by Chris Petit
‘Take your mask off, Seamus.’
Seamus fumbled with the gun, ignoring him.
‘You’re scared, Seamus.’
‘Shut your gob,’ said one of the others.
The fear returned, hammering at him. He willed Seamus through clenched teeth to get on with it. Thirty-three. Thirty-two.
‘Last chance,’ said one of the voices behind him. ‘Tell us what you know and this stops.’
‘Fuck you,’ he managed to say. ‘And the mother you rode in on.’
Seamus moved round behind him.
Twenty-seven, twenty-six. His vision clouded. The black tunnel was waiting. Would it ever end? This field felt longer than the rest of his life together. He tried and failed to think of anything good to take with him. Twenty-five. Twenty—
The report banged in his ears and he was hit in the middle of the back. He pitched forward and tasted earth. They had botched the job. He was still alive.
Twenty-four. Twenty-three.
He couldn’t tell where he’d been hit. There was no pain. The wet warmth he thought was blood was liquid shit. He had voided himself. It wasn’t right that this shame should be the last thing he experienced. Now he knew how the others had felt.
The muzzle of Seamus’s barrel scraped the side of his head and he braced himself for the explosion. There was a scream. He squeezed his eyes shut and had a clear, high-up picture of himself lying there squealing. He was no different from the rest, after all. Then came a series of clicks – the gun jamming, he thought. Click click click. Then he realized Seamus was spinning the chamber between clicks and he understood what they were doing. They were playing Russian roulette with him. His brain was sweating like nitroglycerine. Click click click. He gritted his teeth in a supreme effort to keep back the words building in his throat, waiting to pour out: Davenport, Tranter, phone numbers and all the rest. He swallowed the words back down with the bile that was rising in him. In the everlasting second before the hammer fell again he experienced the fear that until then he had only seen in others.
Then he felt warm breath on his ear, a voice saying, ‘April fool.’
He rolled over and lay staring at the sky, in wild search of the heavens, for some sign of understanding. He wondered if he wasn’t dead anyway, if this was not the start of an afterlife.
His heartbeat gradually settled. With it came a new resolve, a pure hatred born out of a shame revealed to him by his shit, by his screams.
From now there would be no mercy. They would have been better off killing him. One day they would pay.
His would-be executioners were embarrassed and unsure what to do next. They kept their masks on, adding to the unreality of everything. One put his shoes back on and they all walked back to the farm in silence. Candlestick had trouble with his balance. The sharpness of everything made him dizzy. Seamus carried the hood. Who had made it? Candlestick wondered.
They took him to an outside wash house and cut the twine that bound his hands and went outside while he stripped off his soiled clothes and washed himself down. His mind was blank, his hands steady. He waited for the shock to kick in.
He asked for fresh clothes and stood shivering until they fetched a pair of trousers several sizes too big and a vee-neck jersey with holes in the elbows. They led him back to the container. The noise was no longer there. He lay on the mattress, shaking uncontrollably, until by will alone he dragged himself up and started exercising hard, counting off the minutes, counting upwards this time until he reached twelve hundred. Then he lay down and slept like a dog, secure in the knowledge that they would not break him now.
Breen got him drunk after that, both of them downing quantities of vodka. He was sure Breen had been behind the hoax execution. It was a test of Candlestick’s true knowledge, a way of finally deciding whether he was who he said he was. Breen’s cleverness was a slipperiness that was hard to contend with, his vodka yet another test. Drinking with the devil, Candlestick thought, grimly: one devil to another.
As the bottle became emptier Breen’s gentle enticements to confess became harder to resist.
‘Now it’s over, you can tell me,’ he said with a laugh.
Nothing would be easier than to tell Breen everything, just to experience the feeling of lightness it would bring.
‘The girl was part of the set-up, surely?’
‘The trouble with you people is you see things where there’s nothing to be seen.’
‘Well, you’ve got her wrapped round your little finger. She’s been pleading on your behalf, and her da’s more than convinced too. It worries me that she’s not prettier.’
‘She’s fair enough.’
Candlestick’s lips felt thick and clumsy from the vodka.
‘Here’s me: this boy could do better, I’m thinking. So why’s he bothering with a lass like her, unless there’s more to it than meets the eye?’
Candlestick watched Breen fill up his glass until it was level with the top.
‘Do you have an answer to that?’ he added.
‘I bet your wife’s no oil painting.’
Breen threw back his head and laughed.
‘True, true.’
‘Was it your idea to have me shot?’
‘It was my idea not to have you shot. The others were all for sticking a bullet in your ear. I told them it was the way to decide if you were telling the full story. There’s not many who wouldn’t start gabbling in the face of that. Congratulations, comrade.’
Breen raised his glass in mock salute. The vodka appeared to have little effect on him. Candlestick was sure that Breen still didn’t believe him. He knocked back his drink and Breen poured him another. Candlestick tried refusing.
‘There’s no defaulting here. It’s the end of the bottle or nothing. What do you think of Mr Davenport now?’
The reference to Davenport nearly threw him.
‘What are you talking about?’
Breen shook his head, to say never mind.
