by David Hough
She hated it.
And yet, like the rest of the residents in both streets, Sorcha had no wish ever to see it removed. Lives depended upon it remaining.
A noisy crowd was gathered at the other end of Mafeking Street, where it joined Ladysmith Road, another Catholic ghetto. Stubble-faced men shouted foul abuse. Youths with scarves wrapped around their faces threw broken paving stones. Sorcha moved out onto the doorstep, but she was unable to see the target around the corner.
“What’s happening?” she asked Edna.
“The Brits. They found a car bomb.”
“A Loyalist bomb?”
“Hell, no. One of ours.”
“What’s it doin’ here?”
“That eejit, Sean Lenahan, was supposed to hide it before drivin’ it up to Ballysillan this mornin’. What did the eejit do? He left it outside his own house all night.”
“Why?”
“Pissed out of his fuckin’ mind. That’s why.”
“How was it discovered?”
Edna coughed and spat on the pavement. “Someone grassed on ’im, I reckon.”
Ballysillan? Sorcha called to mind the targets she had been given by Fitzpain. Ballysillan was amongst them. So, one bomb could now be wiped from the list, unless there was a spare, a stand-by. And assuming someone else was willing to drive the thing.
“Hope the English don’t come searching down her,” Edna said. “Hate all those bastards, so I do.”
“Youse hidin’ something’?”
“Two crates o’ petrol bombs. Them’s bein’ collected tonight.”
“Get them moved soon, Edna. If those things catch fire both our houses will go up, so they will. And things is gonna get hot today. Really hot.”
“Think so?”
“Know so.”
“Youse hidin’ anything,” the old lady asked.
“There’s an Armalite hidden under mammy’s bed. Been there a few days now.”
“Brian’s gun?”
Sorcha nodded. “Yeah.”
“They’ll be searchin’ his own house one o’these days.”
“They already have. Found nothin’. Why d’youse think the Armalite’s under mammy’s bed?”
The Brits would find it if they searched her mammy’s house today, she thought, and it would be his fault. Brian’s fault. Damn him for taking advantage of an old lady like her mammy.
She took a step forward and then stopped suddenly. Someone was watching her. She focussed on a shadowy figure standing at the rear of the mob. It was Jimmy Fish. That little runt. What was he doing here, and why was he staring at her? He seemed to become suddenly aware he had her attention because he turned away and scurried off along Ladysmith Road, away from the source of the confrontation.
“Bugger him.” Sorcha sniffed and walked on.
He was nothing to her anyway.
***
October 1980
“You had a hard life, Sorcha,” I said. “So much was stacked against you right from the start. I hope you can see that now… see how your background played a part in the things you did.”
She shrugged. “The lawyer tried to make an issue of it at the sentencing, but the judge was only interested in what I actually did.”
“I know. I was there. Do you want to tell me more, or would you rather break off here?” I hoped she would take the hint and let me lead her towards the truth behind the murders, but she shook her head and drew a deep sigh.
“Let’s call it a day for now. Youse’ll come back, won’t youse?”
I accepted the disappointment and put away my notebook. “Of course. There’s a lot more I want to learn from you.”
I drove back to the Europa in Belfast and enjoyed a beer with the hacks now camped out there. They were full of the latest news about the hunger-strikers, but my mind remained focussed on Sorcha Mulveny. I still couldn’t figure out what she might have done that day.
Chapter Five
October 1980
The next time I interviewed Will Evans I arranged the meeting at a pub in Llandudno. I was wary about the risk of meeting Milly again and I thought he might be more likely to open up to me if he knew we would not be interrupted. I had a scotch whisky lined up waiting for him when he arrived.
“How’s the family?” I asked.
He downed half the drink before he replied. “Milly thinks I’m a fool to be talking to you. She says no good will come of it.”
“Depends how well the book sells.”
“Women don’t think like that. You married?”
“I was.” I hesitated before adding, “She died four years ago. Cancer.”
“I’m sorry.”
