’

  ‘It’s too late. Just tell them a story.’

  The driver scans the horizon, no more than black shapes and contours lost in the mist. It is silent, no car noise, no lights, no life.

  He slowly makes his way back to the grave to throw the final sods of earth on another dead man.

  The driver returns her to Dublin. It is a slow, silent journey. The end of life. Emptiness. Utter powerlessness. At the city outskirts, glimmerings of early-morning light peer through the window; she averts her face from them. As they near the house, she asks the driver one question.

  ‘Why did you come for me?’

  He doesn’t look round. ‘They told you. To get him to talk.’ He pauses. ‘Probably needed to check you were sound, too.’ She understands the menace. It doesn’t touch her. Nothing again will.

  He drops her at the end of the street. ‘You get out here.’ She walks slowly at first, a dirge-like trudge, then lifts her head and picks up speed. She silently unlocks the front door and climbs the stairs, praying that Mrs Ryan won’t emerge.

  She looks out at the brightening sky, sits down at her desk, places a book on it and begins to read. She opens a notebook and writes in it. A tear falls onto the page. She wipes it away and arouses herself to anger and purpose.

  CHAPTER 29

  ‘That was it,’ said Anne-Marie, ‘the end of David Vallely. Or should I say Wallis?’

  They had walked up and down the riverside as she told her story and were now at rest, leaning against railings, peering down at the moonlit water. ‘It must have been horrible,’ said Carne. ‘Terrifying.’ He felt his inability to find words of comfort. And an overwhelming relief that she had told him.

  ‘It’s a long time ago. When I think about it, it still feels like yesterday.’

  ‘Have you ever told anyone else?’ he asked.

  ‘No. Until tonight, the only people who know are the ones who were there.’ She paused. ‘That’s my shadow. The things I know and the things I don’t know.’

  ‘So, the here and now,’ said Carne, wanting to re-engage her. ‘You never saw Joseph since that night.’

  ‘Yes. That was the last time I saw him. Alive, anyway. The next time it was his body hanging in the garage.’

  ‘He must have reckoned he was next for a bullet in the head. Either British or IRA.’

  ‘He certainly put saving his own skin first.’

  Carne tried to picture the scene. ‘David didn’t make it any easier for him – “the one who got away”. Why would he say that?’

  ‘Because Joseph had survived, I guess,’ she replied. ‘You can’t read more into it than that.’

  ‘Maybe.’ He stared down, avoiding her eyes, as if ashamed. ‘There’s one thing, Anne-Marie.’

  ‘If you must.’

  ‘At the very end, it wouldn’t matter who actually fired the first shot into his head, would it?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I mean he was g
oing to die, anyway. So it would have been a merciful release for that shot to be fired before he was expecting it. When he felt comforted. And not alone.’

  ‘Yes.’ She was almost inaudible against the hum of traffic.

  ‘If anyone in that position had the courage to do that,’ he continued, I would support them.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But say, just say, Joseph had seen something. Had known who fired the first shot. Who actually killed him. That might give him his threat.’

  ‘That wasn’t Joseph’s threat,’ she countered, then paused. He stayed silent, wondering if she would say more, rubbing his eyes with his hands and keeping the palms on his face, in some sort of supplication. No further words came – there was still something withheld. Perhaps it was merely embarrassing, or awkward. She would reach it in her own time.

  ‘I have a nightmare,’ she said. Her tone indicated a change of subject, a move away from Joseph. ‘For a year or two afterwards, it recurred quite often. Then it stopped. Since that sighting of the man in the brimmer hat, and now the deaths, it’s come back. It will go away in time. But, for now, it’s haunting me.’

  He felt she was trying to find a way of telling him something. Or, perhaps, of avoiding it. ‘What happens?’ he asked.

