In the Morning I'll Be Gone

by Adrian McKinty

  “Well?” she said, folding those blue meat-axe arms across her ample chest.

  “I’ve got a name for you,” I said.

  Her eyes narrowed.

  “Go on.”

  “Before I give it to you I want you to think about something,” I said.

  “What?”

  “Revenge is a mug’s game, Mary. The person getting revenge injures himself far worse by the act of vengeance than he was ever suffering before. He ends up living miserably. I’ve seen this first hand. A few years ago I revenged myself on a man who did terrible wrongs and it has brought me no satisfaction and considerable regret.”

  She scowled at me and grabbed me by the shoulders.

  “Tell me the name, Duffy!”

  “Tell me you’ll think about what I said.”

  “I’ll think about it, Duffy.”

  I nodded.

  I counted to ten in my head.

  If I told her it would be his death warrant.

  “Harper McCullough,” I said.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “She was the witness to his father’s will. His father was going to leave him nothing.”

  I reached into the pocket of my leather jacket and took out the Dictaphone tape recorder and gave it to her.

  “Play this. It’s all on here.”

  Her fist closed on the machine.

  “He admits it but it was a confession obtained under duress. It won’t stand up in court.”

  Of course, that wouldn’t matter at all.

  The Fitzpatrick family hadn’t bothered lawyers and judges with their problems for twenty generations and were unlikely to start now.

  “You should destroy the tape after you’ve played it.”

  “I will.”

  “What about your side of the bargain . . .” I said.

  “My side of the bargain?”

  “Dermot. Your son-in-law.”

  “When do you need this information by?”

  “As soon as possible.”

  “Will twenty-four hours do?”

  “It’ll do.”

  “Where do you like to stay when you’re in London?” she asked.

  “What?”

  “When you’re in London, what hotel do you stay at?”

  “I don’t have a hotel that I normally—”

  “Someone will call you at the Mount Royal on Regent Street tomorrow night. Be prepared to move. If you fuck this up it won’t be my fault.”

  “The Mount Royal Hotel tomorrow night? Should I register under my own name?”

  “How else will I be able to find you?” she said.

  “All right, I’ll be there.”

  There were tears and an insane wildness in her eyes.

  “Thank you, Duffy,” she said, and pushed me gently off the porch into the rain.

  She opened the front door and went back inside.

  I could see Annie looking at me through the living-room window. When she caught me peeping she turned away.

  I walked back to the BMW and drove to the nearest phone box, which was outside the post office in Antrim town.

  I called Kate.

  “I think he’s in England. My informant wants me to go to London,” I said.

  “London?”

  “Yes.”

  “When are you going?”

  “Tomorrow.”

  “Are you sure he’s in England? Our intelligence still says he’s going to attack a British army base in Germany.”

  “That’s where my informant is sending me, so I imagine that that’s where our boy is.”

  “I’ll go with you.”

  “OK.”

  “If it’s true he’s in England that scares me,” she said.

  “Why?”

  “Conference season has begun. The Tory Party conference begins in Brighton next week. The prime minister will be outside her usual security protocols.”

  “I’d get those protocols stepped up, if I were you.”

  “Yes, that might be a good idea.”

  Kate, Tom, myself, and “Alex,” a young MI5 driver, waited by the phone in Room 301 of the Mount Royal Hotel. The SAS and the Met’s Special Branch were on stand-by ready to roll at a moment’s notice.

  Nothing happened.

  We got hungry and ordered room service and played poker and watched Porridge and the snooker on BBC2.

  The phone didn’t ring until a quarter to midnight.

  She was calling from a phone box.

  She asked for me by name and the front desk put her through to my room. We had the phone on speaker.

  “Duffy?”

  “I’m here.”

  “11 Market Road, Tongham, Sussex. If he’s not there now he will be soon.”

  “Will he be alone or—”

  The line went dead.

  Tongham was a large village twenty miles to the north of Brighton. 11 Market Road was right on the outskirts of town. A cottage with woods behind it and fields in front. An out-of-the-way spot where no one would bother you.

  Kate made calls on the way down and the research team found out that it was a rental property. The owner was in Spain.

  We arrived in six Range Rovers. One for us, two for Special Branch, and three for the SAS Rapid Response Unit.

  We parked a quarter of a mile along the road and waited while the blades did their work. They were wearing black camouflage gear, bulletproof vests, and balaclavas. They were carrying MP5 assault rifles and some were armed with heavy machine guns.

  They scouted the place for an hour and twenty minutes. They used heat-seeking cameras and they drilled a hole in an exterior wall and inserted a pinhole video camera.

  We contributed nothing. We just sat there watching, waiting, and smoking in the car.

  Nobody talked.

  Suddenly the SAS team went in. They broke down the front door and piled into the house SWAT-team-fashion.

  Ten minutes later they came out.

  One of them signaled for us to come up.

  We drove to the house to see what they’d found.

  We could tell the place was deserted by the utter lack of excitement in the team.

  Kate questioned the SAS commander, a Geordie sergeant who was already smoking a fag on the downslope of his adrenalin crash.