“She was a good woman. Like you, I married an Irish woman. That’s how an Englishman like me came to be working as a reporter in Belfast at the time of Sorcha’s trial. That’s why I was in court when you gave your evidence.”
“And what did you make of my performance?” He emptied his glass and set it down on the bar table with an air of precision.
I laughed coldly. “Too wooden. It was obvious you were holding back on your emotions. Want another whiskey or are you ready to start telling me what really happened that day? What really got to you?”
He sniffed. “We’ll talk first and then you can get my glass refilled. Make the next one an Irish whiskey. Not this Scotch stuff.” He gritted his teeth. “Reminds me too much of the violence of the Tartan Gangs in Belfast.”
I made no comment on that. It could lead us into awkward territory.
***
Friday 21st July 1972
0820 BST
An unmarked black Ford Cortina drew up outside the house. Will hurried out before it attracted too much attention, not looking behind him for fear of what he might see: Milly glaring at him from the front doorstep.
Detective Chief Inspector Tom McIlroy beckoned him to hurry up.
Will hesitated, pretending to do up his jacket. His anger peaked. To be called in today of all days! Could he defy the voice of authority within the RUC? Could he refuse to go?
He glanced around to see if any of the neighbours were watching.
The Ballymacarrett area was a mixture of Protestants and Catholics and, in some ways, that was good. It showed that not all of Belfast was divided into sectarian ghettos. A lesson for the children, Will thought. But, as Catholics, you could never tell which of your Protestant neighbours was spying on you. That made it a dangerous place to live if you were a Catholic serving in the Royal Ulster Constabulary. Even if you were Welsh. In Belfast, any Catholic peeler was a traitor to his religion, a man fit to be tortured and killed. IRA gunmen made a career out of killing peelers, and the Catholic ones were always first in the line of fire. Will carried his Webley revolver with him everywhere, even to Mass. He had never killed anyone with it, but the threat was always there.
Another gesture from his boss urged Will into the Cortina.
McIlroy, a plain clothes detective in the driver’s seat, accelerated away as soon as Will slammed the car door shut. His boss looked pale and drawn this morning. His eyes were bleary, as if he had been deprived of sleep. They made an odd pair, Will thought. He was tall and thin with unruly black hair, while DCI McIlroy was shorter and more solidly built, with a layer of matted grey that carpeted his scalp. The DCI was rapidly approaching his fiftieth birthday, old enough to be Will’s father, but there were times when the young detective sergeant was glad to have the support of McIlroy’s long experience of police work.
Not today, however.
“Sorted out the family, have you?” The senior man glanced sideways at his passenger. His cheeks were lined from years of stress. This morning the lines were more pronounced.
“Sort of.” Will avoided McIlroy’s gaze.
“Angry with me, are you?”
“Don’t ask. Sir.”
McIlroy went silent for a moment. Then he jutted his chin and hissed out. “Don’t sir me, Will. I’ve enough problems of my own to contend with. For what i
t’s worth, I had no option but to pull you in because we’re two men down. One sick and one dead. Killed last night.”
Killed? Yet another peeler killed? Will felt a sudden pang of remorse rise within him. Maybe he had been a bit too quick to show his anger.
“Who was it?”
“Johnny Dunlop. Stabbed in the chest. They found his body in the Ardoyne at daybreak.” McIlroy’s grey, bushy eyebrows quivered with suppressed anger.
“Oh, God.” Will clasped his fists tight. He’d worked with Dunlop, a young fresh-faced detective constable who came from Larne. He was another Catholic peeler, the same age as Will. They tended to stick together whenever possible because they were such a tiny minority in the RUC. Now he was dead. But that was how things went here in Belfast: you got to know and like your mates, drink with them, work easily with them, and then one day you heard they’d been murdered. That was the RUC for you: the highest rate of policemen murdered for any force in the western world. The ones left behind usually found a way of coping with it, often with the help of a whiskey bottle. The alcohol deadened the emotional pain. There was not a desk inside the North Castle Street barracks that didn’t harbour a whiskey bottle.