For a moment Candlestick saw again into the abyss of his own fear. He started to nurse a hatred of Breen, a murderousness of the kind usually reserved by sons for their fathers.
After the bottle was finished Candlestick offered a confession of sorts, a sour, dank admission of childhood lovelessness.
‘I spent my childhood getting fucked. I think that entitles me to fight for who I want to fight for.’
He added that you didn’t have to be not a Brit to hate the Brits.
Breen raised his empty glass. ‘Amen to that.’
31
CROSS reread the forensic report on the lock-up where blood tracings matching Mary Ryan’s had been found. They had a murder site. As for John Willcox, he was still nowhere to be found.
The phone rang. It was Donnelly calling from the Republic to say that he had located Bernadette Breen’s sister, Molly Connors, living in West Meath under her maiden name.
‘So she never married, by the looks of it,’ said Donnelly. ‘Do you want me to call her?’
Cross called her himself. The phone was a long time ringing. There was a silence when he said who he was and what he wanted to talk about.
‘I thought someone would come asking sooner or later,’ she finally said.
Molly Connors had an attractive voice, deep, perhaps even a contralto, he thought. He asked to come down in the following week. Saturdays were easiest, she replied, and in the end they agreed on the following day, Molly perhaps because she wanted to get the meeting over with, Cross because it would mean not spending the day at home.
At the next morning’s breakfast he announced his intention to spend the day working.
‘I hope you’re not taking the car,’ said Deidre, spooning egg into Fiona’s mouth.
Her car was being repaired, it turned out, and she needed the Volvo as Saturday was the only day she could do the shopping.
‘We can all go, then I can take the car after,’ volunteered Cross.
The argument lapsed into a stubborn silence once
it became clear that Deidre was not prepared to relinquish the Volvo.
‘We shouldn’t be having this row in front of the children,’ she said.
‘Do you want to step outside?’
She pulled a face that told him not to be so childish. Cross felt a blinding desire to hit her and stalked out of the room to escape his anger. It showed how far things had broken down, he thought. Pride prevented him from going back to apologize.
He phoned the barracks and found no vehicle available. The main hire company had nothing either, at such short notice, so he tried Hargreaves on the off-chance, without getting any reply, then rang Westerby. She took her time answering and he wondered if he was getting her out of bed.
He explained what he wanted, wondering why he wasn’t taking the train.
‘Don’t worry if it’s inconvenient,’ he said, but Westerby announced that she could drive him to West Meath, though she sounded doubtful and he started to make excuses. Perhaps he should spend the day with his family after all, he thought. Someone was moving around in the background at Westerby’s end of the line and there was the sound of a pop-up toaster.
‘No, really, it’s fine,’ she said. ‘Martin’s playing rugby anyway, so it gets me out of watching.’
She told him not to thank her until he had seen the car.
Deidre was already gone, with a final glare of anger, before Westerby arrived. It was the first time he had noticed her clothes, he realized. She was wearing jeans and a loose sweater.
The car was small, slow and uncomfortable. Even with the seat pushed right back Cross had trouble with his legs. As they turned on to the Malone Road and headed south Westerby said she had managed to speak to the Irish Times journalist in Barbados.
‘About Heatherington?’
She nodded. After his arrest for his apparent part in the shooting of two policeman, Heatherington had been taken to the Crumlin Road gaol. Cross asked to be reminded of when this had happened.
‘May 1974, sir.’
Westerby went on to explain how in gaol Heatherington had exercised his right to select which prisoners he was put in with and elected to be billeted with the IRA, claiming that he had once been a member of the IRA’s youth movement.
‘The Provisionals questioned him as a matter of course and he struck them as shifty. So they checked with their people outside and found out he’d had nothing to do with the shooting. Well, alarm bells started to ring. When they asked him why he had requested to be put in the IRA wing he quite reasonably answered that it offered protection from loyalist reprisals. As far as they were concerned he’d just shot a couple of policemen. Nevertheless, the Provisionals became convinced they had a plant on their hands and Heatherington behaved like he had something to hide.’
‘So they sweated him?’
‘Exactly. Until he told them he was working for the Brits and backed that up by spilling stuff that could only have come from them. He named the gang that had killed Tommy Herron the year before, which confirmed IRA suspicions that the Brits were behind Herron’s murder. He also had up-to-the-minute information on that month’s bombings in Dublin, again confirming the Provisionals’ belief that the British had been involved. Can this be right, sir? Surely the Brits can’t be condoning the slaughter of civilians.’
‘What did your man in Barbados say?’ asked Cross.
‘He said it was generally thought, even then, that the loyalists did not have the expertise to carry out such a sophisticated operation by themselves. Surely this can’t really be true?’
She took her eye off the road and looked at Cross, perplexed.
‘Hard to believe,’ he said lamely.
Like most people he blanked out the nastier stories: the torture in Castlereagh, the dirty ops and the black propaganda. These things went on of necessity but it was best not to enquire too closely. These things were wrong in theory, but he could see how in practice they became enmeshed in a complex psychological war where moral considerations had no place. He remembered the indignation of the Dublin officer – he couldn’t remember his name – who had told him about the bombings just mentioned by Westerby. Twenty-eight dead altogether. It was hard to believe.
