In the Morning I'll Be Gone (33 page)

I reached into the pocket of my leather jacket and took out the Dictaphone tape recorder and gave it to her.

“Play this. It’s all on here.”

Her fist closed on the machine.

“He admits it but it was a confession obtained under duress. It won’t stand up in court.”

Of course, that wouldn’t matter at all.

The Fitzpatrick family hadn’t bothered lawyers and judges with their problems for twenty generations and were unlikely to start now.

“You should destroy the tape after you’ve played it.”

“I will.”

“What about your side of the bargain . . .” I said.

“My side of the bargain?”

“Dermot. Your son-in-law.”

“When do you need this information by?”

“As soon as possible.”

“Will twenty-four hours do?”

“It’ll do.”

“Where do you like to stay when you’re in London?” she asked.

“What?”

“When you’re in London, what hotel do you stay at?”

“I don’t have a hotel that I normally—”

“Someone will call you at the Mount Royal on Regent Street tomorrow night. Be prepared to move. If you fuck this up it won’t be my fault.”

“The Mount Royal Hotel tomorrow night? Should I register under my own name?”

“How else will I be able to find you?” she said.

“All right, I’ll be there.”

There were tears and an insane wildness in her eyes.

“Thank you, Duffy,” she said, and pushed me gently off the porch into the rain.

She opened the front door and went back inside.

I could see Annie looking at me through the living-room window. When she caught me peeping she turned away.

I walked back to the BMW and drove to the nearest phone box, which was outside the post office in Antrim town.

I called Kate.

“I think he’s in England. My informant wants me to go to London,” I said.

“London?”

“Yes.”

“When are you going?”

“Tomorrow.”

“Are you sure he’s in England? Our intelligence still says he’s going to attack a British army base in Germany.”

“That’s where my informant is sending me, so I imagine that that’s where our boy is.”

“I’ll go with you.”

“OK.”

“If it’s true he’s in England that scares me,” she said.

“Why?”

“Conference season has begun. The Tory Party conference begins in Brighton next week. The prime minister will be outside her usual security protocols.”

“I’d get those protocols stepped up, if I were you.”

“Yes, that might be a good idea.”

Kate, Tom, myself, and “Alex,” a young MI5 driver, waited by the phone in Room 301 of the Mount Royal Hotel. The SAS and the Met’s Special Branch were on stand-by ready to roll at a moment’s notice.

Nothing happened.

We got hungry and ordered room service and played poker and watched
Porridge
and the snooker on BBC2.

The phone didn’t ring until a quarter to midnight.

She was calling from a phone box.

She asked for me by name and the front desk put her through to my room. We had the phone on speaker.

“Duffy?”

“I’m here.”

“11 Market Road, Tongham, Sussex. If he’s not there now he will be soon.”

“Will he be alone or—”

The line went dead.

Tongham was a large village twenty miles to the north of Brighton. 11 Market Road was right on the outskirts of town. A cottage with woods behind it and fields in front. An out-of-the-way spot where no one would bother you.

Kate made calls on the way down and the research team found out that it was a rental property. The owner was in Spain.

We arrived in six Range Rovers. One for us, two for Special Branch, and three for the SAS Rapid Response Unit.

We parked a quarter of a mile along the road and waited while the blades did their work. They were wearing black camouflage gear, bulletproof vests, and balaclavas. They were carrying MP5 assault rifles and some were armed with heavy machine guns.

They scouted the place for an hour and twenty minutes. They used heat-seeking cameras and they drilled a hole in an exterior wall and inserted a pinhole video camera.

We contributed nothing. We just sat there watching, waiting, and smoking in the car.

Nobody talked.

Suddenly the SAS team went in. They broke down the front door and piled into the house SWAT-team-fashion.

Ten minutes later they came out.

One of them signaled for us to come up.

We drove to the house to see what they’d found.

We could tell the place was deserted by the utter lack of excitement in the team.

Kate questioned the SAS commander, a Geordie sergeant who was already smoking a fag on the downslope of his adrenalin crash.

“Is there anyone in there?” she asked.

“No, and I’m no expert but I’d say there hasn’t been for a while,” he said with an air of disgust.

“Our intelligence was good,” Kate said defensively.

“Yeah. Fantastic. We better go. Our job’s done and it’s a hell of a long drive back to Hereford,” the sergeant said.

“It’s good practice for your lads,” I offered weakly.

“If you say so,” the sergeant mumbled.

When the SAS were gone Kate sent in the Special Branch forensic team, who were dressed in white-hooded boilersuits and wearing latex gloves.

This wasn’t
1984
anymore. Now we were in
Clockwork Orange
.

Kate produced a thermos of tea and we drank it while the droogs did their work.

“Are you sure about your information, Sean?” Kate asked me. It was the first time she had expressed any doubt.

“You know who the source is. And you know why she told me the information.”

Kate frowned. “Would Mary Fitzpatrick really give up her son-in-law?”

“Apparently there’s no love lost between them. And like I say, she gave me her word.”

Kate nodded.

The plod hooked up a noisy diesel generator to power their lights and other equipment. The peeler guy in charge, a chief inspector called Dawson, gave us his initial report half an hour later.

“It looks like this intelligence is somewhat out of date. It’s hard to say exactly when, but from the mouse droppings and the layers of dust I’d say that no one’s been resident in this dwelling for several months.”

“Are you sure?” Kate asked.

“Well, I can’t be certain about the dates, but those are good rough estimates. No one has been here recently, that’s for sure.”

Kate looked at me. It was hard to read her expression Not quite irritation, not quite disappointment, but something along those lines.

“Did you get any fingerprints?” I asked.

“We dusted for prints, but we didn’t find any,” Dawson said.

Tom shook his head and groaned. “What a bust.”

“Don’t you find that rather unusual, Chief Inspector?” I pressed him.

“Unusual how?”

“You didn’t find any prints at all in the whole house? Have you ever been at a crime scene where you’ve found
no
prints?”

Dawson was a tall guy with a moustache and salt-and-pepper hair. He didn’t project an air of stupidity, but with coppers you could never really tell.

“No prints. Not a one. That’s very strange, no?” I insisted.

Dawson nodded. “Yes, that is a little uncommon.”

“What
are
you getting at, Duffy?” Tom asked.

“Sean is suggesting that at some point this
was
an IRA safe house,” Kate said.

“But the intelligence is months out of date,” Tom said, and glared at me in the moonlight.

Dawson looked at me with evident distaste. My Irish accent and lack of a police uniform presumably indicated that I was some kind of scumbag informer.

“I think we’re missing something,” I said.

“They played you, Duffy. Your informant played you. They gave you a real lead but they made sure it was a dead one. It’s a classic move. We see it all the time,” Tom said.

“Can I have a look around?” I asked Kate.

Kate raised her eyebrows at Dawson.

“We’re done, help yourselves,” Dawson said.

The three of us went in.

A rather shabby cottage with an odor of mildew. The coppers had rigged up arc lamps but when I flipped the light switch the lights came on, which told me two things: the police sometimes neglected the obvious and someone was still paying the electricity bill.

The furniture was nondescript. A couple of sofas, plastic chairs in the kitchen, a black and white Grundig TV circa 1970.

Two bedrooms with two single beds each.

“Four beds in total. That’s what you’d need for your typical IRA cell,” I suggested to Kate.

She nodded and made a note of it.

Cutlery in the drawers, crockery in the cupboard. An old box of cornflakes, powdered milk, sugar in a glass jar, tea sealed in plastic bags.

Next to the toilet there was a copy of the
Sun
from March 1983. I read through the paper to look for messages or filled-in crossword clues but there was nothing. The page-three girl was a big-breasted blonde called Suzanne, who hoped one day to be a singer on a cruise ship.

I ran the taps in the sink and checked that the gas worked.

“No phone but there’s electricity and gas and running water,” I said to Kate.

“What does that tell you, Sean?”

“They’ve used it before and they’re coming back,” I said.

It was getting on for four in the morning now.

Kate sat next to me at the pine kitchen table. “Don’t beat yourself up about this, Sean. I’m sure you’ve done your best,” she said soothingly.

“We should stake this place out. They’re coming back. Soon. We have to repair that front door and put everything back the way it was.”

“Sean, look, you—”

“Mary wouldn’t have given me bum info. They’re coming.”

“How would she even know, Sean? We’re monitoring her phones, we’re lifting her mail.”

“She knows!”

Kate put her hand on mine.

“You have to learn not to take these things personally.”

“I don’t take it personally. I know I’m right. I want this house watched. If they’re not using it now they’re going to be using it. I want a team on this place twenty-four hours a day. I’ll be part of it.”

She thought about it. “I know what they’ll say back on Gower Street, they’ll say that we’ve got to use our resources in the most sensible way possible. That this is a wild-goose chase.”

“Then you’ve got to convince them, don’t you. A team of watchers, round the fucking clock.”

Kate sighed. “For how long, Sean?”

“As long as it takes.”

“Gower Street will want to know. They’ll want to know the exact commitment.”

“That’s your job, Kate. Finesse them. Convince them. Dermot’s coming here. I know it. I can smell the bastard. He’s planning a spectacular and he and his team are coming here. This is where they do the final prep or this is their bolthole when it’s done. Halfway between the ferry ports and London. Twenty minutes to Gatwick. It’s perfect.”

She smiled indulgently. “If you say so, Sean.”

“You’ll do it? You’ll watch the house?”

“As you say, we’ll need to fix the front door and put everything back the way it was.”

“And the fucking dust and the mouse droppings. He’s cautious, clever.”

“All right.”

“I want to be part of it. I want to be here when he comes. I don’t want you to shoot him when he’s got his hands up.”

“Don’t you trust us?” Kate said.

“No, I fucking don’t. And I don’t trust the SAS either. I’m not in the assassination business. I’m a policeman. We try and bring in our suspects alive if we can.”

She raised her eyebrows slightly.
That’s not what she had heard.
She brushed the dust off her slacks.

We walked outside.

“I have a field office to run. I’ll have to go back to Northern Ireland,” Kate said.

“OK.”

“Which means you’ll be under Tom. You’ll have to do what he says.”

“I can live with that.”

“And there won’t be any heroics either, Sean. I’m going to be leaving strict instructions with the watch team. If you spot Dermot or indeed anyone coming here you’re to call it in and we’ll let the SAS take care of them. Your job will be to observe, nothing more. Is that understood?”

“Understood loud and clear,” I said.

“Well then, I’ll call our wise and venerable masters and I’ll see what we can do.”