EPILOGUE

IT WAS SIX O’CLOCK on a grey morning, the sky swollen with rain, when

Susan Calder turned her mini car in through the gate of St Joseph’s Catholic Cemetery, Highgate. It was a poor sort of place with lots of Gothic monuments from an obviously more prosperous past, but now, everything overgrown, nothing but decay.

She was not in uniform and wore a dark headscarf, blue-belted coat and leather boots. She pulled in at the superintendent’s lodge and found Devlin standing beside a taxi. He was wearing his usual dark Burberry and black felt hat and his right arm was in a black sling. She got out of the car and he came to meet her.

‘Sorry I’m late. The traffic,’ she said. ‘Have they started?’

‘Yes.’ He smiled ironically. ‘I think Harry would have appreciated this. Like a bad set for a second rate movie. Even the rain makes it another cliché,’ he said, as it started to fall in heavy drops.

He told the taxi driver to wait and he and the girl went along the path between gravestones. ‘Not much of a place,’ she said.

‘They had to tuck him away somewhere.’ He took out a cigarette with his good hand and lit it. ‘Ferguson and the Home Office people felt you should have had some sort of gallantry award.’

‘A medal?’ There was genuine distaste on her face. ‘They can keep it. He had to be stopped, but that doesn’t mean I liked doing it.’

‘They’ve decided against it anyway. It would be too public; require an explanation and they can’t have that. So much for Harry wanting to leave the KGB with the blame.’-

They came to the grave and paused some distance away under a tree.

There were two gravediggers, a priest, a woman in a black coat and a girl.

‘Tanya Voroninova?’ Susan asked.

‘Yes, and the girl is Morag Finlay,’ Devlin said. ‘The three women in Harry Cussane’s life, together now to see him planted. First, the one he so greatly wronged as a child, then the child he saved at great inconvenience to himself. I find that ironic. Harry the redemptionist.’

‘And then there’s me,’ she said. ‘His executioner and I never even met him.’

‘Only the once,’ Devlin said. ‘And that was enough. Strange - the most important people in his life were women and in the end they were the death of him.’

The priest sprinkled the grave and the coffin with Holy Water and incensed them. Morag started to cry and Tanya Voroninova put an arm around her as the priest’s voice rose in prayer.

Lord Jesus Christ, Saviour of the world, we commend your servant to you and pray for him.

‘Poor Harry,’ Devlin said. ‘Final curtain and he still didn’t get a full house.’

He took her arm and they turned and walked away through the rain.

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