Cold (9 page)

Joe paused to let this sink in. Then he added: ‘If you’re going to shoot me, get on with it.’

Donnelly exhaled; his face, turned grey by too much prison, stared out at the low-rise housing on the slopes, the cluttered blocks and terraces of Belfast City, and the great yellow shipyard crane below.

‘The strange thing is, Joe, I knew. You do my job, you run an IRA brigade . . . you kill the British, you kill bad Irishmen, you trust good Irishmen, you turn crooked people like the bent copper. You develop an instinct. I knew you’d changed after North Korea.’

‘Are you going to shoot me?’

Donnelly pulled the gun from his coat and pointed it directly at Joe.

‘My question stands,’ said Joe.

‘You saved my life by killing that fucking sadist Chong. You didn’t just save me but the other boys too. So run, Joe, run. But if we ever find you again, wherever you are, you’re a dead man. Understood?’

‘. . . Mr Tiplady? Mr Tiplady?’

Joe made no reply.

‘Mr Tiplady, may I have your full attention?’

Joe came back from the cemetery to the employment tribunal.

‘There’s no record of an active logbook, Mr Tiplady.’

‘Just because you don’t know about something does not mean it does not exist,’ said Joe. ‘Call the day manager and ask him for it. But it’s probably best not to mention that you’re looking for the logbook in relation to this,’ he added.

Mr Brooks jolted awake. ‘Why not?’ he asked.

‘Because the day manager and I had a disagreement,’ said Joe.

‘Are you suggesting that he may be in some way biased against you?’

‘Perhaps.’

‘Why?’

‘Because he’s a fecking bully.’

‘Please respect the tribunal by minding your language,’ said Alison. ‘I’m afraid that our guidelines forbid the introduction of fresh evidence at the fact-finding stage.’

‘What?’

‘You should have raised the issue of your so-called logbook at the preliminary stage.’

‘I thought this was the preliminary.’

‘I’ve already told you this is the fact-finder. Is there anything else you’d like to say?’

Joe shook his head.

‘Very well. The tribunal will reconvene at two thirty. Mr Tiplady, we will see you then. In the meantime, please don’t discuss our proceedings with anyone else. Do you understand?’

‘Yes, I understand.’

He walked out of the frosted-glass box into a bigger, open-plan glass box, and took the lift down and stepped out onto Piccadilly.

The rain had stopped and the sun punched a hole through the cloud cover. The thought of non-winter made him almost whinny with pleasure – that and being away from those miserable creatures. ‘Bureaucratic entropy’ was how Vanessa used to explain that special universe they constructed for themselves. She had such a way with words.

Green Park beckoned. He had time and enough to get some fresh air, grab a sandwich and then return to hear his fate. He rang Terri, his union official. No answer. He left a message about the preliminary being the fact-finder, then rang off.

The park was damp and grubby, the grass slick and wet, the soil overused, the ground so hard-packed by tens of thousands of tourists and office workers that it had the feel of concrete. The air, too, throbbed with chaotic sound. Perhaps he’d had enough of London, its noise and dark energy. Yet as he walked deeper into the park, the great trees still dripping fat raindrops lifted his spirits. Vanessa’s great hero was Orwell, who’d written something about loving the surface of the planet. She liked to quote him, word for word.

He stopped and typed
Orwell
and
surface
into his phone, and out the answer popped:

So long as I remain alive and well I shall continue to feel strongly about prose style, to love the surface of the Earth, and to take a pleasure in solid objects and scraps of useless information.

He smiled with delight at the clever tricks his mobile could do, and fondness, too, for the wonder of Vanessa’s intellect.

He walked on, heading for the south-east corner of the park, where it met The Mall. For the first time that day, he felt a tiny wave of happiness, and at that very moment he saw the two shadows who had stalked him. One hundred yards ahead of them was Wolf Eyes, and one hundred yards ahead of her, splashing in and out of the puddles, was Reilly.

UTAH

I
t was gone midnight when Sergeant William Chivers stared into the styrofoam cup holding his coffee, trying to block out the modern world. Twenty-three years he’d been with the Salt Lake City Police Department, and none of it was getting easier. Instead of enjoying a bit of downtime, taking pleasure in doing not very much for five minutes, the kid sitting next to him in the cruiser, Officer Luiz Alvarez, was messing about jumping between radio stations, hitting on a tune half played out and using some clever thingamajig on his phone to work out what the song was before the DJ got to tell the world.

A thudding bass riff? ‘“All That She Wants” by Ace of Base,’ called out Alvarez. A saxophone pumping out a threnody of exquisite melancholy: ‘“Baker Street”, Gerry Rafferty.’

It was beyond irritating.

Chivers didn’t want to come over a bore, but he was about to call on Alvarez to give it a rest when the cruiser’s police radio crackled. An affray of some sort: an elderly man, slight, described as being the worse for drink, set upon by five assailants in the alley at the back of Harry’s Bar. The sergeant gunned the cruiser, hit the siren and flicked on the light. They became their own mobile storm, flickering electric-blue lightning as they rolled along.

Hatches of light from windows shone on brick walls and a steel fire staircase high above; puddles reflected the blue
flash-flash
from the cruiser underfoot; but at street level, the alley was cast in gloom.

The officers switched on their torches, illuminating a scene beyond strange. Five men, ne’er-do-wells, some of whom Chivers recognised – crackheads, scammers, winos – lying on top of each other like logs, their hands, feet and midriffs trussed up by plastic tape. Sitting on top of the heap of humanity, singing to himself, was a senior citizen, hog-whimperingly drunk.