  She picked her words carefully, but with a distancing abstraction, as if she were talking about a third person. ‘I think what it’s about is becoming him. Experiencing his journey, inhabiting his body. His fears, his knowledge about the end he’s facing, a blankness in a far-off, isolated place. He doesn’t understand why, or how, he’s come to be in this place. Some accidental wrong turning has brought him there. It’s a case, almost, of mistaken identity. It shouldn’t be him, it should be someone else.’ She stopped. ‘Sorry, it sounds silly, doesn’t it, far-fetched?’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ he replied gently. ‘The priest at the funeral – Father Simon – told me something curious. The last time they met, David said he was trapped in a conflict of duty and love. He wanted the priest to give him a resolution. The priest instructed him that it was a choice only he could make. So, perhaps, love had made him the wrong person in the wrong place.’

  She slumped. The movement was almost imperceptible, but enough for him to feel it. ‘But duty prevailed in the end. Is that what you’re saying? Poor, bloody, trapped fool.’

  ‘Not entirely,’ said Carne. ‘He told you he believed he’d made a deal over your brother. He must have thought that resolved the conflict. He could complete his duty and look forward. Until, at the end, he realized it was a contradiction which eliminated hope.’ He fell silent, watching her trying to make sense of the conflicted young man.

  ‘If only he could have spoken of it to me,’ she said. ‘Actually, now I think of it, he did say something – that he’d solved, what was it, two conflicting propositions? He was talking about his thesis but I guess that was just code. I still don’t know if he ever wrote a word of it. The curious thing is that I’d have forgiven all the deceits if he’d had the courage to say it openly. And I’d have got him away.’

  ‘Yes, and he’d have known that you’d try to stop him. To save him from himself. To separate him from his bosses. Even if it meant exposing him.’

  ‘Possibly, yes.’

  ‘So it took another form of courage to complete the task he’d set himself.’

  ‘Or others set for him.’

  ‘If he agreed, it makes no difference.’

  ‘If I think back over his behaviour in those final weeks,’ she reflected, ‘he must have been torturing himself. He probably knew it would destroy him. So why go on?’

  ‘Because,’ replied Carne, ‘he must have still thought he was doing good. That’s what everyone who knew him says. He wanted to do good.’

  ‘To kill? Or, rather, murder?’

  ‘There was a ceasefire four months later.’

  ‘Ends can never justify means if it means murder,’ she declared. ‘Or disappearances. Or torture. Or all the other brutalities they’ve invented. Isn’t that what the history of the human race is about? And why we have laws?’

  ‘Men’s hearts are complex,’ he replied. They held each other’s eyes for a second. He had never seen such a beguiling combination of mind and body.

  ‘Anyway, back to the dream. It changes. He comes into view and I’m now in my own body, controlled by the captors. Slowly he turns, his bloodied, broken face looms into the frame. It’s cinematic. A Gothic horror movie. And a disembodied voice shouts at me to shoot.’

  ‘Do you?’

  ‘I don’t know because I wake up.’ She raised a hand to his cheek and lips and to shush him. ‘That’s enough of an answer. And enough questions. You’ve done your job. You know everything.’

  That he could not yet believe. But the weight of his suspicion, aroused by the fingerprint and DNA, had slipped away. ‘The oddity is this,’ he began. ‘I, we, know what happened. But we still don’t really know how, or why, it happened. Or what the plan was.’

  ‘Of course we do,’ she answered peremptorily. ‘He was a British agent captured in a botched operation against the IRA and summarily executed. There’s no mystery about that. They were a paranoid organization.’ Her firmness and precision had returned; she sounded like a nurse with a confused patient unable to comprehend his treatment.

  ‘It was a botched operation against a wing of the IRA the leadership would have been happily shot of.’

  ‘You mean David was doing the IRA’s dirty work for them so they should be nice to him? Forget it, a Brit spy’s a Brit spy.’

  ‘It’s too neat,’ he said.

  ‘You’re thinking too hard. Give it a rest. Wait for the daylight to clear your brain.’

  Exhaustion, compounded by what felt to him a life-affirming release of tension, overwhelmed him. ‘You’re right. I need to go home. But trust me. It doesn’t add up.’

  CHAPTER 30

  Post-election, Tuesday, 23 May

  ‘There’s no Black Brimmer pub either side of the border, boss,’ said Billy.

  ‘Could be a burnt-out wreck, Billy? Some crook punting for the insurance?’

