No Comebacks

THERE ARE SOME DAYS …

The St Kilian roll-on roll-off ferry from Le Havre buried her nose in another oncoming sea and pushed her blunt bulk a few yards nearer to Ireland. From somewhere on A deck driver Liam Clarke leaned over the rail and stared forward to make out the low hills of County Wexford coming closer.

In another twenty minutes the Irish Continental Line ferry would dock in the small port of Rosslare and another European run would be completed. Clarke glanced at his watch; it was twenty to two in the afternoon and he was looking forward to being with his family in Dublin in time for supper.

She was on time again. Clarke left the rail, returned to the passenger lounge and collected his grip. He saw no reason to wait any longer and descended to the car deck three levels down where his juggernaut transport waited with the others. Car passengers would not be called for another ten minutes, but he thought he might as well get settled in his cab. The novelty of watching the ferry dock had long worn off; the racing page of the Irish newspaper he had bought on board, though twenty-four hours old, was more interesting.

He hauled himself up into the warm comfort of his cab and settled down to wait until the big doors in the bow opened to let him out onto the quay of Rosslare. Above the sun visor in front of him his sheaf of customs documents was safely stacked, ready to be produced in the shed.

The St Kilian passed the tip of the harbour mole at five minutes before the hour and the doors opened on the dot of two. Already the lower car deck was a-roar with noise as impatient tourists started up their engines well before necessary. They always did. Fumes belched from a hundred exhausts, but the heavy trucks were up front and they came off first. Time, after all, was money.

Clarke pressed the starter button and the engine of his big Volvo artic throbbed into life. He was third in line when the marshal waved them forward. The other two trucks breasted the clanking steel ramp to the quayside with a boom of exhausts and Clarke followed them. In the muted calm of his cab he heard the hiss of the hydraulic brakes being released, and then the steel planking was under him.

With the echoing thunder of the other engines and the clang of the steel plates beneath his wheels he failed to hear the sharp crack that came from his own truck, somewhere beneath and behind him. Up from the hold of the St Kilian he came, down the 200 yards of cobbled quay and into the gloom again, this time of the great vaulted customs shed. Through the windscreen he made out one of the officers waving him into a bay beside the preceding trucks and he followed the gestures. When he was in position he shut down the engine, took his sheaf of papers from the sun visor and descended to the concrete floor. He knew most of the customs officers, being a regular, but not this one. The man nodded and held out his hand for the documents. He began to riffle through them.

It only took the officer ten minutes to satisfy himself that all was in order — licence, insurance, cargo manifest, duty paid, permits and so forth — the whole gamut of controls apparently required to move merchandise from one country to another even within the Common Market. He was about to hand them all back to Clarke when something caught his eye.

'Hello, what the hell's that?' he asked.

Clarke followed the line of his gaze and saw beneath the cab section of the truck a steadily spreading pool of oil. It was dripping from somewhere close to the rear axle of the section.

'Oh Jaysus,' he said in despair, 'it looks like the differential nose-piece.'

The customs man beckoned over a senior colleague whom Clarke knew, and the two men bent down to see where the flow of oil was coming from. Over two pints were already on the shed floor and there would be another three to come. The senior customs man stood up.

'You'll not shift that far,' he said, and to his junior colleague added, 'We'll have to move the others round it.'

Clarke crawled under the cab section to have a closer look. From the engine up front a thick strong drive shaft ran down to a huge boss of cast steel, the differential. Inside this casing the power of the turning drive shaft was transmitted sideways to the rear axle, thus propelling the cab forward. This was effected by a complex assembly of cogwheels inside the casing, and these wheels turned permanently in a bath of lubricating oil. Without this oil the cogs would seize solid in a very short distance, and the oil was pouring out. The steel nose-piece casing had cracked.

Above this axle was the articulated plate on which rested the trailer section of the artic which carried the cargo. Clarke came out from under.

'It's completely gone,' he said. 'I'll have to call the office. Can I use your phone?'

