by Chris Petit
He drove on, feeling self-conscious and foolish. The boy was inspecting the car with apparent disapproval.
‘Did you ever steal a Volvo?’ asked Cross, surprising himself with the question.
Vinnie looked taken aback and Cross laughed.
‘Off the record.’
‘Crap car. Too heavy and no speed.’
Cross laughed again. He asked Vinnie about himself, whether he had brothers and sisters and what he did. After an initial wariness, the boy chatted easily enough until Cross asked him if he had a girlfriend.
‘What’s it to you?’
Cross shrugged and half enjoyed the rest of his cigarette, which tasted alternately foul and wonderful.
‘What do you want?’ Vinnie eventually asked.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Why’re you asking all these questions?’
‘No reason, just to pass the time.’
‘You’re not a queer?’ Vinnie looked quite resigned to the prospect.
‘No, I’m not.’
After the shock of the question, Cross saw why the boy had asked – scrounging cigarettes, the unusual intimacy of driving with a stranger at night, his own uncharacteristic lightness.
‘You’re a Brit, aren’t you?’
‘Yes.’
‘You must be daft coming here.’
‘Probably.’
‘What did you do it for?’
‘My wife comes from here and got homesick.’
He looked at Vinnie, whose expression mixed incredulity with curiosity.
‘You came here because of your wife?’ The concept seemed beyond him.
‘And now,’ said Cross without knowing why, ‘I find out she’s having an affair.’
‘Get away.’
Cross wondered what he was doing and did not particularly care. Just being able to say it out loud was a relief. ‘What would you do if you found someone you were with had gone off with another fellow?’
‘I’d probably kill the both of them.’
Cross was startled by the chord it struck in him.
‘You may be right, except I’ve got the children to think of.’
‘Well, just him, then.’
‘That should be enough.’
‘Why are you telling me this?’
Cross, remembering their earlier exchange, laughed and said again, ‘No reason. Just to pass the time.’
Vinnie lit a second cigarette and Cross had to stop himself from asking for another.
As they neared the scene of the accident Cross was reminded of how remote the location was. Without the lights and the vehicles of the security forces to guide him, it took a while to find the spot.
‘The man lying in the road was dead when he was run over. He was probably murdered,’ Cross told Vinnie, after pulling over. ‘Look around, try to remember exactly what happened and see if there is anything, any detail, you might have overlooked.’
He left the boy to walk up and down the road a few times. The night was overcast and, as usual, rain was not far away. Together they went down the bank to where the Range Rover had crashed, and up again without a word. Vinnie appeared withdrawn, dragging hard on his third cigarette.
He let the boy wander around a bit more, though he could see it was hopeless. Vinnie shook his head at Cross and they returned to the Volvo in silence.
‘Can you give me another cigarette?’
Cross asked the boy for a match because the dashboard lighter had gone cold. He dragged deeply, exhaled and leaned forward to turn the ignition, light-headed again. The car was slow to start.
‘Wait,’ Vinnie said, remembering.
Cross paused, willing the boy, who only shook his head. He turned the key again. This time the engine fired.
‘There was another car,’ Vinnie blurted. ‘I heard a car start up, quite a long way off, after the crash. There was that noise an engine makes turning over.’
‘Before the others got here?’
‘Yes.’
‘And did you hear it passing?’
Vinnie’s face screwed up in concentration. ‘I don’t remember.’
Which meant it had probably been parked up ahead and driven away from the crash. Cross drove slowly, looking for a spot where a car might have waited. To the right was the bank. The left side was thick with fir trees and after about two hundred yards was a bend. Past that it seemed that they had gone too far so he turned back.
They almost missed it, a gap in the trees by the bend. Cross stopped and got out, telling the boy to wait.
The space was just wide and deep enough for a car, and there was no ditch to hamper access. It was a good vantage point: anyone waiting there would have had sight of the accident without being seen.
It felt secure in among the trees, sheltered from the chilly wind which was reduced to a gentle soughing in the tops of the pines. Cross looked up at the sky, just visible through the branches, and absorbed its silence, trying to imagine someone waiting whose thoughts would reveal the mystery, if only Cross could tap into them.
Cross returned to the Volvo for a flashlight. Vinnie pointed out that he had left his key in the ignition.
‘Not tempted, are you?’
Vinnie laughed. ‘Like I said, too heavy and too slow.’
Closer inspection of the area showed evidence of tyre marks. For the first time since the start of the case Cross felt that click in his head that told him a connection had been made. He was prepared to bet that, in spite of the time passed, the tracks belonged to the car the boy was talking about. He doubted if any others had pulled in there. It wasn’t the sort of spot lovers used. He’d have the area gone over first thing in the morning.
Driving back, Cross was scarcely aware of Vinnie, beyond his chain smoking. Cross’s excitement detonated the rest of the case in his head – the stigmata, Raymond Wilson’s hand crumpling the copy of the advertisement, his sister’s look of submission, Westerby’s quiet persistence. He could almost hear the hum of the deep freeze that held the frozen body, imagined too being able to visualize for the first time where it might be.
