The Discourtesy of Death (Father Anselm Novels) (12 page)

‘Did the ploy work?’ asked Anselm, doubting if it had, in fact, been a ploy; thinking that the shoot-to-kill issue might have been ‘something’ rather than ‘nothing’.

‘Of course not,’ snapped Mrs Goodwin. ‘Given the
fait accompli
, no one in that room would have rebuked him … we just kept our thoughts to ourselves, for Jenny’s sake.’

‘Even Michael?’

‘Especially Michael. He made another speech. Shook his hand again. Accepted Peter into the family. And Peter just smiled as if he’d pulled off a military triumph.’ Mrs Goodwin paused as if to gather in the prophetic significance of that remembered Sunday afternoon. ‘Poor Jenny … she’d found someone wild and exciting and he was going to take her to a strange and foreign land. And in time, he did. And poor Michael, not knowing what would happen, bowed his head and served the coffee, laughing and nodding by turns at everything clever Peter had to say. He put himself under Peter’s feet and that … that smooth-talking
bastard
just wiped clean his dirty trainers.’

Doctor Goodwin looked at his wife as if she’d come clean off the leash. He reached for one of her hands and squeezed her fingers tight. He wasn’t reproving or annoyed. Just grateful, Anselm thought. She had a way with words. Said the sorts of things he could never say from the pulpit.

‘How did we end up getting into all that?’ he said, helplessly, all his energy gone.

‘I don’t know,’ said Helen.

Yes, you do.
Anselm nodded to himself.
It’s because of me. I took your hint.

Doctor Goodwin let her hand go and he turned to Anselm. ‘I’ve more to say … about Peter and Jenny. I could do with some fresh air. Can I take you to where it all began and ended? There’s something important about place, don’t you agree?’

Anselm did. Gratified, Doctor Goodwin went to a bureau in the corner of the room. With quite extraordinary care, he took a letter from a drawer and transferred it to an inside jacket pocket.

‘I’ll stay here,’ said Helen, pushing the tea trolley towards the door. ‘I’ve lots of jobs to do in the garden.’

Of course you have, concluded Anselm. She had nothing else to add. In the end, despite getting cold feet, she’d done her bit for Jenny. With a little adroit nudging from Anselm, Nigel had completed Helen’s story about Northern Ireland without Helen having to open her mouth. It had gone without a hitch, for Nigel hadn’t quite known what he’d been saying – what the facts about Michael had meant to Helen. Anselm didn’t fully grasp them either. But it was only a matter of time. He just needed to brood upon the meaning of the suppressed information. Taking her hand at the door, he almost said, ‘Your secret’s safe with me.’ Instead he murmured, ‘Thanks for the cake.’

She smiled. They both knew it was dried out; that it should never be called magnificent.

Evening light saturated the long pier at Southwold. The clouds above were soaked an angry crimson. Softer yellow smudges and faint purple streams ran into the watery blue of the sky. Michael stood alone on the silvered wooden planking, hands in his coat pockets. He was looking at the Water Clock.

The clock was an amusing scrap metal sculpture, tall like the grandfather kind, only twice the size and made up of different objects in a welded open casing. Beneath the round face at the top were two taps. They were open and the water tumbled into an old Victorian bath. In the bath lay two recumbent figures with short tubes sticking out of the sides of their mouths as if they were biting on cigarettes. On a platform beneath the bath were two other figures – boys, Michael thought – standing either side of a toilet basin. Near the ground, in a line like targets at a fair, was a row of tulips.

The Nutting Squad had used a bath on Eugene. By the time he came up for air, he’d lost the will to resist. He’d told them what they wanted to know – what they already believed – even though it wasn’t true. There was nothing he could say to persuade them he was innocent. They’d gathered evidence from people who knew him backwards. It all pointed in one direction. Upwards. They knew he was a tout. But they were wrong. Just like the trader in the shop.

Michael looked higher at the hands of the clock and higher still at the blood in the sky.

According to the
Belfast Telegraph
, to get at the inner man, to reach what he was
really
thinking, they’d broken Eugene’s fingers and toes, burned holes in his muscles with cigarettes and placed a hot poker under his arms. Eventually, after a bath, he’d made a taped confession. They’d sent it to his wife as a kind of explanation.

Michael closed his eyes against the wet clouds. He almost heard Liam’s tread on the weathered planking. The priest had gone and the informer had come back into the room.

