Vagabond (2 page)

Later, the ground-floor lights went out and those in the principal bedroom came on. Desperate saw her for a moment as she stood at the window and gazed down the hill. They had no bug in the house so Desperate didn’t know whether she knew about the culvert. Some talked to their women, most didn’t. She was tall and straight-backed, with good bones and a clear complexion. Her expression, at the window through the lenses, was vacant. She would have been accustomed to her husband slipping away as night fell, and of him returning. She would have known what he did, but perhaps not the detail. She would have recognised the risks he ran because there were enough widows on the side of the mountain who had experienced what now confronted her.

‘You all right, Desperate?’

‘Grand, Dusty. Never better.’

There had been heavy talk in the small operations area at Gough. Inside that old heap of grey-stone misery, which the British Army had populated for more than a century, the issue had been thrashed out: no minutes taken, no written record. Could arrests be attempted? Could they be rounded up individually and linked to a murder conspiracy that stood a chance in the Central Criminal Court? The answer had been decisive: ‘Blow the beggars away.’ A last question had been put: ‘Do we lose the source? Is he collateral?’

A response from Desperate: ‘I think we can live with that if we’re taking down four of that calibre.’ Sergeant Daniel Curnow had spoken, and he was the oracle on matters concerning informers, agents, ‘touts’: a warrant officer, a major and a full-ranking colonel listened to him. He was called ‘Desperate’ because of his first name.

Two nights later, awake for hours, he gazed down at the farmhouse. He knew how he’d find out that the enemy were dead. They wouldn’t send their own people, not yet. The priest would come. The light was growing from the east, beyond the Pomeroy road, and the rain fell. Wind rustled the hedgerow. A small car came along the lane, the headlights feeble in the weather. It turned onto the track, bouncing over the potholes, that ran between fields where more cattle were out and some sheep. Either the police or the fellow travellers supporting the Organisation would have called the man out.

The dog barked and ran from the buildings behind the house. A light came on upstairs.

The priest stood at the door and seemed to pause, as if reluctant to take a further step. Then he knocked. Desperate could see, with the magnification of the glasses, that she had thrown on a dressing-gown: as soon as she heard the vehicle progressing at snail’s pace up the track she would have realised that the news was bad. She took the priest inside. As Desperate pictured it, she would lead him into the kitchen, sit him down, put on the kettle, then allow him to speak.

A child came outside in striped pyjamas, a size too small – he was well built, with a tousled mass of thick hair. The file back at Gough said Malachy was eight. Desperate had seen the child from that vantage-point in the hedgerow three days before, when the boy had ridden with his father on the back of the tractor as they took silage out to the cattle. Now he howled – not with misery but anger. It was an animal sound, primeval. Desperate blinked, then cleaned the lenses so he could see better. The child’s face was twisted with hatred – the face of a fighter, he thought.

Dusty said quietly, ‘He’ll be a problem, he will. Remember his name.’

They covered the hide, picked up their rubbish and went on their stomachs along the hedge to the gap they could squeeze through. When they were clear, Dusty would summon the transport to the appointed rendezvous – using Desperate’s call-sign, Vagabond – and they’d return to Gough.

He was responsible, not for the first time and not for the last. The face of that child seared in his mind as he began to trudge across the grass. He saw, too, the face of an older man who believed in him, had trusted him, pocketed money and thought himself Desperate’s friend. He was despised as a traitor, the source of the information that had killed four men. A victory in a war now in its third decade had been won – and had taken the life of the child’s father.

The informer, whose life might now be forfeit, was Damien. He did a bit of carpentry to eke out his unemployment benefit and the hundred pounds a month from his handler. He lived in a bungalow two miles to the east along the mountain, and was thought to be not the full shilling. He had been doing panelling in a man’s home when he had heard the plan talked through in the open air. He had told Desperate, who had recruited him seven months before. His handler knew that the agent, Damien, was now vulnerable: the Organisation’s security people would come from Belfast and check who had known of the plan, where the briefings had been given. Damien had been worth a few hundred pounds, but was not in line for a resettlement package in England, which involved heavy expense. He’d take his chance. If the Organisation identified him as a potential risk, he would be taken to a safe-house, interrogated, burned and beaten. Then he’d be hooded, stripped to his underpants, pinioned and driven to a lane close to the border where he’d be pushed to his knees and shot, one bullet, in the back of the head. The hood would be lifted and a twenty-pound note stuffed between his teeth.

