shovelling the remains of what had, only short hours ago, been a human being. The sight stopped her cold at the top of a mound of debris. Before she could stop herself she was sliding down it, and saw to her horror an arm completely detached from its owner, lying at the bottom of the mound, still clothed in a pale blue sleeve. She scrabbled back wildly, thinking if the arm touched her she might well go mad here in the midst of all this destruction.
A hand, large and strong, caught her from behind and pulled her up sharply. She turned and found a policeman, uniform coated in a fine dust, eyes red rimmed with grief, smoke and fatigue, facing her.
“Are ye alright?” he asked gruffly.
“I—I’ll do,” she managed weakly, swallowing hard on the acid that flooded her mouth.
“Here, lass.” It was Constable Fred coming up behind the man, his florid face kind, though filthy. He took out a handkerchief and handed it to her. “Yer taken a bit badly, that’s all, it’s to be expected.”
The other man nodded curtly and continued on his way through the massacre, shoulders squared against the horrors still to come.
“I feel a right fool,” she said, taking the handkerchief and mopping her face. It smelled comfortingly of limewater, and she took a grateful breath of its starchy folds before handing it back to Constable Fred.
“It’s alright lass; I’d worry if it didn’t bother you in this way. Ye need to get something in ye for the shock.”
Her stomach rebelled at the mere thought of food or drink and she shook her head vehemently.
“Right then, we’ll save tea for later. Is there someone you’d like me to call? I can walk you out beyond the barricades but then I’ll have to come back. I don’t feel right leaving you to yourself, though.”
She fought to get a grip on her emotions. Like the good Constable, she had a job to do and she fully intended to do it. “No, I—I just need a minute, then I’ll be fine.”
He gave her a dubious look, then nodded at the resolve he saw in her face. “Aye, well wait ‘til yer steady on yer pins, lass.”
“I will.”
“Alright, when yer ready to go, follow Gerard around. He’ll be the short one in the red jacket.”
She followed the direction of his finger and saw a man she recognized from his occasional appearance at the Tennant Street Station. She took a short breath and rose to her feet. Still shaky, but given another minute her feet just might agree to carry her around the edges of the huge crater that had once been Oxford Street.
Gerard nodded curtly at her. He was a short man, with a lean, wiry frame and a reputation for being one of the toughest and most thorough men on the job.
“Here,” he tossed her a blue glass jar. “Smear some under your nose, then you’ll not smell the blood or tissue. Makes it easier for both of us to do our job.”
“We’ll start here,” he pointed to the shell of a ribcage, now open, the entire thoracic spine visible, vertebrae strung together by the yellowy pads of cartilage. Above was air—the head and shoulders blown elsewhere. The legs were untouched, stuck out stiff as a scarecrow and capped with well-polished brown shoes. Her gaze was riveted to those shoes, for suddenly she saw him, whoever he had been, shining his shoes, freshly shaved, anticipating the evening ahead. The girl he might meet, an entire future there in a moment’s glance—now gone. A son, a brother, a lover, a carcass, chunks of evidence. The children who would not exist because their future father had been killed by a bunch of hard men who thought blowing up a bus station made some sort of political statement.
“You coming or not?”
Pamela took a deep breath, the menthol stinging her eyes. She put her camera to her eye and began shooting.
The next five hours were a blur of following the red jacket, of taking photos of a catalogue of atrocities her mind could barely take in. A blur of images underlined with the scent of vaporub. Finally Gerard stopped making notes into the tape recorder and nodded wearily to her.
“Come on, we both need a rest. Let’s sit.”
She followed him over to the open back end of a police tender, which had been used to cart supplies over. Later tonight when the scene was finally cleared, it would be reloaded with many of the same supplies, only now they would reek of blood and carnage and the smell of burned human flesh.
She closed her eyes and rubbed them hard. They were burning from the oily smoke and she felt as though the images she’d seen were seared permanently onto her retinas.