‘What will you do?’

Michael didn’t reply.

‘You’ll stiff him, won’t you?’ Liam knew the argot.

Michael’s stomach turned. The priest had done Eugene’s bidding: a Brit who dealt with touts had been told a secret worth dying for. Néall Ó Mórdha was the stumbling block to any peace process. He would never abandon the armed struggle. He’d be alone in Donegal next week, Wednesday night.

‘You’ll have to rub him out,’ murmured Liam, importantly, as if he knew about these things. ‘He has to go down.’

A
priest
had set up a man to be killed.

Michael’s mouth was dry, the spit on his lips crusting like a young scab. What else could the priest mean? What did he expect? That the Brits would frame Ó Mórdha? Engineer a charge on tax evasion to get him banged away for two years? What difference would that make? The man of God had come to Michael because Eugene had told him to speak to someone who dealt with touts: the people who, according to IRA propaganda, organised the execution of unarmed volunteers.

‘It doesn’t work that way,’ said Michael. ‘There’s nothing I can do.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I fill in a CF, a contact form. Someone taps it into the computer. Someone else thinks and acts. And they won’t be sending the SAS into Donegal.’

‘You can’t do nowt?’

‘I said I’ll fill in the form.’

‘That’s not enough.’

‘It’ll have to do. I’m on leave from tomorrow.’

‘You heard what your man Eugene said. You can’t just type it up. You can’t just take a holiday, not now … look, I can help.’

Liam leaned back hard, shutting the door with his shoulders.

Michael appraised his first agent with dismay. Five foot ten. Eighteen years four months old. Thin. Brown greasy hair. Pasty complexion. Spots on the forehead. Black-framed glasses. Large brown eyes. Mouth sloping to one side. First contact: arrested for shoplifting. Charges dropped. Proposed to FRU by Special Branch.

‘Do you hear what I’m saying?’ whispered Liam. ‘I can help.’ The floor above creaked and Liam brushed the sound aside with an impatient, pasty hand. ‘I’m no small fry.’

Michael dropped his head into his hands and the armchair squeaked as if stabbed. The priest had come and gone, a messenger who enjoyed the luxury of not having to act on what he’d said.

‘I said I can help.’

Nigel … what do I do?
Michael squeezed his eyes tight shut.
You were cut out for this, not me. You’re the one who saw wars simply. What do I do? I’ve got a kid in front of me who wants to help me kill someone.

A flash from a sermon came to Michael’s mind. Nigel was in the pulpit at the Royal Memorial Chapel at Sandhurst, broad and strong, hands on the lectern. He’d been invited by the chaplain to address officer recruits destined for the Medical Corps. Michael had tagged along.

‘Life is short, the crisis fleeting, experiment risky, decision difficult,’ declared Nigel. He’d gone back to the
Aphorisms
of Hippocrates.

(Michael saw his brother’s roving eyes.)

‘Doctors – like soldiers – must respond, often quickly and with resolution. One day, you may find yourself alone in a fleeting crisis. The moment of hesitation will have passed and it will be your duty to act.’

For effect, Nigel let his gaze settle upon one individual – someone he’d judged timid and unsure.

‘On that awful day, my friend, be calm. Stare the fast approach of death straight in the eye. Look at the sickness and the suffering. And then get on with it. Take the risk. Make the difficult decision. Save a life, if you can. Don’t let hesitation slow you down. And afterwards, looking back on the crisis, you just might notice a Still, Small Voice – hidden at the time, but present in your anguish. You were never, in fact, alone.’

Michael dropped his hands and looked over at Liam; at his large, demanding eyes.

‘What did you steal? Before you were pushed towards us lot?’

Liam’s jaw dropped in astonishment.

‘Eh?’

‘Answer the bloody question.’

‘Pork chops … a cabbage. A carton of Silk Cut … menthol.’

‘What’s wrong with your mother?’

‘Nowt.’

‘The swollen knees and ankles?’

‘She’s too fat.’

‘She’s in bed?’

‘Couldn’t be bothered to come downstairs. I said I can help. I’m no eejit.’

‘Where’s your father?’

‘Never had one.’

Michael leaned forward and the armchair squealed. He was going to finish Liam’s days as an informer right there and then but Liam barked.

‘I’m holding guns for the IRA. Ammunition, too. And detonators. They trust me.’

