6

London

‘Vile,’ said Sir John Foulkes, who had a flamboyant handlebar moustache and Edwardian sideburns. ‘This business with Walter Whiteford. Utterly vile, Frank.’

Frank Pagan looked from the window of the Undersecretary’s office. A barge was making its way up the River Thames, leaving a wake like a water beetle.

‘Why are these assassinations always so vile?’ the Under-secretary asked. It was not so much a question as a reflection on the lack of common decency in the world. The Under-secretary defined decency in terms of the right breeding, the right schools, and ultimately something that was called ‘good form,’ itself a consequence of being expensively raised and expensively educated. It was a vicious circle of privilege, and Pagan sometimes resented it.

Pagan was surrounded every day of his working life with members of the Old School Tie Network, characters who talked casually about going up to Scotland where they had property reserved entirely for grouse shooting or salmon fishing. It was hard at times for Pagan to believe that this was the late twentieth century. He had moments when he leaned towards a form of primitive socialism in which there wouldn’t be an aristocracy and the land would belong to everybody. Dream on.

The Under-secretary fidgeted with the cuffs of his white shirt. Pagan turned away from the view of the Thames. Today, because he knew he was meeting the Under-secretary, Pagan had made a few concessions. He’d left his blue jeans and sneakers at home. He wore an olive-coloured suit and brown slip-on shoes and his slim silk necktie was pale green. All good earth tones, he thought, and by his own standards subdued.

‘I am certain to figure somewhere in a future assassination plan,’ the Under-secretary said. He swept a hand through the air. ‘It’s not a prospect I relish.’

Pagan moved his head slightly. The Under-secretary was new to Irish affairs. Previously, he had been considered an expert on trade unions. Pagan wondered about his credentials. A knowledge of wage negotiations and how to talk with mining or railway leaders – tasks at which he hadn’t been very successful, a fact that perhaps explained his present posting (which was more of a punishment than a job) – wouldn’t help him in the quicksands of Irish matters. Pagan understood how these unsuitable appointments happened. It was pal helping pal, one Old Boy to another, and to hell with credentials. Only your school background mattered. Incompetence in the higher echelons of power, Pagan thought, could always be traced back to the fact that unqualified men had gone to the right public schools. It was a good way to run a country.

Sir John had his cuffs to his liking now. ‘Ireland is a nightmare to me, Frank. I have times when I think I’ve penetrated its various complexities. But then it seems to slip away from me.’ He stroked his enormous moustache. The satirical magazine Private Eye had christened him Furry Jake.

‘It does that,’ Pagan agreed.

‘Why in the name of God are we still in Northern Ireland?’

Pagan smiled. He wondered if the Under-secretary really wanted an answer or whether he’d just asked another of those rhetorical questions in which, like all politicians, he specialised. Pagan decided he’d answer anyway. ‘Because it’s what the Protestant majority wants, Sir John.’

‘We should just get the hell out of Ulster and say “There, chaps, go work out your own differences with the South.”’

Pagan laid a hand on the Under-secretary’s huge desk. There wasn’t a piece of paper anywhere. He glanced at the bookshelves. Several histories of Ireland were stacked there. They looked as if they hadn’t been opened. ‘We can’t let them settle their own differences so long as the Protestant majority in the North wants to remain a part of the United Kingdom,’ he said. ‘If the day comes when the North wants to be a part of a unified Ireland, fine. Personally I don’t see that happening. There’s too much hatred between Catholic and Protestant.’

The Under-secretary leaned back in his padded leather chair.

‘And there are too many suspicions on both sides,’ Pagan continued, wondering if it was easier for Furry Jake to get his history in small doses like this instead of having to crack open the tomes on the bookshelf. Sometimes Pagan encountered an almost wilful simple-mindedness in the higher reaches of power that appalled him. People like the Under-secretary, in defiance of the tenets of Darwinism, hadn’t evolved since the days when the British Empire could put down a Zulu uprising with a handful of rifles and some good men.

Pagan said, ‘The Protestants in the North are scared shitless by the predominance of the Catholic Church in the South. They think that in a unified Ireland they’d be discriminated against because then they’d be in a minority. They don’t like giving up their present status. Right now they’re the lords of all they survey, but there’s a tide rising against them.’

