The South Lawn Plot

by Ray O'Hanlon

“Where do they hang out? Do they have a monastery or something like that?”

  Plaice folded his arms and looked at his shoes. “Essex,” he said. “Near Colchester, some big old Tudor pile. Seems they managed to hang on to the place when their brethren were being kicked out of everywhere else. Apparently they didn't let on what they were and managed to keep below the radar even during the Cromwell years. That's about it, really.”

  “Was this guy based in Essex?”

  “No,” said Plaice quickly. “He was actually working at a parish just a few miles from here, south side of the river. Saint something or other.”

  Bailey raised his watch close to his eyes and hit the light button. His sight, he thought, must be fading because he was doing this more and more of late. Too much damn time in front of computers.

  “Well, that's not bad at all, Superintendent,” he said. “Henderson will be happy; mysterious order of near extinct priests and now one less of them. ‘Deadfriars’ might be the headline on this one. You wouldn't mind if I sit in one of your cars to send the story over my mobile? I'm freezing.”

  “Not at all, go ahead,” Plaice replied. “'Deadfriars.’ Not bad. And absolutely appropriate in the literal sense, too. It's a play on the bridge's name, I assume.”

  “Bingo,” said Bailey.

  Plaice stared straight at Bailey in a way the reporter could not ignore.

  “Well, it's less a play and more the literal truth,” he said.

  “What do you mean?” Bailey said.

  “This reverend, the one who did a Calvi tonight. I'm not saying he was murdered. We're still working on suicide.”

  Plaice paused.

  “Yes?” Bailey said invitingly.

  “He's not the only one.”

  “What?”

  “Our dead Padre is not the only member of his order to meet his maker recently. There was another one, a couple of months back. Looked like a suicide for sure but two priestly suicides in a short space of time, same order. You're the reporter, work on that one.”

  Plaice had a slight grin on his face now. He had the sense that if he asked Bailey to jump in the river for another installment the reporter might just make a move for the parapet.

  Bailey snatched the cigarettes from his pocket and pulled one from the pocket. “Smoke?” he said, offering one to the man who had just handed him a chance at the Henderson hall of fame.

  4

  A LITTLE OVER FOUR HUNDRED MILES to the north west of Blackfriars Bridge, a man who knew a thing or two about big stories was savoring at close hand the power of the Atlantic Ocean.

  He had checked the light, estimated the wind speed and, as best he could, the time lapse before the next squall.

  The man decided that the light was his most immediate concern. It was changing so rapidly that taking the right shot would be mostly luck, regardless of the sophistication of the equipment he had balanced precariously on the stony shingle.

  It was, he decided, all rather exquisite. If only it wasn't so damn bone chilling.

  He pulled aside the waterproof cover and placed his right eye to the viewfinder. Through it he stared intently at the plumes of spray being blown off the tops of the waves. The rollers were six or seven feet at least, despite the sheltering headland at the northern end of the bay and the great mountain looming over its southern approaches.

  He closed his right hand into a little ball in an effort to restore some feeling to its extremities. He slowly wrapped his fingers around the trigger and squeezed his forefinger lightly against it.

  The Leicaflex whizzed and clicked.

  Steven Pender raised himself. He was in better physical shape than he had been in months, but his back protested. He looked to his left and right, taking in both ends of the deserted stone beach. Had he the advantage of a gull's eye view he would have seen a spit of land not unlike a cocked thumb. He was standing at the end of it, where the stones and shingle fell into the bay.

  Pender fired off the camera a few more times to bring his day's work to a close. He well understood that all his efforts might be for naught. The difference between good and outstanding was not really in his hands on a day like this.

  He had lodged his backpack and camera bag behind an outcrop of rocks about a hundred yards back down the beach. Folding his arms about the tripod and nestling the camera under his chin, Pender began to make his way back to the rocks. They seemed to be miles away. His mind wandered ahead of his feet. It embraced memories of Africa and the steamy heat that had made him dream longingly about places like this: the Lake District, the Shetland Islands, west of Ireland. Somewhere in the world, he thought, there just had to be a happy medium.

  Pender reached the rocks and slumped against the largest of them. It offered some protection from the wind though not the rain, now more intense than the earlier drizzle. Pender tucked his head as deeply into his upturned collar as he possibly could and corkscrewed his rear end into the stones.

  Every fraction of an inch counted. Quickly, and expertly, despite his numbed hands, he broke down the tripod, packed the camera into its bag and pulled both backpack and bag to each side of him. He was facing inwards, towards the land. The alternating shadows and shards of light raced over the shoreline on the far side of the channel, upwards over the stone walled fields and beyond them up the bare slopes of the mountain.

  Pender scanned the channel's landside beach, a sandier affair than the one on which he was huddled. His eyes rested at the point where the path began. It snaked its way through rocky outcrops before ending abruptly at a line of stunted trees, the grizzled sentinels marking out the garden.

  He narrowed his eyes against the wetness and could just about make out the house. The lights were on. Or at least one was, in the living room, the one with the big window.

  Pender picked up a gray colored stone about the size of his palm and turned it over. It would probably be still here a hundred years from now, he thought.

