Alison was becoming more and more frustrated as every question put to Murphy was met either with silence or a muttered ‘No comment’.
Finally, he gave in.
“Right, Mr. Murphy. Clearly we are getting nowhere today. You have been arrested under suspicion of being involved in a potential terrorist act and under the Counter-terrorism Act of two thousand and eight, I can hold you for up to forty-eight hours – which I fully intend to do – and at the end of the forty-eight hours I can apply to a judge for a further extension, which again I fully intend to do.”
Murphy remained impassive. He knew that the police had nothing to go on; the fact that he had hired three vehicles on the same day from different companies – so what? Of itself that wasn’t a crime and unless the pigs could find those vans and their contents, they had nothing.
He was, however, concerned about O’Connell. By now they should have been meeting to sort out somewhere for the bomb maker to stay – remaining in the lock-up was scarcely a suitable course of action. Whilst the remote triggers for the three bombs were not yet live, just having to breath the same air as pounds of fertiliser in a confined space was hardly pleasant.
The thought of remaining in police custody for over forty-eight hours was also worrying him – it would take him past the anniversary date and spoil, at least in part, what he had planned. He was confident that, sooner or later, the police would have to release him, and then he could get things moving again, but it would have to be done very carefully – he was sure that, once free again, the police would retain their interest in him; he could hardly expect to go about his business as usual.
He also wondered about the Maggs brothers. His original plan was the brothers would drive the vans, leaving them at the spots identified by a careful reconnaissance of the Corporation Street area, whilst he himself drove the Mondeo and triggered the explosions. Again, today he should have been meeting with the brothers to finalise things – without meeting him, what would they do?
Alison returned to his office whilst Murphy was taken back to the holding cell to be met with more news. Once again it was DC MacLaine – Alison felt that the girl was becoming something of a lucky mascot in this affair.
“Sir, we’ve tracked those three vehicles on Number Plate Recognition cameras. Haven’t got a final resting place for them, but they all headed towards the same area – a pretty run-down area with several disused warehouses and the like.”
She laid a street map down on Alison’s desk and used her index finger to trace out an approximately square area roughly two hundred yards on a side.
She jabbed her finger down on a road junction.
“All three vehicles were picked up by the camera here,” she jabbed the finger down again, indicating a further road junction almost quarter of a mile from the first, “but none of them passed this camera here, which they would have had to do if they drove beyond the area.”
Alison nodded his understanding.
“Right, good work again. I’ll have the area searched.”
It took a couple of hours to arrange, but by mid-afternoon the whole area was swarming with uniformed police as they sought the missing vehicles.
They missed Liam O’Connell by less than half an hour. Finally wearying of the stench of the fertiliser and the failure of Murphy to appear, the Irishman left the lock-up and walked the hundred yards or so to where he had parked Murphy’s car and drove away. He actually passed one of the police vans as it headed for the area that he was vacating and he wondered uneasily if it had anything to do with Murphy’s failure to appear and he kept on driving until he was out of the city and headed into the Lancashire countryside.
With no specific destination in mind, he took the M62 heading east and was almost at Huddersfield when a thought struck him. If the police had indeed cottoned on to Murphy, might they not be also looking for his car, the very car that he was at the moment driving?
Cursing the way that everything seemed to be going wrong, he turned off the motorway at the very next junction, the New Hey Road, and followed it to the outskirts of Huddersfield itself, before turning off again into a maze of residential streets where he left the car and walked back to the bus route. An hour and a half later he was on the train from Huddersfield to Glasgow.
***********************
Alison was only too aware that he was treading a tightrope. He was holding Murphy based more on supposition than on hard evidence and he badly needed some of the latter if the man wasn’t going to walk free in two days at the most.
He was in luck; the flood of officers searching the area that had been identified were accompanied by sniffer dogs, and Rosie, a four year old Golden Labrador bitch famous in the force for her ability to sniff out noxious substances, was soon pawing excitedly at the door of first one door, then another, of a row of three lock-up garages. The officers were led by Chief Inspector Garry Hammond, a uniformed officer of twenty years’ experience and one not frightened of using his own initiative. He looked at the dog, then at the three doors. He turned to a burly constable carrying a ram.
“Break down that door,” he instructed, pointing at the door which seemed to have most excited Rosie; one swing of the ram and the door burst off its tracks – and an Aladdin’s cave was laid bare. It was the garage within which resided the hired Mondeo, the garage within which O’Connell had actually plied his deadly trade; ten minutes later and all three garages were open, the whole site sealed off with ‘Do Not Cross’ tape and the Bomb Disposal Unit on its way. Hammond phoned through the good news to Alison.
“Got him,” Alison exulted at the news. He turned to DC MacLaine who had been coordinating the results of the property searches as they had been radioed in.
“Shirley, get onto Scientific Services – I want a full forensic team crawling over those garages as soon as the bomb disposal people have declared the area safe.”
As she hurried to do his bidding, Alison leant back in his office chair and exhaled a long, heart-felt sigh of relief. At last he had the concrete evidence that he had needed; for the first time Donal Murphy was going to find himself behind bars for a long, long, time. In fact, the cancer would claim Murphy’s life well before he even came to trial, but Alison had no way of knowing that at the time.
