He pulled over just past Docherty’s farm, once a notorious haven for IRA men on the run, heading for the border. A decade ago he would not have been patrolling here at all. What patrolling there was in South Armagh in those days was done by the military in helicopters or armoured cars.
But that was the past. Now he and his colleagues were far more likely to be hurt in a car accident than in an assassination attempt. Though maybe things were getting bad again – just days before, someone had tried to kill a half-retired officer outside his house in Belfast. No one knew yet who’d done it, or why. Perhaps it was some longstanding grudge, an ex-con avenging himself on the officer who’d brought him down. Hughes certainly hoped it was that. He liked the new comparative calm, the fact he didn’t feel the need to keep his holster unbuttoned when he drove out on patrol.
He rolled his window down, and as cold air filled the inside of the car, he sat sniffing like a gun dog. There – he smelled it again. He got out of the car.
The smell was stronger still outside. Turning round, he felt the wind sting his cheeks and he shivered slightly. It was blowing from the north-east, across the unploughed dun-coloured fields. So he got back into his car and drove towards the source of the smell, taking the first right turn he came to, along an old track he didn’t recognise. He drove slowly on, half-excited by the pursuit, half-scared of what might be around the next corner.
The track climbed gradually around Davitt’s Hill, the highest point in this small stretch of valley. From here you could almost see the border with the Republic, the safety line for so many fleeing the law in the North. Once across the border the Provos had a habit of disappearing into thin air. It wasn’t the Garda’s fault. They’d never had any more use for the IRA than the RUC had. But unless you built an Irish equivalent of the Berlin Wall along every foot of the 220-mile border, you had a refuge route for terrorists that was virtually impossible to police.
The track suddenly stopped in a small lay-by in front of what had been a crofter’s cottage. From behind the decayed ruins smoke rose in a twisty wisp, before dispersing in the wintry winds. It was only when he walked behind the cottage that he saw the remains of the white van. One of its tyres was still smouldering.
The forensic team moved fast – everyone did when a policeman had been shot. They checked for prints, but none had survived the fire, which was so hot that the steering wheel had been reduced to a metal spoke. A few fibres were found, miraculously untouched in a corner of the van’s back compartment; they looked like wisps from a blanket.
Then one of the team discovered a big piece of metal about six inches long lying under the skeletal frame of the driver’s seat. It retained enough of its original shape to be recognisable as a handgun.
‘Old,’ said the forensic team leader, when he was shown the find. ‘Better get it to the lab right away. I doubt they’ll be able to tell if it’s been fired, but they might work out what make it is.’
And while the remains of the handgun were driven at speed to the PSNI laboratory, the team focused on the van itself. Over the course of the next two hours, they carefully extracted what remained of the engine from the vehicle’s charred carcass. After applying acetic acid with a paintbrush they could make out enough of the chassis number to allow a technician at the lab to run a software programme used for identifying stolen vehicles. Its algorithm came up with four possibilities, of which only one was a vehicle large enough to be the burnt-out van found in South Armagh.
It had been a laundry van belonging to O’Neill’s Laundry and Linen Service, a cleaning business run out of Sydenham in East Belfast by a family named – to no one’s surprise – O’Neill. It had been reported stolen a couple of days ago. Twenty minutes later, two officers had driven to the home of the company’s managing director, where they found Patrick O’Neill still irate at the theft of a van from his fleet of nine vehicles.
Did he have any idea who might have stolen the van? No, he replied; he’d assumed it was local villains who’d taken it out of the office yard. Had anyone recently left his employ? Well yes, a guy called Sean McCarthy had quit a few days before. He was a laundry collection and delivery driver, who’d never settled in the business. Was this before the van was stolen? Yes, come to think of it, it was just before the van was stolen…
The PSNI had a suspect now, and they soon discovered from their own database that Sean McCarthy had a string of minor convictions as a juvenile, including illegal possession of a firearm. By now, too, the lab had come back and reported that the charred handgun found in the burnt-out van had been a .25 calibre pistol, probably more than twenty-five years old. Unfortunately, there was no description in the file of the kind of gun Sean McCarthy had been charged with possessing four years before.
McCarthy’s file also showed that he had been an associate of several members of the Provisional IRA. There was no recent information about that strand of his life and one recent informant had opined ‘the boy’s gone straight’, though his evidence for that appeared to be confined to McCarthy’s being in full-time employment – at O’Neill’s laundry service.
He was said to live in the house he’d been brought up in on the edge of Andersonstown – but a visit to his home found only his mother in residence. She seemed unconcerned about the absence of her son, and didn’t seem to know anything about his friends or associates. The interviewing PC believed her – probably because he found her too drunk, at ten-thirty in the morning, to lie convincingly. This was her usual condition, according to a neighbour, who also had seen no sign of Sean McCarthy in the last few days.
34
Judith Spratt stopped for a coffee at a Starbucks two streets away from Milraud’s shop. This was a part of the city she did not know well, a small oasis of galleries, restaurants and boutiques in what had once been a commercial area of small factories and warehouses.
She needed to collect her thoughts before she went into the shop. It had been decided that no publicity was to be given yet to Dave’s disappearance, so Judith had to find some excuse for enquiring about him at the shop. She had been taken aback when Liz had asked her to do this job; she was not used to direct contact with the public and role playing was not her strength. Her job, at which she excelled, was the processing and analysis of information once it had been collected; when the pieces came streaming in she liked nothing better than to use her mind like a prospector’s sieve, throwing out the dross and making sense of the few gold nuggets that remained.
Before she had joined the service she had been an analyst at an investment bank. That was where she had met her ex-husband Ravi. She had enjoyed the intellectual challenge of that job, but had found it ultimately unsatisfying; it had served no real purpose, other than to line the pockets of the firm’s partners and sometimes to help a distant client somewhere to make a killing. With her husband’s encouragement, and the knowledge that his fat salary made the reduction in her pay tolerable, she’d jumped at the chance of working in Thames House. Her subsequent divorce meant that money was now much more of an issue, but she never regretted her change of career. At MI5 the purpose of her work was always important, and sometimes frighteningly urgent.
She finished her coffee and walked down the narrow street to the door of Milraud’s shop. She was wearing an ankle-length knitted coat with a fringed shawl draped round her shoulders, and flat shoes. The look she was aiming at was arty, bohemian, slightly ditzy but definitely genteel. As far away as could be imagined from an intelligence officer. She stood outside the shop for a moment and took a deep breath to calm her nerves, then she opened the door and went in. A bell tinkled discreetly.