Gerard held out a mug of tea one of the constables had passed him.
She shook her head, and he shrugged. “Suit yourself.”
For the first time, she noted his accent didn’t carry the broad tones of Ulster, but rather a curious combination of clipped English consonants and New York street talk.
“Where are you from?” she asked.
“Born in Ballymena, moved to London when I was five, then to New York when I was ten. Came back here a few years ago. And you?”
“New York, summers here in Clare, Belfast, Boston and now Belfast again.”
“Can’t see what the attraction to this place might be, unless you’d family here.”
“I married a native,” she said.
“Ah, love then.”
“Yes, love.”
He took a long slug of tea. “Hard to believe such a thing exists on days like today.”
There was little doubt in her mind that this was the work of the IRA; that men like Joe, and, God help them all, Robin, had likely planned this for months, blinded by their hard-line view that violence was the only means to move toward their goals in the quagmire that was Ulster.
What sort of mind saw this as a means toward anything other than more hatred, more violence, and more pain for a population who no longer knew what it meant to live without these things?
He sighed. “We’d best get back at it, we don’t have a lot of light left.” He shook his head, “Fucking IRA.”
“You think it was them?” she asked, face hidden as she deftly changed her film for the tenth time that day.
“Doesn’t matter which set of psychopaths did it, these people are dead all the same. And undoubtedly you and I will be at a similar scene when the other side takes revenge.”
He stood and she followed suit, taking a deep breath to calm her nerves before facing the carnage again. Around them the activity was beginning to die down a bit, and the light was indeed starting its slow fade into a summer night. A lone fireman was wending his way amongst the rubble of bricks, mortar and glass that lay in great swathes along the street.
Gerard shook his head. “God have mercy on Belfast.”
The death toll would mount as the day came to its close and in all nine people would lose their lives, while one hundred and thirty were injured. Only two of the dead were soldiers, the rest were civilians. The youngest of these a fourteen-year-old boy. The vast majority of the injured were women and children.
The IRA took responsibility for the bombing, though not for the fact that adequate warning was not given for the twenty-seven bombs that were planted, and that it was next to impossible for the areas to be cleared with the short lapse time between the warning calls and the detonation.
In bombing their own city, the IRA had sought to bring an end to ordinary life in Belfast, to try and force a people who had already suffered too much to rise against the perceived oppressor.
What they really succeeded in doing was to hand the British the excuse they had been looking for to launch forces into the formerly sacred Republican no-go areas of the Bogside and the Creggan. Operation Motorman was launched, and an extra 26,000 troops were deployed.
In the end the IRA had rather effectively, with the events of one bloody hour, turned the racing tide of freedom and unity fully against themselves.
Chapter Seventy-two
Hard Man
PAMELA WAS IN THE KITCHEN separating out the several lemon frost thymes that grew in profusion in the big clay pots on the porch. The sharp citrusy sc
ent was pleasing and tended to clear the head when working with them. Working with plants always gave her a feeling of calm, the soil under her fingers soothing. Such small chores were a world away from events such as Bloody Friday, now a week ago, though she still saw the gruesome images every time she closed her eyes.
The newspapers had indulged in a melodramatic field day in the wake of that terrible Friday, the headlines blaring out black from gritty pages about the ‘Massacre—Wanton Murder, Hour of Terror, Day of Infamy and so forth. However lurid the headlines, no one offered any solutions to an untenable situation. The British continued to pour more young men into the narrow city streets, to stumble through tiny back gardens while women and children clanged bin lids in warning to the snipers that took potshots at them from the steeply inclined roofs and then disappeared back into the small jungle that was West Belfast.
Living away from the city provided some small measure of relief, though the tension lived in both she and Casey on a constant basis. It manifested itself in countless ways that became a part of one’s daily routine without an overt consciousness of it. This frightened her more than anything—that looking over her shoulder, that jumping at every loud noise, that looking at every person with whom you were unfamiliar with a jaundiced eye was becoming ingrained in her, and as natural as brushing her teeth.
