FOUR

DEVLIN WORE a dark blue flannel shirt open at the neck, grey slacks and a pair of highly expensive-looking Italian brogues in brown leather. He was a small man, no more than five foot five or six, and at sixty-four his dark, wavy hair showed only a light silvering. There was a faded scar on the right side of his forehead, an old bullet wound, the face pale, the eyes extraordinarily vivid blue. A slight ironic smile seemed permanently to lift the corner of his mouth - the look of a man who had found life a bad joke and had decided that the only thing to do was laugh about it.

The smile was charming and totally sincere. ‘Good to see you, Harry.’ His arms went around Fox in a light embrace.

‘And you, Liam.’

Devlin looked beyond him at the car and Billy White behind the wheel. ‘You’ve got someone with you?’

‘Just my driver.’

Devlin moved past him, went along the path and leaned down to the window.

‘Mr Devlin,’ Billy said.

Devlin turned without a word and came back to Fox. ‘Driver, is it, Harry? The only place that one will drive you to is straight to Hell.’

‘Have you heard from Ferguson?’

‘Yes, but leave it for the moment. Come along in.’

The interior of the house was a time capsule of Victonana: mahogany panelling and William Morris wallpaper in the hall with several night scenes by the Victorian painter, Atkinson Grimshaw, on the walls. Fox examined them with admiration as he took off his coat and gave it to Devlin. ‘Strange to see these here, Liam. Grimshaw was a very Yorkshire Englishman.’

‘Not his fault, Harry, and he painted like an angel.’

‘Worth a bob or two,’ Fox said, well aware that ten thousand pounds at auction was not at all out of the way for even quite a small Grimshaw.

‘Do you tell me?’ Devlin said lightly. He opened one half of a double mahogany door and led the way into the sitting room. Like the hall, it was period Victorian: green flock wallpaper stamped with gold, more Grimshaws on the walls, mahogany furniture and a fire burning brightly in a fireplace that looked as if it was a William Langley original.

The man who stood before it was a priest in dark cassock and he turned from the fire to greet them. He was about Devlin’s height with iron-grey hair swept back over his ears. A handsome man, particularly at this moment as he smiled a welcome; there was an eagerness to him, an energy that touched something in Fox. It was not often that one liked another human being so completely and instinctively.

‘With apologies to Shakespeare, two little touches of Harry in the night,’ Devlin said. ‘Captain Harry Fox, meet Father Harry Cussane.’

Cussane shook hands warmly. ‘A great pleasure, Captain Fox. Liam was telling me something about you after you rang earlier.’

Devlin indicated the chess table beside the sofa. ‘Any excuse to get away from that. He was beating the pants off me.’

‘A gross exaggeration as usual,’ Cussane said. ‘But I must get going. Leave you two to your business.’ His voice was pleasant and rather deep. Irish, yet more than a hint of American there.

‘Would you listen to the man?’ Devlin had brought three glasses and a bottle of Bushmills from the cabinet in the corner. ‘Sit down, Harry.

Another little snifter before bed won’t kill you.’ He said to Fox, ‘I’ve never known anyone so much on the go as this one.’

‘All right, Liam, I surrender,’ Cussane said. ‘Fifteen minutes, that’s all, then I must go. I like to make a late round at the hospice as you know and then there’s Danny Malone. Living is a day-to-day business with him right now.’

Devlin said, ‘I’ll drink to him. It comes to us all.’

‘You said hospice?’ Fox enquired.

‘There’s a convent next door, the Sacred Heart, run by the Little Sisters of Pity. They started a hospice for terminal patients some years ago.’

‘Do you work there?’

‘Yes, as a sort of administrator cum priest. Nuns aren’t supposed to be worldly enough to do the accounts. Absolute rubbish. Sister Anne Marie, who’s in charge over there, knows to every last penny. And this is a small parish so the local priest doesn’t have a curate. I give him a hand.’

‘In between spending three days a week in charge of the press office at the Catholic Secretariat in Dublin,’ Devlin said. ‘Not to mention flogging the local youth club through a very average five performances of South Pacific, complete with a star cast of ninety-three local school kids.’

