The baroness was bouncing with impatience. ‘What? Tell me. Tell me.’
‘My hairdresser changing an appointment.’
‘Do you want me to hit you?’
‘I’ll tell you if you stop the car. I’m not telling you anything interesting while you’re driving like that. We’d go straight into the oncoming traffic.’
She bullied her way into the inside lane and drove on to the pavement in a squeal of brakes. ‘Go on. Go on.’
‘There is some justice. Even if McNulty couldn’t make anything stick, Liam paid for what he did. Shot in the back of the head at home in Belfast. Republican sources say it was retaliation for Laochraí. And the FBI say he was in America last year and that Kelly-Mae may well have met him. She was definitely one of those conservative Catholic Irish-Americans who couldn’t understand the new secular, political thrust of republicanism. And she definitely met Mickey Murphy there too.’
‘Who?’
‘The Slievenamná fellow. He hadn’t moved on either.’
‘So why was she killed?’
‘McNulty thinks she was in Liam’s confidence and probably knew or guessed he murdered Laochraí. Whether she shopped him or he feared she might we may never know.’
‘That’s it?’
‘Well, well.’
She switched on the engine. ‘It reminds me of something. Did you ever talk to McNulty’s side-kick, Sergeant whoever?’
‘Not really.’
‘He made an observation to me apropos what I can’t quite remember.’
‘Yes?’
‘“If you lie down with dogs what will you get up with but fleas?”’
She switched on the engine, put the car into gear and slammed her foot down hard on the accelerator.
Notes
* The Fenians were a nineteenth-century revolutionary organization: ‘Fenian’ is a term of abuse for republicans, which they wear as a badge of pride.
* Gaelic
* Proportional representation
* A 1930s Irish anti-IRA, pro-Mussolini and pro-Franco group
* ‘Therefore the ungodly shall not stand in the judgment, nor sinners in the congregation of the righteous.’ Psalms 1:5
* ‘Myself alone’—as opposed to Sinn Féin, ‘Ourselves alone.’
* A hand-held, goatskin drum
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