“What happened?” he asked, knowing there was a tremor in his voice.
“Johnny’s car was in for service so he was walking home last night. He must have run into an ambush in the Ardoyne. Didn’t stand a chance. Knifed through the heart. The uniforms are pulling in some local dickheads to see if we can get the names of the boys that did it. I don’t give much for their chances though.”
“Who’s investigating?”
“The guys at Oldpark CID are taking the lead on this one, but our beloved leader, Detective Superintendent Boyle, wants us to keep our eyes and ears open. Dunlop was one of ours and he thinks we owe it to him to help find whoever did it.”
“The Oldpark guys won’t want their noses knocked out of joint.”
“The beloved leader is squaring it with them.”
“The beloved leader… is that meant to be irony, boss?”
“No. Pure odium.”
Will blinked. “Why?”
“Don’t ask.” The tiredness in McIlroy’s voice was close to over-spilling.
Will pondered over asking anyway, but decided against it. He lapsed into a minute’s silence before he said, “It won’t be easy to square things with Oldpark.”
“That’s our beloved leader’s problem. Not ours.”
Will pictured the route Johnny Dunlop must have taken. North Castle Street ran between the Loyalist Shankill Road and the Crumlin Road. The fiercely Nationalist Ardoyne area was close by. No peeler should ever walk alone through the Ardoyne and Johnny Dunlop knew that. Maybe, being a plain clothes detective, he thought he would be safe enough, but safety was something no one could rely upon in Belfast. Safety went out of the window back in 1969 when British troops were moved into Ulster. Illusions of safety counted for nothing in a civil war.
“Is that what we’re about now? Looking for suspects?” Will’s question was softened by the realisation that it could have been him. It could have been any one of them at the North Castle Street barracks. You didn’t have to walk alone through the Ardoyne to get yourself killed. It could happen anywhere.
McIlroy shook his head. “No. Something else. There’s a Provo operation in the offing. A big one if the reports we’re getting are correct. Something to take our minds off Johnny Dunlop.” McIlroy turned onto the Sydenham by-pass and headed towards Holywood on the city outskirts. “We don’t know what it’ll be, or where it’ll be, but there’s information coming in that’s got the top brass on edge, including the Chief Constable. They want more detail.”
“So, where are we going now?” Will’s voice was returning to normal, his previous anger with McIlroy melting away.
“I’ve had a call from Jimmy Fish. Says he’s got something to tell us. Something very important, so he says. He’ll meet us by the shore. Usual place.”
Will sank back into his seat and went silent. His mind flipped between the past and the present; between Johnny Dunlop and Jimmy Fish. The young Catholic peeler now dead, and the Republican informer who was very much alive. Eventually, it settled on the present.
Seamus Codd – Jimmy Fish to everyone who knew him – had once worked the fishing boats out of Ardglass Harbour, a largely Nationalist enclave some thirty miles south of Belfast. A year or more ago Jimmy had turned his attention from cannabis to heroin and that made him a danger on any fishing boat. The boat owners understood that, so he never went to sea again. Instead, he slept rough and fed his habit with money he got from being both a police informer and a small-time thief. Jimmy Fish had a history of theft. Twenty years ago he did a twelve month stretch for stealing from a pub. He was what McIlroy laughingly referred to as ‘a normal decent criminal’, one who stuck mostly to shoplifting and burglary. Republican activity was not his scene, but he had his ear to what went on in Nationalist bars. He could have been banged up for theft many more times, but he was a useful man to have out on the streets. Even a small-time crook had an insight into the depths of Belfast’s world of terrorism. There was always a chance that one day he would deliver the really big tip-off, so he stayed free and he stayed on the unofficial payroll of Detective Chief Inspector McIlroy. It had to be McIlroy, Jimmy insisted, because he trusted the DCI to play fair with him. There were two CID men in a secure basement room at North Castle Street barracks who ran most of the covert informants. They also paid them, but they didn’t pay Jimmy Fish. McIlroy did.
