It was the dawn.
The start of another day.
The dawn was the start of the 342nd day since Jon Jo Donnelly had taken the Aer Lingus to Paris and ban in transit two hours and then been carried on a Lufthansa flight to Munich and then caught the British Airways aircraft to London's Heathrow.
The rain came with the dawn.
It fell hard against the upper branches of the forest.
The rain careered down onto the roofing of the ground-sheet. There was the spatter of the rain above his head.
Jon Jo sat under his cover.
He was cross-legged and his arms were folded over his stomach.
Beside him was the torn wrapping paper of a biscuit packet. He had eaten the whole of the packet of shortbreads.
Perhaps it was because of the rain but there were few birds calling the dawn's arrival, only the robin to which he threw the last of the biscuit crumbs. The robin was without fear of him and strutted close to the hide and challenged him for more of the shortbread biscuits. He watched the robin. He saw the proud in advancing on him. He wondered, if he had not wolfed down the biscuits, if he had filled his hand with crumbs and stretched his hand out whether the bird would have had the courage to come to take crumbs from the palm of his hand.
It was as if he sought to find a peace for himself.
He was. still. He sat quite motionless. The robin danced in front of him.
For 250 of those days since he had come to London he had prepared himself for the campaign that was his own. He had found the safe houses, he had bought the cars that were paid for in cash. He had accumulated the documentation that came from the forgers in Dublin.
He had received the dribble of weapons, and the timing devices, and the detonators, and the explosives that were sometimes hand-carried on the cross-Channel ferry and sometimes landed from a fishing boat on the remote stretch of the north Cornish coast in a cove near Gurnard's Head. For 90 of those days he had fought his war. He sat without movement to find again the strength that was needed of a soldier. He took his strength, bled it, from the home that was his, and the woman that was his, and the boy child that was his. He took strength, leached it, from the mountain that was his. They would none of them know, the mass that would flow through a main-line railway station, of his home and his woman and his child and his mountain.
Only the fall of the rain around him and the cheerful strut of the robin.
He thought of the bar in the village, where there was singing and where there were his friends. He thought of the land around the small farm, where the bracken and gorse had been driven back first by his grandfather and then by his father and then by himself. He thought of the church in the village where he had made his first Communion, and where he had stood awkward in his suit and tight in his collar and held little Kevin for baptism. He thought of the neighbours that he had known, who had never left him to feel alone, good men and good women, Mrs Riordan and Mrs Devitt and Mrs Nugent, and Pius Blaney who drove the milk cart and never cursed not even when there was snow on the mountain slope, and the difficult old bugger who was old Hegarty. He thought of the good times, when the Armalite had pounded against his shoulder, when he had watched through binoculars as the road to Aghnagar had lifted under the unmarked police car, when they had taken over the road from Coalisland to Stewartstown and there had been more than twenty of them and they had blasted the barracks at Stewartstown with machine guns and the R.P.G. 7 rocket launcher and sprayed the roof with diesel oil and petrol to get the big fire going… good times. It was his place, they were his people. It was Jon Jo's place, the place of his family's graves. It was Jon Jo's home, the home of the war.
The Strength grew in his body The peace nettled on his mind.
For the first time since the dawn light had come he shifted from where he had sat. He crouched over the flattened ground beneath the cover of his hide. Among the dead squashed leaves, among the grass stems, he found more crumbs, and he tossed them out to the robin and he willed the bird to find them where they had scattered.
He moved away from the hide.
Three times, between the hide and the cache, he stopped and froze against a tree trunk and listened to the rain laning in the forest. He listened for voices and for footsteps, and for the sound of a command whistle to a dog. There was only the clatter of the rain dropping from the upper branches.
He lined up the position of the cache. The uprooted base of a tree and away from it the dead elm disfigured with ivy. That was how he always found the holly tree where the dustbin was buried. He dug with his hands, pushed aside the mulch and then the soil. The lightweight kitchen gloves were on his hands, he look the Semtex explosive and the detonator and the wiring and the timer from the dustbin, and the ice cream box and the adhesive tape. It was difficult to work at the assembly wearing the gloves. He was too careful ever to take off the gloves; Jon Jo could have reeled them off, the names ol the men who had made bombs and who had not worn gloves, and who rotted in the mainland gaols.
It took him half the morning to make the bomb.