The senior customs man jerked his head at the glass-walled office and went on with his examination of the other trucks. A few drivers leaned from their cabs and called ribald remarks to Clarke as he went to phone.

Then there was no one in the office in Dublin. They were all out at lunch. Clarke hung around the customs shed morosely as the last of the tourist cars left the shed to head inland. At three he managed to contact the managing director of Tara Transportation and explained his problem. The man swore.

'I won't be carrying that in stock,' he told Clarke. 'I'll have to get on to the Volvo Trucks main agent for one. Call me back in an hour.'

At four there was still no news and at five the customs men wanted to close down, the last ferry of the day having arrived from Fishguard. Clarke made a further call, to say he would spend the night in Rosslare and check back in yet another hour. One of the customs men kindly ran him into town and showed him a bed-and-breakfast lodging house. Clarke checked in for the night.

At six head office told him they would be picking up another differential nose-piece at nine the following morning and would send it down with a company engineer in a van. The man would be with him by twelve noon. Clarke called his wife to tell her he would be twenty-four hours late, ate his tea and went out to a pub. In the customs shed three miles away Tara's distinctive green and white artic stood silent and alone above its pool of oil.

Clarke allowed himself a lie-in the next day and rose at nine. He called head office at ten and they told him the van had got the replacement part and was leaving in five minutes. At eleven he hitch-hiked back to the harbour. The company was as good as its word and the little van, driven by the mechanic, rattled down the quay and into the customs shed at twelve. Clarke was waiting for it.

The chirpy engineer went under the truck like a ferret and Clarke could hear him tut-tutting. When he came out he was already smeared with oil.

'Nose-piece casing,' he said unnecessarily. 'Cracked right across.'

'How long?' asked Clarke.

'If you give me a hand, I'll have you out of here in an horn and a half.'

It took a little longer than that. First they had to mop up the pool of oil, and five pints goes a long way. Then the mechanic took a heavy wrench and carefully undid the ring of great bolts holding the nose-piece to the main casing. This done, he withdrew the two half-shafts and began to loosen the propeller shaft. Clarke sat on the floor and watched him, occasionally passing a tool as he was bidden. The customs men watched them both. Not much happens in a customs shed between berthings.

The broken casing came away in bits just before one. Clarke was getting hungry and would have liked to go up the road to the caf6 and get some lunch, but the mechanic wanted to press on. Out at sea the St Patrick, smaller sister ship of the St Kilian, was moving over the horizon on her way home to Rosslare.

The mechanic started to perform the whole process in reverse. The new casing went on, the propeller shaft was fixed and the half-shafts slotted in. At half past one the St Patrick was clearly visible out at sea to anyone who was watching.

Murphy was. He lay on his stomach in the sere grass atop the low line of rising ground behind the port, invisible to anyone a hundred yards away, and there was no such person. He held his field glasses to his eyes and monitored the approaching ship.

'Here she is,' he said, 'right on time.'

Brendan, the strong man, lying in the long grass beside him, grunted.

'Do you think it'll work, Murphy?' he asked.

'Sure, I've planned it like a military operation,' said Murphy. 'It cannot fail.'

A more professional criminal might have told Murphy, who traded as a scrap metal merchant with a sideline in 'bent' cars, that he was a bit out of his league with such a caper, but Murphy had spent several thousand pounds of his own money setting it up and he was not to be discouraged. He kept watching the approaching ferry.

In the shed the mechanic tightened the last of the nuts around the new nose-piece, crawled out from under, stood up and stretched.

'Right,' he said, 'now, we'll put five pints of oil in and away you go.'

He unscrewed a small flange nut in the side of the differential casing while Clarke fetched a gallon can of oil and a funnel from the van. Outside, the St Patrick, with gentle care, slotted her nose into the mooring bay and the clamps went on. Her bow doors opened and the ramp came down.

Murphy held the glasses steady and stared at the dark hole in the bows of the St Patrick. The first truck out was a dun brown, with French markings. The second to emerge into the afternoon sunlight gleamed in white and emerald green. On the side of her trailer the word TARA was written in large green letters. Murphy exhaled slowly.

