Alistair Murray's title was that of Intelligence Analyst with the Foreign Office. He reviewed intelligence reports and memos which concerned matters in the Republic of Ireland. As well as skimming the daily release from the Government Communications Headquarters, Murray was also privy to intelligence emanating from covert sources in the Irish Republic and
Northern Ireland. After the phone call to Murray, Kenyon had decided that rank or not, he'd like very much indeed to cut Murray down to size. Especially if Murray ever tried to be coy and hint about the liaison he would necessarily have with the Secret Service to do his job well.
Kenyon had gone to Century House at nine-thirty last night and had pulled everything on Combs out of the Registry. Less than a half hour after he had corralled the files, Kenyon at least had some satisfaction in knowing that someone else's Sunday night had been scuttled, too. A Foreign Office request for the files on Combs had come in the person of someone called Thwaite-Murray's retainer, Kenyon found out later.
Kenyon had heard of an Arthur Combs, but that was three and more years ago. Combs was a relic, an artefact from a different age. Now that Combs was dead and it looked like murder, Murray and company had suddenly seen the light. They, too, wanted to re-evaluate the Combs' material in a hurry. To Kenyon it had all the signs of a potential cock-up.
By midnight last night Kenyon had still felt that feathery doubt in his stomach. Murray had done an evaluation on Combs before, but it had been at arm's length, relying mostly on what one source, a Second Secretary in the embassy in Dublin, had squeezed into half-page memos. Evaluate, Kenyon mused cynically. Garbage in, garbage out. Kenyon snorted.
The feature about Combs' material which stayed in his mind, above all else, was a quality that he had noticed in the man's more recent reports, the faintest signs of something which made his antenna quiver. He hadn't settled on a word for this quality: taciturnity, a tone of resentment, a faintly querulous tone which stopped barely short of telling more? Was Combs trying to explain something, was there that fatal germ of. sympathy, an involvement of the heart to explain in what he said and wrote?
His stomach bilious from midnight coffee, Kenyon recalled a phrase from his university days. 'More Irish than the Irish themselves.' It referred to how Normans who had invaded Ireland assimilated to Irish ways. They proved to be the vanguard of Irish resistance to later Tudor ventures on the island. What was it about that damp island that insinuated itself through everything there? An atmosphere of disloyalty, some anarchic sentiment, another Italy? Ortgeist, was that the word…?
There had been no sign of a failing mind coming through Combs' reports, and Murray should have known that. Combs' reports had sometimes been months apart. A half-dozen priority requests to him to be on the lookout for specific people had been replied to promptly. None had been of any use.
It took a detached scrutiny and several re-reads for Kenyon to finally decide that Murray's assessment had missed the mark. As a university student, Kenyon had read many diarists and his preference in books was still for memoirs. In the last year of Combs' reports, Kenyon felt a slipping away, a closing of some kind. It trickled out even through the typewriter of the officer who summarized Combs' stuff. There had been fewer and fewer particulars in the last year's material. Where before there had been an exact description number, there were now bland comments. 'Party no longer resident in the area' or 'X reported to have moved, whereabouts unknown.' The phrases were almost ironic, as if they quietly parodied the monotonous language of reportese.
Kenyon waited for the pedestrian light opposite the Albert Gate into Hyde Park. While he stood by the swirl of traffic, he imagined Murray using the Combs' reports to feather his own nest in meetings. Murray could throw around phrases like 'diminished activity there… Irish police and border patrols seem to have a better handle' and 'support seems to be dwindling in that area.' Was it something in Murray's nature and background that brought him to believe that superiors wanted only good news? Maybe it was inevitable that in the Foreign Office, or bureaucracies in general, sycophancy ruled and meetings were rituals for you to try and make impressions on your superiors. Everybody was bored to death with the Irish problem. A place where things went wrong anyway, without help from anyone. A bog into which things disappeared.