He scraped the earth and the mulch back over the dustbin. He used a dead twig to scour his footsteps and the indents of his body weight from the ground close to the cache.
The rain had eased.
She hadn't telephoned him, and he wouldn't ring her.
She had the number of the flat and the number of his office at the back of the Department of Environment building, and she hadn't used cither.
If she didn't want to ring him, her problem. If she though he was not up to the job, so be it.
All the while Bren had dressed, and all the while he had eaten his breakfast, he had looked at the telephone in the flat, willed it to ring, cursed it for its silence.
All the while he had sat in his office, turned file papers, made coffee, tried for the hell of it to master the intricacy of the dual carriage projects and the salary restructuring programme for clerical workers, he waited for any of his telephones to ring. The quiet burgeoned round him. Nothing on the receiver that was linked to the building switchboard, nothing on the telephone that Song Bird would have used, nothing on the line that was Cathy's alone. Always talk and always movement in the Curzon Street complex of desks where the Irish unit was housed. This was bloody. Being stuck in a room at the back of a building, where no one came and where the telephone didn't ring, that was a sort of hell to him. He had cracked by the middle of the day. He had rung Hobbes. He'd marked Hobbes down, supercilious bastard, and he was most certainly not going to be spilling to Hobbes that Miss Cathy Parker had cut him out. Trying to be casual. Had time on his hands. Any suggestions as to where he might go, what might be useful?
Hobbes hadn't sounded as if he cared and hadn't sounded as if he was surprised. Just curt. He should try Mahon Road. He should get himself to Portadown. He'd be expected. He was given a name. Hobbes sounded like there was a crisis that he wasn't prepared to share, and Portadown was the sort of place to dump a bored kid. he did as he was told. He drove to Portadown, and the barracks in Mahon Road, and all the way down the motorway he sought to obliterate Cathy Parker from his mind, and the failure hurt him.
High fencing of rusting steel. Black painted watchtowers. Screens of chicken-wire netting that would prematurely detonate an armour-piercing missile. A call on ahead from the taciturn police at the gate check.
It was indicated to him where he should park.
The parking area where he went was separate from the main mass of vehicles. The big area held the shined, washed Cavaliers and Sierras and Escorts, policemen's cars for driving to and from work. Where Bren parked was a junkyard. Old vans without side windows and with convenient mud masking the number plates, and beaten Fords that were scraped and dented, and what might have doubled as a removal lorry, and a Telecom van and another that had the logo of a bakery with a home delivery service. He went to the weapons pit and cleared his Browning and pocketed it again. From the gate, the two-storey building, dull brickwork, had been pointed out to him.
Bren went inside the outer door. He was stopped. The man was younger than himself and dressed casually and there was a short-barrel machine pistol on the table. Identification… Another phone call through… Passed on.
He went up the stairs, past bare walls. He walked into the big open area. He gazed around him. Half a dozen men and three women bowed over computer consoles. Two men and two women at banks of radio equipment, smoking and reading newspapers and talking quietly and with head sets over their ears. Five's place, Five's back room.
"Hello there…"
A quiet voice close to him. Bren spun on his heel.
He saw the cardboard city man.
"Hello again."
"Jimmy's had to pop out, I said I'd field you."
"Oh, I see…"
There were two others sitting with the cardboard city man. They were all three sprawled on chairs at the far side of the big room to the consoles and the radio and their ashtray was filled and a low table near them was cluttered with their boots and their used coffee beakers.
Bren saw the weapons laid on the floor. They'd have done for farm workers, any of them.
There was a printed sign on the wall above their chairs and their table.
‘Hereford Gub Club. No Entry. Trespassers Will Be Shot'.
Bren could smell them from five paces.
‘’I ll do the introductions. The ugly one's Jocko, the really ugly one's Herbie… Don't bloody eat him, guys, he's Cathy's latest
…"
" Pleased to meet you all, I'm Bren."
He felt the pillock. He stood in his slacks and his jacket and he looked down at three men who wore the mud on their jeans and the dirt on their shirts. He felt the daftness of the name he had given himself, could have crawled away
The cardboard city man said, "Jimmy'll be an hour or so. It's a bad time for him, this, tends to pop off out for a drop of nookie in the middle of the day. How long have you?"
"I've a clear afternoon…"
"When's Cathy picking you up '"
"I'm not meeting her."
He saw the puzzlement cross the face of the cardboard city man. "You don't…"
"I don't know where she is."
