The wolf at the door sd-17

by Jack Higgins

  "And that's it? Nothing like: 'Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death, we who are ourselves alone'?"

  "The prayer card," Bounine said to Kurbsky. "You forgot that."

  Kurbsky frowned, and said, "Why, is it important?"

  "It means you are all in great danger. Let's find the ladies, and I'll spell it out for you," and he led the way along to the terrace and the conservatory.

  In the Victorian conservatory, crammed with plants, there was silence when Ferguson finished talking. Kurbsky had produced Cochran's wallet and taken out the prayer card, which lay on a small iron table beside it.

  Svetlana Kelly, Kurbsky's aunt, sat in a wicker chair. Katya Zorin, Svetlana's partner, a handsome forty-year-old with cropped hair, who was an artist and theater scene designer, sat close to her, holding the older woman's right hand.

  "These are terrible things you tell us, General. Such violence is too much to bear."

  "But it must be faced, my dear. The prayer card was involved with all these attacks I've just discussed, except for the business involving Monica Starling. It's hardly a coincidence, and, when I come here, I find this." He picked up the prayer card and held it high. "I repeat, you are in great danger if you stay here, or stay in London for that matter. I think you should take the Americans' offer of sanctuary."

  "To leave my home is a terrible prospect. All my beautiful things. The world is so untrustworthy these days." Svetlana was distressed.

  Ferguson threw down the card. "You've heard the full story. Blake is in the hospital badly wounded, four of the cardholders are violently dead, the attempt to burn down Salter's pub could have killed everybody in it." He turned to Kurbsky. "Please, Alex, just go, and take them with you, and leave us to hunt down whoever is behind this."

  Kurbsky bent down and kissed Svetlana on the head. "He's right, babushka, my decision. We go, and we go tonight, is this not so, General?"

  "You'll take the Gulfstream from Farley Field. Nobody will know you have gone."

  She was weeping now, and Katya kissed her on the cheek. "All will be well, my love. Alexander is right. We must go."

  Ferguson said, "I'll make a deal with you, Svetlana. It's important for Alex to go if there are strange and wicked people stirring, but you needn't worry about your paintings or your antiques. I'll arrange for a caretaker to live here and take care of them, all right? Now I must go."

  Kurbsky walked to the gate with him. Ferguson opened it, and turned. "It really is the smart move until we get to the bottom of all this."

  Kurbsky said, "I'm sure you're right. It's just that I've never been very good at running away."

  "On this occasion, you must think of the women. I'll see you off from Farley. Roper will be in touch to confirm the timing."

  As Martin got out of the Daimler, Ferguson said, "I'll sit beside you." Martin got the door open, it started to rain, and Ferguson scrambled inside. The big man slid behind the wheel and drove away.

  "Thank God, that's sorted," Ferguson said.

  "Things looking a bit better, General?" Martin inquired.

  "Not really," Ferguson said. "Actually, the road ahead looks pretty bloody stony, but there it is." He leaned back, called Roper, and filled him in. "So the intruder at Belsize Park definitely makes their departure a top priority."

  "I'll organize it at once. And that man Kurbsky tangled with-Matthew Cochran, wasn't it? Camden Town, Sixty Lower Church Street. We should check on him, too."

  "You're right. See to it."

  When Roper made the call, Dillon and Billy were in a bar on Camden High Street. Dillon had suggested a luncheon sandwich, but the truth was, he was thinking ahead, about what was waiting for him in Kilburn. Billy suspected that Dillon needed a drink and went along with the suggestion, though Billy never drank. He was a bit alarmed, though, when the Irishman downed his second large Bushmills. Then Roper called.

  Dillon obviously couldn't put it on speaker in the pub, so he listened, then said, "Okay, we'll handle it. We're in Camden High Street now." He relayed to Billy what Roper had just told him. "We'll go and look this guy Cochran up. Do you know the address?"

  "No, but the Sat Nav will," Billy said. "So let's move it."

