Vagabond (22 page)

If the faith went, he would have to face the black marble headstone that bore his father’s name and blurt that he had compromised. He would follow the bastards who had gone into politics or who supervised the crossing in front of a school. He had never crossed his father, had always done his best to please and had hoped for praise.

Bridie was a hard woman. Brennie Murphy said she had the strength of granite. She might spit in his face and walk out on him, with the boy. So he let the man talk as they went towards the rising sun.

He learned more about the bar, the beers that were drunk, the bands that came over from the west of Ireland, the English football that was shown on TV, and buttoned his lip. Finally the driver had run out of small-talk. He asked, ‘I suppose a man like yourself – they didn’t give me a name, only the type of coat you’d be wearing – is important. Does that mean you’re a soldier? You’re a fighter, aren’t you?’

They were in the fast lane and he watched the German traffic going about its business.

The driver said, ‘Don’t mind me. I know when to keep my mouth shut. My family always told me it’s the touts you have to watch for.’

Malachy put the man’s drivel from his mind and thought of home – Bridie would have taken the boy to school. Then he thought of his army.

The boys lived close to each other, were almost inseparable. Neither had work and neither was studying. They hung about together and most days were in each other’s kitchens. Every adult in the village knew why they didn’t have jobs or go to the college on the far side of Dungannon. It would be Pearse’s mother’s kitchen, or Kevin’s mother’s, and the other kids of the two families were gone for employment, training or to school. The boys were set apart, neither criticised nor encouraged: the subject was off limits.

It was Kevin’s mother’s kitchen. Physically, the boys were different. Kevin had red-gold hair and was tall, with spindly limbs. His voice had a reedy twang. Pearse was shorter, heavier, and had a deeper voice. His hair was jet black, Celtic, and curly. Kevin was quiet, Pearse more outgoing and overtly confident. The last time they had been taken to Gough they had sat in separate interview rooms and a detective had said to Kevin, ‘You’re sharp enough to keep better company. You’ll bring ruin on yourself if you run with the shites and failures we see you with.’ In another interview room, a woman detective had said to Pearse, ‘Do you not realise that the time for killing and maiming people has gone and that you should be thinking of your future? It could be better than staring at a closed cell door, because that’s what it’ll be if you stay with Riordan and Murphy.’ The last time they’d come out almost cocky, and had taken the bus back home to the mountain. In their different ways they had felt a new confidence.

That morning it had ebbed.

The kettle whistled. Kevin’s mother was at work, cleaning the community hall, and the smaller kids had gone to school. The radio played the local station. There had been stone throwing and bottling in east Belfast, a boy had been shot in the kneecaps in Brandywell, Derry, and a ‘viable device’ had been found under a pile of rubbish at a tax office in Antrim. Normally they would josh and mess and be their age, but both were subdued.

It was the day when, alone, they would take their own length of piping, and the linked wiring for the detonation to the cabling hidden under the hedge, then wait for the car to come – Eamonn O’Kane’s – and blow him away. They drank coffee, ate biscuits, and watched the hands of the clock on the wall crawl round.

It was as if there had been a death in the corridor.

Early in the morning, there should have been a strip of light under his door, with the indistinct glow from the ceiling distorted in a frosted-glass panel beside it. Jocelyn went by: no light, no voice speaking into a phone, no rattle of the keyboard, no hacking cough. She wore lightweight flat shoes and shuffled towards her own door. From anywhere along the corridor, she, and any other occupant, would have identified the metal tips clattering at the toes and heels of his brogues. The absence left an emptiness.

There were men and women on that corridor, senior management, who went to conferences and seminars, travelled internally or abroad, and left their rooms locked and darkened. They weren’t missed. His window looked out onto the river. The glass was reinforced and supposedly shatterproof against a car bomb in the street. It was not supposed to be opened, but Jocelyn had heard reports of someone hanging out of a fourth-floor window, pipe smoke obscuring his face. She hated him to be away, was almost desolate in his absence.

She fancied she knew more about him than anyone else who worked there. When she was in that office she took no liberties. She would not slouch in a chair. She would not gossip or expect him to. Neither would she share what she knew of him. Jocelyn understood. She had been told once, and once was enough. It was a damp morning in central London and she had her raincoat draped over her shoulders. She made no concession to fashion and had never considered that dress might make her marginally more attractive to him. Both would have seemed, to strangers, emotionless, but they were bound by a fierce, unswerving pursuit of end-games.

If there had been a strip of light under it, or a whiff of pipe tobacco, she would have knocked courteously, would have been called inside and they’d have talked. They did so four times a day, at least.

She went past. It would be a big one. A high-value target was on offer, the most important in two or three years. She walked down the stairs, unwilling to wait for the lift, then through the lobby and past a desk where her card was read by the machine. A barrier opened, and she was out of the side door into the street. She could smell fresh coffee and bacon grilling from the café.

She didn’t stop. The wind blew the sides of her coat hard against her. She cut through side-streets and headed towards Petty France, where buildings had privileged views over the parks and were close to the seats of power. She went through an unmarked doorway. A screen was consulted, her identification checked and a card issued. She went up two flights.

A young, smartly dressed lawyer was waiting for her. She shook his hand and was led towards a far room. The window that would have looked down into a central well was masked and the blind drawn. She had been told that this man, barely out of university, was a prime expert for the Ministry of Justice in areas affecting warrants, sealed or open, powers of arrest, the courts in which a case might be tried, and matters affecting international borders. He made coffee and offered biscuits. They settled. She assimilated advice, guidance, as Matthew Bentinick would have expected of her.