After the puzzlement, the frown. Bren saw the hardening of the face.
"She was here four hours ago, half drowned from being out all night.
Changed, and pushed off again… You're not meeting her?"
"That's what I said." He should have stayed in the office in Belfast. He should have pushed paper.
"And you don't know where she is?"
"She hasn't told me," Bren said, tried to closet the humiliation.
"I thought you were minding her."
"When I'm allowed to."
"Christ, old sunshine, you don't stand on bloody ceremony with her.
You don't let her just bloody wander off alone out there. You bloody handcuff yourself to her. You're here to mind that woman…"
The two others, the one called Jocko and the one called Herbie, gazed up at Bren, like he was beneath contempt.
The cardboard city man said, "When Jimmy's shown you round his box of tricks, we'll take you for a drive round, show you the sights, Cathy'll be back by then. Like I said, you tie yourself to her. You don't put up with her shit. You mind her. You don't allow her out there on her own, not ever."
I'd like the drive round," Bren said.
The O.C. had been and gone the previous evening.
The four men and the woman stayed on in Cavan town, slept on what had been proposed, met again in the morning, thrashed round the proposal that had been brought them from County Tyrone,
"He's a major asset where he is, he should be let be," the woman said.
"Be harder for him back in the North, but it's where he knows."
"To be charitable would be to say that he's done his time over there, and done it well."
"Not done as well recent as before, my thought is that he's slipping."
"If he's slipping then he needs out, it's what we'd owe him."
"Was never said it would be easy over there, why he was chosen, take months to get another in place," the woman said.
"Jon Jo's not one to shout, never complain, but the strain on him'd have to be fierce."
"You keep a man in place too long, and you burn him out, gone for ever."
"Leave him there much longer, so's he burned, and he'll be lifted too."
"He'd have had the colonel if he'd been fresh, not have had the kiddies if he'd not gone stale."
"If you pull him out then you chuck away what he's won," the woman said.
"I say he's ready for out."
" The railway bomb, that's the last."
‘’Let him back."
"Worth gold to have him hitting where he knows."
She fought it to the end. She had never met Jon Jo Donnelly. She had a sociology degree gained from University College, Cork. She came from wealth, a prominent Galway legal family. She had never been accepted quite totally. She was a woman. The organization was of men. She had the intellect and the fervour and she had climbed in rank on the back of the quality of her planning She was credited with setting up a gun team in the German city of Hannover that could roam the autobahns in search if off duty British soldiers. She had seen the vulnerability of a Special Branch computer installed in the Monaghan police station and rented the house on the opposite side of the street and found the man with the design skill to build the scanning equipment that could monitor the computer's transmissions. She possessed the ruthlessness to travel to Belfast, take a bedsitter, search out a soldiers' bar, bring a squaddie on a promise back with her, and shoot him dead between the eyes. But, she was a woman, and the Organisation was of men.
"Jon Jo's done his time."
"There'll be hell after the railway."
"Too hot for him, better for him to cool."
"He should be let to rest, after the railway."
The woman said, "You're frightened, you're scared of real war. So, you have Jon Jo back… So, it'll be the Brits that are thanking you…
There'd not be any of you, I hope, looking for the soft way, talks and conversation and dialogue? There'd not be any of you thinking bombings in London block crap negotiation? There'd not be any of you that's weakened…?"
"That's treason talk."
"No call for it."
"We're strong as we ever was, to fight on."
"It's owed to Jon Jo."
He sat in the coffee shop. He nursed the mug in his hands. He could see right across the concourse where the crowds flowed. There were two uniformed policemen on the concourse and he watched them.
They walked and they stood and they answered tourists' questions and they checked a youth who Jon Jo thought might have run from home to the capital. He waited for them to he gone. He could see the rubbish bin, and he could see the crowds that swelled near the ticket hatch as the afternoon wore on closer towards the evening rush.
He felt at peace.
There was a plastic bag on the floor, held upright tight between his ankles.
A woman asked him if he would be so kind as to pass her the salt and pepper that was on his table, for her sandwich, and he smiled and obliged her.
They split at Cavan town.
The woman travelled west for the wild Sligo shoreline that was her home.
Two of the men went due south for the Irish midlands.