'There it is,' he breathed, 'that's our baby.'

'Will we go now?' asked Brendan, who could see very little without binoculars and was getting bored.

'No hurry,' said Murphy. 'We'll see her come out of the shed first.'

The mechanic screwed the nut of the oil inlet tight and turned to Clarke.

'She's all yours,' he said, 'she's ready to go. As for me, I'm going to wash up. I'll probably pass you on the road to Dublin.'

He replaced the can of oil and the rest of his tools in his van, selected a flask of detergent liquid and headed for the washroom. The Tara Transportation juggernaut rumbled through the entrance from the quay into the shed. A customs officer waved it to a bay next to its mate and the driver climbed down.

'What the hell happened to you, Liam?' he asked.

Clarke explained to him. A customs officer approached to examine the new man's papers.

'Am I OK to roll?' asked Clarke.

'Away with you,' said the officer. 'You've been making the place untidy for too long.'

For the second time in twenty-four hours Clarke pulled himself into his cab, punched the engine into life and let in the clutch. With a wave at his company colleague he moved into gear and the artic rolled out of the shed into the sunlight.

Murphy adjusted his grip on the binoculars as the juggernaut emerged on the landward side of the shed.

'He's through already,' he told Brendan. 'No complications. Do you see that?'

He passed the glasses to Brendan who wriggled to the top of the rise and stared down. Five hundred yards away the juggernaut was negotiating the bends leading away from the harbour to the road to Rosslare town.

'I do,' he said.

'Seven hundred and fifty cases of finest French brandy in there,' said Murphy. 'That's nine thousand bottles. It markets at over ten pounds a bottle retail and I'll get four. What do you think of that?'

'It's a lot of drink,' said Brendan wistfully.

'It's a lot of money, you fool,' said Murphy. 'Right, let's get going.'

The two men wriggled off the skyline and ran at a crouch to where their car was parked on a sandy track below.

When they drove back to where the track joined the road from the docks to the town they had only a few seconds to wait and driver Clarke thundered by them. Murphy brought his black Ford Granada saloon, stolen two days earlier and now wearing false plates, in behind the artic and began to trail it.

It made no stops; Clarke was trying to get home. When he rolled over the bridge across the Slaney and headed north out of Wexford on the Dublin road Murphy decided he could make his phone call.

He had noted the phone booth earlier and removed the diaphragm from the earpiece to ensure that no one else would be using it when he came by. They were not. But someone, infuriated by the useless implement, had torn the flex from its base. Murphy swore and drove on. He found another booth beside a post office just north of Enniscorthy. As he braked, the juggernaut ahead of him roared out of sight.

The call he made was to another phone booth by the roadside north of Gorey where the other two members of his gang waited.

'Where the hell have you been?' asked Brady. 'I've been waiting here with Keogh for over an hour.'

'Don't worry,' said Murphy. 'He's on his way and he's on time. Just take up your positions behind the bushes in the lay-by and wait till he pulls up and jumps down.'

He hung up and drove on. With his superior speed he caught up with the juggernaut before the village of Ferns and trailed the truck out onto the open road again. Before Camolin he turned to Brendan.

'Time to become guardians of law and order,' he said and pulled off the road again, this time into a narrow country road he had examined on his earlier reconnaissance. It was deserted.

The two men jumped out and pulled a grip from the rear seat. They doffed their zip-fronted windbreakers and pulled two jackets from the grip. Both men already wore black shoes, socks and trousers. When the windbreakers were off they were wearing regulation police- style blue shirts and black ties. The jackets they pulled on completed the deception. Murphy's bore the three stripes of a sergeant, Brendan's was plain. Both carried the insignia of the Garda, the Irish police force. Two peaked caps from the same grip went onto their heads.

