The Glory Boys (18 page)

While McCoy drove, fast and with studied concentration heading south toward the river, Famy sat rock-still beside him. The Arab's mind was moving at pace. It was the first time that he had encountered violent death, and the speed with which life had been crushed from the girl amazed him its simplicity, its suddenness. And the doubts he had felt about McCoy had vanished in those few seconds. When the time came the Irishman too was prepared to kill. Famy knew, and it was a feeling he had not entertained before, that they were now a team. In the darkness of the attic bedroom the links between the two men had been irrevocably joined, and with that his last lingering uncertainties about the success of his mission had gone.

'Where are we going now?' Famy asked.

McCoy did not take his eyes from the road ahead.

'Down into the hills south of London. Into Surrey, where the guns are.'

'And where do we sleep?'

'We sleep rough tonight and tomorrow. We have to ditch this car, get another. Come back to London on Tuesday, probably late. This car will do us for a few hours more, but when the balloon goes up we'll have to have another.'

'How long do you think before they find her?'

'Some time, not immediately. And when they do they'll have the bloody commune on their hands. And they won't make much headway with them.'

it was necessary to kill her.' Famy said it quietly, but as a statement.

"Course it bloody was.'

'She knew who we were?' The question again.

'Shouldn't think so.' McCoy sensed the other man's surprise at his answer. He went on. 'Probably there on the drugs scene. Could have been bomb squad and out Provo-hunting. You've got two alternatives. Bluff it out, or the other. And when you start knocking shit out of the girl that narrows it down to the other.'

'How far do we have to go?'

'About another hour and a half. Get some sleep.' It was an instruction. McCoy wanted to drive without chatter in his ear.

Famy closed his eyes. The Irishman, he thought, he would be able to sleep. But with himself there was no possibility of it. As the car jolted its way along the road the image that endlessly repeated itself was of the girl and her eyes that bulged and pleaded, and of the hard calloused fingers on her neck.

But the killing of Doris Lang had not gone entirely unnoticed.

The woman who had nursed her child to sleep a floor below had been unable to sleep herself. She had lain with her eyes wide open, staring at the ceiling. The sounds she had heard baffled her at first. There had been bumps on the boards above, a half-stifled scream recognizable as such though short and cut off. There had been hurried footsteps across the floor, then the noise of struggle, then shouts, too muffled to understand. There had been scuffling, indeterminate and difficult to follow, and then quietness before the footsteps came hurriedly past her door.

The main door had slammed and there had been noise on the pavement, and the sound of a car starting up and driving away.

She had clung to the child that slept, not prepared to go and see for herself whatever had been left in the room. It was light before she summoned up the courage, and by then the men had been gone nearly two hours. When she did go, her child left behind on the mattress still curled foetus-like in sleep, her screams, hysterical and piercing, woke the building.

Henry Davies was drinking tea in the police station canteen. It was thick, strong-brewed, laced with sugar, and hot. He could only sip at it, but always regarded his early morning cup as the essential way to end night duty. He had signed off now, but usually spent fifteen minutes in the canteen, waiting for the day shift handlers to come on, to exchange a few words of gossip and police talk with them.

He had heard on his radio of the flap on the far side of the area covered by the station, but a dog had not been required, and he had methodically continued his patrol, checking factory, shop and warehouse doors.

He was sitting on his own when the sergeant came in.

'Lad, the DI's been on the radio. Wants you down Englefield Road. Number one-six-two. Wants you down there as fast as you can.' It was the standard joke in the station that he called everyone under the age of forty 'lad'.

'What for?' Davies asked.

'I don't know,' the sergeant lied, but did it well, and Davies couldn't read it. 'He asked specifically for you. Slip on down there, lad.'

They'd radioed ahead when he drove out of the station yard, and the Detective Inspector was waiting on the steps of the house for him. There were three police cars parked haphazardly at the side of the street, and a small knot of half-dressed onlookers. Davies got out of the car. A constable who stood on the pavement and who knew him looked away.

