McCallan opened one eye and knew he would not feel any better when he opened the other one. There was a heavy fog in his head and his mouth felt as if someone had held a party in it. The cigar, that was what had done it. Always the killer punch. He blinked and it hurt. Never mind the wine and the brandy and everything else, why was it that you always blamed the cigar? He remembered his mother going to a wine and cheese party when they had such things years ago and not being well afterwards and blaming the cheese.
He fumbled for the watch beside the bed. Nine o’clock. Tuesday morning. He got out of bed, crossed to the window and opened the heavy brocade curtains. Outside, the rain was almost horizontal and the wind whipped the last tenacious leaves from the trees. Beyond, across the main road, the sea was a slate grey with flecks of white in the swell. It was a day that looked just the way he felt. He enveloped himself in a huge fluffy white towelling robe that someone had left thoughtfully on the end of the bed and went off on a journey of exploration to find the sauna.
Half an hour later, he felt a lot better, partly detoxified, the fog in his head reduced to a bearable mist. Dressed, he made his way to the breakfast room where a dark-eyed young woman in a maid’s outfit shyly served him poached eggs, bacon and toast, which had been his choice when she had asked him, although he was well aware that he could have had porridge or scrambled eggs or kedgeree or anything else that took his fancy.
He was amazed how hungry he was. He ate alone, as he had expected to. Lomax would have been at his desk in Belfast by seven as usual but he would have been working long before then, firing out instructions and talking to people all over the world from the back of the car as he made his way in.
He scanned the papers, which had been left neatly on a table by the door, and reflected that he had stayed in worse five-star hotels. On an inside page in the Financial Times, he found a small story about LOC which talked of speculation that there was an imminent buyer. He turned to the share prices and ran his eye down the columns. He whistled softly when he saw what he was looking for.
After he had finished, McCallan found Arthur and gave him a message that he would ring Lomax later that evening. They had not talked about what would happen next, the will and everything. Both Lomax and he were executors but he had not the foggiest idea of what it contained or what was involved.
As he drove through Newcastle in the rain, he wondered just how much his father was worth and what the hell he would do with it all. He tried to add it up. There was the house at Dromore but there was also a lot of land around it which was leased out to a couple of small farmers. Then just up the road there was the old farmhouse. He had forgotten about that. There was a woman renting that, wasn’t there, a university lecturer or something? He had met her briefly once when he and his father had been out for a walk. There was Donegal, of course; he would want shot of that.
The thought of being suddenly wealthy and free to do whatever he wished gave him an excited tingle but it made him feel guilty at the same time. If he had a choice, he would much rather have his father back.
There was post in the hall when he returned, letters and cards of sympathy. That was just the beginning of them. He would have a lot of mail to reply to. He made a pot of coffee and sat with a pen and paper, listing the names and wondering who the half of them were.
The doorbell rang and he went to answer it. At first, he could not place the woman who stood there. She was in her early to mid fifties, strong-featured and striking, greying hair short and combed back. She wore a dark wool overcoat and she kept her hands in the pockets. Hazel eyes played with him as he struggled towards recognition.
It came to him as he looked beyond her, over her shoulder to where the big car sat, the engine idling almost inaudibly, two young dark-suited men in the front.
His eyes widened. ‘Chief Constable,’ he said. ‘I’m so sorry. How good of you to come.’
Ned Rossiter was the caretaker of the Masonic building at Arthur Square in the centre of Belfast and he was getting too old for the stairs. Reluctantly, he admitted it to himself as he closed the big front door behind him and contemplated the long haul up four floors with a Marks & Spencer shopping bag in each hand.
It had been all right – when was it? – fifteen years ago, when he had got the job. The exercise had been good for him then, had forced him to keep in reasonable shape, but the relentless climb was a bit much for him now that he was nearly seventy. Time to retire. Again, he thought.
There was a lift, true enough, a goods lift which the caterers and others used when there were big installation dinners on the third floor but that was not much use to Ned. The flat was the problem, not that it was not comfortable and quite well fitted, which it was, although it had been a bit small when Ned’s wife was alive, but it was the fact that it was at the very top of the building and he had to trudge all the way down and then back up again whenever anyone rang the front door bell.