  “Is there anyone in there?” she asked.

  “No, and I’m no expert but I’d say there hasn’t been for a while,” he said with an air of disgust.

  “Our intelligence was good,” Kate said defensively.

  “Yeah. Fantastic. We better go. Our job’s done and it’s a hell of a long drive back to Hereford,” the sergeant said.

  “It’s good practice for your lads,” I offered weakly.

  “If you say so,” the sergeant mumbled.

  When the SAS were gone Kate sent in the Special Branch forensic team, who were dressed in white-hooded boilersuits and wearing latex gloves.

  This wasn’t 1984 anymore. Now we were in Clockwork Orange.

  Kate produced a thermos of tea and we drank it while the droogs did their work.

  “Are you sure about your information, Sean?” Kate asked me. It was the first time she had expressed any doubt.

  “You know who the source is. And you know why she told me the information.”

  Kate frowned. “Would Mary Fitzpatrick really give up her son-in-law?”

  “Apparently there’s no love lost between them. And like I say, she gave me her word.”

  Kate nodded.

  The plod hooked up a noisy diesel generator to power their lights and other equipment. The peeler guy in charge, a chief inspector called Dawson, gave us his initial report half an hour later.

  “It looks like this intelligence is somewhat out of date. It’s hard to say exactly when, but from the mouse droppings and the layers of dust I’d say that no one’s been resident in this dwelling for several months.”

  “Are you sure?” Kate asked.

&nb
sp; “Well, I can’t be certain about the dates, but those are good rough estimates. No one has been here recently, that’s for sure.”

  Kate looked at me. It was hard to read her expression Not quite irritation, not quite disappointment, but something along those lines.

  “Did you get any fingerprints?” I asked.

  “We dusted for prints, but we didn’t find any,” Dawson said.

  Tom shook his head and groaned. “What a bust.”

  “Don’t you find that rather unusual, Chief Inspector?” I pressed him.

  “Unusual how?”

  “You didn’t find any prints at all in the whole house? Have you ever been at a crime scene where you’ve found no prints?”

  Dawson was a tall guy with a moustache and salt-and-pepper hair. He didn’t project an air of stupidity, but with coppers you could never really tell.

  “No prints. Not a one. That’s very strange, no?” I insisted.

  Dawson nodded. “Yes, that is a little uncommon.”

  “What are you getting at, Duffy?” Tom asked.

  “Sean is suggesting that at some point this was an IRA safe house,” Kate said.

  “But the intelligence is months out of date,” Tom said, and glared at me in the moonlight.

  Dawson looked at me with evident distaste. My Irish accent and lack of a police uniform presumably indicated that I was some kind of scumbag informer.

  “I think we’re missing something,” I said.

  “They played you, Duffy. Your informant played you. They gave you a real lead but they made sure it was a dead one. It’s a classic move. We see it all the time,” Tom said.

  “Can I have a look around?” I asked Kate.

  Kate raised her eyebrows at Dawson.

  “We’re done, help yourselves,” Dawson said.

  The three of us went in.

  A rather shabby cottage with an odor of mildew. The coppers had rigged up arc lamps but when I flipped the light switch the lights came on, which told me two things: the police sometimes neglected the obvious and someone was still paying the electricity bill.

  The furniture was nondescript. A couple of sofas, plastic chairs in the kitchen, a black and white Grundig TV circa 1970.

  Two bedrooms with two single beds each.

  “Four beds in total. That’s what you’d need for your typical IRA cell,” I suggested to Kate.

  She nodded and made a note of it.

  Cutlery in the drawers, crockery in the cupboard. An old box of cornflakes, powdered milk, sugar in a glass jar, tea sealed in plastic bags.

  Next to the toilet there was a copy of the Sun from March 1983. I read through the paper to look for messages or filled-in crossword clues but there was nothing. The page-three girl was a big-breasted blonde called Suzanne, who hoped one day to be a singer on a cruise ship.

  I ran the taps in the sink and checked that the gas worked.

  “No phone but there’s electricity and gas and running water,” I said to Kate.

  “What does that tell you, Sean?”

  “They’ve used it before and they’re coming back,” I said.

  It was getting on for four in the morning now.

  Kate sat next to me at the pine kitchen table. “Don’t beat yourself up about this, Sean. I’m sure you’ve done your best,” she said soothingly.

  “We should stake this place out. They’re coming back. Soon. We have to repair that front door and put everything back the way it was.”

  “Sean, look, you—”

  “Mary wouldn’t have given me bum info. They’re coming.”

  “How would she even know, Sean? We’re monitoring her phones, we’re lifting her mail.”

  “She knows!”

  Kate put her hand on mine.

  “You have to learn not to take these things personally.”

  “I don’t take it personally. I know I’m right. I want this house watched. If they’re not using it now they’re going to be using it. I want a team on this place twenty-four hours a day. I’ll be part of it.”

  She thought about it. “I know what they’ll say back on Gower Street, they’ll say that we’ve got to use our resources in the most sensible way possible. That this is a wild-goose chase.”

  “Then you’ve got to convince them, don’t you. A team of watchers, round the fucking clock.”

