Aloysius Tempo Read online

  And this is all a little haywire, all a bit crazy.

  ‘Wait a wee second here,’ I say. ‘I have no problem with a pecking order. I have a problem with the fact that you could park a convoy of Volvos in the gaps in our security.’

  She takes a drink, thinks for a moment, puts the cup back down, goes ‘What do you know?’

  ‘I can’t say. Not here.’

  ‘You know nothing, in other words.’

  ‘Not true. I’ve had some feedback from someone. I know for a fact there are people who know things they have no business knowing. Things about me, Imelda. Things about you. Things you said you would stop people from getting to know. I find it a little hard not to mention all of that when everything depends on our work staying in the shadows.

  ‘All that stuff you do, that taking shit for granted, not being bothered about the detail, all that it’ll be all right in the morning shite, it’s all a bit Irish, isn’t it? Lovely and quirky and easy on the ear, but it’s got failure written all over it. It’s the kind of shite that gets people dead in this line of work. They might think they have no reason in the world to die, but that’s what gets them dead.’

  And she’s looking at me like she’s not so interested in anything I’m saying, and she says, ‘Where’s Martha McStay?’

  I go, ‘Did you hear what I just said? About security? About your promise being worthless? You think I can ignore this stuff?’

  ‘Where’s Martha McStay?’

  And she takes another drink of coffee. And I take a drink of mine.

  ‘Let me spell it out, Imelda,’ I say. ‘We are being listened to and watched and tracked every fucking step of the way. And I mean every step, no matter what you think. Every job. Every name. The name on my fucking passport. You understanding that? We are totally vulnerable, totally compromised, totally at the mercy of anyone who wants to expose or finish us.’

  And she goes, ‘Answer the fucking question.’

  I say, ‘Fair enough. Fuck it, fair enough. Where is Martha McStay? Fuck knows. I last saw her on the roof of some truck. She fell ten floors. Why? What did you hear?’

  ‘I heard nothing,’ she says. ‘I got an off-message call from my asset in the field before the job was supposed to be done and, since then, I have heard nothing. Nada.’

  ‘They haven’t found her then?’

  ‘Evidently. You’re not bullshitting me, are you?’

  ‘About her falling ten floors?’

  ‘Yes. About her falling ten floors.’

  ‘No, Imelda. I am at this moment confessing to a murder, on tape, in fuck knows how many countries around the world. Probably in Britain, certainly in the US. I am confessing to a murder. Otherwise I’d probably just lie, cover my tracks a bit, but despite being an asset in the field, my chief doesn’t want me to cover my tracks. So, yes, I pushed Martha McStay off a fucking roof, she fell, landed on the back of truck. She is dead as fuck.’

  ‘Okay,’ she says. ‘I got it.’

  I get up, shaking my head, walk to the bathroom, put the plug in the bath, turn on the taps, squirt in some bubbles. I walk back to the kitchen and she’s watching, curious about my movements.

  And I go, ‘We were supposed to trust each other Imelda. There is no trust now. We are clowns, all of us, at someone else’s circus.’

  She nods, finishes her coffee.

  I flip open the cupboard above the kettle, take out the only bottle that’s in there, an unopened Jameson. I lift down two heavy tumblers and I know she is watching me, curious as a cat. The only sound is the spin of the lid as I open it, lift it off. I pour the whiskey into the glasses and the scent suggests class and craic and caution.

  She puts her head to one side as I carry them over, place one in front of her. She clears her throat, maybe taken a little by surprise, looks at the square glass, looks at me.

  I hold mine out to clink it. She sighs and decides and I’m holding my hand there. And holding. And holding.

  And she gets there, lifts hers, touches mine, we say ‘Sláinte’.

  I say, ‘And peace.’

  She nods.

  I say, ‘Who is number four?’

  ‘Come again?’

  ‘Who is next on the list?’

  And she grins, waves at me, as if saying goodbye.

  She goes, ‘Wise up.’

  ‘Who is it?’

