Unholy Ground imm-2

by John Brady

  Kenyon had been in the Security Service, MI5, long before the Soviets had rolled tanks into fraternal Czechoslovakia. Both MI6, what some politicians preferred to call the Secret Service, and MI5 had predicted the invasion as imminent four months previously, but the Foreign Office had pooh-poohed them. Since that intelligence fiasco the Government Communications HQ in Cheltenham had helped to improve on the divergences in different agencies' evaluations by bringing out and circulating daily summaries to agencies like the Foreign Office and MI6.

  Aside even from the gargantuan cock-ups where MI5 was being run by a double agent, and the fact that the Americans simply didn't trust either service anymore, the gaffes and security problems had continued. There had even been a threatened strike at GCHQ, a place that the public was not supposed to know even existed, and the papers had had daily reports about the staff's efforts to join unions there. Comical, but with a sharp edge of lunacy. An East German defector had told Kenyon how his former boss had laughed until tears ran down his cheeks at the trade-union problem. His boss had said that the Worker's State would have taken out the malcontents and shot them.

  Alistair Murray's title was that of Intelligence Analyst with the Foreign Office. He reviewed intelligence reports and memos which concerned matters in the Republic of Ireland. As well as skimming the daily release from the Government Communications Headquarters, Murray was also privy to intelligence emanating from covert sources in the Irish Republic and

  Northern Ireland. After the phone call to Murray, Kenyon had decided that rank or not, he'd like very much indeed to cut Murray down to size. Especially if Murray ever tried to be coy and hint about the liaison he would necessarily have with the Secret Service to do his job well.

  Kenyon had gone to Century House at nine-thirty last night and had pulled everything on Combs out of the Registry. Less than a half hour after he had corralled the files, Kenyon at least had some satisfaction in knowing that someone else's Sunday night had been scuttled, too. A Foreign Office request for the files on Combs had come in the person of someone called Thwaite-Murray's retainer, Kenyon found out later.

  Kenyon had heard of an Arthur Combs, but that was three and more years ago. Combs was a relic, an artefact from a different age. Now that Combs was dead and it looked like murder, Murray and company had suddenly seen the light. They, too, wanted to re-evaluate the Combs' material in a hurry. To Kenyon it had all the signs of a potential cock-up.

  By midnight last night Kenyon had still felt that feathery doubt in his stomach. Murray had done an evaluation on Combs before, but it had been at arm's length, relying mostly on what one source, a Second Secretary in the embassy in Dublin, had squeezed into half-page memos. Evaluate, Kenyon mused cynically. Garbage in, garbage out. Kenyon snorted.

  The feature about Combs' material which stayed in his mind, above all else, was a quality that he had noticed in the man's more recent reports, the faintest signs of something which made his antenna quiver. He hadn't settled on a word for this quality: taciturnity, a tone of resentment, a faintly querulous tone which stopped barely short of telling more? Was Combs trying to explain something, was there that fatal germ of. sympathy, an involvement of the heart to explain in what he said and wrote?

  His stomach bilious from midnight coffee, Kenyon recalled a phrase from his university days. "More Irish than the Irish themselves." It referred to how Normans who had invaded Ireland assimilated to Irish ways. They proved to be the vanguard of Irish resistance to later Tudor ventures on the island. What was it about that damp island that insinuated itself through everything there? An atmosphere of disloyalty, some anarchic sentiment, another Italy? Ortgeist, was that the word…?

  There had been no sign of a failing mind coming through Combs' reports, and Murray should have known that. Combs' reports had sometimes been months apart. A half-dozen priority requests to him to be on the lookout for specific people had been replied to promptly. None had been of any use.

  It took a detached scrutiny and several re-reads for Kenyon to finally decide that Murray's assessment had missed the mark. As a university student, Kenyon had read many diarists and his preference in books was still for memoirs. In the last year of Combs' reports, Kenyon felt a slipping away, a closing of some kind. It trickled out even through the typewriter of the officer who summarized Combs' stuff. There had been fewer and fewer particulars in the last year's material. Where before there had been an exact description number, there were now bland comments. "Party no longer resident in the area" or "X reported to have moved, whereabouts unknown." The phrases were almost ironic, as if they quietly parodied the monotonous language of reportese.

