Bomber

A Novel by

Michael Rolls

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Dedicated to the memory of my dear wife

Veronica Rolls

15th April 1943 to 23rd January 2018

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Bomber

Chapter One. .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... ..... .... .... .... .... .... ... . .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... ..... ..2

15th of June 1996. .... .... .... .... .... ..... .... ... .... ..... .... .... .... .... ..... .... .... .... .... .... .... ..... .... .... .... .... .... .....2

10th April 1998. .... .... .... .... .... .... ..... .... .... .. . ..... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... ..... .... .... .... .... ..... .... .... .... ...5

3rd of March, 2001. .. .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .. .. .... .... .... .... .... ..... .... .... .... .... .. .. .... .... .... .... .....7

Chapter Two. .. .... .... .... .... .... .... ... . .... .... .... . ... .... .... .... .... .... .... ... . .... .... .... . ... .... .... .... .... .... .... ...9

Chapter Three..... .... .... .... .... .... ..... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... ..... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... ....10

Chapter Four.. .... ..... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... ..... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... ..... .... .... .... .... ...17

Chapter Five.... .... .... .... .... ..... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... ..... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... ..... .... ..22

13th July, 2000...... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... ..... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... ..... .... .... .... .............23

Chapter Six... .... .... .... .... ..... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... ..... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... ..... .... .... .....29

Chapter Seven. ... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... ... . .... .... .... ..... .... .... .... .... .... ..... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... ...37

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Chapter One

The doorbell rang. I glanced at my watch in surprise; it was twenty past eight and I wondered who would be ringing my bell at such an hour. Only one way to find out – I got to my feet and limped to the door. I opened it to find a face from the past standing there. Jim Alison was a former colleague, one who had kept in touch, on a fairly casual basis, over the years.

“Jim – nice surprise, but what brings you out here at this hour? Helen thrown you out?”

My jest fell on deaf ear, and I realised that my friend was in no mood for jokes.

“Larry, can I come in?”

“Of course, come you in – you look less than full of the joys of spring!”

I had an unhappy thought.

“Is there really a problem between you and Helen?”

As he stepped through my door Jim shook his head impatiently.

“No, of course not – this is something that concerns you, not Helen and me. Liam O’Connell was released yesterday.”

His words struck me like a hammer blow and my mind rewound the events of many years before. I realised that I was standing stock still, with Jim looking anxiously at me. I shook myself, figuratively and literally.

“Jim, come in and tell me all about it.”

I led the two of us into my living room, a small but comfortably furnished space, the space in which I spent most of my hours. Most, even, of my days. Without needing to be bid, Jim sank into one of my easy chairs and I matching his action in its companion. I looked at him unhappily.

“What happened? I thought that he was safely tucked away for years yet.”

“So did we all, Larry, so did we all, but the parole board seized on the fact that the judge said a ‘minimum of fifteen years’ and decided to grant him parole. He’s out on licence and in theory won’t misbehave or he will be back inside – but I wouldn’t bank on it, would you?”

I shook my head in near despair.

“No, I wouldn’t. What were the stupid fuckers thinking of? The man is a mad dog, a mad dog looking for someone to bite – and I’m the first target for his teeth. Do they want to see me dead?”

Jim shook his head once more.

“You know what it’s like, Larry – you must read the papers. Anything more than a slap on the wrist even for the most revolting of villains is seen to be over the top. Add in prison overcrowding..” he shrugged again,

“well, I suppose that it is all that we can expect in this day and sodding age.”

I agreed wholeheartedly with my friend’s sentiments. As a one-time police officer – and I knew that Jim felt the same – I was sick and tired of the kid gloves treatment that convicted criminals received in our present

‘caring society’ – a society which seems to care far more for the rights of criminals than for the rights of their victims.

My mind was reeling under the impact of Jim’s news. It reeled back to that day in Manchester.

15th of June 1996

It was the biggest bomb that the IRA ever exploded on mainland Britain, the largest bomb to explode on our shores since Hitler’s Luftwaffe had done their best – or worst – to break us during the Second World War.

Three thousand, three hundred pounds of explosives had been set off in Manchester’s Corporation Street, the heart of the city’s business area. Two hundred and twelve people had been injured but, by little short of a miracle, nobody had been killed. Dozens of buildings had been damaged, some so badly that they had had to be demolished and their sites rebuilt upon. The IRA had issued a telephone warning ninety minutes before the explosion, but the time allowed wasn’t enough for the bomb squad to find and disable the device. Five days later the IRA officially claimed responsibility for the outrage and expressed, with staggering hypocrisy, their ‘regret’ at civilian casualties.

In fact, the carnage should have been worse, far worse. There should have been a second bomb, a bomb a lot smaller than the successful one, but a bomb intended to be so located as to catch, and kill and maim, people fleeing from the site of the first explosion. Most of those people would have been ‘civilians’ – so much for the IRA’s regret.

4

I had been a twenty-six year old uniformed police constable – and I was in my first month as an accredited firearms officer. I was on duty that day, one of the three officers in an armed response car, called into action when the IRA ninety minute warning had come through. In charge of our unit was Sergeant Billy Thorndike, forty years old and vastly experienced, although, as I had only recently been made aware, an officer who, despite his training and high range scores, had never actually had to discharge his firearm in a real life situation. Neither had I, nor for that matter had the third member of our team, Jim Alison.

Jim was driving the police Ford Granada and we rocketed towards the assumed target area of the IRA, Manchester’s commercial centre.

We were almost there when Billy screamed out “Stop! Stop the bloody car!”

The tyres howled in protest as Jim slammed on the brakes and the big car came to a shuddering halt. To the end of his days (sadly, he died of cancer only three years later) Billy Thorndike was unable to explain just what it was about the van, and the three men getting out of it, that had triggered his response, but some deeply buried element of his policeman’s psyche had somehow registered danger. Jim and I had seen just what Billy had seen, but to us it was just a van, a somewhat scruffy Ford Transit, no different from hundreds, perhaps even thousands, throughout the area of Greater Manchester, but Billy was our boss and we trusted him implicitly, so we followed him without question as he bailed out of the passenger seat of the Granada, our Heckler and Koch MP5 carbines already in our hands.

“Stop!” he yelled, “Armed police! Stop where you are!”

All three turned towards us. One then turned away again and started running; the other two, however, stood their ground. Both reached inside the loose anoraks that they were wearing – garments out of kilter with a June day, even in Manchester, and as their hands began to emerge, I realised that both were drawing pistols. I echoed Billy in screaming, at the top of my voice,

“Armed police! Drop your weapons!”

I reacted more quickly than either Jim or Billy as, to me, everything seemed to be happening in slow motion.

I could see the men’s hands beginning to come up to bring their pistols into a firing position, and I was aware that their pistols would be levelled at us before either Billy or Jim had his carbine on target. In a purely reflex action, I had already brought my own weapon up to my shoulder and without hesitation I fired at both men.

Both Billy and Jim consistently scored more highly on the range than I did when we practised with our weapons, but they still seemed to be acting as if wading through treacle and neither of them had even levelled their carbines before my bullets had hit both men, two shots each, and they were sent sprawling to the ground from the impact of the nine millimetre slugs. I started to swivel to track the third man, the man who was running away, but a series of parked vehicles prevented me from obtaining a safe firing picture, and I lowered the MP5 to a muzzle safe position.

“Jesus Christ, what has happened?”

It was Billy, his voice shaking with emotion as we looked at my two victims. Both were sprawled on their backs, the pistols still close to their hands. Billy crossed over to them; his first action was to kick their weapons to a safe distance away from their hands, then he knelt at each man, checking for a pulse. Finally, he straightened up, shaking his head.

“They’re goners,” he announced, “Alison, call it in – we need an ambulance and a forensic team.”

Jim radioed in the request, whilst Billy used his own radio to contact the senior firearms officer, Chief Inspector Dawlish, the man who had sent us out, to let him know what had happened.

Before the support could arrive, we heard the explosion in Corporation Street and people were streaming past us in their hurry to get away from the epicentre of the blast. Seeing us standing there, they passed us by, scarcely sparing a glance either at us or the two corpses on the ground.

I stood there in something of a daze as we mounted guard over the two dead men and tried to make sure that the panicking people didn’t intrude on what was, after all, a crime scene.

From then on it was chaos. We learned that the bomb we had heard had been huge, and had damaged dozens of buildings and injured over two hundred people, although, by little short of a miracle, nobody had been killed, although for many of the injured it had been a close-run thing.

Normally, a situation such as the one we found ourselves in would have been handed over to the CID and attended, probably, by a Detective Inspector or a Detective Chief Inspector, but this was by no means a normal situation. Apart from having the area immediately around the van and its one-time occupants sealed off with ‘Police: Do Not Cross’ tape nothing happened for what seemed an age, but was probably no more than an hour or so. Ambulances were at a priority and concentrating on ferrying the living wounded to hospital; the dead had to wait. At last, however, we were briefly visited by a harassed DCI Logan, who spared us no more than ten minutes before authorising the removal of the bodies – when and if an ambulance could be spared, and having the local station post a constable on guard over the scene until it could receive a 5

proper forensic examination, whilst we three were ordered to return to our station and have our weapons impounded for examination and for us to make preliminary statements.

Everything seemed to need to be done at once, and at breakneck speed. The area around where the bomb had been exploded was the subject of frenzied examination, from the site of the blast itself to anything that might have looked remotely suspicious, right down to vehicles with expired parking tickets – no joke, one such vehicle was a somewhat aged Transit van similar to the one that had contained ‘our’ terrorists, but which turned out to be perfectly innocent. The owner, a self-employed decorator, had been taken into hospital the previous day as an emergency to have his appendix removed, and the thought of his van exceeding its parking time hadn’t really been a priority to the man, nor to his wife.

Slowly the picture began to emerge. It was five days before the IRA claimed responsibility for the bomb, five days of mounting fury on the part of the press and the populace. Such was the anger against the perpetrators of the outrage that my shooting of the two men hardly got a mention and certainly not the howls of ‘police brutality’ that might otherwise have been expected from the bleeding hearts.

The men that I had shot turned out to be brothers, Kenneth Conan O’Connell, aged thirty-six, and Fergus O’Connell, aged thirty-two, both known members of the IRA, as was their younger brother, Liam Shaun O’Connell, aged eighteen, who was assumed to have been the man who escaped from the scene.

For my part, I underwent a series of interviews, going over again and again, time after time and in minute detail, just what had happened, why I had fired on the O’Connells, what my reaction was to what had happened, and so on and so on.

I was given counselling – and I had no choice in the matter, that was made perfectly clear – by a psychiatrist, a charming middle aged woman, a Doctor Kathleen Rigby, whose gentle probing into my state of mind was more unsettling than any of the more robust interviews to which I had been subjected.

At the end of a month of all this, I was formally exonerated from any wrong doing and received a commendation for my actions which were felt to have saved the three of us from being subjected to gunfire from the brothers, gunfire which might have proved fatal to us rather than to them. It also transpired than the van itself contained another bomb. Nothing like as big as the one which had been detonated in Corporation Street, but at three hundred pounds of explosive more than big enough to shred the van and send bits of glass and metal as lethal shrapnel over a wide area. Unlike the Corporation Street bomb, which had been set off by a timer, the bomb in the van would have been triggered by a remote device, found on the body of Kenneth O’Connell. Doubtless he would have waited until the stream of humanity fleeing the Corporation Street area presented a suitable target before pressing the button. So much for the IRA’s expression of regret at the

‘civilian casualties’.

I had been exonerated, but I had had enough. I sought, and was granted, an interview with Chief Inspector Dawlish, the head of the firearms division. He saw me in his office, where he was accompanied by another Chief Inspector, a woman, Gillian Ramsey who was in Personnel.

He bade me to sit down and looked at me searchingly.

“So, Constable, why did you ask to see me? I would have thought that you have had more than enough interviews over the last few weeks.”

“I have indeed, sir, and that’s why I asked to see you. I want to be transferred out of the firearms division.”

“Would you like to tell us why?”

“Well, sir, when Sergeant Thorndike, Constable Alison and I accosted the O’Connell brothers, I was the only one to fire. I don’t want to criticise my colleagues – they didn’t ‘freeze’ as it were, but they certainly hesitated. They are both far more experienced in firearms work than I am, and now that I have seen what happens when a police officer does fire his weapon in the course of trying to make an arrest, I think I know why they were slow off the mark that day. The sheer weight of guilt that I feel about what happened makes me worry that in a similar situation I might also hesitate – and in hesitating perhaps get myself or others killed.”

“You have no reason to feel guilty, Constable, none at all – quite the reverse, in fact. If you hadn’t acted as you did, we might now be mourning the deaths of three colleagues instead of being glad that two murderers are no longer around to cause further misery to innocent people. However, I have no wish to retain an officer in my division who doesn’t wish to be there.” He turned to his colleague. “What do you think, Gill?”

The woman gave me an encouraging smile.

“I quite understand how you would wish not to find yourself in such a situation again and I think that your reaction does you credit. Now, if you just return to straightforward uniform duties as a PC, that would look rather as though you were being punished, that you just couldn’t ‘hack it’, which is not the case at all. I wonder, how would you feel about a transfer to CID? There are a couple of DC vacancies at the moment, and if you would like to transfer one of them is yours for the asking.”

6

This was going far better than I had hoped; as Chief Inspector Ramsey had said, just going back to uniform would look to be something of a retrograde step, whereas moving to CID would be seen as quite the reverse.

I hadn’t, up to that stage, looked beyond being a member of the firearms team; this would be something new and I did wonder what it would be like, but nothing ventured, nothing gained.

“I would like that very much, ma’am.”

The two Chief Inspectors looked at each and Dawlish nodded his head firmly.

“Right, that’s settled – and congratulations, Lamb.”

And so I moved into a new phase of my career. My new colleagues welcomed me, although I realised that they doubtless regarded me with a certain degree of wonder. It is very rare for a police officer to discharge a firearm on duty, even rarer to actually shoot somebody, and killing a suspect even rarer – and I had killed two.

I never thought for a moment that my time in CID would be as short as just five years.

10th April 1998

It was the day that the Good Friday Agreement was signed, the agreement that it was hoped would end factional violence in Northern Ireland, to protect the province, and the rest of the UK, from the ongoing violence of ‘The Troubles’. It was seen as a major step towards peace, and by and large in succeeded, not totally, but enough to create a better situation for one and all, regardless of where they lived and what their affiliations.

One effect of the agreement was to release a large number of imprisoned terrorists, both Republican and Loyalists, prematurely. That was an element that many people, of whom I was most definitely one, were unhappy about – but it was an essential element, Without it, the agreement would never have been agreed –

as simple as that. Not only were men – and some women – released from prison early, but some on the run from justice were effectively pardoned. One such person was Liam O’Connell.

At the time that I had shot his brothers, it had been unclear whether or not Liam had been the third man in the van, but subsequent forensic examination of the van had discovered his fingerprints on the upholstery of the passenger seat and on the bomb itself –along, of course, with those of his brothers. The leaving of the prints was not as careless as it might seem – after all, the brothers had expected the van to be blown to smithereens, which would have destroyed any and all forensic evidence for ever.

It was discovered by the security people that Liam had fled to the United States. There had been (to my mind) a somewhat half-hearted attempt to extradite him, but the rather lopsided agreement on such matters between the USA and the UK had enabled him to stay untouched in ‘the land of the free’.

By then I was an established and accepted Detective Constable, getting on well with my colleagues – who had overcome their initial slight unease at my history of having killed two men, and accepted that the two men in question had made the world a better place by leaving it.

On the personal front, although, like so many of my colleagues, I was unhappy at what I saw as something of a surrender to the men of violence, I had other things on my mind, most especially the person of Jenny Morris. Jenny was just a little younger than myself, a telephone operator at our station, and we had met by chance at the retirement party of Chief Inspector Gillian Ramsey, the head of personnel, the lady who had arranged my transfer to CID two years earlier, and who was ultimately Jenny’s boss.

We had, quite literally, bumped into each other at the bar where, struggling through the scrum in front of it to buy a round for my mates, I had collided – but only slowly – with this slim blonde.

“Sorry,” I said hurriedly, more anxious to catch the eye of the barman than anything else – but then I realised that the collision had resulted in one of the two drinks that she was carrying spilling down the front of her dress. I realised, somewhat belatedly, just what I had done. Luckily, the spilled drink was white wine, so there was no immediate stain in sight on the dark blue dress, but I was still going to be in the doghouse –

typical clumsy copper!

“Look.” I said a second time, “I really am sorry that was really clumsy of me and totally my fault – can I get you a replacement?”

She frowned as she looked down the front of her dress, then decided that the damage wasn’t the end of the world.

“Yes please – it was Chardonnay for Grace over there” – she used the hand holding the unspilt drink to indicate a tubby dark haired female sitting at one of the tables a few feet away. It was a table for four, but only the one chair was taken by the girl sitting there – and presumably the girl to whom I was now talking would be a second occupant.

7

I managed to catch the barman’s eye and ordered the drinks for the guys, plus the Chardonnay for the blonde’s friend. After giving the guys their drinks I took the wine, plus my own drink, over to the girls’

table.

“Mind if I join you for a while?” I asked.

Grace, the tubby girl, smiled invitingly.

“Sure, it’s a free country.”

I sat down and smiled back, including the blonde in the smile as best I could.

“Thanks – oh, better introduce myself. I’m Larry Lamb.”

They both giggled – a reaction which was hardly new to me. It was the blonde who spoke.

“Larry? Larry the Lamb? You must be joking!”

I laughed ruefully.

“No I’m not, but it’s not Larry the Lamb – just Larry Lamb. My parents actually christened me Harold Charles, but I got christened ‘Larry’ my first day at school and it’s stuck ever since. If somebody called me Harold or Harry I probably wouldn’t know who they were talking about! But then, that’s who I am – who are you two?”

The tubby girl was the first to reply.