  ‘I can’t tell you that. It’s months away. Forget it. Take some time to yourself, Aloysius.’

  ‘Who is it?’

  ‘Forget it.’

  And I’m nodding.

  She goes, ‘Who were you speaking with?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Who were you speaking with about our operations?’

  ‘No one.’

  ‘Who told you about the gaps in our security.’

  ‘I can’t tell you, it’s not—’

  She goes, ‘Exactly. Same.’

  And I’m thinking she doesn’t even believe me. I’m thinking now she reckons I made that up, that I’m trying to stir the pot, push myself forward, climb the ladder. I reckon she thinks I made it up so that I seemed like a guy with more than she thought I had.

  ‘I’m not lying,’ I say, ‘about that information. I’m not making it up. Someone could be toying with me, yes, but I’ve still been told what I said I’d been told.’

  She smiles sweetly, patronisingly.

  And we pause.

  ‘I had one other question,’ I say, ‘but I don’t want to ask it.’

  ‘You can ask it.’

  ‘I was going to ask you to have a bath with me. I wanted to know if we could share one, chill out, lose a couple of hours. But I don’t want to ask you that. You see, I think I’ve misread you enough. Everything is telling me that I’ve lost a skill I once had. So I won’t ask you to have a bath with me.’

  She doesn’t bat an eyelid, doesn’t look at me or look away, doesn’t drum her fingers or say a word.

  Uncomfortably enough, she sits back now, looks around her – at the uncleaned bits of my life scattered on the coffee table over by the TV, at the way I left my curtains closed, at the way it looks like I’ve slept on the sofa more times than a man with a bed ever should.

  ‘My husband killed himself,’ she says. ‘And I’ve come to know it was the best thing for him to do. I’ve come to understand it, to see it from his side.’

  And I nod. Unexpected interjection in the conversation, but one that makes sense on its own.

  ‘That doesn’t mean he wasn’t a selfish cunt,’ she says. ‘It’s his anniversary.’

  She raises a glass and we clink again.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I say.

  ‘Don’t be.’

  ‘Was he a good husband?’

  ‘He was. Better than most, I think. Men have problems, don’t they? Problems with their role in the world, with what it means to be male these days, with their simultaneous need to create and destroy, don’t they? But he wasn’t like that. He was solid, predictable, dependable. Call it boring if you want, but it was what I liked, what I needed in life. And then he did the most unexpected thing of all.’

  ‘I can get that.’

  She drinks some more and says, ‘Don’t give me any surprises Aloysius, and I’ll do the same for you.’

  ‘Okay,’ I say, and pour another couple of glasses.

  ‘And I’ll go and get naked and sit in your bath and drink whiskey,’ she says, ‘and you’ll wait here, leave me to it.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘I might call you if I need my back washed.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘Can you read all that okay?’

  I shake my head, say, ‘I needed some time to myself, to chill out, spread out in the bath. I was going to ask you to leave, but then I thought how fucking might make us both feel better. Looks like now I’ve lost the bath and the fuck. Another misread on my part.’

  ‘Not necessarily,’ and she takes a drink.

  And I’m wondering if Martin is still outside, wai
ting for us to finish our showdown, sitting in his four-by-four as she, unexpectedly, takes a bath.

  ‘Should I … ?’ I’ve my thumb pointed towards the door.

  ‘I told him to give us an hour or so,’ she says. ‘Don’t worry about Martin. There’s no one on earth you should worry about less than Martin. If ever a man had it all sorted out.’

  And I shrug.

  ‘Tell me about Martha McStay. Why her?’

  ‘You don’t know?’

  ‘I know fuck all about her, to be honest. What sort of story did her life tell?’

  ‘Usual Northern Ireland misguided patriotism from a family of hateful wankers,’ she says. ‘Aged sixteen, beat a paramilitary commander to death when he touched her arse. Locked away for a while, ended up in love with some crazy Polish ex-soldier, ran drugs for him in Belfast, killed him, fucked off east with the cash.’