The Under-secretary didn’t look very interested. He had the expression of an unwilling participant in a crammer course. There was also the fact that he wasn’t absolutely sure of Frank Pagan’s loyalties. Some said Pagan was just a little too soft on the South.

Pagan went on regardless. There was a certain wicked enjoyment in the idea of instructing the Under-secretary in his job and knowing that you were causing him a minor irritation. ‘The Catholics in the Republic don’t trust the Protestants in the North because of their allegiance to England. And there’s been too much English misbehaviour in the past.’ Misbehaviour, he thought. There was a neat little euphemism. ‘People don’t forget quickly. They can’t forget how the English have treated Ireland over the centuries. They can’t put aside the fact that the English have gone periodically into Ireland and filled the streets with Irish blood.’

‘That’s ancient history, Frank.’ Sir John made a small gesture of impatience.

‘To you, maybe. But England has a dirty name over there. It stands for Oliver Cromwell slaughtering the inhabitants of Wexford in 1649 and then as a gesture of real goodwill, committing atrocities on priests of the Roman Catholic Church. It’s a potato famine and starvation, which was exploited by English landowners who didn’t exactly shed tears when they saw Irishmen either starve to death or being packed into emigrant ships – coffin ships – because it meant they didn’t have to rent their land to the bloody peasants. It’s the fact that in six miserable years in the late 1840s, one million people died as a result of famine, while the English landlords didn’t suffer a bit. Quite the opposite; the buggers prospered.’

The Under-secretary frowned. Pagan leaned against the bookshelves. Instant history, he thought.

‘And the Irish can’t forget that in our own century the English crushed the Easter Rising of 1916 with more enthusiasm than the event merited. Somehow we managed to kill about five hundred men of the Irish Volunteers, a militant group of really dangerous men who were poorly armed and badly trained and were never any match for English field guns. And then we went on to execute the leaders of the Rising in front of firing squads. We did a wonderful job all round, didn’t we?’

Sir John stood up. A joint cracked in his leg. He didn’t say anything for a time. With his back to Pagan he looked down at the river. ‘You sound rather sympathetic to the Irish, Frank.’

‘I’ve tried to understand them, that’s all. You might give it a shot yourself, Sir John. Open a book or two. Do yourself a favour.’

The Under-secretary stared at him curiously. He wasn’t happy with Pagan’s tone, but then he wasn’t sure if Pagan was really the right man for the job anyway. His search for Jig, for example, hadn’t exactly been a resounding success. ‘IRA gunmen wander the streets of Belfast,’ he said after a while. ‘They shoot British soldiers. Protestants arm themselves in basements to fight against Catholics and the IRA. And we’ve got this lunatic fellow Jig doing all kinds of damage.’ The Under-secretary fingered his moustache and quietly suppressed a belch, pulling his chin down into his neck. It was all very polite, Pagan thought.

The Under-secretary went on, ‘Damned troublesome island, Frank. Hardly worth the bother. It’s not as if we actually get anything out of it save for a great deal of grief, is it? It’s not as if they’re one of the OPEC nations sitting on millions of barrels of oil or something like that. Sooner we’re out of it, the better.’

Pagan said nothing. Furry Jake’s ignorance and insensitivity were really quite impressive.

‘How do you propose to catch Jig, Frank?’

This question echoed inside Pagan like a minor chord struck on piano keys. ‘I wish I had the answer to that,’ he said, a bleak little response to the problem that dogged him constantly.

The Under-secretary turned. ‘It has to be given top priority, Frank.’

‘It has,’ Pagan replied.

‘I mean top, Frank.’

Pagan nodded. The Under-secretary annoyed him the way all his kind did. They issued their orders and then went out to lunch at their clubs. Fine old sherry and quail eggs and men dozing in leather armchairs behind copies of The Daily Telegraph. The death of the British Empire in microcosm in the fancy clubs of Pall Mall, where you needed a pedigree from Debrett’s Peerage before you could actually breathe the air.

‘What about this business with the ship?’ the Undersecretary asked.

Only that morning Foxie had brought him another telex on the matter, this time one sent from the FBI to Scotland Yard. Pagan had read the thing quickly.

‘Special Branch is handling that,’ he said. ‘My whole section is busy with Jig. Exclusively.’

‘Mmmm,’ the Under-secretary said. ‘Just the same, Frank, I wish you had paid it some attention yourself. It does come under your domain, after all.’

