Reaper

by Hurley, Graham

  “I’m sorry to have barged in,’ he said stiffly, “it was out of order.”

  The doctor shrugged. “You’re angry,” he said, “like everyone gets angry.”

  Buddy stepped towards the door. Then he turned on him again, provoked by his tone of voice, the smugness of the man, the utter conviction that he was right. He put his hands flat on the desk, his face very close, staring him out.

  “One day,” he said softly, “we’ll be back. Both of us. Standing here. We’ll do a little dance for you. Then you’ll know you’re fucking wrong.”

  FOUR

  The meeting in the small sunny office in Downing Street, second floor, was scheduled for three o’clock but began a quarter of an hour early.

  There were three people present. No minutes were taken. The older of the two men, a civil servant with responsibility for the Joint Intelligence Committee, glanced at his watch and opened a thin buff folder. Inside the folder was a two-page typed report. In all, there were three copies, individually numbered. He scanned the report quickly, then distributed the other copies around the table. The other man was gazing out of the window. He was wearing a suit, grey, with the faintest stripe. It looked out of place on him, as if he’d borrowed it.

  “Colonel Miller …?”

  The other man turned his head. He had a strong, wide face, dusted with freckles. “Yes?”

  The civil servant lifted the report. “Are you sure about this?”

  “As sure as I can be.”

  “You’re aware of the … ah …” He glanced across the table. The Prime Minister was watching him carefully. “The implications?”

  “Of course.”

  “But you stand by what you’ve written?”

  “Yes.”

  The civil servant nodded, glancing down at the report again, one finger on the text. “What makes you think this man is so important?” he said.

  “He fits the Intelligence picture. His movements tally. All our intercepts confirm it.”

  “And you want to take him out?”

  “I want to bring him in.”

  “Same thing, isn’t it?”

  “No. Taking him out means killing him. Bringing him in means having a chat.”

  “And afterwards?”

  Miller looked at him, the faintest smile, but said nothing. There was a long silence. The civil servant frowned.

  “So why don’t you pick him up?” he said. “I don’t understand.” There were the beginnings of another silence. Miller glanced at the Prime Minister. The Prime Minister smiled back. Good question, her expression suggested.

  “Because we can’t find him,” Miller said at last, “not at the moment. He’s in the Republic. He’s always on the move. What we need is …” He shrugged, not finishing the sentence. The civil servant smiled.

  “A clear run?” he suggested.

  “Exactly.”

  The civil servant nodded, but said nothing. Miller leaned forward. He’d been rehearsing this speech for nearly a week, trying to work out how best to put it. In the end, there seemed no point in dressing it up. Time was precious. Especially at this address. He glanced at the Prime Minister again. He noticed that the smile had gone.

  “The Hunger Strikes killed ten of them,” he said. “They hold you responsible. This man of theirs has been tasked to kill you. He’s not at the sharp end. He’s a planner. But he’s exceptionally gifted. By far the best they’ve got …” He paused, fingering his copy of the report, his own phrases on the pale cream paper. Then he looked up again. “The way I see it, you have a choice. Either you leave it to normal channels. With all that implies …”

  “Or?”

  “You leave it to us.”

  The Prime Minister nodded. She glanced briefly at the civil servant. “Why should I do that?” she said.

  “Because our sources are better than anyone else’s.”

  “Can you prove that?”

  “Yes.”

  “How?”

  Miller hesitated a moment. He’d spent a great deal of time – weeks – anticipating this very question. The kind of freedoms he wanted, the licence he’d come for, would only be available at a price. If he got the price wrong, he’d go away empty handed. If he got the price right, if he could truly open their eyes, then the gloves, at last, would be off. He bent forward.

  “You’re opening a new factory soon,” he said, “in Basingstoke.”

  “Am I?”

  The civil servant nodded. “Qualitech,” he said, “January 18th.”

  Miller glanced at him, then looked at the Prime Minister again. “There’s a device planned for the eighteenth,” he said. “At the factory.”

