Carthew said, "He's a prickly little beggar."
Foster said, "Prickly is an understatement."
Carthew said, "You know, when he first came, and I called him Gary, I thought he was going to do me Criminal Assault."
"He's the one that I would think most suitable," Wilkins said quietly.
"It had crossed my mind to move him to the Donnelly team, give him something tougher to cut his teeth on. I'd say he was a little frantic for some meat, in rather a hurry, oh yes. He deserves the chance… but I would be less than honest if I did not make plain my disappointment with the reaction of other members of our section…"
Foster said, "I thought Bill was going to have a coronary…"
Carthew said, "No one in their right mind actually wants to go..
Foster said, "Trouble with Charles is that he's got the private means cushion to fall back on. I think if he were posted he'd quit. Be a waste if we pushed him too hard."
Carthew said, "Ulster's hardly the place for a pressed man…"
Foster said, "The only other one that I could think of was Archie.
Quite simply, he declined. I suppose it's because he's taken on that place in the country. The problem is, Ernest, that no one who has a halfway normal life to lead is going to be ambitious for a posting in that dreadful country."
Carthew said, "Brennard's particularly well-suited…"
Objectively, of course, it was not satisfactory to put in a raw young man, but it was temporary. Foster would check out the position on Ferdie Penn, when he could be recovered from the training programme he was running down in Nairobi. Might be a month, might be two…
Brennard wouldn't need to be told that it was just a temporary thing because that would be demotivating.
They chewed at their sandwiches. Wilkins mused, "It's a life that none of us older men were trained for. Alright, we have our Watchers, and we do that well, but for the most part we are a collating agency. All of this frigging around in ditches, carrying sidearms, running sources, it's a new science… You don't think Brennard will let us down?"
Foster said, "Be working under Parker, won't he?"
Carthew said, "With Parker in charge, you could send a babe in arms."
And so, over beef and salad sandwiches and mineral water, it was agreed by the Section Head and his two principal Higher Executive Officers that Gary Brennard should be invited to offer himself for a posting to the Security Service unit working in the province of Northern Ireland. It was further agreed that the invitation should be made quickly, in order that the vacancy left by the compromised Faber should be filled as soon as possible. Faber's return, regrettable though its cause was, would be an asset to the Desk.
"Don't you trouble yourself about young Faber," said Carthew. "He's as tough as old boots. Put him straight to work, that's my advice. Give him any sort of break and you'll be doing him no favours."
Wilkins talked on about the difficulties with Finance. Carthew defended the quality of the glass that could be bought in Hungary.
Foster recalled that every stitch of his and Marjory's spare clothing had been stolen from a camp site near Nice last summer. They were civilised men. They enjoyed each other's company and conversation.
Ireland, the abscess that governed their lives, was, temporarily, forgotten. The laughter was warm.
His P.A. stood in the doorway.
"Bomb in Motspur Park, probably Irish. One woman, two children, both girls, fatals."
He was the familiar figure.
The Commander of SO 13, the Anti-Terrorist Branch of New Scotland Yard, had travelled to the location of four shootings and five bombings that long autumn. He thought he should be seen to attend the site of every atrocity. He regarded the British public as his last and best hope of defeating the terrorist scourge now visited on the Home Counties.
The landlady of the block of letting rooms, the curious neighbour behind her lace curtains, the inquisitive salesman in the second-hand car yard, the Commander regarded them as his most reliable allies. If he could not be bothered to abandon his schedule and turn out, then he could not expect the watchful and the curious to telephone the police with their suspicions.
He still experienced the sledgehammer blow of shock. He reckoned he always would. He stared grimly across the scene. He had been told in the car coming down that James Tennyson, late of the Northern Ireland Office, now with the Department of Trade and Industry, had been warned that his name was on a list passed from Dublin nine months before, and told also that a local Crime Prevention Officer had been to his home to make recommendations on a security system that wouldn't eat half of a senior civil servant's salary. And he had been told that the man was ill, too ill to go to the office that day, that his wife had taken the Volvo rather than her own smaller car to go with their two children to collect some others for a music class. Tennyson had been taken to a brother's house in Kent.
It was pitiful, they were so naked, these men and their families. The Commander stood alone. He was tall, straight in the back. He tugged continually at his heavy moustache.
The car, metallic grey, was just recognisable as a Volvo. The two nearside doors were completely off. The roof, with the splintered sun hatch at the apex, had expanded to a jagged pyramid. The bonnet was nowhere to be seen and a far-side front wheel was gone. Close to a window frame was the chalked outline of a small body shape and a buckled shoe and one half of a violin case.
The car had cleared the drive, probably bounced in the gutter, and been almost in the middle of the road when the device exploded. The garden fence was flattened back onto the flower bed, the gates were off their hinges and mangled, a bare cherry tree was snapped off at its roots. The front windows of the house were blown in, but the curtains were now drawn and flapping in the wind. He knew the age of the girls, and the name of Tennyson's w i f e… He wasn't even important. He had once been a civil servant doing whatever civil servants do, but in Belfast.
There were neighbours across the road who stared at him. They stood with defiantly folded arms.
A Chief Inspector was at his shoulder.
"The garage had an alarm, and he could have expected that. He still went into the garage. He was prepared to take a hell of a risk. .
"So, was he stupid?"
There was the grate, now, of the shovels gathering up the fragments of glass and the metal mess from the roadway to tip into the dustbins.
They moved across to the pavement to allow the recovery vehicle to pass by with the winch to drag the Volvo onto its trailer.
"Ruthless, I'd say, determined to get it right. He used a heavy tool to get the garage window o p e n… "
The Commander said, "Sounds like him."
"Probably a big screwdriver."
"That's my old love, Jon Jo, taking risks again."
When he couldn't sleep, as he hadn't slept in the last ten weeks, when his wife chucked him out and into the spare room at the back of their house, then the face that filled the Commander's mind was that of Jon Jo Donnelly.
"Brennard? Hope I didn't wake you. Ernest Wilkins here…
Something's come up that I'd like to discuss with you. I can't talk about it on the phone. I hope you haven't anything that can't be switched on Monday morning… Let's say before the chaos starts, eight o'clock.
Goodbye, and have a good weekend."
2
It was the story that the child loved best, the story that had no ending.
"They called him Shane. He was from the family of the Donnellys, and they had a small castle at what was then called Ballydonnelly that had been built beside the Torrent river, where there was a ford. People could cross the ford, wade across the river, at that place, so it was right for a castle. Shane was one of the young men of the family of the Donnellys. His father was Patrick Modardha, a funny name because it means that he was called Patrick the Gloomy. It is 350 years ago that this all started. They were the Catholic people, they owned the land, and the English set themselves to drive them off that land just because they were Catholics and to put their own people, thugs and scum, onto that land…