They moved on to the motorway. Westerby broke off her account to coax the car past an army convoy. Cross had never grown used to these faceless, sinister processions of khaki camouflage.
Once past the vehicles, Westerby explained that Heatherington’s interrogators had pushed him into confessing to being part of a pseudo-gang run by British intelligence.
‘Pseudo-gang?’
‘Counter-propaganda outfits is how they were described to me, acting like wild cards. They’d carry out a bank raid, which was then blamed on the Provos, to trick them into hunting through their own ranks for culprits.’
Homers, they were called: unofficial freelance raids done by activists to line their own pockets. The paranoid, discipline-crazy Provos were hard on anyone found carrying them out.
Heatherington’s gang had also been told to undertake ‘no warning’ bomb attacks, again to discredit the IRA. Westerby, after recounting this with a mixture of disbelief and wonder, again looked at Cross.
‘Is it really that dirty?’
‘Probably,’ he said cautiously.
‘Well, it seems like Heatherington was being used for pretty high stakes. The point of his operation, he finally confessed, was to get inside the Provisional wing of the Crum and poison three of its leaders. Once this was discovered and they found where the poison was hidden, all hell was let loose because on top of that Heatherington had named a whole string of Provos who were informers for the Brits.’
‘And the Provos didn’t know whether to believe him?’
‘Not until they learned about the plot to kill the leaders and found the poison. Then they swallowed the lot.’
The Crumlin Road leadership had panicked and ordered a massive internal hunt for the traitors. In the chaos that followed many forced confessions were extracted from innocent men.
‘Are you saying the whole thing was a hoax?’ Cross asked. ‘And he wasn’t there to poison anyone.’
‘That was a decoy to get them to believe everything else.’
Cross was amazed at the elaborate nature of the plot. If Westerby was right then it was someone’s intention that Heatherington should have been suspected of being a British agent from the start, exposed and under interrogation should have passed on crucially damaging false information. The operation was a classic sting.
‘What happened to Heatherington?’
‘After the poison was found someone spirited him into protective custody. He then went on trial for the shooting of the policemen, was acquitted and stayed in Belfast in the belief that he was not on any IRA hit list, which struck me as pretty daft until the man from the Times explained to me that there had been a change in the Provisionals’ leadership as a direct result of the Heatherington operation. And the new men had nothing against him, believe it or not.’
‘But his luck ran out.’
‘Two years later. He was shot, presumably on the orders of the men he’d duped.’
Cross shook his head in disbelief at the whole story.
‘It’s amazing,’ said Westerby. ‘What people have minds like that, sir?’
‘People who like to play games.’
Westerby turned off the motorway, and they drove in silence through Protestant Portadown with its brickwork and kerbstones painted in the colours of the Union Jack, and on towards Catholic Newry. Cross’s back was starting to ache, which took the pleasure out of the journey. He thought about lunch but decided to press on. They were in republican country and he felt exposed and apprehensive.
The rolling fields and hedgerows reminded him of his childhood. The last time he had been in England he had been struck by how few hedges were left, uprooted in the general move towards open farming. South Armagh by contrast was still a countryside of entrenched smallholdings and roadside wild flowers. In the distance he coul
d see the railway line and wondered if it was near where they had been evacuated from the train.
Gazing at the sun-dappled fields, Cross was overtaken by his usual surprise at the contrast between the sleepy landscape and its fearsome reputation. The clatter of an army helicopter, rearing up suddenly from behind a hill, was a sharp reminder of where they were. He watched it head south-west in the direction of Crossmaglen, where the army patrols were ferried to and from by air.
Between Newry and the border they ran into a roadblock. The first warning was a long tailback of traffic. Westerby groaned as they joined the queue. Twenty minutes, said Cross. Half an hour, said Westerby, who turned out to be right.
The stop-start of the traffic eroded what was left of his good mood. He thought of barging to the head of the queue, but a steady stream of cars coming the other way left them boxed in. He got out to stretch his legs. Up ahead he could see soldiers checking each vehicle, letting some pass and pulling others over. Two soldiers approached, inspecting the line of cars, their rifles held down at forty-five degrees. Their arrogance failed to hide their anxiety. They would have seen the local road signs saying Sniper at work.
32
South Armagh, June 1974
THOUGH no longer a prisoner Candlestick realized he might as well be. He had been taken to a farm in remote countryside, somewhere well south of Belfast, he guessed, where he was reunited with Becky. She moved cautiously, with a wariness that pricked at his new pity for her. Some vital spark had been lost since the shooting. She trembled at every noise. He spent long hours holding her, saying little. Her horizons shrank until she was entirely dependent on him. He felt the unqualified affection he would feel for an injured animal, which she returned with docile gratitude.
The one disturbance to their solitude was a man who delivered groceries twice a week. He said they were paid for. The telephone only rang when her father called, and she always said, ‘Yes, I’m feeling much better.’
Sometimes he missed the unpredictability of violence and was driven from his bed in the middle of the night to roam the farm in a frenzy, until he learned to absorb the quietness of the land, and remembered the watchfulness of his childhood.