“If I can’t see ’im face to face in the street, I ain’t dealing with ’im,” Jimmy insisted, and nothing would budge him from that position.
A little way beyond Sydenham aerodrome, McIlroy turned towards the shore, swerved onto an overgrown dirt track and finally pulled up on a patch of waste land. A year ago, Will had been part of a team that discovered the mutilated bodies of two young British soldiers here. They had made the supreme mistake of drinking off-duty in a bar in the Ardoyne. Someone should have told them what Belfast pubs were all about. Their last drinks saw the death of them.
McIlroy kept the engine running as a shadowy figure darted out from behind a crumbling wall, raced towards the car and clambered into the back seat. His chest heaved with the exertion of running. A small, wiry man in his late fifties, Jimmy Fish smelled permanently rancid. He pulled a black beret from his bald head and clasped it in front of him.
“When are you going to wash, Jimmy?” McIlroy sniffed loudly and pointedly.
“When I get a place o’ me own, Mr McIlroy.” The voice was unusually squeaky.
“Don’t leave it too long.” He reached into the glove compartment and pulled out a can of air freshener which he sprayed liberally over the man in the back seat.
Jimmy Fish shrank back. “What did ye do that for, Mr McIlroy?”
“Because you stink, Jimmy. Now, what have you got for me this morning?”
“Somethin’ worthwhile, Mr McIlroy.” Jimmy Fish jammed his head between the shoulders of the two policemen. Despite the air freshener, the body odour intensified. “’Tis real bad trouble this time, so it is. And it’s gonna be a big operation. I swear it is. I heard them talkin’ in the bar last night.”
“Which bar?”
“Ach, I can’t tell ye that, Mr McIlroy. Ye know I can’t. They’d kill me. But they was absolutely clear about it. ’Tis gonna be a real big one, so it is.”
“Who are they. Who did you see?”
“Can’t tell ye that either, Mr McIlroy. But it was one of the IRA’s top men.”
“Not good enough, Jimmy. Tell us something we can use, or get out of my car!”
McIlroy turned to look out the side window, a trick he used to give the impression of losing patience. He pulled out a cigarette and lit up. The smoke had some small effect on masking the informer’s smell.
Will understood the ploy well enough. It was time for him to take over the questioning. He leaned across the seat
back to watch the little informer. The blood was draining from the man’s pinched face. A cloud hovered around his eyes.
“You’ve told us nothing useful, Jimmy,” Will said calmly. “There’s no money in it because there’s nothing there we can use.”
“It’s gotta be worth somethin’,” Jimmy Fish muttered. “I got all these bad debts, ye see.”
“No, it’s worth nothing. Now tell us something useful.”
The informer pursed his lips and lapsed into a period of thought that lasted a full thirty seconds. Only the steady purr of the car’s engine broke the silence. Then he spoke slowly, measuring his words. “Before them bombs go off, ye’ll get lots o’ warnin’s. Some’ll be real and some’ll be false. Ye won’t know which is which.”
Will frowned. “Bombs? You said bombs. Plural. How many, and where?”
“Ach, I swear to God I don’t know, Mr Evans. Truly, I don’t.” The urgency in his voice sounded real. “But ’tis goin’ to be somethin’ real big. Somethin’ ye won’t have seen before. ’Tis all because that English government man, Mr Whitelaw, won’t give into the IRA’s demands.”
“You’re talking about the breakdown of the ceasefire?”
“They were supposed to be havin’ secret talks, so they were, but the talks haven’t come to anything, have they, Mr Evans?”
“Not if you listen to IRA gossip, Jimmy.”
“Ach, to be sure, ’tis more than gossip, from what I hear. The IRA are on the move good and proper, so they are. And they built up a whole stockpile of bombs in the ceasefire.”
Will shook his head, his mind now focussing on the possibility that the interview might be getting onto more solid ground. A stockpile of bombs: that was always a risk in the course of the ceasefire… which had already ended.