Cussane smiled. ‘Guess who was stage manager? We’re trying West Side Story next. Liam thinks it too ambitious, but I believe it better to rise to a challenge than go for the easy choice.’

He swallowed a little of his Bushmills. Fox said, ‘Forgive me for asking, Father, but are you American or Irish? I can’t quite tell.’

‘Most days, neither can he,’ Devlin laughed.

‘My mother was an Irish-American who came back to Connacht in 1938

after her parents died, to seek her roots. All she found was me.’

‘And your father?’

‘I never knew him. Cussane was her name. She was a Protestant, by the way. There are still a few in Connacht, descendants of Cromwell’s butchers. Cussane is often called Patterson in that part of the country by pseudo-translation from Casan, which in Irish means path.’

‘Which means he’s not quite certain who he is,’ Devlin put in.

‘Only some of the time.’ Cussane smiled. ‘My mother returned to America in 1946 after the war. She died of influenza a year later and I was taken in by her only relative, an old great-uncle who ran a farm in the Ontario wheat belt. He was a fine man and a good Catholic. It was under his influence that I decided to enter the Church.’

‘Enter the Devil, stage left.’ Devlin raised his glass.

Fox looked puzzled and Cussane explained. ‘The seminary that accepted me was All Souls at Vine Landing outside Boston. Liam was English professor there.’

‘He was a great trial to me,’ Devlin said. ‘Mind like a steel trap.

Constantly catching me out misquoting Eliot in class.’

‘I served in a couple of Boston parishes and another in New York,’

Cussane said, ‘but I always hoped to get back to Ireland. Finally, I got a move to Belfast in 1968. A church on the Falls Road.’

‘Where he promptly got burned out by an Orange mob the following year.’

‘I tried to keep the parish together using a school hall,’ Cussane said.

Fox glanced at Devlin, ‘While you ran around Belfast adding fuel to the flames?’

‘God might forgive you for that,’ Devlin said piously, ‘for I cannot.’

Cussane emptied his glass. ‘I’ll be off then. Nice to meet you, Harry Fox.’

He held out his hand. Fox shook it and Cussane moved to the French windows and opened them. Fox saw the convent looming up into the night on the other side of the garden wall. Cussane walked across the lawn, opened a gate and passed through.

‘Quite a man,’ he said, as Devlin closed the windows.

‘And then some.’ Devlin turned, no longer smiling. ‘All right, Harry. Ferguson being his usual mysterious self, it looks as if it’s up to you to tell me what this is about.’

In the hospice, all was quiet. It was as unlike the conventional idea of a hospital as it was possible to be and the architect had designed the ward area in a way that gave each occupant of a bed a choice of privacy or intimacy with other patients. The night sister sat at her desk, the only light a shaded lamp. She didn’t hear Cussane approach, yet suddenly he was there, looming out of the darkness.

‘How’s Malone>’

‘The same, Father. Very little pain. We have the drug in-put just about in balance.’

‘Is he lucid?’

‘Some of the time.’

‘I’ll go and see him.’

Danny Malone’s bed, divided from the others by bookshelves and cupboards, was angled towards a glass window that gave a view of grounds and the night sky. The night light beside the bed brought his face into relief. He was not old, no more than forty, his hair prematurely white, the face like a skull under taut skin, etched in pain caused by the cancer that was slowly and relentlessly taking him from this life to the next.

As Cussane sat down, Malone opened his eyes. He gazed blankly at Cussane, then recognition dawned. ‘Father, I thought you weren’t coming.’

‘I promised, didn’t I? I was having a nightcap with Liam Devlin, is all.’

‘Jesus, Father, you’re lucky you got away with just the one with him, but big for the cause, Liam, I’ll give him that. There’s no man living done more for Ireland.’

‘What about yourself?’ Cussane sat down beside the bed. ‘No stronger fighter for the movement than you, Danny.’

‘But how many did I kill, Father, there’s the rub, and for what?’

Malone asked him. ‘Daniel O’Connel once said in a speech that, although the ideal of Irish freedom was just, it was not worth a single human life. When I was young, I disputed that. Now I’m dying, I think I know what he meant.’ He winced in pain and turned to look at Cussane. ‘Can we talk some more, Father? It helps get it straight in my own mind.’

