But when Robbie and Gerry got on to moving back to Dublin, I was reminded of all the reasons I wouldn’t want to live down there. The Church, for one thing, with contraception still illegal, or only for married couples or some such, bloody ridiculous in this day and age, and teenage girls having babies in fields as a result, they go on about the Dark Ages in the north, but it’s not as if it’s a shiny new enlightenment down there. That’s the other thing, the worst thing probably, the aren’t-we-great mentality, the way they all think they’re so fucking wonderful, they’re not exactly shy about diagnosing what’s wrong with us but suggest they could do with drinking less and poking their heads out from underneath their mammy’s skirts and telling their bishops and priests to keep their noses out of people’s affairs and they get all po-faced and humorless, with lots of “At least we don’t go round blowing the shit out of each other.”
Fair point.
Christ, catch yourself on, Claire. No sense in getting defensive, you could feel your spine stiffen at the border checkpoint and you’re a northern Prod, you don’t have to put up with the kind of grief they give Gerry, and God knows how that compares to how they treat a Catholic who isn’t a university lecturer.
Gerry’s gone very quiet.
Probably thinking about his blessed car, we passed one twenty minutes ago, just before we crossed the border, an old couple on the hard shoulder, looked like they’d had a breakdown. Same model, or looked like it, same burgundy color at least. Don’t think Gerry noticed, or he’d’ve been out on the road to help a fellow Jaguar driver.
I love that about him, that he loves his Jag like a wee boy. God, when he starts talking about it it’s exactly the way Luke gets with his Thunderbirds. There’s something incredibly attractive about a man with a passion for something, even if it is something as ridiculous as a fifteen-year-old car. And he really tries to interest Luke in it, and Yvonne too, I especially like that he never tries to leave her out. Not that I wouldn’t expect it of him, but I notice it as well. Surrounded by knuckle-dragging Belfast men who think women should only leave the kitchen with their knickers ’round their ankles, it’d be hard not to.
God forgive me, it’s a smug thought for a Sunday afternoon, but I do love my husband.
Yvonne Coyle
I know Mum and Dad think they’re being so cool and trendy and advanced for sending me and Luke to state schools but raising us as Catholics, but frankly it’s a complete and total pain. You feel like you’re on display all the time, you’re every middle-class Prod’s token Catholic friend, and then when they start making their jokes about nuns being mickey dodgers and how Catholic girls have cobwebs down there you’re supposed to be scandalized when all it does is make you embarrassed for them in their ignorance. I personally wouldn’t care which we were, even if Mum is a Prod, except she is but she doesn’t go to any church, a plague on both your houses, she says, churches, Dad says, you started it, she says, no we didn’t, you did, back with Henry the Eighth, when Mum and Dad think they’re hilarious that’s when they’re at their most nauseating, total boak, but because we’re Catholics, I think we should just go to a Catholic school. But then you wouldn’t see both sides of the argument, Dad says. But that implies all Catholics who go to Catholic schools are bigots, and they’re not, I say. All I want is a quiet life, I say.
Well, we better move down south, Dad says, we won’t see it up here. And Mum makes a face and says when another job in a southern university comes up, in about fifteen years’ time, Dad can apply for it, which is to say they have no money down there and Dad gets all defensive and Mum says joke joke God leave them to it.
All I want is a quiet life. It’s not too much to ask for.
Luke Coyle
One of the main differences between chipper chips and Mum’s chips is that Mum never uses vinegar BUT when you put vinegar on Mum’s chips they still don’t taste the same as chipper chips also chipper chips are hot all the way through and soaky but Mum’s chips are dry and crispy which is good sometimes to dip in a fried egg BUT the chips in the café were a cross between Mum’s chips and chipper chips but not as good as either even though you could get Tomato Ketchup AND Brown Sauce which they never have in the chipper and you’re only allowed one at home never both and the tea tasted like piss with milk in it that’s what Dad said to Mum when he thought we weren’t listening but we always are.
Mum got Yvonne a bra and I saw her in it. She’s my sister though, so it just looked stupid. What’s it supposed to look like?
I can’t wait to tell everyone about the match.