His handler had manipulated him. That was the work Desperate did, and Dusty protected him while he did it.

He’d catch up on his sleep at Gough after the debrief. The kid, Malachy, had howled at the low clouds, but it was the hatred Desperate would remember, how it had creased a young face and made lines in the clear skin. The voice rang in his ears.

Chapter 1

They’d killed him – not shot or strangled him, but when they’d sent him up the road.

The hut in which they had taken refuge from the weather was part collapsed. Three of the walls still stood and half of the tin roofing was there, but storms had taken down the rest; the floor creaked when any of them moved. Manure and a carpet of damp straw lay over the debris, and the place stank of cattle, and of the cigarettes smoked incessantly by the police who guarded them.

It was clear to Hugo Woolmer that he might as well have fired the bullet himself. His partner in the agent’s death was Gaby Davies. Hugo was three years older, at a higher grade in the Service, so had nominal control of the operation. What else might he have done? He could have refused permission for the agent to drive off into the fog that hid the road that snaked up towards the mountain. He might have insisted that he would not allow his agent to be at the beck and call of those who had called him and go to them, without back-up, in the hire car.

The agent had worn no wire under his vest and no microphone in his watch. No bug had been fastened to the small car he had collected at the airport. It had been thought that a wire, a microphone, or a bug was too simple for ‘them’ to locate.

The agent had flown from London, had stayed the night in a modern hotel within a stone’s throw of the police barracks. They had demanded a meeting with the agent. Two alternatives had faced Hugo Woolmer: he could allow his man to drive into the cloud and the labyrinth of narrow roads and farm tracks, which dictated vehicle pursuit was impossible, or he could accept that an agent who had worked with the Service for almost five and a half years should now be reined in, the contact with ‘them’ lost. The chance of replacing the agent was minimal. It had been his decision to make, and Gaby Davies’s voice had been insistent that morning in the hotel when visibility across the car park was negligible.

At the heart of the decision was the agent’s personal safety. He would be beyond reach, with no panic button because it was likely that he would be subjected to a search with detectors. To let him go forward, or not? A crushing weight had burdened Hugo Woolmer.

He was crouched against one of the hut’s surviving walls. The wind came through the trees, whipping twigs against them. He sat on his heels. His head was down on his chest.

She had said, ‘Of course he’ll do the meeting with them. It’s what we brought him over for. It’s a tough old world out there. You should know that and so should he. If he’s blown his cover, then that’s a sound reason for them to summon him to their territory. Or maybe they have a different role for him and want to talk it through. He put himself into this situation. He should have known things might get tricky before he associated with them. To cancel his meeting with them and break the link would mean that any trust they had in him is gone. And they won’t leave it at that. He’d be walking dead. He does the meeting, Hugo. You can’t call MB and tell him you’ve lost your nerve. For God’s sake!’

His chin was hard against the zip of his anorak. His arms encircled his shins. His fingers were locked together, and knuckles white, and he had begun to shake.

The hire car from the airport would have been driven by one of them into a farm gateway and torched. He wouldn’t have seen the car burning. They would have picked him up and slipped him into the back of a van without windows. They might have trussed him, even hooded him, and gone to one of the little homes on the mountain. There, he would be sat on a hard chair and slapped around a bit, if they suspected anything. One would be the smooth talker and would tell the agent that confession would save his life. Or maybe he’d swear at him, put a lighted cigarette close to his eyes and tell him how bad the pain would be . . .