Then the inspector walked toward him, unshaven, roused from his Sunday morning bed.

'I've bad news, Henry. I'm very sorry . . . It's Doris.

Some bastard's killed her.'

He stopped, letting the words sink in. He saw the mask of overt self-control slide across the police constable's features. ,

'When did it happen?' Davies said.

'Early this morning. We had a call about forty minutes ago. I've identified her. Do you want to go and see her, Henry?'

' There'll be all the cameras there, prints. All the bloody paraphernalia. I don't want to see her like that. Not with them all working round her.'

is there somewhere you can go?'

'I'd like to go to her Mum's. Has she been told?'

'Not yet.'

'I'd like to go there, then. Thank you, sir.'

'I'll get someone to drive you round. Fred can come down and pick up your motor, and take your dog home and give it a meal. You can collect him tomorrow.'

'Do you know who did it?'

'I think so. But they're long gone. Two of them. They're telling us a bit inside. More than they usually do.'

The inhabitants of the commune were herded into the main living room on the ground floor while the coffin with Doris Lang's body in it was carried down the stairs to the unmarked hearse. The Detective Inspector watched it go, then walked back into the room. He had spotted the spokesman for the group, older than most, a fragile and defiant figure. He called him out and went with him to the room behind, used as sleeping quarters. Blankets were strewn on the floor in the position they had been left in when the screaming had started.

'You've been helpful, quite helpful, before I was called out. I want it to go on that way.'

The other man looked up at him, without responding.

'The woman who found the body, she tells me two men left after she heard noises upstairs. Some time after half-past four. Who are those two men?'

The man said nothing, but instead spread out his fingers and pushed them through his hair.

'Now, don't mess me about, sunshine. It's a murder inquiry. We get impatient quickly.'

'We knew one of them.'

'Which one?'

'One was an Irishman.'

'I said, and I said it clearly, don't mess me about. I haven't got all bloody day to be playing games.' Their two faces, the one bearded and with traces of acne, the other stubbled and tired, were less than a foot apart. The man from the commune looked away, then said:

'There was a girl who used to live here. Eilish McCoy.

One of the men was her brother. He's called Ciaran. I know because she once showed me a picture of him, in a sort of uniform. Taken back in Ireland. He just turned up here about a week ago, asked for a room, said he had some people coming. Said they needed . . .'

The Inspector said, 'Somewhere quiet, somewhere to lie up?'

'Something like that.'

'And the other one, the second one?'

'We never heard his name.'

'Was he Irish?'

'No.'

'Look, boy, last time, don't screw me about.'

'I'd say he was an Arab.'

'And no name, didn't McCoy call him anything?'

'They didn't mix with us. They were either out or in the room. The second one only came the night before last.

There was no name.'

'You say McCoy said he had "some people coming"?'

'He told me there were three others, only the one showed up.'

A detective came into the room. In his hand, held gingerly between thumb and first finger, was a four-by-two-inch note-book.

it was over in a corner. Left behind. It's Doris Lang's writing, no doubt on that. I've seen it in the station. Her week's log of the comings and goings. Seems she searched these buggers' room on Friday night, again yesterday afternoon. There's a bit about what she found, and a description of the two men. Proper detailed one.'

The Inspector went out of earshot into the corridor and said to the detective, 'Get on to division, tell them to call Special Branch, and shove over all the stuff on McCoy.

And tell the people upstairs to get a move on, we'll have half bloody Scotland Yard here by lunch-time.'

When he reached his office back at the police station an hour later the desk sergeant was there to greet him.

'There's been a man called Jones on the phone for you.

One of the spooks from the Security Service. Said something about a note-pad. Wants to come up and see you as soon as you've ten minutes to spare him. Number's on your table.'

'Coming up in the bloody world, aren't we?' said the Detective Inspector as he went into his office.