The little arsehole was scolding him. Pagan studied his fingernails a moment. ‘My latest information is that we’ve had a positive ID of the individual whose hand was severed at the wrist. One Sean Riordan, aka the Courier, a resident of Philadelphia. His function was the delivery of capital to his sources in Ireland from sources unknown in the United States. So it’s fair to assume the Connie was carrying an amount of cash.’

‘Why do the Americans insist on sending money to those brutes?’

Pagan shrugged. He could have made an easy answer: historic ties. But it went deeper than that, down into the mists of darker emotions and old sentiments and an idealised conception of Ireland that was aroused in many Irish–Americans whenever they heard the first few bars of Danny Boy. This sedimentary yearning had a way of opening wallets.

The Under-secretary asked, ‘Do you have any opinion on who seized this money?’

‘No, I don’t. But you can bet that the IRA will be more than unhappy about the whole thing. What I wonder is how they’re going to react.’

Furry Jake smiled. The idea of the IRA suffering a setback pleased him hugely. ‘One other thing, Frank. I don’t much care for the press we’ve been getting. I don’t think you should say anything to reporters. Let the commissioner do any talking that has to be done. He likes to see his name in print.’

‘All I ever said was “no comment”.’

‘I know that, but some of our journalists take that as an admission of defeat. The commissioner has more … experience in handling the press than you, Frank.’ The Under-secretary looked at his watch. ‘Well, Frank. Keep me posted, will you?’

‘I will, Sir John.’

‘And will you make sure Special Branch keeps its vigilance?’

‘I’ve already requested that security at your home be doubled,’ Pagan said.

‘My wife worries,’ said the Under-secretary, smiling thinly.

And you don’t, of course. Pagan went to the door. He heard Sir John clear his throat.

‘Catch him, Frank. Catch Jig.’

Pagan stopped at the door.

The Under-secretary said, ‘No matter what it takes, you must catch this fellow.’

‘Exactly how do you want him?’ Pagan asked. There was a faint hint of sarcasm in his voice, which the Under-secretary didn’t notice. Catch Jig. Just like that. What the hell did the Under-secretary think Frank Pagan had been trying to do?

The Under-secretary looked a little puzzled. ‘What do you mean how do I want him?’

‘Dead or alive?’ Pagan asked. Poached? Toasted? Pickled? Take your pick, Sir John.

‘Ah.’ The Under-secretary was quiet a moment. ‘I don’t think it matters one way or another with scum like that, do you?’

‘Quite,’ Pagan said and stepped out into a carpeted corridor. Catch Jig.

The Under-secretary called out to him, ‘Been meaning to ask. Who’s your tailor, Frank?’

Pagan stopped. He looked back into the office. ‘Nobody in particular. Sometimes Harry’s Nostalgia Boutique on the Portobello Road. Sometimes Crolla on Dover Street. Why? You want the addresses?’

‘Not really,’ said the Under-secretary.

Dublin

The man known as Jig did not leave the Republic of Ireland from Dublin Airport, although he went there initially. He was accustomed to creating a maze of his own movements. At the terminal he went inside the men’s room and locked himself in a cubicle where he changed his clothes.

He did this as an ordinary, everyday precaution, something that had become second nature to him. He removed his suit and shoes, stuffed them inside his canvas bag, then put on an old pair of faded cord pants and a heavy sweater. He placed a cap firmly on his head and pulled it down over his brow. On his feet he wore the kind of sturdy boots a casual labourer might have worn. Anyone who saw him emerge from the men’s room would have seen a man on his way to look for work somewhere – a man who shuffled a little, like somebody defeated by the prospects of ever finding employment. He wore a money belt concealed beneath his sweater. It contained ten thousand American dollars, one thousand pounds in sterling and five hundred Irish punts.

He walked out of the terminal and into the parking lot. The car he chose was a drab brown Hillman Minx. In the old days, a car might have been left there for him on purpose but now, with all Finn’s mania for secrecy, cars were stolen, not supplied. A supplied car had the distinct disadvantage of being arranged in advance, which afforded one’s enemies the chance and the time to find out about it. Stealing, Finn always reasoned, was less risky because it was random.

