“Professional?”
“Professional—yes ... to the extent that there are three known training-schools in the Soviet bloc which include it in their syllabuses—schools which handle foreign trainees . . .one in East dummy1
Germany, one in Czechoslovakia . . . and the KGB one, naturally.”
“So it doesn’t have to be Irish?”
“It doesn’t have to be—no. Except that they’re the only ones who’ve used similar devices, so far . . .”
“Yes?” Was that uncertainty in the man’s voice?
“Yes . . . well, there is an element of doubt on this one, it’s true. In fact. . . doubt is about all there is, apparently.”
“Doubt?”
“About it being Irish, sir.”
Butler’s heart sank. David Audley was not an Irish specialist, and notoriously avoided any involvement with the Irish problems which came their way even peripherally. He had pinned most of his hopes on that, he realised now.
“Why?” And
“No motive, sir.”
“Since when did the INLA need a motive?”
“No connection, then. General Maxwell never served in Ulster—he wasn’t remotely Irish . . . and he was ten years into his retirement—
more than ten years . . . before this lot of Irish ‘troubles’, anyway.
The nearest thing he had to an Irish connection was his servant, Kelly, and he hardly qualifies as Irish within the meaning of the word, any more than Maxwell himself does—did.”
“Kelly?” Butler could recall no mention of any Kelly, either in the newspapers or in the intelligence circular. But as a name Kelly was dummy1
Irish of the Irish.
“
at Loos, bar at Ypres . . . son went through the ‘39-’45—Dunkirk, Tunisia, Italy—Maxwell’s regiment . . . Peace-time soldiering afterwards, then drove a taxi up north somewhere. . . . Came back to the General about four years ago—totally devoted to him. . . .
What they say is, if he’d known the General’s name was on a bomb, he’d have scratched it out and put his own in its place, most likely.”
Butler thought for a moment. “Could he have been the target, then
—a lackey of the bloody British?”
“A
“Since when has the INLA been choosy?” It was too feeble though
—even for the INLA. Much too thin.
“If they’re going to start blowing up all the Kellys, then they’ll need a nuclear bomb, not a pound of jelly under the seat . . .sir.”
Andrew paused. “But they did check him out. Because it’s true he could have gone up with the General—in fact, if the General hadn’t sent him off on some errand, he
But that isn’t the point, you see.”
“So what is the point?” For Kelly to be a non-starter there had to be a point, of course: that was implicit in Del Andrew’s scorn.
dummy1
“They weren’t expecting this bomb, sir—neither the Provos nor the INLA—that’s the fact of it, the word is ... It caught them both with their trousers down—right down by their ankles.”
“How so?” ‘Not a lot’ was indeed turning out to be quite a lot. So now he also needed to know why Andrew had done so much more than read the circular on General Maxwell’s assassination.
“Well, sir ... after the Hyde Park bombing there was a lot of recrimination—killing Brits was one thing, but killing horses was another—that was bad medicine on the other side of the Atlantic . . . like, in the cowboy films you can have the Indians bite the dust, and the cowboys, and the horse-soldiers . . . but you can’t have the
“Yes.” That was another plus for Chief Inspector Andrew: he saw life as it was, not as it ought to be, with a hot heart but a cool head.
“Yes. So they weren’t planning anything for the rest of this summer. And after the heat had gone off, when things had settled down a bit, they started to reorganise quietly—both the Provos and the INLA . . . But then, out of the blue, General Maxwell’s bomb goes up in the middle of Bournemouth, and all hell breaks loose dummy1
