Casey pulled away from Harrison. ‘It’s true, Don, I heard the poor man say it before they killed him. He didn’t sound like he was making it up.’
Trenchard turned towards her angrily. ‘Shut up, woman, or you’ll find yourself arrested for conspiracy to murder.’ He looked at Harrison. ‘Get her away from here, Tom. We’ve never seen her tonight.’
‘What’s going on, Don?’ his friend demanded.
Trenchard snapped: ‘Don’t meddle in things you don’t understand. Now go.’
The Special Branch detective stepped back out of the cafe, his face pale. ‘Two corpses,’ he announced. ‘One of Billy’s men and a bound man with a bag over his head. Bit of a mess.’
‘Killy Tierney,’ Trenchard said.
Turning to King BiUy, the detective said: ‘William Frederick Baker, I am arresting you for the murder of Kilian Tierney ‘
The Orangeman turned to Trenchard, his big face impassive. ‘I had a deal with you and Mr Jones. A favour for a favour.’
Don Trenchard looked towards the cafe. ‘I don’t recall any deals, Billy. Sorry.’
18
‘I read somewhere that violence turns women on,’ Casey said.
, Harrison leaned on his elbow and looked down at her naked body stretched out languorously on the hotel bed beside him.
‘Did it affect you?’
She wrinkled her face in distaste, the memory of Killy Tierney’s torture and execution was still vivid in her mind. ‘It’s a horrible thought, but I think it must have in a sort of way, don’t you?’
‘Something certainly did. I thought it was me.’ He traced his finger over her nipple and watched with fascination as it puckered and hardened in response.
‘Oh, it is you, Tom, believe me.’ She sounded breathless. ‘I suppose it’s men of violence, rather than the violence itself. I mean, boxers for instance. Big ugly brutes most of them, but there’s never any shortage of pretty girls hanging around.’
His hand followed down across the flat plain of her belly, lingering in the gingery wisps between her legs. ‘You don’t think of me as a man of violence?’
She was beginning to stir again now, pressing up hard against his fingers, her face flushed and her words coming out in short gasps. ‘But — you deal in violence — in a way you deal with the most violent — thing imaginable…’ And she was away, her hands sliding over his shoulders, fingertips kneading the clenched muscles of his broad back, her knees opening to draw him in.
Somehow it was different. Now it was the lovemaking of two people who were certain of each other and committed. There was no shame between them, no obvious secrets. Only once Harrison thought fleetingly of Pippa, how it had never been like this with her. How, if it had, things might have turned out differently.
He had fallen asleep after that second bout of coupling, so long and unhurried. It was about three in the morning when he awoke again, instantly aware that Casey was missing from the bed. She was in her dressing gown, standing at the window and staring out into the night.
‘What’s the matter?’ he called.
She turned, the light from the car-park floodlights creating a halo behind her hair. ‘I didn’t mean to wake you, I couldn’t sleep. Things just keep on going round and round in my head.’
He rubbed his eyes with his hands, swung his legs off the bed. ‘Hardly surprising. It was a pretty gruesome experience.’
‘I-know. But it isn’t that. It’s the confession that poor man made and the way Don dismissed it.’
Harrison shrugged. ‘I can see why, I’d dismiss it too. People just don’t go around faking their own deaths.’
‘Some do — to disappear or to get insurance payouts.’
‘True, but they don’t usually supply a corpse.’
She nodded her agreement, but clearly wasn’t convinced. ‘But it could be done, Tom, couldn’t it? It isn’t impossible?’
He thought for a moment. There was no denying that it wasn’t impossible. And hadn’t he been struck all along by a similarity in the workmanship of the AID AN devices with those of Hughie Dougan so many years before? He began to understand Casey’s concern that Trenchard had dismissed the allegation out of hand. He said: ‘Did you know it was my evidence that convicted Dougan the last time?’
Her eyes widened. ‘Really? Jeez, that’s uncanny.’ She looked at him long and hard, turning something over in her mind. ‘Tom, I’ve been thinking. Perhaps I should pay a visit south of the border.’
‘Where?’
‘Sligo. That’s where Dougan was supposed to have died.’
‘Don’t get involved, Casey. This is the IRA you’re talking about.’
She smiled at his concern. ‘Oh, don’t worry, I’ll be discreet. I’d ask Eddie to come, but he’ll be tied up with interviews.’
Hughie Dougan, Harrison was thinking, the trickiest bomb maker he’d ever known. The man who had tried to catch him out all those years before. Thirteen thousand pounds, that had been the price on Harrison’s head. Thirteen thousand pounds for a dead ATO. Was it just remotely possible that Tierney’s tortured confession was true?
He made his decision. ‘I’ll come with you.’
‘What?’
‘To Sligo, I’ll come with you. I’m on leave, there’s nothing to stop me.’
‘Isn’t it against some army rules or something?’
‘Probably, but only if I get found out.’
‘Oh, Tom, that’s wonderful. We can go tomorrow, first thing.’
‘Then you’d better get some sleep.’
She giggled, reaching across the gap between them and running her hands tantalisingly over his thighs towards his groin. ‘Oh, I can’t sleep now. I’m too excited. I want to make love again.’
He laughed. ‘I don’t think I’ve got the energy. Three times in one night — I’m not as young as I was.’
‘You’re the bomb man, Tom, and I feel like I’m about to blow up.’ She looked closely into his eyes, feeling his body harden in her hands. ‘Defuse me. A controlled explosion would be nice.’
‘It was the X-ray-sensitive switch that finally did it,’ Detective Superintendent Jim Maitland explained at the briefing of Anti Terrorist Branch officers.
Detective Sergeant Myers, who’d been assigned to the laborious chore of tracing down the source of component parts used in the AIDAN bombs, said: ‘Before they used that, the other leads were too vague. Hundreds of firms in dozens of countries make different microswitches, tilt switches and timers for use in everything from pinball tables to video recorders. Most companies willingly cooperate here, but abroad our requests for information are mostly ignored. We scoured the lists of Maplin’s and Radio Spares, the main mail-order suppliers of electronic parts, but no real pattern emerged. Just a lot of fruitless legwork in prospect.’
‘Until they used the X-ray switch,’ Maitland intervened. ‘These gizmos measure levels of radiation which cause the component to change its electrical characteristics — in layman’s language, it’s a current change that’s sufficient to trigger an audio or video signal, or in AIDAN’s case, a bomb.’
‘Who uses these things?’ someone asked.
‘Variants are used in body-scanners or for checking safety levels on VDU screens in offices. And Harwell sells detection guns to local councils for checking natural radon levels. You know, like in Cornwall and north-east Scotland.’
‘The point is,’ said Myers, slightly irked that the big chief should be stealing his moment of glory, ‘that it’s a very specialised area with only a few manufacturers and very limited uses. When we ran their customer lists through the computer and matched them with those of Maplin’s and Radio Spares — bingo! We’d isolated Solent Electronics Manufacturing. An address in the run-down Chapel area of Southampton…’