  “You mean a bomb?”

  “Yes. I gather it’s a big bomb. Enough to kill you.” He paused. “They’re generous that way.”

  The Prime Minister nodded, absorbing the news. Then she looked up.

  “So when do they plan to plant this … ah … device?”

  “They don’t.”

  “Don’t?”

  She frowned and Miller leaned forward, the opening he’d been waiting for. “No,” he said, “it’s already in place. At the factory. I have the details here. That’s why I came.”

  There was another, long silence. The civil servant cleared his throat. He looked slightly shocked, and Miller wondered for a moment whether he’d gone too far. Finally, the Prime Minister stood up and extended a hand.

  “Thank you for coming, Colonel Miller,” she said, “I think you’ll find I’m grateful.”

  Connolly spent Christmas with Mairead in Belfast.

  He took the bus from the Ferryport, up through the City Centre, up past the towering grey concrete of the Divis flats, up the Falls Road, and finally into Andersonstown, a vast Catholic housing estate that sprawled over the lower slopes of Belfast’s Divis Mountain. He walked the quarter-mile from the bus stop to the council house where Mairead lived. Mid-evening, the streets were empty, and there was a cold keen wind blowing flurries of snow in from the north.

  Connolly walked briskly, the single holdall looped over his shoulder, savouring the silence, and the sour tangy smell from dozens of peat fires. It was a bleak estate, with its treeless roads, and abandoned shopping trolleys, and rusting cars skewed by the kerbside, but there was life here too, an indefinable resilience, something that Connolly rather loftily put down to a triumph of the spirit. He’d seen it in the women, and on the faces of the kids. It bonded them against the weather, and the Brits, and the harsher dictates of a sixty per cent unemployment rate. They laughed a lot, these people, and cursed a lot, and two-fingered the old enemies, and if life boiled down to yet another plateful of potatoes and cabbage, then so be it.

  At the corner of Mairead’s road, Connolly paused. There was a lamppost here, taller than the rest, out of keeping with the scale of the houses around it. Connolly was hopeless at estimating height, but it must have been thirty feet at least. After dark, it cast a hostile, sickly, slightly orange glare over the scrawny hedges and threadbare front gardens, and the locals talked meaningfully of surveillance and hidden cameras. It was, they said, part of the security apparatus, another brick in the wall that the Brits had built around them. Connolly didn’t know whether this was true or not, but circling the lamppost at its base was an old bicycle tyre. Nobody knew who’d done it, who’d shinned up the impossibly smooth metal and slipped the tyre over the light at the top, but it had been there for months and no one had ever touched it. Connolly loved the gesture. It was derisive. It registered a small, anonymous, yet very public victory. It did, he thought, say it all.

  Outside Mairead’s house, Connolly paused again and eased the holdall from his shoulder. He’d brought presents for the kids, something special for Mairead, and a large bottle of Johnny Walker from the ferry. The curtains at the front were tightly drawn, but he could see the glow of the television set through the thin cotton.

  He rang the doorbell. He heard the dog bark. The door opened. Mairead stood there. She was
wearing an old nylon housecoat, open at the front. The slogan on her T-shirt read “Queen’s University, Belfast”. She was barefoot, her toes curling on the cold lino.

  “Where’ve you been?” she said at once.

  Connolly shrugged, recognizing the smell of the place, the kids, and the dog, and the peat fire, and the remains of tea on the stove in the small kitchen at the back.

  “Away,” he said simply.

  “You’re not after phoning, then?”

  “I did. Twice.”

  “Please God you did.” She smiled at him. “Twice.”

  There was a movement in the hall behind. Laughter. An uptilted face at the door. Connolly bent and kissed the face.

  “Bronagh,” he said, “Happy Christmas!”

  The child giggled, and wriggled away from him, running back down the hall. He could hear her chanting his name in the lounge – Uncle Derek, Uncle Derek – and a sudden roar of laughter from a studio audience as one of the other kids turned up the television in response. Liam, probably. His father’s son. Connolly glanced up.