  ‘Got a Black Hat, though.’

  ‘Fuck’s sake, Billy!’

  ‘Wonder why they changed the name.’

  ‘Economizing on the sign paint, you daft bastard.’

  As they turned off the M1 towards Banbridge and Newry, Carne was still reflecting on the conversation with Anne-Marie. Maybe the picture on the surface did indeed go no deeper. Brit operation screws up, Brit agent makes a mistake, falls into IRA bad hands, interrogated, beaten up, executed.

  He was not a conspiracy theorist and tried persuading himself to accept it at face value. But Joseph Kennedy did not fit the picture. The one who got away. Maybe nothing wrong with that either. He had got himself on the wrong side of an internal feud, isolated, no choice but a lifetime of hiding. Then the girl he knew from childhood and once loved – with whom he’s for ever locked by their shared knowledge of what happened on that terrible night in April 1994 – surfaces in a position of power. He makes contact, wants her help to return from the nether regions to the living world and, as a dying man, spend his last months at peace. Yet that made no sense. He must have wanted to use her for more than that. But what?

  ‘What’re you thinking, boss?’ asked Billy, turning onto the minor road towards Crossmaglen and the border.

  ‘Probabilities and improbabilities,’ replied Carne.

  ‘We could just stick to the facts.’

  On their left rose the whale’s back of Slieve Gullion, revealing its contours and the crag of its summit, now more like a dolphin’s head. The cerulean sky was marked only by stray wisps of white.

  ‘Fancy a climb?’ suggested Carne.

  ‘That’s a shame, boss, I left my climbing boots behind,’ replied Poots.

  Carne looked at Poots’s tough, black, waterproof shoes.

  ‘Go on,’ said Poots, ‘I’ll mind the car. Can’t trust the natives round
these parts.’

  Carne strode off as grassland gave way to heather, leaving modest single-storey farmsteads as dots below in a patchwork of postage-stamp fields. A landscape returned to its insular peace without the soundtrack of Chinooks and Lynxes, jeeps and crackles of AK-47s. Little more than an hour later he was at the top, alongside the renowned south cairn leading to the passage tomb constructed by Bronze Age man some six thousand years before. At least they once buried the bodies here with proper ceremony.

  On this untypical, luminous day he took in a 360-degree sweep – his beloved Mourne Mountains to the east and the sea beyond, the wilds of his adopted island stretching untamed to the west. Somewhere out there lay more bodies. Bodies that James Beresford Brooks said would never be found.

  Images of the two that had turned up floated in front of him: the bones and tattered clothing of David Wallis and the sunken, diseased flesh of Joseph Kennedy lying on the mortuary table. Some weird connection made Carne think of the Japanese soldier who had hidden for three decades in the jungle after the war’s end, refusing to surrender. He had given up only when his elderly, frail commanding officer had flown the thousands of miles to Luzon to order him.

  Was Joseph Kennedy operating solo, or did he have a commander too? Why did he have to be silenced? Assuming he was. And by whom?

  Poots was waiting for him. ‘Two hours, twenty-one minutes and ten seconds. I was phoning the undertaker.’

  ‘I was delayed thinking of the dead.’

  ‘How’re they doing?’

  ‘Better informed than the living.’

  The Black Hat lay on the main N53 road leading west out of the border town of Dundalk, the IRA’s grim playpen. It was a long, low, white building designed for the Irish peasantry before the advent of McDonald’s.

  If the Black Brimmer had once been like that, the makeover to the Black Hat was transformative. Neat wooden wagon wheels lined the bottom of the walls by the pavement and coloured lights were ranged beneath the guttering. The paintwork was as smooth and unflawed as a rich man’s billiards table. Above the front door, a sign announced the landlords as, simply, Henry and Carl. Inside, along with the mandatory stouts and bitters, were well-stocked wine chillers and a menu, including a dish for vegans. The barman was in his mid-forties, sporting an infant paunch beneath his pink-striped T-shirt, pale washed jeans, greying hair with a blond wave lining the middle, and a chunky gold ring with inlaid onyx on his right forefinger.