The results of the forensic team’s work could scarcely have been better. The prints of Murphy were on all three vehicles and O’Connell’s and Murphy’s were on the bombs themselves and their trigger devices. The second interview of Murphy elicited no more information from the man than had the first, but it mattered not. The physical evidence was irrefutable. The only fly in the ointment was that O’Connell was still at large somewhere, and Murphy refused to give any clue as to where that ‘somewhere’ might possibly be.
The anniversary of the nineteen ninety-six bombings passed without incident. Alison and his team were congratulated by the Chief Constable, no less, and Alison treated the whole team to a slap-up dinner – they had all worked their fingers to the bone, knowing only too well that if they failed the centre of Manchester could have been visited by unimaginable carnage.
As Alison happily put away a fourth glass of wine with the meal, he reflected that the only remaining fly in the ointment was the disappearance of O’Connell – where was that bloody man?
************************
That ‘bloody man’ was in Glasgow, welcomed with open arms by an earlier cellmate. Mark Harris wasn’t Irish – and if the police ever thought of looking as far afield as Glasgow, that was a plus factor. Whilst inside, the two men had formed a mutually supportive duo – mess with one and you messed with both. Their cooperation was based on the fact that they both had an undying hatred for the British government – O’Connell from his love of the concept of a united Ireland, Harris because, as a long time and self-professed anarchist, he simply hated governments per se.
Harris had been released just over a year before O’Connell. His crime had been far less serious – property damage in that he had, whilst somewhat inebriated, set fire to the local offices of the Department of Work and Pensions. The sentence might have been somewhat perfunctory but for the fact that, whilst being arrested red-handed, he had turned on a woman police constable and slashed her face with a Stanley knife. The result had been a ten year sentence and during the course of that sentence he and O’Connell had shared a cell for nearly five years before Harris had been released. They had realised that they were kindred souls and, whilst not swearing on a stack of Bibles or the like, had agreed to help each other to the best of their ability should the need ever arise.
So far as O’Connell was concerned, the need had now arisen.
“So, Liam, what brings you to the finest city on the planet?”
“I’m on the run, Mark, and I’ll make no bones of it – the Manchester pigs would just love to receive my head on a platter. I could tell you all, but to be honest, if I don’t tell you, nobody can squeeze it out of you – are you happy with that? I promise you that had I not been let down by the [censored] incompetence of those trying to help me, then the British government would have had a right kick in the balls.”
“That’s good enough for me, mate – how can I help?”
“I need a place to stay – and I wouldn’t [censored] you – the Manchester police are really after me – so it could be a risk for anybody who puts me up.”
“Don’t worry on that score, me old mate – I can think of a number of places with folk in them who’d be only too chuffed to put one up on the establishment. Some of the folk make you and me look like right wing Tories!”
By the end of the day O’Connell was settled in with a small group of youngsters – three men and three girls, all aged between twenty and twenty five – in a large flat in a tower block in the Cumbernauld area, a flat which had seen better days but which was luxury compared to O’Connell’s last place of residence in the Manchester lock-up garage. None of his fellow flat dwellers were worried by the fact that he was on the run, and when that was verified by the news in the media over the next couple of days, they were impressed by the fact that he was being sought by the police and was described as armed and dangerous. O’Connell read the newspaper report of the success of the Manchester police in thwarting an attempted IRA bomb attack with anger – that idiot Murphy clearly hadn’t got a brain in his head to have failed so miserably. The ‘armed’ bit was an irritation as well – with Murphy in the hands of the police the promised UZI obviously had never appeared and O’Connell was nowhere nearer to settling the score with Lamb than he had been whilst still in prison. But settle the score he would, he told himself grimly; the deaths of his brothers demanded nothing less.
His plan of action was simplicity itself. He would stay in Glasgow, where nobody was looking for him, until the heat died down, and then he would return to Manchester and kill Lamb. The first part was easy; whilst he had initially been worried that one of his flatmates might inform the police of his presence, it rapidly became clear that, on the rare occasions they were compos mentis and not on a drug induced high, that they saw him as some sort of folk hero trying to strike out at the establishment on behalf of the downtrodden. Their fantasy, whilst it struck O’Connell as idiotic, was very welcome.
The second part of the plan wasn’t quite so easy. With Murphy out of the reckoning he had no readily available source of a weapon and he felt that to try and acquire anything would be dangerous, at least in the short term. He had discussed the matter with Harris, who had assured him that a gun of some sort would be easy enough – a pistol or a shotgun, but that a sub-machine gun was another matter entirely. Thinking it over, O’Connell decided to lower his expectations – Lamb would be just as dead if cut down by a blast from a shotgun or a bullet from a pistol; the desire to see him go down from a hail of bullets from the sort of weapon that Lamb himself had used to kill Kenneth and Fergus, which O’Connell had seen as poetic justice, wasn’t the over-riding priority. Just killing the bloody man was.
