Heavy Duty Attitude (27 page)

‘OK Chief,’ asked Bung. ‘Do you want me to handle this?’
‘No, it’s OK I’ll look after it, you go see…’

And Wibble walked him to the door giving him instructions as he went and clanging the steel security doors shut behind him.

 

So then it was just back to the three of us again in the flat.

 

Wibble, me, and Bob still lying oozing onto the floor.

*
‘Why me?’ I asked after a while.
It was a question I’d been asking myself for a while.

Obviously I hadn’t been brought in for PR purposes. That story had to be complete bullshit.

 

‘Because you knew Bob and Bob knew you,’ Wibble said as though it was the most obvious thing in the world. ‘You were his choice not mine.’ ‘Choice, what choice?’

‘He wanted someone outside to know, someone who could be a witness if anything went wrong. You were part of his insurance policy, his back up. You were just one of the safeguards he wanted to have in place when he made contact.’

‘Whatever the risk to me?’
‘He didn’t give a flying fuck about that. Why should he?’

So my guesses had been right after all. Wibble had only brought me in as a way of getting to Bob. I had been what, go-between? Hostage? Witness? All of them or something in between?

I had been there because Bob had wanted me there, to have a liaison point, a source he could trust, and Wibble had agreed they would bring me in and use me.
For Bob I was part of his security, if anything went wrong he had hoped my presence and press links would make it more difficult for Wibble to do anything about him.

‘Having you around, it was just part of the way to get to Bob. You were just a risk worth taking.’

For Wibble, for a while, I was part of the price he paid for maintaining Bob, and then in the end, I was the bait for Bob, luring him into a situation where Wibble could deal with what could otherwise be a dangerous loose end.

‘Well what now?’

 

‘Well, now then,’ he said facing me and holding the bag with the pistol casually in his hand, ‘we’ve got another decision to make haven’t we?’
13 Out
Monday 23 August 2010

There was a flat dark grey sky and the smell of damp and turf smoke outside again when I opened the door, while the rain was an insistent and insidious fine continual drizzle.

It’ll be nice when they put the roof on it, as she always said whenever I moaned about what she called the soft weather.

I shuffled as quickly as I could round to the outhouse at the back where we’d installed a shower, trying to keep under the roof’s overhang and out of the long cold wet grass as much as possible.

Inside, I washed. The little electric shower had been an absolute bastard to fit when I’d got it, but it made all the difference in making the place habitable. It had been raining now for about three days solid and the flow of water in the spring that fed the tank had stirred up the usual level of peaty sediment, so that the water coming out of the tap was the colour of cold tea and was quickly staining the tile grouting to a yellow brown.

A mile and a half out of town and up a winding mud and gravel farm track off the road, the cottage was an old traditional single storey, slate roofed, stone flagged, whitewashed Irish farmhouse. Beyond the gate held shut with string, the path led through an overgrown garden to a small porch to hang up waterproofs and keep the worst of the weather out. Inside there were just two rooms with a central chimney for the kitchen-cum-living room’s peat range and the wholly inadequate little stove in the bedroom. Outside there was a stone built outhouse with a pile of dried turf cut by the owners the previous summer, and an outside loo at the end of the building, which now backed onto the newly installed shower facilities.

Romantic, unless and until you actually had to try living there.

A young guy in Belfast had inherited it the agent had told me. It had been his uncle’s hidey hole or something, although anything less like a secret passion palace it was a bit hard to imagine. Anyway the current owner never used it, except very occasionally for a quick break and didn’t have any cash to spend on doing it up so while he’d had it listed as being for rent no one had ever wanted it.

Not until I had come along that is.

 

For me, it was ideal.

It was anonymous, but not too low profile or that would raise suspicions and questions in itself, particularly here, where people were very good at not asking questions. Derry was only a few tens of miles away across the border and the boyos’ white painted Mac-mansions paid for by the troubles with their high walls and parked Mercedes had sprouted around the landscape.

Here, up my quiet ungraded track, well off the road in the wild Irish countryside of Donegal, I had no neighbours.

