Collusion

by Stuart Neville

  O’Kane’s face darkened. ‘Only a handful of people know what I’m going to tell you. You do this job right, it’ll be just you and me knows the whole story. You’ll be paid well to keep quiet once it’s done. Big money. But if I ever hear a whisper of it down the line …’ O’Kane smiled. ‘Well, I won’t be looking for a refund. Understand?’

  ‘I understand,’ the Traveller said.

  O’Kane pointed to a file on the bedside locker. The Traveller reached for it. He removed loose sheets of paper, photocopies, computer printouts. Some pages had photographs, others blocks of text.

  ‘I don’t read,’ the Traveller said.

  O’Kane eyed him. ‘Don’t or can’t?’

  The Traveller spread the pages on the bed beside him. ‘A couple of people thought that made me stupid,’ he said. ‘They don’t think much of anything nowadays.’

  O’Kane clicked his tongue against his lower lip three times. He started talking. He talked about the madman Gerry Fegan, how he’d been driven by figments of his drink-addled imagination to kill Michael McKenna, Vincie Caffola, a crooked cop, and O’Kane’s cousin, Father Eammon Coulter. He talked about the politician Paul McGinty’s botched attempts to contain it, how they’d made things worse, costing more lives, including McGinty’s own. It had ended in a bloodbath at an old farm near Middletown, O’Kane’s son dead, shot by a traitorous ex-soldier called Davy Campbell, and the old man injured.

  Fegan got away clean, taking Marie McKenna and her child with him. They had vanished into thin air, it seemed. Aside from O’Kane, two survivors from the scene remained: McGinty’s driver, and Kevin Malloy, one of O’Kane’s boys. Malloy was hit in the gut and the chest. The driver Quigley had taken O’Kane and Malloy to a hospital in Dundalk, saving both their lives.

  ‘This needs to go away,’ O’Kane said. ‘The Brits, Dublin, the boys in Belfast; they all want it cleaned up.’

  ‘They said it was a feud,’ the Traveller said. ‘On the news. They said those three dissidents ambushed McGinty at the farm.’

  ‘The Brits put that together,’ O’Kane said. ‘They got McSorley and his boys at the border. They planted the guns in the car, made it look like they’d blown themselves up with their own bomb. Lovely job, it was.’

  The Traveller nodded. He couldn’t deny he was impressed. ‘But that’s not all, is it?’ he asked. ‘There’s too many people in the know.’

  ‘Quigley and Malloy,’ O’Kane said. ‘I want them gone, and so do the Brits. And there’s a lawyer, Patsy Toner. Get rid of him, too. The Brits will turn a blind eye. They’ll make sure the investigation turns nothing up. They’ve as much to lose as anyone.’

  The Traveller folded his arms across his chest. ‘But any arsehole could do those three. That’s not why you need me.’

  ‘I want Fegan,’ O’Kane said. ‘I want him brought to me alive.’ He pointed a thick finger to emphasise the point. ‘Alive. He’s no good to me if he’s not breathing, you understand? Nobody knows where he went. You’ll have to draw him out.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Marie McKenna and her child. The cops have them hidden, but there’s been a bit of luck.’

  ‘Oh? What’s that, then?’

  ‘Marie McKenna’s father had a stroke last week. He’s lucky to be alive, or maybe unlucky, depending how you look at it. He’s in a bad way. I’m told there’s a good chance he’ll have another one before he recovers, and it’ll probably do for him.’

  ‘So you reckon she’ll come out of hiding to go and see him,’ the Traveller said. ‘Her and the kid’ll show themselves.’

  O’Kane tilted his head. ‘I’m told you’ve no problems doing women and children. Is that right?’

  The Traveller shrugged. ‘Depends on the money,’ he said.

  4

  ‘I don’t trust him,’ Orla said to her father after one of the men had escorted the Traveller out. ‘Them gypsies are all the same. They’d thieve the breath from you if you let them.’

  ‘Trust’s got nothing to do with it,’ the Bull said.

  The visitor gone, he shrank back into the chair, grew somehow smaller.

  It still tore at her. He’d seemed a giant when she was a child, whether his hard hands were gathering her to him or slapping her around the ears. While other men seemed to diminish in size as she grew up, her father remained as big. It wasn’t just the height and breadth of him, though they were impressive. His size came from within; he was a giant of the soul, the boss of everything. But now he was smaller, like someone had sucked the giant out of him and left only the skin and bones behind.

