Thrown Down (16 page)

‘I’m grateful for the heads up, Collette, really I am’ said Jeff.

‘Well I can do more than that, Jeff’ Collette replied. ‘I’m coming over to the UK too. My boss thinks it might be useful considering the Patricia Knight angle and the fact that two Australian citizens will be on your patch, one of whom is a former terrorist. He wants to place me with you as a member of your team. Didn’t your boss tell you any of this? Maybe they haven’t had a chance yet’. 

Diane Parker of Melbourne’s ‘The Age’ national newspaper couldn’t believe her luck when she managed to get this scoop. It was like the break from God that could end up making her bloody career. After Patricia Knight called and said she would talk to her after all, Diane managed to persuade Patricia that she should sign an exclusive deal with ‘The Age’ and it was on that basis that she was now sitting in the living room of the house in Scoresby, right on the edge of the greater Melbourne conurbation, that Patricia shared with her husband Dennis. She’d already conducted interviews by phone with Kieran Murphy and family members of Patricia Knight back in Manchester, UK and put together with that she was planning to get out of her interviewee today then the piece she would end up producing would be extensive and shed light deep into the past. She switched on the recording facility on her phone and did the same with her iPad. She wasn’t planning to miss anything of what this woman was planning to tell her.  

‘Just relax, Patricia’ said Diane with as much reassurance as she could muster. Not that she’d needed to reassure her interviewee. Patricia Knight didn’t seem nervous at all. On the contrary she seemed confident, almost too much so. It was a little unnerving given the subject matter that was coming up but it might have something to do with the fact that her husband Dennis had been sitting next to her throughout the interview, without saying anything but he’d been holding her hand gently on the table. It was clearly doing Patricia good. ‘Now we’ve gone through the preliminaries about life for you today and the family you and your husband have brought up here’ Diane went on. She watched as Patricia turned to her husband and they exchanged smiles. They must have one hell of a marriage. Diane was rather envious. Her husband was so infuriatingly particular and tidy about everything that it was a bloody good job she didn’t have a hidden past because he wouldn’t be able to deal with it. ‘But we now need to go back to your days in Northern Ireland before you came out to Australia’.

‘Okay’ said Patricia. Her heart began to race a little. She hadn’t talked about any of this stuff from her past for decades until she’d been forced into telling Dennis all about it. She could be laying herself open to criminal charges but then where would they ever get the witnesses to convict her after all this time? They’d either be too old to remember any significant details or they’ll be dead. Either way she put her worries on that score to one side. This would be like cleansing herself.

‘Did you have an actual job whilst you were a member of the IRA?’

‘Yes’ said Patricia. ‘I worked in the local dry cleaning shop’.

‘And what did you do there?’

‘Well I dealt with the customers when they came in and I dry cleaned their clothes for them’.

‘Did you ever dry clean the clothes of known terrorists?’

‘Well of course, I wouldn’t have referred to them as terrorists. But we didn’t discriminate if that’s what you’re asking. That said we didn’t see to protestant customers because as a known Catholic owned business we didn’t get any protestant customers’.

‘The sectarian divide was that bad it extended to where people did their shopping?’

‘Oh yes’ Patricia confirmed. ‘It certainly did. You have absolutely no idea what it was like. It was like living in an apartheid state with the Catholics as the black people and the Unionists as the whites who kept control of everything with help from the British government in London. We were the Catholics who had to be kept down and that attitude went back centuries’.

‘That’s putting it in pretty dramatic terms’.

‘Well it was a pretty dramatic life that Catholics were forced to live in Northern Ireland back in those days’.

‘Are you saying that it was the combination of others in society and the policies of the British government that led you to commit terrorist acts?’

‘I’m saying that if things had been different and we’d lived in a more just and equal society then I probably wouldn’t have gone down the road that I did. And you can interpret that whichever way you like’.

