No Comebacks (14 page)

The customs man beckoned over a senior colleague whom Clarke knew, and the two men bent down to see where the flow of oil was coming from. Over two pints were already on the shed floor and there would be another three to come. The senior customs man stood up.

'You'll not shift that far,' he said, and to his junior colleague added, 'We'll have to move the others round it.'

Clarke crawled under the cab section to have a closer look. From the engine up front a thick strong drive shaft ran down to a huge boss of cast steel, the differential. Inside this casing the power of the turning drive shaft was transmitted sideways to the rear axle, thus propelling the cab forward. This was effected by a complex assembly of cogwheels inside the casing, and these wheels turned permanently in a bath of lubricating oil. Without this oil the cogs would seize solid in a very short distance, and the oil was pouring out. The steel nose-piece casing had cracked.

Above this axle was the articulated plate on which rested the trailer section of the artic which carried the cargo. Clarke came out from under.

'It's completely gone,' he said. 'I '11 have to call the office. Can I use your phone?'

The senior customs man jerked his head at the glass-walled office and went on with his examination of the other trucks. A few drivers leaned from their cabs and called ribald remarks to Clarke as he went to phone.

Then there was no one in the office in Dublin. They were all out at lunch. Clarke hung around the customs shed morosely as the last of the tourist cars left the shed to head inland. At three he managed to contact the managing director of Tara Transportation and explained his problem. The man swore.

'I won't be carrying that in stock,' he told Clarke. 'I'll have to get on to the Volvo Trucks main agent for one. Call me back in an hour.'

At four there was still no news and at five the customs men wanted to close down, the last ferry of the day having arrived from Fishguard. Clarke made a further call, to say he would spend the night in Rosslare and check back in yet another hour. One of the customs men kindly ran him into town and showed him a bed-and-breakfast lodging house. Clarke checked in for the night.

At six head office told him they would be picking up another differential nose-piece at nine the following morning and would send it down with a company engineer in a van. The man would be with him by twelve noon. Clarke called his wife to tell her he would be twenty-four hours late, ate his tea and went out to a pub. In the customs shed three miles away Tara's distinctive green and white artic stood silent and alone above its pool of oil.

Clarke allowed himself a lie-in the next day and rose at nine. He called head office at ten and they told him the van had got the replacement part and was leaving in five minutes. At eleven he hitch-hiked back to the harbour. The company was as good as its word and the little van, driven by the mechanic, rattled down the quay and into the customs shed at twelve. Clarke was waiting for it.

The chirpy engineer went under the truck like a ferret and Clarke could hear him tut-tutting. When he came out he was already smeared with oil.

'Nose-piece casing,' he said unnecessarily. 'Cracked right across.'

'How long?' asked Clarke.

'If you give me a hand, I'll have you out of here in an horn and a half.'

It took a little longer than that. First they had to mop up the pool of oil, and five pints goes a long way. Then the mechanic took a heavy wrench and carefully undid the ring of great bolts holding the nose-piece to the main casing. This done, he withdrew the two half-shafts and began to loosen the propeller shaft. Clarke sat on the floor and watched him, occasionally passing a tool as he was bidden. The customs men watched them both. Not much happens in a customs shed between berthings.

The broken casing came away in bits just before one. Clarke was getting hungry and would have liked to go up the road to the caf6 and get some lunch, but the mechanic wanted to press on. Out at sea the
St Patrick,
smaller sister ship of the
St Kilian,
was moving over the horizon on her way home to Rosslare.

The mechanic started to perform the whole process in reverse. The new casing went on, the propeller shaft was fixed and the half-shafts slotted in. At half past one the
St Patrick
was clearly visible out at sea to anyone who was watching.

Murphy was. He lay on his stomach in the sere grass atop the low line of rising ground behind the port, invisible to anyone a hundred yards away, and there was no such person. He held his field glasses to his eyes and monitored the approaching ship.

'Here she is,' he said, 'right on time.'

Brendan, the strong man, lying in the long grass beside him, grunted.

'Do you think it'll work, Murphy?' he asked.

'Sure, I've planned it like a military operation,' said Murphy. 'It cannot fail.'

A more professional criminal might have told Murphy, who traded as a scrap metal merchant with a sideline in 'bent' cars, that he was a bit out of his league with such a caper, but Murphy had spent several thousand pounds of his own money setting it up and he was not to be discouraged. He kept watching the approaching ferry.

In the shed the mechanic tightened the last of the nuts around the new nose-piece, crawled out from under, stood up and stretched.

'Right,' he said, 'now, we'll put five pints of oil in and away you go.'

He unscrewed a small flange nut in the side of the differential casing while Clarke fetched a gallon can of oil and a funnel from the van. Outside, the
St Patrick,
with gentle care, slotted her nose into the mooring bay and the clamps went on. Her bow doors opened and the ramp came down.

Murphy held the glasses steady and stared at the dark hole in the bows of the
St Patrick.
The first truck out was a dun brown, with French markings. The second to emerge into the afternoon sunlight gleamed in white and emerald green. On the side of her trailer the word TARA was written in large green letters. Murphy exhaled slowly.

'There it is,' he breathed, 'that's our baby.'

'Will we go now?' asked Brendan, who could see very little without binoculars and was getting bored.

'No hurry,' said Murphy. 'We'll see her come out of the shed first.'

The mechanic screwed the nut of the oil inlet tight and turned to Clarke.

'She's all yours,' he said, 'she's ready to go. As for me, I'm going to wash up. I'll probably pass you on the road to Dublin.'

He replaced the can of oil and the rest of his tools in his van, selected a flask of detergent liquid and headed for the washroom. The Tara Transportation juggernaut rumbled through the entrance from the quay into the shed. A customs officer waved it to a bay next to its mate and the driver climbed down.