  Kenyon waited for the pedestrian light opposite the Albert Gate into Hyde Park. While he stood by the swirl of traffic, he imagined Murray using the Combs' reports to feather his own nest in meetings. Murray could throw around phrases like "diminished activity there… Irish police and border patrols seem to have a better handle" and "support seems to be dwindling in that area." Was it something in Murray's nature and background that brought him to believe that superiors wanted only good news? Maybe it was inevitable that in the Foreign Office, or bureaucracies in general, sycophancy ruled and meetings were rituals for you to try and make impressions on your superiors. Everybody was bored to death with the Irish problem. A place where things went wrong anyway, without help from anyone. A bog into which things disappeared.

  Kenyon had slept poorly last night, Murray's bromides circling elliptically around his head. He had been in the Security Service long enough to know that paradoxes were part of the day's work. His job was to ensure the security of ministers and senior civil servants, not to judge what they had done in the war. Kenyon's wife knew that he was a civil servant who worked for the Home Office. She didn't need to know, any more than any other Briton, that MI5 really answered only to the PM via the Permanent Undersecretary in the Home Office. That was only if the PM asked questions, too. Ministers could come and go, but the Defence of the Realm was sacred. Wendy, Kenyon's wife, used to quip about the phrase early in their marriage when her husband would come home after midnight. Kenyon now ran a desk in the Protective Security Branch of the Service. Very often it meant that he had to protect Cabinet Ministers from the deserving consequences of their own venal stupidity.

  Kenyon had discovered very early in his career that when a colleague drawled out phrases like "Defence of the Realm from external and internal threat" in a caricature of the effete public school drawl, the colleague was deadly serious. The sardonic delivery was the sign of a mild heresy, sarcasm which only a true believer could utter so casually. The phrase was one of the few directives ever given to M15 in written form by the Home Secretary. It dated from 1952, and it came from a one-page set of guidelines issued long before it was publicly admitted that Britain even had a Security Service.

  While he had lain awake in the early hours, Kenyon had brooded about the damn island across the Irish Sea. Ire-land. Land of ire. Could it really ever be considered "external"? Should have sunk the place back in 1921. Murray would be hung out to dry if after all his assessments, it turned out that Combs hadn't been bluffing… Still, it was Kenyon who was finally responsible for the damage when any trouble reached his turf. Sleep had come late to him. Kenyon had even woken up feeling harassed.

  The lights changed and Kenyon strode purposively into the park. He crossed Carriage Drive. When he caught sight of the Dell restaurant, he was both relieved and immediately anxious to realise that he had made his decision. No matter what Murray would say here, Kenyon knew that he had to defend his suspicions about Combs. He'd have to brief Hugh Robertson, the Director of his section, before lunchtime. Better to squirm through that meeting, even if the Director General himself was there, rather than have this blow up in his own face. Kenyon also realised that he was hoping for a sign that would grant an instant logic and credibility to his suspicions. There was but the slimmest chance of winnowing anything like that from the man he had arranged to meet in the resta
urant, one Alistair Murray.

  Kilmartin's secretary, Eilis, greeted Minogue.

  "I have it all waiting for you. And there's preliminary on Mr Combs, too."

  "Aren't you great, Eilis?"

  "It has been said, all right," Eilis answered in the exacting grammar of her native tongue, Irish. "Things are very efficient here now, don't you know? Now, Detective Keating phoned to say he's in Stepaside station with two detectives from the station. They want to interview three men at the station, and they're going to pick them up directly. Tip from an interview with a barman. Barman was on duty in Fox's pub Saturday night. Mr Combs was there, he says."

  "Three men?"

  "Three brothers by the name of Mulvaney, and they live in a place I never heard of before. Barnacullia. Up under Two Rock Mountain. These brothers are well known to police in Stepaside, being as they have criminal records. They say there may be difficulties getting the co-operation of these brothers."