‘Just for a while, then you must get some sleep,’ Cussane smiled.

‘One thing a priest is good at is listening, Danny.’

Malone smiled contentedly. ‘Right, where were we? I was telling you about the preparation for the bombing campaign on the English Midlands and London in seventy-two.’

‘You were saying the papers nicknamed you the Fox,’ Cussane said, ‘because you seemed to go backwards and forwards between England and Ireland at will. All your friends were caught, Danny, but not you. How was that?’

‘Simple, Father. The greatest curse on this country of ours is the informer and the second greatest curse is the inefficiency of the IRA.

People full of ideology and revolution blow a lot of wind and are often singularly lacking in good sense. That’s why I preferred to go to the professionals.’

‘Professionals?’

‘What you would call the criminal element. For example, there wasn’t an IRA safe house in England during the seventies that wasn’t on the Special Branch’s list at Scotland Yard sooner or later. That’s how so many got caught.’

‘And you?’

‘Criminals on the run or needing a rest when things get too hot have places they can go, Father. Expensive places, I admit, but safe and that’s what I used. There was one in Scotland south from Glasgow in Galloway run by a couple of brothers called Mungo. What you might call a country retreat. Absolute bastards, mind you.’

The pain was suddenly so bad that he had to fight for breath. ‘I’ll get sister,’ Cussane told him in alarm.

Malone grabbed him by the front of his cassock. ‘No, you damn well won’t. No more painkillers, Father. They mean well, the sisters, but enough is enough. Let’s just keep talking.’

‘All right,’ Harry Cussane said. Malone lay back, closed his eyes for a moment, then opened them again. ‘Anyway, as I was saying, these Mungo brothers, Hector and Angus, were the great original bastards.’

Devlin paced up and down the room restlessly. ‘Do you believe it?’

Fox asked.

‘It makes sense and it would explain a great deal,’ Devlin said. ‘So let’s just say I accept it in principle.’

‘So, what do we do about it?’

‘What do we do about it?’ Devlin glared at him. ‘The effrontery of the man. Let me remind you, Harry, that the last time I did a job for Ferguson, the bastard conned me. Lied in his teeth. Used me.’

‘That was then, this is now, Liam.’

‘And what is that pearl of wisdom supposed to mean?’

There was a soft tapping at the French window. Devlin opened the desk drawer, took out an old-fashioned Mauser pistol, with an SS

bulbous silencer on the end and cocked it. He nodded to Fox, then Devlin pulled the curtain. Martin McGuiness peered in at them, Murphy at

his shoulder.

‘Dear God!’ Devlin groaned.

He opened the French window and McGuiness smiled as he stepped in.

‘God bless all here!’ he said mockingly and added to Murphy, ‘Watch the window, Michael.’ He closed it and walked over to the fire, holding his hands to the warmth. ‘Colder as the nights draw in.’

‘What do you want?’ Devlin demanded.

‘Has the Captain here explained the situation to you yet?’

‘He has.’

‘And what do you think?’

‘I don’t think at all,’ Devlin told him. ‘Especially where you lot are concerned.’

‘The purpose of terrorism is to terrorize, that’s what Mick Collins used to say,’ McGuiness told him. ‘I fight for my country, Liam, with anything that comes to hand. We’re at war.’ He was angry now. ‘I’ve got nothing to apologize for.’

‘If I could say something,’ Fox put in. ‘Let’s accept that Cuchulam exists, then it isn’t a question of taking sides. It’s accepting that what he’s doing has needlessly protracted the tragic events of the past thirteen years.’

McGuiness helped himself to a whiskey. ‘He has a point. When I was O.C. Derry in nineteen seventy-two, I was flown to London with Daithi O’Connell, Seamus Twomey, Ivor Bell and others to meet Willie Whitelaw to discuss peace.’

‘And the Lenadoon shooting broke the ceasefire,’ Fox said and turned to Devlin. ‘It doesn’t seem to me to be a question of taking sides any more. Cuchulain has worked deliberately to keep the whole rotten mess going. I would have thought anything that might have helped stop that would be worth it.’

