A Prospect of Vengeance

'A big bugger. Like . . . her old man, who was long-dead . . .'e was Rugby League. So she said there was one of 'em built like

'im: six-foot an' more, with broad shoulders an' long legs, an'

a broken nose from way back — ?' Buller paused to let the next identification sink in. 'An' that's Audley, to the life, by all accounts.' Shorter pause. 'Rugby Union, 'e played — not Rugby League . . . But that's Audley.' Even shorter pause.

'But he was late: it was all over when he arrived. It was Butler first, with his umbrella — '

' Why?' Jenny snapped the question, before Buller could continue. 'What was he doing there?'

'Doing?' Buller gave a snort of derision. 'I'll tell you what he wasn't doing, Lady: he wasn't expecting to meet O'Leary.'

'Why not?'

'F — !' Buller swallowed the obscenity. 'If you were goin' to meet an IRA marksman . . . would you carry your golfing umbrella, to help him aim?' He let the thought sink in. 'An'

besides . . . Butler had been told to give O'Leary back to the dummy2

Anti-Terrorist Squad — an' the Special Branch — after the bomb at the University: it was them that were after O'Leary.

An' they thought he'd long gone, too.'

'You don't know why Butler was there?'

'Christ Almighty!' Buller simulated outrage. 'Twenty-four hours — thirty-six hours ... an' you expect me to know what British Intelligence was up to in 1978? An' not just MI5 — but Research and Development? An' not even MI5 knows what R

& D is up to, most of the time. Lady — you don't want much, do you!'

'I'm sorry, Mr Buller. I was just asking, not expecting.' Jenny recovered quickly. Tell me about Mitchell.'

'Yes.' Buller accepted the name, but stopped on his acceptance. Because 'Mitchell' wasn't just another name any more: he echoed distant gunfire now, and maybe more than that.

'He was with Audley?'

'No. Audley was late — I told you. The woman was with him.'

'Yes — of course! Ian's woman.' Jenny dismissed Frances Fitzgibbon once more. 'So ... Mitchell was there with Butler, was he?'

Ian's woman, thought Ian: in a curious way, that was what she had become now — just that. And the need to know more about her obsessed him again suddenly.

'Go on, Mr Buller.' Jenny's patience was beginning to stretch again. 'What — '

dummy2

'Tell me about the woman, Reg.' Ian overrode her. 'Mrs Fitzgibbon.'

'Ian! For heaven's sake!'

'Tell me about the woman, Reg.'

'Yes.' Buller ignored Jenny. ''Just a slip of a girl', the old witch said — Mrs Rowe said she said. A pretty little thing, too

— '

'She had good eye-sight, did she? At ninety-one?' snapped Jenny.

'Eighty-four. An' yes, she did.' Buller's voice strengthened.

'But I told you: she had this old telescope. An' she used to sit in her room, by the window, an' spy on everything — on all the people that came to visit the abbey ruins. Like, it was her hobby: see the coaches come over the narrow bridge, down the road, where they used to get stuck. An' then the kids climbin' on the ruins, an' their mothers pullin' 'em off an'

thumpin' 'em — ' He stopped suddenly. 'A pretty little thing.

An' she saw 'er first when the car came. Like a racin' car, slitherin' on the gravel in the car-park. An' out she comes like lightning — didn't even close the door after 'er, before she started runnin': that's what the old woman saw first, that took her eye — the way she went off runnin'.'

Buller paused there, and Ian thought for a moment that he was challenging Jenny to interrupt again. But Jenny didn't speak, and in the next instant he knew why — and why Buller had stopped, as the final picture he was painting for them in dummy2

words began to form again in his own mind — and to move, like a suddenly-animated film.

'It was rainin'.' Buller confirmed that second thought with extra information, to complete the picture. 'It 'ad been rainin'

all day, off an' on. So there 'adn't been any visitors much, before then. An' it was November, in any case.'

November 11. Next day, there would have been the Armistice Day Sunday parades, with everyone wearing their red poppies up and down the country, and the Queen televised at eleven o'clock, laying her wreath at the Cenotaph, before the veterans' march-past.

'An' then ... it was the way she ran.' Buller's voice was matter-of-fact, as it always was when he was totally-