The Discourtesy of Death Read online

  ‘You’ll have to rub him out,’ murmured Liam, importantly, as if he knew about these things. ‘He has to go down.’

  A priest had set up a man to be killed.

  Michael’s mouth was dry, the spit on his lips crusting like a young scab. What else could the priest mean? What did he expect? That the Brits would frame Ó Mórdha? Engineer a charge on tax evasion to get him banged away for two years? What difference would that make? The man of God had come to Michael because Eugene had told him to speak to someone who dealt with touts: the people who, according to IRA propaganda, organised the execution of unarmed volunteers.

  ‘It doesn’t work that way,’ said Michael. ‘There’s nothing I can do.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I fill in a CF, a contact form. Someone taps it into the computer. Someone else thinks and acts. And they won’t be sending the SAS into Donegal.’

  ‘You can’t do nowt?’

  ‘I said I’ll fill in the form.’

  ‘That’s not enough.’

  ‘It’ll have to do. I’m on leave from tomorrow.’

  ‘You heard what your man Eugene said. You can’t just type it up. You can’t just take a holiday, not now … look, I can help.’

  Liam leaned back hard, shutting the door with his shoulders.

  Michael appraised his first agent with dismay. Five foot ten. Eighteen years four months old. Thin. Brown greasy hair. Pasty complexion. Spots on the forehead. Black-framed glasses. Large brown eyes. Mouth sloping to one side. First contact: arrested for shoplifting. Charges dropped. Proposed to FRU by Special Branch.

  ‘Do you hear what I’m saying?’ whispered Liam. ‘I can help.’ The floor above creaked and Liam brushed the sound aside with an impatient, pasty hand. ‘I’m no small fry.’

  Michael dropped his head into his hands and the armchair squeaked as if stabbed. The priest had come and gone, a messenger who enjoyed the luxury of not having to act on what he’d said.

  ‘I said I can help.’

  Nigel … what do I do? Michael squeezed his eyes tight shut. You were cut out for this, not me. You’re the one who saw wars simply. What do I do? I’ve got a kid in front of me who wants to help me kill someone.

  A flash from a sermon came to Michael’s mind. Nigel was in the pulpit at the Royal Memorial Chapel at Sandhurst, broad and strong, hands on the lectern. He’d been invited by the chaplain to address officer recruits destined for the Medical Corps. Michael had tagged along.

  ‘Life is short, the crisis fleeting, experiment risky, decision difficult,’ declared Nigel. He’d gone back to the Aphorisms of Hippocrates.

  (Michael saw his brother’s roving eyes.)

  ‘Doctors – like soldiers – must respond, often quickly and with resolution. One day, you may find yourself alone in a fleeting crisis. The moment of hesitation will have passed and it will be your duty to act.’

  For effect, Nigel let his gaze settle upon one individual – someone he’d judged timid and unsure.

  ‘On that awful day, my friend, be calm. Stare the fast approach of death straight in the eye. Look at the sickness and the suffering. And then get on with it. Take the risk. Make the difficult decision. Save a life, if you can. Don’t let hesitation slow you down. And afterwards, looking back on the crisis, you just might notice a Still, Small Voice – hidden at the time, but present in your anguish. You were never, in fact, alone.’

  Michael dropped his hands and looked over at Liam; at his large, demanding eyes.

  ‘What did you steal? Before you were pushed towards us lot?’

  Liam’s jaw dropped in astonishment.

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘Answer the bloody question.’

  ‘Pork chops … a cabbage. A carton of Silk Cut … menthol.’

  ‘What’s wrong with your mother?’

  ‘Nowt.’

  ‘The swollen knees and ankles?’

  ‘She’s too fat.’

  ‘She’s in bed?’

  ‘Couldn’t be bothered to come downstairs. I said I can help. I’m no eejit.’

  ‘Where’s your father?’

  ‘Never had one.’

  Michael leaned forward and the armchair squealed. He was going to finish Liam’s days as an informer right there and then but Liam barked.

  ‘I’m holding guns for the IRA. Ammunition, too. And detonators. They trust me.’

  Michael blinked at the nodding head.

  ‘That’s right. I’ve worked my way in. They think I’m small fry with a sick ma. An eejit.’

