Once In, Never Out

by Dan Mahoney

  “I’m Detective McKenna from the New York City Police Department here to see Sergeant Forsythe,” McKenna said into the speaker.

  The constable didn’t answer, but the door swung slowly open. It was electrically operated and there was no one in the vestibule on the other side. McKenna entered and the door closed behind him. There was another steel door at the far end of the vestibule and McKenna was walking toward it when he saw that there was a small receptionist’s window built into the wall on his left. The constable there was standing behind thick bulletproof glass.

  “Detective McKenna to see Sergeant Forsythe,” McKenna repeated into the speaker on the wall next to the window.

  “Could I please see some identification?” the constable asked.

  A steel drawer emerged from the wall under the window. McKenna placed his shield and ID card into the drawer and it was retracted into the wall. The constable examined McKenna’s credentials and made a log entry in the book on the desk at his side. “Please come in,” he said, and the steel door on the far end of the corridor opened. He met McKenna at the door and returned his shield and ID card.

  McKenna had been in hundreds of police stations all over the world and the interior of this one looked exactly as he would have expected, except for one thing. There was a sergeant sitting behind a large desk, there was a small office on the far side of the desk where two constables were seated behind computers, there was another constable on the other side of the desk manning the switchboard and the base radio, but there were no customers or any other sign of activity inherent in any other police station McKenna had ever seen. The people of West Belfast didn’t bother bringing their problems to the police, and McKenna surmised that simply entering a police station would mark a person as an informer. Instead, the Catholics brought their problems to the IRA for action, leaving the RUC there with very little to do in the way of standard police work. In West Belfast, the RUC was not a police force, it was just another component of an occupying army. He was led to a small, empty room and left alone to await Forsythe.

  The walls were lined with wanted posters, but they were unlike any McKenna had ever seen. There were no crimes described under the photos of the fugitives. The captions under the photos simply stated that the subjects were wanted for “Terrorist Activities” or “Suspected IRA Involvement.” Some of the photos had either APPREHENDED or DECEASED stamped across the faces. Gerry Adams’s and Martin McGuinn’s old posters were also there, but someone had drawn a line across their faces and written, “Not now wanted, hopefully later” under the photos.

  McKenna wasted some time counting the posters and had reached 140 when Forsythe came in. He had changed into his civilian clothes, wearing jeans, a cotton print shirt, and a windbreaker. Without his uniform, Forsythe looked younger and certainly friendlier, except for one thing. Under Forsythe’s windbreaker were conspicuous bulges on each side, so McKenna was certain he was heavily armed.

  “Glad you could make it, but we have to hurry,” Forsythe said. “Everyone’s waiting for us.”

  “Who’s everyone?”

  “All the guys who worked the evening shift. We leave here in a convoy after work and head across town.”

  “Everyone lives in East Belfast?”

  “Yeah, or in the suburbs north of town.”

  “The Protestant suburbs?”

  “I see what you’re getting at,” Forsythe said without hostility. “You’re wanting to know if everyone who worked the night shift tonight is Protestant, are you?”

  “I guess I am.”

  “We’ve got one Catholic constable assigned to this station right now. Nice enough guy, married to a Protestant girl from a good family, but not much of a cop.”

  McKenna wondered for a moment exactly what constituted a good family in Belfast, but Forsythe was in a hurry and further questions would have to wait. McKenna followed him through the station and out the rear door.

  In the rear of the station was a parking lot protected by a concrete wall twenty feet high and crowned with razor ribbon. There was another manned guard tower on the wall over a large steel door. Along one wall two squads of troops were standing at attention in formation while their lieutenant inspected their weapons. McKenna thought they looked sharp and professional.

  So did Forsythe, and he had noticed McKenna’s interest in the troops. “They’re from One Para. The Brits always send their best for duty here,” Forsythe said with a touch of pride in his voice.

  “They look the part,” McKenna agreed and left it at that since he couldn’t afford to let Forsythe know exactly how much he knew about him.

