by Chris Petit
Cross was starting to shout. Eddoes glanced nervously towards the next room, which was screened only by a thin half-partition and glass. The door was open and Cross could see a secretary sitting at her desk pretending not to listen.
‘If you don’t want to talk in here we can go outside,’ said Cross, indicating with his head towards the fire escape.
Eddoes got up reluctantly.
Standing next to him on the exposed steps with its low handrail, Cross realized what an intimidatingly big man Eddoes was. But he was more concerned by the feeling of blind rage building up in himself.
‘I’ll tell you about Breen,’ Eddoes said eventually. ‘We were all in the business of fund raising, so how the hell do you suppose we were meant to find money? We could hardly register ourselves as charitable organizations. And we were all more or less afraid – of the Brits, of each other and of ourselves. No one was pointing the way or telling you the right or wrong of anything. In the end it was every man for himself. We were just ordinary fellows who had scraped along until then. Tommy Herron ran a garage. The biggest thing he’d been in charge of was a petrol pump and suddenly he had an army and money was coming in from all sides, so is it surprising he puts by a bit for himself? And what would you do if some fellow from the other side came along and offered you a deal, saying he’d make sure you didn’t get shot if you did the same for him? Tell me, what would you do, under the circumstances?’
‘There were innocent people getting killed while this was going on.’
Eddoes gave a self-conscious worldly shrug like Marlon Brando in The Godfather. The film would have come out not long after the Troubles began and Cross had a chilling vision of Eddoes and Breen and all the rest of them smiling in the dark and deciding that’s how they should behave, for real.
‘When Breen and his pals went over to the INLA, what happened then?’ asked Cross.
‘It’s not a question of what happened then. We looked after our own and it was easier to do that if you had a foot in the enemy camp, so yes I continued to keep in touch with Breen.’
’So why is the INLA trying to kill you now?’
‘Because they’re a lot of unprincipled bastards,’ said Eddoes with a bitter laugh. ‘It may not look like it to you but when Breen and I ran things there were rules, things you did and didn’t do. Cheating the Inland Revenue was fine and good sport, and the Housing Executive racket was state money. The security firms, well, they worked. A lot of businesses asked us for protection. I remember one publican telling me that without us helping to stop robberies and looting he would have gone bust. It breaks both ways.’
‘And now it’s drugs.’
‘Hard drugs and the whole thing’ll blow up for the sake of a few people getting greedy. They’re looking for a quick fix, these boys, that’s their trouble.’
Eddoes being sanctimonious on the subject of greed was a sight Cross found hard to take. There would of course be retaliation by the loyalists who would push drugs into nationalist areas.
Eddoes was warming to his subject, hectoring Cross like a public assembly. ‘One big jackpot and they think they’ll be able to change the course of the war because they’ll be able to buy all the weapons they want. They don’t understand that what’s gone on for fifteen years will go on for another ten because who wants it to end?’
No one had put it like that to Cross before. He asked why not.
‘Because there’s too much invested in the whole thing by all sides.’
Cross looked at the puffiness in Eddoes’ face and sensed that his real objection was that of a man who had been superseded by men more ruthless than himself. Eddoes was no longer the hard man. He’d been softened by good suits and eating too long at the table of corruption. As Cross listened to him ramble on, he realized that Eddoes was actually proud of the fact that he and his kind had made Belfast safer than mainland cities with their muggings and rapes and riots. Northern Ireland boasted the lowest crime rate in the United Kingdom.
Exposed to the likes of Eddoes and Breen, Cross realized that he was no longer sure of his own moral compass. He felt lost in a grey zone, except it wasn’t as easy as that. There were so many different greys, some almost indistinguishable. Eddoes was right. It was impossible to tell how he would have reacted under the same circumstances. He liked to think that he would have resisted corruption, but where was the line to distinguish that from canniness?
‘What can you tell me about an Englishman who went around with Tommy Herron?’
‘There were several.’
‘Fair haired. He used the name Francis Albert.’