The Minx spluttered and hacked like an old man in a terminal ward. Jig drove it as far as the Connolly Station in Dublin, where he bought a train ticket for Belfast. Once there, he would fly to Glasgow and take a bus to Prestwick Airport on the Ayrshire coast, where he’d catch a flight to New York City.

It was a circuitous and time-consuming route, but it was one of Finn’s maxims that you saved time by spending some, that when you were in a hurry you were always prone to that evil demon Carelessness. Survival, Finn always said, is a matter of attention to the mundane. A matter, boyo, of detail.

Jig opened a newspaper on the train and read an editorial that referred to Walter Whiteford’s decapitation. It was funny, though. He couldn’t make a mental picture of a headless man, couldn’t see the head tearing away from the body and rolling down a cobblestoned street. He had a gift for abstraction. He didn’t think in particulars when it came to violence. He always tried to make his acts of violence swift and clean and painless. Finn had drummed this into him. Even now Jig could hear the old man’s melodic voice in his head. You only need to kill. You don’t need to make your victims suffer. In and out with precision, boy, never needless cruelty. This is a war, not a torture chamber. Walter Whiteford wouldn’t have had the time to feel anything. Gone. Like that. Like a candle blown out on an empty Mayfair street. You don’t kill the meek, and you don’t kill the innocent. You only kill the harmful, and even then you do it with economy and speed and grace.

Economy, speed, grace. Jig remembered how Finn, at the point of farewell, had foregone his usual firm handshake in favour of an embrace which had been tight and almost painful as if the old man were reluctant at the last to send Jig on such an unmapped errand. There had been none of the usual last-minute instructions, no quiet encouragement, just an odd imploring look in Finn’s eyes which had put Jig in mind of a man facing the impossibilities of ever seeing his ambitions realised. It wasn’t a look Jig liked to see. For a second it hadn’t been Finn’s face at all, it had lost buoyancy and strength and resilience, like a mask cast suddenly aside by its wearer. It was more than the loss of the money, Jig knew that. It was the loss of all the schemes and plans and uses that the money was good for.

Jig had a sense of sleep coming in on a dark cloud, so he rose and stood in the corridor with the window open and the rainy air blowing against his face. The fresh smell of the nearby sea came rushing towards him.

He had left Dublin before on other missions. But this time, with the wind blowing at his face and the rain on his skin, this time was different for reasons he didn’t altogether understand.

He stood at the window and he thought about the great love he had for this country. He thought of the valleys of Glendalough and Imaal and Clara. The bewitching landscape of Kerry and the great peninsulas of Iveragh and Dingle. The towns of Tralee and Inch and Kenmare and that strange uninhabited group of islands called the Blaskets, which sat lonely in the Atlantic tide. Once, the largest of the Blaskets had been called the next parish to America.

America. And good-bye, Mr. Pagan.

He watched the rails slide past under the March sky, and he wondered when he’d see Ireland and Finn again.

London

Frank Pagan lived alone in a flat at the top of a Victorian house in Holland Park. There had been a time in his life when he had enjoyed the place, when he’d found himself hurrying home from the office and taking the steps two at a time in his haste. Now when the street door closed behind him, he went up through the dark slowly.

He took out his key when he reached the apartment.

Inside, the air was trapped and stale. He turned on the living room lamp and poured himself a glass of scotch, which he carried inside the bedroom. The bed was unmade, the room cold. He sat on the edge of the bed without taking off his raincoat. Bleak House, he thought.

His usual method of cutting back the edge of bleakness was to play rock music loudly. He liked it full blast and raucous enough for dainty Miss Gabler in the flat below to rush upstairs complaining about that ‘dreadful Negro music’ and Pagan would say, Now, now, Hedda (even though her name was Cynthia), we mustn’t criticise music on racial grounds, must we? A dose of Little Richard or some early Jerry Lee Lewis usually worked for him, but tonight he didn’t want to play the stereo.

His condition was paralysis of the heart.

He reached out across the clutter of the bedside table and touched a framed photograph of his wife, Roxanne, then drew his hand away as if it had been scalded. There was still too much pain here. Sometimes he wondered if it would ever go away entirely. It had been more than two years now and there was still the same old nightmare, there were still times when he’d sit up in the darkened bedroom and smoke cigarettes and imagine he heard the sounds of Roxanne moving in the other rooms.