  “Snowing,” he said.

  Mairead nodded, stepping back into the hall and holding the door open. She was shorter than Connolly, twenty-eight years old, curly black hair, and a wide, open, cheerful face. Her skin was flawless, and her eyes were green, and she habitually wore a pair of large gold ear-rings, a trophy from her one visit abroad, a two-week holiday in Magaluf, ten years back. Connolly had never quite got the measure of her, knowing only that she was irresistibly the centre of everything, her own world, and his as well. She shut the door behind him and reached for his coat. He shrugged off the anorak, the snowflakes darkening already in the warmth.

  “So why didn’t you phone?” she said.

  “No time.”

  “You’ve no time to lift the phone? And all those things you were telling me before you went? Should I believe you …?’ She paused. “Or is it a half decent Christmas you’re back for?”

  She didn’t wait for an answer but folded his anorak over the banisters, and indicated the door to the front room. Connolly grinned at her, absurdly pleased to be back, and went in.

  The room looked smaller than ever. There were loops of tinsel hanging from the picture rail, and a lattice of crêpe streamers overhead, criss-crossing the room. By the window, there was a small mountain of presents heaped around the base of a Christmas tree, and there were dozens of cards propped carefully amongst the branches. Connolly gazed round, looking for signs of the room he’d left only weeks before. The dim glow of the turf fire in the grate. The damp clothes drying on the backs of chairs. The wooden harp on the mantelpiece and the framed colour photo of the Pope hanging on the wall overhead. He unzipped the holdall, and took out all the presents, one by one. Instinctively, the kids turned away from the television, sprawled on the floor, looking up at him. There were three of them: Bronagh, Declan, and Liam. Liam, at eleven, was the oldest, blond, freckled, watchful, quiet. Declan was a year younger, a louder child, long-legged, slightly awkward, kind. The two boys shared a tiny bedroom at the top of the stairs, while Bronagh still slept with her mother. Bronagh, at seven, was the baby of the family, perceptibly spoiled, a perpetual escapee from the discipline which Mairead dished out to the boys.

  Connolly held out the largest of the presents. It was wrapped in green paper. The card attached to one corner showed a footballer scoring a goal. Liam eyed it. Connolly glanced across at Mairead. “OK?” he queried.

  Mairead shook her head, and nodded at the tree. “Tomorrow,” she said.

  Liam groaned and turned over on his stomach, back to the television. Declan gazed at the other two presents. Bronagh giggled and lunged at the dog, an ancient long-haired mongrel with soft brown eyes and appalling halitosis. Mairead opened the door again. “You’ll be having tea?”

  Connolly shook his head, added his presents to the pile under the tree, and produced the bottle of whisky. Mairead hesitated a moment, then left the room. Connolly joined her in the kitchen, unscrewing the bottle as he went. The kitchen smelled of burned fat. On the half-scraped plates beside the sink were the remains of an Ulster fry: smears of egg yolk, curls of bacon rind, discarded triangles of soda bread, and a small puddle of baked beans, the sauce already congealing. Mairead cleared a space on the dresser and produced two glasses. Connolly poured the whisky, tipping his glass in salute.

  “Happy Christmas,” he said, “Tiocfaidh Ar La.”

  He wound his tongue around the unfamiliar syllables, savouring the sound of the phrase, the strange, opening guttural, the sing-song end. In fifteen months in Belfast, it was the one piece of Gaelic he’d managed to master. Tiocfaidh Ar La. Our Day Will Come. The traditional, age-old Republican salute.

  Mairead bent her head, refusing to even acknowledge the phrase. Connolly said nothing for a moment, then swallowed another mouthful of the Scotch, letting the tiny kitchen close itself around him. He’d always felt instantly at home here, the one room in the house that Mairead preserved for herself, her own modest price for a domestic life that was otherwise totally devoted to her kids. Most of their relationship, such as it was, had been nurtured here. Hours of talking, Connolly to begin with, later – when she trusted him – Mairead.