  They twisted and turned through a number of side streets, finally reaching one called Church. There was no number 60, and beyond the street was a vast site, obviously cleared for building. There was a convenience store on the corner called Patel's, freshly painted, incongruous against the old decaying houses.

  "Wait for me," Dillon said, and got out of the Cooper.

  The store was crammed with just about everything you would ever need, and the stocky Indian in traditional clothes was welcoming. "Can I help you, sir?"

  "I was looking for an address-60 Lower Church Street."

  "Ah, long gone. Many streets were knocked down last year, and Lower Church Street was one of them. They are to build flats."

  "I was looking for a man named Matthew Cochran who used that address."

  "But I remember number 60 well, it was a lodging house."

  "Thanks very much." Dillon returned to the Cooper.

  "No joy there. Lower Church Street was knocked down last year, and the address was just a lodging house. Let's move on."

  Like many areas of London, Kilburn was changing, new apartment blocks here and there, but much of it was still what it had always been: streets of terrace houses dating from Victorian and Edwardian times, even rows of back-to-back houses. It was the favored Irish quarter of London and always had been.

  "It always reminds me of Northern Ireland, this place. We just passed a pub called the Green Tinker, so that's Catholic, and we're coming up to the Royal George, which has got to be Protestant. Just like Belfast, when you think about it," Billy said.

  "Nothing's changed," Dillon told him. He thought back again, to his mother dying when he was born, his father raising him with the help of relatives, mainly from her family, until, in need of work, his father moved to London and took him with him. Dillon was twelve years old, and they did very well together right here in Kilburn. His father made decent money because he was a cabinet-maker, the highest kind of carpenter. He was never short of work. Dillon went to a top Catholic grammar school, which led him to a scholarship at RADA at sixteen, onstage with the National Theatre at nineteen-and then came his father's death, and nothing was ever the same again.

  Billy said, "Where did you live? Near here?"

  "Lodge Lane, a Victorian back-to-back. He opened up the attic, my father did, put a bathroom in. A little palace by the time he had finished with it."

  "Do you ever go back?"

  "Nothing to go back to. The fella who tried to incinerate you, Costello/Docherty? His address was Point Street. We'll take a look."

  "Will you still know your way?"

  "Like the back of my hand, Billy, so just follow what I tell you."

  Which Billy did, ending up in a street of terrace houses, doors opening to the pavement. There were cars of one kind or another parked here and there, but it was remarkably quiet.

  "This is going back a few years," Billy said as they drew up.

  The door of number 5 was interesting for two reasons. First, there was yellow scene-of-crime police tape across it, forbidding entrance. Second, a formal black mourning wreath hung from the door knocker.

  "Interesting," Dillon said, and got out, and Billy followed. The curtain twitched at the window of the next house. "Let's have words. Knock them up." Billy did.

  The door opened, and a young woman in jeans and a smock, holding a baby, appeared. "What is it?" she asked with what Dillon easily recognized as a Derry accent.

  Billy flashed his MI5 warrant card. "Police. We're just checking that everything's okay."

  "Your lot have been and gone hours ago. They explained that Docherty had been killed in a car accident. I don't know why they've sealed the door."

  "To stop anyone getting in."

  "He lived on his own, ke
pt himself to himself."

  "What, not even a girlfriend?"

  "I never even saw him with a boyfriend, though he was of that persuasion if you ask me."

  Dillon turned on his Belfast accent. "Is that a fact, girl dear? But one friend, surely, to leave that mourning wreath?"

  She warmed to him at once. "Ah, that's Caitlin Daly, for you. A heart of gold, that woman, and goodness itself."

  "Well, God bless her for that," Dillon told her. "A fine child you've got there."

  "Why, thank you." She was beaming now.

  They got in the Cooper, and Billy drove away. "You don't half turn it on when it suits you."

  "Fifteen Green Street, now. Just follow my directions."

  Billy did as he was told. "What's the point? We know Pool lived on his own. I thought you wanted to go and look up the local priest?"

  "We'll get to that, so just do as I say," and Dillon gave him his directions.

  The houses in Green Street were substantial: Edwardian and semi-detached, with a small garden in front and a narrow path around the side leading to a rear garden.