Eddoes looked startled. ‘What about him?’
‘He was also known as Sinatra.’
‘He was known as Dr Death, too,’ Eddoes eventually said. ‘He used to talk of curing a man’s sickness.’
Willcox had also called him that. How many names did the man have? wondered Cross.
‘And if I said he killed your wife, what would you say?’
Eddoes looked shocked for a moment, then shook his head. ‘He got himself killed a couple of years ago.’
‘Was this the same man that later killed Tommy Herron?’
Eddoes looked at Cross sharply and said nothing.
‘Let’s talk about who killed Tommy.’
‘In general?’
‘For a start.’
‘The Brits. Which Brits, I’m not sure.’
‘Try guessing.’
‘The army or military intelligence. Tommy had a lot of dirt on them and would tell anyone that’d listen. There was even a war between them for a while. And Tommy knew that the Brits had had a hand in the Dublin bombings.’
Cross was confused. ‘But Tommy was killed in September ’73 and the bombings weren’t until the following May.’
‘There was an earlier bombing in 1972.’
‘What happened?’
‘I think about ten fellahs got killed.’ He looked at Cross craftily and added, as if to test him, ‘Those fucking Fenians deserve everything they get.’
Cross was then forced to endure a loyalist diatribe against the Republic. He saw the true fanaticism of the man as he shouted on about how the majority of deaths caused in Northern Ireland was the work of those who wanted to implement the Republic’s claims on Ulster. The strategy responsible for these killings came from inside the Republic, which provided a base from which many of them were carried out and a haven for the killers afterwards.
Eddoes worked himself up into such a frenzy that he started to spit. ‘The hands of the Dáil are covered in the blood of Ulster! What makes them think they’re exempt from retribution?’
Cross despaired of ever getting back to the point. He wondered where Westerby was. She’d been a long time parking.
‘Just tell me who killed Tommy on the day,’ he interrupted when he could take no more.
‘There was a gang, run, it was rumoured, by an Englishman attached to Military Intelligence. There was Gregory Brown, who got shot later for his part in it, a couple of Englishmen and a woman. They met in a caravan near Finaghy Road North and sometimes in a flat near Connolly station near Dublin.’
Cross asked how the gang operated.
‘The Brits were smart. Once they’d worked out that the various organizations were keen to claim things for themselves – such and such done in the name of the Provisional Irish Republican Army – then it was very easy to blame the Provvies for things they hadn’t done. As for the business with Tommy, what I heard was they used the woman and brought in a gun, who was the man you know as Francis Albert. And the way they got to Tommy was he was seeing her and they used that to set him up.’
‘Who was the woman?’
‘I heard she was English, that’s all I know.’
‘If she was seeing Tommy, didn’t you see her around?’
‘Tommy always was a back-door man and towards the end even more. There had been other attempts on his life. Seeing her was about the only time he went without a bodyguard.�
�
‘What happened to this Francis Albert after Tommy? Breen took him on, didn’t he?’
Eddoes nodded.
‘And he became a gun for the INLA.’
Eddoes nodded again. He looked tormented and Cross took advantage to drive home his point.
‘And maybe he still is and not dead at all. You’re saying it was the INLA that blew your wife’s brains out and I’m saying our man did. Which may come down to one and the same thing. Maybe you still all know each other. Maybe you still all do each other’s dirty work.’
Eddoes took a step forward, his face a taut mask.
‘I’ll not have any man desecrate the memory of my wife.’
‘Ah, come on, man. You’re up to your fucking neck in shite.’
Cross recognized that edge of aggression he felt just below the surface more and more these days. He was starting to welcome it. ‘So what’s going through your head if I say it was this same man getting into his car outside your house?’
To Cross’s surprise and embarrassment, tears filled Eddoes’ eyes.
‘I’d think it’s Dr Death come again, and that your story about him still being an INLA gun was true after all.’
Cross saw Westerby walking on the concrete apron below. She looked up and seemed surprised by the sight of them standing at the top of the fire escape. Cross motioned her up.