Mind you, the old days must have been much worse, the early seventies, for example, when the IRA bombing campaign was at its height. Living in a flat at the top of a building in the empty heart of the city, being evacuated in the middle of the night into the cold, wet, dangerous streets, would not have been a bundle of laughs. Thank God all that had been over by the time Ned moved in. He would not have been interested in the job otherwise.
But he would have had to have found something, all the same. Ned was a Yorkshireman but had lived in Northern Ireland for nearly forty years, ever since he had been transferred from England by the engineering company that employed him. For some reason he had never risen above his fairly lowly rung on the management ladder. He had applied for promotion often enough but he never seemed to get anywhere and instead saw younger, less experienced people passing him by, until one day he was called into his boss’s office and told he was being made redundant.
He had no savings worth a damn – keeping two daughters at university in England had seen to that – so he had sold his modest house and invested the money and taken this job as a caretaker. The fact that he was a Mason himself, of course, had helped him get it.
Ned paused on the third floor to get his breath. Nearly there. He put the bags down and looked around in the silence. This floor had all been done up a couple of years ago. He looked into the lodge room. It was empty now but it would be full tonight with whatever lodge, he had forgotten which one it was, performing its ancient ritual.
One of his daughters was actually living in Yorkshire now, not far from Leeds, his old home town, and here he was, on his own in Belfast. Life seemed to have moved in some kind of a strange circle. She had talked about him coming to live with them – her and her husband and their youngsters, a boy and a girl. He liked the grandchildren but he had dismissed the notion because he did not want to get in the way. She had mentioned it again recently, though, and maybe he should give it a bit of thought.
There was a room beside the lodge room. It had been an old dusty cloakroom once but in the refurbishment it had been turned into a bigger space, all nicely panelled, with a wall of wooden lockers, like something out of a public school, Ned thought. The lockers were for the provincial officers to use if they wished, somewhere for them to keep personal effects, such as their regalia.
Each rank was inscribed in gold-leaf paint on the locker door. Provincial Grand Master. Provincial Grand Treasurer. He stopped at the next one. Provincial Grand Secretary. He had forgotten. The poor man had died, that awful fire in Donegal. There was a son, wasn’t there? He should really clear the locker and take the contents up to the flat for safe-keeping. Then he would contact the young fellow to make arrangements about collecting it.
He put his hand in his coat pocket and took out a bunch of keys, selected one and opened the locker door. There was a small tan case inside, almost like the sort of thing that would have held a pair of duelling pistols. He checked to see if it was locked. It was not. Ned paused. He really should not open this but he was curious.
There was an apron, neatly folded, plus all the usual bits and pieces, including a couple of small books, like hymnals, with Masonic regulations. At the bottom of the case there was a large manilla envelope with the flap taped shut. Ned turned it over in his hand. There was nothing written on it. It was bulky and it felt as if there might be another, slightly smaller envelope inside.
He made a face to himself. Odd. He put everything back in the case and turned the key in the locker. He would come back for it later. First he had to get this shopping upstairs.
McCallan was flustered and embarrassed at not recognising her. Dorothy Taylor, Chief Constable of the Police Service of Northern Ireland, was one of his father’s oldest friends, but it was a long time since he had seen her. She waved his apologies aside and instead leaned forward and kissed him on the cheek before walking on in.
‘Jack, I’m so sorry, so very sorry. I was devastated when I heard the news. I couldn’t come any sooner, I’m afraid. I tried to reach you last night, left a message on your voice mail. Did you get it?’
‘Oh no. Damn. I’m sorry. I haven’t checked this morning. I wasn’t here. I spent the night down in Newcastle with Henry Lomax and I’ve just got back.’
‘Ah, I see. Henry Lomax. So you’ll be nursing a sore head, then?’
‘Actually, it could be worse. And to tell you the truth it was until I stewed myself in his sauna and then had a good breakfast.’
‘Yes, I hear he’s got quite a place down there.’
‘He certainly has. Haven’t you been? You must know him?’
‘Yes, I do, but I’ve never been to his house. I first met him years ago through your father, of course, since they’re such old friends, but I see him from time to time now professionally. He’s on various committees and so on. Institute of Directors, that kind of thing. I’m giving a speech to them next week.’