  "This is better," Billy said. "No garages, though."

  "People who lived here in 1900 had no need for garages."

  Dillon opened a gate and walked up to the front door through the garden, followed by Billy. The door was exactly the same as the one in Point Street, with the police tape across it and the black mourning wreath hanging from the knocker.

  "Caitlin Daly again, it would appear."

  The door of the adjacent house was within touching distance over the hedge. It opened now, and a white-haired lady peered out. Dillon turned on the charm again, this time pulling out his own warrant card.

  "Police," he told her. "Just checking that all is well."

  The woman was very old, he could see that, and obviously distressed. "Such a tragedy. The police sergeant this morning told me he died in a terrible crash somewhere in central London. I can't understand it. I've driven with him, and he was so careful. A professional chauffeur."

  "Yes, it's very sad," Dillon told her.

  "I knew his mother, Mary, so well, a lovely Irish lady." She was rambling now. "Widowed for years, a nurse. It was a great blow to him when she died. Eighty-one, she was. From Cork."

  Dillon said gently, "I know it well. Wasn't Michael Collins himself a Cork man?

  "Who?" she said.

  "I'm sorry, and me thinking you were Mrs. Caitlin Daly?" She looked bewildered. "The mourning wreath on the door."

  "Oh, I'm not Caitlin, and I saw her leave it earlier. Her mother was a wonderful friend to me. Died last year from lung cancer. Only seventy-five. She was still living with Caitlin at the presbytery by the church. But Caitlin isn't married, never was. She's been housekeeper to Father Murphy for years. Used to teach at the Catholic school. Now she just looks after the presbytery and Father Murphy and two curates." She was very fey now. "Oh, dear, I've got it wrong again. He's Monsignor Murphy, now. A wonderful man."

  Dillon gave her his best smile. "You've been very kind. God bless you."

  They went back to the Cooper, and Billy said, as he settled behind the wheel, "Dillon, you'd talk the Devil into showing you the way out of hell. The information you got out of that old duck beggars belief."

  "A gift, Billy," Dillon told him modestly. "You've got to be Irish to understand."

  "Get stuffed," Billy told him.

  "Sticks and stones," Dillon said. "But everything that befuddled old lady told me was useful information."

  "I heard. Pool was wonderful, so was his mother, this Caitlin bird is beyond rubies, and, as for the good Monsignor Murphy, from the sound of it they got him from central casting." He turned left on Dillon's instructions. "Mind you, he must be good to get that kind of rank in a local church where he's their priest-in-charge."

  "Turn right now," Dillon told him. "And what would you be knowing about it?"

  "I've never talked much about my childhood, Dillon. My old man was a very violent man, killed in gang warfare when I was three. My mum was married to Harry's brother, and she was an exceptional lady who died of breast cancer when I was nineteen. I really went off the rails after that."

  "Which is understandable."

  "It was Harry who pulled me round, and you, you bastard, when you entered our lives. You introduced me to philosophy, remember, gave me a sense of myself."

  "So where is this leading?" Dillon asked.

  The Cooper turned another corner and pulled up outside their destination. "Church of the Holy Name," it said on the painted signboard beside the open gate, along with the times of Confession and Mass. The building had a Victorian-Gothic look to it, which made sense because it was only in the Victorian era that Roman Catholics by law were allowed to build churches again. Dillon saw a tower, a porch, a vast wooden door bound in iron in a failed attempt to achieve a medieval look.

  They stayed in the car for a few moments. Billy said, "The thing is, my mother was a strict Roman Catholic. Not our Harry. He doesn't believe in anything he can't put his hand on, but she really put me onstage. When I was a kid, I was an acolyte. I tell you, Dillon, it meant everything to her when it was my turn to serve at Mass."

  "I know," Dillon said. "Scarlet cassock, white cotta."

  "Don't tell me you did that?"

