Baum liked to keep in shape. Each morning, he awakened at exactly the same time, six o’clock, slid out of bed without disturbing his wife, and pulled on track suit and running shoes. Eileen Docherty, the young maid, was already up and making tea in the kitchen although still in her dressing gown.
‘Breakfast at seven, Eileen,’ he called. ‘My usual. Must get an early start this morning. I’ve a meeting in Derry at eight-thirty with the Works Committee.’
He let himself out of the kitchen door, ran across the parkland, vaulted a low fence and turned into the woods. He ran rather than jogged at a fast, almost professional pace, following a series of paths,.|j|rnind full of the day’s planned events.
By six forty-f^Hie had completed his schedule, turned out of the trees and “hammered along the grass verge of the main road towards the house. As usual, he met Pat Leary’s mail van coming along the road towards him. It pulled in and waited and he could see Leary through the windscreen in uniform cap and coat sorting a bundle of mail.
Baum leaned down to the open window. ‘What have you got for me this morning, Patrick?’
The face was the face of a stranger, dark, calm eyes, strong bones, nothing to fear there at all, and yet it was Death come to claim him.
‘I’m truly sorry,’ Cuchulain said. ‘You’re a good man,’ and the Walther in his left hand extended to touch Baum between the eyes. It coughed once, the German was hurled back to fall on the verge, blood and brains scattering across the grass.
Cuchulain drove away instantly, was back in the track by the bridge where he had left Leary within five minutes. He tore
off the cap and coat, dropped them beside the unconscious postman and ran through the trees, clambering over a wooden fence a few minutes later beside a narrow farm track, heavily overgrown with grass. A motorcycle waited there, an old 35occ BSA, stripped down as if for hill climbing with special ribbed tyres. It was a machine much used by hill farmers on both sides of the border to herd sheep. He pulled on a battered old crash helmet with a scratched visor, climbed on and kick-started expertly. The engine roared into life and he rode away, passing only one vehicle, the local milk cart just outside the village.
Back there on the main road it started to rain and it was still falling on the upturned face of Hans Wolfgang Baum thirty minutes later when the local milk cart pulled up beside him. And at that precise moment, fifteen miles away, Cuchu-lain turned the BSA along a farm track south of Clady and rode across the border into the safety of the Irish Republic.
Ten minutes later, he stopped beside a phone box, dialled the number of theBelfast Telegraph, asked for the news desk and claimed responsibility for the shooting of Hans Wolfgang Baum on behalf of the Provisional IRA.
‘So,’ Ferguson said. ‘The Motorcyclist the driver of that milk cart saw would seem to be our man.’
‘No description, of course,’ Fox told him. ‘He was wearing a crash helmet.’
‘It doesn’t make sense,’ Ferguson said. ‘Baum was well liked by everyone and the local Catholic community was totally behind him. He fought his own board every inch of the way to locate that factory in Kilgannon. They’ll probably pull out now, which leaves over a thousand unemployed and Catholics and Protestants at each others’ throats again.’
‘But isn’t that exactly what the Provisionals want, sir?’
‘I wouldn’t have thought so, Harry. Not this time. This was a dirty one. The callous murder of a thoroughly good man, well respected by the Catholic community. It can do the Provisionals nothing but harm with their own people. That’s
what I don’t understand. It was such a stupid thing to do.’ He tapped the file on Baum which Fox had brought in. ‘Baum met Martin McGuiness in secret and McGuiness assured him of the Provisionals’ good will, and whatever else you may think of him, McGuiness is a clever man. Too damned clever, actually, but that isn’t the point.’ He shook his head. ‘No, it doesn’t add up.’