He heard whimpering and realised it was his. He had become fond of the agent, and reckoned Gaby Davies – for all her bluster about people making their own beds and having to lie on them – liked him too. He was one of those people who seemed to make the sun shine a little brighter, and had an infectious chuckle. He could have cancelled the business, and had not.

Hugo Woolmer was protected: he and Gaby Davies had four taciturn police watching their backs, with Heckler & Koch rifles. Their faces showed disapproval of the two young ‘blow-ins’ from the mainland: they reckoned that Service people from across the water were clever and had good kit but a negligible understanding of problems in the Province. The agent was without protection.

If ‘they’ broke him, which Hugo Woolmer believed was almost certain, they would forget about beating him and burning him with cigarettes. They would sit him at a table, give him pencil and paper and instruct him to write the names of his contacts, handler and the length of his association with the Service. Then they would extricate from him every detail on the extent of his betrayal. He’d be told that if he wrote it all down he would be driven back down the hill to pick up his hire car and drive away. That was what they would tell him, and it would be lies. Hugo Woolmer knew, of course, of the Second World War saboteurs and wireless operators who had been rounded up in the occupied territories, tortured and never broke: he didn’t understand how that was possible. He had heard it said, by a Service veteran, that raw volunteers in the Organisation sometimes fought among each other for the privilege of killing an agent of the British occupation. He knew the agent’s wife and daughter by sight. He could have stopped him going into the fog.

The police watched him, impassive. He wouldn’t have said that Gaby Davies was pretty. From the corner of his eye, Hugo Woolmer could see her face. She was small and stocky, with short dark hair. She wore walking boots, faded jeans, a couple of T-shirts and a heavy anorak. She smoked with the police – kept pace with them. Her rucksack rested against her legs and held sandwiches, a flask of coffee, the communications equipment they’d use at the end of the day and her Glock pistol. Hugo was not armed. They had a correct relationship but when any issue needed closure she had the last word at the discussion stage, and he would make the decision. The agent had gone forward.

Rooks shrieked in the trees and the wind sang in the branches above them. His shoulders shook and tears came.

He was watched with a hawk’s intensity.

It was Dermot and Dymphna Fahy’s home. Daft, the pair of them. They had been sent in their car to the town with a twenty-pound note, which would last them the morning as they pushed a trolley up the aisles of the Spar, then the pound shop. They’d have enough left, maybe, after their shopping for a glass of Guinness each in O’Brien’s. The bungalow was a good place, quiet, not overlooked by neighbours, the Fahys had no record with the police so there wouldn’t be surveillance. The front garden was a wilderness – there was an old pram in it, and a bicycle frame; the paintwork on the window frames was flaking and the door knocker was askew. Nothing happened at that bungalow so it was the right place for him to have been brought to. There was a dog, a collie-cross, but the Fahy woman had shut it in the shed. It had barked when they’d arrived, but was quiet now.

He was watched closely and they looked for the signs – sweat on the neck and forehead, nervous blinking . . . Malachy stood beside Brendan Murphy and the two filled the doorway into the back bedroom. There was no bed – it had gone with the Fahys’ boy to a room he rented in Lurgan town. A dressing-table with a mirror, cracked on the left side, was covered with old newspapers and some plastic bags from the Spar, and there was a pile of brown envelopes, unopened. Across them a cable, plugged to a wall socket, led to a well-used electric drill – not for heavy use, but big enough to make a hole in a wall for a Rawlplug or to damage a man’s kneecap. Also under the cable there was a length of towel, folded into a strip, and a coil of baling twine from a farmer’s yard. The man had his back to the dressing-table but would have seen what was on it, as was intended, when they’d led him in. He was sitting on a straight-backed wooden chair and kept his knees together – protection of sorts. He didn’t make eye contact. Interesting that he hadn’t complained at being bundled into the back of a van, or when he had been blindfolded at the end of the journey, or when he had stubbed his toe on a step between the collapsed gate and the front door. The curtain was drawn. He wouldn’t know where he was. It was good that he didn’t show fear: either he didn’t feel it or he hid it well.