  That someone was Gerry Fegan, and even to think his name forced hate to swell in her breast. But she was a practical woman, always had been. While her brothers pissed away their youth living off their father’s name, she had strived to make herself worthy of it.

  ‘Do you want back into bed?’ she asked.

  ‘Aye, love,’ he said. ‘I’m tired.’

  Orla went to him, slipped her arms under his. He linked his hands behind her neck, and they grunted together as she hoisted him up.

  ‘Easy, now,’ she said as he lowered his damaged leg, the blanket spilling away. He hissed as his foot settled on the floor.

  Only a few months before, the very idea of lifting him would have been absurd, even as broad and strong as she was. But with the giant hollowed out of him, she could manage it, barely.

  Orla back-pedalled, letting him take tiny baby steps as he followed her momentum. She felt the edge of the bed against her thighs and turned him. He sagged onto the mattress, and the bed groaned. She scooped up his legs and swung them up and over the blankets. He gasped and cursed.

  ‘There, now,’ she said. ‘Lie back.’

  He did as he was told and settled into the mound of pillows. Sweat glistened on his blotched forehead. She fetched a cup of water and held it to his lips, then dabbed at the dribbles on his chin with a tissue. The softness of the flesh made tears climb up from her throat. She swallowed them.

  ‘I don’t like him,’ she said.

  ‘He’s the best,’ her father said. ‘Doesn’t matter if you like him or not. I’m paying him to do a job, not to be your friend.’

  ‘You don’t need him for Toner and the rest of them.’ She dropped the cup and the tissue into the wastepaper bin. ‘Any fucker could do them.’

  ‘Don’t swear, love,’ the Bull said. ‘It doesn’t suit a girl to swear.’

  She took his big hand in hers. ‘Oh, don’t be such an old nag. Point is, you could get anyone who knows how to do the job to go after them boys.’

  Her father sighed, the breath leaking out of him until his massive chest seemed to sink back into itself. ‘It’s not them I need him for. It’s Fegan.’

  Orla studied the broken veins criss-crossing his face, the tufts of his eyebrows, the dark circles beneath them. ‘You could let Fegan go. No one’s heard of him since. He’ll stay away. He’s no reason to come back.’

  His hand loosened in hers. ‘I’m sick of talking about this. You’ll not turn me.’

  ‘The dreams won’t stop if you kill him,’ she said, renewing her grip on his thick fingers. ‘You think you’ll be well again if he’s dead, but you won’t. There’s no—’

  ‘Go on, now, love.’ He pulled his hand away from hers. ‘I’m tired.’

  ‘All right,’ she said. She leaned in and placed a kiss on his damp forehead, holding her lips there until he turned his head away.

  The door closed softly behind Orla as she let herself out into the corridor. She sat in the chair facing her father’s room. Fat ugly sobs bubbled up from her middle as she buried her face in her hands. Once again she imagined putting a pillow over the old man’s face and saving him from whatever it was that festered inside his mind.

  5

  Sylvia Burrows dabbed at her nose with a balled-up tissue. Her thick glasses magnified her tearful eyes. She sniffed long and hard, then slumped as she let the air out. Lennon sat across the interview room table from
her, a pad covered with his spidery scrawl lying between them. He’d type the statement up in the afternoon and call her back to sign it in the morning.

  ‘I seen three men shot dead in my café over the years,’ Sylvia said. ‘One of them in the late Seventies, another in 1981 during the hunger strikes, and the third one just before the ceasefire. I knew every one of them, called them by their names when I held their hands. I’ll never forget that feeling, the trembling in their fingers. Then it stops and they go cold.’

  She laid her hands flat on the graffiti-strewn table, spreading her fingers wide. Old burns scarred the loose skin, a blue plaster wrapped around the ring finger of her left. She stared down at them. ‘Jesus, I’m getting old,’ she said.

  Lennon placed his hands on top of hers. She clasped his fingers, squeezed them.

  ‘You’re a good young fella,’ she said.

  He fought the urge to pull his hands away, to tell her there was little good about him.

  ‘Handsome,’ Sylvia said. She lifted his hands, turned them, studied the shape of them. ‘I never married, you know. There was plenty chased me, but I could never settle. Too many handsome boys to pick from. That was my soft spot, the handsome boys.’

