They had had him for a week, a good clear week since the big men in their combat jackets and their balaclavas had bullocked into his house. A week before they had hooded him, trussed him with twine, put him into the boot of a car or the back of a van, and driven him to the killing ground.
He saw that the hands were tied together at the wrist and seemed to clutch at his privates, as if even at the moment of death he had flinched from another kicking. He heard the sigh of impatience from the major behind him and the fidgeting of the policemen. He couldn't blame them, couldn't blame anyone for wanting to be off this bloody awful hillside before darkness came down.
In time the player might have become seriously important. As it was, he had only been useful. He had wanted to please. That had been the worst thing about him. Pathetically eager to please. Perhaps they had rushed him. He had told the player often enough that his life was sacred, that no risk would be taken with his safety. And he would never know how his player had been discovered. It could have been because of his knowing of the movement of the two Kalashnikovs in the car that had been stopped a month back at the apparently random vehicle checkpoint at which two volunteers had been arrested. It could have been because he had flashed his money in a bar when the whole estate knew he hadn't been in work since he came out of gaol. It could have been because he'd taken drink and the adrenalin of the double life had pushed out some careless remark. Whatever the reason, the player was dead, and the player's life had been his responsibility.
They always hooded them. They always took the shoes off them; in that community it was the ultimate shame to die barefoot. He took the black plastic in his hands and ripped it. He saw the bruising on the face, and the left eye puffed shut, and the front tooth missing. He saw the blood mess of the bullet's entry wound.
He nodded. It was his player. He pushed himself up from the grass.
As he had stepped away they were already bringing the stretcher forward, and moments later the Scenes of Crime men were starting a check of the ground on which the body had been dumped. It had happened before, it would happen again. The handler gazed down into the mutilated and tortured face of his player, and then the face was lost to his view by the slashing zip of the body bag.
He walked fast back down the lane towards the knot of soldiers and policemen. No one spoke to him. He was the handler who had lost his man to the enemy for a week. His man had been beaten and kicked and burned until he shrieked his confession onto the slowly turning spools of their tape recorder. The enemy would know everything of him that Eddie Dignan, codename Tallboy, had known.
Through a farm gateway, he sheltered by the hedge from the wind.
He wanted to be out on the first of the helicopters, with the major and the senior police officers and the body of the informer. He had thought himself a hard man and the tears ran down his cheeks. He would never work in the Province again. Never again play God, hold in his safekeeping the life of an informer. Good riddance. Send in some other bastard, and good luck to you, sunshine.
In the barracks where the helicopter put down, he walked at once to his car. He had to wait at the main security gate because the sentries gave precedence to the hearse coming in. On an empty road, in the darkness, he drove back to Belfast to write his report, to pack his bag, and to get on a flight home. Two and a half years of work come to an end, with his player in a ditch.
'There was this preacher, might have been Paisley and it might not, real red hell-fire merchant, and up the Shankill he's given them two hours of sermon, frightened the wits out of them. First time in two hours and he draws breath, mops his forehead, sweat like it's raining. 'Are there any questions?' Little wee lady, clutching her brolly, at the back, pipes up,
'Do angels have wings?' Big fellow in the front, fast as light, says 'Do they, feck…' And the preacher he shouts back, 'One question at a time
…' Got it?'
Jon Jo laughed out loud. He always laughed at that story, whether he heard it or whether he told it himself.
He thought the driver was all tensed up and needed to wind down.
The driver had missed the last set of lights, gone straight through on red. The joke was to calm the driver. And round the next bend there had been a police car, just cruising. Even Jon Jo, and it was hard to get his temperature up, had felt his heart racing when they had gone past the police car after being tucked in behind it for a full minute when the police car had slowed right down. And over the next mile as the police car sat on their tail.
'I heard it already,' the driver muttered, through gritted teeth.
'Did you now?'
'And it was told better the last time.'
'Was it now?'
And then the police siren exploded on them and the driver moaned and jammed on the brakes, but the police car was past them, blue lights twirling, and they sat still with the engine off for several minutes, saying nothing.
He had never seen the driver before. He had been given over the telephone the colour and make of the car, its registration number and what time it would pick him up by the taxi rank outside the underground station when he came off the last train of the night. He cuffed the shoulder of the driver to encourage him. The drivers weren't as good as they had been the year before, nor the couriers.
'So just watch the road.'
'I will.'
The driver's accent was Dublin. Jon Jo Donnelly didn't rate these youngsters from down south. Given his choice, and he wasn't, he would have had boys from his own place, but they sent him drivers and couriers from the south now because they were the ones who weren't on the fingerprint files.
Jon Jo had the map spread across his knees, and he used a torch to track their route into the sprawl beyond Wimbledon. He was wearing pink plastic washing-up gloves. The last thing that he had done before he had identified the car had been to pull on the thin, clammy gloves. It was past one in the morning. He thought the driver was scared out of his mind. He gave the directions quietly and he tried to breathe his confidence back into the kid. They came to the road, the headlights caught the name of the road.
'Well done, that's great.'
The driver did not reply.
The road was poorly lit, long stretches of blackness between the street lights. Along the avenue of mock- Tudor homes a very few still showed an upstairs light, and one only had a ground-floor light on. The suburb was asleep. He had walked down the road and round the right-hand bend just before the target's house, in the morning of the day before. He had walked fast and not slackened his speed when he had passed the house that concerned him. The house needed new guttering at the side above the garage, and he had noted the car parked by the front door, and he had seen the bright new burglar alarm box high above the windows on the first floor. There were no lights now in the house.
They drove down the avenue, and then did a figure of eight in the streets at the end. No cars passed them. They came back down the road again.
Two streets away there was a railway station with a sporadic service through the night from Waterloo. The driver parked there, away from the lights. It was the time of night that fathers and brothers and boyfriends would wait outside a station to pick up a girl to save her walking home. Jon Jo rehearsed the driver in his role and then he said,
'Ten minutes, could be fifteen, but you wait for me.'
'Good luck.'
'Won't be me that's needing luck. You wait, you don't crash out unless there's sirens in my street, you hear me?'
The driver said, 'Get the pig.'
'You just have the car good and ready.' Jon Jo switched off the car's interior light, checked that the car park was empty and slipped out through the door. He closed it quietly behind him. For a moment he saw the driver's face. So bloody young. He walked away from the car carrying a dark brown shopping bag, heavily weighted.
He hugged the shadows. The night was his friend, and had been ever since he could remember.
He was a little over six foot in height, broad and strong because all his life he had known physical labour. He was made more formidable by the quilted charcoal anorak that he wore and the black woollen cap that was pulled