“I’m Grace Lewis”

“And I’m Jenny Morris,” her companion chipped in.

“Well, pleased to meet you, ladies,” I raised my glass to them, “cheers!”

They responded in kind and I looked more closely at Jenny. She was, I judged, about my own age and undeniably attractive, with her blonde hair cut to come to her jawline, framing an oval face with blue eyes which positively sparkled. About five feet three or four tall and slimly built, I felt an instant attraction to the girl. Perhaps something of the sort communicated, because after a moment or two, Grace finished her white wine in a couple of swallows and rose to her feet. I started to rise with her, but she waved me back down.

“No, don’t get up, Larry – I’ve just seen Deidre over there and I must say hello to her.”

Jenny looked at me, her head tilted slightly to one side, a mannerism I was to grow to know and love over the years.

“I’ve not seen you before, Larry – but then Grace and I work on the main switchboard, so we don’t see many people at all other than in the canteen. What do you do?”

“I’m in CID, Detective Constable, been there for a couple of years or so now.”

Her eyes suddenly widened.

“Of course – you’re the chap who got those two IRA gunmen, aren’t you?”

I was used to a variety of reactions from folk when they made that particular connection, ranging from adulation – very rare – to disapproval – less rare – to horror – fortunately rarer still in the force, although I had been more than a bit put out by the reaction of a couple of my mother’s friends who seemed to think I was no better than Jack the Ripper.

Jenny’s expression was neutral as she looked at me for a moment before saying anything more, then she spoke.

“Good. I’m pleased to meet you, Larry Lamb. Two more of the buggers the rest of us don’t have to worry about.”

I was relieved at her reaction – I didn’t want her to be one of the people in the horrified camp. I decided that I wanted to see more of Jenny Morris; the retirement party was winding down and many of those present were beginning to drift away. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Jenny’s friend Grace disappear through the door, but Jenny seemed either not to notice or not to care; my fear that she would immediately join her friend in disappearing was unfounded.

I looked at my watch – this was an early evening ‘do’ and it was still only just after eight o’clock.

“Look,” I said, “it’s still early. Do you fancy a bite to eat somewhere.”

She smiled ruefully and indicated the front of her dress, where the wine had spilled.

“Sorry, I really need to change out of this, but what about tomorrow?”

“That would be fine by me – what’s your address – I’ll pick you up –what sort of time?”

“Eight o’clock?”

“That would be great – I’ll look forward to it.”

And that is how it started. We compared notes – I was an only child, Jenny had had an older brother but he had been killed in Northern Ireland four years earlier, aged twenty-nine, a lieutenant in the Paratroop Regiment, one of the reasons that she hadn’t had a fit of the vapours when realising that I had killed two IRA gunmen. My parents were both still living, as were Jenny’s. Both of us had gone to University, in my case to Birmingham University, where I had obtained a bachelor degree in law, whilst Jenny had gone to Glasgow where she had read French and Spanish. My course had been taken because I expected it stand me in good 8

stead when, as had been my ambition from an early age, I joined the police. Jenny admitted that she had gone to university because she wanted a change from Manchester and her established life style there; she had thoroughly enjoyed the change and when I expressed surprise that, given her qualifications, she was operating a switchboard, she explained that she had only had the job a bit over six months, was saving hard, and after a further six months intended to go over the France to work in the travel industry for a while –

being a company representative for a tour company, preferably one specialising in tours for English speaking tourists.

As things developed between us, Jenny happily dropped the idea of going to France in favour of staying with me. Instead, just about at the time when, under her original plans, she would have been crossing the Channel, we got married.

It was a happy affair – our parents got on well together, helped by a mutual interest of our two fathers in bowls, and the fact, unbeknown to each of them before they met, they both worked for Lloyds Bank, although in different offices – my father was a financial advisor, Jenny’s a branch manager. We married on the 2nd of October 1998. Things got even better when, on the 20th September 1999, Louise (in honour of Jenny’s mother) Helen (in honour of mine) Lamb was born, boasting her mother’s blue eyes and fair hair and her father’s insatiable appetite. Everything in the garden looked rosy.

3rd of March, 2001

Looking back to those days, I suppose it was too much to expect that we could just motor serenely on. There were times when I wondered if life wasn’t just too good to be true, especially when I was promoted to Detective Sergeant on the 1st of January two thousand. However, not even in my most pessimistic moments could I have imagined what was to happen.

With Louise now two and half years old, Jenny was working two days a week at our local library – we lived close enough to both sets of parents for our respective mothers to be only too delighted to look after the little one for a day a week each.

To make life easier for Jenny, we now had a second car, a Fiat Tempra estate, not too big, but large enough to transport Louise and all the paraphernalia needed by a two and a half year old. It had been cheap because it was a left hand drive vehicle, having been brought into the UK by an Italian business man who had brought his family with him – the Tempra had been his wife’s car – but who was now taking his family back home and had no desire to take an aging car with them.

It was March and dark, cold and wet. I had not used my own car that day – a colleague, Jim Alison, who had been with Sergeant Thorndike and myself on the fateful day back in nineteen ninety-six and who was now, like myself, a Detective Sergeant, had picked me up in the morning as we had both been involved in attending court that day, and at the end of the day he had dropped me at my mother’s house, where wife and toddler were already waiting for me.

Jenny had been suffering from a bit of a cold for the previous couple of days, but had insisted on going in to work anyway, but when I arrived, after having a cup of tea with wife and mother, as we were preparing to leave, Jenny turned to me.

“Larry, I’m sorry, but I’m bushed. Would you mind driving us back?”

“Of course not, let’s get you two home and tucked up in bed.”

“Hmm, please.”

From my mother’s home to our place was just over five miles, mostly urban streets, but with a bit of more or less of non-built up area, where the road had a forty mile an hour speed limit. I was just about at the forty limit, passing a parked car, when a man stepped out from behind it. In the beams of the Fiat’s headlights I could see, with a mixture of horror and disbelief, that he had a gun in his hands. I automatically stamped on the accelerator to try and put him off his aim, but he opened fire even as I did so. I was aware of bullets hitting the car, of the windscreen shattering, of Jenny screaming – then all went black.

******************

I woke slowly, aware that my entire body seemed to be just a single receptacle of pain. Someone was hovering over me, and with difficulty I focussed my eyes on a young woman in a nurse’s uniform.

“Can you hear me, Mr. Lamb.”

Through swollen lips I managed to mutter a more or less decipherable affirmative.

“Good. Are you in pain?”

Once again I conveyed that I was.

“Don’t worry, I can do something for you for that.”

9

She fiddled with a stand at the side of the bed, a stand from which a tube went into my arm, and a few minutes later I drifted back into a dreamless sleep.

The process was repeated a couple of times over the next forty-eight hours, but at last the pain was bearable without constant infusions of morphine and I was visited by my boss, Detective Inspector Lucy Young. A few years older than myself, I had been on her team for just on a year now, and we respected each other. I saw that she was accompanied by Jim Alison, even though he wasn’t in our team. One look at them and I knew that they were the bearers of bad news. I forced the question out.

“How are Jenny and Louise?”

Lucy shook her head slowly.

“I’m so very sorry, Larry, but they’re both gone.”

I stared at her. I heard her words, I understood her words, but I couldn’t believe her words.

“Dead? But they can’t be.”

Lucy was a tough boss to work for; we respected each other, but didn’t always see eye to eye, but at that dreadful time in my life, I couldn’t have asked for more support, for more understanding. Slowly, I was told just what had happened. It was Lucy who went through the story in the main, although Jim also contributed from time to time.

“The gunman was using a sub-machine gun. He fired at your car from the other side of the road at a distance of no more than fifteen to eighteen yards away, starting at the offside and sweeping his fire across the front of the Fiat. I’m afraid that both Jenny and Louise were hit several times and must have died instantly. You were only hit once – a bullet hit your right shoulder but without hitting the bone or anything vital. You must have swung the wheel over to the right, because the car swerved and actually hit the gunman, injuring him enough to render him unable to escape and he’s now in custody awaiting trial.”

Jim cut in on the narrative.

“The gunman is Liam O’Connell, Larry, and when he was arrested he was boasting that he had avenged his brothers.”

I looked at them both, my mind a whirl. A dreadful truth hit me.

“He thought that I was driving – which I was – but the Fiat is left hand drive. He thought he started firing at the driver, but he was actually firing at the passenger side first.”

I lapsed into silence. If I hadn’t driven, Jenny might have survived the way that I had, but with Louise’s child seat secured behind the front passenger seat, nothing would have saved our little one.

Lucy continued the tale of horror.

“After hitting O’Connell, your car crashed into a parked vehicle, still doing over forty miles an hour. One of the bullets which missed you smashed the anchor point for your seat belt, so when the car hit it was as though you had no seat belt at all – nearly all your injuries came from the crash, not the gun fire.”

It was the start of a nightmare. The loss of Jenny and Louise crushed me, and for days I was incapable of any rational thought, just going over and over and over again in my mind what had happened and how it might have been avoided. My parents, and Jenny’s, both visited me but failed to rouse me from my mental torpor.

My physical state didn’t help; I was in constant pain which only strong pain-killers could alleviate, pain-killers which the doctors were reluctant to prescribe too often for fear of driving me into a state of addiction.

When Jenny’s parents came I was consumed with guilt. If their lovely daughter hadn’t married me, had never met me, she would still be alive, still with her whole life ahead of her. Instead, she, and our child, were dead, dead because of my actions in protecting the public from an IRA attack back in nineteen ninety-six. It was hard to bear for me, it must have been far, far worse for them, but never once, not by word, deed or even facial expression, did they make me feel that they blamed me in any way – which somehow made things even worse.

Healing – at least physical healing – took a long time. I was discharged from hospital at the end of four weeks, but for six months I was in a wheelchair, living with my parents, virtually helpless at first, but slowly becoming more able to fend for myself. After managing to put the wheelchair behind me, I managed on crutches, then a pair of walking sticks, but it was nearly two years before I got to as good a physical state as I could hope for. I would always have a limp; my shattered left leg had been put back together like some sort of macabre jigsaw puzzle, but despite the attention of some brilliant orthopaedic surgeons, the pieces refused to ever quite fit back together quite as they should have done. I could, however, walk for a mile or so before the leg really began to ache, and when I did walk, even a short distance, I still needed the help of a walking stick.

In the meantime, I had been invalided out of the police force. I suppose that, had I really wanted, I could have been found a desk job, but my heart wasn’t in it; being a policeman had resulted in the deaths of my wife and child, and I had no wish to re-enter that world.

10

Chapter Two

Jim and I looked at each other. His news had come as a bolt from the blue. I had managed to put thoughts of Liam O’Connell buried deep in the depths of my mind, and I hadn’t consciously thought of the man himself, as opposed to what he had done, in ages. What he had done, however, lived with me every day, every time I looked at the pictures of Jenny and Louise, every time my gammy leg gave a twinge, I remembered what the man had done. To hear that he was now free to walk the streets once more was an awful blow.

I had been at his trial, of course, needed to give evidence from my wheelchair. When charged, he had refused to say anything, a refusal he had carried through, with a brief exception, to the bitter end. The exception had been his refusal to plead and his refusal to accept that the court had any legitimacy over him. As a result, a plea of not guilty had been entered on his behalf, whether he wished it or not, and a trail had taken place. As a trial, it must have been one of the shortest, for so serious a crime, on record. Defence counsel had a hopeless task as O’Connell refused, quite literally, to talk to them. The evidence against him was overwhelming. He had been found, with a broken leg and unconscious, and therefore unable to escape, at the scene of the crime. The weapon, a MAC-10 machine pistol, had been found only feet from his hand. It was covered with his fingerprints. Gunshot residue had been found on his hands and clothes. Bullets from the gun had been matched to those taken from the car and from the bodies of Jenny and Louise. Nobody was in the slightest doubt as to his guilt and it took the jury less than twenty minutes to return verdicts of guilty on two counts of murder against the persons of Jennifer Helen Lamb and Louise Helen Lamb, and one of attempted murder against the person of Harold Charles Lamb. The judge promptly sentenced him to life imprisonment with a recommendation that he should serve at least fifteen years before any consideration might be given to any thought of parole.

It was that element of the sentence – ‘not less than fifteen years’ – which had been seized upon by the parole board and for whatever reason they had decided that fifteen years was long enough, whereas I had assumed –

foolishly – that the nature of his crimes would keep him behind bars for far longer.

“So what now?” I asked dully. Jim shrugged his shoulders.

“I honestly don’t know, Larry. I can’t believe that the sod is going to accept how lucky he has been and vanish into a life of normality. I honestly think that so far as you are concerned he is deranged and that his time in prison has made him divorced from reality in his hatred of you. Under the terms of his licence he is supposed to report to his local police station once a day, but I wonder how long that will last. As you know, there is a fair number of Irish folk, and first generation descendants of Irish folk, around Manchester, and I’ve no doubt that some of them will have Republican sympathies. If he were to put his mind to it, I wouldn’t be surprised if O’Connell took it into his mind to disappear amongst folk who still share his political views, despite the peace progress and all that has happened in Ireland over the last twenty years or so.”

I had to agree with my friend’s view – you didn’t get to be a Detective Superintendent without some idea about the local communities and what they really represented. Jim sat back in the chair.

“So, Larry, what do you think? One thing I can promise you. If the sod so much as drops litter we’ll be on his case – and if he does take it into his head to disappear into the woodwork, you’ll know the moment that I do.”

“Thanks, Jim. For the moment, to be honest, I’m feeling a bit thunderstruck. If he does decide to come after me again, I don’t know what I can do, to be honest. I mean, anyone can find me – or anyone else – who’s on the electoral roll. I could move away, of course, but where to, and for how long – and to be honest, why the hell should I?”

As I said those words, I did wonder just what options were open to me. I had no illusions; if O’Connell really did decide to come after me again there was precious little that I could do about it. The police could hardly mount a permanent guard on me - the most I could expect of them, over and above what Jim had just promised, was that they would do their very best to catch O’Connell – after he had blown my head off – I couldn’t rely on the man missing twice. If he repeated his previous tactics – a gun attack from ambush – I had virtually no chance of survival. It really boiled down to O’Connell’s state of mind. Did he still hate me enough to put his very freedom at risk?

It was then that I began, at least mentally, to rebel. The man had ruined my life – was I just going to sit around and wait for him to come and end it?

Jim spoke again.

“Look, Larry, don’t answer if you don’t want to, but do you have any means of defending yourself if O’Connell does come after you?”

I shook my head.

“Oh, I suppose that I could always shake my walking stick at him and then whilst he’s rolling around on the floor helpless with laughter, I could stagger over and kick his head in. That should do it nicely!”

11

Jim chuckled – but there was little humour in it. The situation that I was likely to find myself in was scarcely likely to provoke laughter.

“Well, if O’Connell does disappear, I’ll be in touch – perhaps we can do a bit better than a walking stick.”

After I had seen Jim to the door and he had left me, I sat down again, furiously to think, as my old English master would have put it. About the only thing that I had going for me was money. When I had been invalided out of the force I had received a pension and also some money from the fund available to help victims of violent crime. Over and above those two pots, my own parents, and those of Jenny, had all died in the last five years, and with nobody else to leave their money to, I had inherited from both couples. Their major assets had been their houses, plus some stocks and shares, and even after the taxman had stuck his greedy fingers into the pot, what was left over made me what many people would regard as comfortably off, even wealthy.

There was even a further source of income. For a couple of years after my injuries from O’Connell’s attack, I had been bored out of my skull. Using crutches to get around clearly limited ones choice of activities, but at last I had hit on something that didn’t require me to be particularly mobile. I could write, so write I did and to my surprise I found a publisher who liked what I had written. I wrote about something that I understood –

police work, and my ‘hero’ Detective Chief Inspector John Margrave, proved quite popular. I was never going to challenge the big names in the genre, but all the books did quite well, invariably featuring in the crime section of the best sellers list a comfortable mid-table position. I found something of a niche in that Margrave concentrated on complicate, but not necessarily brutal, crimes – indeed in some of the books nobody even got killed, making them a bit out of the ordinary. In the last three years I had switched to publishing on Kindle as opposed to paper books; the reasonable reputation that I had achieved resulted in faithful readers following my move and the change meant that I kept a larger proportion of the turnover income, which enabled me to lower my prices, which sold more books! The previous year, and for the first time, my income from my books had exceeded my pension.

With the money that I had I could, if I so wished, run and hide – but again, for how long would I need to hide

– the rest of my life?

As I thought things over, I wondered if perhaps I was looking at things the wrong way round. If he showed any sign of intending to come after me – why didn’t I try to hunt O’Connell down first, to become the hunter rather than the hunted? After a lot of thought, I decided to wait a while and see what happened, but I had at the back of my mind a method of striking back at the man who wished to kill me.

I did wonder about hiring myself a bodyguard, but decided against it. If O’Connell mounted a similar attack to his previous attempt I would simply be putting another person in danger as well as myself. My house, a medium sized bungalow in the small town of Worsley, about six or seven miles from the centre of Manchester, offered a reasonably secure location once I was inside – the danger would, of course, be when I was outside; at the time I could not contemplate O’Connell trying to break into my house when, for all he knew, I might be waiting for him with a shotgun, although it was a view that I was later to have cause to change.

I waited just over a month, before I got the news. Jim phoned one afternoon to let me know that O’Connell had failed to report at the local police station that day and it was reasonable to assume that he hadn’t simply forgotten.

“Of course,” Jim said hopefully, “there’s always the chance that he’s been run over by a bus, but I doubt that we can bank on being that lucky.”

Chapter Three

O’Connell had not been run over by a bus. The morning after Alison’s telephone call to Lamb, O’Connell woke early, little after seven o’clock, and as he got up there was a sleepy protest from the girl next to him in the bed.

“Christ, Liam, what time do you call this? Come back to bed.”

“Sorry, love –got to go – meeting a man for breakfast.”

