Belfast Girls

by Gerry McCullough

  Mary said nothing for a few moments. Then she remarked casually, “There’s an old flame of yours back in town. Sheila Doherty. Have you bumped into her yet?”

  “Sheila Doherty!” John’s voice held a world of bitterness, which told Mary more than the longest, most eloquent speech.

  “Yeah.”

  “That’s somewhere else where I’ve messed up,” said John at last. He spoke slowly. The words seemed dragged from him. “It was my fault, you know, that we broke up. I’ve come to see that lately.” He stopped, gazing into his cup.

  Something in Mary’s silence, a warmth, a quietness, allowed him to go on. “I was a fool. Very self-righteous. I knew it all. I made judgements, wrote people off. Wrote Sheila off. Labelled her. It was my own insecurity, I see that now. I had a list of rules for myself and for everyone else. If anyone fell down on those rules, I despised them.

  And yet I knew I hadn’t done so well on the rules myself. That’s mainly why I gave up the priesthood as an ambition. I could see easily enough that I wouldn’t be able to keep to the requirement for celibacy. But I laid it on myself even more strictly, that I would keep to normal rules, chastity outside marriage, and I expected everyone else to do the same or else they were trash. What a mess I’ve made of my life.”

  “It’s not really about rules, John,” said Mary cautiously.

  He looked up suddenly and smiled. “Hey, listen to me feeling sorry for myself! It’s a bit late now for regrets and for all this self-analysis.”

  “It might not be,” said Mary softly.

  “Oh, Mary, of course it is!” he burst out. “What would Sheila Doherty want with the likes of me now? A world famous model, going with racing drivers and film stars and the like? She’s probably forgotten my name and, if she hasn’t, it’s only because she remembers what a clown I was! The last time we met, it was very clear that she had no more interest in me!”

  “I think you’re wrong there, John. I wouldn’t be surprised if she still remembers you very well.”

  John looked up at her and grinned, raising one eyebrow sceptically. “Only as someone to avoid, I guess.”

  “I had a drink with her and Phil Maguire yesterday,” Mary told him. “She hasn’t really changed. I don’t think she’s very happy.”

  John’s expression changed suspiciously. “Oh?” was all he said.

  Mary wondered if she should go on.

  Then she decided to risk it.

  “I think the ball’s in your court, John. Do you want to play? Sheila won’t try to contact you. She thinks you despise her. But I don’t see the point of throwing away something you both seem to want, something that could be good, just because you’re afraid to make the effort to find out for yourself if it might still work. Why don’t you give her a ring?”

  “Because,” said John angrily, “I don’t even know her number. She has an apartment by the river, but her phone is ex-directory.”

  “But I know it. Here.”

  She took a slip of paper from her pocket with the number written on it and placed it on the table in front of him.

  John’s face was inscrutable.

  Mary felt that she had said enough.

  It was up to him, now. If he wanted to take any action, he knew how to do it.

  She changed the subject and began to talk of other things.

  Chapter Seventy-Three

  Phil had no way of getting in touch with Davy, or none that she wanted to make use of.

  He had gone straight back down south after their brief time together, and although he had tentatively suggested that he should give her a name to contact if she wanted to get a message to him, she had rejected the idea. She wanted no more guilty knowledge to weigh her down.

  By the end of the summer, she longed to see him.

  Her pregnancy was becoming noticeable and she had eventually, with difficulty, told first Gerry and then their parents.

  It seemed to Phil that she had brought them problem after problem.

  She was moved by their cheerful acceptance of her announcement.

  All her life it had loomed over her as the ultimate disaster – her upbringing had underlined it constantly – to be fool enough to become pregnant outside marriage – to have to break it to her parents that she was pregnant! Suddenly it was not so bad after all.

  Annie fussed over her and Kevin expressed, awkwardly, his intention of helping in any way possible.

  Phil told them as little as she could about the father, but they guessed, and she reluctantly confirmed to them that it was Davy.

  She explained to them that he was out of the country and unreachable. What they read into that she had no way of telling.

  She had no-one but her family to turn to at this time. Mary had moved into her community and Sheila had gone back to Delmara Fashions in mid June.

  Phil sank back into the warm cocoon of her family and focussed more and more on the new life growing in her womb.

  Davy had returned to his hideout near Dublin.

  He lived a strange life there which he still found it hard to accept as normal. He thought of himself as a businessman, not as a crook, but although he tried hard to believe it, he knew, when he allowed himself to think about it, that it wasn’t the truth.

  He had been allocated a room to himself in a house which held five other men, all gang members. Most of his time was spent chatting or playing cards with these men, eating, or sleeping.

  Then there would be brisk, active intervals, when he would be driven off, sometimes to an area he could not easily identify, to take charge of consignments of drugs and see that they were safely shifted to a safe place and in due course delivered to the next link in the chain, who would split the stuff up into smaller lots and pass it to the street traders.

