by Chris Petit
Mary Ryan turned out to be startlingly ordinary, heart-breakingly plain and the third girl sharing, found through the classifieds.
‘She’d sometimes watch the telly with us, but most evenings she’d be in her room,’ the bossier of her two flatmates told Cross and Westerby.
‘What was she like?’ asked Westerby.
‘We liked her because she was quiet,’ said the second.
‘We make enough noise for half a dozen, so we wanted a bit of a church mouse.’
‘Och, Mary, that sounds terrible,’ interjected the other.
‘Well, you know what I mean.’
Cross and Westerby left them to their banter. Westerby was looking tired, thought Cross. She had drawn the harrowing task of dealing with Mary Ryan’s parents. They lived in County Derry in remote countryside and had disapproved of their daughter going to the big city, where they were convinced no good would come of her. From what Westerby had been able to discover, their daughter’s passage through Belfast had been virtually unnoticed: a year or so working at Collins and Sullivan, photographic developers, where her presence had barely registered; no boyfriend; and only a month or so sharing in her new flat. Before that she had been in bedsit lodgings, again leading a life so self-contained that she left virtually no trace.
The only irregularity Westerby could find was in Mary’s letters home. These said that she was happy and had lots of friends.
Her room revealed as little as everything else. The furnishings came with it. Other than that there were a few clothes, a Bible and a rosary, a framed photograph of her mother and father, an old good luck card from an aunt, dating back to her arrival, a transistor radio, a Catherine Cookson novel, and the cheap suitcase that she had carried them in.
‘The mystery is why should anyone want to kill someone as inoffensive as Mary Ryan?’ asked Cross. ‘Are we looking for someone who knew her? I find it impossible to believe that anyone could have held a grudge against her.’
‘As far as we know,’ said Westerby, ‘she walked to and from work, which would have taken her about twenty-five minutes. Sometimes if it was raining she took the bus, but it was fine the night she died so she probably walked. We don’t know what route she took but she had the choice of cutting through Ormeau Park.’
Cross felt that so far it had been a year without a break. Although crimes were committed and solved in the usual run of things, he could not remember so much frustration surrounding a handful of cases. He could not think of a murder more pointless than Mary Ryan’s. Why on earth should anyone have noticed her? Cross pinched the bridge of his nose. He had a headache coming on. Deidre was going to Brussels the next day. He’d wanted to ask her whether she was meeting her lover. He wanted to ask if she was happy with him, but knew he wouldn’t dare.
Instead he went to bed that night, saying nothing, after religiously cleaning his teeth, a ritual that made him feel that everything was still all right. He checked on the children, staring at them in blank wonder, listening to Deidre’s hostile movements downstairs.
25
Belfast, October 1973
CANDLESTICK got drunk, which he rarely did. He drank because he could see the frame shifting and was afraid of the implications. Back at the beginning it had all seemed so simple.
It had started with a young man with fair hair, pale blue eyes and a weak chin, whose languid public school air and manner of deflecting remarks disguised his true purpose. He’d introduced himself as Davenport but never said what department he was.
Davenport had approached him through his company commander. He wore a check jacket and cavalry twills, yet, in spite of this, did not seem military.
‘Are you interested in going to Ireland?’ he’d asked.
‘I’ll go anywhere.’
It was all the same to him.
He was taken for training to a large white mansion near Carshalton, which stood in its own grounds surrounded by a high wall and rhododendrons, where he fractured the cheekbone of his self-defence instructor. Sometimes he was woken in the night and questioned and beaten to test his resistance. He never saw Davenport during these interrogations but sensed him close by. He was taught about detonators and explosives, and on the pistol range they increased the rapidity of the moving targets from five seconds to two. They sent him into rooms with live ammunition where men were waiting to test his reflexes. The unspoken understanding was that he was on his own.
When Davenport told him what he wanted it was a disappointment.
‘That’s Baker.’
The photograph showed a man in uniform with a cropped army haircut and a broken nose. The separate parts of his features looked as though they ought not to belong together, but the overall effect was arresting and almost handsome. A brief dossier showed that Baker had been to Fort Hood in Houston, Texas, for special training and then to the Gulf with 22 SAS.
‘Get close. Do what he does. Tell us,’ said Davenport with the easy air of a man asking a small favour.
Because of Baker’s name it amused Davenport to give him the codename Candlestick. ‘Better than Butcher, don’t you think?’
Candlestick signed papers agreeing to monthly payments into a false name account of Barclays Bank in Downham Market, tax to be deducted at source. It was explained that his operation was to be self-financing, after the five hundred pounds they gave him to get started, which again he had to sign for. Davenport made him memorize contact numbers and names. There was a London number where he was to ask for Mr Tranter only in emergency. His local Belfast contact would approach Candlestick, who was told to drink in Robinson’s Bar on Mondays between eight and nine. He would introduce himself as Danny Boy. Candlestick wondered if these people were for real.