Once, when he’d drunk too much Chivas Regal, he stumbled through the apartment calling out her name. Banging doors open, slamming them shut, saying his wife’s name over and over like some incantation, he stalked her. The rooms were all empty, all dark. He’d never encountered anything like that kind of emptiness before. It was worse than any pain he could ever have imagined.

Dreams, Pagan thought. Roxanne was gone. He glanced at the photograph. It was a fine face with wide bright eyes that were filled with an amused intelligence. The mouth suggested great depths of humour. It was the kind of mouth that had been built for smiling. Sweet Christ, how he had loved her! Even now, he loved her. But Roxanne was gone. Then why in the name of God did he keep sensing her presence in this bloody flat?

He got up from the bed and wandered inside the kitchen. There were eggshells in the sink and coffee stains on the surface of the stove. He sat at the kitchen table and finished his drink and his eyes brimmed with moisture. He wiped them with the sleeve of his coat. Maudlin behaviour. He was being drawn down into the morbid centre of himself. He poured a second drink.

‘Roxanne,’ Pagan whispered. ‘Dear Roxanne.’

Outside, a March wind came rushing out of the night, springing through the shrubbery. He heard the branch of a tree knock against the side of the house.

Pagan sat down, fidgeted with his glass. He liked to think of himself as a practical man living in a practical world, one without psychic interference. He liked to think his personal radio was tuned only to what was broadcast in reality, not to ghosts, not to dreams. But what was this presence of Roxanne he kept feeling? Why did he keep talking aloud to a woman who was no longer alive?

Pagan closed his eyes tightly. He didn’t need to remember any of this.

Roxanne Pagan, twenty-seven years of age, had died at Christmas, 1984, killed on a Kensington street. She had been doing some last-minute Christmas shopping. She didn’t know that a man called Eddie Rattigan had planted a bomb inside a waste-basket beside a bus stop. She didn’t know that her own life was destined to collide with the violent longing of Eddie Rattigan, who later told the police he wanted to make a political statement on behalf of all IRA soldiers held in Northern Irish jails.

Roxanne Pagan had been passing the waste-basket when the explosion took place. Eddie Rattigan’s bomb killed seven people and injured a dozen others. Eddie Rattigan’s ‘political statement’ killed Roxanne and tore the heart out of Frank Pagan’s life, shattering his world in a matter of a second.

Pagan blinked at the window. He remembered Eddie Rattigan’s trial. He recalled the small man’s interminable smirk during the whole proceedings. Rattigan was pleased with himself. Pleased that his bomb had actually worked! After Rattigan was sentenced to life imprisonment Pagan had worked for months on a wild plan to get inside Wormwood Scrubs and kill the man. But the notion of vengeance passed, and he was left with an emptiness that had been with him ever since.

Pagan went into the bedroom. He wanted to sleep but he didn’t want to close his eyes because he knew the nightmare would rush in at him again. In this awful dream he was running down that Kensington street towards Roxanne and he was always too late to warn her. He shouted her name until his throat ached but she never heard him, never turned in his direction. Turn! For God’s sake, turn! Pagan would scream. Screaming, running. And then the explosion came. Which was when Pagan always woke, shivering and afraid and racked by unspeakable grief.

He removed his coat and tossed it across a chair. Then he kicked off his shoes and sat with his back to a pillow, his glass in his hand. He understood that he was a lonely man, but he’d come to terms with that. Once or twice since Roxanne’s death he’d gone out, hitting a couple of bars where single people stared morosely at one another and casual sexual assignations were made with all the passion of people selecting lamb chops out of a butcher’s window. The whole scene depressed Pagan. If he didn’t belong there, where did he belong? Here in this apartment with a phantom? Was that his future?

He smoked a cigarette. He had a third drink. Halfway through it his front doorbell rang. He glanced at the bedside clock: 9:45. He went inside the living room, where he switched on the intercom button.

‘Who is it?’ he said.

‘Drummond, Mr. Pagan. It’s Jerry Drummond.’ The voice crackled up from the street.

‘What do you want?’

‘I have a message for you.’

‘I’m listening, Jerry.’

‘Not like this. Let me come up, Mr. Pagan.’

Pagan sighed. He pressed the buzzer that opened the street door. He heard the sound of footsteps on the stairs. Then Drummond’s soft knock at the door.