  Kate sighed. “For how long, Sean?”

  “As long as it takes.”

  “Gower Street will want to know. They’ll want to know the exact commitment.”

  “That’s your job, Kate. Finesse them. Convince them. Dermot’s coming here. I know it. I can smell the bastard. He’s planning a spectacular and he and his team are coming here. This is where they do the final prep or this is their bolthole when it’s done. Halfway between the ferry ports and London. Twenty minutes to Gatwick. It’s perfect.”

  She smiled indulgently. “If you say so, Sean.”

  “You’ll do it? You’ll watch the house?”

  “As you say, we’ll need to fix the front door and put everything back the way it was.”

  “And the fucking dust and the mouse droppings. He’s cautious, clever.”

  “All right.”

  “I want to be part of it. I want to be here when he comes. I don’t want you to shoot him when he’s got his hands up.”

  “Don’t you trust us?” Kate said.

  “No, I fucking don’t. And I don’t trust the SAS either. I’m not in the assassination business. I’m a policeman. We try and bring in our suspects alive if we can.”

  She raised her eyebrows slightly. That’s not what she had heard. She brushed the dust off her slacks.

  We walked outside.

  “I have a field office to run. I’ll have to go back to Northern Ireland,” Kate said.

  “OK.”

  “Which means you’ll be under Tom. You’ll have to do what he says.”

  “I can live with that.”

  “And there won’t be any heroics either, Sean. I’m going to be leaving strict instructions with the watch team. If you spot Dermot or indeed anyone coming here you’re to call it in and we’ll let the SAS take care of them. Your job will be to observe, nothing more. Is that understood?”

  “Understood loud and clear,” I said.

  “Well then, I’ll call our wise and venerable masters and I’ll see what we can do.”

  The van was parked on a layby half a mile from the house under an ancient copper beech tree. It was a beautiful location for an observation post because although it wasn’t that far away, we were on a completely different B road from the house itself. We were parked opposite a scrapyard that got intermittent use, and we were on a slight hill, which meant that you could look down on the house across the rapeseed fields. You could see any vehicles approaching on the London Road and you could see whether anyone was entering the house either from the front or the back. There was even a phone box at the scrapyard, which we could use if the battery on our wireless ever died.

  Dermot was a circumspect character, but if he did scout his safe house first to check for watchers it was unlikely he’d notice the dirty old Ford Transit half a dozen fields away next to the town dump.

  We had repaired the farmhouse’s front door, got rid of our footprints, and even put down that additional layer of dust I’d asked for so it would look as if no one had been inside in months.

  MI5 watchers came in teams of three. Shifts were twelve hours on and twelve hours off, which meant that you needed, at minimum, six personnel. Since this whole thing was my gaff I insisted on taking the place of at least one team member on the hated night shift.

  Our base was MI5’s own rather seedy safe house in nearby Brighton, and to save money and time we all stayed there rather than London.

  I shared my room with a young Scottish intelligence officer who called himself Ricky. He said he was from Glasgow. He played in a ska band and he had a beard. I liked him and I always let him beat me at Scrabble because I could see how important
it was to him. He said that he’d been recruited at St. Andrews because of his proficiency in foreign languages. He’d been studying Russian literature but could also read Czech, Polish, and Serbo-Croat—no doubt these skills were why they had put him on the Northern Ireland desk.

  Ricky was Tom’s deputy and the two of them ran the show.

  After the first three days Ricky and Tom stayed but all the other personnel changed because, as Tom explained, observation post duty was a notorious way to burn out intelligence officers.

  There were a few other developments: we tracked down the owner of the property, an octogenarian English accountant called Donoghue who had moved to Spain five years previously. He had a dozen properties along the south coast and he’d rented this cottage out to various people over the years, none of whom, it materialized, were in any way connected to the IRA. Because of the damp no one had apparently rented the place for nearly a year, and if it was a safe house it was one that was almost never used. After the op was over he’d have to be brought in and questioned, but at this stage it seemed that if the IRA was in fact staying in one of his houses he didn’t know anything about it.

  They were patient lads on the whole, and it wasn’t until Day 5 that I began to hear the mutterings about a “false lead” and “bad intel.” I sympathized with the agents who thought it was shite. If it hadn’t been for Mary’s word, and if I’d been outside this investigation looking in, I’d have me pegged as the sap too. And as time wore on I began to suspect, not that Mary had deliberately lied, but more that she had been given bad information. Perhaps she had played me, but, more likely, she’d just been given junk.

  Day 6 and Day 7 crawled by. Dreary hours in the van watching an unoccupied house, or dreary hours in Brighton playing poker with a rotating team of intelligence officers who lost money with depressing ease.

  At the end of the first week, Tom, Ricky, and myself drove up to London and met with Kate in Gower Street.

  Tom and Ricky were convinced that the operation was a waste of time but I insisted that my source was unimpeachable.

  Kate had the final say and after a slight hesitation agreed to sanction another full week’s surveillance. As she explained to us, and subsequently her superiors, the Tory Party conference was upon us and the IRA “safe house” was suspiciously close to Brighton . . .