‘Morality is it?’ Devlin raised a hand and smiled wickedly.

‘Good then, let’s get down to brass tacks. This fella, Levin, who actually saw Kelly or Cuchulain or whatever his name is, all those years ago. I presume Ferguson is showing him pictures of every known KGB operative.’

‘And all known adherents of the IRA, UDA, UVF. Anything and everything,’ Fox said. ‘That will include looking at what Special Branch in Dublin have because we swop information.’

‘The bastards would,’ McGuiness said bitterly. ‘Still, I think we’ve got a few that neither the police in Dublin nor your people in London have ever seen.’

‘And how do we handle that?’ Fox demanded.

‘You get Levin over here and he and Devlin look at what we’ve got no one else. Is it agreed?’

Fox glanced at Devlin who nodded. ‘Okay,’ Fox said. ‘I’ll ring the Brigadier tonight.’

‘Fine.’ McGuiness turned to Devlin. ‘You’re sure your phone’s not tapped or anything like that. I’m thinking of those Special Branch bastards.’

Devlin opened a drawer in the desk and produced a black metal box which he switched on so that a red light appeared. He approached the telephone and held the box over it. There was no reaction.

‘Oh, the wonders of the electronic age,’ he said and put the box away.

‘Fine,’ McGuiness said. ‘The only people who know about this are Ferguson, you, Captain, Liam, the Chief of Staff and myself.’

‘And Professor Paul Cherny,’ Fox said.

McGuiness nodded. ‘That’s right. We’ve got to do something about him.’ He turned to Devlin. ‘Do you know him?’

‘I’ve seen him at drinks parties at the university. Exchanged a civil word, no more than that. He’s well liked. A widower.

His wife died before he defected. There’s a chance he isn’t involved in this, of course.’

‘And pigs might fly,’ McGuiness said crisply. ‘The fact that it was Ireland he defected to is too much of a coincidence for me. A pound to a penny he knows our man, so why don’t we pull him in and squeeze it out of him?’

‘Simple,’ Fox told him. ‘Some men don’t squeeze.’

‘He’s right,’ Devlin said. ‘Better to try the softly-softly approach first.’

‘All right,’ McGuiness said. ‘I’ll have him watched twenty-four hours a day. Put Michael Murphy in charge. He won’t be able to go to the bathroom without we know it.’

Devlin glanced at Fox. ‘Okay by you?’

‘Fine,’ Fox told him.

‘Good.’ McGuiness buttoned his raincoat. ‘I’ll get off then. I’ll leave Billy to look after you, Captain.’ He opened the French window.

‘Mind your back, Liam.’ And then he was gone.

Ferguson was in bed when Fox phoned, sitting up against the pillows, working his way through a mass of papers, preparing himself for a Defence committee meeting the following day. He listened patiently to everything Fox had to say. ‘So far, so good, Harry, as far as I can see. Levin spent the entire day working through everything we had at the Directorate. Didn’t come up with a thing.’

‘It’s been a long time, sir. Cuchulain could have changed a lot and not just because he’s older. I mean, he could have a beard, for example.’

‘Negative thinking, Harry. I’ll put Levin on the morning flight to Dublin, but Devlin will have to handle him. I need you back here.’

‘Any particular reason, sir?’

‘Lots to do with the Vatican. It really is beginning to look as if the Pope won’t come. However, he’s invited the cardinals of Argentina and Britain to confer with him.’

‘So the visit could still be on?’

‘Perhaps, but more important from our point of view, the war is still on and there’s talk of the Argentinians trying to get hold of this damned Exocet missile on the European black market. I need you, Harry. Catch the first flight out. By the way, an interesting development. Tanya Voromnova, remember her?’

‘Of course, sir.’

‘She’s in Paris to give a series of concerts. Fascinating that she should surface at this particular moment.’

‘What Jung would call synchromcity, sir?’

‘Young, Harry? What on earth are you babbling about?’

‘Carl Jung, sir. Famous psychologist. Synchromcity is a word he coined for events having a coincidence in time and, because of this, the feeling that some deeper motivation is involved.’

