Sabbathman (26 page)

‘To whom?’

‘To “T” Branch. That’s where he pitched his tent, the moment he came back from Belfast. “T” Branch is rough trade, of course. We all accept that. And in my heart I suspect it needs someone like Cousins. But even so …’ He picked at a loose end in his cardigan. ‘There are limits.’

Annie nodded. ‘Your job’s up for grabs,’ she said, ‘and I gather he’s favourite.’

‘You gather correctly.’ He offered her a chilly smile. ‘But no decision’s been taken. Not yet. Nothing final. Nothing binding.’

‘So why are you telling me all this? Or is it rude of me to ask?’

Wren studied her a moment. He looked tired round the eyes and his face was slightly puffy. Poor diet, Annie thought. And not enough sleep.

‘Are you asking me what’s in it for you?’ he said. ‘Is that what you mean by “rude”?’

‘Yes,’ Annie nodded, ‘crudely put, but yes.’

Wren said nothing, turning away. The usual queue had formed outside the House of Lords, foreigners mainly, marshalled by tour guides in gay blazers. Wren watched them as the bus inched past, stuck again in a traffic jam.

‘You’re young and you’re highly thought of,’ he said at last.

‘Just like Cousins.’

‘Yes.’ He glanced across at her. ‘And you’re also a woman.’

‘You think that’s relevant?’

‘Yes, I think maybe it is. These things go in cycles, of course, but just now it helps to wear a skirt.’ He paused. ‘There are great opportunities, that’s all I want to say.’

Annie looked away. They were in Parliament Square and the bus had stopped again. Beside Great Palace Yard, two young policemen were bent over an old tramp. The tramp was sitting on the pavement, playing a jig on a battered tin whistle. Despite the noise of the traffic, Annie recognised the tune. ‘The Wild Colonial Boy’ she thought, one of Kingdom’s favourites.

‘Cousins is a fighter,’ she said quietly. ‘He doesn’t take prisoners.’

‘Precisely. That’s what makes him so dangerous. That’s why I’m here, talking to you.’

‘Have you said anything to anyone else? Officially or otherwise?’

‘No.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because there’d be no point. Once you’re out of the loop, you’re dead and buried. Make a fuss, raise your voice, and the whole thing just gets worse. So why compound grief with further insult? Why do that?’

‘Grief?’ Annie stared at him. ‘Is it that bad?’

Wren offered her a bleak smile. Then he produced a small, silver-embossed card. On it was his home address and telephone number. ‘I’m having a few people round,’ he said, ‘people I’ll miss. People I’ll treasure. Quite a small gathering. Nothing extravagant.’ He touched her lightly on the arm. ‘Might you come?’

Before Annie had a chance to say yes, he stood up. The bus was on the move again, turning onto the Embankment, pulling up outside the Norman Shaw building.

Annie gazed up at him. ‘You’re getting off?’

‘Yes. Lunch appointment, I’m afraid.’ He nodded towards the House of Commons. ‘Good luck in Dublin, though.’

‘What?’

Wren had turned and was making his way up the aisle. Annie caught him by the stairs.

‘Where?’ she said.

‘Dublin.’ Wren frowned, checking his watch. ‘Hasn’t anyone told you?’

Kingdom’s flowers had arrived at Gower Street by the time Annie returned to her desk. The lady who patrolled with the tea trolley had brought them up and they were already in water, neatly arranged in a hideous brown vase. A card propped in her printer read
‘Time warps for no man. Except me’
.

Annie picked the card up, fingering it, surprised and touched. Kingdom had never sent her flowers before. That kind of gesture just wasn’t in his repertoire. Quite what it meant she didn’t fully understand but she was still grinning when the phone began to trill. She recognised the voice at once, Cousins’ secretary, over at Euston Tower. She sounded brisk.

‘I’ve been calling for the last two hours.’

‘I’m sorry. I’ve been out.’

‘So I gather.’ She paused, then suggested Annie get a pen.

The Fishguard seizure had evidently raised a diplomatic storm. Ulster Unionist MPs were accusing the Irish government of gun-running, and journalists on both sides of the Irish Sea were busy stirring the pot. The Taoiseach’s office had spent most of the morning on the phone to Downing Street and were insisting that someone from British Intelligence be sent to Dublin to monitor the Garda’s investigation. The invitation was pressing. It was an opportunity that ‘T’ Branch would be foolish to ignore.

