She knew Binding as a clever but impatient man, whose impatience was at its worst when he had to work with female colleagues. More than impatience, in fact, since he patronised them in a manner so anachronistic and breathtakingly rude that he somehow got away with it. He had become famous for it throughout Thames House and, far from taking offence, most of the women he worked with put up with it and treated it as a joke, swapping stories of occasions when he had called them ‘dear’ or sighed loudly and raised his eyebrows when they disagreed with him. It was a matter of speculation among the women in Thames House what made him do it. Most thought that it was probably because his wife bossed him about at home.
Liz had never had to work for him before, but a few years previously she had had to interview Binding during an investigation – the same one that had unearthed a mole at a high level of MI5. Binding had been difficult, obstreperous, objecting to her questioning until Liz had warned him that she’d bring in DG if Binding did not cooperate, which reluctantly and sulkily he then had.
After that, she had kept as far away from him as she could, and when their paths had occasionally crossed he had treated her with cautious resentment. So she watched warily now to see how he would react to her joining his staff.
‘I must say,’ he opened, ‘I was hoping to be sent someone with Northern Ireland experience. I understand you have very little.’
Liz gazed at him levelly while she decided how to respond. ‘Not much,’ she said eventually in a bright, cheerful voice. ‘But as I’m sure you know, I have a lot of agent-running experience and I assume that’s why I was chosen for this particular job.’
Binding said nothing for a moment. First blood to me, thought Liz to herself. Then, changing tack, he said, ‘It’s busier here than you may think.’ He spoke defensively, as if he sensed scepticism. ‘I know there isn’t much coverage on the mainland of things over here, but the Troubles have far from gone away. Sometimes I think the media doesn’t want to report any problems in the hopes they’ll just disappear.’
‘What exactly are the problems?’
‘Well, with no Northern Irish background you may find yourself at a disadvantage in understanding the current situation.’
Liz forced herself not to respond and kept her face expressionless as he went on.
‘The usual, just on a much reduced scale. Our estimate is that there are over one hundred paramilitaries still active on the Republican side. They are not particularly well-organised, thank God – they belong to almost as many splinter groups as there are members.’
‘Still, a hundred individuals could do a lot of damage,’ said Liz.
‘Precisely,’ he said in the pedantic tone Liz remembered, designed to make her feel like a pupil who was being marked on a test. ‘Equally worrying, they can trigger a reaction on the other side. For now, the Loyalist groups have laid down their arms, but a few sectarian murders could change that overnight.’
‘Where are these fringe people getting the resources to carry on? Is there still any foreign support?’
‘Not that we know of. Al Qaeda aren’t moving in, if that’s what you’re thinking,’ he added with heavy sarcasm,
‘I wasn’t, actually,’ said Liz dryly. ‘I was thinking about funding and weaponry – from the States, the Basques, North Africa, South America, wherever.’
He looked a little surprised that she knew anything about the past sources of IRA arms. ‘Their funding is local now as far as we know. But none of it’s legitimate. Crime of all sorts – drugs, prostitution, robberies. God knows what else.’
‘How’s our coverage of their activities? Have we any decent sources?’ asked Liz, moving the conversation on to her own area of responsibility.
‘Reasonable. As always it could be better,’ said Binding. ‘I gather you’ve met some of the agent runners just now. I’ve had Dave Armstrong acting in charge of the team. But Dave is an action man. He prefers to be out running his own cases.’
What does he think I’ve done for most of my career? thought Liz. But he obviously thinks the light shines out of Dave’s eyes. Not that she’d disagree with that. ‘I’ve worked with Dave before,’ she responded. ‘He’s good. I’ll certainly need his input until I get up to speed.’
Binding looked at his watch with undisguised impatience. ‘Well then, why don’t you get your feet under the desk, get settled in at the flat, talk to Dave? Then in a day or two, we’ll meet up again and you can give me your first impressions.’
And you’ll let me know where they are wrong, thought Liz. Different posting, different place, different clothes. Same Michael Binding.
6
‘I’m going out,’ Dermot O’Reilly shouted as he left the house. This was as far as he kept his wife posted on his whereabouts, a habitual secrecy that had originated during the Troubles, when it was safer not to let her know what he was up to.
She’d had a good idea, nonetheless, and when the knock on the door had come that day in 1975 and five RUC men had taken him away, she wasn’t very surprised. ‘Cheer up,’ she’d said on her first visit to the H-Blocks at The Maze. ‘Think of it as a holiday from me.’
The ‘holiday’ had lasted two years and had been especially hard on Cath. He knew he was a gruff man to live with, and he had never liked to show emotion, but he was devoted to his wife in his way, and understood how long-suffering she was. Especially since after he’d been freed he’d waited less than forty-eight hours before resuming the activities that got him interned in the first place.
He’d been the munitions officer of Company B of the Belfast Brigade, with weaponry stored in half a dozen safe houses and hidden caches under the floor of barns and sheds. He remembered with a half-smile now the weird farrago of firearms they’d had to rely on in the early days of the conflict – before Colonel Gaddafi of Libya had sent them ships full of the latest of everything and cash to go with them. The Irish Americans had been a steady source of revenue too. Did all those drinkers in the bars in Boston really believe that when they dropped their cash into the collecting buckets, it was going to go to widows and orphans of the struggle? Seamus Piggott would know all about that, since the boss of The Fraternity was from Boston.
Dermot didn’t like Piggott. He didn’t trust him. What was an American doing carrying on the struggle? What was he hoping to get out of it? But Dermot had joined The Fraternity when he was approached, because of all the breakaway groups it seemed the best resourced, the most professional.
At first he had been chief targeting officer. The plan was to kill a cop in the new PSNI – to show them that though they might have renamed themselves, to true Republicans like him they were still the enemy. Piggott had got hold of a list of addresses and Dermot had spent some cold, damp days on surveillance, watching policemen and their families coming and going, planning the best way to attack.
Wherever Piggott had got the list from, and he certainly wasn’t revealing that to Dermot, it seemed to be an old one. Some of the houses Dermot had watched had no apparent police connection, so he assumed that they’d changed hands. In others the inhabitants were middle-aged or obviously retired. He guessed that the list had come from the RUC, before it was turned into the PSNI, and that what he was targeting was not current front-line police. When he’d mentioned that to Piggott, he didn’t seem to care. ‘They’re all bastards, and bastards don’t retire in my book,’ was his response.