The remaining two drove on the Dublin road. It was the way of the Organisation that age counted for little. The youngest at the meeting had been a Belfast man, not yet past his twenty-fourth birthday. He had laid bombs in his home city and in Holland, and he had twice travelled to the eastern states of the U.S.A. to obtain more sophisticated and advanced electronic equipment. The youngest was the passenger in the car headed for Dublin… He had loathed the woman at the meeting since he had first realised that she wanted to bed him, and he thought her hair hideous, and her underwear dirty because he could smell it, and her breath foul, and her politics patronising.. . Jon Jo was gone from his mind. Jon Jo would telephone after the railway bomb, and would be given the decision of the meeting. A greater problem concerned him.
Under his guidance the Organisation had known months of success.
The success had come because they had used for the detonation of bombs the combination of the radar gun that was standard issue to the highway police in the United States, along with the detection devices that warned motorists of the use of the gun and that could be purchased at any Radio Shack store, good and cheap. The army could block them now… It was the laser that was wanted. The army could match the wavelengths; two men dead, their car blown up, to prove it, and the crowing of the Lisburn H.Q. Press Desk for another 'own goal'. A laser signal from the command hide to the bomb, instant detonation
… A real problem, and the one that concerned him now that the matter of Jon Jo Donnelly was settled.
His view, the war at home mattered. His opinion, the war in London was a sideshow. His intention, if that bitch from Sligo ever again accused him of running frightened, going scared, he'd smack the gob off her, break her jaw. His doubt, that the war, wherever, could be won, any time… he dozed. That a bomb rested between Jon Jo Donnelly's ankles in the coffee shop of a
London station was not enough to keep him from his sleep. * He wrote a terse note.
'Ernest, the Prime Minister will see you at 4.45 p.m. today. I understand Sec. of State N I bent his ear this morning. Probably tin hat required. No concessions., please, D.G.'
The Director General of the Security Service usually sent men such as Ernest Wilkins to face Downing Street flak. He seldom attended himself. Not cowardice, of course not. He believed, and he was right, that the operations of Curzon Street were best defended by those who knew most about them. The Prime Minister would know nothing, the Secretary of State would have rehashed a brief given him. Ernest Wilkins would baffle them with detail, perhaps. There was a difficulty, the matter of Miss Parker and a boy tortured to death was most certainly a difficulty. But then, Wilkins was so accomplished in the art of plausible deniability. Accomplished enough? It would depend on the Prime Minister's mood, and it was a pity that the man had as yet shown no recognisable sign of steel.
And if Wilkins failed? Well, time then for further consideration. His brother knew Miss Parker's parents, good landowners. He would stand and fight on the future deployment of Five in Northern Ireland, but the young woman… There was always a good home for Miss Parker to go back to.
He buzzed for his secretary, asked her to take the folded note down to Wilkins, Irish Desk.
Jimmy was bald with a monk's ruff of hair sandwiched between his shined scalp and his ears. He wore thick glasses and Bren would have expected him to be working in a university laboratory. Not the, sort of man that Bren had met in Curzon Street. Jimmy rattled through a brief precis of the work on the second floor of the detached building on Mahon Road as if it were unsatisfactory to be sharing secrets with a mere handler. The computers logged ‘traces’. Traces came from police and uniformed military. Who had been seen, with whom and when and where. Jimmy said that the computers built patterns of behaviour and associates and routines. The radios controlled the bleeps that were issued. The bleeps were carried by informers and by operatives. The channels were monitored twenty-four hours a day and an emergency transmission would be acted on immediately, the necessary information flashed to police and army barracks for Quick Reaction back-up.
Jimmy said that in another area they controlled remote cameras and also the listening bugs that were planted in known arms caches and where it was thought meetings might take place; he didn't seem to want to take Bren to that area, and Bren didn't push. It was the world of back-room men. Bren asked Jimmy if he ever went out into the field and was left with the impression that it would take half a troop of the Special Air Service to be in position as escort before this academic and vague creature would even consider getting cow shit on his shoes. He had gazed around the room. He had wondered which of the technicians monitored Cathy Parker's emergency bleep…
He left with the cardboard city man and the others who were Jocko and Herbie.
The bodywork of the car was dirty, rusted, dented and scraped. The engine purred, ran smooth.
He was given a flat cap to wear and it was pointed out to him that the sooner he got his hair growing long then the happier they would be. He pulled off his tie and buried it in his pocket and wrapped himself in his anorak. Herbie drove and had armed his pistol and laid it on the seat under his thighs. The cardboard city man and the big fellow, Jocko, had Heckler and Kochs.