‘Of course,’ Annie said, ‘Hugh should do it.’

‘Mr Cousins is in Belfast.’

‘I know. Dublin’s down the road. He could be there in a couple of hours.’

‘Quite.’ The secretary sounded icy now. ‘But he’s disappeared as well. I suggest you call here on the way to the airport. There’s a full brief due anytime from the Home Office, and I’ve sorted out some extra numbers in Dublin. You’re booked on the Aer Lingus flight. Half-past five.’ She paused. ‘Unless, of course, you’d prefer someone else to go.’

*

Annie got to Heathrow with five minutes to spare. She was last onto the aircraft and they were airborne before she had a real chance to take stock. At Euston Tower, she’d run into Andrew Hennessey, the head of Special Projects at Tory Central Office. He’d been sitting behind Cousins’ desk, reading one of the Bairstow files that still formed a neat pile beside the blotter, yet another breach in the wall that was supposed to separate MI5 from the world of the politicians. Annie had already spent nearly an hour on the computer at Gower Street, updating herself on incoming source reports, and because time was now so short Hennessey had offered to brief her en route to Heathrow.

Annie thought about the conversation now, as Windsor Castle slipped beneath the starboard wing and the first streaks of cloud hid the ground from view. It was the first time she’d found herself at close quarters with Hennessey and she hadn’t enjoyed the experience. He was thin and sallow with an abrupt manner and a nervous tic beneath one eye. He’d sat in the corner of the taxi, his briefcase on his knees, sketching in the background for the job she had to do. Annie recognised the technique from her exchanges with Wren, the way he carefully parcelled out the information, keeping the facts to the bare minimum, twitching the curtain from time to time, giving her just a glimpse of life backstage.

The thing was tricky, he seemed to be saying. Top secret ‘conversations’ were under way in Northern Ireland. These involved certain factions on the Provisional IRA Army Council and go-betweens reporting to Whitehall. Both the Unionists in the north, and the coalition government in Dublin, had scented the smoke in the wind, and neither party was happy. The Irish cabinet had been further incensed by the way the British were reporting the Sabbathman murders. Pointing the finger at the Republicans, implying that somehow an Irish hand lay behind the killings, had the ugliest possible implications, especially now, when there appeared to be prima facie evidence that a top Fianna Fail supporter was smuggling explosives into the UK. What were the Brits up to? Did they really believe that the Irish government – properly constituted, democratically elected, fellow members of the EEC – would really behave in this way? Where would the innuendo and the accusations lead? And when would they ever stop?

Hennessey had raised the questions in turn, emphasising the importance of each with a tiny chopping motion of his right hand, and when he’d finished he’d leant back against the corner of the cab.

‘How much of that did you know already,’ he’d said, ‘as a matter of interest?’

‘About the conversations? Sinn Fein? Whitehall?’

‘Yes.’

‘Most of it.’

‘Who told you?’

‘I was briefed. In fact I passed it on. To a journalist.’

‘Who?’

‘Willoughby Grant, off the record, of course. It was part of a negotiation. The lunch I described when we all met at Queen Anne’s Gate.’

Hennessey had nodded, gazing out at the traffic. ‘So who told you?’ he’d asked again. ‘Who authorised all that? I assume it was authorised?’

‘Oh, yes.’

‘So who was it?’

Annie had shaken her head, shielding Wren, under no obligation to do the bidding of some apparatchik from Smith Square, and when Hennessey had mentioned Wren himself, asking her for a simple yes or no, she’d once again declined to answer. The exchange had soured the rest of the journey, and when they’d finally pulled to a halt on the Departures ramp at Terminal One, and when she’d inquired about practical help – names, phone numbers – he’d simply handed her an envelope from his briefcase and then opened the door for her to get out. Standing on the kerbside, shaking the creases from her coat, she’d turned round to say goodbye, but the cab was already half-way down the ramp, looking for a gap in the traffic, heading back towards London.

Now, glad of the coffee at her elbow, Annie opened the envelope. The brief occupied a single sheet of paper. At the top, it was stamped ‘SECRET: ADDRESSEE ONLY’. Annie read it through, recognising the odd echo here and there, phrases that Hennessey had already used in the taxi. The brief had come from his pen. Definitely. In essence, it boiled down to a single contact,
an inspector in the Garda’s Special Branch. The man’s name was Dermot Reilly. He was based at SB headquarters in Harcourt Terrace. He’d be meeting her at the airport. He had access to the files on O’Keefe’s business, and he was part of the team that was tracing every mile of the journey from Longford to Fishguard. If anyone had an answer it would be Dermot Reilly and he was under orders, for once, to share everything with London.