‘The man’ was a former associate of Liam and his brothers back in their time in Belfast, but who had now lived in the UK mainland for over twelve years. Donal Murphy was now fifty years old, a short but stockily built man, his once plentiful red hair now thin and grey. His face was lined and weather-beaten from his days roaming he borders between Ulster and the Republic, out in all weathers as he brought ‘The Struggle’ home to the British Army and those allied to them. Murphy had blood on his hands – a lot of blood – but he had never been caught, never had to know the inside of a prison. In his time he had made enemies, even within his erstwhile IRA colleagues because of his total and utter refusal to accept any compromise in the aims of 12

the Cause. To him, the Good Friday Agreement was a disgrace, a surrender, and he would have no part of it.

As far as Donal Murphy was concerned the fight went on, but he was only too aware that some one time IRA leaders wanted him neutralised whilst they sought to achieve a united Ireland by cosying up to the politicians. O’Connell had tracked him down, very cautiously, well aware that Murphy was both paranoid and dangerous. This would be their first meeting; far from having breakfast together, the meeting was on a deserted site on the bank of the River Irwell. Once a large warehouse with an equally large yard area in front of it, the warehouse had burnt down ten years before and never been rebuilt. As a location for a meeting between two men who were wary of each other it was ideal. O’Connell, as instructed, arrived at precisely eight thirty and waited, in his car, at the western side of the site. A few minutes later a second car entered the site from the west and stopped fifty yards away. Again as instructed, O’Connell got out of his car and walked slowly towards the newcomer. Despite the nip in the morning air, O’Connell was dressed in cotton jeans and a thin T-shirt and he advanced with his arms held out wide.

The driver’s door of the other vehicle was opened and Donal Murphy got out of the driver’s seat but remained behind the door, using it as a shield between himself and O’Connell.

O’Connell got to within fifteen feet of Murphy before the older man spoke.

“That’s far enough, Liam. We can talk from here – now, you wanted to meet me and you’ve been asking around trying to find me. Who told you I was around here – and what do you want?”

O’Connell still had his arms outstretched.

“Donal, me arms are killin’ me – can I put them down, please?”

“OK – but slowly.” As he spoke Murphy brought his right hand into view – it held a pistol.

“Thanks, Donal, that’s better. I asked a lot of people if they had ever heard of you and most said no – but I know some of those who said no were lying to me – and they must have let you know that I was asking around – and they would have checked who I am before passing on the message. Now, it’s no secret that some of the boys back home would be happier if you were to go away – however that happened. It’s also no secret that I’m just out of prison. Now, I know you to be a careful man, Donal – and so am I. If the positions were reversed, I’d be worried that someone out after just fifteen years for two murders might just have done some sort of deal to get out a bit early, a deal leading to somebody like you – but is it likely? The only people I could have done a deal with are the Brits – and they’re not looking for you – not hard, anyway. You’ve always been too smart to let them have any sort of a lead onto you. The only people really after you are some of the men we used to see as comrades – men now sucking up to the politicians back in Stormont. Am I right?”

Murphy looked long and hard at the younger man, then slowly slipped the pistol back into his pocket and, crossing the distance between them, grabbed him in a bear hug.

“Jeez, and it’s good to see you again, Liam, that it is!”

“You too, Donal, you too. Donal, I want your help.”

Murphy released O’Connell and stepped back.

“What sort of help, Liam – is it for the Cause?”

“For me it is, Donal, for sure – but you may see it different. I want a gun, Donal – something serious like a MAC-10 or an UZI.”

At the mention of the sub-machine guns Murphy’s eye widened.

“That is serious, Liam, sure and it is – what do you want it for?”

“I said that I see it as for the Cause, Donal, and so I do. I want to finish what I fucked up fifteen years ago!”

“You mean that copper?”

“Yes – he killed me bros, and I missed out on killing him – and I want to put it right.”

“Well, I reckon that I can help you – although getting something like those isn’t easy, not for a respectable Irishman living quiet and minding his own business. It would be easier to get something from one of the drug gangs around here, fuck knows, there’s enough of them.”

“They’re not Irish, Donal – I don’t know them, they don’t know me – they might well take money from me –

if I had money, that is – and blow my head off anyway.”

Murphy frowned.

“I can see what you mean, old son – look, let’s get somewhere a bit warmer and talk.”

“OK – where?”

“A coffee shop – follow me in your car.”

Fifteen minutes later, after having driven in convoy across most of Manchester, the two men were seated at opposite sides of a small table in a booth in a quiet coffee shop, enjoying coffee and doughnuts. Finishing his food, Murphy pushed the plate away, wiped his lips on the paper napkin, and gave a sigh of satisfaction.

“Ah, that’s better. Now Liam, do I take it that you have no money?”

13

“Well, I’ve got about five hundred – but that’s it, and even that is a bit lucky. Kenneth was always the bright one of the family and he arranged bank accounts for us in Dublin as well as Belfast. I never did know how he actually arranged it, but before I got caught I used that account, and after I got out of prison I checked on it –

and despite the time lapse, I could still use it. It’s in Euros, of course, so I had to change money into sterling, and I lost a bit on doing that, but now I’ve got what was left in cash – as I say, just on five hundred.”

“Well, that’s nothing like enough for what you want – a couple of grand if we’re lucky, probably a good bit more – but don’t worry. I think that I can see a way in which we can help each other over this. Christ, it’s good to see you, Liam – I only wish your brothers could be here with us as well.”

“So do I, Donal, so do I.”

“Well, what do you say that we do something really big in their memory?”

O’Connell blinked slowly.

“Well, I’d drink to that – but not in coffee.”

He reached into the pocket of the heavy jacket that he had donned upon returning to his car and pulled out a quarter bottle of John Jamieson Irish whiskey. He reached over and poured a generous measure into Murphy’s empty coffee cup, then did the same with his own. He raised his cup in salutation.

“Here’s to something big, Donal!”

Murphy raised his own cup and the two men clinked then together.

“To something big!”

Murphy put the now empty cup back down on the table.

“Liam, there’s something that you need to know about me.”

“Now what would that be after being?”

“Liam, I’m dying.”

O’Connell looked at the other man in shock.

“Dying? Sure and we’re all dying one day at a time, Donal – but, dying? Christ man, but you’re what, fifty?

What is it?”

“Yes, I’m fifty, but I’m not going to see fifty-one. I’ve got cancer, Liam – diagnosed a couple of months ago and they reckon I’ll be lucky to see another six months out.”

He paused, and O’Connell was only too aware of unshed tears in the other man’s eyes.

“Jeez, Donal, but that’s awful.”

Murphy nodded slowly, then paused.

“Liam, do you have any more of the Jamieson?”

Without speaking, O’Connell pulled out the bottle again and emptied it into Murphy’s cup. The older man took a small sip and put the cup down again.

“Liam, all my life I’ve fought for the Cause – and so did my da before me, and so did his da, and his. Me great grand-da was at the Dublin Post Office in nineteen sixteen in the Easter Rising. The Brits caught him and hanged him – he was only twenty-nine. All my family have fought for a united Ireland – and I had hoped to see it. Well, now I never will. I know that all the politicians have said that if the folk in the Six Counties ever decide by a majority that they want to combine with the rest of Ireland then it will happen, but when, Liam, when? And can we trust fuckin’ politicians to keep their word? I don’t want to see Ireland still cut in two when I am dead and gone and not have done every last thing that I could to get the Old Country united.”

O’Connell was only too aware of his friend’s agony and, given his own family history could readily empathise with him.

“So what do you want to do, Donal?”

“I want to go out with a bang – literally. Now, I know that back in the day you were just a lad – but you were a bomb maker, right?”

O’Connell nodded his head slowly, beginning to see where this might be leading.

“Yes, that’s right – I learned from the best.”

“Liam, I want you to make me some bombs – do that and I’ll fund a sub-machine gun for you.”

“How big? What’s your target?”

“Back in nineteen ninety-six, when your bros were killed, when the centre of Manchester came to know that Ireland had had enough of British rule, it didn’t go as well as it might. That police car catching you, Kenneth and Fergus – what were the odds against that? Just sheer bloody bad luck.”

O’Connell nodded.

“That’s right – and it wasn’t just any police car – it was an armed response car. If they’d just been ordinary coppers we’d have taken them out and still been able to set off the bomb. As it was….”

He shook his head in sad remembrance of the day.

“So, what’s the target, Donal?”

14

“Corporation Street again, but with a bit of a difference. What you and your brothers tried to do was the way we should have gone at the time – cut down as many bloody Brits as possible, not just wreck some shops and office buildings. What I have in mind is a bomb more or less where the nineteen ninety-six one was – but nothing like as big, nothing at all. Instead, my idea is a bomb that when it goes off it scares people into running, running away from the site of the explosion – and that then one or two more bombs hit them as they are running. Could you do that for me?”

O’Connell needed to think only for a moment or two.

“Yes, that could be done, Donal.”

“What would you need?”

“Well, I don’t suppose you’ve got a source of Semtex, have you?”

Murphy shook his head in negation.

“Then we have two choices. Either we steal some dynamite from a legitimate source – and that’s much harder to do now than back in the day, or we make our own explosives.”

“I don’t know anywhere with a legal stock of dynamite – there’s some used for quarrying not all that far away, but the amount they use isn’t all that great and they don’t store it at the site, just bring it there from somewhere else when it is needed.”

“That doesn’t sound too promising, so it’s back to making our own. For that we need fertiliser, and quite a bit of it. We need a fertiliser based on potassium nitrate – not all of them are – and that sort of fertiliser is regulated pretty carefully when it’s being made and when it’s first sold – but once it’s been delivered to individual farms – who knows how careful the farmers may be with it? It’s the old ‘familiarity breeds contempt’ sort of thing.”

“Looks well worth looking into then, Liam. I know a few lads who would be willing to pop out into the countryside to see what they can find.”

“Are you sure that they can be trusted, Donal – I don’t want to find meself back inside again. I like it on the outside too much to want to go back at all.”

“Don’t worry about that – I’ll make sure that they only know about me, not about you – after all, what have I got to worry about? Six months from now and I’ll be past caring anyway. How much fertiliser do we need?”

“Well, for three bombs – and the first one doesn’t need to be anything grand, it’s just there to get the buggers running, so one fifty-six pound bag will do for that one. The other two – they’re the real thing – I’d want four bags for each, five or even six would be better, but we can get by with four.”

“Right, Liam, I’ll see what I can come up with – by the bye – where are you living? Is it somewhere you could make the bombs?”

“Jeez, no – I’m shacked up with a lass from Derry – her family came over here in the seventies and although she never says, I reckon her da was for the Cause – he died a while back and she moved into her own place, a wee flat behind Albert Square. No chance of making the bombs there – no, we’ll need somewhere like a lock-up garage or the like.”

“No worry – I’ll see to that. Now, the size of the two big bombs – they’ll need vans really, won’t they?”

“Transits or the like would be ideal, but any small van would do.”

“How long would you need to actually make the bombs?”

“Once I’ve got the fertiliser, three to four days is all, ‘cos I’ll get the other stuff together before hand – or better still perhaps you can help out there as well, Donal. I don’t reckon the police are looking very hard for me, but I did break my licence conditions by leaving the approved place.”

“So what do you need?”

“Well, for the big bombs, they need a container each – an empty forty-five gallon metal oil drum or the like would be best. Then for the shrapnel – quite apart from the bits of the van that will be flying around – say twenty pounds or so of big steel nuts – twelve millimetres would be fine- for each of the big bombs. For the little bomb – a smaller container, doesn’t really matter what it is – no shrapnel, just the bang and a few bits of the car or whatever that it is in will be enough to start a real panic.”

“OK, leave the shopping list to me. I’ll be in touch end of next week to let you know how it’s all going – I’ve got your mobile number, so wait to hear from me. Oh, and how are you fixed for transport – you came in a motor, it’s not hot is it?”

O’Connell shook his head.

“No way. No, the lass I mentioned – a sort of cousin or something has a used car lot – he’s let me borrow one of his stock.”

“Oh, and what else is on the shopping list?”

“I need sulphur and charcoal – what I’m making is just old-fashioned gunpowder. For the big bombs about thirty pound of sulphur each and twenty pounds of charcoal. Sulphur shouldn’t be too hard to come by – gets used a lot by vets, used in some weed killers. And with all the barbeque supplies the charcoal should be easy 15

as well – probably even easier – just buy it from a hardware shop. Oh, and pro-rata on the sulphur and charcoal for the little bomb.”

******************

Detective Superintendent Jim Alison, pushed his desk chair back and looked at his subordinate with less than enthusiasm.

“So, DS Tremlett, you’re telling me that three weeks after a double murderer out on licence simply walks out of his approved hostel accommodation, nobody has seen sight, nor heard sound, of the bloody man?”

Harriet Tremlett nodded her head.

“I’m afraid so, sir. Not a trace. Looks like he’s left the area.”

Alison shook his head.

“Possible, but I doubt it, somehow. I reckon that he still has a score to settle with one time DS Lamb, and he can’t do that if he’s left the bloody area. We look bad over this –OK, I know the hostel is the responsibility of the probation service, I know the idiots on the parole board let him out early, but we’re the ones supposed to find him – so get out there again and bloody find him!”

“Sir.”

The young woman turned and left Alison’s office, resisting to temptation to express her frustration by slamming his door on the way out – unlikely to be a wise career move, as Alison wasn’t known as a forgiving boss.

Left to himself, Alison steepled his fingers under his chin as he thought about the missing Irishman. As he had said to the DS, he doubted that O’Connell had left the Manchester area. All those years back he had attended the Irishman’s trial and had been struck by the ice-cold, implacable hatred that had emanated from the young man.

As he thought about O’Connell, his mind went back, beyond the trial, to the day of the bombing, the day that Larry Lamb had killed the two elder O’Connell brothers and prevented the detonation of the second bomb.

Intelligence reports at the time, gleaned from informers after the event, was that Liam, the youngest of the brothers, was the actual bomb maker of that second bomb. That bomb, by all reports, had been a fertiliser bomb, effectively a version of old-fashioned gunpowder, the very earliest explosive known to man, but no less effective for all that. He gazed around his office and his glance fell upon the calendar on the wall. A Christmas present from his younger daughter, it was a collection of scenes of Manchester, featuring the many fine buildings the city boasted. As he looked at it, an uneasy thought crossed his mind; in a little over three weeks it would be the twentieth anniversary of the bombing of Corporation Street, and one of the men responsible for that atrocity was on the loose in the city. Alison had been promoted to head up the force’s Anti-Terrorist Unit just over two years earlier and he was keenly aware of just how thinly were all police resources, including his own, stretched following a succession of budgetary cuts over recent years, whilst the politicians continued to thump the old mantra that the cuts were ‘efficiency savings’ and that reduced police numbers didn’t mean reduced police effectiveness. It was not a view that Alison shared. Could he justify increasing his unit’s efforts to find O’Connell, given the pressures on his budget? His thoughts turned back to Larry Lamb. Following the Manchester bombing when, in Alison’s opinion, the speed with which Lamb had reacted in gunning down the two armed O’Connell brothers had quite possibly saved his own life and that of Sergeant Thorndike and Lamb himself, he and Lamb had become firm friends, and he had been best man at the wedding of Larry and Jenny, and had shared his friend’s grief at the murder of his family. They had drifted apart a bit of late as the pressures of the job took up more and more of Alison’s time, but the underlying friendship was still strong, and over-reaching all of that was the fact that he was sure that he owed his very life to his friend.

“Sod the budget,” he said to himself, “I want O’Connell found.”

**********************

He didn’t realise it at the time, but Murphy made a mistake in relying upon Fergus and Colm Maggs. The two brothers had worked for him before and proved satisfactory and reliable, so he had set them the physical task of acquiring the fertiliser needed by Liam O’Connell. He should have impressed upon them the need not to look for a single source, but to look for a number of sources, preferably from isolated farms where a bag or two at a time might not even be noticed.

Not wanting to put themselves to the drag of scouring the entire Lancashire countryside for miles around, the brothers simply broke into a large farming suppliers one night and took away twelve fifty-six pound bags of potassium nitrate based fertiliser.

The theft was noticed the next morning as soon as staff turned up for work and duly reported to the police.

The fertiliser was one of many substances the theft of which was on a list of ‘interesting items’ that was held in every police station, and, although it took forty-eight hours for the news to reach him, Alison was made 16

aware that a vital element of a possible bomb was now somewhere in the city, as was a man with the skill to make use of it to the maximum danger of the innocent citizens of Manchester.

Now he was really worried; the more thought that he gave to the matter, the more convinced he became that O’Connell – probably with support – would attempt to stage a reprise of the nineteen ninety-six bomb which had been so devastating in its effect.

Detectives throughout Manchester leant on their informants for any whisper of the whereabouts of O’Connell and/or the fertiliser, but to no avail. Although his error – of which he was still unaware – of relying on the Maggs brothers had triggered the investigation, the very small circle of those who knew anything at all about what was going on meant that the police gained no useful intelligence. Murphy’s big worry was over O’Connell himself. Living with the girl – Murphy had his own informants, and although O’Connell had never divulged her name, nor her address, Murphy had discovered that she was Maureen Healy, hailing, as O’Connell had said, from Derry. Maureen was twenty-nine years old, had lived in her flat for the last five years, and her only living relative was her widowed mother who lived in Liverpool.

Although Murphy had no reason to doubt the girl’s discretion, the fact that she worked in the local branch of Lloyd’s Bank meant that she came into contact with a large number of people. Who could say that she might not let slip something about her new boyfriend within the hearing of the wrong pair of ears? He decided to tackle O’Connell about the possible problem. The bomb maker assured Murphy that he was worrying unnecessarily, that Maureen knew full well that he needed to keep his location secret from the police, and that he himself kept very much to himself, scarcely venturing abroad.

