Jig Read Online Free Page A

Jig’s bravado, and who had sometimes seemed even to glorify the man in bold headlines, had never been able to uncover anything. It was as if Jig existed in a place far beyond the scope of all their investigative techniques, a place beyond probing, a fact that made him even more of a hero in certain quarters of Fleet Street. His name was mentioned often, in a tone that was almost reverential, in the wine bars and pubs of the newspaper district. Jig had become more than a terrorist. He was a star, the brightest entity in the whole constellation of terrorists. There were even some who thought the assassination of Walter Whiteford – an unpopular man with unpopular right-wing views – a justifiable act on a level with mercy-killing. This prominence Jig enjoyed reflected badly on Pagan’s section. That Jig could vanish after his killings without so much as a trace made Pagan feel useless – and yet at the same time all the more determined to catch the man.
    Pagan had moments when he wondered if Jig actually existed. Then he’d think it all through again and he’d be struck by the fact that the acts of terrorism perpetrated by Jig were different in sheer quality from random bombings of hotels and busy stores and crowded streets – and he realised there was something about this character Jig he actually admired , albeit in the most grudging way. The man never did anything that would harm an innocent bystander. The man was always careful to select his victim and the proper circumstances, when there was nobody else around to be harmed by an explosive device or a badly-aimed shot. It was a kind of tact, Pagan thought, a strange form of charity at the heart of violence.
    Pagan peered down towards Piccadilly Circus now. Jig was almost an artist. It was as if he were signing his violent portraits, as if he were saying how unlike the regular IRA rabble he was, underlining a difference between himself and all the rest, those butchers who gave no thought to children and women and anybody else who just happened to get caught accidentally in the crossfire. It was a crude war, but Jig gave it his own civilised flourish.
    For a second, Pagan thought about his boyhood, when he’d spent a couple of summers with his grandparents in County Cork. He’d developed a great fondness for the Irish and a sympathy for their plight as inhabitants of one of the most troubled countries in Europe, but he’d never seen a solution to their problems in the violence of the Irish Republican Army. He couldn’t even imagine a situation in which the South, free of British sovereignty since 1921, would be reunited with the North. The Irish were a fractured people, polarised by religions, distanced by bigotries, and hammered to the cross of their history, which had given up more martyrs than there were holy saints in Rome.
    Pagan moved away from the window. He turned his thoughts again to Jig and the sight of what was left of Walter Whiteford on South Audley Street. When Jig had first entered Pagan’s lexicon of terrorism, it had been with the murder in 1982 of Lord Drumcannon, an old judge with a known hatred of the IRA and a propensity to sentence its members to long prison terms. Drumcannon had been shot once through the head by a sniper while walking his beagles on his country estate at Chiddingly in Sussex. The body, surrounded by yapping dogs, had been found by a gamekeeper. There was a solitary bullet hole in the centre of the skull. One shot, which was all Jig ever seemed to need.
    The next victim had been George Connaught, Member of Parliament for a district in Northern Ireland. Connaught was a hardline Protestant, the kind who thrived on the conflict between religious parties. He had been gunned down – and this was an example of Jig’s talent, his daring, Pagan thought – in broad daylight in Westminster in the spring of 1983. The MP, who revered Queen and Country as if they were twin mistresses