THROWN DOWN ELEVEN

Chief Superintendent Geraldine Chambers knew that she should seek help. The situation was getting worse. Her partner Hazel couldn’t seem to help lashing out at her whenever she thought the going was getting a little tough. She didn’t hit out at her face or anywhere else that would give her game away. Like most physical abusers she did her best to mask her handiwork. But Geraldine knew she had to get help from somewhere. Otherwise all the years of giving out sympathy and advice to other victims would be rendered meaningless if she couldn’t follow it herself.

There was a knock on her door and Detective Superintendent Jeff Barton came in. After having slept on what he was told in the call from Collette Ryan down in Australia, Jeff was feeling much less annoyed about having been left out of the loop with regard to the special branch involvement in the case and the fact that Ryan would be winging her way over to assist them. He’d decided to take the line of least resistance. It wasn’t worth picking a battle with Chambers about. There would be much bigger issues to scrap with her about.

‘Ah Jeff, come in and sit down’ she welcomed. She kept her arms level and remained in her chair. She was getting accustomed to planning her movements carefully so as not to give away any of the pain. ‘There are some matters I need to discuss with you’.

‘Patricia Knight and Detective Constable Collette Ryan of the Victoria State Police?, ma’am’

‘Yes? How did you know?’

Jeff treated her to his best appeasing smile. ‘I had a call from Ryan last night, ma’am and she filled me in on a few things’

‘Well in that case I’m sorry you had to find out that way’.

‘Well what matters now are the implications of what she told me’ said Jeff. ‘Padraig O’Connell has a sister in Australia who was an active member of the IRA until she left the province in nineteen seventy-six. Why did she leave? Was she forced to do so? And why did our colleagues in the Victoria state police receive a message from special branch here to go and tell Patricia Knight that her brother was dead when they didn’t deem it fit to tell us, ma’am?’

‘Yes, I agree Jeff there are some bewildering unknowns in all of this’ said Chambers. ‘But we are all supposed to be on the same side’.

‘Isn’t it the same definition though, ma’am, as the so-called special relationship this country is supposed to have with the USA? We’re on the same side when it suits them? I’m particularly recalling Argentina at the time of the Falklands, and Grenada. I seem to recall the USA seemed to need reminding of that special relationship in both those cases’.

‘Oh God!’ Chambers cursed. ‘Why do you have to be a good police officer and think as well? Why can’t I just bark orders out at you like in the old days?’

Jeff smiled. ‘Because it wouldn’t suit you, ma’am. It’s not your style’.

‘I don’t know so much sometimes’ said Chambers. ‘Anyway, sit down, Jeff’.

Jeff sat down in front of her desk. It had already been a morning of developments in the investigation, not least of which was the apparent suicide of poor Carol Anderson. Jeff felt sorry that she’d taken such a drastic step. She’d seemed such a sad character. But he was also convinced that she could’ve told them more about the elusive Chris O’Neill and that’s why he was having her flat done over by the forensics team. He had the distinct feeling that they would find traces of someone known as Chris O’Neill in the flat.

There was a knock on the door and another man came in. He was stocky, somewhere in his thirties and dressed in a light blue suit with white shirt and dark blue tie. He looked for all the world like an air steward who’d eaten perhaps one or two too many leftover passenger meals. Jeff recognized him from somewhere and then the penny dropped. He held out a hand and shook it. 

‘Detective Superintendent Jeff Barton, this is Detective Inspector Howard Freeman from our special branch unit’.

‘Yes, I remember you’ said Jeff, standing up and turning to Freeman. ‘Weren’t you at DI Rebecca Stockton’s funeral?’

‘Yes, I was’ Freeman confirmed. ‘Rebecca and I were old mates from way back. We actually went to high school together in Denton. I still can’t grasp that she’s gone’.

‘No’ said Jeff, trying to hide his feelings. ‘A lot of us feel the same’.

‘I’m sorry, gentlemen’ said Chambers. ‘I didn’t put two and two together before’.

Both Jeff and Freeman made all the right gestures to tell Chambers that it didn’t matter and then Freeman got down to business. ‘Sir, we’re following your investigations into the murders of Padraig O’Connell and Barry Murphy’.

