'Pete and I raised too many pints to have secrets. As you say, he made no friends of men he might have to watch die in battle. But he was friendly to me since I'm hard to kill, and no longer in the fight.'
'Do you think Jenkins killed him?'
'Now, you know I don't have a high opinion of the man, even on his best days. But I won't say he isn't a smart fellow. Ignorant perhaps but smart, if you know what I mean. He's kept out of trouble, even though he runs the Red Hand, and that takes a bit of work up here,' Grady said, tapping his head. 'Would a smart man endanger all that by shooting an American soldier? That brings down a whole new set of troubles upon him, he who has everything worked out so well that the English and the IRA can't touch him. Why risk upsetting that applecart, I ask myself? Money? Maybe. I've never been cursed with it myself, so I can't say how it would make a man behave. More tea?'
'Sure,' I said, holding out my cup. I stirred in some more contraband sugar and let the steam warm my face. What Grady said made sense. Would Jenkins endanger his position over a payoff? If he had, what did that mean?
'So what did that brute of an English sergeant want with you? Did he give you trouble?'
'No, he's just a chauffeur with a lousy attitude. I have to go up to Belfast tomorrow with him and another officer.'
'Well, keep your wits about you, Billy Boyle. I did not like the looks of the man.'
I nodded, drank my tea, and let the fire warm my feet. I looked at the pictures again, a dead rabbit and Jesus wearing a crown of thorns, and tried to remember what we had hanging on the walls of our house in South Boston. I was fairly certain there were no framed pictures of blood and death.
CHAPTER TWENTY
I'd arranged to meet Joe Patterson at the Lug o' the Tub at eleven o'clock. I parked my jeep next to his and knocked on the locked door. It was a few minutes before opening, but Tom let me in. Sergeant Patterson was at the bar, busy with a bowl of stew.
'Rabbit,' Tom said. 'You boys have had a hard day already. I can't serve drink yet, but you're welcome to a bowl. Short on rabbit, long on potatoes.'
Based on how Jack was wolfing the stuff down, I accepted the offer. Jack handed me a picture of Pete Brennan, smiling into the camera, standing in front of a tent, his fore-and-aft cap set at a jaunty angle. Basic training, maybe. A lifetime ago.
Tom leaned against the bar and sighed. 'How many lads have had that same photograph taken? I think I have one like it myself,' he said.
'Yeah, me too,' Jack said. 'I took that from his personal effects. Give it back when you're done, OK?'
'Sure. Find anything else?'
'No,' said Jack, scraping his spoon around the bowl to get the last of his stew. 'Nothing from around here, nothing recent.'
'Nothing that looked like receipts, invoices, shipping records?'
'Nope. Is this about the guns?'
'I'm pretty sure Pete didn't have anything to do with that but he did know about some shady deals between Jenkins and Thornton. Looks like he used that as leverage for a payoff and a ticket back to Italy.'
'Not a smart move,' Jack said.
'I think it was his only move. He lost everything at Salerno, which means he had nothing here. Maybe he was going back to the only place that meant anything to him. But he shouldn't have trusted Jenkins.'
'Do you think Andrew Jenkins had a hand in this?' Tom asked. He had moved to the other end of the bar, setting out glasses, but he had a sharp ear.
'Nothing I can prove, just shoptalk. Keep it under your hat, OK?'
'Under my hat it is, Billy. Watch your step, though. Jenkins is not a man to sit idly by if an accusation of murder is made against him. He's been suspected often enough but always manages to shake loose of it.'
'How? Do witnesses end up in ditches?'
'Some change their minds, to be sure. A visit from the Red Hand can be persuasive. Other times, the investigation just dries up. I knew a fellow down Dromara way who gave a statement that he saw Jenkins and two men walking toward Slieve Croob in the Mournes, and later saw only Jenkins and one man return. Two days later, the body of a Catholic was found in a small wood in that area.'
'So what happened?' Jack asked.
'Nothing. The constable took his statement. Hugh Carrick was investigating, or so I heard, and then nothing.'
'What happened to the witness?'
'Nothing. He told me no one ever made a threat or asked him to withdraw his statement. This was two, maybe three years ago.'
'Is he still around?'
'No. Joined up, even though he had helped the IRA now and again. Last I heard, he'd been captured in Libya somewhere.'
'It doesn't add up,' Jack said.
'Doesn't it?' Tom asked. He set down two half pints of ale in front of us. 'On the house, along with the stew. To fortify your investigation. Close enough to opening time.'
'I'm not supposed to drink on duty,' said Jack.
'A half pint? You call that drinking?' Tom said in amazement.
'He's got a point,' I said, and raised my glass. The ale tasted cool and crisp after the hot stew. Actually, he had two good points. You couldn't call a half pint serious drinking, and it did add up. Someone was protecting Jenkins, giving him enough cover that he didn't have to bother with intimidating witnesses or worry about shooting a GI in order to save some dough. How high did you have to go to get that kind of protection? Maybe I'd find out tomorrow when Slaine O'Brien let me see the secret files at Stormont Castle. But maybe she held more secrets than her files did.
I took my time with the half pint, thinking about what my next move should be. I would drive to Armagh to ask around the Northern Bank if anyone had seen Brennan the day before. Then I thought I'd head toward the border to get the lay of the land around Omeath, where Jenkins's truck had been abandoned. I couldn't cross the border myself without risking internment but I could check out how easy a crossing might be. If the roads were jammed with traffic then maybe I could stop on the way back in Annalong and have a drink in the pub where Thornton said he had seen Eddie Mahoney arguing with an unknown man. It sounded like a lot of driving so I savored the half pint and leafed through a local weekly newspaper, the Newcastle Times. Rugby scores, war news, local weddings. One story about U.S. Army maneuvers ruining fields as tanks chewed up farmland and trucks clogged the roads. Next to it was a picture of a convoy making its way through Clough, with Constable Adrian Simms standing in the road, holding up local traffic, Sam Burnham in full snowdrop regalia next to him. The line of trucks stretched into the distance. It was going to be a long wait, which probably hadn't made the villagers very happy.
'That happened last week,' Tom said. 'Big row all around. Farmers on about their crops being ruined, traffic backed up everywhere, although I'm not complaining. Some folks waited it out in here, so it was good for business.'
'Lot of damage done?'
'Not so much. It's more that folks don't appreciate being told they have to put up with it, like it or not. Human nature,' he said, shrugging.
I finished up a few minutes later and waved goodbye to Tom. Outside the sun was bright and promised a clear day. From in back of the pub came the hoarse sound of a motorcycle revving up and taking off. As I got into the jeep, I thought about how much fun it would be to make this trip on two wheels, as long as it didn't rain. A piece of paper on the passenger-side floor, held down by a stone, caught my eye. I looked around to see who might have placed it there and heard the distant sound of a motorcycle fading away, maybe the same one I'd glimpsed at