Murphy was still not satisfied, but he came up with a solution. It was now only two weeks until the anniversary of the nineteen ninety-six bomb, and he persuaded O’Connell that he needed to be even less conspicuous than was currently the case. Reluctantly, the younger man agreed and moved out of Maureen Healy’s flat and into a caravan park used by a number of itinerant workers, mainly Eastern European but also with some Irish.

It was a second mistake.

*****************************

Maureen Healy was disappointed that O’Connell was moving out – but what Murphy did not know –

because O’Connell hadn’t told him – was that she was fully aware of what was going on. As O’Connell had intimated to Murphy, her late father had indeed been a member of the IRA and had moved, with wife and daughter, from Derry to Liverpool when it became clear that he was a marked man, the target of Loyalist para-militaries due to his part in the murder of one of their leaders. When her father died, Maureen had moved to Manchester where she had rapidly made herself part of a circle of Irish Republican sympathisers –

although none of them had ever done anything other than talk. With that sort of background, Maureen’s discretion was absolute. Provided that he stayed close, there was little chance of O’Connell being discovered other than by the cruellest of chances. As a result, Maureen understood why Murphy and O’Connell felt that it was imperative for the bomb maker to be hidden from view.

Detective Constable Jack Jordan was bored. Rising concern in Manchester over the amount of crime being committed by immigrants from Eastern Europe had resulted in a number of surveillance operations being mounted, trying to identify likely gangs and gang members. One such operation was for Jordan to rent one of the static homes on the very caravan park that O’Connell would be using.

The population of the site was in a constant state of flux, but Jordan had rapidly come to the conclusion that he was wasting his time. Most of the inhabitants seemed to be honest workers, whether they were Eastern Europeans or Irish – the split between the two was roughly three to one – and Jordan had seen nothing that led him to believe any of them were criminals.

The arrival of a new face was just about all that kept him from screaming with frustration at the pointlessness of what he being required to do, and luckily there were several new faces a month. This particular new face, however, was a little unusual – he had his own car. Not unique in that respect, but not normal, either. Most of the men on the site used the bus stop a quarter of a mile away from the entrance, but some did have cars, but again most of the cars had been brought into the UK by their owners so bore, mostly, Polish or Bulgarian plates.

Not only did the new arrival have his own car – it was only about six years old, about half the age of most of the vehicles on site, one or two of which were even older than the tatty, seventeen year old Ford Fiesta that Jordan was using to keep in character.

He didn’t get a good look at the man behind the motor for the first couple of days, but his first step had been to call in the car’s registration number, a call which came back with the information that the car was part of the stock of a used car salesman, one Gordon Lacey. A check on Lacey’s background produced nothing more exciting than a couple of convictions for speeding, so unlikely to be a master criminal and in any case, Lacey 17

had a home address and it wasn’t the caravan park, so unless his wife had kicked him out of home and hearth in the recent past or the like, the man driving the car – a Vauxhall Astra estate – was not Lacey himself, but somebody he was letting use the vehicle.

Jordan’s report on the new arrival was added to the file that was being kept on the occupants of the caravan park, a file which was proving to be a disappointment to the police for its lack of any useful leads. It was unfortunate that Jordan hadn’t seen one of the many photos of O’Connell which other CID officers were showing here, there and everywhere in their efforts to trace the bomb maker, but there was no reason why he should have done.

It was two days before somebody followed up on the current owner of the Astra, and then it was done purely as a routine, not as something expected to have any great result. PC James Elliot was deputed by his sergeant to check with Lacey as to just who was using the Astra. It was a query that neither Lacey, nor O’Connell had expected, and when the question was put to him, Lacey’s reaction was one of discomfort before coming up with the claim that he had loaned it to a friend of a friend who was down on his luck.

James Elliot had been a policeman for over ten years; he was seen by his colleagues as a steady plodder who just might one day surprise everybody by reaching sergeant’s rank, but nobody could envisage him ever going any higher. Despite that, Elliot was no fool. Over the years he had questioned many people on a very wide variety of subjects, and he had developed a fairly good set of antennae which picked up vibes that were off target. He got the vibes on this occasion; Lacey’s whole demeanour was wrong for the answer to so simple a question.

“So what would be the name of this friend of a friend, Mr. Lacey?”

Lacey paused too long before replying.

“It’s Harry, Harry Jones.”

Well, I suppose that’s a bit better than ‘John Smith’, Elliot thought to himself.

“And what does Mr. Jones do for a living?”

The answer came more quickly this time.

“I don’t really know – I think that he’s trying to get building site work, but I don’t really know. Look, I only loaned him the motor for a few days to help him out – what’s he done?”

“Why should he have done anything, Mr. Lacey?”

Another pause.

“Well, if he hasn’t, why are you asking about him? Whatever it is, it’s nothing to do with me.”

Elliot adopted a knowing look and leant slightly forward as if what he was about to impart was of major importance.

“Well, don’t tell anyone, Mr. Lacey, but we have a general interest in that site – all these immigrants, you know. Can’t be too careful – no telling what some of them might be up to.”

Lacey was now looking distinctly worried and Elliot, deciding to let him stew in his own juice for a while, took his leave of the man.

No sooner was the policemen off the premises, than Lacey was on the phone to O’Connell.

“Liam, it’s Gordon. Look, I’ve just had a plod round here asking about the motor I lent you and who was using it. I gave a false name – Harry Jones.”

O’Connell was thunderstruck. He and Murphy had agreed that for him to remain with Maureen was potentially insecure – something that had been demonstrated to be the case with police informants being quizzed and the police themselves now actively searching for him. How on earth were they apparently onto him?

“Did the copper seem satisfied?”

“I don’t think that he believed me – but it means that the motor is now hot. I think that it would be safest if you were to bring it back and if the fuzz come round again, I’ll just tell them ‘Mr. Jones’ brought it back and I told him the police were asking after him.”

O’Connell was thinking hard. Lacey’s idea was almost certainly the best for the moment, but what thereafter? At a stroke he had lost his accommodation and his transport.

Lacey was about to speak further when, looking out of the window of his small portakabin office, he saw PC

Elliot coming back.

“Liam – got to go – that copper’s coming back!”

Elliot came in through the door and smiled broadly at the by now distinctly concerned Lacey.

“Ah, Mr. Lacey – silly me. I forget to ask you something – This Mr. Jones using your motor. You said that he was a sort of a friend of a friend – so who’s the friend he’s a friend of?”

Lacey had been relieved when Elliot had failed to ask that obvious question at his previous visit – but now the policeman had asked it and finding an answer wasn’t easy, but expecting that the question might be asked he was ready with an answer.

18

“It’s my cousin Kevin, it is. He gave me a bell and said Harry was an old mate of his down on his luck since he lost his job over in Ireland and was coming over here to try his luck.”

“And where can I find this cousin of yours, Mr. Lacey?”

“He lives in Rosslare – that’s in the Republic.”

“I know where Rosslare is, thank you, Mr. Lacey. Do you have a telephone number for him?”

“Well yes – but not here. I’ve got it somewhere at home, but until he phoned me the other day we hadn’t spoken since before Christmas.”

As far as it went, it was true – Lacey really did have relatives in Ireland and one of them was indeed a cousin called Kevin, although the tale of a phone call was a fabrication.

Elliot reached into his pocket and drew out a card which he handed to Lacey.

“When you get home, Mr. Lacey, ring that number and leave a message for me with your cousin’s number and address.”

“Sure I’ll do that, officer – I get home about seven – will that do?”

“That’ll do fine, Mr. Lacey.”

After Elliot had left for the second time, Lacey again phoned O’Connell and brought him up to date, although truth to tell, the knowledge that Lacey had invented a request from a cousin to help out a fellow Irishman down on his luck was of neither use nor interest to the bomb maker. He was far more concerned over where he was going to hide out now that the caravan park was clearly out of the question. He phoned Murphy.

“Donal, it’s Liam – got a problem. The police have been round to Gordon Lacey asking about the motor he lent me – seems that caravan park is being watched by the pigs because of the number of East Europeans there. Now I’ll have to return the motor and find somewhere else to stay.”

Murphy swore angrily.

“Look, the motor’s easy – take Lacey’s back to him and borrow mine. There’s no reason for the police to be interested in it at all. Now, somewhere to live – not so easy. Look – I need to think on that – the police have been all over the city showing your photo – suddenly they’re really interested in finding you, although fuck knows why.”

Murphy failed to mention the reason for the raised interest by the police in finding O’Connell – those two idiotic Maggs brothers stealing all the needed fertiliser from one place in a single heist. It didn’t need a genius amongst the police to get worried at the fact that a known IRA bomb maker had gone off their radar, and very shortly afterwards a large quantity of the main constituent of a home-made bomb had been stolen.

The main thing now, however, was not to worry about what was over and done with, but to find a solution to the problem that had been created. A thought occurred to him that would, at least in the short term, offer a possible answer.

“Look, Liam, I’ve got two lock-ups hired for when the vans need to be loaded and a third for you to make the bombs – they’re in a row of three off a back street so there’s nobody close to them. All I can think of for the moment is that you doss down in one of them for the time being whilst we try to come up with something better – OK?”

O’Connell wasn’t much impressed with the idea of a lock-up garage as a home, even for just a temporary period, but he couldn’t come up with any better alternative, so reluctantly agreed.

Chapter Four

With O’Connell on the loose and possibly looking to find me to complete what he failed to achieve back in two thousand and one, I had decided that discretion was the better part of valour and had booked into the Airport Hotel. About five miles from the city centre, it was reasonably priced and as basically an hotel catering to people in transit to all parts of the globe, it was not an obvious choice for someone needing a potentially lengthy stay, so hopefully O’Connell would not think of looking for me there. Its distance from the city centre was also a boon – very little chance of an accidental encounter.

I had advised Jim Alison of my new location, but nobody else. My neighbours had deliberately been left in the dark – what they didn’t know, they couldn’t reveal.

It was now nearly two weeks since I had gone to ground and I was beginning to develop stir fever. I had no need to leave the hotel itself, and for the first couple of days I hadn’t, but I was effectively in a self-imposed solitary confinement and it irked me more every day.

I kept in constant touch with Jim, but he was as frustrated as I was at the failure to find O’Connell.

***********************

19

The man himself was working hard at his deadly trade. He had all that he needed – the raw ingredients of the bomb – the fertiliser to provide the saltpetre, the sulphur and the charcoal– as he had expected, it had proved easy to source an adequate amount of charcoal without arousing suspicions, although the sulphur had proved rather more difficult – and the items that he needed to create the detonators which would trigger the explosions. These, again were an improvision – but an effective and well-proven one. They comprised nothing more sophisticated than three dozen photo flash bulbs – now a rarity in modern photography, but still available, three nine volt batteries, and four untraceable pay-as-you-go mobile phones. The bit that required his expertise – anyone could have done the rest of the work - was turning three of the mobile phones into triggers for the detonators. By the time that he had finished, when one of the modified phones received an incoming call the circuitry which would normally sound the ring tone to announce the call would instead now trip a small switch which in turn would complete the circuit between the nine volt battery and the flashbulbs. Taped together – fifteen each for the big bombs, six for the little one, the heat that they would generate would be enough to ignite the gunpowder. The fourth mobile phone had the numbers of the other three on speed dial so they could be activated from anywhere that there was a mobile phone coverage. It meant that the bombs could be activated without any danger to Murphy – who had claimed the ‘honour’ of setting off the explosions – nor to any of the others involved.

The most time consuming element of O’Connell’s work was actually making the gunpowder. Just pouring the constituents into the barrels wasn’t enough. To do so would be a replication of the very earliest days of the explosive – the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Oh, it would off alright, but with very little power. No, the three elements had to be blended together, which would produce a far more powerful ordnance. This took time as he had use a mortar and pestle to grind small quantities of the ingredients at a time together with a little water until he had a ‘cake’ of about two pounds which he then laid out to dry, but at last all the explosive had been prepared and the many cakes had dried out and were packed into the two oil drums, into each of which he also put several dozen of the large nuts that Murphy had acquired – steel nuts which would form lethal shrapnel. He didn’t bother with the nuts for the small bomb, which he had created by packing explosive into into a fibreglass suitcase – its sole purpose was to scare people into running into the killing zones of the big bombs – any injuries it inflicted would be a bonus. He phoned Murphy.

“Hello”

“It’s me – they’re ready.”

“I’ll come round.”

Twenty minutes later Murphy arrived at the lock-up. The previous day the transport for the bombs had been delivered, so for the last twenty-four hours O’Connell had been sharing his living and working accommodation with a Ford Mondeo estate – the transport for the small bomb - whilst each of the other two lock-ups now held a Ford Transit van.

O’Connell briefed Murphy on the workings of the remote trigger – something which only took a minute or two and included the very important advice to keep the trigger phone switched off until the very last minute.

“Now,” he said, “I’ve done my bit – so where’s my sub-machine gun?”

“Never worry, Liam old son – I’ve sourced an UZI for you – it’ll be here the day after tomorrow.”

O’Connell nodded his head in satisfaction, The fact that it would arrive the day before the bombs were due to be set off didn’t seem of any relevance, just so long as the weapon arrived safely and he could track down that sod Lamb and use it on him.

*********************

Jim Alison was a worried man – a very worried man. The more that he thought about it, the more sure he became that Liam O’Connell, probably with help from members of the local Irish community who still held Republican sympathies, was planning to set off a bomb, or bombs, on the twentieth anniversary of the Corporation Street bombings – and that anniversary was now only three days away and there was still no sign of the man.

He wondered desperately if there was any avenues that he might have left unexplored, and he could think of nothing obvious. There were, of course, many avenues that were impossible to explore- for example, interviewing everyone in Manchester who had an Irish connection, but being realistic, there seemed to be nothing left.

Then he had an idea. He remembered – how could he ever forget? – that day in nineteen ninety-six when Manchester had been rocked by the IRA bomb. But for Larry Lamb’s decisive action, people fleeing the scene of the first bomb would have been cut down by the explosion of the second. The Bomb Squad officer to whom he had spoken had been of the opinion that given the original, only partially successful, IRA plot, it was highly likely that a similar plan would be employed this time – and the amount of fertiliser stolen would easily run to two substantial bombs, even two substantial bombs and one considerably smaller.

20

“Suppose,” the Army man had hypothesized, “the bugger sets off a fairly small device in Corporation Street, aimed at making people run away from the immediate vicinity of the explosion, and they run into the killing zone of another device, perhaps even two more devices?”

The policeman and the soldier had then pored over a Manchester street map, concentrating on the logical escape routes of people fleeing for their very lives from Corporation Street. The soldier, Lieutenant Colonel James Harris, stabbed his forefinger down on the map.

“If I was placing a bomb and wanted to inflict as much death and injury as possible, I’d want folk to run down Hanover Street. It’s narrow with high walled buildings on both sides – ideal to contain the explosion and maximise the effect of any shrapnel I’d packed into the bloody thing.”

Alison nodded in agreement.

“So, with that in mind, the logical place to put the first bomb has to be here.”

Like the Lieutenant Colonel, he stabbed down with his finger, but this time indicating a point about fifty yards north of where Hanover Street joined Corporation Street. The soldier nodded in agreement.

“Absolutely. Most people are likely to be south of that point, so Hanover Street looks like a safe refuge.

Anyone further away,” he shrugged his shoulders, “well, they’ll go further south along Corporation Street down towards the football museum and Withy Grove – so to catch those people – if indeed there is as second bomb waiting - the logical place is a bit north of the museum.”

Alison gazed thoughtfully at the map once more.

“Yes, and to make things worse, there are parking spaces down there – elsewhere, it’s all yellow lines, so leaving a vehicle is going to stick out like a sore thumb.”

“Can’t you enforce a temporary ‘No Parking’ area around there?”

“Oh yes, and we will do just that that, don’t you worry.”

He paused as he turned the various scenarios over in his mind.

“OK, now if it was me, I would want a vehicle in Corporation Street where we thought. I’d have to overcome the yellow line restrictions – so how? Two options. Either drive into my chosen location, stop the car, get out and leg it as quickly as my feet would take me and then set off explosion number one as soon as I was sure that I was a reasonable distance away, or alternatively fake a breakdown, lift the bonnet, look helpless, take out a mobile and appear to be phoning the AA or RAC or whatever. First option would make me look suspicious right away, so I’d probably go for number two.”

The soldier nodded his head in agreement.

“Seems the most logical way to set about it.”

“There’s another thing to think about – if I am pretending to call out a breakdown service I would be expected to stay near the vehicle, so I am going to look to a pretty minor explosion for number one – just enough to get people running away, but not enough to blow me to Kingdom Come.”

Alison had already briefed his superior officers on the likelihood of another IRA bomb outrage in Manchester and it had been agreed that on the anniversary of the nineteen ninety-six attack there would be strict ‘no parking’ regulations enforced in the general area, and a strong armed police presence, but everyone was only too aware that the result was most likely to be an attack elsewhere in the city or on another day; it was too much to hope for that the bombers would simply give up.

The only real hope was to catch O’Connell and anybody helping him before the attack happened – and time was running out and there was still no sign of the man. The previous day Alison had given much thought to the logistical problems facing the bombers – for he was convinced that more than one person would have to be involved. From the amount of fertiliser stolen and the assumption that the bombers would be looking to create as much carnage as possible, the most likely scenario was two major bombs and they would be big enough to have to be contained in something like a forty-five gallon oil drum, something that the IRA had often used in the past – and such an item was too big to be transported in an ordinary car without being clearly visible to anyone seeing the vehicle. No, they would need a couple of vans of at least Transit size and Alison had ordered that he should be informed of any vans stolen anywhere in the Manchester area over the last three weeks – the period since O’Connell had gone off the radar. To his surprise, not a single van had been reported stolen in his time frame, so he put in motion a check of all companies hiring small vans – and at last there was a breakthrough.

It was Detective Constable ‘Shirley’ MacLaine – she had been christened Jane Elena, but given her red hair the nickname was inevitable – who brought him the news.