  He tried to keep his thoughts focused on the stone, a simple thing. But it was useless of course. Jonas Sem was close by, his body all twisted and bloodied.

  They had taken no chances with Sem. At least half a dozen AK47 magazines had been unloaded into the room. It was as if the bastards were trying to kill the entire building.

  Pender's photos of the assassinated rebel leader had been sensational. Not surprising since the man's blood was still flowing when he had taken them. The shots had appeared in just about every significant newspaper and magazine on the planet. They had sealed his growing reputation as the man who got the big ones.

  Prizes and awards had followed. Someone else always had to collect the bronze cameras and framed certificates on his behalf, because Pender was invariably lost in some war-crazed hellhole, daily witnessing death so seemingly casual that it had become just that.

  Sem had been the start of the casual phase. He had no regrets. The bastard had died too quickly, really. And his death had probably saved hundreds of lives, maybe thousands. It had been a good thing. So why was he thinking of it again now? Here in this rain purified place.

  Pender shivered, stood up, gathered his gear and began to walk back to the house. Fifteen minutes later he stood in the doorway gazing into the main room of the cottage.

  There was no sight or sound of Manning. He had, Pender remembered, mentioned something about a walk up the mountain. And they laughed at mad dogs and Englishmen, he thought.

  Figuring that he had a few minutes to himself, Pender walked straight to the writing desk against the far wall. Manning kept a diary. Over the past couple of nights Pender had noticed that the last thing that the Irishman did before bed was to write for about three or four minutes in a leather-bound journal.

  Pender flicked through the pages. Most of them referred to mundane events in Washington. There were, as was to be expected, frequent references to his host's wife and daughter and several to his work at the embassy. The first secretary and political officer at the Irish Embassy was, by dint of his own words
, clearly a little restless. Promotion to ambassadorial level, it seemed, had not quite come quickly enough.

  Pender opened the pages for the last couple of days. Manning referred to his presence in the house, but there was no indication as to how he felt about his English guest. No criticism, no praise, no pithy observation. Perhaps he expected his visitor to spy. There was, at various points in the diary, mention of a man named Michael who appeared to be linked to the cottage in some way. Pender had met no one else since his arrival. He rubbed his palm over his chin as his eyes fixed on the stranger's name. He needed a shave.

  Pender closed the diary and placed it back exactly as he had found it. He had noted that it had been placed with the text facing out from the desk, so upside down from his perspective. It might have been nothing, but he had employed tricks himself from time to time when he wanted to be sure that eyes were not prying. One of them was to place an object at a particular angle, or in a specific position relative to others.

  He walked across the room to the wall that served as a picture gallery. Here there were several dozen framed photographs arranged in what appeared to be chronological order, oldest on the left and most recent on the right. This had been only one aspect of the overall order and neatness that Pender had observed seconds after his arrival in the cottage. But he also had the sense that it was someone else's order. Manning's late father.

  The oldest photographs were of Victorian ladies and gentlemen staring at the lens as if it were the barrel of a gun. There were several of soldiers dressed in British uniform, the bellhop variety. They were from the ranks though one appeared to have been a junior officer. Moving to the right, Pender crossed the threshold of the twentieth century.

  One of pictures was of a group posing with an early model automobile. And then there were more uniforms, a couple still British but several of stern young men in the dress of the Irish Republican Brotherhood.

  Before he was posted to Northern Ireland, a time when the place could dish up dramatic photos as if on a conveyor belt, Pender had taken a crash course in Irish history. It served him well now as he could distinguish between the IRB boys and a lone member of the Irish Citizen Army.

  The photos to the right of the soldiers were all of civilians, family groups and the occasional individual. There were three photos of a man in barrister garb. The father. Pender knew of him, or at least of him. Manning senior had been famous, or infamous, for his ability to get IRA men off the hook, even in the non-jury special court in Dublin. His death, fortunately for many of his likely future clients, had come after, and not before, the Provo ceasefire.

  Pender's version of a sixth sense told him that something had changed in the room. He turned and stiffened. A man was standing in the door, an old man. He was bareheaded and wore no coat. He looked at least eighty though he had a thick and wavy head of white hair.

  But it was the eyes that Pender was drawn to. They did not betray age. They were a grayish-blue and not in the least bit inquisitive.

  “You must be Michael,” Pender said with a half smile. The old man said nothing. The nod was barely discernible. The old man was carrying a couple of plastic bags. He turned, and with surprisingly agile steps, went into the adjoining kitchen. Pender glanced at his watch. It was a few minutes shy of four thirty. The old man had apparently brought dinner and, from the banging of pots now coming from the kitchen, was also intending to cook it.

  “Splendid,” Pender said to himself. “A batman for the old legal eagle.”

  He decided to pour himself a small whiskey to warm up his damp bones. This entailed stepping into the kitchen and retrieving both the bottle and a glass from an old pine dresser.

  “I was down on the beach taking photographs and the damp went right through me,” Pender said by way of making conversation.

  The old man was holding potatoes under a thin stream of water flowing from the faucet and scrubbing them with bony hands.

