Vagabond Read online

  Vagabond

  Gerald Seymour

  www.hodder.co.uk

  First published in Great Britain in 2014 by Hodder & Stoughton

  An Hachette UK company

  Copyright © Gerald Seymour 2014

  The right of Gerald Seymour to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

  eBook ISBN 978 1 444 75862 7

  Book ISBN 978 1 444 75859 7

  Hodder & Stoughton Ltd

  338 Euston Road

  London NW1 3BH

  www.hodder.co.uk

  For

  Nicholas and James

  and

  Alfie

  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  About the Author

  Also by the Author

  Prologue

  Behind them a smear of a softer grey crested the mountain and the forest’s tree tops, but in front the rain, in usual obstinacy, refused to move on. They had been in the makeshift hide since an hour after dusk the previous evening, and had alternately slept and kept watch on the farmhouse. In front of them, way beyond Camaghy and Shanmaghry, and in line with the chambered grave of Neolithic times, was the building and the lit yard. Now, both were awake and alert. They watched and waited.

  It was, of sorts, a reward for their patience. The flash, beyond the Pomeroy road, even in the low cloud, was brilliant.

  ‘That’s our baby,’ Dusty murmured.

  The sound of the explosion seemed slow to reach them, as if the cloud and the rain impeded it. Desperate – as he was known with some affection inside the only family he had – thought the noise, distant and muffled, sounded like a paper bag bursting after a kid had blown it up. ‘Went off like a good one,’ he whispered into Dusty’s ear.

  What Dusty had called ‘our baby’ and Desperate a ‘good one’ was likely to have been the blast of an eighth of a tonne of chemical fertiliser fired by a commercial detonator buried in the pliable putty of a pound and a half of Semtex. The flash was fast spent and the sound had dissipated against the higher slope of the mountain. The cloud was too dense for any smoke to force its way up against the rain.

  They needed good hearing and the vantage-point in the hedgerow. Cattle had come close when they had first moved into the hide, dug two nights before. Cattle were always the worst. Sheep could be sent away, and most dogs could be quietened with biscuits and a tickle. Cattle lingered longest, but they had gone on before midnight and found shelter closer to the farm buildings. It was quiet around them and they could identify far-away gunfire.

  Most on automatic. Few single shots. Men who didn’t engage in a primitive form of warfare might have flinched at the barrage of bullets fired around the point where the light had flashed. At least two hundred shots. Out there, the ambush team would have been slapping on fresh magazines and keeping the belts fed through the machine-guns. The noise did not have the crisp tone of a drumbeat or a champagne cork’s pop, but was a messy blur. It was the reward for waiting.

  Both men – Desperate more so than Dusty – had imagination. It was easy enough for either to picture the scene close to the culvert drain that took rainwater off the fields above the lane. The culvert was of good-quality concrete and well built but had sufficient bramble and thorn growing around its mouth for it to be an ideal place to secrete an explosive device. It had, too, the necessary cover, with the reeds that grew in the field, for a command cable to be laid; would have been unwound until it reached a shed – the firing position for the bomb. The target, as they knew, was to be a Quick Reaction Force sent out from the barracks eight miles away where a fusilier unit was based. The troops would respond to a hoax call from an anonymous man, using a public phone box to report a rifle left on a verge close to the culvert. Both men, cold and soaked, would have known what had happened. In the darkness the ‘bad guys’ would have struggled to get the fertiliser, in sacks, clear of the Transit and manhandled it towards the ditch and culvert. Their last moments would have come as they slid to the concrete mouth. The night sights on the rifles and machine-guns would have locked on them. An electronic switch would have been thrown to detonate the bomb and the firing would have started. Maybe two had died in the blast, and the other two would have been cut down by the volume of bullets. All would have been mangled, body parts spread . . . Neither Dusty nor Desperate winced at what they imagined.

  The rain was heavier and the shooting had stopped. They were probably too far from the culvert to hear the helicopter come in. If the shooting was over it would have been called for, and it would fly low, hugging the contours, from the barracks, and set down momentarily in the sodden field to take in the Special Forces men, the ‘Hereford Gun Club’, who had been the ambush team. Blacked up, weighed down with their kit, they would heave themselves past the helicopter’s machine-gunner and flop onto the metal floor. Then it would lift, bank and disappear. Behind the helicopter there would be a scene of carnage. Dusty and Desperate were silent. Neither was a killer at first hand: both took more responsibility than the men who had slapped in the magazines and fed the belts.

