'I had a meeting with Five's man. He thinks our friend may have done something underhand. Wrote a bloody memoir. Left some documents, or told someone. They'll want you for a debriefing, too,' said Murray. 'And I expect they'll do a sweep of the house, too,' he added.
'I'm ninety-nine percent sure the place is clean. There was nothing.'
'They'll be thorough,' Murray replied. 'They're very tender about the border security conference here. Everybody's edgy.'
Ball read the rebuke between Murray's words. Couldn't have come at a worse time… was there no better way to fix it? Ball said nothing.
'What exactly did he say to you when he called you on Thursday?' asked Murray.
'He phoned me at the embassy. I met him in a pub that afternoon. He'd been drinking-'
'But did he say how he'd do it?' Murray interrupted. 'What did he say he could do? What would he use?'
Ball paused before answering. This was his third time trying to reassure Murray.
'He said he wanted out and that we had better listen to him this time around. I got him calmed down. He didn't say how but that he'd see to it somehow-'
'Somehow,' Murray repeated. 'Somehow.'
'Exactly. He thought we had his mail opened and that we knew when he went to the toilet. He had no real plan, nothing. He went off at half-cock, without thinking it out. He said I should 'walk the plank' for it. You too.'
'He didn't know me,' Murray said quickly.
'I know. More bluff. He only met you once. He called you'the ringleader.' How do you like that title?'
Murray did not care for Ball's grim humour one bit. There was a taunting edge to it: Ball, the action-man, chiding Murray, the desk-man. Murray thought back to the meeting in a seedy Dublin hotel. Combs had already been into his second-or was it third? — Scotch minutes after the hotel bar had opened, looking sullenly from Ball to Murray, hardly bothering to conceal his hostility.
'But he had no inkling after you met him Thursday? That we wouldn't buy, I mean?'
'Right.' Ball said sharply. 'I got him calmed down and I gave him what he wanted. I told him it would take a couple of days to get the passport through, so it'd be Monday at the earliest. But that we'd hurry things up…'
'Yes,' said Murray, distracted yet.
'… Stroked his hand, cooed his ear about the work he had done. I sent him home happy. At least more sober than when he arrived at the pub. I told him we had been about to wrap the whole thing up soon.'
'You're certain he wasn't specific even then?'
'Absolutely. He didn't say what he would do, or would have done. That's because he didn't have anything prepared,' Ball added slowly for emphasis.
Except his instincts, Murray almost added aloud. Kenyon's reading of the Combs' material… Would Combs have suspected something from the way Ball had behaved at that meeting, that he'd never be let go knowing what he knew? Was Combs really the boozy, truculent character that Ball had been dealing with, or had Kenyon scented something more basic in his make-up?
'All right,' Murray said finally, staying his own wandering. 'Expect to be called in about Combs.'
Murray hung up and hailed a taxi. He tried to ignore the garrulous Cockney cabbie. Ball was experienced, dependable. His motivation was at least as high as Murray's own. Mervyn Ball had dealt with Combs for two years, babysitting him, humouring him-his had to be the more accurate assessment. Most of all, Ball had not flinched, even when Murray himself had thought it precipitate to silence the old man.
The taxi joined a traffic jam near Oxford Circus. The cabbie's eyes sought out Murray in the mirror.
'Bloody bomb scare, I shouldn't wonder,' said the Cockney. 'Who's it this time, I wonder? The bloody Arabs or the Irish, eh?'
Murray ignored the question. Combs' 'Somehow': it was very telling, all right. A loose threat, stillborn. He wondered if Ball had felt much pity for the old man. Hardly. Ball had been tough from the start. Perhaps not tough- more like firm, uncompromising-but still able to coax the old man. Did Combs wonder how Ball could cave in so readily to his demand last Thursday, though? Combs might have sobered up and then wondered why, after years of the cold shoulder, he was suddenly being granted what he had been asking for at least thirty years…
Murray recalled the black-and-white framed snapshot which he kept in his desk. The confident, boyish face and the haircut they had laughed about. It was 1971, of course, and even Murray himself had grown sideburns. 'Passing out at Sandhurst' had been the joke when Ian Murray had his arm around his younger brother's neck in a chokehold, laughing into the camera. Ian the doer, Ian the adventurer. A ham, a litany of broken arms and legs through youth, the ebullient extrovert. The same Ian Murray on a greasy footpath in Belfast three years later, dead before he hit the pavement, the dumdum spraying his brains and teeth twenty feet further down the path.
Did Mervyn Ball have a photo like that, too? One of his own brother, one he looked at before he went to Combs' house that night? Donald Ball had been a Royal Greenjacket, Ian Murray a Para. Ball told him that he had a letter from Donald describing the mountains outside Belfast-'once you're out of bloody Belfast, it's a marvellous country, believe it or not'. Three days later, his brother was dismembered by a bomb in a roadside culvert… believe it or not.
The taxi inched forward.
'It's the silly season, in'nit then?' said the cabbie.
Murray took out his wallet and looked at the meter. He handed three pounds to the driver and opened the door himself.
'Ta, mate. Bloody bombers are probably back safe in bloody Ireland by now, sitting in a pub laughing. The bastards.'
Murray paused before slamming the door.
'Safe in Ireland?' Murray echoed with a sneer. 'No such thing.'
CHAPTER 5
Minogue had finished a jumble of cauliflower, potatoes and stringy mutton. The vegetables were barely tolerable and he had little relish for the mutton'. For his pains, the waitress could only offer him the choice of jelly or ice cream.
'I'll go jelly then,' he said.
'Tea or coffee?'
'Neither thanks. I'm saving myself for Bewley's later on. Don't tell anyone or I'll be in trouble.'
When Minogue saw the cubes of jelly shivering on the bowl under him, he knew that he didn't have the heart for it. Still, he trapped a cube under the edge of the spoon, cut it and tasted it. Wicked. Was jelly the kind of thing that old people living on their own would eat? Like in America with the TV dinners you bought and could just sling into the oven and eat right out of the package? Old people living alone… Maybe Mrs Hartigan had fed Combs right. Minogue felt his thoughts slump. Damn and damn again. There had to be something she'd know to get this moving.
When Minogue reached the Squad HQ in St John's Road, the smell of Turkish tobacco stopped him in his tracks. Yes, Paris, Minogue remembered, with his wife giggling at his French: the smell of Gauloises, piss and diesel in the early morning streets by Mont-martre.
Eilis nodded at him. Her air of impatience served to keep groundlings at bay. She had had enough of humans, it seemed, but not enough that she did not entertain a Trinity College professor as her lover. So the rumour went anyway. The ones who raised their eyebrows the most were the policemen who were about the same age as Eilis, married men.
'It's yourself that's in it, is it?' she breathed. Wisps of her dark red hair had escaped the clasp gathering her hair over the collar of her blouse.
'And how's our Inspector?' she continued in Irish.
'Fine and well,' Minogue replied in her vernacular. 'He says hello to all and sundry here.'
Eilis sat down. She almost smiled at Minogue's pun. On the surface, 'fine and well' in her vernacular of Munster Irish meant that the party so described was happily drunk.
'I have reams of stuff to give you, you'll be thrilled to hear,' Eilis muttered around her cigarette. The smoke