‘Sir, are you all right?’ Chivers asked the old man. He sang his tune and stared into space as if the two police officers and the criminal pyramid beneath did not exist. Close up, his breath stank of booze.

‘What’s your name, sir?’

‘Archibald Sayce. Professor Archibald Sayce.’

‘Hey, Archibald, could you tell me: how did you end up sitting on these men?’

Archibald Sayce returned to his singing: ‘
Druzhby narodov nadyozhnyy oplot!
’

‘Archibald . . . sir . . . ?’

‘
Partiya Lenina – sila narodnaya. Nas k torzhestvu kommunizma vedyot!
’

For the first time ever, Chivers realised that Alvarez might not be entirely useless as a police officer.

‘Officer Alvarez.’

‘Sir?’

‘Can you use that thingamabob on your phone and work out what Archibald here is singing?’

Alvarez pushed a few buttons on his phone and held it towards the singer, oblivious to the detective work going on in front of his face.

‘OK, Alvarez, so what’s the tune?’

There was a delay while the thing on the phone worked it out.

‘It’s the Russian national anthem, sir. No, it’s correcting . . . it’s the old Soviet one.’

‘Well, blow me.’

They called in backup and took all six in for fingerprinting, ID’ing and photographs. All five bound in tape had previous, some of them for nasty stuff. They couldn’t get anything out of the old guy, Professor Archibald Sayce. No one of that name lived in the continental United States. He just kept humming his Stalin tune. His prints were clean for the whole of Utah, but Chivers was worried that he might be a Communist sympathiser, what with his choice of song and all. He sent a copy upstairs to the night duty supervisor, a Captain Hackman, who could log on to an FBI database for a federal check.

An hour later, the door to the charge room swung open and the captain beckoned him over.

‘Can I have a quiet word, Sergeant Chivers?’

‘Yes, Captain.’

‘The old guy – his prints have popped up on the grid.’

‘Sir?’

‘What name did he give you?’

‘Archibald Sayce. Professor Archibald Sayce.’

‘That’s not his real name and he’s not a real professor. He’s Ezekiel Chandler, and he’s sixty-three years of age and he’s a Mormon.’

‘He’s a Jack Mormon, sir – full of liquor. Drunk as a skunk.’

Hackman ignored him. ‘The FBI are telling me his former occupation.’

Chivers shrugged. ‘Farmer?’

‘No, sergeant. You told me that when you found him, he was singing the old Soviet anthem. How many farmers from these parts know that song?’

The sergeant started to blush.

‘Our wino in the drunk tank is a former deputy director of counterintelligence, Central Intelligence Agency. The FBI say it’s our call, but they kindly suggest that it might be better if we let him go with a personal caution, and they kindly suggest that I call them back the moment we’ve come to our decision, and they kindly suggest that that might take two minutes, if that. You comfortable with that, sergeant?’

‘Sir, my recommendation is that we let him go with a personal caution, sir.’

‘My thinking, too. And the FBI also kindly suggest that we should give him a lift home. Bear Lake.’

‘Sir, that’s close to the Idaho line. That’s three hours driving. I . . . er . . .’

Hackman gave him a cold look.

‘Will do, sir.’

Chivers spent a full five hours making the trip up to Bear Lake, because the first big snowfall of the winter came clunking down. The snow deadened sound and both men, lost in their own thoughts, were engulfed by a sense of wilderness reborn. Archibald – that’s how he thought of the old guy – must have a pretty sore head, Chivers reckoned, but he didn’t complain. Barely said a word the whole way. Apart from one sentence when they stopped for a break: ‘I shouldn’t have drunk the coffee.’

When they got to a log cabin up in the mountains, an old Ford pickup was standing outside, keys in the ignition. Smoke was coming out of the cabin chimney. The old man invited him in for refreshment but the sergeant declined.

‘I’m sorry I’ve used up your time, sergeant, and thank you very much for your patience.’

‘No problem, sir. You just look after yourself.’

Zeke shook the sergeant’s hand and walked up to the shack, opened the unlocked door and called, ‘Mary-Lou?’

No one was home. On the kitchen table was a letter addressed to him in her copperplate handwriting. He opened the envelope, knowing that the judgement of the Strengthening Church Members Committee would have been instantly communicated to Mary-Lou. He read her letter; as he feared, she was asking him for a divorce.

Zeke felt a stab of pain in his weak wrist. The cold got to it, always had. Still, she had done a damn good job fixing him up, and now, damn fool that he was, she’d gone. He leant against the doorframe of the cabin and his eyes began to well up.

On the long journey back to Salt Lake, Chivers reflected that there was something special about the old guy. He was old Mormon, they said, and clearly in trouble of some kind, sure – ending up that drunk – but Chivers reckoned that he deserved a bit of a break. Though about that, others were not so sure.

Chivers booked out a whole shift in lieu because of the long drive home through the snow. When a few days later he caught up with Alvarez, he heard that it had been decided to free the five men who’d been trussed up, with a personal caution.

‘Sergeant,’ said Alvarez, ‘when I let them go, most of them said nothing. One of them, a bum, he told me what happened. They were going to do over the old man, take his wallet and all. The old guy was out of it, it was going to be like stealing candy from a baby.’

‘So what happened?’

‘Well, the bum says this old lady came out of the shadows and she had an elephant gun, and she was real mean and she forced him to bind all the other men up or she’d blow their heads clean off. The bum said he didn’t care to meet that old lady ever again, his whole life.’