  Michael’s seat yelped.

  ‘I keep the guns for two weeks at a time and then they move ’em. I’ve had a pistol and four rifles for a couple of days now I have. There’s a Browning automatic under your chair. And a silencer behind the boiler. You can use ’em and put ’em back and no one’ll know a thing. You can stiff the Army Council fella using one of their own tools. The ballistics will show the bullets came from a thing used by the IRA in other killings. No one’ll think it was the Brits or the UDA or whoever. And yous lot can then feed the results to the IRA through me and they’ll go crazy trying to find one of their own.’

  Michael felt faint. The Army had sent him on a psychological training course to help him identify when an agent was slipping off the rails. Liam had developed none of the symptoms … but he’d obviously crashed through all the barriers without making a single noise. He’d acted outside the authority of his handler and he hadn’t even broken a sweat.

  ‘Father Doyle says as a people we’re in need,’ muttered Liam, adjusting his heavy glasses, his back still to the door. ‘We can’t get out of the cycle of violence and mayhem. Neighbours are killing neighbours. There’s no end to the funerals. The grief. Well, thanks to your man there, Eugene, we can do something. You can’t just fill in a bleedin’ form and leave it to some other fella. Father Doyle brought you the message, so. Now it’s over to you to do yer stuff.’

  Stuff? Michael could no longer move: the cheap synthetic covering was silent. His first agent was out of control. Worse: Michael was sitting on an arms dump belonging to the Provisional IRA. The enormity of the situation crashed in upon him.

  He’d been with the FRU six months. Liam had been recruited two months prior to that. They were both green though Liam was that smidgen longer in the tooth. But they’d been told some grade A1 intelligence with a fast-moving shelf life. Do your stuff? Liam – like Father Doyle – meant assassination. But that’s not the way it worked. Sure the SAS took short cuts and he’d heard rumours of a Rat Hole, a place where top handlers managed top agents, cutting corners every now and then … but no one he could think of was going to authorise the killing of Néall Ó Mórdha next Wednesday. And yet, the Republican zealot was going to be there. It was a moment of opportunity. To tilt the balance against violence. Eugene had said so, just before they shot him.

  ‘Are you going to answer me or what?’

  Colonel Stauffenberg attempted to kill Hitler, thought Michael. He, too, was backed by a pastor … Bonhoeffer. If they’d succeeded, the war would have been cut short by a year. Thousands of lives would have been saved. If they’d killed him in 1939, there would have been no war, no holocaust.

  ‘Well, are you even breathing?’

  Michael let his eyes come into focus. He saw Liam’s earnest face against the peeling wallpaper, his mouth half open. This petty thief was no backroom conspirator in the High Command. Father Doyle was no Bonhoeffer. And I’m no hero. Michael shuddered at the exalted grubbiness of his circumstances. The chair whined.

  Nigel, what do I do?

  Michael listened, still paralysed, aching to hear that Still, Small Voice.

  At first he wasn’t paying proper attention. But then, in complete horror, he started tracking Liam’s words: his murderous advice, whispered just in case, for once, his mother had come downstairs and paused on her way to the kitchen.

  ‘You have to be calm, you know. They say a man’s life flashes before him just before he dies. Wel
l, it’s not true.’ Liam came over and sat down in a chair by his handler. ‘He sees the future he might have had. His eyes are full of wonder … you can see it, just before you kill him. It’s the look of a newborn … and you can’t hesitate. You turn out his light.’

  Michael stood up as if the devil himself had slipped into Liam’s skin. He stepped away, backing towards the dead gas fire.

  ‘You’ll have to practise,’ promised Liam. ‘Look into the eyes of someone you love. Try to …’

  This wasn’t Liam speaking. His voice had changed. His syntax had altered. This is what the kid had heard at some other door. He’d heard an old hand teaching a new recruit how to be a trigger man. The evil had entered Liam’s lungs like Silk Cut, the poison and fumes stealing into his soul. He’d memorised the phrases, turning them over with the insight of a child learning Shakespeare.

  Get Ó Mórdha, and you’ll get a peace process, sputtered Eugene from the torture chamber in Ballymurphy. Let him go and the war will just drag on.

