Vagabond (34 page)

He slapped him again. It was about authority. Danny would have said, in the old-speak of a former life, that it was necessary to create authority. The man was not a friend. He was not grateful to Exton. The man’s heroics and the odds stacked against him were unimportant. The agent was the key. He sought to dominate.

A third slap. He had brought the plague with him. Why had he come back and why had he neutralised all the years of convalescing from the pain? He was a lemming, speeding towards the cliff edge. He re-created the hotel room from memories of the Portakabin at Gough, the dark car parks behind pubs and woodland walks where no tourists came. They had all cowered when he struck them. He had done it with his fists and his tongue and he reckoned he could make an agent pliable again. He was unsure, at that moment, whether Exton needed a fourth slap, a kick or a punch – and he didn’t have Dusty Miller behind him with an H&K hung across his chest and a Glock at his waist.

‘If you think you can play games with us, you are so, so, mistaken.’

The curtains were back. Sunlight spilled into the room.

‘Fucking us about, chummy, holding back on your Russian friend, that’s just not acceptable.’

Ralph Exton’s head was in front of the light. He had missed the trick of reading the face.

‘Good on the Irish end and crap on the—’

It hadn’t happened before. Not just a couple of flailed blows but the anger of a street-fighter’s attack.

The weight of Ralph Exton hit Danny Curnow. The sun had been in his face and he hadn’t seen the response welling. A man possessed. He went down.

What would Dusty have done? Dusty would have powered forward, the shoulder stock of the H&K raised. He would have brought it down – required force – on the back of Ralph Exton’s head. He would have flattened him. Then he would have levered Danny up, with that world-weary look on his face: ‘What would you do without me to pick up the pieces, Desperate?’ Dusty wasn’t there.

The fingers were rearing towards his eyes. The weight was on him. Surprise first, then control, last the response. Unequal. He had the fingers out of his face, and the weight off him. He pitched Ralph Exton, the star agent, used to coddling, onto his stomach. Danny had a knee in the small of the agent’s back, and he had the fingers and one arm against his knee, twisted round. He turned the fingers some more, and the cry was of agony.

Submission.

‘You listening to me?’

‘Yes.’

‘You frightened of them?’ Danny asked it lightly: as if real and total fear was everyday stuff.

‘Do you know anything?’

‘Telling you what I know.’

He kept the pain constant. Felt no pride in it.

Danny told it like he thought it was. ‘I reckon it’s about loyalties. You don’t have any to me. Why would you? A nice life, pulling in the cigarette money, but the idyll ends when you get called into a police station. You’re trapped, coerced, compromised. You work for the Irish and they’re heavy with threat and could put a drill bit through your kneecap. You have your friend and you can see that the mistake you made was in involving him. Would he get angry if crossed? A mobster. A broker in arms deals. How angry? Who can inflict the pain? Who has the longest arm? I can, Ralph, and I have.’

He twisted the fingers. The unarmed-combat people had taught it. They were weathered old birds: tracksuit bottoms, white vests, stubble on their chins, hair cropped tight. They smelt of cigarettes, and knew about pain, the creation of fear. The trend, as he had seen on the local TV talk shows in Bagram interrogation centre outside Kabul and at Guantánamo, was to say that pain did not produce reliable results. Hurting people let them cough up any shit to halt the pain. They’d say
anything
. Not the way Danny Curnow knew it. Alongside the unarmed-combat instructors, there had been the guys who did the heavy interrogations at Castlereagh and Gough. Water, sleep deprivation or punches to the stomach where the soft flesh doesn’t bruise. They’d talked. Not too much weight given to human rights or any Amnesty report. Good stuff spilled out. It was all about fear. His mouth was close to the agent’s ear. He whispered, ‘I am certainty. My arm is long and the pain I can inflict is guaranteed. No escape from it. You hear me?’ The barest movement – enough to bring on the agony. ‘Glad of that. The arrangements?’ He loosed the hold. The agent gasped. Then Danny heard the hissed schedule for Ralph Exton’s movements, when the pick-up would be and where he would be taken. Pretty much what he needed. He thought he could justify what he had done. Into the ear, ‘I’ll tell you what I’m not. I am not your good friend.’

He let it sink in.

‘I am your last, best – and only – hope. Last hope, best hope, only hope.’

The door closed. Ralph lay on the floor.

He did not know where Gaby was. He thought he deserved a bit of her but was too drained to crawl to the bedside table where the telephone was. He had attempted to juggle loyalties and failed.

It was early afternoon. He rolled onto his back and tried to flex his hand, then massaged it until the feeling returned.

He believed. The long arm existed for the Irish on the mountain and for his friend, whose driver was due that evening. He did not doubt that the man who had inflicted pure pain on him had a long arm. The words sang in his ears:
last hope, best hope, only hope
. He crossed the floor, pushed himself up, took the phone. God, he needed comfort. Where to find it? He dialled for an outside line, fed in the international code and the digits.

She didn’t answer. Neither did his daughter. A man answered. He recognised the voice.

‘Hello . . . Yes? Hello.’

His own voice was stifled.

He heard, ‘Don’t know who it is.’

He imagined his wife reaching across the bed. An arm would have stroked a path across the dentist’s chest – a bare arm – and the fingers would have cancelled the call. The whine rang in his ear. Where else to look? Only one place.

He vomited. Danny Curnow hadn’t trusted himself to get from Exton’s hotel on Stepanska to his own. He wouldn’t have made it that far, then up the stairs, along a corridor and into his room.

Sick as a dog, a parrot or a squaddie first night on leave.