  Imelda rubs at her face, tired of all of this, tired on this day her husband died.

  She goes, ‘So she came home a couple of years later, helped spring her nutcase dad as he was going to a court hearing. Arranged for an ambush, shot two prison guards in the head. Got completely away with it, by the way, to the point where the mud didn’t even get thrown, let alone stick. These days her dad’s living somewhere in Ukraine, making all sorts of dodgy connections and showing up at illegal arms fairs. They had been keeping in touch via handwritten letters, full of codes the intelligence lads were never able to break.

  ‘Anyway, Martha was, as you will have gathered, charismatic, sexy, sharp as a tack, and one by one every fucking flag-waving loon was falling at her feet. And her latest move had been to become a politician. She was high-speed becoming the most divisive fucking fool in the North.’

  I say, ‘So why the hard solve?’

  ‘Why? Because she was sitting on a stockpile of nine tonnes of high explosives and two hundred AK-47s. Because she had thirteen simultaneous bombings planned for 2022, anniversary of the foundation of the state. Because she was going to be nowhere near any of it when it happened. She was running rings round Irish and British political and security figures and half of them reckoned they were the targets themselves. She had too many people looking over their own shoulders. The truth is that neither the Brits, nor the Yanks nor even any of us on this busy little island had seen anything like the threat that passionate little Martha was starting to pose. She was a fucking red alert, Aloysius, and just getting more and more dangerous. There was nothing on her, nothing legal. There was nothing legitimate anyone could do. And people like that lend themselves well to sudden death. The conspiracy theorists have so little hard data it makes her unworthy. Hence the hard solve.’

  I go, ‘Jesus.’

  ‘A woman like that could set a country back sixty years. She could cost it more than it could afford. Between the deaths and the emigration and the hatred she was going to cause all of us, she was like the second fucking Famine personified. Some people, you know, are just not necessary.’

  ‘And she couldn’t be stopped?’

  ‘Not in any conventional way, no. She knew and loved how much sway she had, knew how to build on it too.’

  ‘Can I see her file?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because I just killed her.’

  Imelda nods, takes a drink, says, ‘That you did.’

  And I’m taking a drink when she says, ‘She get to you somehow? She make some kind of impression on you, Aloysius? Before you did the deed?’

  I shrug, act it up a bit, look a little coy, say, ‘Maybe a wee bit.’

  ‘I’m taking that bath,’ she says, stands up, presses two hands in her back, stretches out, turns away.

  ‘Can I see it?’

  She stops, ‘What?’

  ‘The file.’

  ‘Now?’

  ‘Yes. That okay?’

  ‘Jesus. You in fecking love or something?’

  ‘Please.’

  She looks at the laptop in her bag, and back to me.

  I say, ‘Fifteen hours ago, I let go of her, ten storeys high. She’s the only one I hadn’t researched, the only one I didn’t know all about before I did it, had no clue what she believes in. And, to be honest, it’s fucking killing me.’

  Imelda pulls her laptop from her bag, opens it on the breakfast bar, keys in a password, brings up a file, sets it in front of me.

  ‘I believe you,’ she says. ‘But if you do happen to go looking for the fourth name on the list on my laptop, you won’t find it.’

  I say, ‘Maybe better if I don’t know it.’

  ‘Yes,’ she says. ‘You’re right about that.’ And she’s walking to the bathroom as I pull the machine in front of my face.

  ‘You can’t go online, by the way,’ she says. ‘It can’t connect to the Internet.’

  ‘No worries,’ I say, sliding on glasses as a door closes.

  And I shrink the document and scan the desktop. All the files are numbers, weird words, random jumbles of letters. There’s some kind of code going on here. I click one open and it’s images of a roadside, shots of where the white lines are. I click another and it’s police pictures of Danny Latigan floating, dead and bloated, in his own swimming pool.

  I click one and see pictures of an airport. One document has a breakdown of government spending on state security. Another lists millions of words, none of them in any language I’ve seen before.

  ‘Fuck,’ I say.