They drove out onto the street.
Jocko said, North-Country burr, "We're not used to passengers, we don't do the guide book bit. You don't talk unless you're asked to, and what you don't do is anything that might distract us…"
They skirted the shore of Lough Neagh.
They drove flat and straight lanes. They passed small hedged fields that sprouted bog reeds. They went by little and isolated communities of bungalows and Housing Executive homes. They had the rain wipers clearing water from the windscreen…
The cardboard city man said, "We get called to a stake-out, but we may not have time to do the recce the way we'd like. Ideal world, we'd have three, four, days to know the land. Most times we don't get what we'd like, it's hassle and hum". We spend as much time as possible cruising, getting familiar with the ground. It's what we're at today
…"
Going by a pair of semi-detached bungalows, each with a cattle barn at the back.
Jocko said, "Right-hand home, two boys, one's doing fifteen and the other's got eight years. Next door's two decent kids, no trouble, never.
Left-hand side won't touch violence, but they wouldn't interfere, wouldn't even consider picking up the Confidential phone…"
Going by a woman driving a speeding Mini car, seeing fast the throw of her fine black hair to her shoulders.
"… Bloody hard case, that one. Started as a teenie bop at the barracks gates collecting detectives' car registrations, moved up to running messages, on to shifting hardware. She'll kill. She's bad and going to get worse. She'll take stopping, that one…"
Going by a big house, new, white painted rendering, double garage.
Jocko said, "Six times in the last ten years they've had a car pinched for a P.I.R.A. hit. Rings the Organisation to ask for it back, gives 'em hell, wouldn't ever ring the police. If he rang the police and the car was stopped and the boys lifted then he'd be dubbed a collaborator.
Collaborators get nutted. Who'd blame him…"
Going by a young man who drove a cow and three calves on the lane, and who didn't look up at the car as it waited for the road to clear.
Jocko said, "He did nine years, Attempted Murder and Possession of Explosives, served his time and came home. He's one of the best in the community now, does a hell of a good job with handicapped kids. He's never been involved again. They leave him alone because they know he hates them for what he went through in their name, but he wouldn't cross the road for you, me, or a policeman if we were half dead in a ditch with gunshot wounds…"
Going by a bar with a Harp sign above the door and a security camera and big rocks in the forecourt to prevent cars driving against the outer wall and heavy mesh on the windows.
Jocko said, "It got hit by the Protestants, went in and shot two Provos. The Scenes of Crime guys and the detectives weren't allowed inside. A U.D.R. man was shot in retaliation. They did it their own way. They'll remember for ever that two ol their blokes were killed here, they'd have forgotten the day after that a U.D.R. man was killed .. ."
Going through a crossroads, where the high-hedged lanes met.
"History doesn't go away here. Stories lose nothing by the the telling.
Stories are handed down, father to son, family to fanily, close as frogs in a drain here. Listen… This crossroads, anyone'll tell you, was where the Auxiliaries shot the Catholic postman in 1922.. ."
Going by a farmhouse, three hundred yards further.
"… Two lads, one from the farm, best Sunday clothes, go to check a weapons cache, our boys mashed them, middle 1970s…"
Going by a copse, and the road falling away towards a cemetery, bright with white headstones and fresh-cut flowers.
"… That's the wood where the guns were, that's the graveyard where they are, and there's a prison escaper in there with them, shot in the early 1980s…"
Going away from the graveyard and towards the bridge where the lane joined the main road and where the fast stream tumbled dirty underneath.
"… The Protestants came to burn down the R.C. chapel here, there was a hell of a fight and about a dozen Catholics were beaten to death.
They call it the Battle of Black Bridge. They know it like it was yesterday, but yesterday was 1829…"
Going by the shops at the main road junction.
"… There was a U.D.R. man, drove the school bus, shot here a few years back. Nobody remembers when because nobody cares when, but they'll tell you the day and the hour when the postman was shot, and the boys at the cache, and the lad breaking out from the Kesh, and they'll tell you whether it was wet or fine on the day of the Battle of Black Bridge…"
"You trying to depress the poor bugger?" A sly grin from the cardboard city man.
Jocko said, cheerful, "It's better he knows, safer."