  "I'm afraid so, and, Billy, I've really got news for you. I did it in this very church we're about to enter. I was twelve when my father brought me from Northern Ireland to live with him in Kilburn. That means it was thirty-seven years ago when I first entered this church, and the priest in charge is the same man, James Murphy. As I recall, he was born in 1929, which would make him eighty."

  "But why didn't you mention that to Ferguson and the others? What's going on? I knew something was, Dillon. Talk to me."

  Dillon sat there for a moment longer, then took out his wallet and from one of the pockets produced a prayer card. It was old, creased, slightly curling at the golden edges. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death, we who are ourselves alone.

  "Jesus, Dillon." Billy took it from him. "Where the hell did this come from?"

  "It was Father James Murphy, as he was then, who first received the news of my father's death in that firefight in Belfast, an incident that turned me into what I am, shaped my whole life. 'A casualty of war,' he told me, gave me the card, and begged me to pray." He smiled bleakly, took the card, and replaced it in the wallet. "So here we are. Let's go in, shall we? I see from the board someone's hearing confessions in there, although it may not be the great man himself."

  He got out, and Billy joined him, his face pale. "I don't know what to say."

  They entered and walked through the cemetery, which was also Victorian-Gothic and rather pleasant, marble effigies, winged angels, engraved headstones, and cypress trees to one side. "I used to like this when I was a boy, liked it more than I liked it inside the church in a way. It's what we all come to, when you think of it," Dillon said.

  "For Christ's sake, cut it out," Billy said. "You're beginning to worry me."

  He turned the ring on the great door, and Dillon followed him through. There was faint music playing, something subdued and soothing. The whole place was in a kind of half darkness, but was unexpectedly warm, no doubt because of central heating. The usual church smell, so familiar from childhood, filled his nostrils. Dillon dipped his fingers in the holy water font as he went past and crossed himself, and Billy, after hesitating, did the same.

  The sanctuary lamp glowed through the gloom, and to the left there was a Mary Chapel, the Virgin and Child floating in a sea of candlelight. The place had obviously had money spent on it in the past. Victorian stained glass abounded, carvings that looked like medieval copies, and a Christ on the Cross which was extremely striking. The altar and choir stalls, too, were ornate and, it had to be admitted, beautifully carved.

  A woman was down there wearing a green smock, arranging flowers by the altar. Fifty or so, Dillon told h
imself, a strong face with a good mouth, handsome in a Jane Austen kind of way, the hair fair and well kept with no gray showing, although that was probably due more to the attentions of a good hairdresser than nature. She wore a white blouse and gray skirt under the smock, and half-heeled shoes. She held pruning scissors in one gloved hand, and she turned and glanced at them coolly for a moment, then returned to her flowers.

  Dillon moved towards the confessional boxes on the far side. There were three of them, but the light was on in only one. Two middle-aged women were waiting, and Billy, sitting two pews behind them beside Dillon, leaned forward to decipher the name card in the slot on the priest's confessional door.

  "You're all right, it says 'Monsignor James Murphy.' "

  A man in a raincoat emerged from the box and walked away along the aisle, and one of the women went in. They sat there in silence, and she was out in not much more than five minutes. She sat down, and her friend went in. She was longer, more like fifteen minutes, then finally emerged, murmured to her friend, and they departed.

  "Here I go," Dillon whispered to Billy, got up, opened the door of the confessional box, entered, and sat down.

  "Please bless me, Father," he said to the man on the other side of the grille, conscious of the strong, aquiline face in profile, the hair still long and silvery rather than gray.

  Murphy said, "May our Lord Jesus bless you and help you to tell your sins."

  "Oh, that would be impossible, for they are so many."

  The head turned slightly towards him. "When did you last make a confession, my son?"

  "So long ago, I can't remember."

  "Are your sins so bad that you shrink from revealing them?"

  "Not at all. I know the secrets of the confessional are inviolate, but acknowledging the deaths of so many at my hands in no way releases me from the burden of them."

  Murphy seemed to straighten. "Ah, I think I see your problem. You are a soldier, or have been a soldier, as with so many men these days."

  "That's true enough."

  "Then you may certainly be absolved, but you must help by seeking comfort in prayer."