  All who had worked the evening shift were in their cars with the engines running. Forsythe led McKenna to his car, an old MG convertible in mint condition.

  “Pretty small car for a guy your size,” McKenna observed.

  “It’s my wife’s car. Woke up this morning to find four flats on mine,” Forsythe explained.

  “IRA?” McKenna asked, feeling it was the appropriate question.

  “No,” Forsythe said, and left it at that. They got in the car.

  The constables drove south on Springfield Road at high speed, barely slowing down for the occasional red traffic lights they passed through. At The Falls Road they turned and headed east. Minutes later, the procession passed a cleared area that was once the Catholic neighborhood of the Lower Falls before the British army had plowed it under. At that point the constables slowed their autos to normal driving speed.

  “Always glad to get back to The Shankill,” Forsythe announced when they had cleared the DMZ.

  “On the surface, this doesn’t look much different from Ballymurphy,” McKenna observed, looking around. It was another middle-class residential neighborhood of small row houses, but unlike Ballymurphy, the streets were well lit. However, there was plenty of graffiti to be seen on walls and fences. It was neater than the Ballymurphy graffiti, leading McKenna to believe that the RUC didn’t bother the Protestant artists much, but the hatred was still there in different messages: “No Surrender, Not an Inch,” “United Kingdom, Now and Forever,” and “Off the IRA.” The Union Jack was painted on other fences and also flew from the flagpoles in front of many of the homes.

  “The Shankill Road coming up,” Forsythe said. “Heart of Protestant Ulster.”

  Most of the cars ahead of them turned right at The Shankill Road, toward the motorway a few blocks away. The rest continued east on The Falls Road. Forsythe was the only one to make the left onto The Shankill Road.

  Belfast was not a city of wide boulevards, but McKenna had expected the “Heart of Protestant Ulster” to be somewhat grander than it was. At first glance the Shankill Road appeared to McKenna to be nothing more than an ordinary commercial strip of small stores and pubs with room for only one lane of traffic in each direction. However, as Forsythe drove on, McKenna’s impression quickly changed.

  First, there were the churches. There seemed to be at least one every three blocks. Most were Presbyterian, but a few other Protestant denominations were represented. Forsythe pointed to the many loudspeakers mounted in front of each church as they passed, but McKenna didn’t get his point. “Evangelical preaching all day long. You’re never out of earshot of the Word of God in The Shankill,” he said with a smile, but it sounded like a complaint to McKenna.

  Then there were the clubs. Interspersed among the small businesses were many storefront locations occupied by organizations whose signs outside proclaimed themselves to be football clubs, rugby clubs, or fraternal associations for former members of various British army units. Although every business on The Shankill Road appeared to be closed at that hour, outside each of the storefronts were groups of watchful, sullen young men. All of the lookouts paid particular attention to Forsythe’s car as he passed them.

  There was something illegal going on all around and McKenna suspected what it was. “Quite a sports-minded town you’ve got here,” he commented sarcastically. “Those boys sure get up early for p
ractice.”

  “Before they were outlawed, the paramilitaries used to paint their names proudly right out front and march around in their uniforms. But it’s only a little different now. The worst of the thugs are still there, but membership is declining and they’ve been forced to change the names on their signs outside.”

  “So what are the lookouts watching for? The IRA or the RUC?”

  “Both. It would surely be a black mark for them if the IRA shot out their windows, painted over their signs, or blew up their place and they weren’t there to fight and die for the honor of their bleeding paramilitary. But what they’re looking for is trouble in general, and sometimes we give it to them with a raid.”

  “Are there many raids?”

  “It happens, but there should be more. Seems to me that they’re tipped off to most of them and we usually don’t come up with much. If we’re to accomplish anything, we’ve got to get the thugs out of the RUC.”

  A lone RUC Land Rover passed them from the opposite direction, cruising as slowly as any police car patrolling at night would in any city in America. Forsythe pulled over to watch as the young men in front of their storefronts made a show of moving on as the Land Rover approached them.