“Something a bit odd, sir,” she had offered, “I’ve found two Transit vans hired out – hired by the same man but from different companies and on the same day last week. I thought that looked a bit odd, so I checked again using his name – and he also hired a Mondeo estate, again on the same day, from yet a third company.

The man doing the hiring is one Donal Murphy. I’ve checked him out and apart from a couple of speeding convictions he’s clean. Here’s his address and here’s his picture – got it from his licence application to the 21

DVLA.”

Alison was intrigued – and puzzled. This man Murphy clearly existed, and whilst just having a name that seemed Irish was no crime, his odd behaviour over the hiring of the vehicles made him a person of interest.

“So,” he mused to himself, “who are you, Mr. Murphy and what are you up to?”

He made up his mind.

“Good work, Shirley. I want him picked up – but if he is connected to what we are after he could be dangerous – so uniforms and armed officers to get him.”

Murphy was at home when the knock on the door came and, totally unsuspecting, answered it and within minutes found himself in the back seat of a police patrol car whisking him to the police station.

The news of Murphy’s arrest was kept as quiet as possible. O’Connell, expecting the man to appear to finalise matters, was left in limbo and growing increasingly uneasy, wondering if he had been betrayed – but if that were the case, why was he still secreted in the lock-up with the mobile bombs? If, for whatever reason, Murphy wanted to play him false, this seemed an odd way of going about it.

The more he thought about it, the unhappier he became. He truly doubted that Murphy was trying to betray him – it made no sense. That meant that, for one reason or another, he had been prevented from appearing when agreed. Could he have somehow fallen foul of the police? If that were the case, and he was persuaded to talk, no matter how unlikely that might be, the lock-up he was currently sharing with one car bomb, whilst two more were in the adjacent lock-ups, was no place to be. He needed to move, and quickly – but where to?

******************************

Alison was becoming more and more frustrated as every question put to Murphy was met either with silence or a muttered ‘No comment’.

Finally, he gave in.

“Right, Mr. Murphy. Clearly we are getting nowhere today. You have been arrested under suspicion of being involved in a potential terrorist act and under the Counter-terrorism Act of two thousand and eight, I can hold you for up to forty-eight hours – which I fully intend to do – and at the end of the forty-eight hours I can apply to a judge for a further extension, which again I fully intend to do.”

Murphy remained impassive. He knew that the police had nothing to go on; the fact that he had hired three vehicles on the same day from different companies – so what? Of itself that wasn’t a crime and unless the pigs could find those vans and their contents, they had nothing.

He was, however, concerned about O’Connell. By now they should have been meeting to sort out somewhere for the bomb maker to stay – remaining in the lock-up was scarcely a suitable course of action.

Whilst the remote triggers for the three bombs were not yet live, just having to breath the same air as pounds of fertiliser in a confined space was hardly pleasant.

The thought of remaining in police custody for over forty-eight hours was also worrying him – it would take him past the anniversary date and spoil, at least in part, what he had planned. He was confident that, sooner or later, the police would have to release him, and then he could get things moving again, but it would have to be done very carefully – he was sure that, once free again, the police would retain their interest in him; he could hardly expect to go about his business as usual.

He also wondered about the Maggs brothers. His original plan was the brothers would drive the vans, leaving them at the spots identified by a careful reconnaissance of the Corporation Street area, whilst he himself drove the Mondeo and triggered the explosions. Again, today he should have been meeting with the brothers to finalise things – without meeting him, what would they do?

Alison returned to his office whilst Murphy was taken back to the holding cell to be met with more news.

Once again it was DC MacLaine – Alison felt that the girl was becoming something of a lucky mascot in this affair.

“Sir, we’ve tracked those three vehicles on Number Plate Recognition cameras. Haven’t got a final resting place for them, but they all headed towards the same area – a pretty run-down area with several disused warehouses and the like.”

She laid a street map down on Alison’s desk and used her index finger to trace out an approximately square area roughly two hundred yards on a side.

She jabbed her finger down on a road junction.

“All three vehicles were picked up by the camera here,” she jabbed the finger down again, indicating a further road junction almost quarter of a mile from the first, “but none of them passed this camera here, which they would have had to do if they drove beyond the area.”

Alison nodded his understanding.

“Right, good work again. I’ll have the area searched.”

22

It took a couple of hours to arrange, but by mid-afternoon the whole area was swarming with uniformed police as they sought the missing vehicles.

They missed Liam O’Connell by less than half an hour. Finally wearying of the stench of the fertiliser and the failure of Murphy to appear, the Irishman left the lock-up and walked the hundred yards or so to where he had parked Murphy’s car and drove away. He actually passed one of the police vans as it headed for the area that he was vacating and he wondered uneasily if it had anything to do with Murphy’s failure to appear and he kept on driving until he was out of the city and headed into the Lancashire countryside.

With no specific destination in mind, he took the M62 heading east and was almost at Huddersfield when a thought struck him. If the police had indeed cottoned on to Murphy, might they not be also looking for his car, the very car that he was at the moment driving?

Cursing the way that everything seemed to be going wrong, he turned off the motorway at the very next junction, the New Hey Road, and followed it to the outskirts of Huddersfield itself, before turning off again into a maze of residential streets where he left the car and walked back to the bus route. An hour and a half later he was on the train from Huddersfield to Glasgow.

***********************

Alison was only too aware that he was treading a tightrope. He was holding Murphy based more on supposition than on hard evidence and he badly needed some of the latter if the man wasn’t going to walk free in two days at the most.

He was in luck; the flood of officers searching the area that had been identified were accompanied by sniffer dogs, and Rosie, a four year old Golden Labrador bitch famous in the force for her ability to sniff out noxious substances, was soon pawing excitedly at the door of first one door, then another, of a row of three lock-up garages. The officers were led by Chief Inspector Garry Hammond, a uniformed officer of twenty years’ experience and one not frightened of using his own initiative. He looked at the dog, then at the three doors. He turned to a burly constable carrying a ram.

“Break down that door,” he instructed, pointing at the door which seemed to have most excited Rosie; one swing of the ram and the door burst off its tracks – and an Aladdin’s cave was laid bare. It was the garage within which resided the hired Mondeo, the garage within which O’Connell had actually plied his deadly trade; ten minutes later and all three garages were open, the whole site sealed off with ‘Do Not Cross’ tape and the Bomb Disposal Unit on its way. Hammond phoned through the good news to Alison.

“Got him,” Alison exulted at the news. He turned to DC MacLaine who had been coordinating the results of the property searches as they had been radioed in.

“Shirley, get onto Scientific Services – I want a full forensic team crawling over those garages as soon as the bomb disposal people have declared the area safe.”

As she hurried to do his bidding, Alison leant back in his office chair and exhaled a long, heart-felt sigh of relief. At last he had the concrete evidence that he had needed; for the first time Donal Murphy was going to find himself behind bars for a long, long, time. In fact, the cancer would claim Murphy’s life well before he even came to trial, but Alison had no way of knowing that at the time.

The results of the forensic team’s work could scarcely have been better. The prints of Murphy were on all three vehicles and O’Connell’s and Murphy’s were on the bombs themselves and their trigger devices. The second interview of Murphy elicited no more information from the man than had the first, but it mattered not. The physical evidence was irrefutable. The only fly in the ointment was that O’Connell was still at large somewhere, and Murphy refused to give any clue as to where that ‘somewhere’ might possibly be.

The anniversary of the nineteen ninety-six bombings passed without incident. Alison and his team were congratulated by the Chief Constable, no less, and Alison treated the whole team to a slap-up dinner – they had all worked their fingers to the bone, knowing only too well that if they failed the centre of Manchester could have been visited by unimaginable carnage.

As Alison happily put away a fourth glass of wine with the meal, he reflected that the only remaining fly in the ointment was the disappearance of O’Connell – where was that bloody man?

************************

That ‘bloody man’ was in Glasgow, welcomed with open arms by an earlier cellmate. Mark Harris wasn’t Irish – and if the police ever thought of looking as far afield as Glasgow, that was a plus factor. Whilst inside, the two men had formed a mutually supportive duo – mess with one and you messed with both. Their cooperation was based on the fact that they both had an undying hatred for the British government –

O’Connell from his love of the concept of a united Ireland, Harris because, as a long time and self-professed anarchist, he simply hated governments per se.

23

Harris had been released just over a year before O’Connell. His crime had been far less serious – property damage in that he had, whilst somewhat inebriated, set fire to the local offices of the Department of Work and Pensions. The sentence might have been somewhat perfunctory but for the fact that, whilst being arrested red-handed, he had turned on a woman police constable and slashed her face with a Stanley knife.

The result had been a ten year sentence and during the course of that sentence he and O’Connell had shared a cell for nearly five years before Harris had been released. They had realised that they were kindred souls and, whilst not swearing on a stack of Bibles or the like, had agreed to help each other to the best of their ability should the need ever arise.

So far as O’Connell was concerned, the need had now arisen.

“So, Liam, what brings you to the finest city on the planet?”

“I’m on the run, Mark, and I’ll make no bones of it – the Manchester pigs would just love to receive my head on a platter. I could tell you all, but to be honest, if I don’t tell you, nobody can squeeze it out of you – are you happy with that? I promise you that had I not been let down by the fucking incompetence of those trying to help me, then the British government would have had a right kick in the balls.”

“That’s good enough for me, mate – how can I help?”

“I need a place to stay – and I wouldn’t shit you – the Manchester police are really after me – so it could be a risk for anybody who puts me up.”

“Don’t worry on that score, me old mate – I can think of a number of places with folk in them who’d be only too chuffed to put one up on the establishment. Some of the folk make you and me look like right wing Tories!”

By the end of the day O’Connell was settled in with a small group of youngsters – three men and three girls, all aged between twenty and twenty five – in a large flat in a tower block in the Cumbernauld area, a flat which had seen better days but which was luxury compared to O’Connell’s last place of residence in the Manchester lock-up garage. None of his fellow flat dwellers were worried by the fact that he was on the run, and when that was verified by the news in the media over the next couple of days, they were impressed by the fact that he was being sought by the police and was described as armed and dangerous. O’Connell read the newspaper report of the success of the Manchester police in thwarting an attempted IRA bomb attack with anger – that idiot Murphy clearly hadn’t got a brain in his head to have failed so miserably. The ‘armed’

bit was an irritation as well – with Murphy in the hands of the police the promised UZI obviously had never appeared and O’Connell was nowhere nearer to settling the score with Lamb than he had been whilst still in prison. But settle the score he would, he told himself grimly; the deaths of his brothers demanded nothing less.

His plan of action was simplicity itself. He would stay in Glasgow, where nobody was looking for him, until the heat died down, and then he would return to Manchester and kill Lamb. The first part was easy; whilst he had initially been worried that one of his flatmates might inform the police of his presence, it rapidly became clear that, on the rare occasions they were compos mentis and not on a drug induced high, that they saw him as some sort of folk hero trying to strike out at the establishment on behalf of the downtrodden. Their fantasy, whilst it struck O’Connell as idiotic, was very welcome.

The second part of the plan wasn’t quite so easy. With Murphy out of the reckoning he had no readily available source of a weapon and he felt that to try and acquire anything would be dangerous, at least in the short term. He had discussed the matter with Harris, who had assured him that a gun of some sort would be easy enough – a pistol or a shotgun, but that a sub-machine gun was another matter entirely. Thinking it over, O’Connell decided to lower his expectations – Lamb would be just as dead if cut down by a blast from a shotgun or a bullet from a pistol; the desire to see him go down from a hail of bullets from the sort of weapon that Lamb himself had used to kill Kenneth and Fergus, which O’Connell had seen as poetic justice, wasn’t the over-riding priority. Just killing the bloody man was.

Chapter Five

I had returned to my bungalow. Two months had passed and there had been no sign of Liam O’Connell. It was as though he had never really existed; the best efforts of the Manchester police had failed totally to find any trace of the man. The only possible clue – which had led nowhere – was the discovery of Murphy’s car in a residential street on the outskirts of Huddersfield. Forensic examination made it clear that O’Connell had driven the vehicle and as his were the uppermost fingerprints in various locations within the car, including the steering wheel and gear lever, it was logical to deduce that he had been the last person to drive it, and therefore the person who had abandoned it.

24

However, I remained convinced that O’Connell’s present disappearance didn’t mean that I was safe from the man, a view that Jim Alison shared with me. We were sure that O’Connell’s hatred of me would have been in no way diminished by his failure to contribute to a massacre in Manchester – the disappointment might even have hardened his resolve.

I was careful when out of the house, but horribly aware that the entire initiative rested with O’Connell. We were reasonably confident that he wasn’t currently in the Manchester area – the attempt to murder as many innocent shoppers as possible had led to unprecedented levels of cooperation from a wide variety of underworld sources, none of whom, despite strenuous efforts in addition to those being undertaken by the police, had found any sign of the Irishman.

The more that I thought about it, the more annoyed I became at my effective helplessness. I could hardly expect the police to protect me and the law of the land prevented me from owning any effective means of self-defence, even a pepper spray or the like, never mind a decent knife or, heaven forbid, a gun. The more I thought about it, the unhappier I became and eventually I came to the conclusion that I would far rather be able to defend myself, even if ineffectually, given that all the advantage lay with O’Connell, than go down at his hands without a chance of shooting back. It was time to call in a favour, a favour of very long standing.

13th July, 2000

I had been a newly promoted Detective Sergeant and one of the aspects of my new responsibilities had been to visit some of the less openly illegal, but still somewhat dodgy, establishments in our division – premises such as the euphemistically named ‘massage parlours’, some of the betting shops and pawnbrokers, that sort of thing. Really, I was marking the cards of the various proprietors and making sure that the retirement of my predecessor, DS Hook, didn’t mean that the eagle eye of the law was any less sharp.

One of the people that Ken Hook had commented upon particularly was Richard Lane, who ran a large pawnbroker’s shop, a shop which was largely legal but which also was a front for his other business – acting as a minor fence for local burglars and the like. Despite this, Hook had never taken any action against the man because he was a very useful contact, with tendrils reaching far and wide beyond Manchester.

I was quite surprised when I met the man for the first time. I don’t know what I had expected, but the slightly built, neatly dressed and softly spoken forty year old wasn’t it.

Lane smiled at me as I entered his shop.

“Detective Sergeant Lamb, I assume? Mr. Hook said that you would be replacing him. It’s nice to meet you.”

I was further taken aback – Lane’s greeting was a far cry from the surly suspiciousness that I had encountered elsewhere and despite what I knew about him, I found myself warming to the little man – for he was no more than five foot five or so tall

“Nice to meet you as well, Mr. Lane.”

“Sergeant, I wonder if I could beg a few minutes of your time? I learnt something yesterday which I think might be of interest to you.”

“I’ve certainly got a few minutes for anything interesting, Mr. Lane.”

He ushered me into a small office, an office as neat as the man himself. He indicated a comfortable looking visitor’s chair into which I sank and he seated himself behind a small, uncluttered, desk.

“The thing that I thought might interest you, Sergeant, is that John Inbrook was released from prison last week and I have heard that he intends to return to Manchester in the near future.”

This was indeed of interest. As a member of the CID team I was already aware that Inbrook, who had been imprisoned down south for a fifteen year stretch of which he had served eight years before being released on licence, was a particularly nasty piece of work and had been found guilty of seriously injuring a shop assistant in the course of a robbery in which Inbrook had used a baseball bat on the unfortunate girl to devastating effect. It had been before my time with CID, indeed before I had joined the force, but Ken Hook had been involved in the investigation and was livid that the charge the team wanted – attempted murder –

had been reduced by the Crown Prosecution Service to grievous bodily harm. The judge must have been of the same mind as the team, for fifteen years was at the high end for a GBH sentence – “And the bastard deserves to serve every bloody day of it” – had been Ken’s comment.

So now the man was coming back to his roots. Presumably this had been approved by the probation service or there would have been a heads-up if he had simply walked away from whatever conditions had been attached to his licence.

“Thank you, Mr. Lane – we’ll keep a weather eye open for the man.”

I was about to get up to go when Lane spoke again.

“There is something else that I would like you to know, sergeant. When the IRA set off that bomb in Corporation Street, my wife and twelve year old daughter were there, and they were amongst those who ran 25

away from the scene. They passed within a few yards of where you had shot those terrorists – had you not done so and had that second bomb been set off they might well have been killed, so I owe you an extreme debt of gratitude.”

Taken aback by the revelation, I didn’t know what to say, apart from mumbling that I was glad that I had been able to prevent the possible tragedy.

That had been the first, by no means the last, time that Lane had proved helpful, and I soon understood why Ken Hook had turned a blind eye to the man’s other activities – and in any case, he was very careful in carrying them out. Actually building a case against him would have been extremely difficult and to what end?

The good turns Richard Lane did me stood me in good stead and helped in several arrests. Then came the day that I was able to do him a second good turn.

We had taken to having a regular meeting in a pub near his shop – had I been a frequent visitor to the shop itself someone would doubtless have noticed and the fact that Lane had a regular police visitor would have reached the wrong ears. This evening, for no particular reason, Lane had left a minute or two when I realised that he had left his spectacles case on our table. I picked it up and hurried after him to return it. As he turned down a side street, presumably making his way to wherever he had parked his car, he was set upon by two men. They were both a good bit bigger than their target, and both were swinging baseball bats – clearly this was no mugging, but a determined attempt to kill or cripple. Lane dodged the first blow, and a second as the two attackers got in each other’s way, but a third caught him on the side and he fell to the pavement. The two men were so intent on their task that they failed to realise that I was approaching and my high speed arrival, culminating in a shoulder charge on the nearest man which sent him sprawling to the ground, was the first intimation that they had that they were not alone with their victim.

In his fall, the man I had shoulder charged had dropped his baseball bat and I swooped on it, picked it up and swivelled round to catch the blow aimed at me head with the bat. The clash of wood on wood sent tremors up my arms and must have done the same to my opponent who, in his turn, also lost his grip on his weapon.