After Baker’s flight Candlestick felt less in control. In spite of a rift with Tommy Herron, who suspected him of tipping off Baker, he carried on killing for him, but wondered if the past wasn’t catching up when information given by him to Herron months before was returned in the form of an assassination order. The target was a prorepublican city councillor, once mentioned to him by Lena, the masseuse. According to her story, which he had passed on, Councillor Healey knew the identities of the killers of three soldiers shot while pissing at the roadside, thinking they were on their way to a party.
Four of them snatched Healey outside McGlade’s Bar and bundled him into the back of a Cortina, along with the woman that was clinging on to his arm. Healey was drunk from hours of whiskey, and argumentative with it, bellowing his innocence in the tight confines of the car while the woman squawked with fright.
When Candlestick produced his gun the man shouted on regardless, the drink still working on him.
‘Shoot, then, you fucker! Pull the fucking trigger, cunt!’
He meant it. Healey was staring mad. Then the woman started up a wail that no amount of slapping would stop.
‘Shooting’s too good for the pair of you!’ shouted Candlestick, his nerves on edge.
‘Shut that bitch up!’ yelled the driver.
An armoured Land Rover trundled past going the other way, oblivious to the chaos in the car.
When they arrived at the spot where it was to be done, Candlestick was out of the car before it had stopped, yanking open the back door and dragging out the nearest volunteer, then the woman. He threw the woman to the volunteer.
‘Get the fucker out here!’ he ordered the man still in the back with Healey, who swung his feet up and lashed out at Candlestick. It took the driver’s help to drag him from the car, with the woman screaming her head off until the volunteer holding her clamped his hand over her mouth. Candlestick made the other two hold Healey down, face up, making sure the woman was watching.
‘Are you looking?’ he grunted as he straddled the thrashing councillor. ‘Then here’s lookin’ at you, buster!’
Healey’s teeth were bared, snarling in anger and fear, as the big commando knife swung down. Candlestick in the frenzy of his assault forgot to take account of how the man looked
in his last mortal moments.
Afterwards he read in the paper that he’d stabbed him thirty times and the woman over twenty. He had no memory of her, just a dull ache in his wrist and a vague memory of the knife skittering across her breast bone after it had failed to find a path between the ribs. Whatever he had been stabbing in his imagination it hadn’t been either of them.
Now, after more than two years in Belfast, he was no longer sure what his masters’ plans were for him, though he had a hunch and did not like the implications. He was sure they’d ultimately been behind the plot to assassinate Tommy Herron – in ways that he could only guess at. The approach to him to kill Herron had been made by a man calling himself Brown. Brown was dark and Spanish-looking and fancied himself. Brown’s first plan was to have Herron and Breen killed together during one of their meetings, but Candlestick’s handler Danny Boy had put a stop to that by telling him to warn Breen.
‘It could be useful to put Breen in your debt,’ Danny Boy said in his flat Scunthorpe accent.
Anyone less Irish than Danny Boy was hard to imagine. He looked like a dandy – with his pale face and long, smooth red hair – and talked like a trawler man. ‘I put the cunt in Scunthorpe,’ he’d told Candlestick when they’d first met.
Candlestick warned Breen and Breen asked why.
‘Because I’ve nothing against you and you might return the favour one day.’
When Breen duly avoided the meeting, Candlestick drove back to Belfast with Herron grousing at the other’s failure to show. Candlestick wanted to tell Herron how lucky he was to be alive.
He reported back to Brown who wanted to know why he hadn’t gone ahead and shot Herron.
‘The contract is for Breen and Herron. If one of them isn’t there, how can I shoot him?’
The second plan involved getting rid of Herron only. Candlestick was told a woman would help.
He met her twice, once before the shooting and on the day itself. He had never met anyone so cool and self-possessed. This woman with her seen-it-all eyes was light years ahead of him.
Afterwards he missed her very badly. He tried to find her. Their encounter made a nonsense of his relationship with Becky, the young student he was seeing on Danny Boy’s instructions. Danny Boy had also told him to start selling information about the loyalists to Breen.
Becky was from a republican family and had been pointed out as one of several possibilities. Candlestick hung around the university haunts, dealing a little hash and grass by way of cover. He liked Becky because her faraway look reminded him of the skies of his childhood.
He didn’t see it at first, the overall picture of their plan. It was not until he was missing Maggie, and wondering what he was still doing in Belfast, that he realized what they wanted. Somewhere in the bottom of his fifth glass of Guinness he understood the importance of putting Breen in his debt.
‘Fuck,’ he said, loud enough to attract looks from other drinkers. It was not a bar where anyone talked. His hostile stare deterred any further curiosity and he went back to his brooding.
They wanted him to switch sides. They wanted him to sell himself to the Officials. But why, he could not see.
He slipped out of Belfast, telling no one, and made his way back to the Fens, where he haunted the landscape of his early years, spending the last of the autumn sleeping rough and stalking his childhood. He stole a car and trapped animals – birds and rabbits – which he hurt before dismembering and eating. He tried to recapture that feeling of blank curiosity that had once driven him.