The last of the contents of the grip were two rolls of black, adhesive-backed sheet plastic. Murphy unrolled them, tore off the cloth backing and spread them carefully with his hands, one onto each of the Granada's front doors. The black plastic blended with the black paintwork. Each panel had the word GARDA in white letters. When he stole his car, Murphy had chosen a black Granada deliberately because that was the most common police patrol car.

From the locked boot Brendan took the final accoutrement, a block two feet long and triangular in cross-section. The base of the triangle was fitted with strong magnets which held the block firmly to the roof of the car. The other two sides, facing forwards and backwards, also had the word GARDA printed on the glass panels.

There was no bulb inside to light it up, but who would notice that in daytime?

When the two men climbed back into the car and reversed out of the lane, they were to any casual observer a pair of highway patrolmen in every way. Brendan was driving now, with 'Sergeant' Murphy beside him. They found the juggernaut waiting at a traffic light in the town of Gorey.

There is a new section of dual carriageway north of Gorey, between that ancient market town and Arklow. Halfway along it, on the northbound lane, is a lay-by, and this was the spot Murphy had chosen for his ambush. The moment the column of traffic blocked behind the artic entered the dual carriageway section, the other car drivers joyfully sped past the lorry and Murphy had it all to himself. He wound down his window and said 'Now' to Brendan.

The Granada moved smoothly up beside the cab of the truck, and held station. Clarke looked down to see the police car beside him and a sergeant waving out of the passenger seat. He wound down his window.

'You're losing a rear tyre,' roared Murphy above the wind. 'Pull in to the lay-by.'

Clarke looked ahead, saw the big P on a notice by the roadside indicating a lay-by, nodded and began to slow. The police car moved ahead, swerved into the lay-by at the appointed spot and stopped. The juggernaut followed and drew up behind the Granada. Clarke climbed down.

'It's down here at the back,' said Murphy. 'Follow me.'

Clarke obediently followed him round the nose of his own truck and down its green and white length to the rear. He could see no flat tyre, but he hardly had a chance to look. The bushes parted and Brady and Keogh came bounding out in overalls and balaclavas. A gloved hand went over Clarke's mouth, a strong arm round his chest and another pair of arms round his legs. Like a sack he was swept off his feet and disappeared into the bushes.

Within a minute he had been divested of his company overalls with the Tara logo on the breast pocket, his wrists, mouth and eyes were sticky-taped and, shielded from the gaze of passing motorists by the bulk of his own lorry, he was bundled into the rear seat of the 'police' car. Here a gruff voice told him to lie on the floor and keep still. He did.

Two minutes later Keogh emerged from the bushes in the Tara overalls and joined Murphy by the door of the cab where the gang leader was examining the driving licence of the unfortunate Clarke.

'It's all in order,' Murphy said. 'Your name's Liam Clarke, and this load of documents must be in order. Did they not pass it all at Rosslare not two hours back?'

Keogh, who had been a truck driver before he served time as a guest of the Republic in Mountjoy, grunted and climbed into the truck. He surveyed the controls.

'No problem,' he said, and replaced the sheaf of papers above the sun visor.

'See you at the farm in an hour,' said Murphy.

He watched the hijacked juggernaut pull out of the lay-by and rejoin the northward stream on the Dublin road.

Murphy went back to the police car. Brady was in the back with his feet on the recumbent and blindfolded Clarke. He had lost his overalls and balaclava and was in a tweed jacket. Clarke might have seen Murphy's face, but only for a few seconds, and then with a police cap on top of it. He would not see the faces of the other three. That way, if he ever accused Murphy, the other three would give Murphy an unbreakable alibi.

Murphy glanced up and down the road. It was empty for the moment. He looked at Brendan and nodded. Both men tore the Garda signs from the doors, screwed them up and tossed them in the back. Another glance. A car sped by unheeding. Murphy yanked the illuminated sign off the roof and threw it to Brady. A further glance. Again, no traffic. Both uniform jackets came off and went to Brady in the back. The windbreakers went back on. When the Granada pulled out of the lay-by it was just another saloon car with three civilians visible in it.

