Confessional - Jack Higgins [69]
Cussane was well on his way when the explosion rent the night, yellow and orange flames flowering like petals. He glanced back only briefly. Things couldn't have worked out better. Now he was dead and McGuiness and Ferguson would call off the hounds. He wondered how Devlin would feel when he finally realized the truth.
He landed on a small beach dose to Ballywalter and dragged the inflatable up into the shelter of a dump of gorse bushes. Then he retraced his steps up to the wood where he had left the motorcycle. He strapped his bag on the rear, put on his crash helmet and rode away.
It was another fishing boat from Ballywalter, the Dublin Town, out night-fishing, which was first on the scene. The crew, on deck handling their nets about a mile away, had seen the explosion as it occurred. By the time they reached the position where the Mary Murphy had gone down, about half an hour had elapsed. There was a considerable amount of wreckage on the surface and a life-jacket with the boat's name stencilled on it told them the worst. The skipper notified the coastguard of the tragedy on his radio and continued the search for survivors or at least the bodies of the crew; but he had no success and a thickening sea mist made things even more difficult. By five o'clock, a coastguard cutter was there from Dundalk, also several other small fishing craft, and they continued the search as dawn broke.
The news of the tragedy was passed on to McGuiness at four o'clock in the morning and he, in turn, phoned Devlin.
'Christ knows what happened,' McGuiness said. 'She blew up and went down like a stone.'
'And no bodies, you say?'
'Probably inside her, or what's left of her on the bottom. And it seems there's a bad rip tide in that area. It would carry a body a fair distance. I'd like to know what happened. A good man, Sean Deegan.'
'So would I,' Devlin said.
'Still, no more Cussane. At least that bastard has met his end. You'll tell Ferguson?'
'Leave it with me.'
Devlin put on a dressing gown, went downstairs and made some tea. Cussane was dead and yet he felt no pain for the man who, whatever else, had been his friend for more than twenty years. No sense of mourning. Instead a feeling of unease like a lump in the gut that refused to go away.
He rang the Cavendish Square number in London. It was picked up after a slight delay and Ferguson's voice answered, still half asleep. Devlin gave him the news and the Brigadier came fully awake with some rapidity.
'Are you sure about this?'
'That's how it looks. God knows what went wrong on the boat.'
'Ah well,' Ferguson said. 'At least Cussane's out of our hair for good and all. The last thing I needed was that madman on the rampage.' He snorted. 'Kill the Pope indeed.'
'What about Tanya?'
'She can come back tomorrow. Put her on the plane and I'll meet her myself. Harry will be in Paris to brief Tony Villiers on this Exocet job.'
'Right,' Devlin said. 'That's it then.'
'You don't sound happy, Liam. What is it?'
'Let's put it this way. With this one, I'd like to see the body,' Devlin said and rang off.
The Ulster border with the Irish Republic, in spite of road blocks, a considerable police presence and the British Army, has always been wide open to anyone who knows it. In many cases, farms on both sides have land breached by the border's imaginary line and the area is criss-crossed by hundreds of narrow country lanes, field paths and tracks.
Cussane was safely in Ulster by four o'clock. Any kind of a vehicle on the road at that time in the morning was rare enough to make it essential that he drop out of sight for a while, which he did on the other side of Newry, holing up in a disused barn in a wood just off the main road.
He didn't sleep, but sat comfortably against a wall and smoked, the Stechkin ready to hand just in case.