  Lennon returned her smile. ‘Thank you for talking to me. I hope you’ll testify, if it gets to court.’

  ‘I never testified before.’ She returned his hands to the tabletop. ‘Two of them, I saw their faces when they shot those men in my café. I could’ve drawn pictures of them. I can still see them now. But I got the phone calls late at night, the bullets in the post. I never went to court. But I will this time.’

  She squeezed Lennon’s wrists.

  ‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘You’ll be safe, I promise. There’s no need to be afraid.’

  ‘Afraid’s got nothing to do with it,’ she said, her face hardening. ‘People should stick by their own. My God, trying to kill someone the same sort as you. If you can’t trust your own kind, who can you trust, hmm?’

  Lennon forced a smile and slid his hands from beneath hers. ‘I’m glad you feel that way.’

  A knock at the door broke the moment. Chief Inspector Uprichard leaned in.

  ‘Can I have a minute?’ he asked.

  DCI Dan Hewitt sat to the side of Uprichard’s desk, watching Lennon. Hewitt and Lennon had come through Garnerville together. Hewitt had progressed higher in the ranks, despite being a year younger than Lennon at thirty-six. He was smart, always playing the angles, and well suited to the covert work of C3 Intelligence Branch. While Lennon struggled his way into C2 Serious Crime, Hewitt eased into the shiny new replacement for Special Branch. In the reborn police force, cleaned and polished for the post-ceasefire Northern Ireland, there was no longer any need for the cops to have their very own secret service.

  Except everyone knew that’s exactly what C3 was, and many continued to call them Special Branch, unless they were filling out a form or talking to the press. The officers of C3 still worked in sealed rooms, locked away from their colleagues, protected by a wall of silence and number pads on the doors. Only ten years ago, Special Branch saved countless lives by running informants, mounting surveillance operations, and making life difficult for the paramilitaries. But they played dirty, as did MI5 and the army’s Fourteen Intelligence Company. Every agency ran its own operations, sometimes cooperating, more often not. All of them worked in the cracks between the law and the necessary, and all of them had blood on their hands. Some felt the peace process rendered the likes of Special Branch at best obsolete, at worst a dangerous relic of the quasi-military role the police had played in this place for thirty-odd years. Others felt the force-within-a-force still had a vital job to do while the paramilitaries remained on the streets. Lennon wasn’t sure which side of the argument he came down on. It depended on whom he was most pissed off with at any given time: C3 or their enemies.

  Uprichard rocked his chair back and forth. The creaking gnawed at Lennon’s nerves.

  ‘What?’ he asked.

  Uprichard fidgeted.

  Hewitt scratched his chin.

  ‘What?’ Lennon asked again.

  Uprichard looked at Hewitt. ‘You wanted to see him, not me.’

  Hewitt sighed. ‘How solid is it?’

  Lennon looked from one man to the other. ‘How solid is what?’

  ‘The case against Rankin.’

  Lennon laughed. Hewitt’s frown deepened. The laugh died in Lennon’s throat. ‘You’re serious?’

  Hewitt raised his eyebrows and waited.

  ‘I have a witness who saw him knife Crozier and is willing to testify to it. I’ve got a victim who can identify him when he’s fit. I’ve got a weapon with Crozier’s blood and Rankin’s prints on it. I’ve got the blood on his clothes. Do I need to go on?’

  Hewitt’s face reddened. ‘Fuck,’ he said. ‘There’s no way to spin it?’

  Lennon sat forward. ‘Spin it? Nothing short of a time machine is going to keep Dandy Andy Rankin out of Maghaberry. Unless I’ve missed something, I’d have thought putting Rankin away was, you know, good.’

  ‘Not for everyone,’ Hewitt said. ‘Look, do you have to put attempted murder to the PPS? What about GBH? A fight that got out of hand. No intent to kill.’

  Lennon swallowed anger. ‘Go over to the City Hospital and take a look at the hole in Crozier’s throat. Tell me Rankin didn’t try to kill him. He’s lucky he didn’t hit the—’

  ‘It couldn’t have been self-defence? There was a lot of confusion at the scene. Did you identify yourself properly as a police officer?’

  ‘I identified myself. Jesus, he had poor Sylvia Burrows with a knife to her throat.’

  ‘Fuck,’ Hewitt said.