They passed the juggernaut just north of Arklow. Murphy, driving again, gave a discreet toot of the horn. Keogh raised one hand as the Granada passed, thumb upward in the OK sign.

Murphy kept driving north as far as Kilmacanogue then pulled up the lane known as Rocky Valley towards Calary Bog. Not much happens up there, but he had located a deserted farm high on the moor which had the advantage of a great barn inside it, large enough to take the juggernaut unseen for a few hours. That was all that would be needed. The farm was reached by a muddy track and screened by a clump of conifers.

They arrived just before dusk, fifty minutes before the juggernaut and two hours before the rendezvous with the men from the North and their four vans.

Murphy reckoned he could be justifiably proud of the deal he had clinched. It would have been no easy task to dispose of those 9000 bottles of brandy in the South. They were bonded, each case and bottle numbered and sooner or later bound to be spotted. But up in Ulster, the war-torn North, it was different. The place was rife with shebeens, illegal drinking clubs that were unlicensed and outside the law anyway.

The shebeens were strictly segregated, Protestant and Catholic, with control of them firmly in the hands of the underworld, which itself had long been taken over by all those fine patriots they had up there. Murphy knew as well as any man that a fair proportion of the sectarian killings performed for the glory of Ireland had more to do with protection racketeering than patriotism.

So he had done his deal with one of the more powerful heroes, a main supplier to a whole string of shebeens into which the brandy could be filtered with no questions asked. The man, with his drivers, was due to meet him at the farm, unload the brandy into four vans, pay cash on the spot and have the stuff into the North by dawn through the maze of country lanes crossing the border between the lakes along the Fermanagh — Monaghan line.

He told Brendan and Brady to carry the hapless driver into the farm where Clarke was thrown on a pile of sacks in the corner of the derelict kitchen. The three hijackers settled down to wait. At seven the green and white juggernaut grunted up the track in the near darkness, lights out, and the three ran outside. By muffled flashlights they heaved open the old barn doors; Keogh ran the truck inside and the doors were closed. Keogh climbed down.

'I reckon I've earned my cut,' he said, 'and a drink.'

'You've done well,' said Murphy. 'You'll not need to drive the truck again. It'll be unloaded by midnight and I'll drive it myself to a point ten miles away and abandon it. What will you drink?'

'How about a nip of brandy?' suggested Brady, and they all laughed. It was a good joke.

'I'll not break a case for a few cups,' said Murphy, 'and I'm a whiskey man myself. Will this do?'

He produced a flask from his pocket and they all agreed it would do nicely. At a quarter to eight it was completely dark and Murphy went to the end of the track with a flashlight to guide the men from the North. He had given them precise instructions, but they could still miss the track. At ten past eight he came back, guiding a convoy of four panel vans. When they stopped in the yard a big man in a camel overcoat descended from the passenger seat of the first. He carried an attach6 case but no visible sense of humour.

'Murphy?' he said. Murphy nodded. 'Have you got the stuff?'

'Fresh off the boat from France,' said Murphy. 'It's in the truck still, in the barn.'

'If you've broken the truck open I'll want to examine every case,' threatened the man. Murphy swallowed. He was glad he had resisted the temptation to look at his loot.

'The French customs seals are intact,' he said. 'You can examine them yourself.'

The man from the North grunted and nodded to his acolytes who began to haul open the barn doors. Their torches shone on the twin locks that kept the rear doors closed upon the cargo, the customs seals still covering the locks unbroken. The Ulsterman grunted again and nodded his satisfaction. One of his men took a jemmy and approached the locks. The man from the North jerked his head.

'Let's go inside,' he said. Murphy led the way, torch in hand, into what had been the sitting room of the old farm. The Northerner unclipped his attach^ case, laid it on the table and opened the lid. Rows of bundles of sterling notes greeted Murphy's gaze. He had never seen so much money.

'Nine thousand bottles at four pounds each,' he said. 'Now that would make thirty-six thousand pounds, would it not?'

