by Chris Petit
The topics were schools, holidays, children, and gardens.
‘And how many do you have?’ a fearsome-looking matron asked Cross.
‘Gardens?’ asked Cross, nonplussed.
‘Children.’
‘Oh, two. At the last count.’
The matron soon gave up on him and Cross stood watching the guests. How comfortable, unaware and protected they looked, how at ease with their world. His own could have been a fiction or a dream for all that it touched on theirs.
Cross was aware of his father-in-law approaching. He complimented him on the party and they stood looking at the view in silence.
‘Everything all right?’ Gub O’Neill eventually asked.
‘Since the hospital?’
‘Yes, though I was thinking more of you and Deidre.’
‘I think you should ask Deidre that.’
‘I already did and she told me. Everything.’
Cross stared at his empty glass. He wanted another drink.
‘This isn’t really the time to talk,’ O’Neill went on, ‘but I’d like to help. There hasn’t been a separation or divorce in the O’Neill family. We stick together.’
O’Neill caught Cross’s dark look and qualified himself. ‘That sounds altogether too harsh. I didn’t mean it like that. Perhaps it would help for you to know that for many years there was another woman in my life besides Barbara. It caused a lot of pain and upset. I suppose what I’m saying is that I understand about these things. I’m more broad-minded than you might think.’
Cross tried to analyse his feelings. His father-in-law’s confession had left him tongue-tied. He heard him say, ‘Ah, there’s Deidre.’
‘What are you two talking about?’ she asked.
‘Admiring the view,’ said Cross.
O’Neill extricated himself, leaving them together. Deidre gave Cross a quizzical look. Behind her he could see Matthew and Fiona running around with bowls of snacks for the guests. The evening sun caught Deidre’s face, softening it. He didn’t want to exchange terse pleasantries.
‘I’m hunting a mass murderer at the moment.’
She said nothing, but accepted the hand he laid on her arm. He wondered if he were telling her from obscure motives, trying to extract her sympathy to distract her from enquiring into other areas of his life.
‘We think he started killing in 1971 for the paramilitaries, but now he’s out on his own and it’s going to end in a bloodbath.’
‘Do you have any idea who it is?’
‘Yes, but he’s cleverer than us.’
Deidre turned to Cross, who found it hard to read her expression. ‘I know you think I live in my own smug, isolated little world, and don’t give a damn for anything outside, like most of these people here,’ she said in a matter-of-fact voice. ‘But I do know a thing or two about the Irish. The Irish mental state is one based on siege, manipulation, victimization, destruction and self-destruction, like the Kilkenny cats. I know this and choose to avoid it, choose to try and lead an ordinary life in spite of living in a country that’s ripping itself apart. That’s why I never ask about your work.’
‘What are the Kilkenny cats?’
‘When Cromwell’s men put everything to the sword – the humans and then the animals – they finally came to the cats and for them they devised a game. They tied them together in pairs by their tails and slung them over a line, and watched them claw each other to death, which they did, cats being cats.’
‘Why are you telling me this?’
‘I’m aware that the most unspeakable things go on within five miles of our front door. I know that there are many justified grievances and I can even accept with my head, though not with my heart, that violence is the only adequate voice for this. I’m just saying that I know you’re more serious than I am, and that you have more of a conscience to wrestle with, and, yes, you can take the moral high ground any day. I know you think I’ve surrendered entirely to my parents’ narrow little world, but I have a responsibility, which perhaps you don’t share, which is to our children. The rest of it doesn’t matter. What does is their well-being and future happiness.’
To illustrate her point, Fiona fell over and Deidre hurried off to join the concerned crowd gathered around her. Cross realized he didn’t know what he wanted from anything. Father and daughter had the same disconcerting knack of talking at and through you. They spoke with the entire weight of their family history behind them. Theirs was a world where nothing was acquired – even Deidre’s fierce protection of her children – and everything inherited. He wondered if she ever really saw him for himself.
The party showed no signs of ending. He wandered into the house and found no one he wanted to talk to. Barbara O’Neill gave him a half-wave, a cigarette held jauntily between her fingers. She was a social smoker. The O’Neills were the sort of people who still served cigarettes at parties, laid out in silver boxes next to chunky table lighters, to the disapproval of Deidre. Cross took a cigarette and wandered back outside, away from the other guests, to where there was a bench overlooking the water. He’d not had a cigarette since hospital.
He wasn’t aware of Matthew at first, standing next to him, a bowl of peanuts in offering.
Cross helped himself to a handful and said, ‘Come and take the weight off your feet.’
Matthew sat down. Cross asked if he minded the smoke. The boy shook his head and said he liked it.
‘Bad habit,’ Cross said. ‘How do you like staying here? The garden must be great.’
Matthew said it was all right, which Cross took to mean that he’d prefer it if they were all together.
‘You know my work is very hard at the moment. That’s why it’s difficult for me to be here. But I haven’t forgotten about the holiday.’
He had in fact but promised himself to do something about it the next day. They didn’t say much after that. His conversations with Matthew usually exhausted themselves pretty quickly. He never managed to enter into the spirit of his children’s world.