  It was the first normal bit of policing McKenna had seen since arriving in Belfast, but it highlighted one aspect of Belfast life: The police were at home in The Shankill and it wasn’t necessary for them to patrol there in heavily armed convoys with military escorts. Then the second normal thing happened: The lookouts returned to their positions as soon as the Land Rover was gone.

  “Those constables should have stopped and searched those blighters,” Forsythe commented.

  “Why do you think they didn’t?”

  “Maybe they’re afraid of harassment if they arrest them,” Forsythe offered.

  “Or maybe they’re sympathetic to the paramilitaries,” McKenna said.

  “Maybe.”

  “I take it that you would have stopped and searched them if you were working.”

  “I always do my job,” Forsythe stated.

  “Do you like your job?”

  “Sometimes, but never when I’m working in the Catholic neighborhoods.”

  “You don’t work there all the time?”

  “If I had to do that, I’d quit. We have to spend only three months or so a year working there. The rest of the time I’m assigned to the Tennant Street station in East Belfast.”

  “An easier job in more pleasant surroundings?”

  “The work atmosphere certainly isn’t as tense and it isn’t as dangerous as working in West Belfast, but actually the job is harder there,” Forsythe said. “Instead of wasting time manning checkpoints all night, there’s a wee bit of real police work to be done in East Belfast.”

  “You consider the checkpoints to be a waste of time?”

  “Surely. The real hard men have spies everywhere and they monitor our radios. They know where we’re going to be as soon as we do, so we never catch them at a checkpoint. What we wind up with sometimes are their dumber junior operatives driving stolen cars, carrying guns, or transporting explosives and fuses.”

  Thinking back on his own experiences that night made McKenna wince. Forsythe was certainly right; the RUC could have easily wound up with two of the dumbest IRA junior operatives carrying guns in a stolen car, with a New York City detective thrown in as an added newsworthy bonus.

  McKenna wanted to get off that track quickly. “Do you think the situation here is hopeless?” he asked.

  “Not at all. We’re winning,” Forsythe answered confidently. “It’ll take a long time, but we’ll eventually put an end to the Troubles if the Brits remain behind us.”

  McKenna was surprised to hear Forsythe’s conclusion. It was the first optimistic forecast he had heard from either side since arriving in Belfast, but it flew in the face of everything he had learned so far. “You’re winning? Are you sure?” he asked.

  “Of course. British Intelligence thinks the IRA is down to maybe two hundred full-time hard men, and their financial support from you Americans is declining. Of course, before this little lull we’re experiencing they were still doing all the damage they could, but they’ve shifted most of their terror campaign to Britain.”

  “Why do you think they’ve done that?”

  “Because we filled up the Maze Prison and fought them to a standstill here. Most of the hard men wouldn’t dare show their faces in City Centre or East Belfast because they know we’d be on to them straight away.”

  “But weren’t there still plenty of bombings here before the truce?”

  “Surely, but they were amateur jobs done by the young, inexperienced crowd. As usual, the Paddy Factor was at work and half the time they wound up blowing themselves up by accident, either when they made the bomb, placed it, or set the fuse.”

  “What’s the Paddy Factor?”

  “What it comes down to is that the people the IRA is using for their dirty work here are fairly inept and not too bright. Unemployed secondary school dropouts, most of them. Sure, they’re a murderous-enough bunch who would shoot you in the back of the head without a second thought, but placing a bomb correctly and setting fuses is a different matter. The Paddy Factor means that if somehow it can be screwed up, then those are the fellows sure to do it. Half of the bombs now go off by accident in the Catholic neighborhoods, killing quite a few apprentice bombers in the process.”

  Half of them? That’s too high a number to be true, McKenna thought. Unless … “Would the RUC or the Brits have anything to do with all these accidents?”

  McKenna saw at once that he had asked a question Forsythe didn’t want to answer. “Like what?” the constable asked defensively.