  She began unwrapping a packet of Gitanes. Minogue had known Eilis for some years. She was a single woman of thirty-eight or so, from the Dingle peninsula, who had tired of teaching Irish to fellow civil servants. The language had been a sacred cow in the public service, because it had held the bizarre status of co-equal with English as an official language of the state. Eilis had had enough of civil servants and teachers using Irish simply to get promotion, and one morning, stone cold sober, she unburdened herself of a life's rich gleaning of insults, all in her native tongue. While some of her baroque curses were narrowly local to her native County Kerry, she managed to touch most of the important taboos in her minute's fluency. It was one of her better students who deciphered some of her imprecations. Eilis was oddly satisfied to have taught him so well. After all, the one who reported her was a Dublin hooligan.

  The civil service had a heart, however, and it listened to Eilis's uncle, a strong Party man who represented Kerry in the Dail, a man with formidable tribal connections. Civil servants who had gone mad, "had trouble with their nerves."

  "lost interest" or fell into any other nineteenth-century category which described people who were cracked, were often found work. One of these legion of disaffected public servants was well known to Minogue. He routinely saw the former Higher Executive Officer in the Revenue Commissioners-now a messenger-happily shouting his way around the streets, barking mad and refusing to take the pills which were supposed to render him subdued like other mortals.

  Eilis was also a relative of Kilmartin's wife, Maura, but that alone was not enough for her to be taken on in so demanding a job as the police, not to speak of the Technical Bureau. A reluctant Kilmartin persuaded Eilis to take an intelligence and aptitude test, just as the Americans did, in the hopes of thereby demonstrating to his wife that he had tried his best to find something for Eilis but that, alas, she "couldn't function."

  Eilis, who knew nothing of the shapes and questions which made up such tests, scored one hundred and seventy-four on an IQ test. She demonstrated a frightening ability in her deductive faculties, excellent creative thinking and indicated that she would have made a formidable jurist. Eilis now occupied a desk next to Kilmartin's office, chain-smoking and keeping track of anything that walked, crawled, ran or was telecommunicated to the section. Minogue had read in her the abandon of one who had found the world to be mildly entertaining. This was an attitude which others construed as arrogance and contrariness, never stopping themselves to recognize a tragic sense because they could not know such things and be themselves again.

  "I think that means," she paused to inhale more smoke, "that they're tricksters of some sort, I suppose. Do you follow?"

  "I expect you're right. Have you the number of the station handy?"

  Eilis drawled out the telephone number.

  "Safe home, your honour," she added in Irish. He detected no humour.

  Murray was groomed like a mannequin, right down to the cuff-links. Few things about a man's clothes show up the parvenu as easily as cuff-links, Kenyon believed.

  "One Colombian coffee-nothing less, mind you," Murray said to the waiter. "And yourself, James?"

  "Tea will do."

  "You'll have read the Combs' material, James?" Murray began.

  "Yes, I did."

  "We can readily agree then, I'm sure, that we both know the background here. Even the ancient history," Murray said.

  "Have you read up the material lately?" Kenyon asked.

  "Really, James. You know quite well I did. But I sense that your evaluation may be different."

  "There's the matter of his murder," Kenyon continued. "He was found Sunday evening, it seems."

  "The police don't have a suspect, that I know."

  "Who would want to kill Combs?"

  Murray adjusted his shoulders inside his jacket.

  "The Foreign Office would like to know, too. Even if Combs was small change. Very minor capacity. We'll find out from the police soon enough, I'm sure."

  Kenyon made a conscious effort to keep the irritation out of his voice. Was it already time to tell Murray that he had not asked for a meeting to be showered with gratuitous non sequiturs? The waiter's return gave Kenyon time to figure out a new approach.

  "Tell me, Alistair," Kenyon began, "what did you make of Combs' grumblings when he first started sending material over?"

  Murray smiled wanly as he stirred his coffee.

  "Oh those, yes. Well, that was over two years ago, of course. Combs obviously didn't like to be asked to live there, that was pretty clear, um?"