  He grew used to crawling, face down, through fields in the Border area, avoiding the Customs and Excise men, waiting for the lorry to arrive with the goods and be unloaded, then slipping silently across by unofficial, unapproved roads. As the weather grew colder again with the approach of winter, this became a less and less pleasant experience. On one particular night, a barking dog alerted the customs men to the existence of himself and his companion before they had reached their position. They spent a long, cold half hour almost submerged in a nearby stream before it was safe to escape.

  On another occasion, Davy managed to stumble over someone lying in ambush.

  The man’s yells at once gave the alarm so that Davy and the other men with him were forced to fly for their lives amid a shower of bullets, leaping over hedges and ditches and racing across fields until they were safely out of range.

  It wasn’t the customs men or the police.

  There was no way they would have been firing like that at random, without warning given.

  Davy knew quite well who it was.

  Big Jim Murphy. The gangster whose men had beaten Davy up years ago now, before he threw his lot in with O’Brien. These were his men.

  There had been gang warfare between Murphy and O’Brien and their men in the early days of the peace process. Things had been more settled for a while, as each realised the other was too strong to be pushed out altogether, but with O’Brien in jail and likely to be there for a long time, Murphy clearly felt it was a good opportunity for another push.

  Often, too often, now, drugs were going astray. The lorry would turn up empty or not at all. It wasn’t that the Customs and Excise men were seizing them on entrance to the country. If that was happening, they would be eagerly publicising their success.

  There was something else behind it. Murphy had an informer, someone who was telling him dates and places so that he could intercept the loads.

  There had been shootings, too, mainly in the North, but not only there.

  One day late in October, Davy was summoned with a number of others to a high level meeting.

  The atmosphere was charged.

  “There’ve been too many mistakes recently,” Sean Joyce said grimly. Since O’Brien’
s arrest and imprisonment, it was mainly Sean who had taken on the leading role. “It’s Murphy and his gang, I know it is. They think now O’Brien’s out of the way, they can take over, hijack our stuff. It’s got to come to a show down.

  Davy, you have experience of these guys. You know who most of them are. We’d like you to set up a meeting with them. We’ll get together and see what can be arranged by way of drawing up boundaries, identifying each other’s territory.”

  Davy was in full agreement. He was certain that the present situation, where nothing was being achieved, needed to change. If nothing was done soon, it would be better to forget the whole business and get out with what he had. He had sacrificed a lot for this last effort to make enough to give him and Phil what he thought of as a good future. But it had gone on now for too long. It was time to win or lose.

  In a remarkably short time everything was organised.

  Davy sent out feelers to the people he knew best on Murphy’s side. Would they be up for a high level meeting? Would Murphy himself be willing to come to an agreed place with some of his henchmen to meet Sean Joyce and a picked few supporters, or would they prefer something a bit more low key? Davy and a couple of others could have a preliminary meeting with some of Murphy’s men if that would be better.

  Word came back by devious routes. Murphy himself wasn’t prepared to come into the open just yet. Maybe at a second meeting.

  Meanwhile, some of them would meet Davy and others at an address in Belfast which, they claimed, was neutral ground.

  Davy wondered. It didn’t sound like neutral territory to him.

  But Sean was happy enough to go ahead on Murphy’s terms.

  Davy, a youngster called Paddy McCormick, and a stout, balding man known as Shorty McFee, were picked to go. Late on the chosen night, they piled into a black BMW and drove off, heading north out of Dublin.

  When they came within reach of the Border, they moved off to one side, turning into a narrow, minor road. There were no soldiers, no police even, at the main Border crossing points these days, nevertheless Davy felt it was wise to keep as much out of sight as possible. They crossed by one of those small cross-border roads which some few years ago had been constantly dug up by the Army to prevent just this sort of ingress by terrorists, and as constantly mended again by the local inhabitants.

  It was a pitch black night. There was no one about apart from their own car. They travelled slowly and cautiously, driving only on sidelights, until they were well away from the border area.

  It seemed to take an eternity before they reached the outskirts of Belfast, and stopped.

  Davy got out.

  The meeting place was a small farm house on the east side of the city.

  Davy knew that they weren’t far from it by now. His instructions had been detailed and explicit. They should be driving down the next small lane on the right, he reckoned.

  Standing beside the car, he addressed the others.

  “All right, boys. Take it slowly now. We’ll park here and go forward on foot. It’s not so much that I don’t trust Murphy as that I don’t trust Murphy.”

  This raised a weak grin from Paddy and Shorty.

  “What I want to do here is go in by the back way across the fields, so they don’t know we’re coming until we’re there, see?”

  The other two men nodded. To them it made sense. Never throw away an advantage. Take the other side by surprise when you could.

  They went ahead, moving like shadows ready to retreat if necessary, across the damp fields beside the narrow country lane.

  Davy came at the rear. He was watching carefully for any sound of movement, any ambush, any betrayal, from that direction.

  After twenty minute’s slow, careful advance, they were within sight of a small farmhouse set on a slight rise in the ground, almost a hill.

  There was a light in one of the downstairs windows. This would be the place.

  Davy called a halt.