Suspecting her husband’s long hours were not strictly confined to his work and time at the youth center didn’t sit easily with her either, and yet just such a suspicion had been growing like a tiny weed in her for some time now. She knew he was spending more time with Robin of late than he had before internment, and she had a feeling their activities weren’t strictly confined to lifting pints or playing at horseshoes.
The door opened, startling her. She jumped and knocked over the bag of potting soil that sat on the counter beside the clay pots.
“Damn it all to hell!” She exclaimed as a dark pour of soil fell out onto the wooden floor. The floor she’d finished washing no more than an hour ago.
“Lawrence, is that you?” she called out.
“No, ‘tisn’t,” came back the reply.
She glanced over at the big wooden clock that sat atop the mantelpiece. It was early for Casey to be home. She wiped her hands on a linen tea towel and craned her head around the door to the boot room.
He was sitting on the narrow boot room bench, work boots still on his feet, lunch bag lying in a heap by the door.
“You’re home early.”
“Aye, we’re waitin’ on a load of schist from Derry, truck had an accident near Maghera an’ went into the ditch. They sent us home for the rest of the day.”
He pulled his boots off, his movements unnaturally stiff.
“Did you have an accident yourself? You’re moving oddly.”
“Not an accident as such, more of an intentional head-on, ye might say.”
“What do you mean?”
“I got in a bit of a fisticuffs with one of the other men.” He cricked his neck as though it pained him and stood, stocking-footed. “Will ye put the kettle on, Jewel? I could use a hot cup, an’ maybe a bite of somethin’.”
“What do you mean ‘will ye put the kettle on’? Why on earth were you fighting?”
“Can I come in the house first, woman? Then I’ll explain it to ye.”
She gave him a gimlet eye and then stood back. In the bright light of the kitchen, she could see clearly that he’d been in more than a ‘slight fisticuffs’. His shirt was torn and he still had traces of dried blood on his knuckles, which were skinned and puffy. She pulled his shirt—what was left of it—up out of his jeans and pushed it up to his chest, amid protest on his part.
“Good Lord! How long were you at it?” His ribs were a mottled black and blue down his entire left-hand side.
“The ribs aren’t the man’s fault—we fell onto a pile of concrete blocks from above—ye should see his one leg, ‘tis a deal worse than the wee bruise I’ve got.”
“Wee bruise my arse,” she exclaimed, “your ribs look like you’ve been mauled by a grizzly bear.”
“Well I daresay I feel about as bad as if I had been, Tim Piggott not bein’ particularly small.”
“You were fighting with Tim? What on earth for?”
Tim was a big, bluff good-natured fellow that worked hard, and drank harder. Casey had always gotten along quite well with him. How the two of them could have come to blows was something she found hard to countenance.
“He said somethin’ I took offense to, an’ I smacked him in the mouth but good. An’ then he took offence to that.”
“Yes,” she said dryly, “I imagine he would. What exactly did he say?”
“He said my wife was after getting’ herself a reputation as the RUC’s whore.”
“What?!”
“Aye. He said he’d a cousin lives down near Crossmaglen, an’ yer name came up in conversation recently amongst a certain group of men. An’ that there were rumblins’ about ye an’ that burned out RUC car. Those South Armagh boys are mad as friggin’ hatters woman, can ye not stay clear of trouble for more than a minute altogether?”
“Don’t deviate off topic here, how exactly did he get round to calling me a whore?”
“His cousin is South Armagh IRA, Pamela, an’ if they get a bee up their nose about ye, ye might as well go pick out yer coffin. They’ll kill ye for having the temerity to walk about breathin’, never mind that yer pokin’ yer face into things they don’t want found out. An’ twas them called ye the RUC’s whore—a Catholic woman doin’ the policeman’s dirty work. Tim was repeatin’ it. I think he meant it as warnin’ but it took me the wrong way an’ so I hit him.”