He was hardly aware of the boy talking, and whatever he said in reply must have sounded vague or insincere because Vinnie clammed up, saying that he was crazy even to think of trusting a policeman, let alone a Brit.
They drove in tense silence, with Cross fumbling to remember the start of the boy’s conversation. Clearly what he’d wanted to say was important. It had begun with him asking if it was Cross who had handed him over to ‘the other peeler’. Cross, in his distraction, had missed the point. He had been thinking of Deidre, with a surge of jealousy and lust that had shattered the kaleidoscope of other images in his head.
Cross tried to start the conversation again, apologizing, but failed. Was it a gift of his, he wondered, to reduce others to silence?
About five minutes from York Road station Vinnie started gabbling, the words spewing out of him, half-formed sentences that made little sense, stitched together by panic.
‘I talked to the man – I shouldn’t ha’. I talked to the man. I talked to the man.’
Vinnie repeated it over like a record stuck in a groove.
‘What man?’
‘The man I shouldn’t ha’.’
‘Who? I can’t help unless you tell me who.’
‘O’Mara.’
‘Is this something to do with the other policeman?’
Cross felt a wrench of anxiety, a sense that he was being drawn into something better left alone.
Vinnie nodded. He was hiccoughing, tears pouring down his face as he spilled his pathetic story.
When Cross realized what he was being told he interrupted to say that Vinnie should not carry on because, as a policeman, he could not guarantee his silence. He thought how pompous he sounded.
‘You said you’d help,’ whined the boy.
It was too late. He had the gist of the boy’s story and was compromised as it was. Besides, he wanted to hear him out. Vinnie’s confusi
on mirrored his own: perhaps a part of him wanted to see himself bawling out his own helplessness in similar fashion.
He did not stop the boy, as he knew he should, and instead told him to go on. His own separate train of thought ran parallel to the boy’s tumbling words, but there was some nugget of self-revelation that lay beyond reach.
Cross gripped the steering wheel tighter after Vinnie was done and turned to him. He felt strangely calm, like a man who had just seen off an attack. He realized what it was about himself, an unacknowledged part lived with too long – his silent companion, self-loathing.
‘What you’re doing is feeding your policeman what O’Mara tells you?’
Vinnie nodded, spent after the exertion of confession. He was being used by Blair to watch the IRA. That much Cross could have guessed, but not what followed. Vinnie had thrown himself at the mercy of the IRA man, who was using him to pass back false information to Blair.
‘What have you been asked to say?’ Cross asked.
Vinnie wouldn’t tell at first and Cross repeated, ‘I can’t help unless you tell me.’
‘They told me to say that there was a senior officer, an inspector, who was passing on information to the IRA because of being blackmailed.’
‘Did they give you a name?’
‘No. That’s all I was told.’
‘And how were you supposed to have found this out?’
‘Because I work in the bar now and overheard the conversation when I was in the cellar changing the barrels. O’Mara meets sometimes in the room above.’
What a mess, thought Cross. He doubted if he had it in him to help the boy. It would be far cleaner to go to Blair but Blair would no doubt pass on Vinnie’s name to loyalist gunmen.
‘Why are you telling me this?’ asked Cross. Their conversation was starting to go round in circles.
‘I want you to tell me what to do because you’re clever.’
‘Why trust me?’
‘Because you treated me like I was a human being instead of a lump of shite.’
Had he? He was aware of a curious atmosphere of heightened intimacy.
‘Go home and do nothing for the moment,’ Cross eventually said. ‘I don’t know what I can do, but give me a couple of days and meet me on Saturday at seven outside the station.’
Cross found the house in darkness when he got home, though it was not late. He sat in the kitchen and poured three fingers of whisky, which he drank too quickly while pretending to read the newspaper. After another whisky and eating nothing, he lay beside the sleeping figure of Deidre and again was confronted by the uncomfortable realization that he still desired her.
In the night he awoke and went to the bathroom and masturbated, trying to think of Deidre.
All he knew was that he should not shop the boy to Blair. He would not have the boy’s death on his conscience. He was tempted to tell Blair that he knew from a source that the IRA suspected Vinnie of being a tout. That at least would cause Blair to regard his information as tainted and to call off any investigation into a non-existent informer in the RUC. He seemed to have travelled a long way that night, to what end he did not know.
15
Belfast, April 1972
CANDLESTICK drove Tommy Herron to a hotel on the outskirts of the city where Herron had hired a meeting room. They were joined by two men, one darkly good looking with greying hair, the other much younger and his bodyguard.
‘Francis,’ said Herron. ‘How’re you doing?’
‘Fine, fine, Tommy, you old rascal.’
‘Any objection if my man stays?’
‘None,’ said the other beadily. ‘If Pat does too.’
Pat and Francis, Candlestick thought. What kind of names were they? Not Protestant. He had assumed the meeting was going to be one of Tommy’s regular gettogethers with other loyalist leaders. From the way this man was talking it was clear that he was IRA. But this was no tense encounter with the enemy, Candlestick soon realized, rather a pally hard-drinking affair to sort out their different business interests.