I liked it here, there was the space, the emptiness, the lack of people. When it was dry some evenings, as it had occasionally been over the summer, I could sit outside playing music; Leonard Cohen, Radiohead, sometimes even Bauhaus if I could stand it.

*

With my cap jammed down on my head and fastening my jacket against the rain as I pulled the door shut behind me, I set off along the track to the road and the walk down into the village.

I walked in once a week or so to pick up the papers they kept for me. ‘Hi there,’ I said as I walked up to the counter of the village stores, ‘here for the news.’

 

‘Now here you are then,’ the shopkeeper said reaching under the counter and producing the week’s bundle.

‘D’you have a piece in this week?’ he asked.
‘Might have,’ I said, ‘I’m not sure till I check.’

We had more or less the same exchange every week as he stuffed the papers into a plastic carrier bag so I could keep them dry, or as dry as possible on the walk home back up the hill. It was a routine.

I had thought that I had to tell him, and them something, as not telling people anything would lead to even more questions and right now, questions were the last thing on earth I wanted. And I’d thought that saying something that was close to the truth would be easier to carry off than an absolute fiction.

So I had told the agent I was a freelance writer, after the peace and quiet to work on a book, which was kind of the truth as it happened, but not the whole truth obviously. And now everybody locally knew it too.

There was a howl as I splodged my way through the puddles along the track and then an outbreak of ferocious sounding barking as I reached the gateposts, a noise that didn’t seem to be disturbing the cows grazing in the field opposite one iota. Robbie, our Old English Sheepdog came bounding down the path, a muddy dreadlocked bundle of fur and teeth. He was soft as shit with us but big and nervously loud and territorial when it came to anyone else swinging off the track and starting to undo the twine holding the rusty iron gate shut. Which was just what I had wanted when I’d found him almost a year ago just after I’d arrived, lost or, more likely these days, abandoned, howling in the pound; alarm and deterrent in one furry package.

She was sat at the kitchen table as I walked back in. The folder with its typed pages open in front of her, the inevitable mug of tea cupped in her hands.

‘Have you read it?’ I asked.
‘Yes,’ she said, looking up at me with an odd expression in her eyes. ‘So what do you think?’ I asked.
She seemed to consider this for a moment.
‘Well I have to say, I just don’t get it. Why are you still alive?’ I sighed.
That was the easy part.

*
‘So what happened?’ she asked.

We were lying in bed. The fire had burnt down in the grate and I needed to organise some more turf, but snuggled up here with her under the warmth of the duvet, and with the wind howling around the outside of the cottage, venturing out into the dark was the last thing I wanted to do right now.

So I told her.
I talked her though my last conversation with Wibble.

The last one I’d had, and which I sincerely hoped, would be the last one I would ever have.
14 These colours don’t run

He had picked up one of the cheap looking kitchen chairs and carried it over to just opposite me. He swung it round so it was facing away and plonked himself down astride it, legs either side, so his face was a few feet from mine, his chin resting on his clasped hands and his elbows resting on the straight top of the chair back.

‘Look, before we go any further,’ he said, ‘I want you to understand one thing. I’m not stupid, so don’t make the mistake of ever trying to treat me as if I am. Is that clear?’

I nodded.

 

I had never thought he was stupid and I certainly wasn’t going to make that mistake now.

‘Now I know you’re not stupid either, am I right?’
I nodded again, more gingerly this time.

‘So I’m guessing that you are going to have taken steps to protect yourself. Once you started getting involved with us that is.’

I didn’t know what to say at this point but it didn’t seem to matter, Wibble wasn’t actually waiting for or even seeming to expect a response from me at this point.

‘Look,’ he said making himself explicit, ‘I know you’ll have a whole load of incriminating stuff on us. Files, papers, notes, tapes, pictures, all sorts of whatever, right?’

I shrugged as best I could in my trussed state. There was no point in denying it.

 

‘And now you know all this shit as well,’ he continued, as if in appreciation of my honesty he was going to be honest straight back.