Annie reclined the seat a little, gazing down at the grey corrugations of the Irish Sea, wondering exactly where Hennessey fitted into the picture, and what gave him the right to the information he carried in his briefcase. Her hour on the computer at Gower Street had included a series of phone-calls to all the major intelligence sources for Northern Ireland. She’d anticipated, at the very least, reports of a rumour or two about new arms channels but wherever she’d gone, whoever she’d spoken to, the answer was always the same. The young Army captain on the intelligence coordination staff at Lisburn reported a total blank. The same went for MI5’s own desk officer at Stormont. And when she’d phoned E3, the RUC’s intelligence specialists at Knock, her inquiry had drawn a grim chuckle. They’d no advance knowledge of the seizure but there were hundreds of firms exporting from the Republic and all of them would be sitting ducks for the IRA quartermasters. O’Keefe’s prominence in Fianna Fail, the fact that he had a high profile politically, simply made him an even sweeter proposition. ‘Who’d ever dream of going through Dessie’s stuff,’ the inspector had asked, ‘when the wee man has so much to lose?’

Dermot Reilly stepped aboard the aircraft the moment the cabin crew swung the big door open. He was younger than Annie had expected, with thick dark curly hair and a battered tweed jacket. His tie was loosened at the neck, the shirt button at the top undone. He had a fresh country complexion but there were signs of exhaustion around his eyes. Annie followed the stewardess up the aisle. The young detective had a farmer’s handshake and the smile brought his face alive.

‘You’re supposed to be six foot nine with a moustache,’ he said, ‘the way I heard it.’

They stepped out of the aircraft. At the end of the access pier there was a door. While the rest of the passengers hurried towards the arrivals complex, Annie followed Reilly down two flights of wooden steps. Another door at the bottom opened onto the concrete apron. Annie stood in the gathering dusk. Coloured lights winked red and green and the air was heavy with the sweet tang of aviation fuel.

Reilly was standing by a battered Ford Sierra. ‘The limo,’ he said simply.

They drove beneath the arrival piers and out towards the perimeter road. Reilly kept a pair of glasses on the dashboard and he put them on now, peering uncertainly into the gloom. On the far side of the airfield, Annie could see some kind of trading estate, a collection of steel sheds, brightly-lit islands in a sea of black tarmac. There was a control point at the main gate. Reilly held his ID against the windscreen and a finger rose in salute as they drove through. One corner of the compound was occupied by a big green warehouse, slightly shabbier than the rest. Folding doors were concertinaed back and there was a line of container trailers parked inside. Men were working under the big overhead lights, transferring packages from one container to another, while a supervisor in a white coat scribbled notes on a clipboard.

Reilly stopped the car at the mouth of the warehouse and turned off the engine. They’d been talking about the consignment of office furniture, the packages from Longford that had rolled off the ferry at Fishguard. Reilly had spent the last eight hours at O’Keefe’s factory, going over the workforce roll with the personnel manager, looking for employees with Republican sympathies, or family connections in the north, or some private problem serious enough to warrant risking a brief flirtation with the Provisionals. The factory, he said, was smaller than he’d expected, no more than sixty people, and most of them had been with the firm from the off. They’d known each other for years. They were like a family. There were few secrets. As Reilly talked, Annie was thinking about Fat Eddie’s fortnight on the factory shop-floor. He’d said the same thing. Almost word for word.

She looked across at Reilly. He seemed half asleep. ‘So what do you think,’ she said, ‘about Longford?’

‘I can’t believe it happened there. There’s no evidence that I could find. No motive, either. O’Keefe’s not an eejit. There’s no votes in Semtex. Not any more.’

Annie smiled. She liked this man, his soft voice, his easy wit, and she believed him, too. She looked at the containers again. The woman with the clipboard was examining a pile of cardboard boxes.

‘So what happens here?’

Reilly reached for a peppermint from an open roll on the shelf beneath the dashboard. He examined it for dust and hairs and then put it in his mouth.

‘O’Keefe sends consignments all over,’ he said. ‘Anything for the UK comes here. There’s usually not enough to fill a whole container so they off-load it from his wagon and add it to other part-loads. It’s cheaper that way, and quicker. According to Dessie.’