He looked into my eyes and clearly didn’t like what he saw there, for he turned and fled, followed by his companion who scrambled to his feet and made good his escape.

I turned to Lane, who was getting painfully to his feet, holding his side as he did so.

“Are you alright?”

“I think so, my side hurts but I don’t think that it is anything serious. Thank you for driving those two off – if you hadn’t arrived, I don’t know what they might have done to me.”

“Do you know who those two are?”

“Oh yes. They are associates of Doug Fischer.”

Fischer was a local bookmaker with a less than savoury reputation.

“Why did he set those thugs on you? Do you owe him money?”

Lane shook his head.

“No, nothing like that – I think that he imagines that I am responsible for his brother being arrested last month.”

The arrest of Bill Fischer, the younger, and far less bright, brother of the bookmaker, had followed a tip-off that he had been involved in a number of robberies with violence from shops over the last few months. I hadn’t been involved in the case myself, but I did know that the tip-off had come anonymously, but almost certainly from a disgruntled girlfriend, and certainly not from Lane.

“So what now?”

“Well, if you could accompany me to my car, just in case they are waiting for a second go at me, then I’ll have to convince Fischer that he is mistaken.”

I had picked up the second baseball bat and carried them with me to Lane’s car where I deposited them in the boot and watched as he drove away in safety.

A couple of days later we had a report that two men had been found very badly beaten in an alley near to the general hospital, where they had been treated for their injuries but steadfastly refused to say anything more about the incident other than that they had been set upon by several assailants unknown to them. I was sure that Lane had been behind the attack and that the two men were those from whom I had saved him, but nothing more ever came of the incident.

********************************************

All that was more than fifteen years in the past as I limped up the gravel drive to Lane’s house, a mini mansion set in three acres or so of immaculate garden, having parked my car in the road outside. My approach to the house had not been without incident. The dwelling was surrounded by a high brick wall, 26

pierced by a pair of ornate wrought iron gates for vehicles, gates which were firmly shut, and an open single gate for pedestrians, and it was this gate that I had passed through, only to find my way barred by a man who had stepped out of a sort of sentry box arrangement.

“Who are you?” he demanded truculently.

“I’m here to see Mr. Lane.” I said mildly.

“No you’re not. People don’t just come to see Mr. Lane – they have to be on my list, and you ain’t on it, so piss off.”

“Mr. Lane will be pleased to see me, so I suggest that you step aside and let me through.”

“Look, granddad, get it into your skull – you’re not coming through, so fuck off back to where you come from.”

The ‘granddad’ appellation really hurt. I am, after all, only forty-six years, and thanks to Liam O’Connell, I never will have any grandchildren. The combination of the insult and the man taking a belligerent step forwards, decided me. I half turned away, doing my best to project an aura of middle-aged timidity, but instead of backing away, I continued the turn, pivoting fast on my good leg and lashing the gatekeeper on the knee with my walking stick. My stick is a Malacca cane with a fancy silver handle in the shape of a horse’s head on it – but the bottom of the cane is loaded with lead, making it a useful weapon in the sort of circumstance in which I now found myself.

The man was big, six feet four or five and perhaps seventeen or eighteen stone – and all that weight didn’t help him as his kneecap probably cracked from the force of the blow and he collapsed with a scream of pain.

I stepped over him and continued to limp the thirty yards or so to the house’s front door.

As I got to within a few feet of the door, it opened and Lane himself stepped out to greet me, his hand extending for shaking, and I gratefully took it and shook it.

“Mr. Lamb – it’s so nice to see you again after all this time. I’m sorry that Eddie failed to greet you properly; I’m afraid he gets over-zealous at times, and |I am sure that you were fully justified in taking him to task in the way you did.”

“I’m sorry as well, and I expect he is – I’m afraid that I may have broken his kneecap.”

“Oh dear, well come into the house and we’ll do something about it.”

He lead the way up the three steps to the front door and I followed him into an elegant hall with a tiled floor and light oak panelling to the walls, which were hung with several attractive land and seascapes. A broad staircase was immediately in front of us, but Lane ushered me into a room to the left, which proved to be an office, boasting a medium sized desk and a couple of filing cabinets, whilst an expensive looking laptop and printer reposed on a table at right angles to the desk.

“Won’t you sit down, Mr. Lamb?” He gestured to a comfortable looking visitor’s chair and I sank gratefully into its embrace – the rapid pivot to maximise the force of my blow on the unfortunate Eddie’s knee, although performed with my good leg taking most of the strain, had still caused my bad leg to protest and taking my weight off it was a relief.

“Perhaps you wouldn’t mind if I did something about Eddie before we talk.”

Taking my silent nod as assent, he pressed a button on the phone on his desk and moments later the door was opened to admit a man who was clearly some sort of general factotum.

“Yes, sir?”

“David, I fear that Eddie’s over-enthusiasm has led him to suffer an injury. Would you go and check on him, please, and if necessary take him to hospital. Oh, and impress upon him that Mr. Lamb is a very good friend and I am most annoyed at the way he has been treated. Tell Eddie that he is to make no mention of how he came by his injury. Provided he keeps his mouth shut there will be some recompense for him – I suppose we could call it industrial injury compensation. On the other hand, if he does talk about the incident, tell him that not only will he have no job here, but I will pass the word around that I would regard anyone else employing him a similar role as an unfriendly act.”

David absorbed all this without a flicker of emotion and left us. Lane turned his attention back to me.

“I’m sorry about that, but I felt it best to deal with Eddie straight away. However, now that’s out of the way, what can I do for you – because I assume that this is more than just a social visit, pleased as I am to see you again.”

“You’re right, I’m afraid – I need a favour.”

“Mr. Lamb, at the very least you once saved me from serious injury and it is very possible that you saved the lives of my wife and daughter. Anything that I can do for you, I will.”

I was reassured by my welcome – and impressed by my host. He had clearly come a long way since he ran a pawnbroker’s business. I came straight to the point.

“I need a pistol.”

If he was surprised. Lane’s countenance did not betray the fact.

27

“So Liam O’Connell is still of concern?”

“Absolutely. As you doubtless know, he was involved in the attempt to explode another bomb in Corporation Street, but escaped and nobody knows where he may be at the present, but I am pretty sure that once he feels that things have calmed down, he will come after me again – and I want to be as prepared as I possibly can be.”

Lane nodded his head.

“Yes, I can quite see your need. I’m sure that I can come up with something for you. Do you have any preferences?”

“Well, when I was a firearms officer I trained on the Glock 17, but anything in that sort of class would do.”

Lane frowned in thought.

“Let me do some digging and see what I can find for you. I must admit to knowing very little about firearms, but, as the saying goes, I know a man who does. It will take a day or two – is that alright?”

“That would be fine.”

“Good.” He looked at his watch. “Can I offer you a bite of lunch? We only have a light lunch, but you are very welcome to join us, and I am sure that my wife would love to meet you.”

I accepted the invitation gratefully and ten minutes later I was introduced to Mrs. Lane, an elegant woman who looked younger than her fifty something years. She advanced and shook my hand as Lane made the introductions.

“Darling, this is ex-Detective Sergeant Lane, the man I have so often told you about.”

His wife’s smile climbed another notch in its welcome.

“Mr. Lamb, it is so nice to meet you at last. You know, we are both quite certain that when you took down those two IRA men you very probably saved my life and also the life of Clarissa, our daughter.”

I mumbled something appropriate as she led us all to the dining room, where the table had been set with three places, and we enjoyed a light meal. Afterwards, Lane excused himself and left me alone with his wife.

We chatted on a generality of subjects for perhaps twenty minutes before Lane returned.

“Thank you for entertaining Mr. Lamb, darling, but now he and I have some business to discuss, so if you will excuse us?”

With a last smile at me, Mrs. Lane left us and Lane gave a slight frown.

“I have done some telephoning – a Glock 17 isn’t immediately available, I’m afraid, although I am sure that I could obtain one for you in a week or so. However, a week might be a long time, given your circumstances.

If you like, I can find you a Beretta M9 – that’s the model used by the American armed forces nowadays –

by tomorrow evening. It is unused except for a test firing to ensure that it functions properly.”

I had never handled a Beretta, but to have the weapon available so quickly over-rode all other considerations.

“That would be fine – how much?”

Lane looked pained.

“Mr. Lamb, the cost to you is nothing – it is my small repayment to you for the services that you have already performed for my family and me.”

I was touched at the man’s generosity and gratefully accepted his offer.

True to his word, the following evening we met briefly in a pub near the city centre, where he handed me a small, but heavy, parcel secured with heavy duty adhesive tape.

Obviously, I left the parcel wrapped up until I got home, but once there I wasted no time in unwrapping and examining my new possession. It was as Lane had promised, effectively brand new. I had no illusions; possessing the gun put me outside the law, but breaking that particular law weighed not at all on my conscience – I was far more concerned at what O’Connell might be up to.

Had I but known it, at that moment O’Connell was some three hundred miles away in Glasgow, plotting his next move far from anyone interested in finding him.

********************************

Liam O’Connell stirred restlessly as he awoke, causing the girl in the bed beside him to murmur sleepily. He had been in Glasgow for more than a month now, and was hopeful that the hue and cry over him down in Manchester might be starting to die down. So far, things had gone swimmingly. The other occupants of the house, when they weren’t high on drugs, regarded him with something approaching admiration as a man, as they saw it, fighting back against the power of the state, and O’Connell did his best not to disillusion them.

In particular, Sophie Clarke, the girl beside him in the bed, saw him as an heroic freedom fighter, despite the fact that although currently living in Glasgow, having dropped out of her course at Glasgow University the previous year, she was as English as they could possibly come. Her choice of Glasgow University, where she had been reading, without very much commitment, Politics, had been to distance herself as far as possible from the family home in Esher, where daddy was a stockbroker and mummy stayed at home and did good 28

works. O’Connell simply couldn’t understand why someone with so easy and affluent a life style would want to throw it all away, but then, that was her problem, not his. As far as he was concerned, she was just a silly little spoilt rich kid playing at rebellion – and the rich part had been demonstrated when he had discovered that the rental of the flat was in her name and that she virtually bank-rolled the other four youngsters. He got out of bed and started to dress; Sophie, half awake, half asleep, gazed blearily at him.

“Liam, come back to bed – what’s the time?”

“Half nine, love – and I’m off to meet a man, so got to go!”

With a further muttered but inaudible protest, the girl sank back beneath the covers as O’Connell, now fully dressed, slipped from the room.

He was indeed due to meet a man, a man that Mark Harris had identified to him as a possible source of a firearm. Harris had warned O’Connell that anything that the man, Sean McLean, might produce was likely to be expensive – a man on the run had to expect to be taken advantage of, but between them Harris and O’Connell had hatched a way round the fact that O’Connell was virtually penniless.

O’Connell was to meet McLean in a small coffee shop; this was a preliminary meeting, at which O’Connell was to state his needs, McLean to state the price.

O’Connell was at the coffee shop well before time, waiting to see if, and how, his contact would appear.

McLean was a small man, perhaps fifty years old and no more than five feet five or perhaps six, but he carried himself with a swaggering arrogance to which O’ Connell immediately took objection, What was this man, other than a grubby go between? He looked at the man with less than unbridled enthusiasm. In his turn, McLean looked at the Irishman with little concealed hostility. He knew O’Connell’s reputation and the fact that the police were searching for him, a matter which would, he felt, extract a good price from this Irishman, even if he was no thick Mick from the bogs.

“So, what do you want?”

O’Connell stared at the man.

“I want something decent, something clean. If I have to use it, I don’t want the police forensic people to tie it into something used before.”

“Yeah, I can see that might be difficult for you – but clean guns cost more – you have to understand that, old son.”

“Of course I do – all I need to know is can you provide something clean?”

McLean pursued his lips as if in deep thought, although he had actually viewed this sort of debate long before coming to this meeting.

“So, you want a pistol, right?”

“Well, I’d prefer a sub-machine gun but I doubt that my funds would run to a MAC-10 or a UZI.”

McLean nodded his head.

“You’re right – up here they’d cost at least three to four grand, perhaps more. However, I can get you a clean Browning Hi-Power or the like for around a grand. Interested?”

O’Connell hesitated, trying to convey a picture of someone who could run to that sort of money but was reluctant so to do.

“Well, even that’s a bit steep, you know – I was thinking more on the lines of five hundred.”

McLean shook his head.

“For five hundred, a handgun would most probably have a history – now you wouldn’t want that, now would you?”

O’Connell shook his head, and this time his declining the offer was very much the real thing. The last thing that he wanted was to use a gun which could be traced back by the police to an earlier crime – even, the Good Lord forbid, a murder.

“OK, I can run to a grand – when can you deliver?”

McLean, once more, gave the impression of considering the question, although, in truth, it was once again something that he had already worked on.

“Day after tomorrow suit you?”

“That would be fine – where do we meet?”

“Well, not here, that’s for sure. Do you know the docks area?”

“Not really, but I know a couple of the locals who could doubtless point me to the right place.”

“OK, come off the Stobecross Road and past the transport museum – it’s all pretty busy there, but if you keep going there’s an area waiting to be redeveloped, all abandoned containers and the like, but mostly there’s an open area several hundred feet across. Drive onto that area at ten on the morning and wait. I’ll come a bit later when I’m sure that you are alone.”

“Not very trusting, now, are you?”

“In this business, my friend, I trust only money and myself.”

29

Having delivered that quip, McLean got up and left, leaving O’Connell alone with his thoughts. Two things were certain; he had to have a gun before going after Lamb again, and there was no way he would be able to get his hands on a thousand pounds to pay for it, which meant that, one way or another, McLean was in for a big disappointment.

As he made his way back to his car, McLean reviewed the meeting that he had just concluded. Getting a gun, specifically the Browning that he had mentioned, posed no problem. He did, however, wonder how far he should trust the Irishman. O’Connell, he knew full well, was no thick Mick from the sticks. He was a confirmed IRA bomb maker, doubtless with much blood on his hands, and could be a dangerous man to cross – let alone double cross. All in all, he decided, it would be safest to play straight with the man, even though here in Glasgow he was, as far as McLean was aware, currently acting on his own. However, he was aware that he needed to keep in mind that there was always the danger that O’Connell might have, or if needs be might develop, links to the many people within the city who had either come across the Irish Sea themselves, or were the children of parents who had.

*****************************

Forty-eight hours later, O’Connell drove onto the industrial wasteland that McLean had described; his transport was a borrowed Astra, borrowed from Sophie Clarke, who was only too willing to lend the vehicle to further whatever element of an anti-establishment agenda that she believed that O’Connell might be pursuing.

He waited for some ten minutes before another car entered the area. This one stopped a few yards away from him and McLean got out. He wasn’t alone. A second man climbed out of the vehicle, and whilst McLean, perhaps fifty years old, five feet six or so and perhaps twelve stone and giving the impression of being less than fit, his companion was different. Six feet two or three tall, he had the look of a bodybuilder about him, and was clearly there to ensure that McLean came to no harm during the transaction.

It was something that O’Connell had anticipated and prepared for. The fact that McLean had selected a deserted location, a location totally devoid of witnesses was even more to O’Connell’s advantage than it was to McLean’s. It was a mistake, a mistake that McLean would soon regret.

O’Connell advanced on the two men, his arms dangling loosely at his sides. McLean wasted no time.

“Got the money?”

“Yes,” O’Connell reached with his right hand into his jacket pocket and withdrew a bulky brown paper envelope. He extended his arm, offering the package to McLean, but the smaller man indicated, with a nod of his head, that it should be handed to his companion. O’Connell too another pace forward, proffering the package to the big man, who made to take it. As he did so, O’Connell’s left hand, which had disappeared from view as the attention of both the other men focussed on the package, suddenly appeared from behind his back, holding a long bladed knife which he plunged into the big man’s body, just below the sternum and angled sharply upwards, perforating the left lung and reaching towards the heart. The man’s knees folded beneath him and he pitched forward; O’Connell stepped back, letting the man’s weight and motion drag the knife blade from the massive wound. For a moment McLean was rooted to the spot in shock, then he started to move, but he moved too late as O’Connell closed on him and delivered a second fatal blow to a second victim.

Ignoring the bigger man for the moment, O’Connell quickly searched McLean’s body, relieving the corpse of a well filled wallet and an oilcloth package which proved to contain the promised Browning pistol. He then turned to his other victim, whose wallet revealed him to be one John Gregg. John Gregg also had a wallet, a wallet containing a bit over one hundred pounds, but he also had two further items of interest – a roll of banknotes and a pistol. Perhaps in keeping with the size of the man, the gun was also large – a big Smith and Wesson forty-four Magnum ‘Must have seen himself as Clint Eastwood’ O’Connell mused to himself. Momentarily, O’Connell wondered if the gun merchant would have played fair with him had he really had a thousand pounds to hand over, but the thought was academic. O’Connell possessed nothing like a thousand pounds, he had an over-riding need for a weapon, so the end result was inevitable. Tossing his finds into his borrowed car, he dragged the two bodies into McLean’s car. He momentarily considered keeping Gregg’s big revolver as well as the Browning, but quickly dismissed the idea – it was too big to be carried around easily and had no spare ammunition other than the six rounds already loaded into it, so he threw it into the car on top of its late owner. He then tossed a small package in with the two men, opened the windows but shut the doors of the car, and retrieved a can of petrol from the Astra’s boot, petrol which he splashed liberally into the interior of McLean’s vehicle. He then got into his own motor and drove off.

Ten minutes later the small package burst into violent flames as the timer ran down, and ignited the petrol soaked car interior and the clothes of the dead men.