Cross told himself that he was content sitting in silence with his arm round the boy, watching the sunset.
He wondered when he could decently leave and went and sought out Barbara to make his excuses, reckoning it would take him at least twenty minutes to work his way out of the door. Sure enough, Barbara promptly introduced him to an historian called Naylor, from Queen’s University, an ancient academic who’d retained his youthful features and sticking-up boyish hair.
‘And what do you do?’ Naylor asked, just at the point when Cross thought he could slip away.
‘I’m a policeman.’
‘Yes, yes, quite.’
‘Talking of which,’ said Cross, taking an exaggerated look at his watch, ‘back to the beat.’ He planned to call Westerby on the way into town.
Naylor seemed not to notice and stared off into the distance. He gave off a faintly musty smell and Cross wondered how long it was since anything of his had been to the dry cleaners.
‘It’s interesting how Prime Minister Thatcher has done such a U-turn on Northern Ireland,’ Naylor remarked apropos of nothing. ‘What do you think?’
The question was rhetorical, which was just as well as Cross didn’t have a ready answer. Naylor went on: ‘“This lady’s not for turning,” and so forth. Yes, yes, quite. I think you’ll find that hindsight will reveal a weak Prime Minister, not at all the Iron Lady she makes out. What do you think?’
‘She works very hard at the Iron Lady image.’
‘Terrified of being seen to be feeble or feminine, except if you look at her choice of Cabinet. That’s where you see her vanity. I’m told, by someone highly reliable, that she sits with her legs wide apart in meetings.’
Naylor giggled and Cross saw he was very drunk for all his fluency.
‘No, quite weak, quite weak, whatever her great claims to be the new Churchill. It’s not him she reminds me of. It’s Chamberlain – same didacticism, same absolute lack of humour. She’ll be got rid o
f in the end.’
‘Really?’ Cross was sceptical. ‘Who’ll get rid of her?’
‘Oh, the same ones who’re pushing her into this Dublin agreement. Don’t forget this was the woman who once said Ulster was as British as Finchley. Of course Edward Heath tried and failed, largely because he was ousted from office, though he managed the first stage of the process by getting rid of the Unionist government in 1972.’
‘Do you think the Dublin deal is a prelude to selling off the North?’
‘Oh, yes. She’ll dress it up in a series of fancy promises, saying it’s the best guarantee the people of Northern Ireland have ever had, but that’s all baloney. Anyway, it’s not up to her. It’s the Yanks, and what do the Yanks want?’
‘A single Ireland?’
‘Inside NATO, though how the Reverend Paisley takes to Mr Haughey remains to be seen. Of Haughey I once heard it said, never trust a man who wears jackets with double vents. Not altogether true, as we might see from looking around this room.’ He paused and giggled again. ‘But witheringly accurate in the case of Haughey, wouldn’t you say?’
Cross realized he was enjoying the company of this dry old stick with a streak of mischievousness.
‘And it really is up to the Americans?’
‘Afraid so. By the end of the century they’ll have the world to themselves, which gives them perhaps twenty years until the Japanese or Chinese manage to put an empire together again. Quite long enough for them to balls it up completely.’
‘What about the Soviet Union?’
‘On its last legs. Article in the paper not so long ago about German springtime and possible reunification, within the foreseeable future. Not impossible. Once the Soviets cease to be a threat, it’s likely the conflict here will fizzle out because the North’ll cease to be of strategic use and when the Americans move on there’s not much point, is there?’
‘It can’t just be about what the Americans think.’
‘Can’t it? The trouble with the United States is that it doesn’t really understand the ins and outs of history. It only understands the broad sweep, which is why it’s had to create an enemy large enough for it to understand, hence the cold war. In the thaw – and it’ll come much quicker than anyone expects – there’ll be an unholy mess when the Eastern European states, and the Balkans in particular, start feuding again. The Americans will not be able to get to grips with that at all.’
Naylor looked up at the ceiling and abruptly shut up as though he was aware of being the party bore.
‘What about Mrs Thatcher’s U-turn?’ asked Cross in what he thought was a polite attempt to round off the conversation.
‘Oh yes, quite. Staunch Unionist to begin with. Of course with her Methodist background she would instinctively understand the Calvinist thrift that governs the Protestant North, and approve. The Catholics she’d find much too swarthy and Mediterranean – gypsy even – and lax, not at all in the mould of free thinking and self-sufficiency that she likes so much.’
‘What turned her?’
‘Airey Neave’s death.’
Cross was suddenly alert. ‘Neave?’
‘Oh yes, no question. Neave was in many ways her mentor. He took a tough line towards insurrectionists and actively sought the job of Secretary of State for Northern Ireland. What do you remember about Neave?’
Cross knew he had been a war hero whose memoirs of his escape from Colditz had been a bestseller. He had favoured draconian measures in Northern Ireland. These, Naylor reminded Cross, included the reintroduction of internment, a full-scale deployment of the SAS, and arrest on sight of known republicans.