  And I hear her getting in, sliding down. I thought she’d have me join her, thought I could have stolen away to rifle her laptop, but this is an even better opportunity.

  I click onwards, looking for patterns, for images, for clues as to what might be a live or imminent project. And there’s nothing, nothing, nothing.

  What am I looking for?

  The next on the list. The next on the list.

  So I’m looking for the list.

  And what do I know about the list?

  I know Latigan is on it. I know Marley and McStay are on it.

  I hit search and type them all – Latigan, Marley, McStay. There’s one document that has all of those in it, called ‘data bridge 3994’.

  I click through, and we’re talking 200,000 words of what looks like total shite. More random words, often repeated dozens of times. Random names, numbers, colours, towns, cities, countries.

  But I see Latigan now, I see the word appears nineteen times. And I look at it, flick through all of them, looking at it typed nineteen times.

  And I look at them all, at what’s around them. But it’s all just other names, words, numbers. It goes ‘celia yellow park tramlines Latigan charleston dundee shelf 208839 upswing … ’ and on it goes, bullshit galore.

  Yet there, in the tenth mention, perhaps just by luck, I see it’s different. The second letter is an italic.

  It’s all Latigan, then I see Latigan.

  An odd little happening.

  And in the tenth mention of the word Marley, it’s Marley.

  And in the tenth mention of McStay, it’s McStay.

  ‘Wow,’ I say, chuffed with myself, pleased at the code cracking. This must be something she’s shared, something printed, maybe passed to Martin, passed to whoever it is they talk with.

  But I have 200,000 words in front of me now and, I realise, I’m looking for a word I don’t know that has an italic as a second letter.

  ‘Wow and shite,’ I say.

  Can I search for italics?

  And, I don’t know why, but she’s getting out of the bath now. Why is she doing that?

  I hear her getting out and she goes, ‘Aloysius?’

  A questioning tone, a word that is a whole question.

  Fuck it. So can I search for italics? I can’t even google that question. No wait, I can, my phone.

  She goes, ‘Aloysius?’

  Says use ‘Find’, then ‘Advanced Find’, then ‘Format’, then ‘Font Style’.

  She’s drying herself off in there, the shortest bath in history.

  S
he goes, ‘Just a little question for you.’

  I get it to find all italicised ‘A’s in the document. It brings up one Latigan, one Marley.

  I try ‘e’ and there’s none.

  She goes, ‘Aloysius?’

  Then ‘i’ and there’s – no, wait.

  The door opens, I can hear the towel being tugged as she tightens her dressing gown.

  And there it is. One entry, an answer to my question. Second letter an italic.

  I click off the search box.

  She is behind me now, reaches over, closes the laptop.

  ‘You not hear me?’

  ‘I did. Thought you were calling me in. I was just going to get the whiskey.’

  She goes, ‘You said “Not what she believes in”.

  ‘What?’

  ‘You were talking about having killed Martha McStay and you said, quote, that you didn’t know “What she believes in”.’

  ‘Meaning?’

  ‘Meaning present tense. Meaning, in your mind, she’s alive.’

  I stand, say, ‘Fuck you, Imelda. Not this bullshit again. You’re finding trouble where there is none.’

  ‘None?’

  ‘None. You’re paranoid.’

  ‘No, not paranoid. Just annoyed.’

  ‘I know how that feels.’

  And I wait for a retort, a hard-to-follow comeback, and she’s just looking at me, her toes gripping the carpet beneath her. Gripping and releasing. Gripping and releasing.

  And I’m thinking how she’s the leader of the pack, how she’s the top dog, how she’s at the top of the pecking order and how I’m throwing myself around too much within it.

  She’s looking at me, at my face, trying to read it, trying to see what’s going on under this big blank front of mine. She’s looking at it, all suspicious now, and all she sees is suspicious looking back at her.

  And all I can think of is Martin.

  He’ll be parked up outside now.

  Martin’s outside.

  Martin’s outside.

  He’s next on the list.

  Chapter Twenty-three

  March 2017