Secret Asset

12

I hate these early morning starts, thought Liz. It was still only nine-fifteen and she was already halfway across the Irish Sea. The journey so far had been the usual nightmare—a packed Tube train and then the frustrating waiting around at Heathrow as the flight in from Belfast was delayed. You never know what to wear when you start so early, reflected Liz. She had chosen her new linen jacket—a risky option for this time of year and for a journey in a packed plane. Linen always looked so good on the hanger, but after half an hour’s wear it could assume the contours of a crushed rag. Luckily she’d been able to hang it on a hook in front of her seat on the plane, and she had every hope it would arrive in a reasonable state.

As she gazed out of the window and saw the shelf of cloud sticking out from Wales give way to blue sky, her mood lightened. Perhaps this trip was going to be more productive and enjoyable than she expected.

She was glad she had only brought hand luggage when she saw the crowds round the baggage carousel, and she was first at the Avis counter where, using her driving licence in the alias of Falconer, she rented a Renault 5.

She drove around the outskirts of the city to avoid the tail end of rush-hour traffic. She enjoyed driving, though she found the Renault underpowered compared to her own Audi, and she pushed it on, not wanting to be late for her appointment. Dr. Liam O’Phelan, Lecturer in Irish Studies, Queen’s University Belfast.

It felt strange returning to Belfast after ten years. Thank God I no longer have to check whether the car is being followed, or worry whether someone has put a bomb under it, she thought. Both had been standard concerns when she was last here, in the era when security was precarious.

She thought back to her first posting, several months on the Northern Ireland desk. Based in Thames House she had spent three short stints in Belfast. She remembered how nervous she’d been on her first visit with expectations of violence, fostered by the television images of armoured cars and rioting mobs she had grown up with. But she had missed the worst of the Troubles. In her time there in the mid-nineties, Northern Ireland was on the cusp of peace. There was an occasional sectarian killing, but overall the fragile cease-fire held.

Not that there weren’t plenty of other opportunities for conflict, mused Liz, though of a non-violent sort, between the Northern Ireland office, the intelligence-gathering factions of MI5, Army Intelligence, and the then Royal Ulster Constabulary and its Special Branch. She’d had a rapid education in the politics of intelligence-gathering in Northern Ireland. I had to grow up fast, she thought now, remembering how when she’d been given a low-level informant to run, she’d discovered an RUC Special Branch officer trying to pinch him. I soon sorted him out, thought Liz with satisfaction.

Driving north on Stranmillis Road, past the lush Botanic Gardens, Liz parked on a quiet, tree-lined side street off University Road. The neighbourhood of the University was an oasis of calm respected by both sides of the sectarian divide. She walked diagonally across the lawn of a quadrangle, ringed by Victorian High Gothic buildings, looking enviously at the students sprawled on the grass with their books, soaking up the sun, an oddly summer-like scene for May. She felt a pang at the sight. So familiar and so carefree.

With a few false starts, she eventually found the Institute of Irish Studies, one of a row of grey Victorian houses. Liam O’Phelan had his office on the second floor.

He had been almost prissily precise about the time he would see her (11:45 a.m.) but when she found his room and knocked on the door there was no reply. Then a voice called out from along the corridor, “Just coming.”

From the file Peggy had given her, Liz knew that O’Phelan was forty-two, but his thinning hair and worry lines made him look older. He wore a pale green tweed jacket and flannel trousers. She’d seen many versions of that jacket on middle-aged men who frequented her mother’s garden centre, but this one was beautifully cut, and didn’t look as if it had been within a mile of a potting shed.

“Dr. O’Phelan.”

“That’s right,” he said extending a dry soft hand. He looked at her with sharp blue-green eyes. “And you must be Miss Falcon. My favourite bird of prey.”

“Falconer, actually,” she said.

“Better still,” he said as he opened the door.

The lavish, almost voluptuous decoration of the room took her aback. It was not what she expected in this otherwise drab house. At one end there was a false fireplace of white marble, and covering the wooden floor, oriental rugs in reds and blues. The walls were studded with paintings, prints and drawings, and she recognised portraits of Yeats and Joyce.

O’Phelan motioned Liz to one of two old stuffed armchairs in the middle of the room. “Please sit down,” he said formally, “and I’ll make some coffee.”

While he did, Liz got her papers out and looked at the notes she’d drafted the night before. She never stuck rigidly to any order of questioning, preferring to let an interview develop naturally, but she wanted to make sure she got answers to all her questions.

O’Phelan brought a tray with two china cups and saucers, and placed them on the small table between them. Sitting down, he languidly crossed one leg over a knee, and sipped the hot coffee, while Liz discreetly examined him. He had straight sandy-coloured hair, slightly crooked teeth and a thin straight nose. Like a younger Peter O’Toole, she reflected.

“You’re here to talk to me about one of my old students, I gather.” His accent was cultivated, with none of the harsh burr of an Ulsterman.

“That’s right. Michael Binding.”