“I just asked a few questions, people will talk to a woman sometimes when they won’t talk to a policeman.”
“It’s my understandin’ ye asked a rather direct question about Noah Murray.”
She swallowed, feeling slightly nervous. The truth was she had asked if anyone had seen Noah Murray about. Which, in hindsight, had seemed more than a little foolish. Noah Murray was, for all intents and purposes, the godfather of the South Armagh brigade of the IRA. He was known for his ruthlessness and his ghost-like ability to elude the police and prosecution of any sort. It was rumored that even his neighbors never questioned him about the strange nocturnal activities that took place on his farm, for fear they would end up in a body bag in a lonely country ditch somewhere.
“I did.”
“Are ye tryin’ to commit suicide, woman?!” Casey drove his hands through his hair in frustration, ruffling the short curls into spikes. “The man runs the ‘Ra down that way.”
She could feel her shoulders creeping upward in defiance and shrugged to ward it off. “If I worried about displeasing them I’d never get my job done.”
Casey snorted in disgust. “Displeasing is it? Those men are the law down there, yer wee policemen friends can’t protect ye from the likes of them. An’ nor can I.”
“So we should just stand by and let people be killed, leave murders unsolved?”
“Ye don’t understand because ye didn’t grow up here,” he said, eyes turning smoky gray.
“And that’s my greatest sin, isn’t it? That I wasn’t born here, so I can never understand all the rules.”
“Ye damn well don’t understand the rules, an’ that’s the plain truth of it.” In moments of great emotion his Belfast street brogue got the better of him, rendering his words harsh and angry.
“Sometimes I feel like I don’t know you at all,” she said, stung by his tone as well as the words.
“Aye well, there are days the feelin’ is mutual in that respect.”
“I am not talking about my job anymore,” she said, with a certain mulishness that had become ingrained over her months of employment.
“My point exactly. Ye have your bits that belong only to you and I have mine. I come from a world, Pamela, where a man’s wife would never dream of hiring out to his enemy.”
She started back
as if slapped. “Is that how you see me? As working for the enemy? If you’re not involved with the IRA again, why should anyone be the enemy? And while we’re on the topic, exactly what the hell were you doing coming in the house in the wee hours looking like you’d been dragged in by the cat, with charcoal all over your face and brick dust on your shoes?”
“Yer checkin’ my shoes after I’ve been out? Christ, it’s good to know ye trust me.”
“I do trust you, I’m just saying not all your activities seem designed to keep you alive and breathing, either.”
“That’s different.”
“How is it different?” She stuck her hands on her hips, a full rolling boil of anger starting to bubble in her veins.
“Because I’m a man, I can take care of myself.”
It was her turn to snort derisively. “And I can look after my own self as well. I’ve had plenty of practice, after all.”
“What the hell is that supposed to mean?”
“You know what it means,” she said coolly, while inwardly quaking at the thunderstorm that was brewing up dark and violent in his face.
“Jaysus woman!” his fist struck the countertop, making crumbly bits of earth roll across its polished surface. “Do ye not realize the ‘Ra will have yer address on file now? That they’ll have established yer routine about a week after ye started yer work an’ may decide that ye constitute a good hit one of these days?” He was breathing in short angry bursts. “Ye can’t be the naïve American over here, it’s goin’ to get ye killed.”
“As,” she said acidly, “I’m not allowed to be the naïve American in my own country, I guess you’ll have to put up with me here, where I never seem to put a foot right.”
Casey’s eyes narrowed. “Not allowed—what the hell are ye inferrin’ by that?”
“I’m not bothering with inference,” she said, anger making her feel as if she was floating up off the floor, “I’m saying it straight. You couldn’t handle living in Boston, so I brought you back here, where you promptly got in trouble again.”
“I knew ye resented leavin’ Boston, but I really didn’t think ye’d go to these lengths to punish me for it.”
Mermaid in a Bowl of Tears (Exit Unicorns Series Book 2) Page 81