‘What are we to make of all this?’ Eddoes asked in a cracked voice and Cross thought: you old ham. He was depressed by his encounter with Eddoes. Talking to him had only succeeded in blurring the picture. It was another of those incidents that summed up so much recent history: the sharp clarity of violence followed by distraction and torpor.
Westerby joined them. She pulled a face to show her exasperation at being so long. Cross raised his eyebrows to let her see that he’d found Eddoes not much use.
‘Any questions for Mr Eddoes?’ Cross asked her.
Westerby cocked her head and took her time.
‘There is one. Mr Eddoes knows our man?’
‘Mr Eddoes does,’ said Cross.
‘Well, we all know that our man has a history of violence, so I suppose what I was wondering was had Mr Eddoes ever witnessed any of this violence first hand?’
Westerby addressed her question to Cross. Eddoes yelped like somebody had dropped a brick on his foot.
‘This is outrageous,’ he spluttered. ‘Insinuating—’
‘We have a number of murders,’ went on Westerby calmly, ignoring the interruption, ‘done by your man. Your wife, for a start, and several others more brutal. Be thankful he didn’t do to her what he did to wee Mary Ryan. I’d say that to find anything like what he did to her you’d have to go back a long way, to the summer of 1972. You know what I’m talking about?’
Eddoes looked nervous and reluctant. Beads of sweat shone on his forehead.
‘That’s when this man learned his trade,’ Westerby went on. ‘And thirteen years later he’s still killing and butchering people. He killed your wife.’
Eddoes spent a long time avoiding their gaze, plucking at the seams of his carefully pressed trousers.
‘I told Tommy to get rid of him, that he was a head case, though most of the time you wouldn’t notice the fellow. He didn’t say much, but there wasn’t much he missed, and he seemed harmless enough until you put a weapon in his hand.’
‘Perhaps you could tell me something,’ said Westerby, who appeared just as impatient with Eddoes as was Cross. ‘Was there any question of this man working for the Brits?’
‘It was said in some quarters but it never stuck.’
‘So what was he doing in Northern Ireland?’
‘I’d say he was there for the killing.’
‘So, tell us about your man and the Butchers.’
‘I know nothing about that.’
Westerby sighed with impatience. ‘It’s your wife’s killer we’re talking about. How many times do we have to tell you that before it sinks in?’
Eddoes finally relented and said he knew of one occasion. Two of the Butchers had been fighting among themselves and one had dropped a beer barrel on the other, killing him stone dead, and then the man that had dropped the barrel had been shot by a friend of the first, though not a member of the gang. The shooter was arrested by the loyalists and taken to one of their social clubs and sat on the stage facing the entire Belfast command, plus all the rest of the gang which was lined up in the front row.
‘Anyway, before the trial could begin,’ said Eddoes, ‘your man jumped up on stage with a gun in his hand, saying, “This guy’s a fuckin’ idiot.” Everyone thought he was going to kneecap the bastard, but he put the gun to his head and blew the fellah’s brains out, all over the command. People were freaking out, picking the brains off themselves. The top fellahs were so angry they made your man clean up the whole mess. And you’re saying this man killed my wife.’
Cross nodded.
‘Then God help us all. He’s an animal.’
Westerby looked at Cross. They were in an empty Italian restaurant five minutes’ walk from her flat. After Eddoes she had spent the rest of the day going through the notebook again. She had felt soiled afterwards, and unsure. Everything in her flat had suddenly looked unfamiliar, like it was not hers, and the bath she’d had had not got rid of the grime left by the day.
She realized she was drinking too much and had barely touched her food. She caught Cross looking at her a couple of times and wondered: how do married men start affairs? Were they starting one? All the men she had been out with had been single. Even then most of them had left her feeling vaguely guilty. She reminded herself that he was her senior officer, and married.
‘He’s not going to stop now,’ she said, pushing her plate aside. ‘He has a taste for it.’