 

So I would have protected myself he rationalised. He was just setting out his assumptions, what he would have done in my place.

Whatever I had found out and put in the paper, there would be other stuff that I would have found, stuff that I would know but couldn’t have published, either because it didn’t fit a story, or because I didn’t have the evidence as such to back it up. Stuff however that, even if I didn’t have proof, would be stuff that was useful to the cops. And if I was going to protect myself, what I would probably do is keep a full file somewhere, a file with everything I knew or thought I knew, a file to be opened in case of my suspicious death; a file in other words to hold over the head of anyone who might be thinking about organising a suspicious death.

I didn’t say anything to disabuse him of this conclusion.

‘There’d be everything you’ve ever had about us, going all the way back, the stuff from Damage, the tapes of your conversations, everything. Am I right?’

I nodded.

‘Of course you have,’ he said. ‘What else would I expect you to do? You’d be an idiot not to do something like that to protect yourself wouldn’t you? We’ve just agreed that neither of us are stupid haven’t we?’

I just stared back at him, waiting to see where this was going. ‘I think we understand each other?’ he insisted.
At that I just nodded, ‘I think we do.’

‘So,’ he continued conversationally, as he began to outline his options as he saw them and setting out their logic almost to himself at first, just as if he was running through an everyday mental list. ‘I could get some of the guys to torture you, work you over until we get you to reveal what you’ve done, what you’ve put where.

‘But then I’d never actually know for sure would I? You can get people to say anything with enough time and pressure, but you never know whether they’ve actually told you the truth, or the whole truth, or just what they think you want to hear. So I’m not a big fan, it’s too uncertain, although obviously it has its place.

‘Not when there are other ways. Other things that have more certainty. ‘You know what we’re capable of and prepared to do.’

I nodded, I knew just what they could do. I’d heard and now seen enough to know that.

‘We could just snuff you,’ he continued in a perfectly calm tone, ‘but then we’re back at the file problem aren’t we? We just don’t know what you’ve got put away that could come out and hurt us.’

So it sounded as though killing me and what might then bite him on the arse were just moral equivalents, nothing more than a choice of inconviences when it came down to it as far as Wibble was concerned.

‘On the other hand we could just kick you out…’
‘But then how do you know I won’t talk?’ I interrupted, not quite believing what I was hearing coming out of my mouth. Almost too surprised to try to box clever and bargain for my life, or perhaps looking back on it, just clever enough. Protestations that he could trust me not to tell anyone, not to talk would have been a waste of time. There was no way Wibble was going to rely on any crap I might say at a moment like this when I could be saying anything just to save my own skin.

No, Wibble didn’t operate like that. Wibble operated on the basis of interests and fears and what makes people really tick. Wibble wasn’t going to let me go on the basis of anything I might say. What was it he had called promises? Empty bags of air.

No, Wibble was going to make his decision based on realities, of threats and opportunities, on his judgement of risks and rewards, for him and for me and how these would make each of us act.

This wasn’t a time for emotions or sentiment or pleading.

This was a moment for cold headed hard rationalism I realised. That and the right answers and circumstances were all that were going to keep me alive and get me out of here. I needed to be part of a real conversation with my potential killer, about the realpolitik of my situation and his potential interests in its potential outcomes.

‘How do you know I won’t just go to the cops with what I know?’ I challenged, engaging with him in the process.

‘Well firstly, why should they believe you? After all you’re on their files, you heard what matey boy here put there,’ he said, nodding casually at the blood stained mess that had been Bob, ‘and now he’s going to disappear. For the moment.’

He caught the look on my face as I realised what he meant.

‘He’ll be going somewhere nice and safe where he won’t be found, and that gun with your prints on it? It’ll be going with him, that and oh, I don’t know, how about a note in his pocket asking him to come over to this flat? The one that’ll also have your dabs on it.

‘Not to mention all the other tasty bits of stuff,’ he said with a grim grin tugging the baggie with the bomb’s detonation telephone number out of his pocket and dangling it between two fingers in front of my face.