'Nothing really. I'm to give you this.' Sarah Milek handed over a sealed envelope which Avedissian accepted in silence. 'Open it here,' she said. 'It contains all you need.'
Avedissian sat down at the long table that had been used by Sir Michael and the others. He opened the envelope as Sarah Milek turned to leave. When she reached the door she turned and said, 'Take your time. When you're ready the porter will let you out.'
Avedissian examined the contents. One hundred pounds in cash, a railway timetable and a travel warrant. A brief typed and unsigned letter instructed him to present himself in the lobby of the Brecon Inn in Ebbw Vale on Saturday at ten in the morning. There was a suggestion that it might be sensible to spend the previous night at the inn.
The porter opened the front door as Avedissian emerged from the lift and walked towards him. Almost on impulse Avedissian pointed to a building across the square and asked, 'What building is that?'
The porter seemed embarrassed and looked briefly at his feet before saying, 'I'm afraid I have no idea. I've not been here very long.'
'No, I didn't think you had,' said Avedissian. The 'porter' was no more part of Trinity College than he was.
Avedissian bought himself a large gin at a riverside pub and ordered something from the bar menu. The veranda doors were open so he took his drink outside and leaned on the railing to enjoy the green pleasantness of a perfect summer day.
'Would you like to eat out here?' asked a girl whose accent proclaimed her as a student doing vacation work.
'Please,’ he replied.
After lunch Avedissian walked by the river and thought about the morning. On the positive side he felt that he was employed again and that must be good… or was it? He could not make up his mind. He had no idea what his job was but the one good thing seemed to be that it did not involve selling and that was a big plus.
Avedissian was temperamentally unsuited to selling as a career for, apart from the occasional person whom he liked instinctively, he tended to regard people in general with reserved suspicion. They were idiots until they proved different and, if they didn't, then he had no further time for them.
Unfortunately, his career as a representative with several companies, as Sir Michael had so euphemistically put it, had brought him into contact with a succession of people who had failed the Avedissian Test when he had been in no position to flunk them. Clients had felt that he had not treated them with due deference and company superiors had felt that he had not acknowledged their true importance. In the end both had conspired to make his life a misery.
All that was behind him now. The question was, what lay in front? He paused to watch two little boys play with model boats in the water before leaving the towpath to rejoin the road by crossing the footbridge. He had a hundred pounds and a travel warrant in his pocket and he had to be in Wales on Saturday.
TWO
Kevin O’Donnel was dying and like so many at such times, he was unprepared for death and struggled to say so much before it was too late. Martin O'Neill cradled the dying man's head in his arms and tried to comfort him but he was too badly hurt himself to be of much use and blood flowed freely from a shattered left arm. It started to rain, turning the pools of red a muddy brown and plastering the men's hair to their heads as they huddled in their backstreet doorway.
'I'm thirsty,' croaked O'Donnell, but there was only the summer rain to moisten his parched lips.
O'Neill looked up sharply as he heard the shrill sound of a whistle in the distance. Next would come the clatter of army boots and the revving of laboured engines as the British combed the area. O'Donnell had heard the sound too and reacted with new urgency.
'Listen… Listen to me. There's an envelope in the safe at the Long House. Get it, hide it, let no one else see it. Promise me?'
'I promise.'
There was a trickle of blood at the corner of O'Donnell's mouth and a gurgling sound from his throat that said his lungs were filling up. He gripped O'Neill's lapel and pulled him closer. 'One… last order.'
O'Neill brought his ear close to hear it then sat upright and repeated, as if in a daze, the words he had just heard.
‘That's right,’ O'Donnell gasped. 'Obey it…'
O'Neill nodded dumbly as O'Donnell's head fell back and he was dead.
O'Neill clutched his wounded arm to his side as he struggled to his feet. The shouting was coming closer but the pain in his arm was becoming unbearable. He set off down the lane but had to stop as light-headedness blurred his vision, for he had lost too much blood. Knowing that he was in imminent danger of passing out he knelt down in another doorway and put his head on the ground to restore the blood supply to his brain. He had to make a decision.
The British had already achieved a major victory. They had killed Kevin O'Donnell, the IRA’s senior commander in Belfast and, whether they knew it or not, the most listened-to voice on the war council. They must not take him alive as well, for he knew too much and the British would make him talk, of that he was sure. There was no level of bravery that could stand up to modern interrogation techniques and only a fool would believe differently. By the time that sound machine had scrambled his brain he would be ready to kiss the Queen's arse and recite nursery rhymes for the Duke. There was no real decision to make. He would have to take his own life.
The ultimate test of loyalty had come and here, in a dark street in Belfast with the rain pouring down, his life would come to an end. Had it been worthwhile? Would anyone miss him? And what of O'Donnell's last order? Had the dying man taken leave of his senses? Surely he could not have meant it? But he had, O'Neill was sure of that. He had seen O'Donnell's eyes when he had said it and the man had been perfectly lucid. But now it seemed to be academic anyway for circumstances were dictating that he would be in no position to carry it out. He reached inside his jacket and pulled out his pistol.
The pain from his arm was becoming unbearable and O'Neill knew that he could not remain conscious for much longer. Just as long as he could pull the trigger. His vision blurred again as he tried to focus on the meagre output from a faulty streetlight on the other side of the lane. The filament dissolved in the rain to form a misty halo that grew and grew until it swallowed him up and all was quiet.
There was a smell of fried onions when O'Neill awoke and he could hear the yells of children playing. His first black thought that he might be inside a British prison was allayed for the moment, for prisons did not smell of fried onions. They smelt of cabbage and urine. And they did not sound of children, they clanged and echoed. A stab of pain from his arm made him consider a hospital but that idea did not gel either. It did not feel like a hospital because it was cold. Hospitals were not cold. They had the heated dryness of a hairdresser's and the smell of a school sick room.
O'Neill started to shiver then found that he could not stop. The involuntary convulsions stirred his arm to new extremes of pain and made him cry out as he clutched at it to minimise the effects of the tremor.
A woman came into the room and hurried over to him, alarmed at what she saw. 'Easy,' she soothed, pushing him back gently on to the pillow. 'You're all right. You're safe now. Try to relax.'
O'Neill searched the woman's face and found reassurance. The convulsions became more intermittent, each one being met by the woman's renewed insistence that all was well. O'Neill thought that she looked about forty-five but had to admit that the truth could have lain anywhere from twenty-five upwards. The lines around her eyes and the thickness of her waistline said that she led the kind of life that brought age early to a woman. Her fingers smelled of nicotine as she brought the blanket up to his chin.
'Where am I?' O'Neill asked.
'The Flats.'
O'Neill's eyes asked the question.
The Doonan Flats. My husband and his brother brought you here.'
'But the Doonan…'