Kenyon had slept poorly last night, Murray's bromides circling elliptically around his head. He had been in the Security Service long enough to know that paradoxes were part of the day's work. His job was to ensure the security of ministers and senior civil servants, not to judge what they had done in the war. Kenyon's wife knew that he was a civil servant who worked for the Home Office. She didn't need to know, any more than any other Briton, that MI5 really answered only to the PM via the Permanent Undersecretary in the Home Office. That was only if the PM asked questions, too. Ministers could come and go, but the Defence of the Realm was sacred. Wendy, Kenyon's wife, used to quip about the phrase early in their marriage when her husband would come home after midnight. Kenyon now ran a desk in the Protective Security Branch of the Service. Very often it meant that he had to protect Cabinet Ministers from the deserving consequences of their own venal stupidity.
Kenyon had discovered very early in his career that when a colleague drawled out phrases like 'Defence of the Realm from external and internal threat' in a caricature of the effete public school drawl, the colleague was deadly serious. The sardonic delivery was the sign of a mild heresy, sarcasm which only a true believer could utter so casually. The phrase was one of the few directives ever given to M15 in written form by the Home Secretary. It dated from 1952, and it came from a one-page set of guidelines issued long before it was publicly admitted that Britain even had a Security Service.
While he had lain awake in the early hours, Kenyon had brooded about the damn island across the Irish Sea. Ire-land. Land of ire. Could it really ever be considered 'external'? Should have sunk the place back in 1921. Murray would be hung out to dry if after all his assessments, it turned out that Combs hadn't been bluffing… Still, it was Kenyon who was finally responsible for the damage when any trouble reached his turf. Sleep had come late to him. Kenyon had even woken up feeling harassed.
The lights changed and Kenyon strode purposively into the park. He crossed Carriage Drive. When he caught sight of the Dell restaurant, he was both relieved and immediately anxious to realise that he had made his decision. No matter what Murray would say here, Kenyon knew that he had to defend his suspicions about Combs. He'd have to brief Hugh Robertson, the Director of his section, before lunchtime. Better to squirm through that meeting, even if the Director General himself was there, rather than have this blow up in his own face. Kenyon also realised that he was hoping for a sign that would grant an instant logic and credibility to his suspicions. There was but the slimmest chance of winnowing anything like that from the man he had arranged to meet in the restaurant, one Alistair Murray.
Kilmartin's secretary, Eilis, greeted Minogue.
'I have it all waiting for you. And there's preliminary on Mr Combs, too.'
'Aren't you great, Eilis?'
'It has been said, all right,' Eilis answered in the exacting grammar of her native tongue, Irish. 'Things are very efficient here now, don't you know? Now, Detective Keating phoned to say he's in Stepaside station with two detectives from the station. They want to interview three men at the station, and they're going to pick them up directly. Tip from an interview with a barman. Barman was on duty in Fox's pub Saturday night. Mr Combs was there, he says.'
'Three men?'
'Three brothers by the name of Mulvaney, and they live in a place I never heard of before. Barnacullia. Up under Two Rock Mountain. These brothers are well known to police in Stepaside, being as they have criminal records. They say there may be difficulties getting the co-operation of these brothers.'
She began unwrapping a packet of Gitanes. Minogue had known Eilis for some years. She was a single woman of thirty-eight or so, from the Dingle peninsula, who had tired of teaching Irish to fellow civil servants. The language had been a sacred cow in the public service, because it had held the bizarre status of co-equal with English as an official language of the state. Eilis had had enough of civil servants and teachers using Irish simply to get promotion, and one morning, stone cold sober, she unburdened herself of a life's rich gleaning of insults, all in her native tongue. While some of her baroque curses were narrowly local to her native County Kerry, she managed to touch most of the important taboos in her minute's fluency. It was one of her better students who deciphered some of her imprecations. Eilis was oddly satisfied to have taught him so well. After all, the one who reported her was a Dublin hooligan.
The civil service had a heart, however, and it listened to Eilis's uncle, a strong Party man who represented Kerry in the Dail, a man with formidable tribal connections. Civil servants who had gone mad, 'had trouble with their nerves.'