TEN

Like an incoming ocean tide that thrusts its way into rock gullies and crevices so the name of Ciaran McCoy swept through the many departments of Scotland Yard. Photo-graphic section, fingerprint section, Special Branch and its Irish section, Murder squad, Criminal Records, Liaison Regional Crime. The name was telephoned to the Commander in charge of Special Branch, and to the Assistant Commissioner (Crime). Meetings were hurriedly convened, and at the centre of them were the suitably doctored files passed on from Leconfield House the previous night.

The photograph of McCoy was rapidly reproduced, and despatched to all police stations in the Metropolitan area.

The photofit team began work on a compilation of the unknown Arab's features, using principally Doris Lang's written description, written by a trained hand, and also including the sketchier accounts of his appearance as given by the occupants of the commune. Teleprinter messages from the Royal Ulster Constabulary headquarters at Knock Road on the east side of Belfast carried more information on the Irishman. The decision was made to release the picture of McCoy at lunch-time for the Independent Television current affairs programme that would be on the air at that time, and for a BBC newsflash.

That was when Norah saw the picture.

Her father always insisted that the television should be on during the formal eating of the Sunday roast, because he liked the farmers' programmes. After the music had faded away and the end-title shot of a threshing machine had disappeared behind a hill the screen went to black before the appearance of the 'Newsflash' symbol. The three people round the table, Norah, her mother and her father, all stopped eating and turned their attention to the set, food still on their forks. The item lasted a minute or so, the first forty seconds taken up by pictures of the comings and goings in Englefield Road. A policewoman had been found in a commune. Dead, strangled.

'Bastards,' Norah's father muttered to himself. 'Bloody bastards.'

Police were anxious to trace a young Irishman. Name -

Ciaran McCoy. The picture came up then, and stayed on the screen for twenty seconds. Half this time had elapsed before Norah recognized the boy she had lain beside at the swimming pool, the boy she had kissed, and who had left her so abruptly last Thursday night. She could see it was a police photograph, a man just taken into custody, aggressive and caged. But it was still the same man, the lines of a mouth whether set in anger or friendship change little, only superficially.

'Little swine,' her father said. 'We should string them up. Only thing they understand.'

Norah had said nothing. She put her head down and close to the food lest her parents should see the tears that welled up in her eyes. She had bolted her food, made an excuse and run through the front door. She walked endlessly that afternoon, conscious of an overwhelming feeling of shame, of having been dirtied in some way.

When Jones came back from the police station he brought with him photostats and transcripts of the note-pad.

Duggan and Fairclough were waiting in his office.

Duggan said, 'He's blown it, hasn't he, our little boyo?

Lost his safe house, lost his base. His picture will be plastered everywhere by tonight, all over the television, and front pages of the papers tomorrow. And now he's running, concerned with his own survival. Not what you'd call an auspicious start for what he's after.'

'Meaning what?' said Jones.

'That it may well be over for him. His concentration now is how to stay free. Does a man in his position go walking through a police cordon, cordon forewarned, cordon with a description? Does he, hell! He stays out.

Packs it in.'

'That's one viewpoint.' Jones acknowledged the argument, but looked sceptical.

'The other view takes a different course,' Fairclough joined in. if we look at the Palestinian, or Arab, or whatever he is, we can come out with a different answer.

He's been through a crisis before, in France on Thursday, and he's still on the move. Look at it from his point of view. If he doesn't go on what does he go back to? They won't welcome him with open arms back in his camp.

He'd be a miserable failure. Fiasco. It's when the suicide mentality breaks through. The harder the going gets the more he will be prepared to risk his own life in order to succeed.'

'And the conclusion from that?' asked Jones.

'The conclusion from that is that the Arab is now extremely dangerous. Tiger in the long grass with half his guts shot out. He's a killer still, more so, only thing we can be certain of is that. But he's at a disadvantage, and that's positive, and consolation for us.'

'The picture of one of them, detailed description of the other. Available to every man round Sokarev. That stacks the odds a bit against our two friends.' Jones was able to smile, rare over the last two days. 'But if the Arab wants to go on what about McCoy?'