  They could imagine the scene where the culvert drain bored under the lane because Desperate had been told that was where the bomb would be laid, when it would be brought there, at what time the hoax call would be made, and which men would be settling into their firing positions to wait for the military response. He knew the features of those men and their histories in the war being fought out on the shallow slopes of the mountain, and where they lived in the Townlands between the Chambered Grave and the summit point called the Seat of Shane Bearnagh. His files carried their biographies and he could trace the tribal links that held them together: he had the names of the wives, girlfriends and kids. Desperate had furnished the information that had brought the special forces up from Ballykinler. He could have predicted each moment in the killing process. He had choreographed it.

  The helicopter would have gone, and the guys inside the cabin would soon be showering away the stench of cordite, then heading for the canteen and breakfast. Not Desperate and Dusty.

  The cows were on the move. They came across the open field into the teeth of the wind and rain. Through his glasses, an image intensifier built into the lenses, Desperate could see their steady progress, and hear the squelch of their feet. For a full minute they masked the farmhouse and the buildings where the man stored his agricultural plant livestock lorries, the weapons and bombs he dealt with. There were no lights on in the house. It was too close to the explosion, the firing and the ambush. Desperate felt no particular satisfaction at the part he had played in the matter and didn’t imagine Dusty wanted a high-five.
What both men would have liked was a cigarette – forbidden. The absence of a Marlboro Lite might have mattered more to Desperate and Dusty than their part in the deaths of four men.

  They were good cows from a pedigree herd – not that they were milked by the man who owned – had owned – the farmhouse, the outbuildings and forty-nine acres of poor, if serviceable, land. They were led each morning and evening to a neighbour’s parlour and milked there. When they had come back the previous evening, the man had been flitting from his back door to his buildings and had returned with heavy-duty navy overalls. He must have forgotten the balaclavas because he’d had to return to the big shed. They’d watched him.

  Dusty had dug out the pit that was the basis of their hide. He had many skills and building hides was one. They were low in the hole – bracken and gorse grew around its edge. A man would almost have stepped on them before he realised they were there. Dusty and Desperate feared the cows. The animals had the habit of coming to the hide and forming a half-moon round it, obscuring any view. Both men now sat in a pool of water that had formed in the pit. The damp penetrated their trousers and underwear, and their thermals no longer kept out the cold. It was what they did, nothing exceptional. It wasn’t exceptional either for Desperate to preside over the killing of four men. That was what he did.

  Rescue came. A vixen strutted from the hedge to their right, threaded between the clumps of nettles and attracted the cattle’s attention. They veered off in pursuit of her. The view of the farmhouse was restored.

  Four men would have died. There could have been no survivors. The blast of the premature detonation would have killed some and the gunfire would have done for the others. There would be another killing on the shallow slope of Altmore mountain within a week or, at most, a month. Desperate would be as responsible for the final death in this sequence as he was for the others. The cold gripped him, the damp shrivelling his skin. His eyes ached from gazing through the image-intensified lenses. He had seen the man carry the gear between the farm buildings and the kitchen door, and later had watched as the lights went on upstairs – the child being put to bed.

  Late in the evening, when the wife’s television programmes were over, he had come out of the back door, then had turned, taken her in his arms and kissed her hard. A moment of seeming weakness and she had clung to him until he’d broken away and gone. They had watched him lope down the track leading from the farm to the lane and a car had come.

  Later, the ground-floor lights went out and those in the principal bedroom came on. Desperate saw her for a moment as she stood at the window and gazed down the hill. They had no bug in the house so Desperate didn’t know whether she knew about the culvert. Some talked to their women, most didn’t. She was tall and straight-backed, with good bones and a clear complexion. Her expression, at the window through the lenses, was vacant. She would have been accustomed to her husband slipping away as night fell, and of him returning. She would have known what he did, but perhaps not the detail. She would have recognised the risks he ran because there were enough widows on the side of the mountain who had experienced what now confronted her.

  ‘You all right, Desperate?’

  ‘Grand, Dusty. Never better.’

  There had been heavy talk in the small operations area at Gough. Inside that old heap of grey-stone misery, which the British Army had populated for more than a century, the issue had been thrashed out: no minutes taken, no written record. Could arrests be attempted? Could they be rounded up individually and linked to a murder conspiracy that stood a chance in the Central Criminal Court? The answer had been decisive: ‘Blow the beggars away.’ A last question had been put: ‘Do we lose the source? Is he collateral?’

  A response from Desperate: ‘I think we can live with that if we’re taking down four of that calibre.’ Sergeant Daniel Curnow had spoken, and he was the oracle on matters concerning informers, agents, ‘touts’: a warrant officer, a major and a full-ranking colonel listened to him. He was called ‘Desperate’ because of his first name.