  Liam was still speaking. He’d tipped up the armchair that Michael had been using. On his knees, he felt inside the frame for the ‘tool’.

  ‘You can’t hesitate,’ he said, bending lower, proudly repeating to Michael what he’d learned from the master. ‘You move quickly. He has to go down … you do the job.’

  Michael stared at the threadbare carpet, appalled at Liam’s metamorphosis. The weave had once been soaked in colours. Where had they gone?

  ‘There’s no other way,’ growled Liam, still kneeling, holding the gun by the barrel, offering the grip to Michael, his features blank and grey like the carpet. ‘All the thinking’s been done, hasn’t it? If you want peace, you’ll have to pull the trigger.’

  In a kind of daze, Michael took the gun and asked for the silencer. Eyes narrowed as if he’d walked into a snowstorm, he told Liam there’d be no assassination and that they’d meet on Saturday of next week, when he’d return the weapon, modified with a tracking device in the handle. The rifles? Too big to hide. For the time being they would have to stay under Liam’s mother’s bed. His standing as an agent would be under review, along with the level of pay.

  On reaching Thiepval, Michael sat down at his desk to fill in the CF but found himself staring at the page. His hand reached into his pocket and he took out the scrawled directions to a cottage in the Blue Stack Mountains. He watched his hand put it away again. He watched the other hand put the unmarked CF back in a drawer. All the while Liam’s Browning was lodged at the base of his back, the silencer standing like a stick of Brighton rock in the overcoat pocket that hung on the door.

  During the night Michael tossed and turned. At one point he sat bolt upright … he could have sworn he’d heard a voice. But there was no other sound save the distant rev of a Saracen and the soft tick of his bedside clock. Instantly, as if carrying on where he’d left off, he thought of Colonel Stauffenberg, but it was Nigel’s words – the reference to Hippocrates – that came sharply to mind:

  Take the risk. Make the difficult decision.

  And then, mysteriously, he slept as if drugged.

  By morning, when he woke, Michael wasn’t sure he knew himself. He was strangely cold, deep in his bones. The barracks – the whole of Northern Ireland – seemed a little far off; not quite within arm’s reach. Somehow he’d made a decision without articulating its content or implications. While shaving, he asked himself what lay at the forefront of his mind. It wasn’t the Troubles and the need for a solution, and it wasn’t the death of Eugene or his attempt to give it some clout. No, it was Liam Finnerty, spotty and callow. Michael wanted to change the direction of Irish history, so that people like Liam wouldn’t be needed to pry on rebels, hide their guns and take pocket money from the ancient invader. Michael dried his face, unable to see any further than the actions necessary to fulfil his objective. After dressing in casuals, he set about his duty.

  First, he called Emma, saying he wouldn’t be coming home. Hush-hush. Then he put the Browning and silencer into his Billingham bag and took a train to Limerick in the Republic of Ireland, where he bought a jalopy for 450 punts, cash in hand, and left the gun in the boot. The next day, using his British passport, he flew from Shannon airport to Edinburgh, spent three nights in a hotel rehearsing his moves, and then came back again, re-entering the country on his Canadian passport. The whole back and forth was an expensive palaver. He wasn’t covering his tracks, as such, because a careful look at the plane manifests would reveal his name. No, the shift in location and identity was an attempt to separate himself from what he was about to do: to make the difficult decision, he would go away as a peacemaker and come back as a killer. The ruse helped him assume the role he’d never dreamed would be the ineluctable consequence of his coming to Belfast. And so, while the British Army officer was on leave in Scotland, the Canadian assassin headed north in a rattling Fiesta.

  The Water Clock struck the hour, and Michael snapped out of his remembered holiday. After a moment’s clunking, the two figures in the bath sat up, spouting water from the pipes in their mouths. On the level below, the boys’ metal trousers dropped and they started to pee, each of them missing the toilet pan. It was funny, only Michael thought he might collapse. He turned away, thinking of Eugene and Liam, a man and a boy, both of them touts. They’d both relied on Michael to take down Néall Ó Mórdha and cut short the long war.