  Lennon sat back. ‘Can someone explain to me how bagging a piece of shit like Rankin could possibly be a bad thing?’

  Uprichard coughed. ‘Well, Jack, you know our colleagues in C3 move in mysterious ways. They often have information that us ordinary officers don’t. There may be wider implications to this, other operations that might be comp—’

  ‘Rankin exercises a huge amount of control over his patch of Belfast,’ Hewitt said, ignoring the look of annoyance on Uprichard’s face. ‘He keeps everyone in line, keeps the dealers away from kids, stops the local boys from cutting each other’s throats. He may be a piece of shit, I won’t disagree with you there, but he’s a useful piece of shit.’

  ‘Is he an informant?’

  Hewitt tilted his head. ‘You know better than to ask me that, Jack.’

  ‘Is he? Is he a tout?’

  ‘That’s none of your concern. Listen, Rankin keeps discipline among his boys, something the Loyalists have always lacked. It’s the same on your side of the fence. When McKenna and McGinty got killed, the whole Republican movement could have torn itself apart, but the leadership clamped down, kept them in check.’

  ‘What the fuck do you mean, my side of the fence?’

  ‘Now, Jack,’ Uprichard said, his tone ominous.

  ‘I just mean you’re a Catholic, you’re from that community,’ Hewitt said, showing his palms.

  Lennon went to rise from his chair, with no idea what he’d do next, but Uprichard said, ‘Jack, please, let the man finish.’

  Lennon sat down and locked his fingers together.

  Hewitt smiled. ‘You know how tight a ship the Republicans run. The Loyalists aren’t like that. They’d kill each other’s grannies to get ahead. We take a stabilising force like Rankin out of the community, Christ knows what might happen.’

  Lennon stared hard at Hewitt. ‘Is this you talking, or the Northern Ireland Office?’

  ‘Inflicting grievous bodily harm, Jack. GBH. He’ll do time, even if he pleads, which I guarantee he will. You’ll put Rankin away. It’ll be on record as your arrest, your case. It’ll look good for you, how you performed under pressure, how you carried out first aid on Rankin and Crozier, how you stopped that old dear getting cut up. There could be a commendation in it for you. You can interview
Rankin at the hospital when the doctors say he’s fit, see if he’ll give you any dirt you can follow up on. I wouldn’t be surprised if you got back on a Major Investigation Team.’

  Lennon kept staring. ‘GBH with intent.’

  ‘No,’ Hewitt said. ‘That could be a life sentence if he gets the wrong judge.’

  ‘He’ll only get five with GBH, probably less if he cooperates. That means two and a half at most if he behaves himself inside. He’ll do a chunk of that on remand.’

  Hewitt stared back. ‘I’ll make sure the PPS push for the maximum.’

  ‘Will you shite,’ Lennon said.

  Uprichard said, ‘DCI Gordon has a space coming up on his MIT. Charlie Stinson is going to South Africa for a year on placement. I’m sure Gordon could use you.’

  Lennon’s mind lingered on that idea. DCI Gordon led the best Major Investigation Team in the city.

  You were the smartest one out of the lot of us back at Garnerville,’ Hewitt said. ‘Smarter than me, even. Don’t cause yourself grief over a shit-pile like Rankin. Besides, you can’t claim any moral high ground given your recent history. You got off light with that Patterson business. You owe me a favour.’

  Lennon buried his face in his hands.

  ‘Fuck,’ he said.

  6

  Sometimes dreams followed Gerry Fegan into waking. He knew the border between his mind and the world beyond was solid, but the dreams had a way of crossing over. Just a few months ago, he drowned his terrors with whiskey every night. Now that he was sober they flourished, swelled, grew until they rubbed against his daylight hours.

  But still, anything was better than before, when the shadows of the dead followed him through Belfast’s backstreets and alleyways.

  He threw the blankets aside and let the damp air jerk him awake. Even as his consciousness flickered to life the dream-figures climbed the walls. He blinked and rubbed them away. The heels of his calloused hands scoured his eyelids as the city’s early rumbles and screeches seeped through his single window. He hoisted himself upright and dropped his legs over the side of the cot.

  The scarring on Fegan’s left shoulder itched, a shiny pink sun surrounded by the slashes of amateur stitches. He rubbed them with his palm, the layers of hard, cracked skin scraping the irritation away. Aches of fatigue rippled through his shoulders and arms as he stretched.