A small man with pointed ears, Jerry Drummond wore long side-whiskers and invariably had a green silk scarf knotted at his throat. His nickname, perhaps predictably, was the Leprechaun.

‘I’m not meaning to disturb you, Mr. Pagan,’ Drummond said as he came into the room.

‘It’s late, Jerry.’

‘So it is, so it is.’ Jerry Drummond sat down, taking a flat tin from his overcoat. There would be, Pagan knew, the usual elaborate performance of rolling a cigarette, which Drummond did with all the intensity of an architect designing a cathedral.

‘And how is yerself today?’ the Leprechaun asked.

Pagan nodded. ‘I’ve known better days, Jerry.’

The little man lit his cigarette and his cheeks subsided into huge hollows as he puffed. ‘Haven’t we all known better days?’

‘What do you have for me, Jerry?’ Pagan asked.

‘Oh,’ said the Leprechaun mysteriously, twinkling like a Christmas tree light.

‘I haven’t got all night. You said you had a message, Jerry.’

The little man smoked furiously. At one time, he’d been a promising apprentice jockey at a stable in New-market, but a fondness for alcohol and a lack of discipline had finished his career quickly. Now, he was an odd-job man who was also one of Pagan’s many connections to the puzzle known as Ireland.

‘It’s from some of the boys,’ the Leprechaun said.

‘Which boys?’

‘I’m not at liberty to say, Mr. Pagan.’

‘Then I don’t want to hear, Jerry. You know what I think about anonymous messages.’

Jerry Drummond was using his open left hand as an ashtray. ‘I do, I do,’ he said. ‘But I’m just a simple messenger. I can’t tell you everything you think you want to know, can I? A messenger has only limited information, after all. He’s like a walk-on part in a play, when you think about it –’

Sighing, Pagan interrupted. He knew the little man could gab all night long, going off at tangents. ‘Who sent you, Jerry?’

Drummond was quiet for a time. ‘Shall we just say it’s a certain party interested in bringing Jig to justice?’

‘Jig?’

‘Right.’

‘What about Jig?’ A tiny flutter went through Pagan’s heart.

Drummond leaned forward, looking conspiratorial. ‘I’m to tell you that Jig is on his way to the United States of America, Mr. Pagan.’

‘And why would Jig be going to the United States, Jerry?’

‘I understand there’s a small matter of some missing money to be settled, Mr. Pagan.’

Pagan finished his scotch and set the glass down. ‘How do you know this, Jerry?’

‘Tut-tut,’ Drummond said, his eyes wide.

Pagan said, ‘If you expect me to believe your story, Jerry, you’d better tell me its source. Otherwise, I’m going to throw you out of here. Bodily.’

‘Ah, the English don’t know the meaning of hospitality, do they now?’ the Leprechaun smiled. He tilted his tiny pear-shaped face back and stared at the ceiling. ‘Let me say this much, seeing as how you threatened me with physical violence just then and me being a peaceable sort of fellow and all. Let me just say the message comes from members of the Free Ulster Volunteers, Mr. Pagan.’

‘That bunch of scum?’

‘They’re fine men, Mr. Pagan. They believe in keeping Northern Ireland for Britain. Could anybody have a finer goal than that, eh?’

The Free Ulster Volunteers. In recent years Frank Pagan had become bewildered by the proliferation of groups and sects that had arisen in Ireland. There was a thicket of them, each with its own initials. And they spawned themselves on almost a daily basis. Even with the help of computers, it was impossible to keep track. On the Protestant side, Pagan had heard such names as the Tartan Hand, Tara (an allegedly homosexual group of anti-Catholics), the Ulster Defence Association, the Ulster Freedom Fighters, the New Apprentice Boys, the Free Ulster Liberation Army. The Catholic IRA had split into cells and groups, some of them of a religious nature, some with Marxist objectives, others with ties to terrorist groups in Germany and Italy. Disenchanted IRA members had formed their own outfits. The Irish Liberation Army. The New Sinn Fein. The Catholic Brotherhood. More recently Pagan had heard whispers concerning something called the Association of the Wolfe, supposedly run by a man named Finn, who appeared nowhere in Pagan’s data banks. Some of these organisations were chimerical. Others exaggerated their membership. A few had power. Finn was said to have his hands on the bankbooks, but whoever Finn was – and Pagan suspected the name was a pseudonym – he obviously led a secluded life, far removed from the conflicts of Belfast and Derry. Certainly, none of Pagan’s sources knew the man.

