Fox went along to the bar and changed a five pound note for 5op coins. Billy White was still sitting there, reading the evening paper. The glass of lager looked untouched.
‘Can I buy you a drink, Mr White?’ Fox asked.
‘Never touch the stuff, Captain.’ White smiled cheerfully and emptied the glass in one long swallow. ‘A Bushmills would chase that down fine.’
Fox ordered him one. ‘I may want to go out to a village called Kilrea. Do you know it?’
‘No problem,’ White told him. ‘I know it well.’
Fox went back to the phone booth and closed the door. He sat there for a while thinking about it, then dialled the number Ferguson had given him. The voice, when it answered, was instantly recognizable. The voice of perhaps the most remarkable man he had ever met.
‘Devlin here.’
‘Liam? This is Harry Fox.’
‘Mother of God!’ Liam Devlin said. ‘Where are you?’
‘Dublin – the Westbourne Hotel. I’d like to come and see you.’
‘You mean right now?’
‘Sorry if it’s inconvenient.’
Devlin laughed. ‘As a matter of fact, at this precise moment in time I’m losing at chess, son, which is something I don’t like to do. Your intervention could be looked upon as timely. Is this what you might term a business call?’
‘Yes, I’m to ring Ferguson and tell him you’re in. He wants to talk to you himself.’
‘So the old bastard is still going strong? Ah, well, you know where to come?’
‘Yes.’
Til see you in an hour then. Kilrea Cottage, Kilrea. You can’t miss it. Next to the convent.’
When Fox came out of the booth after phoning Ferguson, White was waiting for him. ‘Are we going out then, Captain?’
‘Yes,’ Fox said. ‘Kilrea Cottage, Kilrea. Next to a convent apparently. I’ll just get my coat.’
White waited until he’d entered the lift, then ducked into the booth and dialled a number. The receiver at the other end was lifted instantly. He said, ‘We’re leaving for Kilrea now. Looks like he’s seeing Devlin tonight.’
As they drove through the rain-swept streets, White said casually, ‘Just so we know where we stand, Captain, I was a lieutenant in the North Tyrone Brigade of the Provisional IRA the year you lost that hand.’
‘You must have been young.’
‘Born old, that’s me, thanks to the B Specials when I was a wee boy and the sodding RUC.’ He lit a cigarette with one hand. ‘You know Liam’Devlin well, do you?’
‘Why do you ask?’ Fox demanded warily.
‘That’s who we’re going to see, isn’t it? Jesus, Captain, arid who wouldn’t be knowing Liam Devlin’s address?’
‘Something of a legend to you, I suppose?’
‘A legend, is it? That man wrote the book. Mind you, he won’t have any truck with the movement these days. He’s what you might call a moralist. Can’t stand the bombing and that kind of stuff.’
‘And can you?’
‘We’re at war, aren’t we? You bombed the hell out of the Third Reich. We’ll bomb the hell out of you if that’s what it takes.’
Logical but depressing, Fox thought, for where did it end?
A charnelhouse with only corpses to walk on. He shivered, face bleak.
‘About Devlin,’ White said as they started to leave the city. ‘There’s a tale I heard about him once. Would you know if it’s true, I wonder?’
‘Ask me.’
‘The word is, he went to Spain in the thirties, served against Franco and was taken prisoner. Then the Germans got hold of him and used him as an agent here during the big war.’
That’s right.’
‘The way I heard it, after that, they sent him to England. Something to do with an attempt by German paratroopers to kidnap Churchill in nineteen forty-three. Is there any truth in that?’
‘Sounds straight out of a paperback novel to me,’ Fox said.
White sighed and there was regret in his voice. ‘That’s what I thought. Still, one hell of a man for all that,’ and he sat back and concentrated on his driving.
An understatement as a description of Liam Devlin, Fox thought, sitting there in the darkness: a brilliant student who had entered Trinity College, Dublin, at the age of sixteen and had taken a first class honours degree at nineteen, scholar, writer, poet and highly dangerous gunman for the IRA in the thirties, even when still a student.