I wonder what beer tastes like if you have more than a sip.
I wish we had real aunts and uncles not just Mum and Dad’s friends, because real aunts and uncles send you presents and let you maybe stay up late if you go to their house, and watch the boxing from America at two in the morning like John Burley’s uncle. Also Grannies and Granddads, who spoil you all year round and especially at Christmas, but all of ours are dead.
I wonder what’s for dinner.
South Armagh, November 9, 1980
Ice felt a lot of what was wrong with the IRA was embodied in Red, and what that amounted to was hypocrisy. The Irish Republican ARMY, not lobby group or political party, ARMY. And what did any army since time began run on? The harnessed energy and unbridled aggressiveness, not to say ferocity, of young men. They were the foundations war was built on. Red made out that Ice was some kind of inhuman creature, one without real feeling, but that was a necessary part of the armor: Ice’s job (and Red’s too if he’d get down and do it) was to be a leader, not in the abstract, but a real leader of men prepared to kill at close quarters, in a war where civilians were present, not a romanticized battlefield where the men had been sent overseas and the women kept the home fires burning. Their job was to shoot a man in his front garden, with his family close by. How was that worse than shooting a man on a battlefield with his family safe two hundred miles away? Ice would like that explained to him. And how were you to do that, to shoot and kill a man in front of his wife and weans, if you hadn’t hardened your heart first? Otherwise you’d be actively irresponsible, you’d hobble a boy psychologically, for life, if you didn’t groom him for it. If you didn’t make it clear it was an act of war to kill that man, just like the acts of war he, as a policeman or a prison officer, was carrying out every day against our comrades in arms, against our army.
No one was arguing for unnecessary cruelty or brutality. But there was a place for civilian deaths, just as there was in Germany toward the end of World War II, to undermine the morale of enemy combatants and strike terror into the hearts of the population that supported them. Ice regretted the deaths of innocent people, that went without saying, but no one could tell him that the killing of civilians, particularly on English soil, didn’t have an effect—the effect of sickening the hearts of the British, and pushing them in the direction of inevitable withdrawal. And if the loyalists hit back at our own people, well, in a war, it was a case not only of who can inflict most, but who can endure most.
In a war—that seemed to Ice to be the point folk like Red glossed over. If the cause was just—the entitlement of the Irish people, as represented by the Irish Republican Army under the authority of the first Dáil, to wage just war on the British to liberate themselves from the yoke of imperialist oppression—and if Red and his Marxist friends thought there was something wrong with any of that, let them speak up and then get out—say it again, if the cause was just, then the war had to be fought by every means possible. The Brits didn’t stint on carpet bombing German cities full of women and children; the Yanks didn’t balk at dropping the big one on the Japs; why? In a word, victory. Sometimes, with folk like Red, you felt victory was the last thing they wanted; they’d prefer to be sitting around tables having talks like politicians. Well, the botched talks that led to the treaty of 1922 that partitioned Ireland were the reason Ice and Red were hiding out among the hawthorns halfway up a hill on a November Sunday in South A
rmagh waiting to blow a British judge and his wife straight to hell. Ice didn’t want his son to be doing this in twenty years’ time. Talking to the enemy would never secure peace. Waging war against them would.
It wouldn’t be long now. They had pictures of the car—a Jaguar Mark 2 3.8 liter, a big saloon with curved roof and boot and long bonnet, not as long as the E-type, dark red in color. Shame it had to be such a class car, but still. Red watched the road, barely moving, the cold no longer an issue. At a certain stage, you moved beyond cold; anxiety and adrenaline played their parts; it was only later, only afterward, thawing out, teeth chattering and hands shaking, that you realized how cold you had actually been. Or maybe that was fear.