'Thirty-five,' grunted the Northerner. 'I like round numbers.'

Murphy did not argue. He got the impression from this man that it would not be wise. Anyway, he was satisfied. With £3000 for each of his men and his outlay recouped, he would be well over £20,000 clear. 'Agreed,' he said.

One of the other Northerners appeared at the broken window. He spoke to his boss.

'You'd better come and have a look,' was all he said.

Then he was gone. The big man snapped the case closed, gripped the handle and stalked outside. The four Ulstermen, along with Keogh, Brady and Brendan, were grouped round the open doors of the truck in the barn. Six torches illuminated the interior. Instead of neatly stacked columns of cases bearing the world-renowned name of the brandy producer, they were looking at something else.

There were rows of piled plastic sacks, each bearing the name of a famous manufacturer of flower-garden aids, and beneath the name the words 'Rose Fertilizer'. The man from the North stared at the cargo without change of expression.

'What the hell's this?' he grated.

Murphy had to pull his lower jaw back from somewhere near his throat. 'I don't know,' he croaked. 'I swear I don't know.'

He was telling the truth. His information had been impeccable — and costly. He had got the right ship, the right transporter. He knew there was only one such truck on that afternoon's arrival of the St Patrick.

'Where's the driver?' snarled the big man.

'Inside,' said Murphy.

'Let's go,' said the big man. Murphy led the way. The unfortunate Liam Clarke was still trussed like a chicken upon his sacks.

'What the hell's this cargo of yours?' the big man asked without ceremony.

Clarke mumbled furiously behind his gag. The big man nodded to one of his accomplices who stepped forward and tore the medical plaster unceremoniously from Clarke's mouth. The driver still had another band across his eyes.

'I said what the hell's this cargo of yours,' the big man repeated. Clarke swallowed.

'Rose fertilizer,' he said. 'Sure, it's in the cargo manifest.'

The big man flashed his torch over the sheaf of papers he had taken from Murphy. He stopped at the cargo manifest and thrust it under Murphy's nose.

'Did you not look at this, you fool?' he asked.

Murphy took out his growing panic on the driver. 'Why didn't you tell me this?' he demanded.

Sheer outrage gave Clarke boldness in the face of his unseen persecutors. 'Because I had a fecking gag over my mouth, that's why,' he shouted back.

'That's true, Murphy,' said Brendan, who was rather literal.

'Shut up,' said Murphy, who was becoming desperate. He leaned closer to Clarke. 'Is there not any brandy underneath it?' he asked.

Clarke's face gave away his utter ignorance. 'Brandy?' he echoed. 'Why should there be any brandy? They don't make brandy in Belgium.'

'Belgium?' howled Murphy. 'You drove into Le Havre from Cognac in France.'

'I've never been to Cognac in my life,' yelled Clarke. 'I was driving a cargo of rose fertilizer. It's made of peat moss and dessicated cow manure. We export it from Ireland to Belgium. I took this cargo over last week. They opened it in Antwerp, examined it, said it was substandard and they wouldn't accept it. My bosses in Dublin told me to bring it back. It cost me three days in Antwerp sorting out the paperwork. Sure, it's all there in the papers.'

The man from the North had been running his torch over the documents he held. They confirmed Clarke's story. He threw them to the floor with a grunt of disgust.

'Come with me,' he said to Murphy and led the way outside. Murphy followed, protesting his innocence.

In the darkness of the yard the big man cut short Murphy's protestations. He dropped his attach^ case, turned, gripped Murphy by the front of his windcheater, lifted him off his feet and slammed him into the barn door.

'Listen to me, you little Catholic bastard,' said the big man.

Murphy had wondered which side of the Ulster racketeers he had been dealing with. Now he knew.

