It was the middle of the following week when Bill got the call he was expecting from the Police forensic science laboratory.
“We’ve been able to trace the spent ammunition and cartridges you brought in,” said his contact. “Interesting. The weapon has been used at least three times in the past. A couple of sectarian murders of Protestant hardliners some three years ago, then a kneecapping in the Falls Road, which we took to be a punishment shooting. But then nothing, until this.”
“So it’s an IRA weapon?” asked Bill.
“No doubt about it, but until now, it hasn’t been used for about three years.”
“Any sign of the weapon?”
“That’s interesting, too,” came the reply. “As it happens, we only picked it up within the last two weeks. We found it stuffed down the back of the sofa in Father Sean Doyle’s flat.”
Major Bill Clayton briefed his team on this astonishing news.
“You’re not saying, are you,” asked Brian Foley, “that Sean Doyle killed Edward Benbow?”
“No,” replied Bill, “but it was his Smith and Wesson that was used, so he must have authorised it and provided the weapon.”
“Why, on earth?” asked Catherine Wilson.
“Well, we can’t ask him,” said Bill, “but my guess is – and that’s all this is – my guess is that he thought Benbow had been responsible in some way for blowing the ‘Hercules’ out of the water, on her way from Libya with the IRA arms.”
“The significance of all this is lost on me,” said Brian Foley.
“The significance is,” proffered Nick Marsden, “that your chum Father Sean Doyle was a double agent.”
“I’m very much afraid that I think you’re right, Nick,” said Bill. “There’s no other possible explanation. And it begins to look as if the red herring he spoke of in his letter was not the trail of child pornography which he had left, so much as his second, scribbled note, naming Alistair Vaughan.”
“If that’s true, then why, in heaven’s name,” asked Catherine, “did he give us that list of bank accounts? Surely, if he really was on their side after all, he would never have done that.”
“Risky, I agree,” said Marsden. “But he must have assumed that the list was useless to us, and that we would never have been able to do anything with it. In that,” concluded Marsden, “he severely under-estimated the talents of our Major Bill Clayton.”
“What’s more to the point,” said Bill “he had obviously never heard of Jim Farlow.”