  “I'm going to have a drop; fancy one yourself?”

  “Later,” said the old man.

  There was no arguing.

  Pender was determined not to retreat. A high stool was backed up against the wall at the opposite end of the narrow kitchen from where the old man stood.

  Pender poured himself a generous measure of whiskey. He reached into the ancient refrigerator's icebox and chipped out a couple of cubes. He sat on the stool and watched the old man who was now cutting up a thick piece of steak he had taken from one of the plastic bags.

  “Making an Irish stew?” said Pender.

  The old man was cutting the steak into squares. “Just a stew,” he said.

  Pender stared into his glass.

  “Eamonn must have gone for a walk up the mountain,” he said.

  “Mr. Manning likes his walks,” the old man replied, more quickly this time.

  The old man was cracking a bit, Pender thought.

  “I suppose his father liked to walk the mountain as well,” he said.

  “Did,” came the reply.

  That was about it. The old man made a fuss of digging out a large cooking pot from the space below the sink.

  Pender decided to retreat into the living room. He stood and considered the kind of job he had been given. If it required the use of a diplomat based in Washington he imagined that his target would be either political or diplomatic; hopefully not his host but, of course, what could one do if it was?

  Then again, it might be a business type. Diplos met all sorts of people. Manning would more likely be the means of access and introduction, the Trojan Horse.

  Would the horse have to be disposed of at the end of the operation? He stared intently at his hand holding the glass. Not a tremor. The liquid was absolutely still. He was curious as to what was coming next. But for now he would just relax and enjoy a little Irish hospitality.

  5

  MANNING STARED THROUGH THE WINDOW. His guest was somewhere out in the murk. The ambassador had asked him to entertain Pender. And so he had, for two long days.

  It wasn't that Pender was dull, or uneasy company. But Manning had not flown the Atlantic to socialize.

  He had planned the visit to the house for months. It was to be a final immersion in his father's private space before the place was put on the market. But it hadn't been so simple. He had been foolish to think that simply because of his father's death the old man's presence would somehow evaporate. Adjourning to the town and considering matters from the safe distance of a hotel would have been an alternative.

  But now there was Pender, lost somewhere below in the gloom.

  Still, Manning thought, his guest would be gone tomorrow and he could manage to wangle another couple of days leave from the embassy, time enough to make final plans. And besides, there was the sudden complication. The thought of it made him look again at his watch. What the hell did they want now?

  He tried to clear his mind by thinking of other things, of Rebecca, Jessica, even work at the embassy. But he had found solace only by turning his mind back, to his father, here in this place, and earlier still to the boarding school in the midlands, the one with the farm, ivy covered walls and scholar monks who were either three quarters genius, or two thirds mad.

  The place had been his home for six years. There had been days of late when he wanted to be back there, closeted behind the muscular traditions and the embracing certainty of history essays and Latin preparation.

  But thoughts of schools days had faded, and Manning was again staring out of the window towards the bay and its hidden islands and islets.

  His hands were in his pockets. His father would have scolded him.

  Hands were tools, weapons, Joe Manning would have said. You could turn a jury, sometimes even a judge, with the proper use of hands.

  A sudden flash of sunlight banished thoughts of the father and focused the son's eyes on the world outside. One by one, the islands in the bay below the house were popping into view. The squall, easing now, had been the heaviest of the day. It had unleas
hed itself over the bay, smacking its turreted edges with great sheets of water. But now the rain had galloped inland and was soaking the upland bogs and walled fields of Mayo's wild interior.

  A wood pigeon glided across the lawn on a collision course with the hedge. Just before the crash, the bird's wings began to flap furiously. It rose over the top before dropping down the far side. Flying away and vanishing had its merits, Manning thought.

  He walked around the pine dining table that doubled as a work desk and sat himself down. His tea, stewing away in the chipped mug, was still warm. He picked up the cup and swallowed a gulp of the stuff. His eyes rested on the table and the assortment of items that were the afternoon's primary concern.

  Before him, neatly arrayed, was a stack of papers, a leather-bound diary, a radio with short wave capabilities, Japanese make, and a pistol.

  It was an old gun, a Browning of considerable vintage but still in good working order. His father had taken good care of the weapon. The wily senior counsel, friend of the politically oppressed, one side anyway, had his enemies. He was presumed to be a target for loyalists from the North. This had been his personal protection firearm though Manning had been unable to find a permit.

  The gun's presence in the house had been a secret for all the years that his father had used the place as his refuge. Not that there had ever been much chance of someone finding it. Old Joe had kept even his law library cronies at a distance. The house was his world and his alone. His mother had only been in it about three times in their entire marriage.

  About three days before his death, Joe had muttered something about hidden treasure under the floorboards. Manning had only to rummage for a few minutes to find it. There were four bullets. It was hardly much of an arsenal, but Manning well remembered the times when his father's life had been threatened and he had gone to bed only after spending endless minutes staring out his bedroom window into the darkness. More often than not, a police car was stationed on the street outside the house. But the fear remained. It had been the price for his father getting so many hard men on one side off.