30

In the meantime, O’Connell had stopped in a side street and examined his finds. McLean’s wallet proved to contain over nine hundred pound, mostly in fifty pound notes, whilst the Browning pistol looked to be in good working order, complete with a cardboard box containing twenty-five round of ammunition. The roll of money that he had taken from Gregg was a pleasant surprise – just on three thousand pounds in fifty pound notes, and he assumed that the money was probably McLean’s but that he had relied on Gregg to keep it safe whilst dealings with unscrupulous men were conducted. He checked his watch; it was still not quite half past ten, so he drove away from the docks area and was soon on the M74 headed for Carlisle. He wondered how long it would take Sophie Clarke to realise that he was not coming back, and neither was her Astra. He felt a momentary twinge of sadness about the girl, she’d been a pleasant enough companion and good fun in bed, but she really should have stayed in Esher, not ventured into the wider world where nasty things happened to silly little girls – however, if having a lover walk away and take her car with him was the biggest disappointment that she ever suffered in life, she wouldn’t be doing too badly.

Four and a half hours later, having scrupulously observed every speed limit on the way, he drove into the outskirts of Manchester. Sophie would presumably at some stage overcome her reluctance at dealing with

‘authority’ and report the Astra stolen, but he reckoned that he had at least a couple of days grace before that happened. It was then that a thought struck him – time to test the power of love. He phoned Sophie’s mobile.

“Hello, Liam, is that you?”

“Yes, love – look, listen, I haven’t much time. You know I went out to meet a man?”

“Yes.”

“Well, I thought that he was a comrade from the old days – but he was an undercover cop. I belted him and made a run for it, and I’m out of Glasgow entirely at the moment. Thing is –if I’m on foot they’re going to catch me for sure. Can I borrow the Astra for a few days, please?”

“Yes, of course you can – just take care of yourself and come back safe, please!”

“I will, love – you’re a star – and I promise you that this is all for the cause.”

He rang off, greatly pleased with himself. Now there was no chance of the Astra being reported as stolen, so he had clean wheels. Never, he thought to himself, underestimate the gullibility of the young in love.

It was now nearly two months since Murphy had been arrested and O’Connell felt that whilst the police still wanted him in connection with the attempted bombing, the initial frenetic activity must surely, by now, have been scaled down a bit. In that assumption he was almost one hundred percent correct; only Detective Superintendent Alison still harboured the belief that O’Connell would, at some stage, return to Manchester.

He felt that way because he believed that O’Connell would never rest until he had avenged the deaths of his two brothers at the hands of one time Detective Sergeant Larry Lamb.

Chapter Six

I was beginning to wonder if I might, at least for the time being, be safe from Liam O’Connell’s attention, but despite that I was still exercising extreme caution wherever that was possible. I knew only too well that if O’Connell did decide to attempt another ambush, all the advantages lay with him. I was permanently risking prison by not only having the pistol that Richard Lane had acquired for me, but by also carrying it with me whenever I left the house. Whilst walking it was tucked into the waistband of my trousers, snuggling into the small of my back. Whilst driving it lay on the passenger seat beside me, hidden from casual view by nothing more sophisticated than a light jacket lying on top of it. They were the best precautions of which I was able, but likely to be woefully inadequate if O’Connell did make a move against me.

It was early in the evening, but it had been a dull, dreary day and darkness was already closing in when my phone rang. I lifted the receiver and put it to my ear, wondering who might be calling – a received few phone calls.

“Lamb”

“Mr. Lamb, it’s Richard Lane.”

Surprised at the identity of my caller, I wondered why he was contacting me; we had neither spoken nor seen each other since he had obtained the Beretta for me.

“Nice to hear from you again, Mr. Lane.”

“I’m afraid that I am not the bearer of good tidings, Mr. Lamb. I have received news of Liam O’Connell.”

My heart sank; this was the last thing that I had wanted to hear. Lane continued.

“My contacts tell me that he has been seen in Glasgow recently, where he has been associating with a Mark Harris, a man whom I suppose might best be described as a small time crook of all trades. I asked my contact if he would be kind enough to keep an eye on O’Connell, but he called me earlier today to say that the man hasn’t been seen anywhere for the last two days. There is also something further to add. Two days ago there 31

was a somewhat singular crime on a piece of wasteland in the Glasgow docks area. A car was found burnt out with two bodies in it. The bodies were identified as those of Sean McLean and John Gregg. McLean was known locally as an armourer to the various gags; Gregg was his bodyguard, a much needed person in the circles in which McLean moved. The bodies were very badly burned and cause of death was difficult to determine, but it seems that both were dead before the flames consumed them and that they had almost certainly been stabbed to death. The really interesting thing, however, is the way in which the car was set light to – there were the remnants of a timer actuated small explosion to set off the petrol with which everything had been doused – in other words, a bomb maker was involved.”

My blood ran cold. I could see only one explanation; O’Connell had been in Glasgow and had killed two men, men who could have provided him with a firearm of some sort. The time lag since he had escaped from Manchester was significant – it was long enough for him to assume that the initial energy devoted to searching for him must have been reduced, even if the search was theoretically still ongoing.

“Have you told anyone else about all this?”

“No, I need to protect my sources, but obviously you may feel the need to alert your friend, Detective Superintendent Alison. O’Connell was seen by somebody who used to know him leaving the English Lounge last night. As he would have been recognised he couldn’t risk following O’Connell to see where he went –

the man is after all, a known killer.”

What he had said just about confirmed my suspicions that Lane had contacts in the police, and from the sound of it, not just in Manchester, but at the very least in Police Scotland as well. I wondered uneasily just how far his contacts and his influence might stretch. As long as I had been in the force there had always been suspicions that Lane had a finger in many pies, not all of them savoury, but his usefulness as a source of information had led to him being not looked at too closely, not least by myself. I wondered what to tell Jim Alison.

********************

O’Connell was lying low in a small boarding house in a poorer part of Manchester, an establishment which provided a bed and asked no questions provided the occupants paid on the nail and didn’t bring trouble to the door.

He had already reconnoitred Lamb’s home, having easily obtained the address via the electoral roll. He had driven past a couple of times at night, drive-bys which had demonstrated that Lamb was home, and once in the day to get a better view of the bungalow and its surroundings.

The house was a not impossible location for an assassination attempt, but by no means a perfect, nor even an easy, one. Although the bungalow was detached, the neighbouring properties were quite close. In common with his neighbours, Lamb’s house had a small front garden with a low wall separating it from the pavement, a wall pierced by wrought iron gates opening into a short gravel drive to an integral garage, the wall of which met the hedge which ran between Lamb at his neighbour, with a similar hedge on the other side of the house, but this time separated from the house wall by some three of four feet, clearly a path through to the back garden. A session on Google Earth, courtesy of free computer usage at the nearest public library, had shown that all the houses in Lamb’s road backed onto similar houses in a road running parallel.

Altogether, not an easy prospect. The only means of approaching the bungalow directly was via the front gates, which meant walking over the gravel – difficult to do without being heard. The night time drives had shown up another problem. Not only Lamb’s property, but also those on either side of him and several others in the road, had security lights which had come on as he had driven past.

He had also driven along the road parallel to Lamb’s, with somewhat more encouraging results. None of the houses which were anywhere near to backing onto Lamb’s had security lights. Furthermore, they had the same sort of set-up as did Lamb – hedges between houses, but a walk through at one side of each house to reach the back garden without having to go through the house itself.

He still hadn’t decided whether to attack Lamb in his house to try and ambush him somewhere. The problem with an ambush was firepower. Back fifteen years ago he had the use of a sub-machine gun – and even then he hadn’t killed the bastard, although only because he hadn’t realised that Lamb was in a left hand drive car.

Back then he had known that Lamb frequently drove to one or other set of parents to pick up his wife and child. Now, there was no such regular journeys in Lamb’s life, and he was far less predictable. Given that fact, and the limited firepower offered by his pistol, he finally came to the conclusion that it would have to be an attack on the house. Obviously, it would have to take place in the early hours of the morning when everyone, Lamb and his neighbours, would be safely sound asleep.

********************

32

I had decided that, in all conscience, now that I knew that O’Connell had returned to Manchester, then Jim Alison and his troops needed to be aware of the fact, so only minutes after ending the call with Lane, I was on the phone again.

“Alison”

“Jim, it’s Larry Lamb.”

“Larry – how are you doing?”

“So far, so good. Jim, I’m ringing because I have been told by a mutual acquaintance that Liam O’Connell has been seen back in Manchester.”

“Has he, now? Nothing’s come my way yet. How reliable is your information?”

“Very – he owes me a big favour and I’ve trusted him for years.”

I knew that Jim would form his own conclusions as to my source from what I had just said, but we were both happier not to mention a name.

“Right. I’ll get some digging started. No idea of a location, I suppose?”

“I’m afraid not – he was seen in transit from a pub, The English Lounge, but not followed.”

“Well, we can’t expect to have all our work done for us – I’ll get people working on it – and Larry – look out for yourself, you hear me?”

“I hear you, Jim – I’ll be careful, very careful.”

“That’s my boy.”

After I had finished the call, I poured myself a large glass of Merlot and sat back in my chair whilst I mentally reviewed how O’Connell would come after me – for come after me I was sure that he would. If he had somehow once more obtained a sub-machine gun and just waited for me to walk or drive into his sights, being realistic, there was damn all that I could do about it. It did seem something that he would find difficult to achieve, however. I had bought the bungalow whilst still on crutches from my injuries when O’Connell had machine gunned our car, and one of the things that I had done to make life easier for myself was to have the up and over door to the garage motorised and fitted with a remote control. The garage had a communication door into the utility room, so I could get into my car, open the garage door and drive out without having to go outside the house – the wrought iron gates into my front garden I left permanently open so that they didn’t create a barrier.

When Jim had advised me that O’Connell had been released from prison I had immediately organised another piece of equipment for the house – a CCTV system. It had been quite expensive, and was quite sophisticated, using four cameras. Three were at the front of the of the house, with one covering the front garden so that anybody walking up to me door had their image recorded. The other two cameras at the front covered the road, one pointing one way, one the other, so any vehicles driving by were similarly caught on film. The fourth camera covered the back garden. Call me paranoid, but the system made me feel a little bit less vulnerable.

I decided to review what my cameras had captured over the previous forty-eight hours. Ours is a quiet road; it doesn’t offer a short cut to anywhere and thus the only vehicles likely to be seen during the course of the day are those of my neighbours, the postman and an occasional delivery van. I was therefore intrigued to see that the same Vauxhall Astra had driven past my house three times – twice at night, once during the daytime.

The cameras were good; the number plate could be read with ease. In this day and age it is quite simple to check if a vehicle is insured – very useful if somebody drives off after damaging your car – and my check showed that the car was registered to a Sophie Clarke with an address in Esher. That seemed odd, to say the least. Why should a woman with an address some two hundred miles to the south of me be driving down my road three times in the course of a day and two nights – and the night time drive-bys had been late – around two in the morning for one of them, a little earlier for the other?

I looked at my watch. It was still only a little after eight, so I phoned Jim again and told of my find. Like myself, he was instantly suspicious.

“Larry, that looks odd – I’ll get that Esher address checked out first thing in the morning.”

“Thanks, Jim.”

Jim was as good as his word, and phoned back late the following evening.

“It’s all a bit strange, Larry. I got onto the Met and they sent someone round to that Esher address. Sophie Clarke is the twenty-two year old daughter of John and Helen Clarke. The husband is a stockbroker, the wife stays home but is involved with several charities. They are the archetypal upper middle class couple with plenty of money to bless themselves with. Sophie went to Glasgow University and is, in theory, still studying there as far as her folk are aware – but more of that anon. The car was a present from her parents so that she would be independent whilst up in Scotland, and they also pay the rent of a flat up there for her, a flat that she shares with three other girls – again, more anon. She keeps in touch by telephone; she and her mother last talked at the end of last week. When asked why a car registered to an address in Esher was actually up in 33

Glasgow, the answer was predictable. A young driver’s insurance premium in leafy Esher is a lot lower than it would be in a busy area of Glasgow, although both parents protested that Sophie’s ‘proper’ address was the family home and that she was only living in Glasgow whilst at University.

“Now for the rest of the story. Once I heard from the Met I got in touch with an old colleague of ours – you remember Dave Lewis?”

“Yes, of course – I presume he’s now north of the border?”

“That’s right – he’s now a DCI in Glasgow. I explained the position to him and he had Sophie Clarke checked out right away. She isn’t studying at the Uni – she did enrol up there, but dropped out in her second year. She lives in the Glasgow flat alright, but not with three other female students as her parents believe. It apparently has a bit of a floating population; currently, three young men and three girls, none of them over twenty-five, none of them students. Over and above, until a few days ago there was a fourth man who was only there for a couple of months or so. He is an Irishman, a good bit older than the rest of them – about late thirties. When she was asked about her car, Sophie said that she had lent it to this Irishman who was visiting family down south, although she didn’t have any names nor addresses. His name, according to her, is Liam Connelly. Her house mates more or less supported her tale, although the officer who spoke with them all reckoned that they were lying through their teeth. He showed them a picture of O’Connell and they all said that it wasn’t Connelly. Again, the officer is convinced that they were lying. Larry – that was O’Connell, sure as houses.

“Now, I’ve got a general alarm out for that Astra, and I think that once we find it, we’ll also find O’Connell, so things are looking up a bit.”

I was somewhat reassured; we now knew for sure that O’Connell was in the area and we knew his vehicle.

As Jim had said, if the vehicle could be found, then O’Connell would almost certainly be found as well.

*********************

Over the years O’Connell had developed what might almost be called a sixth sense concerning danger.

Something was niggling him, and for the first time since leaving Glasgow he phoned Sophie from his mobile. The news that the police had been to the flat asking about her car immediately alerted him. His once clean set of wheels was now a major problem; the police would doubtless be searching for the car even as they spoke, and it was parked less than a hundred yards away from the boarding house. He finished the call to his erstwhile lover and promised that they would be together again as soon as was humanly possible, but that it clearly couldn’t be in the immediate future.

He decided that his simplest course of action was to leave the car where it was and let the police find it as soon as they might, but that he himself would be elsewhere. He thought back to Maureen Healy and wondered if she would be able to help him. He hadn’t seen her, nor heard from her, since going on the run after Murphy had been arrested, but that was only three months or so ago. Knowing his background – and being thoroughly sympathetic to his aims – she wouldn’t have expected him to imperil either of them by getting in touch, so she was a possible source of help, and one he knew that he could trust. He decided to try her, and dialled her number.

“Hello?”

“Maureen, it’s me – I need help.”

“Liam? What sort of help?”

“I don’t want to say over the phone – can we meet somewhere?”

“Of course.” There was a pause whilst the girl was obviously thinking.

“You remember where we fed the ducks?”

O’Connell furrowed his brow, wondering what she was talking about – as far as he could remember they had never, during their time together, fed any ducks, anywhere. Then the penny dropped.

“Of course I do – see you there?”

“Yes. How about in an hour?”

He looked at his watch. It was just after nine at night, but he could make the suggested rendezvous in time easily.

“See you there at ten, OK?”

“Fine. Take care.”

“You too. Bye.”

At ten o’clock O’Connell was standing opposite the entrance of the Mallard public house, a pub that he and Maureen had frequented on an occasional basis. He watched and, with satisfaction, saw the girl walk along the pavement, pause to look around and then go through the door. She was clearly alone, and O’Connell, ever cautious, walked across the road and entered the pub.

34

As he entered, he looked around to size up the clientele. Nobody stood out as a potential problem, so, after buying two drinks at the bar, a Guinness for himself, a white wine for Maureen, he made his way over to the corner table where she had already seated herself. She smiled up at him as he approached.

“Hello there, Liam – sure and you’re a sight for sore eyes.”

He seated himself opposite her, returning the smile.

“And so are you macushla. How have you been?”

“Well, I’ve been missing you, if that’s what you want to hear – but how come you’re back in Manchester –

I’m sure that the pigs are still after you. And anyway, where have you been hiding out?”

“I’ve been in Glasgow, but now they’re after me there as well, so I thought that I’d come back – the heat must have gone down a bit by now, surely?”

“Well, when you first got away the papers were all full of it for days, but you haven’t warranted a mention for weeks now,”

“That’s good to hear.”

“But why didn’t you tell me where you where?”

“It’s not them I was worried about – when Murphy was arrested it made the papers, of course, and there was always the chance that some of the less forgiving boys from the old days might have got wind of it and come looking for me, so I felt that getting right away from here and right away from you was the best protection that I could offer you. In the event, none of them ever came over, for which many thanks.”

“I see,” Maureen frowned slightly, “but suppose they did come over and found me and didn’t believe that I knew nothing?”

“I’m sure that you could have convinced them.”

Maureen still looked doubtful and O’Connell hurried to change the subject.

“Still, it never happened so let’s drink to the future. Cheers!”

He took a long swallow of his Guinness and Maureen likewise took a deep pull on her wine. She set the glass down gently and look searchingly at O’Connell.

“But what is the future, Liam?”

He looked back at her, and sighed.

“Short term or long term, love?”

“Both, really.”

“Well, the short term is to settle matters with that sod Lamb – my brothers are still not avenged. The long term? Well, I can’t stay in Britain, that’s for sure, so it’s away as soon as Lamb is out of the way. Either back to the States or just to the Republic – I’ve got cousins there who would look after me, provided that none of the unforgiving men don’t want to know about me. On balance, it’ll be more likely to be the States. Would you believe that there are some folk in Boston who still see men like me as heroes?”

“Of course I can, Liam – and as long as there are men like you, a united Ireland will happen one day – and not too far in the future, either.”

“Sure, and it’s grand to hear you say that, Maureen. You know, I’ve missed you, sure and I have. Once Lamb is out of the way, would you come with me? Whether it’s the States or the Republic?”

Maureen looked at him.

“I’d love to, Liam. Are you sure, though? It would be a big step for both of us.”

“I’m sure, Maureen – I realised just how much I missed you when I was stuck up in Glasgow. The short term, though – I’ve nowhere to go at the moment – can I stay with you again?”

She reached over the table and took hold of O’Connell’s hands in her own.

