Sabbathman (12 page)

‘Barry?’

‘Sir?’

‘Can I talk to my father?’

There were more noises, then Kingdom recognised his father’s voice. He sounded a little out of breath, but undeniably cheerful.

‘Dad?’ Kingdom said blankly.

‘Who’s that?’

‘Alan.’ Kingdom paused. ‘Alan?’

‘Who?’

‘Me, Dad. Your son. Alan.’

‘Ah … yes. Alan. He’ll be back soon, I expect. Sunday.’

‘What?’

The phone changed hands again, Barry back in charge. Kingdom turned towards the window, embarrassed, trying to protect the conversation from listening ears. Barry said something about the people at the agency. They needed a deposit. He said it was urgent.

‘How much?’ Kingdom asked.

‘A week, sir. A week’s attendance. It’s standard terms. Part of the contract.’

‘How much is that, then?’

‘Ah …’ Barry paused, but Kingdom could tell he’d already worked it out. ‘Say £400, sir. Maybe more.’

‘Four hundred quid?’ Kingdom stared hard at the window.

‘Yes, sir. Seven hours a day. Plus travelling.’

‘Seven hours?’

‘Yes, sir. That’s the way we’ve worked it out.’

‘Who’s we?’

‘Me and your dad, sir. Mr Ernie.’

Kingdom paused a moment, wondering whether to press the nurse any harder on the phone or leave it until later. Seven hours a day sounded like a lot of meals. Maybe Ernie was making up for lost time. Or maybe they were simply getting ripped off.

Kingdom bent to the phone again, remembering Steve’s promise to send a replacement cheque.

‘Barry?’

‘Yes, sir?’

‘Is there any mail for me? Envelope with a Woodford postmark? Or maybe Romford?’

Kingdom heard Barry on the move. At length he found the letter.

‘OK,’ Kingdom said, ‘tell the agency they’ll be getting a cheque, and tell Dad to behave himself. I’ll be back tonight. See you later.’

Kingdom hung up, staring at the phone for a second or two, trying to get his thoughts in order. At this rate, Steve’s money would last even less than a month. After that, Barry would have to go. So how long would it take the Social Services to come up with an alternative? And what was he supposed to do if they didn’t?’

Kingdom shook his head, knowing there was no simple answer to any of the questions. Two desks away, one of the WPCs had pushed her chair back and was putting on her jacket. Kingdom went across and introduced himself. When he asked to borrow the terminal, she agreed at once. She was due for a coffee. She’d be back in ten minutes.

Kingdom thanked her and settled down behind the terminal. Before he switched the machine on, he caught sight of his own reflection in the screen, the narrow, bony outline that framed his new face. He moved slightly, a little profile, left and right. In the depthless grey of the monitor screen he looked OK, different, but OK. Maybe he could live with it. Maybe it wasn’t quite as bad as he’d thought. He shrugged, mildly embarrassed by his own vanity, then reached for the power switch. The screen came to life and he keyed in the standard code to access the menu. The menu scrolled up from the bottom of the screen and Kingdom studied it a moment before entering another access code of his own, a seven-digit number and a password to get into the big Special Branch computer at New Scotland Yard. The computer was heavily shielded from electronic prowlers and sometimes it could take literally hours to negotiate entry. Today, though, Kingdom was lucky. The screen cleared and he recognised the distinctive Special Branch directory. Towards the bottom, it offered an update on the
latest surveillance data filed by MI5’s ‘A’ Branch, the Gower Street specialists who kept physical track of selected targets.

Kingdom began to scroll through the entries for the past twenty-four hours. In the main, they were routine surveillance reports on specific Provisional terrorists, known players with a place on what Northern Command still called ‘The England Team’. Each contact was coded with a number. The numbers were changed every week but Allder kept an up-to-date list and Kingdom consulted it now, matching each of the names on Allder’s list to numbers that tallied on the screen.

Amongst the trace reports were seven specific targets, all filed under the same batch code. The batch code indicated that the targets all formed part of the same inquiry, and Kingdom studied their names with interest. He knew them all. He’d spent two busy years in Belfast amongst the small print of their private lives, a paper chase through endless RUC files, supplemented with stills and video surveillance. He’d never met any of these men or women in the flesh but they were like old friends. He knew about their families, who they lived with, whether or not they’d had kids. He knew what they liked to wear, the kind of meals they went for when they ate out, whether or not they were drinkers. He knew how they behaved under arrest, whether they’d ever shown signs of buckling under the heavier sessions at the RUC interrogation centre. And he knew, too, that none of them carried the suffix (X), indicating a possibility that they might be turned. No. These guys were the real thing, the hard cases, the biz. They belonged to the top cadre of sharp-end operators.

Kingdom frowned, easing back from the screen a moment, recognising the logic behind this sudden outburst of surveillance activity. Given three high profile killings, it obviously made sense to check out the Premier League Provos, the men and women who – conceivably – might have lent a hand. In every case, as far as he could see, they were in the clear but that, too, was significant. It meant, as Kingdom was already beginning to suspect, that Sabbathman had nothing to do with the Republicans. It meant that the contents of this huge computer were largely irrelevant. It meant that they had to start all over again.

Kingdom called up the next page of the file, the one reserved
for trace requests logged in the last hour. Here, there was just one entry: 56734. He cross-checked the number against Allder’s list, finding a name he didn’t recognise. Sean McTiernan. Kingdom gazed at the name, searching back through his memory. He’d heard of a McTiernan early on, in the first months at RUC headquarters, but he was sure the first name had been Michael. He reached for a pad and scribbled down the number. Then he glanced at his watch: 10.42. He hesitated a moment before picking up the phone. Allder’s secretary answered on the first ring. The Commander was about to leave. There was a car outside. Couldn’t it wait?

‘No,’ Kingdom said.

The secretary grunted, and then Allder came on. Kingdom read him the number.

‘I’ve got a Sean McTiernan on Five’s trace list,’ he said. ‘I’m not sure that’s kosher.’

There was a silence. Then he heard Allder chuckling. More than anything else in the world, he loved being ahead of the game.

‘He’s changed his name.’ he said, ‘I thought you’d have known.’

‘No,’ Kingdom said. ‘So what was he before?’

‘Eddie McCreadie.’

‘Fat Eddie?’

‘Yes.’ Allder sounded suddenly impatient. ‘Anything else?’

‘No, sir.’

Allder rang off and Kingdom wrote the new name on the pad beside the number, sitting back again in the chair, his pencil between his teeth. Fat Eddie had been an active republican in Belfast, a quartermaster, a man near the centre of the Provisionals’ Northern Command. The violence that he’d witnessed over the years had finally sickened him, and towards the end of his days in Belfast he’d provided enough hard intelligence to save dozens of lives. The operations he’d compromised had always carried the risk of civilian casualties, and to Kingdom’s certain knowledge he’d never asked for a penny in payment. As such, Fat Eddie had left his Army handlers in a state of some bewilderment: why did he do it? What was his real motivation? How could they hope to bind him hand and foot, the way they did the rest of the touts?’

In the end, Fat Eddie had left Belfast, preferring his own version of retirement to a violent death in the bottom of some
ditch in South Armagh. He’d moved his wife and family to a housing estate on the edge of Birmingham, and he’d at last accepted Army help in the shape of a job at a local engineering works. Kingdom had inherited him as a ‘dry source’, someone to go to for background – history, really – and over the course of several conversations he’d taken a real liking to the man. He was generous and funny, one of life’s survivors. He doted on his family, and the last time they’d met, in the upstairs restaurant at Birmingham Airport, Kingdom had ended the evening with the purchase of five plastic footballs, one for each of Eddie’s kids. Like Eddie, the kids were soccer-mad, and Kingdom remembered the scene now, Eddie juggling the footballs on the down escalator, returning to the car park, trying to wave goodbye. Away from Belfast, the man was reborn. He had a new life. He could sleep at night without worrying about knocks at the door, or petrol through the letterbox, or neat little parcels of Semtex taped to the underside of his car. So what was he doing back in the frame? Why had he changed his name? And why had he so suddenly appeared on the MI5 trace list?

Kingdom pondered the questions, aware of the WPC standing behind him. Back from the canteen, she was studying the screen with interest. MI5 display files were evidently a rare sight in provincial police stations.

‘Can you make any sense of that?’ she said, nodding at Fat Eddie’s trace code.

Kingdom glanced up. ‘No,’ he said truthfully, ‘I can’t.’

Portsmouth’s main hospital, the Queen Alexandra, lies on the lower slopes of Portsdown Hill, the steep fold of half-quarried chalk which looks down on the city from the north. Kingdom had phoned the Accident and Emergency Department from the Incident Room and had arranged to meet the Junior Registrar at eleven. With luck, she said, she’d be free for coffee. They could talk in the staff room.

Now, Kingdom stirred sugar into his coffee and waited while the young doctor dealt with yet another inquiry on the internal phone. Jo Hubbard was in her late twenties, stocky, solidly-built, with broad shoulders and a pleasant open face under a startling haircut. The hair, tinted a rich auburn, was scissored in a straight line level with her ears. At the back and sides, beneath the line, it was shaved to a close nap. The overall effect was two-fold. At first, meeting her, Kingdom had thought it was ugly. Now, on closer inspection, it said something else. In this, and probably every other respect, Jo Hubbard was very definitely her own person.

She put the phone down at last and apologised for the interruption with a grin. She grinned a lot. Outside, while he’d waited in the casualty department, Kingdom had watched her stepping from cubicle to cubicle, bending to examine an ankle or a knee, reassuring the younger kids with a squeeze on the shoulder or a tickle under the chin. She had natural warmth, and she seemed to leave little parcels of it behind her wherever she went.

Now, she poured herself another coffee and sat down. Rob
Scarman, it turned out, was a distant relative. She’d talked to him on the phone about Carpenter, more out of curiosity than anything else, but she hadn’t made any kind of formal statement. She sipped at her coffee. Carpenter’s medical notes lay beside her on the low occasional table.

‘He was a mess,’ she said. ‘Strictly speaking, he was still alive but that had more to do with the ambulance boys than anything else. They were brilliant.’

Kingdom looked at the notes. An outline of Carpenter’s head was bisected by a careful line of pencilled dots. Kingdom frowned. In his experience, two bullets in the head led straight to a drawer in the mortuary.

‘Alive?’ he queried.

‘Yes.’ Joe Hubbard picked up the notes. She extracted a sheet of blue scribble and peered at it. ‘They’d worked on him in the ambulance. His BP was way down and his breathing was pretty shallow and once I got the dressing off it was obvious he wasn’t going to make it, but …’ she looked up, the grin again, ‘… he was still with us, just.’

‘What did he say?’

‘
Say?
You think he was still conscious? Wound like that?’ She laughed. ‘Afraid not.’

‘So what did you do?’

‘I got some fluid in him and tried to do something about his breathing but in the end I had to put him on the respirator. Machine that did his breathing for him.’

‘Knowing he wouldn’t make it?’

‘Yes.’

‘Why?’

She hesitated a moment, thinking about the question. There was a copy of
The Citizen
lying on the table. Someone had put their coffee on the photo of Max Carpenter and he peered up through a wet, brown circle.

‘I was the only one who knew who he was,’ she said at last. ‘We had no ID at the time, nothing from the para-medics, but I’d seen him before.’

Kingdom nodded at the table. ‘In the papers?’ he said. ‘On telly?’

‘No. In the flesh.’

‘And that’s why you put him on the machine? Kept him alive? Because he was who he was?’

‘Yes.’ She nodded. ‘I suppose so. God knows why. It wouldn’t have made any difference. Switch off the machine, and he’d have died anyway.’

‘Which is what happened? In the end?’

‘Yes, more or less.’ She consulted the notes again. ‘I got the neuro-bods over. Better they took the decision than me. They agreed it was hopeless. He came off the machine at’ – she picked up the notes – ‘ten past one. Went into cardiac arrest about a minute later.’ She glanced up. ‘And that was that.’