'What the hell happened to you, Liam?' he asked.

Clarke explained to him. A customs officer approached to examine the new man's papers.

'Am I OK to roll?' asked Clarke.

'Away with you,' said the officer. 'You've been making the place untidy for too long.'

For the second time in twenty-four hours Clarke pulled himself into his cab, punched the engine into life and let in the clutch. With a wave at his company colleague he moved into gear and the artic rolled out of the shed into the sunlight.

Murphy adjusted his grip on the binoculars as the juggernaut emerged on the landward side of the shed.

'He's through already,' he told Brendan. 'No complications. Do you see that?'

He passed the glasses to Brendan who wriggled to the top of the rise and stared down. Five hundred yards away the juggernaut was negotiating the bends leading away from the harbour to the road to Rosslare town.

'I do,' he said.

'Seven hundred and fifty cases of finest French brandy in there,' said Murphy. 'That's nine thousand bottles. It markets at over ten pounds a bottle retail and I'll get four. What do you think of that?'

'It's a lot of drink,' said Brendan wistfully.

'It's a lot of money, you fool,' said Murphy. 'Right, let's get going.'

The two men wriggled off the skyline and ran at a crouch to where their car was parked on a sandy track below.

When they drove back to where the track joined the road from the docks to the town they had only a few seconds to wait and driver Clarke thundered by them. Murphy brought his black Ford Granada saloon, stolen two days earlier and now wearing false plates, in behind the artic and began to trail it.

It made no stops; Clarke was trying to get home. When he rolled over the bridge across the Slaney and headed north out of Wexford on the Dublin road Murphy decided he could make his phone call.

He had noted the phone booth earlier and removed the diaphragm from the earpiece to ensure that no one else would be using it when he came by. They were not. But someone, infuriated by the useless implement, had torn the flex from its base. Murphy swore and drove on. He found another booth beside a post office just north of Enniscorthy. As he braked, the juggernaut ahead of him roared out of sight.

The call he made was to another phone booth by the roadside north of Gorey where the other two members of his gang waited.

'Where the hell have you been?' asked Brady. 'I've been waiting here with Keogh for over an hour.'

'Don't worry,' said Murphy. 'He's on his way and he's on time. Just take up your positions behind the bushes in the lay-by and wait till he pulls up and jumps down.'

He hung up and drove on. With his superior speed he caught up with the juggernaut before the village of Ferns and trailed the truck out onto the open road again. Before Camolin he turned to Brendan.

'Time to become guardians of law and order,' he said and pulled off the road again, this time into a narrow country road he had examined on his earlier reconnaissance. It was deserted.

The two men jumped out and pulled a grip from the rear seat. They doffed their zip-fronted windbreakers and pulled two jackets from the grip. Both men already wore black shoes, socks and trousers. When the windbreakers were off they were wearing regulation police- style blue shirts and black ties. The jackets they pulled on completed the deception. Murphy's bore the three stripes of a sergeant, Brendan's was plain. Both carried the insignia of the Garda, the Irish police force. Two peaked caps from the same grip went onto their heads.

The last of the contents of the grip were two rolls of black, adhesive-backed sheet plastic. Murphy unrolled them, tore off the cloth backing and spread them carefully with his hands, one onto each of the Granada's front doors. The black plastic blended with the black paintwork. Each panel had the word GARDA in white letters. When he stole his car, Murphy had chosen a black Granada deliberately because that was the most common police patrol car.

From the locked boot Brendan took the final accoutrement, a block two feet long and triangular in cross-section. The base of the triangle was fitted with strong magnets which held the block firmly to the roof of the car. The other two sides, facing forwards and backwards, also had the word GARDA printed on the glass panels.

There was no bulb inside to light it up, but who would notice that in daytime?

When the two men climbed back into the car and reversed out of the lane, they were to any casual observer a pair of highway patrolmen in every way. Brendan was driving now, with 'Sergeant' Murphy beside him. They found the juggernaut waiting at a traffic light in the town of Gorey.

There is a new section of dual carriageway north of Gorey, between that ancient market town and Arklow. Halfway along it, on the northbound lane, is a lay-by, and this was the spot Murphy had chosen for his ambush. The moment the column of traffic blocked behind the artic entered the dual carriageway section, the other car drivers joyfully sped past the lorry and Murphy had it all to himself. He wound down his window and said 'Now' to Brendan.

The Granada moved smoothly up beside the cab of the truck, and held station. Clarke looked down to see the police car beside him and a sergeant waving out of the passenger seat. He wound down his window.

'You're losing a rear tyre,' roared Murphy above the wind. 'Pull in to the lay-by.'

Clarke looked ahead, saw the big P on a notice by the roadside indicating a lay-by, nodded and began to slow. The police car moved ahead, swerved into the lay-by at the appointed spot and stopped. The juggernaut followed and drew up behind the Granada. Clarke climbed down.

'It's down here at the back,' said Murphy. 'Follow me.'

Clarke obediently followed him round the nose of his own truck and down its green and white length to the rear. He could see no flat tyre, but he hardly had a chance to look. The bushes parted and Brady and Keogh came bounding out in overalls and balaclavas. A gloved hand went over Clarke's mouth, a strong arm round his chest and another pair of arms round his legs. Like a sack he was swept off his feet and disappeared into the bushes.

Within a minute he had been divested of his company overalls with the Tara logo on the breast pocket, his wrists, mouth and eyes were sticky-taped and, shielded from the gaze of passing motorists by the bulk of his own lorry, he was bundled into the rear seat of the 'police' car. Here a gruff voice told him to lie on the floor and keep still. He did.