'You,' said the big man in a whisper that froze Murphy's blood, 'have hijacked a load of bullshit — literally. You have also wasted a lot of my time and my men's time and my money…'

'I swear to you…' croaked Murphy, who was having trouble with his air supply, 'on my mother's grave… it must be on the next ship, arriving at two p.m. tomorrow. I can start again…'

'Not for me,' whispered the big man, ‘cos the deal's off. And one last thing; if you ever try and pull a stroke like this on me again I'll have two of my lads come down here and redistribute your kneecaps. Do you understand me?'

Sweet Jesus, thought Murphy, they're animals these Northerners. The British are welcome to them. He knew it was more than his life was worth to voice the thought. He nodded. Five minutes later the man from the North and his four empty trucks were gone.

In the farmhouse by the light of a torch Murphy and his disconsolate gang finished the flask of whiskey.

'What do we do now?' asked Brady.

'Well,' said Murphy, 'we clear up the evidence. We have gained nothing but we have lost nothing, except me.'

'What about our three thousand quid?' asked Keogh.

Murphy thought. He did not want another round of threats from his own people after the scare the Ulsterman had thrown into him.

'Lads, it will have to be fifteen hundred apiece,' he said. 'And you'll have to wait a while until I make it. I cleaned myself out setting up this stroke.'

They appeared mollified if not happy.

'Brendan, you, Brady and Keogh should clear up here. Every scrap of evidence, every footprint and tyre track in the mud, wipe it out. When you're done, take his car and drop the driver somewhere south of here by the roadside in his stockings. With tape on his mouth, eyes and wrists, he'll be a while getting the alarm up. Then turn north and drive home.

'I'll stick by my word to you, Keogh. I'll take the truck and abandon it way up in the hills towards Kippure. I'll walk back down and maybe get a lift on the main road back to Dublin. Agreed?'

They agreed. They had no choice. The men from the North had done a good job of smashing the locks on the rear of the artic's trailer, so the gang hunted round for wooden pegs to secure the two hasps. Then they closed the doors on its disappointing cargo and pegged them shut.

With Murphy at the wheel the juggernaut growled back down the track from the farm and turned left towards the Djouce Forest and the hills of Wicklow.

It was just after 9.30 and Murphy was past the forest on the Roundwood road when he met the tractor. One would think farmers would not be out on tractors with one faulty headlight, the other smeared with mud, and ten tons of straw bales on a trailer at that hour. But this one was.

Murphy was bombing along between two stone walls when he discerned the looming mass of the tractor and trailer coming the other way. He hit the brakes rather sharply.

One thing about articulated vehicles is that although they can manoeuvre round corners that a rigid-frame lorry of similar length could not get near, they are the very devil when it comes to braking. If the cab section which does the towing and the trailer section which carries the cargo are not almost in line, they tend to jackknife. The heavy trailer tries to overtake the cab section, shoving it sideways into a skid as it does so. This is what happened to Murphy.

It was the stone walls, so common in those Wicklow hills, that stopped him rolling clean over. The farmer gunned his tractor clean through a handy farm gate, leaving the straw bales on the trailer to take any impact. Murphy's cab section began to slither as the trailer caught up with it. The load of fertilizer pushed him, brakes locked in panic, into the side of the bales, which fell happily all over his cab, almost burying it. The rear of the trailer behind him slammed into a stone wall and was thrown back onto the road, where it then hit the opposite stone wall as well.

When the screech of metal on stone stopped, the farm trailer was still upright, but had been moved ten feet, shearing its coupling to the tractor. The shock had thrown the farmer off his seat and into a pile of silage. He was having a noisy personal conversation with his creator. Murphy was sitting in the dim half-light of a cab covered in bales of straw.

The shock of hitting the stone walls had sheared the pegs holding the rear of the artic shut and both doors had flown open. Part of the rose fertilizer cargo was strewn on the road behind the truck. Murphy opened his cab door and fought his way through the bales of straw to the road. He had but one instinct, to get as far away from there as possible as fast as he could. The farmer would never recognize him in the darkness. Even as he climbed down, he recalled he had not had time to wipe the interior of the cab of all his fingerprints.