‘Not policies to endear him to anyone outside hardcore Unionists. Anyway, the point is, since Neave’s death Mrs Thatcher has been led in quite the opposite direction. The Americans would of course have been appalled by Neave throwing his weight around. He would have been anathema to them. Are you all right?’
Cross was not all right. He felt like an invisible weight was pressing down on him. Naylor stared after him as he mumbled his excuses and left.
Cross had no memory of finding his car and driving away. He saw later that he had only driven a quarter of a mile before pulling over. It was dark and he’d not put his lights on, was his first clear thought. He was like a man waking from a nightmare in a muck sweat with no idea of what had frightened him so much.
It took him several goes to work out what it was. While Naylor was talking about Neave Cross had automatically asked himself: who gained most from Neave’s death?
According to what Naylor was saying, it was the Americans and the pro-American British faction instrumental to carrying out their plans. Left Hand or Right Hand? Left Hand in all likelihood: the long-term strategists, pro-Dublin, unlike Neave. This, then, meant the same lot that had placed Heatherington and organized Candlestick’s defection – Candlestick’s defection. That was the phrase that had detonated the explosion in his head.
Listening to Naylor he had resisted the leap his imagination had made, so violently that he’d thought for a moment he was having a heart attack.
Sitting in the car, feeling the shock subside, he started to appreciate the dreadful symmetry and the dizzy complexity of it all, a complexity that also had a deadly simplicity.
It was common knowledge that the British had cultivated Unionist paramilitaries.
But what if they’d managed to pull off the unthinkable and do the same with the other side?
What if, in the wake of Candlestick’s penetration, the British had somehow managed to contrive a split in the Officials, out of which was born a maverick and unprecedented terrorist organization?
What if, in fact, the INLA was the monstrous brainchild of British intelligence?
Cross was desperate for a cigarette. He stared at the near darkness. The last of the day was reflected in a streak of light in his rear-view mirror. A couple of cars went by in slow convoy, their lights dipped. He felt in possession of knowledge that he had no desire to have.
Who gains? The INLA had helped foment a bitter feud within the republican movement, which led to a civil war that drew in the already weakened Provisionals. This was ultimately of advantage to the British. The INLA killed Airey Neave, which was also to the advantage of a British faction because it brought the new Prime Minister into line.
Who benefited most from the creation of the INLA?
The British.
How had the INLA managed to penetrate the House of Commons and kill one of its members within its precincts? The INLA had little operational experience, and the far more experienced Provisionals had never managed a coup like that.
Did they receive help?
And were the British ultimately behind the plan to get rid of Neave?
Cross remembered Eddoes talking about the INLA’s move into drugs, with the aim of weakening the Protestant middle classes, and wondered again: whose the hidden hand?
Did a British faction still have a controlling interest in the INLA? And was this plot part of the pro-Dublin faction’s attempt to destabilize the Protestant community?
Cross paused before turning on the engine, trying to shake off his thoughts by telling himself that he was succumbing to paranoid fantasy. The whole notion was ridiculous, he told himself, then straight after found himself asking: what if Candlestick knows this too?
Cross drove on, unable to free himself from the turmoil in his head. If Candlestick was the holder of such black secrets, Moffat could never afford to have them revealed. Candlestick alive and talking was the last thing Moffat wanted, Cross realized, and if he and Westerby got caught in the crossfire, tough.
He stopped at a garage for cigarettes. As he drove on, and the nicotine calmed him a little, his thoughts turned to Baker and his religious conversion. He’d heard that conversion and terrorism often went together, invariably after arrest and usually among loyalists. Such conversions were often designed with the judge’s leniency in mind. He wondered if Candlestick had undergone a similar convers
ion – but for real – hence the use of religious quotations. When God has deserted His Mansion the Devil must do His work indeed. Indeed, Cross thought grimly, nature abhors a vacuum.
Perhaps this conversion was Candlestick’s wild card, yet to be played.
54
CROSS had just left the following morning when the telephone rang. Westerby expected it was Martin, wanting his computer again. So far she had managed to stall him.
‘Hello?’ There was no answer. From his silence she knew who it was. At last.
‘Hello?’
She hung on until the connection was severed. Her hand hovered over the phone, waiting for it to ring again. When nothing happened she cursed. She wanted to call Cross but did not want to risk using the line in case Candlestick called again.
The night before she’d stayed up listening to Cross after he’d got back from his party. There was a tension between them. The reminder of his life outside theirs was difficult for her and she had spent the time that he was away fretting and watching the clock. By eleven she was tired and angry. When he turned up at quarter past she didn’t know if she was glad or not.
Some of her resentment was to do with his invasion of her flat. It had always been her own space, separate from her job, an eyrie to which she could retreat. Now it was just another work station and a refuge for him. What she found harder to cope with was the feeling of always being at the end of the queue. Even when they were alone, which was not often enough, it took too long to get him to herself. Candlestick was always coming between them and it was only when he’d been talked out of the way – temporarily exorcized – that they could turn to each other.