“And you’re from the Ministry of Defence.” He was watching her carefully.

“Yes. You wrote a reference for him when he first applied to the MOD. You do remember him?”

“Very well,” announced O’Phelan. He raised his forefinger, as if to make an announcement. “I was his thesis supervisor but not for very long. He switched supervisors when I left Oxford to come here.”

“Is that normal practice?”

“What? For me to come here?” He laughed lightly at his deliberate misunderstanding. “Actually, it depends. In his case I think he probably wanted to change. Certainly I did.”

“You didn’t get on?”

O’Phelan shrugged. “Not particularly, but that was neither here nor there. I didn’t agree with his whole approach.”

“To his thesis?” O’Phelan nodded, and she asked curiously, “What was it about?”

“Charles Stewart Parnell.”

“Anything in particular about Parnell?”

He seemed surprised by her interest. “His political speeches. How they reflected the politics of the age, and vice versa. Usual stuff. It was only an MLitt.”

“But you say you didn’t like the line he took.”

“No, I thought it entirely wrong. Of course, I’m of the school of historians which Conor Cruise O’Brien once called ‘highbrow Fenian.’ Parnell to me is first and foremost an Irish nationalist.”

He seemed to be savouring his words, as if mentally punctuating the sentences as he spoke. He continued, “Binding saw him only in the context of British parliamentary democracy. He seemed to believe that if Parnell had been lucky enough to be English, he would have done great things—on the other side of the Irish Sea.”

“Whereas you think Parnell was great as he was?”

Liz waited for his reply.

“Absolutely,” he said, and for the first time there was enthusiasm in his voice. “But the fundamental problem I had with Binding wasn’t that we held different views. I mean, if I taught only people who agreed with me I wouldn’t be a very busy man. No, it was rather—how shall I put this politely?—the simple fact that he wasn’t very good.”

He elaborated on this for a few minutes, explaining in soft tones that Binding had been poor at research, neither thought nor wrote clearly, and, in short, had possessed none of the basic intellectual skills one expected of a postgraduate student at Oxford University.

It was a masterpiece of denigration, couched in tones of such apparent regret that it took Liz a moment to see it for the poisonous demolition job it was. Even O’Phelan found the front of ostensible charity impossible to sustain, and he concluded witheringly: “I was astonished to learn that his thesis had been accepted.”

“I see,” said Liz neutrally. She picked up her pencil from the table. “I also wanted to ask you about his private life.”

“Ask away, but I’m not sure I’ll be able to help you. I didn’t know him particularly well. I was at St. Antony’s and he was at another college—Oriel, I think. One of the smaller ones at any rate.”

“Do you know if he had many friends?”

O’Phelan shook his head. “No I don’t.”

“Or girlfriends?”

He paused and smiled slightly. “He had girlfriends—more than one.”

“Really?”

“Yes. They used to wait for him sometimes when he came to see me. It happened several times, and there were at least two different girls. I remember thinking, ‘Such devotion.’”

Liz smiled politely. “Did he belong to clubs or play a sport?”

O’Phelan opened his hands to express mild bewilderment. “That’s not something I would know, I’m afraid.”

“What about politics? Was he interested?”

O’Phelan looked thoughtful. “He was, as a matter of fact. More than most of my pupils at any rate. He loved to argue the toss—he liked to quote the Daily Telegraph at me, as if that were an impartial source.”

“So he was a Conservative?”

“Yes. But then so in many ways I am too. It was on the subject of Ireland we disagreed. He’d bring in some Anglo-Protestant rubbish and quote it to me, probably just to annoy me. It usually did.”

After a few more questions, Liz made a show of checking her list, but O’Phelan had told her what she wanted to know about Binding.

I wonder, she thought, and, reaching down into her briefcase, she extracted another sheet of paper from a folder. “If you don’t mind, I’d like to read you a list of names—they are people who were at Oxford at about the same time as Binding. I’m just wondering if you knew any of them.”

And she slowly started to read out the names of the others on her list of suspects, while out of the corner of her eye she watched O’Phelan’s reaction. But he sat still, his face impassive and his hands in his lap.

Then suddenly, when she was almost through, he leapt up. “Excuse me a minute,” he said. “I think there’s someone at the door.” He went and opened it and stuck his head out. “Ryan, I shan’t be long now.”

He returned, saying, “I beg your pardon,” and sat down again.

Liz read out the last name on the list: “Steven Ogasawara.”

O’Phelan shook his head. He smiled apologetically. “I’m afraid none of them means a thing to me.” He raised his forefinger again, this time as if to correct himself. “That doesn’t mean I didn’t know them once. As any teacher will tell you, students come and students go—one simply can’t remember all their names.”

“That seems entirely understandable,” said Liz. “Well, thank you very much for your time.”

“Not at all,” said O’Phelan and he stood up when Liz did and walked with her to the door. “Let me know if I can be of any further help,” he said, then opening the door peered out. “Young Ryan seems to have disappeared.”