They finished.

He said, ‘I was once taught, Jocelyn, the legal creed. “Be he ever so mighty, no man is above the law.” Any observation you’d care to make?’

She said, ‘We’re not offenders. In the old days, we used “little people” for the nasty bits and let them run far enough to be out of sight. Then we couldn’t account for what they’d done. But that, of course, was the old days.’

He’d sat in his room. She hadn’t come or called: the mountain and Mahomet. He had gazed out of his window at the street opposite, a few chimneys and some satellite dishes. Nothing there to excite Ralph Exton.

His breakfast had been brought up on a tray – coffee, juice and a croissant. At home he was usually up early. When he was downstairs and dressed, Fliss and Toria still in bed, he had his desk in the dining room to himself and could shuffle the brown envelopes, make the decisions on which bills to pay and which to slip to the bottom of the heap. He could also consider new deals. Furniture always paid well, and he’d heard that there were good lines in clay garden pots from Vietnam – it was simple enough to run off the FairTrade stickers the garden centres liked. That was the trouble with Ralph Exton’s life: money. When he was away the brown envelopes couldn’t follow him. Maybe Fliss and Toria weren’t at home. Maybe Toria was with a friend, and maybe Fliss had an early appointment in the chair, before the nurse arrived. Some men would not have accepted his wife’s behaviour – they might have gone at her with an axe. There were men who stabbed or strangled their wives, then hanged themselves in the nearest woodland. That did not appeal, and the dentist was welcome to her. What did appeal to him was the next
big
deal, something that eclipsed the arrangements he had with the Irish for the cigarettes and was way bigger than the weapons he was brokering for them. It was elusive.

He could harbour an idea, then see it retreat into the mist when he dissected it. In the meantime there was business to sort out with Miss Gabrielle, and something rather firmer in the way of remuneration. He reckoned, with her in Prague and away from Thames House, he stood a better chance. It was the moment when they needed him. The mountain had not come to him, although he thought she liked him. He needed a pay-day.

He had a sheet of hotel paper, from beside the phone, and had made some calculations on it with the hotel’s pencil. In his home bathroom there was a glass jar from a jumble sale, filled with hotel soaps, shampoos and shower gel. He was a serial pilferer and would slip the pencil into a pocket, then the replacement that the maid would leave.

He would be Mahomet. He left his room. The corridor was quiet as he padded its length. At her door he stood for a few seconds, listened, and heard the TV playing an English-language channel. He took a breath and knocked. ‘Who is it?’

He looked up and down the corridor. ‘Ralph.’

‘Hold on a moment.’

He had his back to the door and kept a watch on the corridor, with the lift entrance at the far end to his right. It opened behind him.

‘Yes?’

The lift came to that floor. Two girls walked out. They were Vietnamese – or Chinese, Japanese, Korean or . . . He turned. Gabrielle stood just back from the door. She was dripping. A towel was wrapped round her and her calves glistened. She seemed small, and the skin on her arms was white, as if it was never exposed to the weather. She stood there, legs a little apart, and stared up at him.

‘Well?’

‘Sorry, I’ll come back.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous. Come in and make some coffee – milk and no sugar for me.’

He thought, couldn’t be sure, that the towel had slipped an inch. She went back to the bathroom. There was a kettle, a bowl of coffee sachets, teabags and little milk pots. He boiled the water and poured. He heard her in the bathroom, clattering, then the whine of an electric toothbrush.

‘Ralph?’

‘What?’

‘There’s a pile of my clothes on the chair by the window – I put them out for today. Could you bring them here?’

He did so. Her hand came out and she took them from him.

‘I was about to call you.’

The kettle had boiled and he made the coffee. There was no book beside the bed and the sheets were barely disturbed. He reckoned she had slept well. Why should she not? She would have thought she had control of him. He poured. She hummed to herself in the bathroom.

‘What couldn’t wait for me to contact you, Ralph?’

‘I need to talk to you.’

‘What about?’

She was in the door of the bathroom. Her jeans were on, fastened at the waist but not zipped, and her bra. She was towelling her hair.

He said it quickly: ‘My future. I don’t have a budget from you. We have an arrangement, week to week, day to day, and—’

‘I can’t offer you a wage, Ralph.’

‘I need something better in place.’

‘Are the Irish not paying up front?’

‘My future is when I come out. Where’s the exit?’

She pushed him down onto the bed, then brought over their coffee. She sat beside him.

‘We’ll look after you, Ralph. It’s about trust, and you have good reason to trust us. You’re really important. All the people in our building who need to know about you are rooting for you. All of them. We really admire what you’re doing.’

A sweet voice, the burr of her accent, and nowhere near to an answer. His phone rang. She eased back, stood up and carried her cup to the window. He answered it. ‘Hello . . . Yes, that’s me . . . Yes, I have it. I’ll be there.’

In his mind he saw the young woman he had walked past at the airport, a fleeting memory. He hung up. ‘Gaby, we never seem to consider it appropriate to discuss my future.’

‘That’s for London, not here. How often do I have to tell you, Ralph, that we’re all committed to you.’ She put on her T-shirt. ‘You worry too much, and there’s no need for it. You meet her and come back to me. Your future? Well, that depends how all this shakes down.’