  16

  Crossing the road, Anselm and Mitch turned as one to look at the upstairs window. A net curtain fell. The monk and the musician shared a glance, each confirming to the other his strong suspicion: Doctor Goodwin did need to take a breather, but only because he wanted to move the conversation away from the person upstairs.

  ‘I came back to Long Melford a few months before Jenny died,’ he said, as the Land Rover juddered into life. ‘Early retirement. Zimbers hadn’t been the easiest assignment. I wanted to write and I’d been asked to do some tutoring at Cambridge. Turn right.’

  Doctor Goodwin had given no indication of where he was leading them. He restricted himself to simple directions.

  ‘Straight on. We bought the house with family money before I was ordained. Stayed there in the holidays. Whenever I saw Jenny, I saw Peter and he never tired of asking me, when I left, how I squared a loving God with suffering. He was absolutely sincere, but I think, deep down, I, too, scandalised him, with my myths and incantations. I was a colluder … with ignorance. Stick to the A134.’

  Anselm looked over the empty fields, meditating on collusion. It was a disagreeable word. The Force Research Unit. Shoot-to-kill. Stray dogs.

  ‘I would have liked to discuss faith with him,’ continued Doctor Goodwin. ‘Not its content, but its function as a kind of daring commitment to what we don’t fully understand, but I fear the very sight of me provoked him … to assert what he believed was true, as a man of reason and science. He didn’t seem to appreciate that so much of science rests upon a faith in evolving explanations, a readiness to question all our certainties. The recognition of doubt as shared ground in the search for truth … well, it could have brought about a very interesting discussion, for both of us. As it is, he preferred to set up things I didn’t believe and then knock them down.’

  You provoked your brother, too, thought Anselm. Michael had to turn away, even after Jenny’s fall from grace. Why? Because he didn’t like Evensong any more? Or was it guilt, roused by what you represent?

  ‘Helen can’t forgive Peter,’ acknowledged Doctor Goodwin, careful (for professional reasons) to dissociate his name from the declaration. ‘She’s tried but one can’t escape history. There’s been no gathering in of all that’s happened. So the resentment lives on. And so it should. Because it’s honest. It’s the necessary precursor to any profound reconciliation. And, in our case, I doubt if that day will ever come to pass. He killed her, you know. We can’t prove it, but she was murdered. He knows it and we know it. Bear to the right.’

  Anselm leaned on the shuddering, grimy window, thinkin
g of Helen. She didn’t think it was Peter at all but she’d said nothing to disabuse Nigel. I have my own theory about Jenny’s death … but I can’t tell you in front of my husband.

  ‘What about Michael?’ asked Mitch, with a tap to the indicator. ‘Is he sure, too?’

  ‘I can’t speak for him,’ said Doctor Goodwin, perfunctorily. ‘As I told you, my work had kept us apart. After Jenny’s death he … he slipped further out of reach. I don’t know what he thinks.’

  ‘And Emma?’

  ‘She felt as I did, as Helen did … because there was only one person who wasn’t surprised by Jenny’s sudden death.’

  ‘Peter?’

  ‘Exactly. It was as though he’d known she was dead before she died.’

  Anselm put the counter-argument, intrigued to know how Doctor Goodwin would reply: ‘But this is a man who’d argued for the importance of legislative safeguards. How could he come to kill a defenceless woman?’

  ‘Because when he found himself in a concrete situation that he didn’t like very much, his ideas gave out. High principles often collapse when they get in the way of a quiet life. And Jenny was the weight dragging him down. You’ll understand what I mean once I’ve told you her story … and this is where it begins, Polstead.’

  Doctor Goodwin opened the farm-style front gate bearing a plaque that read ‘Morning Light’. He let Anselm and Mitch pass onto a gravel courtyard and then led them to an adjacent lawn and a neat arrangement of teak garden furniture. Ahead stood a thatched cottage, the clean lemon plaster pierced by white-framed windows of different sizes, randomly placed, it seemed, adding a capricious stroke to the builder’s seventeenth-century construction.

  ‘Jenny loved this place,’ said Doctor Goodwin, eyeing the warm, grey thatch. ‘She thought she had everything that was worthwhile and good … a home off a biscuit tin lid, a young son, a brilliant partner …’