It was one thing Red envied in Ice, the seeming lack of fear, or rather, because he must have had it, Ice was only human after all, even though he went to great lengths to cover it up, how he had mastered his fear. Red might have had disgust for what he saw as Ice’s ruthlessness, worse, his relish for the mayhem he inflicted, but deep down, he understood that this reflected as much on Red as it did on Ice: it encapsulated the divide within the movement between the military and the political wings. Just like any liberation struggle, just like war of any kind: the natural tendency of a significant sector in the army is to fight on, and to fight harder, and to murder and maim and destroy: there was no reason to despise them for that. It was their mission and their profession, they weren’t blood-crazed savages, and if at times they were prone to appearing that way, well, that was what war did: the entire point of it was that it didn’t take place around a table. And Ice was a possessed and gifted commander, no doubt about that: his men were the most highly motivated, disciplined active service unit in the Army, and if Red found Ice’s methods—particularly his insistence, contrary to recent policy, that civilian deaths were a necessary evil in wartime—excessively brutal, there was no question but that they were employed to further the cause of a United Ireland. Ice was staunch about the justness of the War in ways that Red, privately, simply was not.
Republican strategists invoked South Africa as an analogous situation, with the ANC as brothers in arms. Red found the comparison not just inaccurate, but frankly embarrassing. In South Africa, a white minority imposed their will on an electorally disenfranchised majority by brutal force of arms; it was racist, fascist rule on a scale that demanded bloody and violent revolution.
In Northern Ireland, the unionist majority got the bulk of the social housing and the industrial jobs, and there was discrimination in education and in the civil service. And the police were a bunch of violent, bigoted bastards and if Red had shed a tear or given it a second thought when he heard that one of them had got his, he couldn’t remember it, unless he’d been done in front of his kids. There was plenty wrong with the place—it had been rigged, after all, to ensure the unionists had the whip hand, and boy had they cracked the whip—but the idea that it was like South Africa, or Chile, or El Salvador, simply didn’t add up. Worse, Red was coming to believe that the struggle was starting to prove counterproductive, that ordinary, decent unionists and Protestants who just wanted a quiet life and to raise their children in peace and didn’t think nationalists or Catholics should be discriminated against were so alienated by the IRA campaign that their attitudes were hardening. Soon there would be so much bitterness and division and grief that Red feared the wounds would never heal.
The idea that the unionists, having been bombed and shot at every day for years, would one day miraculously come to their senses and demand a united Ireland—a core belief in republican thought—was positively demented. You couldn’t bomb and shoot your way to peace, not when the peace you sought was to be shared with the neighbors you’d been bombing and shooting. The British weren’t just the British army, they were the people who lived here who called themselves British.
That was the challenge in the years ahead. It wasn’t a challenge men like Ice were interested in meeting, or even in acknowledging. And that was understandable, Red thought as he kept his eyes fixed on the motorway, waiting for the judge’s red Jaguar to appear. When the time came, as with any war, the soldiers would be thanked for their service and sent back to their homes. Everyone knew what kind of society you got when the soldiers refused to go home. It wouldn’t be easy. But when that time came, men like Ice would see that men like Red had a cause too, a cause they didn’t just believe, they knew to be just, and in pursuit of that cause, they were capable of exhibiting a ruthlessness of their own. If the soldiers refused to go home, they would have to be removed by other means. When the day came, Red believed he would be ready.
CHAPTER 22
My doctor didn’t want anyone to come near me until they had the results of the MRI scan on my brain. Apparently I had lost consciousness again shortly after the Guards had arrived at Noel Sweeney’s house. Whether they had attacked me or I had passed out because of the injuries I had received earlier wasn’t clear. But it was late on Easter Sunday, and Jack Cullen was walking free, and I was in no mood to lie in a hospital bed. I had to get out, and in order to get out, I had to get the Guards to question me. More to the point, once they had done that, I had to get them to let me go. It was up to me, so I demanded to be seen by the Guards. It took a couple of hours for them to arrive. There were two uniforms outside my room, but they were just there to ensure I didn’t make a break for it. I spent the time working out a statement in my head, running it over and over so that I could stick to it without faltering.