‘Then you’ll know we’ve issued a warrant for the arrest of Chris O’Neill on suspicion of the murder of Padraig O’Connell?’

‘Yes, sir’ Freeman confirmed.  ‘But I expect you want me to talk to you about Patricia Knight?’

‘Well it’s a bit late in the day but it might be useful, yes. Why did you ask the Victoria state police to inform her of her brother’s death and yet you didn’t tell us?’

‘DSI Barton’ said Chambers in a warning voice.

‘No, it’s a fair point, ma’am’ Freeman conceded. ‘Patricia Knight, or O’Connell as she then was, wasn’t just any old member of the IRA. She was a member of the IRA Army Council and as such she would be complicit in all IRA activity in Northern Ireland during the early days of the troubles. Nothing that the IRA did during that period would’ve escaped her attention and probably approval either by herself or as part of a wider command structure. But of course she ended up betraying them, including her best friend Deirdre Murphy and her boyfriend Fergal. She betrayed them all by taking up with one of our agents, James Carson’.

‘The one whose body has never been found?’

‘Yes, although Padraig O’Connell was sent down for his murder’.

‘Are there any standing charges against Patricia O’Connell/Knight?’

‘No, sir, there aren’t’.

‘No cold cases held by the PSNI or even the Garda in the Irish Republic that directly or indirectly involve her?’

‘No, sir’.

‘Then why are you flushing her out now? You’ve known where she’s been all these years and I’m sure the Australian security services have kept an open file on her all this time that remains empty?’

‘Correct’ said Freeman. ‘You have a second murder case on your hands. That of Barry Murphy?’

‘And?’

‘We want to see if any of the old connections are being made’ said Freeman. ‘Because we know that Barry Murphy had been laundering money through his business for dissident Republican groups for the last two years’.

‘So why would that have anything to do with Patricia Knight now if she’s been clean for all these years? And why would Barry Murphy want to do any kind of business with the woman who betrayed his mother to such an extent that it got her abducted and murdered?’ Oh but wait a minute, I get it. You’re using her as bait. You think if she comes sailing into town with her past in her bag then she’ll draw out any of the IRA senior citizens who worked with her then and might be working with the dissident groups now. Am I right?’

‘That’s something I can neither confirm nor deny, sir’.

‘I knew I was right’.

‘And you also know that the mission is classified’.

‘I know that it was money from the IRA that set Barry Murphy up in business because his brother Kieran told us’.

‘And I’m sure he told you that the rest of the family wouldn’t take the IRA’s so-called offer of compensation over their mother’s disappearance and subsequent death when Barry did? But what if Kieran is lying about that? What if he has also been working in some way for dissident republican groups then that would be rather embarrassing considering he’s spent the last decades fighting the IRA’s silence over what happened to the disappeared’.

‘Isn’t that a bit tabloid logic? Somebody is doing some good for their community so we’ve got to try and dish up some dirt on them so we can destroy them? I don’t believe Kieran Murphy is using his organization to mask something more sinister. I do believe that the man known as Chris O’Neill could’ve killed Barry Murphy and it could be because I suspect that he was having an affair with Murphy’s wife Tabitha. Everyone at O’Neill’s pub knew that he was having an affair with a woman they described as some posh bird from out Cheshire way and who they believe was married. When we initially interviewed Tabitha Murphy it was clear she’d had both feet out of her marriage for some time. And it looked like she was expecting someone, looking round all the time, checking her mobile’.

‘Hardly the grieving widow then?’ said Chambers.

‘Anything but, ma’am’ Jeff concurred. ‘DS Bradshaw and DC Alexander have learned from her sister that Tabitha Murphy is planning to go away somewhere and leave her daughter behind to be looked after by her sister. If Tabitha Murphy is planning something with the man we know as O’Neill that she could very well lead us to him. It would seem logical that they would be planning to abscond at some point but that’s why I don’t want to bring Tabitha Murphy in and make a big fuss in case it scares O’Neill into hiding. Keep our enquiries low key and he won’t be put off. I’ve got the house watched, ma’am. We’ll be able to move in fairly quickly’.