  “Like maybe seeing to it that the IRA is supplied with defective fuses and timers,” McKenna suggested.

  That wasn’t it, McKenna could tell from the look on Forsythe’s face. “Now how would we go about doing that?” the constable asked sarcastically.

  It was apparent to McKenna that Forsythe didn’t know something that the Nazis only found out too late in World War II, that those folks in British Intelligence were an extremely resourceful bunch when it came to deception, high chicanery, and setting traps for their adversaries. “Maybe they found a way to blow the bombs by remote control before they could be placed,” McKenna tried.

  Forsythe gave McKenna a sidelong suspicious glance, but he didn’t answer.

  That was a pretty good guess, McKenna thought. “You gonna tell me about it?” he asked.

  “Nothing to tell. That’s just a rumor that’s been going around, but I don’t know. The Brits deny it every time it comes up.”

  Of course they would, McKenna concluded. Along with the bombers there would have to be additional casualties, some of them entirely innocent. “I’d sure like to hear this patently false rumor just the same,” he said.

  “Okay, why not? We know that these kids don’t have the know-how or experience to assemble and arm their bombs at their intended target locations, so they do it at home. Since most of the bombs are blown by remote control, the rumor is that the Brits sometimes transmit strong signals on the frequencies of the radio detonators that the IRA uses.”

  “Now who would believe a fantastic rumor like that?” McKenna asked, even though he numbered both himself and Forsythe as believers.

  “Apparently the IRA does,” Forsythe answered nonchalantly. “The last three bombs in town were all detonated the old-fashioned way, with timers.”

  There was a silence while McKenna pondered the information he had just received. Then Forsythe yawned and McKenna suddenly felt very tired himself. It had been a long, trying day.

  “Where would you like to go now?” Forsythe asked.

  “Would the Hotel Europa be taking you too far out of your way?”

  “Not at all. It’s less than a mile from here.”

  “Thanks,” McKenna said. He appreciated the favor, but found himself wishing his hotel was hundreds of
miles from Belfast. After just one day, he was that sick of the town.

  Twenty-Three

  THURSDAY, MARCH 12TH—BELFAST, NORTHERN IRELAND

  McKenna had to give the Maher family some credit, but not much. Owen Stafford had arrived at the funeral home for the last day of Meaghan’s wake and the fact that he was black didn’t seem to bother them. They knew that Meaghan had always considered herself to be as American as Madonna, and MTV had been available in Ireland for years. They all knew about the strange antics and customs of those daft Americans, so Thomas, Peg, Kevin, Bridgette, and Ryer initially treated Owen like family. He was an easy man to like, handsome, courteous, well-mannered, and appropriately dressed in a dark suit. His stock soared in Meaghan’s family’s eyes when he cried like a baby over Meaghan’s body. He obviously had loved her very much and she had probably loved him, so that was good enough for them.

  Owen had quite a few questions for McKenna about the circumstances surrounding Meaghan’s death. McKenna answered them as best he could, and Owen took the story hard. Then McKenna had a question for him. “Why didn’t you call the police when Meaghan didn’t show up?”

  Owen gave him the answers he had expected. He had been frantic when Meaghan hadn’t arrived according to their impromptu plan and had begun making calls. For two days he had tried her apartment, and finally the police as his concern mounted. The Montreal police had been polite, but told him that they couldn’t initiate a missing persons investigation on Owen’s complaint since he wasn’t a relative. They suggested that he have Meaghan’s family contact them, but that was a problem for Owen—he didn’t have the Mahers’ number or address.

  Owen then went on to try the NYPD and ran into the same bureaucratic wall he had hit with the Montreal police, but the Missing Persons detective who had answered the phone gave him something else to think about. He had been kind enough to add that he was too busy to investigate a case that sounded to him like a girl dumping her boyfriend.

  After a week without hearing from Meaghan, Owen had figured that the detective was right—Meaghan had had a change of heart and was on vacation somewhere, he hoped alone, while she put her thoughts in order.