Michael blinked at the nodding head.

‘That’s right. I’ve worked my way in. They think I’m small fry with a sick ma. An eejit.’

Michael’s seat yelped.

‘I keep the guns for two weeks at a time and then they move ’em. I’ve had a pistol and four rifles for a couple of days now I have. There’s a Browning automatic under your chair. And a silencer behind the boiler. You can use ’em and put ’em back and no one’ll know a thing. You can stiff the Army Council fella using one of their own tools. The ballistics will show the bullets came from a thing used by the IRA in other killings. No one’ll think it was the Brits or the UDA or whoever. And yous lot can then feed the results to the IRA through me and they’ll go crazy trying to find one of their own.’

Michael felt faint. The Army had sent him on a psychological training course to help him identify when an agent was slipping off the rails. Liam had developed none of the symptoms … but he’d obviously crashed through all the barriers without making a single noise. He’d acted outside the authority of his handler and he hadn’t even broken a sweat.

‘Father Doyle says as a people we’re
in need
,’ muttered Liam, adjusting his heavy glasses, his back still to the door. ‘We can’t get out of the cycle of violence and mayhem. Neighbours are killing neighbours. There’s no end to the funerals. The grief. Well, thanks to your man there, Eugene, we can do something. You can’t just fill in a bleedin’ form and leave it to some other fella. Father Doyle brought you the message, so. Now it’s over to you to do yer stuff.’

Stuff? Michael could no longer move: the cheap synthetic covering was silent. His first agent was out of control. Worse: Michael was sitting on an arms dump belonging to the Provisional IRA. The enormity of the situation crashed in upon him.

He’d been with the FRU six months. Liam had been recruited two months prior to that. They were both green though Liam was that smidgen longer in the tooth. But they’d been told some grade A1 intelligence with a fast-moving shelf life. Do your stuff? Liam – like Father Doyle – meant assassination. But that’s not the way it worked. Sure the SAS took short cuts and he’d heard rumours of a Rat Hole, a place where top handlers managed top agents, cutting corners every now and then … but no one he could think of was going to authorise the killing of Néall Ó Mórdha next Wednesday. And yet, the Republican zealot was going to be there. It was a moment of opportunity. To tilt the balance against violence. Eugene had said so, just before they shot him.

‘Are you going to answer me or what?’

Colonel Stauffenberg attempted to kill Hitler, thought Michael. He, too, was backed by a pastor … Bonhoeffer. If they’d succeeded, the war would have been cut short by a year. Thousands of lives would have been saved. If they’d killed him in 1939, there would have been no war, no holocaust.

‘Well, are you even breathing?’

Michael let his eyes come into focus. He saw Liam’s earnest face against the peeling wallpaper, his mouth half open. This petty thief was no backroom conspirator in the High Command. Father Doyle was no Bonhoeffer.
And I’m no hero
. Michael shuddered at the exalted grubbiness of his circumstances. The chair whined.

Nigel, what do I do?

Michael listened, still paralysed, aching to hear that Still, Small Voice.

At first he wasn’t paying proper attention. But then, in complete horror, he started tracking Liam’s words: his murderous advice, whispered just in case, for once, his mother had come downstairs and paused on her way to the kitchen.

‘You have to be calm, you know. They say a man’s life flashes before him just before he dies. Well, it’s not true.’ Liam came over and sat down in a chair by his handler. ‘He sees the future he might have had. His eyes are full of wonder … you can see it, just before you kill him. It’s the look of a newborn … and you can’t hesitate. You turn out his light.’

Michael stood up as if the devil himself had slipped into Liam’s skin. He stepped away, backing towards the dead gas fire.

‘You’ll have to practise,’ promised Liam. ‘Look into the eyes of someone you love. Try to…’

This wasn’t Liam speaking. His voice had changed. His syntax had altered. This is what the kid had heard at some other door. He’d heard an old hand teaching a new recruit how to be a trigger man. The evil had entered Liam’s lungs like Silk Cut, the poison and fumes stealing into his soul. He’d memorised the phrases, turning them over with the insight of a child learning Shakespeare.

Get Ó M
ó
rdha, and you’ll get a peace process,
sputtered Eugene from the torture chamber in Ballymurphy.
Let him go and the war will just drag on.

Liam was still speaking. He’d tipped up the armchair that Michael had been using. On his knees, he felt inside the frame for the ‘tool’.