The interview would be conducted by Detective Inspector Kevin Hayes of Donnybrook Station and Detective Superintendent Derek Conway of the Serious Crime Review Team, Dave Donnelly’s current boss, incidentally, and neither Hayes, a squat, balding man with a salt-and-pepper mustache, nor Conway, a bulky man with a chubby face and dark wavy hair that looked like a wig but wasn’t, looked like they wanted to spend more time on me than they needed to. Short of a confession, they had everything they needed; indeed, they had enough forensic evidence to solve three murders, and while I could say what I liked, I was going nowhere for twenty years as far as they were concerned. The crucial thing for me was to seize control of the interview and not let go until they had heard what I needed to say. I saw immediately that my best hope was Conway; Hayes was the drunk cop who had pushed into my apartment and threatened me. Apparently sober now, he was still belligerent and stupid and I had a flash of his having been at the crime scene and screaming something at me, cop killer, perhaps, and very possibly knocking me down, probably out.
Once they had set up audio and video recording, and they had stated their names and ranks for the record, the first thing I said was that I thought there should be someone from the Special Detective Unit present, because I was certain there were individuals involved in this case who were in receipt of their protection. This got a derisive response from Hayes but Conway looked at the very least like he wanted to hear more. I then outlined a version of the case to date that wasn’t far from the one that had resulted in the deaths of Charlie Newbanks and Lamp Comerford, taking care at every opportunity to emphasize the real or alleged IRA backgrounds of Jack Cullen and Bobby Doyle. The first time I mentioned Doyle’s name was instructive; Hayes greeted it with the same snarl of loathing he had maintained throughout; Conway’s eyebrows shot skyward, and, if he didn’t quite grin, there was a look of recognition and of excitement in his eyes.
I told them what had been taking place in Dublin was a feud within the Provisional IRA and that any talk of INLA involvement was a smoke screen. I took them through Lamp Comerford’s role in the process: how he had targeted Ray Moran out of jealousy, but his boys had mistakenly attacked me; how I had left them breathing but Lamp had finished them off, and then tried to use the murder weapon to blackmail me into finding out who the tout was within Cullen’s drug-smuggling operation (more eyebrow work from Conway); how Lamp Comerford had murdered Paul Delaney in the car park under Delaney’s Parnell Street apartment block, a murder confirmed to me last night by Comerford’s a
ccomplice, Charlie Newbanks.
At this point, Conway stood up and turned the recording equipment off and, following a brisk muttered exchange with Hayes, left the room.
“Where is Newbanks now?” Hayes said to me.
“He’s dead,” I said.
“Very fucking convenient,” Hayes said.
“Not for him,” I said. “And not for me either.”
Hayes made a face, as if I’d been cracking wise. But all I’d been telling was the truth, in that at least. As for the rest, my brain hurt too much for me to know what might be true or false in the broadest sense; what I needed to hold on to was the truth that served me best. I could think about the rest of it when I got out of here. If I got out of here. I wasn’t entirely sure where exactly I was, but given that there were uniformed Guards and not prison officers outside my room, I suspected I must be in a regular hospital.
I flashed on Lamp Comerford in the red firelight last night, brandishing the smoking poker like a guttersnipe Satan, and then on tossing his dead body into a freshly dug grave and the barman from the Parting Glass gobbing on his corpse, and the horror and ugliness of it overwhelmed me; I brought the palms of my hands to my eyes and bowed my head, shaking at the enormity of it all.
“That’s right, that’s the yellow-arsed cop-killing fucker you are. Get used to sniveling, because when you go down, the lags’ll use you as a shitbox and a fuckpuppet and you can snivel morning noon and night for all the good it’ll do, you cunt-soaked holesucker.”
There was silence after this, and then the door clicked open. When I looked up, Conway had resumed his seat, and there was a third interrogator in the room, a gray-haired man of about sixty in a pale gray suit, medium build, round steel-rimmed glasses, looked like a career civil servant.
“Please pick up where you left off, Mr. Loy,” Conway said.
“Aren’t you going to introduce your colleague?” I said. The man with the steel-rimmed glasses looked at me through them without any expression in his cold eyes. They reminded me of Jack Cullen’s eyes. Conway didn’t even shake his head; he simply repeated his request for me to continue. I asked if I should recap what I had told them already and Conway said there was no need. I assumed Steel Rim was from the SDU or some branch of Garda security; maybe even from the Department of Justice, why not? I decided to begin big, to see if I could get a rise out of him.
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