The farmer had squelched his way out of the silage and was standing on the road beside Murphy's cab reeking of an odour that will never really catch on with the aftershave industry. It was evident he wished for a few moments of Murphy's time. Murphy thought fast. He would appease the farmer and offer to help him reload his trailer. At the first opportunity he would wipe his prints off the inside of the cab, and at the second vanish into the darkness.

It was at this moment that the police patrol car arrived. It is a strange thing about police cars; when you need one they are like strawberries in Greenland. Scrape a few inches of paint off someone else's body work and they come out of the gratings. This one had escorted a minister from Dublin to his country home near Annamoe and was returning to the capital. When Murphy saw the headlights he thought it was just another motorist; as the lights doused he saw it was the real thing. It had a Garda sign on the roof, and this one did light up.

The sergeant and the constable walked slowly past the immobilized tractor-trailer and surveyed the tumbled bales. Murphy realized there was nothing for it but to bluff the whole thing out. In the darkness he could still get away with it.

'Yours?' asked the sergeant, nodding at the artic.

'Yes,' said Murphy.

'A long way from the main roads,' said the sergeant.

'Aye, and late too,' said Murphy. 'The ferry was late at Rosslare this afternoon and I wanted to deliver this lot and get home to my wee bed.'

'Papers,' said the sergeant.

Murphy reached into the cab and handed him Liam Clarke's sheaf of documents.

'Liam Clarke?' asked the sergeant.

Murphy nodded. The documents were — in perfect order. The constable had been examining the tractor and came back to his sergeant.

'One of your man's headlights doesn't work,' he said, nodding at the farmer, 'and the other's covered with clay. You would not see this rig at ten yards.'

The sergeant handed Murphy the documents back and transferred his attention to the farmer. The latter, all self-justification a few moments ago, began to look defensive. Murphy's spirits rose.

'I wouldn't want to make an issue of it,' he said, 'but the garda's right. The tractor and trailer were completely invisible.'

'You have your licence?' the sergeant asked the farmer.

'It's at home,' said the farmer.

'And the insurance with it, no doubt,' said the sergeant. 'I hope they're both in order. We'll see in a minute. Meanwhile you can't drive on with faulty headlights. Move the trailer onto the field and clear the bales off the road. You can collect them all at first light. We'll run you home and look at the documents at the same time.'

Murphy's spirits rose higher. They would be gone in a few minutes. The constable began to examine the lights of the artic. They were in perfect order. He moved to look at the rear lights.

'What's your cargo?' asked the sergeant.

'Fertilizer,' said Murphy. 'Part peat moss, part cow manure. Good for roses.'

The sergeant burst out laughing. He turned to the farmer who had towed the trailer off the road into the field and was throwing the bales after it. The road was almost clear.

'This one's carrying a load of manure,' he said, 'but you're the one up to your neck in it.' He was amused by his wit.

The constable came back from the rear of the artic's trailer section. 'The doors have sprung open,' he said. 'Some of the sacks have fallen in the road and burst. I think you'd better have a look, sarge.'

The three of them walked back down the side of the artic to the rear.

A dozen sacks had fallen out of the back of the open doors and four had split open. The moonlight shone on the heaps of brown fertilizer between the torn plastic. The constable had his torch out and played it over the mess. As Murphy told his cellmate later, there are some days when nothing, but absolutely nothing, goes right.

By moon and torchlight there was no mistaking the great maw of the bazooka jutting upwards, nor the shapes of the machine guns protruding from the torn sacks. Murphy's stomach turned.

The Irish police do not normally carry handguns, but when on escort duty for a minister, they do. The sergeant's automatic was pointing at Murphy's stomach.

Murphy sighed. It was just one of those days. He had not only failed signally to hijack 9000 bottles of brandy, but had managed to intercept someone's clandestine arms shipment and he had little doubt who that 'someone' might be. He could think of several places he would like to be for the next two years, but the streets of Dublin were not the safest places on that list.

He raised his hands slowly.

'I have a little confession to make,' he said.