He heaved. By keeping his head low he minimised the mess. But the squaddie, the parrot or the dog did not throw up because of acute shame. He did.

He flushed it three times to leave it acceptable. He swilled out his mouth, but couldn’t touch the shame.

He came out of the hotel door onto the street and hardly saw where he was going. He would have cannoned into her if she hadn’t pulled aside.

‘Where are you going? Where have you been?’

He looked into the face of Gaby Davies. A good-looking kid. Didn’t wear any rings. He walked past her. Just at that moment he had no wish to mouth excuses, shed half-truths and fight his corner. His back was to her.

She called after him, ‘What the hell have you done?’

He hurried, and the bile was climbing again in his throat. The shame outweighed the pride that he had extracted more of the necessary information, going hard, than she had by going soft. He texted Matthew Bentinick. The shame was for his self-inflicted wound. Of course it was dirty – whoever said it wouldn’t be?

The priest watched from the lane, forbidden to enter the field. The two bodies were covered with tarpaulins. Alongside him, also waiting to be called forward, was the team from the undertaker in Dungannon. They had the body-bags and the metal boxes that would be used to remove the corpses. The priest had protested to the senior uniformed officer at the long delay during which the bodies were left in the field, but he was stonewalled. He was told that there were procedures to be followed and he must be patient. The rain was heavy and the cloud base low. It was unlikely to clear. The priest would have seen that a fingertip search had been made up the line of the hedge, that a tracker dog – an attractive black cocker spaniel – had gone back and forth across the field, and that a number of the search team were in the trees some hundred yards from the tarpaulins. The priest would have seen the parents of Eamonn O’Kane stand by their front door, sheltered from the elements by a golf umbrella: he had not received an invitation to the celebration of the previous evening but knew of it, knew many who had been there, knew their son and of his work. It was likely that when the bodies were dignified with names he would know those who had died in the pursuit of the armed struggle. He never used the word ‘murder’: it was inappropriate, and unwelcome to many of his parishioners. He could hear the cold remarks made by the police officers, Protestants, of course.

What he did not know was that the search teams had carefully retrieved two parts of the command cable, either side of the snip that had saved the life of Eamonn O’Kane. There were bomb-disposal troops on the scene, matter-of-fact and casual in their work, and they had filled small plastic sachets with metal scraps. He was familiar with the prosecution of the war. He had worked as a junior on the mountain, had transferred to west Belfast, then spent four years at a college in Rome for the Irish, on via dei Santi Quattro. Afterwards he had returned to the mountain and had thought himself blessed. But a thread had continued. Men killed, men died. The aims had not altered. What had changed was that expertise had lessened. He knew well enough what would happen higher up the slopes of the mountain in the villages that had small estates of pinched family homes. For two wives or mothers this would be a time of growing anxiety, of spreading anguish.

He had heard the explosion. His knee had been painful so he had been up in the early morning, searching for a paracetamol, and he had heard it, faint, distant, had known the sound. In two homes there would be undisturbed beds. Two wives or mothers would be waiting. He did not know how much longer he would be kept behind the cordon. He could not tell the families on the mountain that it was for nothing: it was not his remit to lecture them. He also knew, from his experience, that when the priest was called out and ministering was needed, the work of an informer was close behind, like a hideous shadow. Here, as before, he sensed that evil in the dank air, and the presence of those who had fashioned it.

It was a hard landing. The aircraft shuddered on the second impact but Matthew Bentinick seemed immune to the white-knuckle mood around him. Others grasped armrests and the sides of the seats in front. Arms folded, eyes almost closed, he rode the bounce, flotsam on a wave. Then folded his newspaper and slipped it into the rack in front. He satisfied himself that his tie knot was straight, that his handkerchief was displayed the correct amount in his breast pocket and that his waistcoat was buttoned. He patted his hair to flatten strays. He did not join the scramble to be off the aircraft. He unbuckled his seatbelt when the cabin was nearly empty, retrieved his bag from the hatch above him, thanked the stewards and set off along the corridors.

He cleared the formalities. He switched on his phone. Oscar, from the driver’s pool, was meeting him. They were away quickly. He read the text from Vagabond.

An afterthought from Oscar – were they heading for Thames House? No, they were going home. Oscar often took Matthew Bentinick back to the suburbs late at night, knew the way, the street and the house. Sometimes Bentinick talked to him and sometimes he didn’t. Not that day. He would go to the Five building early the next morning, Thursday, but would have to be away again in the early afternoon. Then . . . Well, by the weekend a small part of it would be over, God willing.

Selfish? Some might have thought so. He called Jocelyn, said where he was, what he was doing, and relayed the text message. Then he called Rosie and told his wife when he’d be home.

He sat back in his seat, closed his eyes and reflected that it had been a good decision to leave Vagabond to see the matter through. He had always placed his trust in the man, had cursed and loved him, had worked him to the bone and was responsible for him . . . The car had an uncongested road and made good speed. It was difficult, coming home.

Jocelyn beavered at the growing file. In the building, and inside the loop, only the director general had oversight of her work. In normal investigations there would have been a line manager, a head of section and an assistant director. They were bypassed. Jocelyn, now nearly forty-four, could have been described as ‘plain’: not ugly, not unattractive, but plain. In her fiefdom, she passed the hours of the day, and often of half the night, alone. Few of the men with similar rooms in the corridor, or in the open-plan area to the left on that floor, came to chat with her in the hope of future favours. She wore flat shoes, a shapeless long skirt that hid most of her shins, and a large sweater, likely to have come from a charity shop. She had no lover. Any affection she was able to give went to the cat that lived a mostly lonely life in her flat, with a litter tray, ample food and a radio station for company.