  He’d first kissed her here, first brought her closely into himself, trying to imagine what it would be like, done properly, with space and time and no prospect of interruptions from the kids. It had never happened that way, ever, and the one time he’d slept with Mairead was Bronagh’s first and only night away, staying three houses down the street with Kath, her best friend. Mairead had made him get up at dawn and return downstairs before Liam appeared on the landing. From his sleeping bag on the floor of the lounge, Connolly had listened to the boy’s footsteps on the bare lino overhead, the unoiled hinge on Mairead’s bedroom door, the mumble of conversation, recognizing the noises for what they were: the sound of the eldest son, patrolling the family’s space, seeking the reassurance of his mother’s otherwise empty bed. It had never been easy here, never simple, but the more he got to know Mairead, the more he belonged to her, a form of surrender in which he knew he had no say whatsoever.

  He’d gone to London because she’d asked him to. He’d met Leeson, and he’d well and truly renewed the friendship, and now he was back, the faithful messenger, full of talk of the Falkland Islands. He reached for the bottle and poured himself another generous measure.

  “You’ll want to know about my friend,” he said. “Leeson.”

  “I will?”

  Connolly looked at her. Her voice had hardened. She looked tense, even angry. Quite why she’d asked him to go to London, to see Leeson, to pick up the threads again, he didn’t know. He’d never told her about the physical relationship between them, and he didn’t propose to start now. But that, in any case, was irrelevant. All that mattered was the request itself, her need for whatever he could find out. Normally, she asked very little of him, apart from time. She never wanted money. She never yearned for nights out in the city, or the pub. And so this strange suggestion had been quite unexpected, out of character. Go see yer man, she’d said. Find out about him. What he does. Who he knows. Then come back and tell me all about him. And so here he was, Christmas Eve, back home with her, two glasses down, full of news.

  “He’s wrecked,” he said. “Alcoholic.”

  “Really?”

  She looked pointedly at the bottle of Scotch on the table, and Connolly began to wonder about the wisdom of not phoning more often, of what it might have done to their relationship. More than anything else, he wanted to spend Christmas with her. The thought of returning to the small, bleak flat off the Ormeau Road was more than he could face.

  “What is it?” he said. “What’s the matter?”

  She looked at him a moment, and then shook her head, turning away, her own glass untouched. Connolly glanced up the hall. The hall was empty, the sound of the television audible through the closed door of the lounge. Peals of canned laughter. Christmas Eve with De
s O’Connor. Connolly reached out and touched Mairead lightly on the cheek. She shook her head again, then turned into him.

  “You’ll not want to be a part of this,” she said.

  “Part of what?”

  “All this.”

  She gestured hopelessly around her, the kitchen, the sink, the pile of neatly folded washing on the stool under the window.

  “This?” Connolly frowned. “This life of yours?”

  She looked up at him, very close now, wide green eyes.

  “No,” she said softly, “The Rah.”

  Connolly blinked. The Rah was the Republican Army, the Provisional IRA, street slang for the ever-younger gunmen who slipped in and out of the headlines, hooded figures in combat jackets and old jeans and cheap trainers, terrorists in Whitehall, facts of life in Andersonstown.

  “The Rah?” Connolly prompted.

  Mairead nodded, swallowing hard. “You’ll have seen your man. Leeson.”

  “Yes,” Connolly smiled, “like you asked.”

  She shook her head, an abrupt, emphatic movement. “I was wrong.”

  “Why?”

  She looked at him for a long moment, her eyes moist. “So help me God, please …”

  She turned away and began to cry. Connolly stepped forward, holding her against himself, comforting her. The smell of her body. Her hair soft against his cheek. Leeson had opened up a new path to her. She’d asked, and he’d complied, and now he was back, ready to deliver. Except something had gone horribly wrong.

  “What is it?” he whispered. “Tell me.”

  She shook her head again, and began to sob. Connolly pushed the door shut with his foot.

  “I saw him,” he said, “truly.”