Jack Higgins - The wolf at the door

Billy said, "Where did you live? Near here?"

"Lodge Lane, a Victorian back-to-back. He opened up the attic, my father did, put a bathroom in. A little palace by the time he had finished with it."

"Do you ever go back?"

"Nothing to go back to. The fella who tried to incinerate you, Costello/Docherty? His address was Point Street. We'll take a look."

"Will you still know your way?"

"Like the back of my hand, Billy, so just follow what I tell you."

Which Billy did, ending up in a street of terrace houses, doors opening to the pavement. There were cars of one kind or another parked here and there, but it was remarkably quiet.

"This is going back a few years," Billy said as they drew up.

The door of number 5 was interesting for two reasons. First, there was yellow scene-of-crime police tape across it, forbidding entrance. Second, a formal black mourning wreath hung from the door knocker.

"Interesting," Dillon said, and got out, and Billy followed. The curtain twitched at the window of the next house. "Let's have words. Knock them up." Billy did.

The door opened, and a young woman in jeans and a smock, holding a baby, appeared. "What is it?" she asked with what Dillon easily recognized as a Derry accent.

Billy flashed his MI5 warrant card. "Police. We're just checking that everything's okay."

"Your lot have been and gone hours ago. They explained that Docherty had been killed in a car accident. I don't know why they've sealed the door."

"To stop anyone getting in."

"He lived on his own, kept himself to himself."

"What, not even a girlfriend?"

"I never even saw him with a boyfriend, though he was of that persuasion if you ask me."

Dillon turned on his Belfast accent. "Is that a fact, girl dear? But one friend, surely, to leave that mourning wreath?"

She warmed to him at once. "Ah, that's Caitlin Daly, for you. A heart of gold, that woman, and goodness itself."

"Well, God bless her for that," Dillon told her. "A fine child you've got there."

"Why, thank you." She was beaming now.

They got in the Cooper, and Billy drove away. "You don't half turn it on when it suits you."

"Fifteen Green Street, now. Just follow my directions."

Billy did as he was told. "What's the point? We know Pool lived on his own. I thought you wanted to go and look up the local priest?"

"We'll get to that, so just do as I say," and Dillon gave him his directions.

The houses in Green Street were substantial: Edwardian and semi-detached, with a small garden in front and a narrow path around the side leading to a rear garden.

"This is better," Billy said. "No garages, though."

"People who lived here in 1900 had no need for garages."

Dillon opened a gate and walked up to the front door through the garden, followed by Billy. The door was exactly the same as the one in Point Street, with the police tape across it and the black mourning wreath hanging from the knocker.

"Caitlin Daly again, it would appear."

The door of the adjacent house was within touching distance over the hedge. It opened now, and a white-haired lady peered out. Dillon turned on the charm again, this time pulling out his own warrant card.

"Police," he told her. "Just checking that all is well."

The woman was very old, he could see that, and obviously distressed. "Such a tragedy. The police sergeant this morning told me he died in a terrible crash somewhere in central London. I can't understand it. I've driven with him, and he was so careful. A professional chauffeur."

"Yes, it's very sad," Dillon told her.

"I knew his mother, Mary, so well, a lovely Irish lady." She was rambling now. "Widowed for years, a nurse. It was a great blow to him when she died. Eighty-one, she was. From Cork."

Dillon said gently, "I know it well. Wasn't Michael Collins himself a Cork man?

"Who?" she said.

"I'm sorry, and me thinking you were Mrs. Caitlin Daly?" She looked bewildered. "The mourning wreath on the door."

"Oh, I'm not Caitlin, and I saw her leave it earlier. Her mother was a wonderful friend to me. Died last year from lung cancer. Only seventy-five. She was still living with Caitlin at the presbytery by the church. But Caitlin isn't married, never was. She's been housekeeper to Father Murphy for years. Used to teach at the Catholic school. Now she just looks after the presbytery and Father Murphy and two curates." She was very fey now. "Oh, dear, I've got it wrong again. He's Monsignor Murphy, now. A wonderful man."

Dillon gave her his best smile. "You've been very kind. God bless you."

They went back to the Cooper, and Billy said, as he settled behind the wheel, "Dillon, you'd talk the Devil into showing you the way out of hell. The information you got out of that old duck beggars belief."

"A gift, Billy," Dillon told him modestly. "You've got to be Irish to understand."

"Get stuffed," Billy told him.

"Sticks and stones," Dillon said. "But everything that befuddled old lady told me was useful information."

"I heard. Pool was wonderful, so was his mother, this Caitlin bird is beyond rubies, and, as for the good Monsignor Murphy, from the sound of it they got him from central casting." He turned left on Dillon's instructions. "Mind you, he must be good to get that kind of rank in a local church where he's their priest-in-charge."

"Turn right now," Dillon told him. "And what would you be knowing about it?"

"I've never talked much about my childhood, Dillon. My old man was a very violent man, killed in gang warfare when I was three. My mum was married to Harry's brother, and she was an exceptional lady who died of breast cancer when I was nineteen. I really went off the rails after that."

"Which is understandable."

"It was Harry who pulled me round, and you, you bastard, when you entered our lives. You introduced me to philosophy, remember, gave me a sense of myself."

"So where is this leading?" Dillon asked.

The Cooper turned another corner and pulled up outside their destination. "Church of the Holy Name," it said on the painted signboard beside the open gate, along with the times of Confession and Mass. The building had a Victorian-Gothic look to it, which made sense because it was only in the Victorian era that Roman Catholics by law were allowed to build churches again. Dillon saw a tower, a porch, a vast wooden door bound in iron in a failed attempt to achieve a medieval look.

They stayed in the car for a few moments. Billy said, "The thing is, my mother was a strict Roman Catholic. Not our Harry. He doesn't believe in anything he can't put his hand on, but she really put me onstage. When I was a kid, I was an acolyte. I tell you, Dillon, it meant everything to her when it was my turn to serve at Mass."

"I know," Dillon said. "Scarlet cassock, white cotta."

"Don't tell me you did that?"

"I'm afraid so, and, Billy, I've really got news for you. I did it in this very church we're about to enter. I was twelve when my father brought me from Northern Ireland to live with him in Kilburn. That means it was thirty-seven years ago when I first entered this church, and the priest in charge is the same man, James Murphy. As I recall, he was born in 1929, which would make him eighty."

"But why didn't you mention that to Ferguson and the others? What's going on? I knew something was, Dillon. Talk to me."

Dillon sat there for a moment longer, then took out his wallet and from one of the pockets produced a prayer card. It was old, creased, slightly curling at the golden edges. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death, we who are ourselves alone.

"Jesus, Dillon." Billy took it from him. "Where the hell did this come from?"

"It was Father James Murphy, as he was then, who first received the news of my father's death in that firefight in Belfast, an incident that turned me into what I am, shaped my whole life. 'A casualty of war,' he told me, gave me the card, and begged me to pray." He smiled bleakly, took the card, and replaced it in the wallet. "So here we are. Let's go in, shall we? I see from the board someone's hearing confessions in there, although it may not be the great man himself."