This told him nothing new, she could see that.
‘But it’s more than that,’ she went on. ‘I don’t think he’s even begun.’
‘What was Mary Ryan, then, and Catherine Edge?’
Cross was angry without knowing why. Her hand came to rest lightly on his. It was the first time they had touched since the car. Cross was reminded of his first impression of her and her uncomplicated gaze. He had thought her plain then.
‘It’s like he’s waiting to prove something. The killings so far, I think they’re not the real point of the exercise, and it is an exercise.’
She slipped her hand away.
‘Think about it,’ she continued. ‘What have we got? A run of murders that gradually connects up.’
‘A pattern of religion and age. Ages forty-nine to fourteen, all divisible by the number seven.’
‘Exactly. Seven. I think that’s what he’s aiming for.’
‘He’s already killed eight.’
‘No, not numbers. Age. Seven-year-old children.’ She paused for him to work it out and added, ‘You wouldn’t let me say it before.’
He was about to protest, then thought of his own son and felt connected to the case in a way he had not before. He knew she was right but wanted to doubt it, as he did most things.
‘He’s established the pattern,’ she said. ‘He won’t stop there.’
‘Maybe he’ll stick at fourteen, like he did with Catherine.’
He didn’t believe it, even as he said it.
‘No. It’s the way they go down in age. It’s the children he’s after. I’m sure.’
Her rational assessment corresponded to what he had been feeling, messily, for some time. Until now the case had had no guts, no belly, like the killer was toying with them before revealing his real purpose. These children, he knew now instinctively, would be butchered like the animals in the barn.
‘Why?’ he asked helplessly.
‘I can’t answer that. I don’t know yet.’
All of a sudden he did. The words fell out of him in a rush.
‘It’s biblical. He’s biblical. He’s playing God. Or Herod ordering the massacre of the Holy Innocents.’ He saw the pattern and hurried
on, though he had no desire to give voice to the thought. ‘Except they were infants, they were innocent in the way no seven-year-old is.’
It was her turn to feel provoked.
‘And what can a child of seven be guilty of?’
‘Seven is the age of reason. When the child is thought old enough to tell right from wrong. Seven is the age we start to sin.’
She tried to take in what he was saying and thought back into her own childhood and saw he was right.
‘Yes,’ she said simply. ‘I remember.’
Afterwards they walked self-consciously back towards Westerby’s flat, still talking about the case, both aware that it was a way of avoiding the unstated subject that shadowed their evening. Westerby wondered what Cross was thinking and whether he was aware of the hot itch of desire in her. She wanted to tell him but stopped instead and said, ‘It’s odd.’
‘What?’
‘The cold-bloodedness. There’s no sexual angle. That’s the usual impulse, or, rather, that’s the impulse I would expect to find in a case where someone is driven to kill repeatedly. And the missing underwear in the case of both Marys suggests some sort of kink.’
Westerby waited until an approaching couple had passed before going on.
‘There’s an angle missing. I can’t see what’s driving him.’
‘Whatever sense of mission he has,’ said Cross.
‘Yes, but there’s something more, I’m sure of it.’
They walked on in silence until reaching Cross’s car. He got out his keys. Staying would only make things difficult, but he did not want to go home.
‘Is there anywhere we can get a coffee? I should have had one in the restaurant.’
‘Do you want to go back there?’
‘It’ll be closed. What time is it?’
‘Half eleven. You’re welcome to come in for a while.’
‘No, I ought to get home.’
He made no move. What an inane conversation, he thought. He wondered how long he had spent staring at the pavement.
‘Did you do that thing of not walking on the cracks when you were a kid?’ he said eventually.
She didn’t answer and Cross shrugged helplessly and they laughed at the absurdity of two grown people standing in the street unable to make a move. Cross took her by the hand and pulled her towards him and she slipped into his arms and immediately felt like she belonged there. There was nothing awkward about it. He lifted her face towards his and kissed her, and was surprised again by the intensity of her tongue working his.