Bren sat huddled in the back of the car. He wondered where was Cathy. They had been gone more than two hours before Herbie accelerated for home base. He wondered why she had not allowed him to be with her. They drove fast away from the low wetland beside the Lough. And he wondered how it was possible to survive, on the ground, alone, out there, and he thought the mountain of Altmore was worse than what they had shown him.
They returned to Mahon Road.
Cathy hadn't shown.
Bren asked if he could wait for her.
They thought it was where she would come back to. He should please himself.
Wilkins stood.
He had thought the man feeble. He was lashed with the Prime Minister's tongue.
Wilkins was the chastised labrador dog and the beating was savage.
He thought he could accept it, it was why he had been sent. He would never, ever, answer back. It was why he had been sent from Curzon Street, to absorb a verbal thrashing.
"… 1 have to tell you, Wilkins, that I had expected your Director General. On a matter of this importance I had not thought it necessary to stipulate the attendance of the Director General. What I most certainly do not require is a potted and imprecise lecture on the work of the Security Service in Northern Ireland, a golden petal. I am not in need of generalities, but of some very clear specifics. The charge brought to my attention against the Security Service operations in the province is of the gravest type. It smacks to me of a total disregard on the part of senior officials for the close supervision of juniors. The charge laid against you, and one that should have been answered by the Director General, is that a young man was set up, the correct vernacular I believe, so that the Provisional I.R.A. might consider that young person to be an informer. He was not an informer, never had been, and was unlikely to be one in the future. The young man was quite directly pitched into a most hideous danger, from which he unhappily did not survive. It is unspeakably revolting behaviour on the part of your juniors. I am informed, and since it is not denied I have to assume the information is reliable, that a junior officer, a woman, is currentlv careering around Northern Ireland making policy on the hoof, taking it upon herself to decide that a young man's life is not important. Do you begin to see, Wilkins, the colossal arrogance of such a posture? I won't have it, that shocking behaviour, and I am minded to order the disengagement of the Security Service from the province…"
"I really think…" The small voice, Ernest Wilkins?, so mild.
"You'll be given your chance to defend the indefensible when I've finished. You will do me the courtesy, Wilkins., of hearing me out. If the Security Service believes that it is not accountable, as are the police and army, then a very rude shock…’’
A schoolboy going home. He had lost his season ticket in the playground. His headmaster had given him the money to buy the necessary train ticket. The boy shouted through the hatch the name of the station where he lived.
A middle-aged secretary travelling to visit her mother, and requiring a return ticket to come back to the capital in the morning. She was weighed down with the gifts that would cement success on the small family birthday party. She stood behind the schoolboy.
A young account executive employed by a major advertising agency of central London. He was heading north for a client dinner and would make his preliminary presentation in the morning. He held his closed lap-top computer in one hand, his mobile telephone in the other and shouted the news to his wife as to where he was. He waited behind the middle-aged secretary.
A retired army officer who had been given a lift into town in the morning and was now making his own way back to the country. He rolled on his heels. Great willpower to have taken himself away from the company of colleagues and a worthy lunch and an open bar at the Cavalry club. He reckoned that if the schoolboy and the middle aged woman and the yuppie didn't shift themselves, if he didn’t get his ticket and decamp soonest to the urinal, then he'd wet his trouser leg.
A West Indian boy, bright in the plumage of his French- manufactured leisure suit, dropped a beefburger's wrapping into the rubbish bin…
An impatient queue. The departure board flickering new departure times.
None of them would see the disintegration of the rubbish bin.
The light flash.
None of them would hear the hammer blow of the explosion.
The thunder roar.
The flash and the roar would be seen, heard, by the masses on the far side of the station and on the middle ground of the concourse, before the pressure blast flattened them against walls and to the ground.
They were the battlefield victims.
They were a schoolboy and a secretary and an account executive and a retired army officer and a young West Indian.
They were the enemy.
They were broken, split, mutilated.
After the light flash and the thunder roar came the monsoon fall of glass shards, and then the pain quiet.
Across the concourse the dust settled on Jon Jo Donnelly's bomb.