McCallan ushered her into the living room and she explained that she had been visiting the regional police headquarters in Lisburn and had decided to call while she was in the area. She was relieved to find him in because it had been troubling her that they had not spoken.
As they talked, McCallan studied her. She took her coat off and threw it carelessly over the back of a chair. Underneath, there was a well-cut grey suit, civilian clothes but a touch formal, he thought, a uniform of sorts. He left her for a few minutes while he went to the kitchen to make coffee and when he came back he found her at ease in an armchair with her elegant legs crossed and her hands cupped across one knee.
She had been a young officer in the RUC when the Troubles had come to an end. She had been a rather rare specimen, a woman at the sharp end of anti-terrorist work, operating alongside men like Bob McCallan, but it had been her brain and her wits which had earned her that role and had made an impression on everyone who worked with her. When the force was reformed and a lot of the old guard, including his father, had retired, she had found herself in the right place at the right time, a woman on the way up.
She had undoubted ability, she was tough, and her gender was certainly not going to harm the image of a new force with opportunities for all. Promotion had followed by degrees and then transfer to head up one of the big new regional crime squads covering the West of England. Her public profile had grown, the Sunday papers wrote colourful features about her and she sometimes popped up on television discussions. She had been Chief Constable for the past three years.
She had the confidence that came with power. Her manner was engaging, the charm seductive, but McCallan sensed from her the ruthlessness that lay beneath it all and just for a moment he wondered if there had ever been anything more than a professional relationship between her and his father.
‘Jack,’ she said, leaning forward with the coffee cupped in her hand, ‘how are you coping? Is there anything I can do, anything at all? You know you only have to ask.’
McCallan smiled his gratitude. ‘Yes, I know. Everyone has been so kind.’
‘I don’t need to tell you how wonderful your father was, what he meant to me. He was a great man, a great help to me when I was a young policewoman just learning the ropes and great support over the years. Even after he retired, I often turned to him for advice.’
The thought about her and his father was there again and he could not quite shake it. She had never married, right enough. His own situation came to mind: unattached, having an affair with a married woman.
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘he talked about you a lot. He was very proud of your success, always knew you would do well. And he wasn’t a bit ashamed about taking some of the credit for it.’
He smiled. ‘But he was a bit old-fashioned, though. Women had their place, I suspect, although he would never have put it quite like that. I think even he was surprised when you actually became the Chief Constable, if you don’t mind me saying so.‘
She laughed. ‘Well he only had himself to blame. He obviously trained me far too well.’
They talked on, their thoughts turning to how McCallan’s father had died, and the conversation became more muted.
‘You always wonder, don’t you,’ she said, ‘when something like this happens. Was it just an accident? Have you been wondering? I bet you have.’
He nodded, relieved to find her broaching the subject instead of him.
‘I wondered myself,’ she said, ‘so I did something I shouldn’t do. I got on to the Guards personally. Not the sort of thing the Chief Constable should be up to, exactly. A bit high on the Richter scale of not terribly good diplomatic behaviour, I‘m afraid, but what the hell, I couldn’t just sit around. Your father was too dear to me for that. So I found out that they’ve got the forensic results now. They moved quite quickly on it, really, it has to be said.’
She sipped her coffee. ‘Well, anyway, it does seem as if it was a genuine accident all right and confirms everything you were probably told at the scene. And I suppose that’s a relief in a way although it doesn’t make the shock of your father’s death any easier. But at least there’s no question of anything, well, sinister.’
McCallan thanked her and then he told her about Mrs Benson’s death and the policemen who had called with Grace Walker.
‘God,’ she said, ‘isn’t that tragic? What a dreadful coincidence. That poor woman. As for her police visitors, I wouldn’t have a clue. Could be anybody but it sounds a bit strange in the circumstances. I can always get someone to check with Lisburn, if it’ll ease your mind, find out who they were and what they were on about.’
‘Thank you,’ McCallan said. ‘You’re very reassuring.’
She gazed over his shoulder and into the past somewhere. ‘We all went through a lot. Some horrible things. It’s a wonder we kept our sanity, never mind our lives. You can’t imagine.’