‘Ach, I’ve known Franny for years,’ said Herron on the drive back to Belfast. He was drunk and garrulous and happy to entertain Candlestick’s astonishment at their meeting with Fenians. Breen was a Sticky, he said, a member of the Official IRA who had stayed with the rump of the movement when the Provisionals had split away in 1969.
‘Breen’s too canny to get caught up in all that fanatical stuff. There’s not much of a life to be had in the Provos.’
Over the next weeks Candlestick became privy to the extent of the two men’s interests. At first they seemed concerned only with defining their respective boundaries and reaching agreement over areas of dispute. But then Candlestick came to see that it was more complicated and sophisticated than that. For all their official hostility, there were pockets held in reserve where Breen and Herron acted together. Property stolen in one man’s area could be fenced in the other’s.
Candlestick sensed that Breen knew exactly what he wanted from Herron. Herron was crafty enough but no match for Breen, whose lazy, amiable air hid a greater application. Candlestick watched Breen bamboozle Herron, then move in with his own proposal, which was that the Officials be allowed to work a racket on building sites in Herron’s area.
‘Jesus, Francis, I don’t know about that. I can’t let a bunch of Micks be seen to be running around my patch.’
Both men laughed easily.
‘Tommy, Tommy. This is money, big profits. We shouldn’t let political differences interfere with business.’
By then Candlestick had learned a valuable lesson. Nothing was to be taken at face value. On the surface it seemed straightforward enough – the oppositions and the barricades and the divisions of life in wartime. But beyond that there was another zone where everything moved freely, where opposite numbers met to discuss common interests in backroom deals, where hidden alliances formed and shifted and regrouped.
Candlestick kept his own council. He knew better than most that many were not what they seemed. He wondered if Herron knew that he and Baker had been planted by the British, and, if he did, what difference it would make. Of himself he knew that he knew more than Baker, because unlike Baker he had more than one master.
Sometimes he was surprised by how carelessly secrets were confided. The temporariness of everything – and the invisibility of the enemy – made people curiously lax. Off-duty hours became an excuse for loud-mouthed celebration. Baker’s gang of mercenaries operated in a social climate that drew together a mixture of people from right across the security forces. At Saturday night parties in different houses he met off-duty RUC officers and soldiers from the Ulster Defence Regiment. More than once men were pointed out to him and he was told they were Provos. He was never sure whether to dismiss this as far-fetched. The idea of Provos being at these parties against all the odds seemed in keeping with the strange fraternizations of the time. There was a sense in which out-of-work hours were accepted as a period of truce, a relief from the absurdity of the daily conflict.
He even saw Captain Bunty at one of these parties. It was being held in a large, under-furnished, uncarpeted students’ house and he was on the stairs talking to a woman who shouted above the din of loud music, ‘I tell you, the only way is stick it to the fuckers.’
A large, voluptuous Hungarian with a raucous laugh had introduced herself as Lena and later told him in bed, after making him come by rubbing his penis between her oiled breasts, that she worked in a massage parlour run by an ex-republican internee that was a front for army intelligence gathering. She mentioned this casually as though it were all a game to be shared and enjoyed. Candlestick thought of Baker strutting around, and Herron and Breen fixing up deals, while Lena lazily told him, as they lay on her crumpled sheets, that a client of hers was a city councillor who was tight with the Provos and knew the names of the gunmen who had killed three soldiers they had picked up and driven off to what they’d promised was a party.
‘They shot
the boys while they were standing pissing by the road, with their beer mugs still in their hands.’
She liked it when he licked her with his fastidious tongue and liked his body, and the fact that he told her nothing of what he did.
‘Most of them you can’t shut them up,’ she said.
Candlestick passed on the information about the councillor to Tommy Herron and heard no more. By then Herron was distracted by a struggle with his apparent ally, the army. It was Breen who’d first told him that the army was not quite the friend he thought it was.
‘They’re not nice people, Tommy. But then you’ve probably not had them in your home. They’re like pigs on their house searches, kicking doors down in the middle of the night and dragging families out of bed. How would you feel walking down to the corner for a packet of fags, trying to slide by some squaddie with his rifle pointed at your head and barking out orders and probably not yet nineteen year old?’
Herron shrugged and said it wasn’t his problem.
‘It is, Tommy. They’re using you, Tommy.’
‘Get away.’
‘I can tell you of at least three shootings of Prods that were not the work of the IRA, but your friends the Brits – soldiers in plain clothes masquerading.’
Herron squinted at him suspiciously. ‘They’re fucking amateurs thinking they can run around like cowboys taking pot shots at anyone.’
Candlestick had never seen him so enraged. Later he saw how these deaths fitted the larger pattern. It was clear from what he had picked up from Bunty that he and Baker were there to train the loyalists to take the war to the enemy, and part of that involved terrorizing ordinary Catholics into withdrawing support for the IRA. Undercover soldiers killing Protestants in cold blood and pretending it was the IRA was the same policy in reverse, aimed at hardening Protestant resolve.
He also saw what Tommy didn’t see: that by passing on this information Breen drew Herron into conflict with the army and took heat off the IRA.
Herron ordered his men to fire on soldiers patrolling the streets of his patch of East Belfast. Candlestick was quite happy to join in, but Baker, he noticed, was never anywhere to be seen.