  Two nights later, awake for hours, he gazed down at the farmhouse. He knew how he’d find out that the enemy were dead. They wouldn’t send their own people, not yet. The priest would come. The light was growing from the east, beyond the Pomeroy road, and the rain fell. Wind rustled the hedgerow. A small car came along the lane, the headlights feeble in the weather. It turned onto the track, bouncing over the potholes, that ran between fields where more cattle were out and some sheep. Either the police or the fellow travellers supporting the Organisation would have called the man out.

  The dog barked and ran from the buildings behind the house. A light came on upstairs.

  The priest stood at the door and seemed to pause, as if reluctant to take a further step. Then he knocked. Desperate could see, with the magnification of the glasses, that she had thrown on a dressing-gown: as soon as she heard the vehicle progressing at snail’s pace up the track she would have realised that the news was bad. She took the priest inside. As Desperate pictured it, she would lead him into the kitchen, sit him down, put on the kettle, then allow him to speak.

  A child came outside in striped pyjamas, a size too small – he was well built, with a tousled mass of thick hair. The file back at Gough said Malachy was eight. Desperate had seen the child from that vantage-point in the hedgerow three days before, when the boy had ridden with his father on the back of the tractor as they took silage out to the cattle. Now he howled – not with misery but anger. It was an animal sound, primeval. Desperate blinked, then cleaned the lenses so he could see better. The child’s face was twisted with hatred – the face of a fighter, he thought.

  Dusty said quietly, ‘He’ll be a problem, he will. Remember his name.’

  They covered the hide, picked up their rubbish and went on their stomachs along the hedge to the gap they could squeeze through. When they were clear, Dusty would summon the transport to the appointed rendezvous – using Desperate’s call-sign, Vagabond – and they’d return to Gough.

  He was responsible, not for the first time and not for the last. The face of that child seared in his mind as he began to trudge across the grass. He saw, too, the face of an older man who believed in him, had trusted him, pocketed money and thought himself Desperate’s friend. He was despised as a traitor, the source of the information that had killed four men. A victory in a war now in its third decade had been won – and had taken the life of the child’s father.

  The informer, whose life might now be forfeit, was Damien. He did a bit of carpentry to eke out his unemployment benefit and the hundred pounds a month from his handler. He lived in a bungalow two miles to the east along the mountain, and was thought to be not the full shilling. He had been doing panelling in a man’s home when he had heard the plan talked through in the open air. He had told Desperate, who had recruited him seven months before. His handler knew that the agent, Damien, was now vulnerable: the Organisation’s security people would come from Belfast and check who had known of the plan, where the briefings had been given. Damien had been worth a few hundred pounds, but was not in line for a resettlement package in England, which involved heavy expense. He’d take his chance. If the Organisation identified him as a potential risk, he would be taken to a safe-house, interrogated, burned and beaten. Then he’d be hooded, stripped to his underpants, pinioned and driven to a lane close to the border where he’d be pushed to his knees and shot, one bullet, in the back of the head. The hood would be lifted and a twenty-pound note stuffed between his teeth.

  His handler had manipulated him. That was the work Desperate did, and Dusty protected him while he did it.

  He’d catch up on his sleep at Gough after the debrief. The kid, Malachy, had howled at the low clouds, but it was the hatred Desperate would remember, how it had creased a young face and made lines in the clear skin. The voice rang in his ears.

  Chapter 1

  They’d killed him – not shot or strangled him, but when they’d sent him up the road.


  The hut in which they had taken refuge from the weather was part collapsed. Three of the walls still stood and half of the tin roofing was there, but storms had taken down the rest; the floor creaked when any of them moved. Manure and a carpet of damp straw lay over the debris, and the place stank of cattle, and of the cigarettes smoked incessantly by the police who guarded them.

  It was clear to Hugo Woolmer that he might as well have fired the bullet himself. His partner in the agent’s death was Gaby Davies. Hugo was three years older, at a higher grade in the Service, so had nominal control of the operation. What else might he have done? He could have refused permission for the agent to drive off into the fog that hid the road that snaked up towards the mountain. He might have insisted that he would not allow his agent to be at the beck and call of those who had called him and go to them, without back-up, in the hire car.

  The agent had worn no wire under his vest and no microphone in his watch. No bug had been fastened to the small car he had collected at the airport. It had been thought that a wire, a microphone, or a bug was too simple for ‘them’ to locate.

  The agent had flown from London, had stayed the night in a modern hotel within a stone’s throw of the police barracks. They had demanded a meeting with the agent. Two alternatives had faced Hugo Woolmer: he could allow his man to drive into the cloud and the labyrinth of narrow roads and farm tracks, which dictated vehicle pursuit was impossible, or he could accept that an agent who had worked with the Service for almost five and a half years should now be reined in, the contact with ‘them’ lost. The chance of replacing the agent was minimal. It had been his decision to make, and Gaby Davies’s voice had been insistent that morning in the hotel when visibility across the car park was negligible.