Pagan sighed. Irish goulash. Rich, impenetrable, inedible, filled as it was with alphabet macaroni.

The Free Ulster Volunteers was a Belfast-based clandestine group of Protestant thugs who specialised in torturing and killing anybody with a connection to the IRA. When they couldn’t find a bona fide IRA member, any passing Catholic would do. Now and then, they slipped over the border into the Republic to make a hit.

The FUV was allegedly connected, in tenuous ways, with a Belfast zealot called the Reverend Ivor McInnes, a pastor without a church. He’d been ejected from the official Presbyterian Church for preaching sermons designed to encourage his congregation in the belief that Catholicism, like cigarettes, was bad for your health and should therefore be abolished. McInnes still wore his dog collar and drew huge crowds of Ulster Loyalists to hear him speak in public places. He was one of those fire and brimstone shouters who could raise the temperature of a mob to boiling point. He was a man of many gifts – charm, eloquence, and that nebulous quality called charisma – but Pagan considered them wasted ones. Ivor was utterly committed, some would say blindly so, to a Northern Ireland free of any Catholic influence. He didn’t want his own little domain, all five thousand square miles of it, all one million and a half souls, tainted by popery, dogged by priests and nuns. Pagan had never been able to prove conclusively that Ivor was the power behind the FUV. If he was, he somehow contrived cunningly to keep himself removed from the organisation.

‘Exactly who in the Free Ulster Volunteers sent you here? Ivor McInnes?’

‘Now, Mr. Pagan. We all know the Reverend isn’t associated with the FUV, don’t we?’

‘Don’t make me laugh, Jerry.’

The Leprechaun smoothed out the folds in his coat. ‘Can’t we just say the FUV sent me here and leave it at that?’

‘It’s not precise enough, Jerry. Give me a name. Give me something authentic.’

The Leprechaun sighed. It was a long-drawn-out sound. ‘One name, that’s all.’

‘One’s enough,’ Pagan said.

‘John Waddell.’

‘Waddell?’ Frank Pagan brought an image of Waddell to mind. He was a short man with a sharp face that was practically all snout. Eight months ago Pagan had interviewed John Waddell in connection with the killing of an IRA man in the London suburb of Chalk Farm. At the time, Pagan hadn’t been impressed by Waddell, who struck him as strangely timid and not at all the kind of material the FUV would use in an assassination. He’d released Waddell for lack of evidence, convinced that the man hadn’t had anything to do with the murder. Too scared. Too gun-shy. Now he wasn’t so certain. The FUV absorbed all types, especially the meek and the cowardly, who found the courage to act only when they were concealed under the umbrella of a movement. ‘Your information came directly from John Waddell?’

‘I’m not saying,’ Drummond answered.

‘But he’s involved.’

‘Mr. Pagan, you asked for a name, I gave you one. Don’t be pressing me for more than I can give you.’

Pagan thought for a second. ‘Why would the Free Ulster Volunteers want me to have this message, Jerry?’

‘You’re looking for Jig, are you not?’

Pagan nodded. His mouth was dry. He filled two glasses with scotch and gave one to Drummond.

Drummond smacked his lips and said, ‘You’ve got the resources to find him. You and the Yanks between you. You can find him before he kills anybody else.’ The word ‘kills’ came out of the Leprechaun’s mouth as culls. Pagan disliked the hard accent of Belfast. The Dublin lilt, by contrast, could be musical and hypnotic.

‘How does the FUV come by this information?’ Pagan asked.

‘That’s something I wouldn’t know,’ Drummond answered. ‘I’m only told so much, Mr. Pagan, and it would be fruitless for me to speculate, wouldn’t it now? But the members of the FUV would like for you to get your hands on Jig and hang the bastard. They don’t like seeing somebody going around killing politicians who are sympathetic to the free Protestants of the North.’

Pagan sipped his drink. ‘We don’t hang people in this country, Jerry.’

‘More’s the pity.’

‘I almost agree with you,’ Pagan said.

