Vagabond Read Online Free Page B

right. Might have done it by now, miss.’
    ‘You know him well enough – how would he take a rough-and-tumble with them? Round here there was once a fist fight between two of the volunteers – the old days – about which of them should fire the bullet that killed a tout . . . How would he stand up to a beating, miss, burns and the full works? Another time, again in the old days but little’s changed, they turned on the hob rings on a cooker and got the tout’s trousers and pants off. When the rings were glowing, they sat him on them . . . Most don’t last long. Might already be over.’
    She nearly tripped over Hugo Woolmer’s legs as she went outside. She threw away the barely smoked cigarette and was sick against a tree. He’d been staying in a hotel in London and had been with the cigarette people the night before. They’d needed to do the briefing early, and she’d knocked on his door. He’d unlocked it – must have come straight from the shower: a towel was knotted at his waist and she’d seen his skin. Nothing special – a few birthmarks, some straggly hair, no burns, no contusions from a club. His fingertips had been intact. The leaves at the base of the tree were saturated with her vomit.
     
    Brennie Murphy didn’t know. He should have known.
    The men on the mountain looked to him for decisions on tactics and strategy, and for his guidance on targets in the mid-Ulster and Lurgan areas. He had good antennae and understood weakness in the enemy. Some had turned their back on the struggle, and the television each night carried clips of former fighters who now chuckled with the people they had tried to kill. It was as if the old colleagues of Brennie Murphy now pissed on him. He wouldn’t compromise, take government grants, become a paid stooge and call himself a community officer: the armed struggle, for him, was alive. With so few engaged in – as they called it – ‘keeping the fire lit’, it was inevitable that the attention of the police and Five would be intense, worse than anything he had known when he was young. The attacks on what remained active of the Organisation were based on the technical excellence of the surveillance systems and also the infiltration of their cells by paid informers. Did he trust this man? Should he trust him?
    The man sat on the chair. He did not quiz them, argue with them or cringe. Men Brennie Murphy knew, who he might have believed were taking twenty, fifty, a hundred pounds a week would have come here and shown terror. The switching on of the drill would have brought a stain to their crotches, and they’d have pleaded their innocence too hard.
    He and Malachy were in the hallway. They could see the man through the open door into the back bedroom. He asked, ‘Do you believe him or not?’
    ‘I don’t know.’
    ‘He’s promised the shipment.’
    ‘He’s promised to bring it to a point in Europe. Then we get it home.’
    ‘We need it.’
    ‘The weapons bring the kids to us, not to the collaborators.’
    ‘It’s against every instinct in my body.’
    ‘And mine.’
    ‘But you must have the weapons.’
    ‘Must have them, Brennie, or we’re nothing.’
    Brennie Murphy’s nostrils flared. It wasn’t strange, he told the kids, that a man of his age could harbour such hatred. More than anything in his life he dreaded abandoning the memory of the many who had died, old comrades. He prayed he would die before weakness pushed him towards compromise. The dead didn’t deserve it. ‘You’d have to go to test-fire – all of that,’ he said. ‘So’s we’re not skinned.’
    ‘If I have to.’
    Brennie took his arm. ‘You do.’
    They went back inside.
     
    He sat on the chair, could have killed for a cigarette, but he wasn’t offered one. Smoke came through from the hall where the two of them spoke in low voices.
    He had realised that the room with the awful wallpaper would be easy to turn into a torture chamber. The makeover would be