‘The fact that you’re in Ireland is no excuse for acting as if you’ve gone soft in the head, Harry,’ Ferguson said testily.

He put down the phone, sat there thinking, then got up, pulled on his robe and went out. He knocked on the door of the guest room and went in. Levin was sitting up in bed wearing a pair of Ferguson’s pyjamas and reading a book.

Ferguson sat on the edge of the bed. ‘I thought you’d be tired after going through so many photos.’

Levin smiled. ‘When you reach my age, Brigadier, sleep eludes you, memory crowds in. You wonder what it has all been about.’

Ferguson warmed to the man. ‘Don’t we all, my dear chap? Anyway, how would you feel about running over to Dublin on the morning plane?’

‘To see Captain Fox?’

‘No, he’ll be returning here, but a friend of mine, Professor Liam Devlin of Trinity College, will take care of you. He’ll probably be showing you a few more photos, courtesy of our friends in the IRA.

They’d never let me have them for obvious reasons ‘

The old Russian shook his head. ‘Tell me, Brigadier, did the war to end all wars finish in nineteen forty-five or am I mistaken?’

‘You and a great many other people, my friend.’ Ferguson got up and went to the door. ‘I’d get some sleep if I were you. You’ll need to be up at six to catch the early morning flight from Heathrow. I’ll have Kim serve you breakfast in bed.’

He closed the door. Levin sat there for a while, an expression of sadness on his face, then he sighed, closed the book, turned out the light and went to sleep.

At Kilrea Cottage, Fox put down the phone and turned to Devlin. ‘All fixed. He’ll come in on the breakfast plane. Unfortunately, my flight leaves just before. He’ll report to the information desk in the main concourse. You can pick him up there.’

‘No need,’ Devlin said. ‘This minder of yours, young White. He’ll be dropping you so he can pick Levin up at the same time and bring him straight here. It’s best we do it that way. McGuiness might be in touch early about where I’m supposed to take him.’

‘Fine,’ Fox said. ‘I’d better get moving.’

‘Good lad.’

Devlin got his coat for him and took him out to the car where Billy White waited patiently.

‘Back to the Westbourne, Billy,’ Fox said.

Devlin leaned down at the window. ‘Book yourself in there for the night, son, and in the morning, do exactly what the Captain tells you to. Let him down by a single inch and I’ll have your balls and Martin McGuiness will probably walk all over the rest of you.’

Billy White grinned affably. ‘Sure and on a good day, they tell me I can almost shoot as well as you, Mr Devlin.’

‘Go on, be off with you.’

The car moved away. Devlin watched it go, then turned and went inside. There was a stirring in the shrubbery, a footfall, the faintest of sounds only as someone moved away.

The eavesdropping equipment which the KGB had supplied to Cuchulain was the most advanced in the world, developed originally by a Japanese company, the details, as a result of industrial espionage, having reached Moscow four years previously. The directional microphone trained on Kilrea Cottage could pick up every word uttered inside at several hundred yards. Its ultra-frequency secondary function was to catch even the faintest telephone conversation. All this was allied to a sophisticated recording apparatus.

The whole was situated in a small attic concealed behind the loft watertanks just beneath the pantile roof of the house. Cuchulain had listened in on Liam Devlin in this way for a long time now, although it had been some time since anything so interesting had come up. He sat in the attic, smoking a cigarette, running the tape at top speed through the blank spots and the unimportant bits, paying careful attention to the phone conversation with Ferguson.

Afterwards, he sat there thinking about it for a while, then he reset the tape, went downstairs and let himself out. He went into the phone box at the end of the village street by the pub and dialled a Dublin number. The phone was picked up almost immediately. He could hear voices, a sudden laugh, Mozart playing softly.

‘Cherny here.’

‘It’s me. You’re not alone?’

Cherny laughed lightly. ‘Dinner party for a few faculty friends.’

‘I must see you.’

‘All right,’ Cherny said. ‘Usual time and place tomorrow afternoon.’

Cuchulain replaced the receiver, left the booth and went back up the village street, whistling softly, an old Connemara folk song that had all the despair, all the sadness of life in it.