  Kenyon nodded as he doctored his own tea.

  "You see, our Second Secretary in the Dublin embassy at the time… well, he wasn't as experienced as we would have liked for this kind of work. All in all, a bit of a damp squib."

  "You mean that Combs' threats were not taken seriously?"

  Murray arched his eyebrows as he drew the cup down from his lips again.

  "They were hardly threats, for heaven's sake. He grumbled about being there. I've been there on a few wet winter days myself and to be candid, I'd be grumbling, too. Dull enough work, too, I imagine."

  "The embassy memo says the police suspect robbery."

  "Um," Murray nodded and affected a consideration of Kenyon's interruption.

  "What we had there with Mr Combs, James, what we had… we had an old man who was hitting the bottle rather hard for a long number of years. Prone to grudges, willful misinterpretations. Quite paranoid, too.

  Now match that with the Second Sec we had there at the time, his local link-a chappie fresh out of Oxbridge, who probably spent his weekends reading spy books…"

  Murray's faint smile trailed off into a look of indulgent regret. Kenyon said nothing. He waited for Murray to replace the dangling cup on its saucer. Murray's gaze swept over the view of the Serpentine before returning to Kenyon.

  "What you get are melodramatic memos on the wire. Combs tried to put the wind up the boy and succeeded. Well, we didn't play Combs' game, as you can see from your hours in the Registry yesterday."

  Kenyon did not return Murray's sardonic glance.

  "We placed a new Second Sec there. He's one of our best, James. One of our best."

  "Who was handling Combs, the new Sec?"

  "Ball. Mervyn Ball. Fine fella, Mervyn. Soon put Combs to rights. Got him motivated, feeling positive."

  Kenyon recalled dating the memos that had mentioned Combs' ramblings in those meetings which Combs had had with his novice handler from the embassy. Murray might well be right on that, he had to concede. There hadn't been a peep since Ball had taken up the station. But did that mean that Combs had simply swallowed his bitterness for two years? Had it really been just drunken complaining before?

  "Was it your impression that Combs didn't mind the place so much after he had been there for a while?" Kenyon tried.

  "Ireland? Well, now that you mention it, I had thought that he was a little more tolerant of the place, yes," Murray allowed.

  Kenyon suppressed his rising anger
. He remembered the feeling he had when he had read the place names, the mention of redundant information in

  Combs' later reports. There was a quality of a surreptitious sneer about them.

  "It strikes me that Combs may not have been the old fool you're implying. Much less the drunken old fool," said Kenyon in a restrained tone.

  "Really, James?" said Murray, blinking with a new interest.

  "You know his background. He was badly treated. He toughed it out during the war in very tight situations. More to the point, he was not a man to bluff. Judging by his record, I mean," Kenyon said slowly.

  "Really, James? That's forty years ago. Personalities deteriorate. That's human nature. Aren't we talking about an old pouf-dah who had taken to the bottle? I don't wish to speak ill of the dead, but we have the living to contend with," Murray said, out in the open now.

  "Look," he continued, "we kept tabs on him since he landed in Ireland. We think we know him rather well."

  The barb registered with Kenyon, but he was grimly pleased to see Murray throw off the first of his gloves and turn to his prejudices.

  "There's one flaw in what you're saying," Kenyon said coldly. "If he really was such an unreliable man, why did your office take him on in the first place?"

  Murray blinked once.

  "James, James. You know as well as I do that we inherited him. We looked around at what we had for assets in Ireland. It was a particularly bad time. We thought we could use Combs. Believe me, we wouldn't have chosen him if he weren't on the books. He was a relic."

  "He was placed in Ireland on the condition that he live near Dublin?"

  "Yes. He has been at us for years to be allowed back into Britain. It was decided that he'd be less of a risk if he were at arm's length. You know who he worked with during the war, I take it?" said Murray with a challenging edge.

  "Yes. And I know what they did to him afterwards, too."

  "Let's not get lachrymose, James. It's not for us to wonder why… et cetera. Particularly after forty years, um? Combs was a security risk and that was that."