Frustration bred violence and carelessness. In an empty field he came across a barking dog. The dog was aggressive and suspicious and it took Candlestick a patient quarter of an hour to gain its trust. As the dog reached up to lick his hand, he struck, using the commando knife brought over from Belfast. The look of betrayal in the animal’s eyes seemed almost human.
He slung the dog’s body in the boot of the car and drove to Ipswich, where he picked up a prostitute and tried to get her to fuck him like Maggie had, in the front seat, but she didn’t see the point and didn’t like it and wouldn’t kiss him on the mouth.
Afterwards he had nowhere else to go. He phoned the London contact number and asked for Mr Tranter, who passed him on to Davenport.
‘I see you’ve been a busy boy,’ said Davenport when they met at a house behind Liverpool Street station. ‘I don’t suppose you even know her name.’
He referred to a folder in front of him with a photograph of the mutilated prostitute. He closed the file and Candlestick realized that this was Davenport’s way of telling him that whatever happened from now on was between them. It was also his way of saying that if Candlestick stepped out of line again he’d be put away for a very long time for the murder of an Ipswich whore.
Candlestick returned to Belfast in November 1973 and resumed his affair with Becky, as instructed. It needed persistence because she had taken up with another student. He held back, restricting their meetings to drinks in pubs, drawing her out, letting her believe that she was drawing him. But after Maggie his conversations with Becky were like cardboard and he felt his own distance and reluctance, which, curiously, made him more attractive to her. She seemed frighteningly innocent and listened with solemn astonishment when he confided that any relationship between them was impossible because of what he was: an army deserter, ashamed of his past, and not right for her. From the look in her eye he saw that he had planted the necessary fatal seed of rebellion and curiosity.
With Breen he was more comfortable, the two of them drinking together, Breen mocking Candlestick’s drinking only halves. He told Breen that since the death of Herron he had lost his mentor and was regarded with mistrust by the new leadership.
‘So I thought I’d come and work for you.’
Breen laughed in disbelief. ‘Either you’re a bigger fool than I thought or you’ve got a nerve.’
Candlestick joined in the laughter, and, still laughing, added that he was serious.
‘I can see you are. But what am I to do? There’s no call for a Brit in these parts.’
‘A Brit would give you access to places where your boys can’t go, did you think of that?’
‘It’s a cause, not a game, a question of birthright. Besides, we’ve a ceasefire with the Brits.’
The ceasefire had been in operation nearly eighteen months and had earned the Officials the contempt and enmity of the Provisionals.
Candlestick tried to speak but Breen held up his hand. ‘There’s nothing I can do with a Brit. How do I explain you to the other fellows? Look at you – Her Majesty’s services, running around with loyalist hoods and for all I know covered in the blood of republicans, and probably an intelligence asset into the bargain.’
‘A man can change his mind.’
‘If you’re talking Road to Damascus, son, you’re a long way from seeing the light.’
Candlestick stared at Breen with his level gaze. ‘Know thine enemy. Bollocks anyway. There are Prods who are republicans. You need all the help you can get.’
‘Not if it’s tainted. I’m happy to drink with you but I don’t see how we take it any further. Let’s just keep playing footsie, shall we?’ He looked at Candlestick. ‘Well, if you’re disappointed, you’re not letting it show. Are you having the other half?’
Candlestick said that it was his turn.
‘Well, at least you stand your round, which is more than could be said for Tommy, God rest his soul.’
26
DEIDRE went away leaving the coolest of kisses on his cheek, after hugs and tears for the children. They all stood outside in the damp early morning air and waved at the departing taxi. She had insisted on a taxi in spite of his offer to take her to the airport, a treat for the children. Matthew and Fiona stood watching for a long time after she had gone, until Cross took them both by the hand and led them back into the warmth of the house. He prepared them for school and handed them over to Sally, the childminder who was staying while Deidre
was away because of Cross’s erratic hours.
He felt aimless in her absence and found himself inexplicably arrested by mundane details – the smell of coffee in the kitchen, sunlight on the windowsill – stopped in his tracks, unsure of how he had got there or what he was in the process of doing, or even what had caught his attention in the first place. He wondered how much he ignored the surfaces of his life. Everything was drawn inwards into that tangled jungle of emotion and motive, half-motive, indecision, and something too puny to call fantasy.
He went to Niall Warren’s memorial service, curious to see who turned up. Journalists, mainly, he guessed from the scruffy assembly which included McCausland and Stevens.
The priest did his best until he got Warren’s name muddled and called him Neil instead of Niall and someone got the giggles and an infectious titter spread to several rows.
Heads in front turned as a latecomer announced herself with a clack of high-heels. Cross glanced round but all he could see was a black hat settling in place as she slipped into a pew.
He recognized her afterwards. She had the same poise as in the photograph in Warren’s flat, rearranged to appear suitably sombre. The hat, the high-heels and a simple black dress and coat marked her out as the most elegant person there. She stood smoking, talking to McCausland. He realized he didn’t know her name.
She caught his eye. He went over to introduce himself. She told him she had moved to Dublin and by chance had seen the edition of the paper with Warren’s obituary.