There was a silence in the room. The missing money the Leprechaun had mentioned was presumably the same that had been on the Connie O’Mara. Attached, Pagan guessed, to the Courier’s wrist. But there was something here that didn’t quite fit, and he felt faintly uneasy. How the hell did the Free Ulster Volunteers get this information? How did they get so close to Jig that they knew his movements? Or had Jerry Drummond been sent here to convey false information? But that made absolutely no sense. Why would the little man come here with a pack of lies?

He looked at the Leprechaun. ‘What else can you tell me, Jerry?’

‘I’ve already told you a wee bit more than I intended, Mr. Pagan. What else is there?’

‘America’s a big place.’

Drummond finished his drink and stood up. He was twinkling again and there was a certain mischief in his eyes. ‘Oh, didn’t I mention New York, Mr. Pagan?’

‘No, you didn’t mention New York.’

‘And Father Tumulty? Did I mention him?’

Pagan shook his head. This was so typical of Drummond. He’d dole his message out in fragments, getting as much mileage out of it as he possibly could. He was like a comedian taking a tortuous, suspenseful route to his punch line.

‘Who’s Father Tumulty?’ Pagan asked.

‘Sounds like a priest to me,’ and Drummond smiled.

Pagan heard the night wind spring up again. ‘Is that the complete message now, Jerry?’

‘Aye.’ Drummond seemed hesitant. ‘Wait. There’s one other thing. Jig sometimes uses a passport made out in the name of John Doyle.’

Pagan took the empty glass out of Drummond’s hand. ‘Why don’t your friends in the FUV go after Jig themselves?’

‘All the way to New York, Mr. Pagan? They couldn’t afford that kind of expense. You, on the other hand, you travel all expenses paid, don’t you? Besides, they don’t have your resources, Mr. Pagan. Nor your expertise. And you’d have the Americans to help you out, with their computers and all. The only computer I ever saw belonging to a member of the FUV was a small Japanese thing he used for playing Pac-Man. Then it went on the blink.’

Pagan watched the little man a moment. ‘You really expect me to drop everything and transport myself to New York on your say-so, Jerry?’

The Leprechaun looked hurt. ‘Mr. Pagan, have I ever given you false information? Have I ever done that?’

‘No.’

‘Didn’t I tell you about that shipment of rifles in Ostend? The ones in cool boxes marked butter that were destined for Dublin? Didn’t I do that for you? And wasn’t that true?’

Pagan nodded his head.

‘Didn’t I tell you about a small IRA bomb factory right here in Fulham? Right here on your own doorstep? Was that a lie?’

‘Jerry, your information has always been high quality. But this is something quite different.’

‘I don’t see why you would disbelieve me now.’

‘Maybe because I don’t exactly trust your FUV friends, Jerry.’

The Leprechaun got out of his chair. ‘Cross my heart, Mr. Pagan. This is all on the level. Jig is on his way to New York City. And you’d be a fool to ignore that fact.’ ‘Fool’ pronounced fule.

Pagan watched the little man go out. Alone again, he found the apartment smaller than before. The walls pressed in on him. It made sense, he thought, that Jig would be the one to track down the missing capital. The man was a hunter. He had predatory instincts and the capability of vanishing on the wind. But how did the FUV get hold of this information?

The question turned over in his mind again, and he had the feeling he was missing something, something important. Puzzled, he went back inside the bedroom and sat down. For a moment he tried to imagine Jig’s face. A young man, an unremarkable face you wouldn’t look twice at in the street, drab unassuming clothes. Perhaps a nervous mannerism. A tic in the jaw. A fingernail biter. A way of smoking cigarettes right down to the filter. Nicotine stains. Slightly discoloured teeth. And maybe there was a light in his eye, something that suggested intensity. He had to be intense, committed to his purpose. Highly trained too. The kind of training that wasn’t available in Ireland. The kind you went abroad to get in places like Libya and Cuba.

Pagan lay back across the bed. Had the American suppliers of the money somehow turned their thinking around and seized their capital back on the high seas?

Pagan sat up now. The sense of being perplexed wouldn’t leave him. There was something a little askew, out of joint. He couldn’t think what except that there were small threads he couldn’t quite stitch together. They kept unravelling in his mind.

He reached for the photograph of Roxanne and held it tilted under the bedside lamp so that the glass caught the yellow glow of electricity.

‘New York City,’ Pagan said to his ghost. ‘It’s been a long time.’