  “Okay, boys. This is it. We go in slowly, keeping a look out all round, okay? I’ll knock and give the password. You two keep back until I signal you forward. Guns out and ready, but for any sake don’t be firing unless there’s good reason. This is meant to be a friendly meeting, right? Any questions? No? Okay, then.”

  They moved forward again. Below them, the dark was chilling. The lights of the city gleamed. In the small hours of the morning, they were fewer and more scattered. Davy had a strange, momentary feeling as if he was one of the ancient army of Brian Boru advancing on the enemies of Ireland.

  Then the feeling faded and he was sharply aware of the buildings below him. In the sleeping city, few but police and criminals would be awake, he thought.

  He went to the back door of the building and rapped sharply.

  “Who’s there?” came a quiet voice, sounding, to his satisfaction, surprised.

  Good, thought Davy. They didn’t hear us coming, then.

  “Captain Kirk and his two Klingons,” he said, just loudly enough to be heard.

  Whoever had suggested the passwords had been a Star Trek junkie, he thought with an inward grin.

  The door swung open.

  Davy saw that he was facing a gun pointed straight at his face.

  “And we’re the Daleks,” said a rather louder voice giving the counter sign.

  “So now you can put the gun away,” Davy said. He raised his own. “None of us need them.”

  “Okay,” said the man, who Davy now recognised as Johnny McCann, the one of Murphy’s henchmen he had mainly dealt with in setting up the meeting. “Call in your mates.”

  Davy turned round to signal to Paddy and Shorty.

  As he did so, he heard a noise behind him, a click from McCann’s gun. He recognised it without a shadow of doubt for what it was. The sound of the safety catch on McCann’s gun being released.

  Almost before he had recognised it, a warning bell went off in his head.

  In the split second while he was still identifying the sound, he dived sideways out of the light streaming from the farmhouse door and began to run, heading back towards the others, leaping wildly over the nearest wall at the edge of the farmyard and crouching down for cover.

  Suddenly the place was full of noise.

  Shots, voices shouting.

  There was no need to warn the other two men to keep back.

  The noise was enough.

  The place was in an uproar. Men armed with guns were pouring out of the building, far more of them than the agreed three. Shrieks and groans pierced his ears. Someone had been hit but not one of his own men, he thought. The noise came from just outside the house. One of Murphy’s men. Shorty or Paddy, or maybe both, must have opened fire when they realised they had walked into an ambush. He heard the sharp noise of many shots.

  Davy fired, aiming as best he could at the muffled figures to be seen against the light from the doorway.

  His instinct to distrust Murphy had been right, he realised. They should never have come here, never have risked setting up this meeting.

  In the darkness it was hard to see who was doing what. The sounds of fire from nearby him told Davy that Paddy and Shorty were still there. Time they stopped firing and got safely away. Davy moved cautiously forward, trying to see over the rough wall to find someone to fire at.

  He automatically fired and reloaded, fired and reloaded. A dream took possession of him. He was fighting, protecting his own men, destroying the enemy.

  Davy thought of the many men who had been in the same position as him throughout the history of the world. Soldiers fighting for something. Some of them fighting for a cause they believed in. Some of them fighting for a reason they could not fully understand.

  He thought of his grandfather and his uncle fighting for the freedom of Ireland. He thought of all those people who had fought on both sides in the recent Troubles.

  What cause was he fighting for?

  He thought, “How did I get myself into this position?”

  Had h
e made the right choice?

  Was anything good going to come of it?

  Had he wasted his time?

  The thoughts ran through his head.

  Davy banished them.

  Concentration was the important thing at this moment. He could not afford to be side-tracked.

  Perhaps, when tonight was safely over, he might rethink what he was doing?

  He fired again and became aware that Paddy and Shorty must be safely away. He could no longer hear the crack of their bullets close to him. There was only the enemy fire.

  It was time to retreat. He had unwittingly moved into a more exposed position than he had realised. The dream had carried him forward, firing, loading, moving forward, firing.

  It was time to go. He needed to be careful to find cover. He glanced round. He was still crouched behind a low wall within range of the farmhouse. There were a number of outbuildings quite near. He needed to make his way to the next building to his rear and then from there on.

  Bending low, keeping his head down, he ran quickly across a short piece of open ground to the nearest building. There was a bang and the sound of a bullet cracking, and a sharp pain in his shoulder. Davy ran on, half bent over, and rounded a corner to safety.

  For a moment he paused there, aware that he had been shot, as yet feeling only the beginning of pain. It would be worse presently, he knew. He raised his gun, hurting his arm in doing so, and fired again. It was important to get away now, before it became more difficult to move. He fired again, then ran quickly to the next cover. As he crossed a wide piece of open ground between buildings, he realised that there were more bullets than before whistling past his ears.

  He had made it. There was another wall between him and the bullets.

  But there was still a long way to go before he would be safe.

  Should he wait or try to move on more quickly?

  If he waited, McCann and his men out there in the dark might come closer, might catch him up.

  Davy decided not to wait.

  Bent low, he dashed out from behind the wall where he had stopped to shelter and made for the next building.