“Munchkin!”
“Watch your language. Or I’ll twat you.”
She unwrapped the orange paper square while Roddy stared in murderous hatred. “I’m doing this for your own benefit,” she explained. “Secrets between colleagues is not a good idea. I mean, okay, we’re spies, but . . .”
Unscrunched, the Post-it turned out to carry two words. A name.
“Next question,” Shirley said. “Who the fuck is Julian Tanner?”
When Avril woke in the early hours, it was only partly because of Daisy’s bad dream: She had known putting head to pillow that if sleep came, it would come briefly. Pitchfork had sunk its prongs into her mind, where Pitchfork did what a pitchfork does: It shifted, lifted and sieved. Daisy’s whimperings might have had the same source but she had no coherent report to make, so Avril held her until she grew quiet again, and then lay while darkness skulked outside the window, slowly surrendering its ghosts.
Pitchfork was the operation, and also the code name of its subject. Dougal—Dougie—Malone, long-time IRA enforcer, and the owner of a well-earned reputation for brutality, fostered not simply by his keenness for punishment beatings, but by the methods he chose to implement them: the hammer, the car jack, the crowbar. A short, narrow man, he carried himself like an unpulled punch, and to look into his eyes was to set your darkness echoing, as if his presence dared you unleash the devil in yourself. For two decades he was the Provos’ iron fist in its studded glove, seeking out dissent in its ranks and pounding it flat. He had raped at least seven women. And for half the time he enjoyed such power he had been an informer for the British intelligence service, an asset so highly valued that he had a team of four assigned to his care and security: herself, CC, Al and Daisy. If he was Pitchfork, so were they.
All spies together, then, though it hurt Avril to admit Malone into their company. She would rather focus on their difference: Malone had become a spy not to uphold a cause, nor even only for the money, but to gratify evil urges. The dark was where they all worked, she could acknowledge that. But it was where Malone lived, and where he found his joys, chief among these being the death of his enemies, or some of them, because it would have taxed even his endless hatred to murder everyone. He did his best, though, directing his IRA death squad at those whom he named as informers, partly to protect his own position, but mostly because that was who he was, a man who delighted in torture and murder and rape; and who, when it was over, was removed from the Province and settled in Cumbria under a false identity, with a rumoured £80,000 a year in a Gibraltar bank account. Fifteen years later, he was found dead in his own garage, murdered by a method he’d pioneered himself on two luckless colleagues, Stephen Regan and Bernard Docherty; Provos both, and in need of jail time, but who ended up stains on a concrete floor for looking sideways at Dougal Malone.
Last night, three drinks down, CC had offered a toast: that its subject roast in hell.
“Dougie Malone, the nastiest bastard who ever walked the earth. Who helped bring about the arrest of thirty-four terrorists bent on wreaking carnage both sides of the Irish Sea, thereby saving the lives of innocent civilians—and when he wasn’t doing that, damn his hide, was running his own little nutting squad with our help and protection, whose victims we could have forewarned, or offered escape routes.”
His glass trembled.
“So here’s to the numbers game, played for the greater good. And here’s to the nameless heroes who put Malone down. But most of all, here’s to Dougie dead. May our Pitchfork even now be tossed on a bigger one, and the devil himself be giggling at the sight.”
He downed his whiskey. Daisy had started working on hers before he was halfway through. Avril and Al, though, held their hands.
It was Al that CC focused on. “Come on, Alastair. Empty your glass.”
“I’ll not drink to another man’s death.”
“Not even Malone’s? Can you think of a man deserved it more?”
“Leave him be,” said Avril.
“What is this, a mutiny? An uprising?”
“No more than you deserve. Jesus, what were you thinking? What have you done? We’ll wind up in a pit of sorrows.”
“Not if we’re careful.”
“And I’ll not see Daisy back in a dark place.”
“I can speak for myself,” Daisy said.
“Of course. I didn’t mean to—”
“And I’ve said we should do it.”
“But Avvy’s right,” Al said. “Sorry, love. But this is a door better left closed. There’s no knowing what’ll come crawling through it.”
Our own past lives, thought Avril. Our own misdeeds.
“I don’t care,” said Daisy. “CC’s right. They owe us.”