“Of course you can. Why don’t we finish our drinks and go home?”

And that is just what they did.

**************************

I reviewed my house inch by inch, looking for weaknesses. The CCTV and the security lights between them made it unlikely that O’Connell could arrive and depart without being thoroughly identified and recorded.

The problem lay in what might happen between his arrival and his departure.

Needless to say, the Beretta pistol was never out of my arm’s length; if O’Connell did try to attack me at my home, at least it gave me some sort of chance against him. Just how much of a chance depended very much on what firepower he could bring with him and whether he surprised me or if I could surprise him.

The more I thought about it, and the more I thought about how I would approach the problem of killing me if the positions were reversed, the more convinced I became that the approach which would give him his best chance of success was to wait until all normal folk were safely tucked up in bed and fast asleep, then make his way to my back garden via the garden of the house which backed onto mine. Once in my back garden he 35

would, of course, trigger the security light – not the end of the world as it was quite often set off by wandering cats, so would not, of itself, present as anything much out of the ordinary to the immediate neighbourhood. What I did not know was if he was aware of the security light at the back of the house – his night-time excursions would have alerted him to those at the front, but what about the back? If he wasn’t expecting it, might it’s sudden illumination give me the chance to seize the initiative? And if it did – then what? I could scarcely just shoot him down, much as I would like to. The civil rights brigade would have my head on a platter – as far as that sort of bleeding heart was concerned, a much preferable outcome would be for O’Connell to kill me (after all, in the view of such people, I was a one time member of the forces of oppression and I had actually killed his two brothers), be arrested and tried with the full panoply of the law, and put away in a nice cosy cell where, after a suitable lapse of time, a movement would doubtless be started to secure his early release because his mother had been beastly to him when he had been a toddler, or some such rubbish.

What I really needed was some form of non-lethal restraining device to immobilise the man until the cavalry could arrive, but for the life of me, I couldn’t come up with anything suitable. It looked like one of two scenarios would play out. Scenario one; O’Connell takes me by surprise and guns me down. Scenario two; he fails to surprise me and a replay of the gunfight at the OK Corral ensues – maybe I win, maybe I lose.

Neither scenario appealed to me very much.

I continued my survey of the house, feeling more and more depressed as time went on. Assuming that he came, how would O’Connell try to break in without awakening me? He must surely expect that I would have taken some sort of precaution against him, although, given the limp wristed attitude of Britain’s politicians, and the even worse attitude of some of our judges, he would probably not expect me to have a pistol.

My back door was reasonably solid; it was a replacement, purchased when I had been told by Jim that O’Connell had been freed. The original had been flimsy wood and vulnerable glass. The new one was solid wood, and the small window beside it, which if broken would have allowed a reasonably agile person to haul himself through it after breaking the glass, had been replaced by half inch thick plywood securely screwed in place. Coming through my back door could not be achieved quietly.

However, there were also the sliding glass doors from the living room into the back garden. Breaking their toughened double glazing would be even more noisy that forcing the back door, but a determined attack with a jemmy could force them open in moments, and I could see no way of securing them any more firmly than was already the case.

How would he come? I wracked my brains time and again. So much depended on what sort of armament he bring with him. At the ultimate end of the horror spectrum, suppose he had a rocket launcher? The IRA had possessed such devices back in the day and used them against Army helicopters. If O’Connell had obtained such a device, I was dead – no argument. There was no way a suburban bungalow could survive an attack from such a weapon. At the other end of the spectrum – suppose he only had a pistol? Under those circumstances my chances were a good bit better, although by no means would my survival be a given. I once more gave thought to leaving the bungalow and holing out in an hotel somewhere, but would I ever be clear of fear about O’Connell if I did that? He had managed to evade the police almost at will and if he did so again – then what? Was I to spend the rest of my life looking over my shoulder, frightened at what I might see?

No. One way or another I was determined that this matter had to be brought to a finish. Since losing Jenny and Louise life hadn’t been all that great; I had long felt that I was not living, just existing. Perhaps if I could overcome O’Connell in some way things would at last begin to look up for me. My wife and daughter had been dead for fifteen years and for fifteen years I had been in limbo – and all because of O’Connell. Surely it was time for it all to stop.

************************

It was the next day that the Astra that O’Connell had been using was found – but with no trace of the man himself. An assiduous door to door enquiry produced nothing. The boarding house where, had the police but known it, O’Connell had been staying, was inhabited by a small group of people with no love of, nor desire to be helpful to, the police. When shown O’Connell’s picture they strenuously denied ever having seen the man, and the fact that the car was parked a hundred yards or so away meant there was no reason to suspect that O’Connell had inhabited the place, or indeed any house in the road or even the immediate vicinity – he might simply have dumped it and be miles away.

Alison swore, angrily but uselessly, at the news. Once again, every police officer in Manchester was on the lookout for the Irishman, but to no avail. Reluctantly, he picked up his phone and passed the bad news on to Larry Lamb.

*********************

36

O’Connell had ‘viewed’ Lamb’s house, and those nearby by using Google Maps’ Street View facility, but there was no substitute for true real life reconnaissance. It was two in the morning and he was crouched at the rear of the garden of the house backing onto Lamb’s bungalow. There was enough ambient light to make out the general layout in front of him, but not enough to make out details. He was about to depart, having learned as much as he was able, when there was a sudden blaze of light as a security lamp, triggered by a cat appearing from the house to the left of Lamb’s as O’Connell looked at it. His night vision totally destroyed, O’Connell cursed under his breath, but then realised that security light coming on had provided him with two vital pieces of information. Firstly, the cat had jumped down from the top of the wooden fence separating the two properties about half down the length of Lamb’s garden and had triggered the lamp – but the animal had not triggered a similar lamp in the next door property. He realised that he could avoid Lamb’s security lamp by going up the length of the next door garden and scaling the fence – it was only four feet high – close to the actual back of the house.

The second thing that he had learned from the blaze of light was that there was a trip rope stretched across Lamb’s garden, going right across it about twenty feet from the house. Presumably it was some sort of alarm, and was something else that he could defeat by approaching from the neighbour’s garden.

Very satisfied with his night’s work, he returned the way that he had come, moving stealthily along the path beside the house and emerging onto the road parallel to Lamb’s. He was dressed all in black, including a woollen ski mask, the lower half of which he now rolled up so that it was merely a woollen hat. It was unlikely in the extreme that anyone would see him as he walked the half mile to where Maureen was waiting for him in the car, but if they did, a hat would arouse no suspicion, whereas the sort of ski mask favoured by bank robbers most certainly would.

He slid into the passenger seat of Maureen’s car and she drove smoothly away, anxious to make as little noise as possible.

“How did it go?”

“Pretty well. He’s got a security light and some sort of trip rope, presumably to an alarm, at the back of the house, but I can defeat both of them easily by using the garden next door. I can get right up to his back wall without him being any the wiser.”

Maureen let out a sigh of relief. It had been very nerve wracking, waiting and not knowing how Liam was getting on, but now it looked as though he would be able to execute his plan without problem. ‘Execute’ she mused to herself – most appropriate.

**********************

Convinced that, when he came, O’Connell would do so in the early hours, I had taken to sleeping in the early evening and being awake from midnight on until it became light, sitting in the lounge in front of the sliding doors, the Beretta pistol on my lap, just waiting. I had carried on like this for five nights now, and all that I had seen was next door’s cat trigger my security light several times a night. Although, by comparison with the surrounding darkness, the lamp seemed to blaze out, it was in fact quite low powered and the shade to it was so arranged that it only illuminated my back garden and didn’t cause a nuisance for my neighbours.

Each morning I reviewed the CCTV footage from the rear garden camera. It was a high quality unit and even without the illumination provided by the security lamp, it gave a good picture, and this morning I felt that it was picking up something that hadn’t been there before. There seemed to be a dark shape at the bottom of the garden of the house backing on to mine, a shape that wasn’t there in the light of day. Was it O’Connell, spying out the land? If so, he would have realised the problems that simply coming up my back garden would cause him. Hopefully, he also realised that he could defeat my security lamp by using next door’s garden for his initial approach. If indeed it was O’Connell, he would hopefully have seen the rope that I had stretched across the garden at mid-shin height. The rope didn’t actually do anything at all. It was simply there to be seen – a piece of misinformation. Hopefully, he would have been unable to make out my real means of defence – other than the pistol.

**********************

O’Connell was preparing himself for the final act of his campaign to avenge himself upon Lamb for the killing of his two brothers all those years ago. He and Maureen had made love earlier that evening, both aware, but neither mentioning, the possibility that should things go wrong it was almost certainly for the very last time. As she clung to him in passion, Maureen sobbed softly.

“Please come back to me, Liam, please.”

O’Connell was equally moved.

“Don’t worry, macushla, I won’t fail – I will kill the swine and then we’ll be away from here.”

They had already made plans for their escape after Lamb’s death. The car was packed with two suitcases containing changes of clothing, but also money, bank cards, passports and the like. Their plan was simple.

37

They would drive to Liverpool, lying up outside the town until they could arrive at the ferry port at a credible hour to catch the nine thirty ferry to Dublin. It was a journey for which no passports were needed, so the chance of discovery was small. The tickets were already purchased – Maureen had done that on line using her credit card. They were going as foot passengers – the car would be abandoned in a side street somewhere. Once in Dublin, O’Connell had arranged to meet up with a distant cousin, Dermot Lynch, another who was unhappy at the way that the IRA had abandoned the armed struggle and was sucking up to the politicians. Lynch would drive them right across the country to his home in Galway, where they would stay until a false passport could be obtained for O’Connell, Once that had been achieved, they would fly from Shannon airport to Boston where O’Connell had contacts made in his years in the city after his escape from the Manchester bombings in nineteen ninety-six. There, they expected to be safe.

It was time to go. O’Connell checked over his Browning pistol for one last time, assuring himself that it would not fail him when the time to use it came. They left the flat and Maureen drove them, once more, to the spot where she had waited so anxiously for Liam’s return the previous night.

He turned to her and kissed her fiercely on the lips.

“Don’t worry, love, it’s all going to go off just fine.”

And with that he was off into the night, once more dressed in black from head to toe. He walked the half mile or so to the houses backing onto Lamb’s road, where he made his way carefully beside the house which offered him his route and into its back garden. Once there he waited, letting his eyes acclimatise to the low light levels now that he was away from the street lamps. Once he was satisfied that there no unseen obstacles to blunder into or trip over, he made his way to the fence at the rear of the property. This was higher than that between Lamb and his neighbour, over five feet high, but he scaled it easily enough and dropped down lightly, landing on the balls of his feet, on the other side. Crouching down, to avoid any chance of triggering Lamb’s security light by creating movement over the level of the top of the fence between the two properties, he made his way to the very rear wall of the house. Once there it was a simple matter to scale the lower fence and drop onto the paving slab patio that extended for perhaps six feet from Lamb’s rear wall.

From his previous reconnaissance, he had established that Lamb’s rear door, unlike the majority of such doors, was a solid piece of wood, with no glass panels to offer easy access; also the small window beside the door had what looked like a piece of wood behind the glass, again preventing access. That left the sliding patio doors and he approached them cautiously. The doors were all glass apart from the narrow metal frame and O’Connell had come prepared to defeat any lock that they might possess. A short crowbar was tucked into his belt next to the Browning, but a quick look at the doors showed that they seemed to be closed by a simple catch, something that could be overcome by sliding a stiff knife blade between the two doors and forcing the catch down. He gently slipped the blade of his knife into the tiny gap and started to apply pressure.

He was suddenly aware of a crushing blow, then of pitching face down on the ground. Then everything went black.

*******************

I had done my very best to channel O’Connell to where I wanted him to be. I had even turned off the security light to encourage him into thinking that he had defeated it. Now, as I sat in the darkened room, looking out at my back garden, the outside was actually a bit lighter than total blackness with the result that I had sensed, rather than seen, his progress along the far side of the fence between myself and my neighbour. Then my senses were confirmed as he scaled the low fence with ease and dropped lightly onto my patio. He made his way to where the two patio doors met and started to fiddle with something, presumably a knife or something similar to slip between the doors and force the catch.

It was time to spring my surprise. I had secured a twenty-eight pound bag of builder’s sand under the guttering above the back door. It was balanced precariously on an upright piece of two by four timber and was on the end of a rope, the other end of which was secured above where the patio doors met in the middle.

From the top of the timber a strong cord led through a hole that I had drilled through the back door; the cord led into the lounge and I held the free end of it. Very much a Heath Robinson set up and I couldn’t be totally sure that it would actually work, but I metaphorically crossed my fingers and gave the cord a sharp tug. After all, even if it didn’t work at all I was no worse off, and if it deployed but failed to hit O’Connell, at least it should distract him for a vital moment. To my relief, I could see that he wasn’t carrying a long gun of any sort, although it was possible that he had a small sub-machine gun like a MAC-10, hardly bigger than a large pistol, but the over-riding relief was that he was using both hands in his attempt to open the patio doors. If the swinging bag missed him and he went for a weapon, I was going to shoot him through the glass doors and take my chances with the law and the do-gooders. Depending on how fast his reactions might be, if the bag missed him, we might get into the OK Corral gunfight scenario that I dreaded.

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I didn’t have to worry, A twenty-eight pound weight swinging on the end of a five foot long rope has a lot of momentum, and it hit him somewhere in the small of the back area and sent him pitching face down on the paving slabs.

I leapt to my feet and hurried through the kitchen and out the back door – had O’Connell but known it, I had left it unlocked for this very purpose. As I arrived he was still face down on the ground and I fell down on him, knees first, driving any remaining breath from his body. I had heavy duty cable ties in my pocket and I used them as improvised handcuffs and leg restraints. Then I finally rose to my feet as a shuddering groan from my victim proved that he was still alive, if not necessarily in the best of health.

Whilst securing O’Connell’s arms and legs I had tucked my pistol into the waistband of my trousers. I now drew it out again as I used my foot to roll the Irishman onto his back. He was regaining consciousness and he viewed me with what I can only describe as utter hatred.

For a long, long moment I seriously considered shooting him as he lay there, but reluctantly concluded that I dare not risk it. Shooting an armed man would go down badly enough in this day and age; shooting one bound and helpless would be seen as murder, no matter that O’Connell had come to kill me and still would, should he ever get the opportunity. Instead, I went back into the house via the kitchen door, crossed into the lounge, opened the patio doors and dragged – none too gently – O’Connell into the room, leaving him lying on the floor. Then I phoned Jim Alison and, whilst waiting for the police to arrive, I went into the garage and hid my Beretta in a niche that I had created for it, a niche hidden by a couple of loose bricks.

**************

Maureen waited for Liam’s return, expecting that she might well hear gunshots of things got messy, but there was no sound in the street until the cry of an owl made her jump. Quarter of an hour passed with no sound and, more worryingly, no sign of Liam. Surely he must have reached Lamb by now? Then she did hear a sound, one that she had been dreading. It was a police siren and it was approaching the road in which she was parked, a road at right angles to that in which Lamb lived. Her worst fears were confirmed when a police car, siren sounding and blue lights flashing, passed the end of her road and swung into Lamb’s.

Even then she continued to wait; surely it was possible that Liam had failed, hence the call to the police which had resulted in the car arriving in haste, but was still at large and hiding somewhere?

A further half hour dragged by, during which time another marked police car arrived, accompanied by an unmarked car. Surely, if Liam was at large he would have appeared by now?

Then another thought struck her. Supposing he had escaped but dare not come back to where she was parked, but was making his way back to the flat? She started the engine and drove home. All the rest of that night she sat up hoping against hope that Liam would return.

She hoped in vain, and when she turned on the early morning TV news her worst fears were confirmed. The police had issued a statement saying that a thirty-nine year old man, armed with a handgun, had been taken into custody and was being questioned on a number of charges. She wept, softly and quietly, for what might have been.

Chapter Seven

The trial was a forgone conclusion. Once again O’Connell refused to plead, and said nothing other than to refuse to recognise the right of any British court to try him. It cut no ice and he was found guilty of involvement in the thwarted bomb attack in June. He was sentenced to twelve years, which meant that in all probability he would be out in six. I had hoped that he would be tried in Scotland for the deaths of the gun dealer Sean McLean and his bodyguard, but despite the belief amongst the Scots investigating the case that he was, indeed responsible, they had to accept that there was absolutely no evidence to link him to the deaths.

Jim and I were equally appalled at the leniency of the sentence, but it was something that we could do nothing about. Was I never to be free of the man’s hatred? When he was released he would still only be in his forties and doubtless just as implacable as ever in his hatred for me. He was imprisoned in Strangeways, the grim Victorian mausoleum which housed the worst criminals in the north of England, and I hoped that his time there would be utterly miserable, that it might in some way break the man’s spirit, but I didn’t really hold out any hope.

He had served just six months of his sentence when I turned on the TV news and the lead story showed Strangeways as the backdrop to a reporter trying to look unperturbed by the cold rain that was shown lashing across the screen. I turned up the sound.

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“.. and although it is not yet officially confirmed, it is believed that the dead man is a former member of the IRA and that his death is being treated as suspicious.”

It took a couple of days for the story to emerge fully. Apparently O’Connell had been found in the shower block, stabbed to death with an impromptu blade fashioned from a toothbrush handle. Nobody was ever brought to trial over the killing as the other inmates all closed ranks over what had happened. The general feeling, however, was that as the prison also housed some former members of the Ulster Defence Force, the para-militaries who had long engaged in tit for tat killings with the IRA during The Troubles, that they had somehow got to O’Connell even though the two factions were supposedly kept apart. To me, it mattered not in the slightest. All that I was concerned about was the fact that I no longer had to worry about O’Connell –

the weight of worry had been lifted from my shoulders.

That evening I strolled along the bank of the River Wey and, when I was sure that I was unobserved, I slipped the Beretta into the all concealing waters.

THE END

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Table of Contents

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven