Only photographs of three of the bombers were immediately available from security files: Hughie Dougan, Pat McGirl and a teenage Clodagh Dougan, taken when she’d been involved with the Cumainn na n Ban. In Ulster the RUC Special Branch was visiting the parents of Lock, Muldoon and Doran to try and obtain recent photographs from the family albums.
Police vehicle checks were set up on the approaches to all motorway junctions in the target area, each with firearms-trained officers in attendance. Every available unmarked car was deployed on the motorway system itself, on the lookout for recently s(tolen vehicles, unmarked vans and lorries and anything that might raise suspicions. Speeding motorists, the most unlikely suspects, would never know how lucky they had been that day.
Meanwhile the HOLMES computer was being reprogrammed to concentrate on the target area. Over the weeks, hundreds of wholesale and retail suppliers of ammonium nitrate based fertilisers had been contacted nationwide and asked to draw up lists of customers, particularly new ones, who had ordered large quantities. These lists were gradually becoming available, but the results were patchy, depending on the quality and detail of the records kept.
Many customers could be deleted from the lists: local council parks and other government departments. Thousands of others comprised mostly garden centres, nurseries and farms, all of which would have to be checked.
On a parallel programme, catering suppliers had been asked to supply lists of anyone buying unusually large quantities of icing sugar which would have been mixed with the fertiliser to make the explosive mix. Unfortunately a high proportion were cash-and-carry customers.
By three in the afternoon five farms in the target area were showing up as having had large deliveries of fertiliser in recent months.
One in particular was of special interest. The farm had unusually occurred on the lists of three different suppliers and, illogically, all out of its immediate vicinity. Individually the deliveries weren’t excessive; added together the amount was considerable.
‘Get me Henley nick,’ Maitland ordered.
The call to the chief inspector at Henley was patched through minutes later. ‘Just caught me before I went home. What can I do for you?’
‘High Farm, south of Henley. Anyone there know it? I need an idea of its acreage.’
‘When do you want the information?’
‘Yesterday.’
The chief inspector telephoned back in twenty minutes. ‘High Farm is a smallholding. Hard to be exact, but between ten and eleven acres, I’d say.’
‘Know anything about farming?’
‘Some. Try me.’
‘Might it use nine thousand pounds of fertiliser in a year?’
The voice chuckled. ‘Only if they’re growing exhibition specimens. No, I really don’t think so.’
Maitland replaced the receiver, just as one of the HOLMES operators approached. ‘Something of interest here, sir.
Remember the guy who ran the Southampton scam on electronic parts? Used the name of Roke. Well, here’s a Henry Roke who ordered a big supply of icing sugar. He paid cash, but the wholesaler’s kept a note of the delivery address.’
‘What is it?’
‘Top Flight Bakery, High Farm, Henley.’
Maitland snatched up. his phone. ‘Let’s go. Ops room in five minutes!’
20
‘The suitcases are in the car,’ McGirl said. ‘Leo and Liam are outside.’ iClodagh Dougan nodded her acknowledgment and glanced round the room, checking for the umpteenth time that nothing had been overlooked. If the Trafalgar House talks went their way, they would not return to the house and High Farm would be put back on the market; the movement might even make a small profit with land prices inching up again. But if Bishop McLaverty failed and PIRA’s demands were not met, she and McGirl would be back.
Either way, no trace should be left in the meantime. The place had been scrubbed from top to bottom, all surfaces washed or polished to remove fingerprints. Apart from those retained in one of her suitcases, all the leftover circuit boards, components for making the TPUs, together with surplus supplies of Semtex, were buried in waterproofed toolboxes in the garden under a flagstone, where they would be retrieved at a later date by the mainland flying column.
She and McGirl had lit a bonfire in the overgrown vegetable patch and burned any rubbish that might have provided forensic clues, along with all of her father’s clothes. That had been painful, yet, strangely, spiritually cleansing. She might never know the location of her father’s grave, but at least the bonfire had been like a symbolic cremation. Better than nothing. At last she had been able to grieve, to allow the tears to flow as she clung to McGirl’s arm. Although he said nothing, she sensed that he understood and she was grateful for that.
Now they would move on, to a new safe house provided by the flying column and their network of fixers, either willing or unwitting.
‘Come on,’ McGirl urged.
The telephone rang. Its strident tone abruptly shattered the quietness of the room. She stared down at the receiver.
Five rings, silence; then it rang again.
‘Answer it, then,’ McGirl said irritably.
‘Hello.’
‘Mrs Mayo?’ It was the liaison officer of the flying column.
‘Yes.’
‘Have you seen this afternoon’s Standard?’
‘No.’
‘Your picture and all the team names.’
‘Christ!’
‘Get out now. Make absolutely certain you’re not being followed. And don’t go near the farm.’ He hung up.
She told McGirl what had been said.
‘Don’t panic,’ he replied. ‘If they were that close to us they wouldn’t be putting our names and your picture in the press. They’re after information from the public. If they’ve got names it’ll be a leak from over the water. Some loose-mouthed bastard will be going for his tea.’
She knew the euphemism for execution. ‘What do we do?’
‘Continue as planned. Stay calm.’
‘I want to call in at the post office in Marlow. See if there’s mail from Caitlin.’
McGirl laughed harshly. ‘I said stay calm, not calmly stick your head in a noose. Forget it.’
She followed him out, turning off the lights and locking the door behind her. There were two cars in the driveway, Muldoon and Doran were in the first. As McGirl opened the door of the second, they heard it. The screech of tyres from behind the boundary hedge, the high-revving engines, the white police car glimpsed speeding northwards past the gate. Then another and another. No sirens, no flashing lights. Heading towards High Farm.
Muldoon drove out onto the road first. And turned south.
‘Hurlingham School,’ McGirl said.
As always, the novelty salesman’s intelligence was faultless. Clodagh Dougan looked across the road from the passenger window of the car. Twin spreadeagles of carved stone stood atop the gate posts, between which the gravel drive swept into the grounds of the Wokingham private school. ‘Must cost a fortune to send a child here.’
‘Harrison’s on a major’s salary and his wife’s family’s got money. All good chinless English stock.’ He tossed his cigarette end out of the window. ‘All set?’
She nodded grimly. ‘How do I look?’
At the safe house, a rented basement flat in Slough, she had plucked her eyebrows and redrawn them in pencil. She had also dyed her hair mid-brown, which she now wore pinned up with a tortoiseshell clip. The mustard-coloured business suit, white blouse and sheer white tights completed the effect.
‘Good enough,’ McGirl said, engaging first gear, ‘I’d trust you with my old granny.’