"… the Security Service may feel, because of the very vague nature of its terms of reference in Northern Ireland, that it has been given the nod and the wink to involve itself in areas where the police and army, quite rightly, feel inhibited to tread. If the Security Service feels that then it has placed itself on shifting sands, false foundations. My inclination is that the time has been reached for a sharp lesson to be learned…"
The Prime Minister broke off. There had been the faintest knock at the door, barely heard by Ernest Wilkins. The aide's shoes slid silently across the carpet. A notelet was passed. There was that shiver of annoyance on the Prime Minister's face, not a man who could take interruption. He read the message and the door closed on the aide.
The colour was gone from him.
His eyes closed momentarily.
He seemed to rock.
Ernest Wilkins waited on him.
"Oh, God…"
Held his peace.
"… the wicked bastards…"
Gave him time.
"… Bomb at Marylebone, at least three dead, many injured, no warning, no chance…"
It had been the intention of Ernest Wilkins to let the storm blow itself over before he had launched himself..He would have allowed the Prime Minister's anger to exhaust itself before offering defence of the Service's operations. He took the cue.
His voice was gentle, so reasonable. "That'll be Jon Jo Donnelly, sir.
You'll remember when the name was last talked of, and the suggestion that the man be encouraged to return to his home, because there we would stand a greater chance of trapping him. I said then that I would be working on it, that you should leave it in my hands. There's a young woman in Northern Ireland, I don't think it wise you have her name, one of my best. Donnelly comes from the mountain country of Tyrone.
I tell you, sir, in the greatest confidence, we have an informer inside that community. He is our informer, sir, not the army's and not answerable to the police. At our instigation there have been meetings inside the Provisional I.R.A., East Tyrone Brigade and Army Council level, that should, we hope, earn the recall to home territory of Donnelly. The informer, I don't think you need that person's identity, will tell us of Donnelly's return and give us the location of his hiding place.
That young woman, sir, so heavily criticised by the ill informed, has taken very grave risks to her personal safety to lake us thus far
… Oh, yes, what you should be told, our informer, vital to us, was threatened last week with exposure. We felt it necessary, for the greater good of the greater number, to divert the threat…"
"I want that bastard, that Donnelly animal, dead…"
"Of course, sir. I never doubted that, sir."
He seemed to Ernest Wilkins to be in pain. "God, that bloody awful place…" "And much worse there, sir, when it's not left to the professionals."
"Do what's necessary."
"If I might say so, sir, a very wise attitude."
Outside, in the corridor, Ernest Wilkins paused to wipe the first sweat beads off his forehead. He thought he had done well, really rather well.
In the evening, the undertaker brought home the body of Patsy Riordan.
The open coffin was laid on trestles in the front room. The boy's face had been cleaned but a patch of hospital gauze covered that part of his jaw where the killer bullet had exited.
His mother sat stone-faced and dry-eyed beside the head of the coffin.
His father stood near to the door with a filled whiskey glass in his hand. Some neighbours came and took tea or a small glass and muttered embarrassed condolences. They were the few.
Patsy Riordan had been executed for touting.
The few paid their respects, the majority gathered in the village bar.
"Should she have come by now?"
There was the sharp look into Bren's face from the cardboard city man.
"You work with her, I don't."
"Please, I don't need any bloody sarcasm. I'll repeat my question.
Should she have come by now?"
The cardboard city man said, "I'd have expected her an hour or two back, but you can't tell with her."
They played cards, the cardboard city man and Jocko and Herbie. The night duty had taken charge of the computers and the banks of radio equipment. Outside the rain beat the windows and the wind whined in the telephone wires.
Bren waited. And he promised that he would never let Cathy Parker, alone, loose out there again.
They had rowed through the evening. Siobhan had finally followed Mossie into the bedroom to hiss in a spat and hushed voice that it was right for her to go to Mrs Riordan's home.
He had a feeling, small, for what he thought was right; a feeling, sometimes, for what he knew was wrong. He thought it was not right, that it was wrong, that his Siobhan should be away down to the Riordan house.
"You can't, not after what was done."
"It's respect for her."
"You'd be a sham."
"It's respect for the family."
"I'm not going with you, I'd not have the face."
"I was never asking you to be with me."
"I don't know how you'd have the face."
Siobhan said, cunning, "It'd cause more talk if I didn't, and she's a good and decent woman."
It had been the usual way that they argued. They found the corners of the bungalow, away from his mother, out of earshot of the children.
They had been silent through the tea, him asking the children to ask their mother to pass him the brown sauce, her asking his mother to ask him whether he wanted more chips. His mother and the children wouldn't have known that they rowed over whether Siobhan should attend the house of a shot tout.
