'Don't think you can pull the strings behind my back, young lady.
And don't you go thinking that I cared when I heard you were gone missing, that you damn near got yourself killed. Don't think that I was fussed…'
Cathy touched his hand. 'Thanks.'
At the Dungannon barracks two constables had been detailed to provide Detective Sergeant Browne with immediate close-quarters protection. They were waiting for him. His superior, the Detective Inspector of Special Branch who had taken Rennie's call, had set in train the process of transferring D.S. Browne and his wife and child.
Two detectives in plain clothes, women, armed, had slipped discreetly into the house, like friends calling for a coffee morning, to guard her and the baby and to help her with the packing of essentials.
Why wasn't D.S. Browne on the radio in his car, the Detective Inspector had asked of D.C. McDonald? Malfunctioning, in repair, been reported, should be in working order tomorrow.
The motorcycle had been stolen in the early hours of the morning in the Creggan estate of Derry, away to the west. It had not been seen on the motorway that linked Lisburn to Dungannon, but now it was at the wide roundabout at the end of the motorway, between Derrycreevy and Moygashel. Many motorists and lorry drivers saw the motorcycle on the Donnydeade side of the road, and saw the two men in their black leather gear and their crash helmets, bent over the engine parts. The messages came to them by portable radio. The first that the car had turned out of the avenue and onto the main road. The second that the car was turning onto the motorway. The third that the car had not used the alternative route from the motorway turn-off at Tamnamore, thai it was coming the safe way, the fast way. They had the make and the colour of the car and the registration. A van driver, carrying building equipment, saw the two men finish their repairs and straddle the 500 cc motorcycle and gun the engine. The car. came steadily into the roundabout. The motorcycle powered forward, drew level with the policeman's car.
There was the dark line of the high ground ahead. They were east of Crossmaglen and west of Forkhill. The girl had said that it was a good route, and it was the one that she knew best. Himself, he would have gone far to the west, almost to the Atlantic seaboard, before crossing the border, but he couldn't fault the girl's choice. There were no patrols, no roadblocks. The border was only a bump and a lurch from the car.
They crossed where the army had cut a ditch ten years before, where ten years less a couple of days ago the local people had filled the ditch in again. The lurch of the car told Jon Jo that he was home.
He saw a helicopter far away, a high speck. He saw the watchtowers of the Brit army on the hilltops. He saw the dark purple of the winter-scarred heather and the old gold of the bracken and the worn green of the fields. He settled back against the seat. He wound down the window and let the cold air rip into his face. The tension slipped from him. Jon Jo Donnelly was back among his own.
The car had gouged twin tyre tracks through the grass verge and down the bank. Bren stood beside the driver's window. The glass had gone with the gunfire. He stood and stared at the face of the come and she had looked at the dead, cold face and she had gone back to her car that was parked behind Rennie’s. Rennie’s driver was out of his car and smoking hard.
The back of the head was smashed to hell and gone but the face was recognisable. A young man’s face, and the moustache that all policemen in the province seemed to need, His tie was neatly knotted at his throat still and the shirt was soaked in blood. Bren stood a few feet away and Rennie was at his shoulder. He stood back because the Scenes of Crime men men, white overalls, were already at work, and the photographer. Subdued voices all about. Necessary stuff about camera angles and spent bullets, one of them chipped and, oh aye, out of shape, embedded in the inside of the front passenger door.
They had come off the motorway, following hard on Rennie 's car, swept the roundabout, past the football pitches, been short of the rugby club, when they had seen the rotating blue lights on the cars and on the police Land-rovers. A policeman saluting, leaning down, explaining to Rennie, and Rennic had been out of his car and walking briskly back to them. They might be interested, they might care to follow him. Cathy had walked down the bank behind Rennie and had withstood his terrible silence, not rejecting his fury, not denying the blame he was determined to wound her with.
She had absorbed it and she had gone back up the slope to the car. Bren knew nothing worthwhile to say. There seemed to be no anger around him. Too soon for that. Too much to get on with. It wasn't them, this time it was another poor bastard. He thought they had seen it all before, and would do it all and see it all again. He stayed until the men in black suits brought the plain wood coffin awkwardly down the steep bank.
He turned away. He didn't want to see the body manhandled out of the car.
He stood at the top of the bank and he gulped for air.
Cathy had her arms folded across her chest, watched him.
'I'm sorry,' Bren said.
Rennie's voice was utterly flat. 'That's very good. I'm very gratified that you're sorry. I'd be sorry if I'd sat on something for fourteen hours and not thought through the consequences. We could drive back to Lisburn and you could say the same thing to a young woman, that you're sorry, and you could help her change her baby, and you could tell her that for fourteen hours you slept on a little bit of information that had happened your way. Would you like to do that?'
He wondered if Rennie were about to hit him, if the big fist were about to belt him. The men in the black suits came past him, mud on their polished black shoes. Bren shook his head. 'I don't think I've the strength…'
'To face up to the consequences? No, not many do. They leave that to other people.' And without a glance at Cathy, he went to his car, slammed the door, and was gone.
Cathy said softly, 'You have to hack it, Bren. There's no other way.'
He saw the defiance on her face.
He saw no love in her, only her strength. He loved her and he felt his fear of her.
He was always tuned to the B.B.C.'s Radio Ulster when he worked. The B.B.C. didn't have the good music but it had the news on the hour. The news carried the condemnations:
The Secretary of State – 'a bestial and pointless crime…'; theM.P. -
'… this dreadful murder of a young man who had the courage to stand up and be counted…'; a bishop – '… every decent-minded person will be revolted by this killing, this disgusting sectarian killing…'; and the Chief Constable – '… the force I have the honour to command will not for one instant be intimidated from its duty by the men of violence who prey on our society…'
Mossie heard them all. His hand shook and the brush strokes wavered. The bitch had let a policeman be blown away to keep him in place. No doubt on it. She had had all of a night and a morning to clear the policeman off the patch, and the policeman was dead. There was the trembling in his hand and he told the foreman that he was sickening with the 'flu, and that he was packing it in for the day.
The kids not yet returned from school. His mother was out, thank the Christ. Mary was asleep in her cot.
He told Siobhan of his power and saw the shock spread across her face.
'They'd do that for you…?'
‘’For me to get them Jon Jo.'
'Does it frighten you?'
‘’Half out of my skin.'
Jon Jo Donnelly had been the big man on the mountain. He had been the man the kids whispered of and the man the girls eyed. He had been the man that the soldiers hunted. When Jon Jo had been on the mountain then no policeman and no soldier had felt himself safe.
Mossie knew all the tales. Donnelly with the heavy-calibre, and with the culvert bomb, and with the long- barrel sniping rifle. There had been a big man in South Derry, and another down in Fermanagh, and another from Cullyhanna near the border in Armagh, all shot down, and there had been Jon Jo Donnelly. It was the stuff of stories.
'How much’ll they give you?'
'Don't know.'
'It'd be thousands?'
'Sure to be.'