She had forgotten, obviously. She was right in that he had never been a policeman in Northern Ireland and could not know what that had been like. He was also part of a generation for whom the Troubles were a swiftly fading memory. But one thing he did know, one experience he did share with a great many people: he knew what being shot was like.
‘No,’ he said. ‘I can’t.’
She had not really heard him, was still off somewhere else. ‘You pause for thought at a time like this. You start to think about your own life, what you’ve done with it, your experiences.’
She turned her attention back to him. ‘Did your father talk about the past much?’
She did not wait for his answer. ‘You know, some people left the force because they actually missed the Troubles. Could you believe that? They missed the buzz, the excitement of the unknown, of being close to danger. Couldn’t handle all this boring peacetime policing. Amazing, isn’t it?’
It occurred to McCallan that she might be talking about herself but he did not say so.
‘Maybe Dad might have been like that if he’d stayed,’ he said. ‘Who knows? But he didn’t stay and, as far as I can recall, there were a lot of people like him who didn’t have the option, did they?’
She looked at him. ‘You’re being a bit harsh, don’t you think? All big organisations have to change to survive and we were certainly not any different. We had to do it bloody quickly because of the new political circumstances. It was only right to give people the opportunity to choose, to decide whether they felt they could be part of the new environment. If they felt it didn’t suit them, then we let them go with dignity and a good financial deal, upgraded pensions, the lot. Only right and proper. We owed them everything. Your father never complained, did he?’
She had all the management patter. Wrapped in veils of euphemism, it meant that those whose faces did not fit were shown the door. But she was right. His father had not complained, nor, of course, had he waited around to become one of the compulsory volunteers.
‘No, he made the right decision at the right time and it all worked out very well for him. A new life entirely.’
He thought for a moment. ‘As for the past, when I think about it, there wasn’t much in the line of reminiscence. The odd snippet now and again. I suppose he viewed it as something of a closed book, really.’
It was a book, he reminded her, which might have ended a lot earlier, in 1975, to be exact, on a bright spring day in County Armagh, roads lined on either side by pink apple blossom, when the Landrover in front of Bob McCallan had disintegrated in an explosion which had lifted his own armoured vehicle and blown it into the ditch. By that time, of the eight people in the police patrol, only four were still alive and as they had scrambled out, the shooting had started.
Two more had died at that point, shot in the chest by an expert sniper. Bob McCallan had grabbed an M1 carbine and crawled behind an apple tree for cover and until the Army helicopters arrived he had kept firing at the hillside from which the attack had come. By that time the terrorists had gone only he and one constable with serious wounds had survived. Out of that incident had come a British Empire Medal for his gallantry.
‘Remarkable,’ the Chief Constable said, remembering, ‘remarkable.’
‘It seemed as if he preferred to keep past history very much to himself,’ McCallan said. ‘Anyway, I used to think a lot of his reticence had as much to do with him not wanting to be reminded about my mother’s death as much as anything.’
‘Yes, well, you’re probably right. And I suppose that if being secretive is part of your job and your way of life, then it’s hard to be anything else. The need-to-know principle, we used to call it. You become a bit uncommunicative, reluctant to answer questions, always suspicious about why they’re being asked.’
She looked at her watch and stood up. ‘I have to go but may I ask you a question before I do?’
‘Sure, anything.’
‘May I say a few words at the funeral?’
Embarrassment hit him again and he kicked himself mentally for not having thought of it first.
‘Oh, Chief Constable—’
‘I think we’d both feel a lot more comfortable if you called me Dorothy, don’t you? After all this time.’
‘Dorothy. Of course. I’d be delighted if you said something. So bloody thoughtless of me not to ask.’
From her pocket she took a small white card with a phone number on it. ‘That’s my home. When all this is over and before you go back to London, you must come and have a drink. Just call me.’
‘Thank you. I’d like that very much.’
They walked to the front door and as he reached across to open it he brushed against her accidentally. But she did not draw back from his touch.
In that brief awkward second, he felt the shape of her, firm under the fitted suit. His eyes met hers for a moment but he tried to pretend they had not and he busied himself with the doorknob as if there were a problem with it. Then she was out of the door and into the car and away up the drive and he stood there with his heart beating.