He sat on the bed. The fight was gone from him. He looked to her for comfort.
"Will us ever be forgiven for what we've done?"
He saw the hard set of her mouth, it was a new mouth for her to wear.
"Get paid, don't we?"
He repeated what she'd said, the bitterness in his voice. "Get paid, don't we?"
"You'll wait outside, they'd not be expecting the likes of you, there'll be none like you there… and we'll go after and take a drink."
It was accepted. He could never fight her and win. The only time that she had not won her way was when they had returned from Birmingham to his mother's bungalow. Only the once. Every other time they fought, she won. They came out of the bedroom and he let her slip her arm round his waist, like it was a sign to the children and to his mother that the hidden problem was solved. If it had been he that was shot, if it had been Mossie Nugent killed for touting, then he reckoned that Mrs Riordan would have called for her respects. The lie burdened him, he thought the weight of the lie grew each day he woke.
He gave her time to change, the dress she wore often for Sunday Mass. He helped his mother with the washing of the plates and pans, and then he romped and larked with the kids and built bricks for Mary.
Mossie drove to the Riordan house.
If the boy had been shot by the army, if he had died in the ferrying of a bomb, then the lane in front of the house would have been filled with cars. The cars would have stretched a quarter of a mile in front of the house. He had been executed by his own. There were six cars parked outside the Riordan house. If it had been the army that had done him, or his own bomb, if he had been the volunteer 'tragically killed on active service', then the neighbours would have flown black flags from their upper windows. The neighbours showed what they thought, front-room curtains open, lights blazing, televisions blaring. He parked away from the house. He let Siobhan walk a hundred yards. He sat alone in the car and he smoked a cigarette.
Shit, and he was his own man. Shit, and he had the laugh on all of them. None of them knowing, all of them ignorant, that Mossie Nugent was his own man. The smile played at his lips. It was when he could cope best, when he was alone with himself and the night was around him, when he had the laugh on all of them. There was the rap at the window of his car.
He saw the O.C.'s face, grinning. He wound down the window.
"Surprise…"
"Missus gone in, I'm not. We's going for a drink after. You're not going in?"
"I am not. Just seeing who is, like to know."
"She's a respected woman…"
"You heard it from London today?"
"Big bomb, no warning, I heard."
"Jon Jo's coming,"
Mossie said quietly, "Is that right?"
"Jon Jo's sent for."
"That's good."
The face was gone from the window. She hurried down the road towards the car, skipping between the rain puddles. She sagged into the seat, and the breath was out of her. Siobhan said that terrible things had been done to the boy and that his chin bone was half blown away.
Mossie didn't answer her. She said that Mrs Riordan was a brave woman and that her husband was scum and drunk and bad-mouthing his son. Mossie started up the car. She said that she didn't care about the money. He reversed away up the lane to the junction. She was crying, and she asked him how long it would go on, the killing. He told her to clean her face and he drove towards the village bar.
The bar was full, like it was Friday evening or Saturday night. He pushed his way through with Siobhan holding his hand and letting him lead. If Patsy Riordan had been shot by the army or blown away by his own bomb then the bar would have been empty and the drink would have been taken at the Riordan house. The bar was in celebration because the body of a tout had been brought back by the undertaker.
Loud music from the speakers and the steady chime of the fruit machine and belly laughter and shouting. He found the corner of a bench, room for Siobhan and if she pushed then room for him when he was back from the bar. He wormed forward towards the bar counter.
He was a big man in the Organisation and that was known to every man and woman in the bar, not what he did but that he was important. His shoulder was slapped, his hand was shaken, he was made welcome.
The pint for himself, the gin and bitter lemon for herself, and a drink for Bernie behind the bar. Back to where she sat. A place made for him to sit. The bar swam with noise and smoke.
Mother of God. It was her.
Sitting across the far side of the bar.
He saw her and then the pitch of the bodies between them hid her.
He saw her again. She seemed to have a map in front of her.
She drank from a Guinness glass.
He jabbed the stomach of the young man beside him.
"The girl across the bar, who's she? j"
Nearly gone, pissed up. "Australian, Bernie said, car's broke, waiting for a mechanic to come out Be lucky…" Christ, she'd no right… Shouldn't have been there…
He felt the cold shiver in his body and the music and the laughter belted in his ears.
He saw the red gold of her hair.