Northern Spy

by Flynn Berry

  “Does Marian consider herself a British or Irish citizen?”

  “Irish.”

  “How does she think a united Ireland will be achieved?”

  “Democratically. She thinks there will be a border poll. But Marian’s not political,” I say. I had to remind her to vote last year. When I mention the guests on our program, she rarely knows who they are.

  Above the road, the neon sign for Elliott’s bar blinks red. People are standing outside, holding pints in the humid air before the storm breaks. I blow on my tea, not wanting to leave this room. Any news about Marian will come here first. I’d sleep here, if they’d let me.

  “Why do you think people join the IRA?” asks the detective.

  “Because they’re fanatics,” I say. “Or they’re bored. Or lonely.”

  He rotates his pen on the table. “We want to bring your sister back,” he says. “She can explain what happened herself, she can tell us if she was coerced, but we need to find her first, right?”

  I nod. I need to be polite to him. Marian and I have to work in unison now, without seeing what the other one is doing—her from the inside and me from out here, like we’re picking a lock from either side of the door.

  He says, “We have Marian’s address as Eighty-seven Adelaide Avenue, is that correct?”

  “Yes.”

  “Any other residences?”

  “No, but she wasn’t home this week, she’d rented a cottage on the north coast.”

  I tell him the name of the rental agency. All I know about the location is that a waterfall is nearby. Marian said she’d hiked down to the end of the headland, below the cottage, and when she turned around, a waterfall was twisting over the top of the cliff. I want the detective to see this, Marian standing alone on a spit of land in hiking boots and a rainproof jacket, watching water pour into the sea.

  “Did anyone go on the trip with her?”

  “No.”

  “Have you spoken to her since she left?”

  I open our messages and hand him my phone. He scrolls up, reading our texts, pausing at the picture she sent yesterday morning from Ursa Minor of two cream horns. I can’t bear to look at it, to think of her sitting in a bakery, working through her pastries, not realizing what was about to happen.

  “Are you certain she went alone?” he asks.

  “Yes.”

  “Who took this picture, then?” he asks, turning the phone toward me, at the photo of Marian laughing on the rope bridge.

  “I don’t know. She must have asked another tourist.”

  “Has Marian made any other trips recently?”

  “No.”

  “Does she have travel documents in any other names?”

  “Of course not.”

  I remember how distressed she was after the Victoria Square attack in April, how pinched her face looked. Marian was off duty during the attack, but still ran to help. The IRA had planted an incendiary device, which went off prematurely, when the complex was full of shoppers. Hours later, when she appeared at my house, her jeans were stiff with blood from the knee to the ankle. She said, “When is it going to stop?”

  I slowly lift my head to look at the detective. “Is she working for you? Is she an informer?”

  “No.”

  “Would you know?”

  “I’d know.”

  Detective inspector. How many ranks are there above him? Fenton checks his watch. I look down at the traffic on the Westlink, where the cars have slowed almost to a standstill as the sky opens, releasing the downpour.

  “Does Marian visit extremist websites?” he asks.

  “No.”

  News broadcasts sometimes show IRA videos, though. She may have seen those. Men with ski masks over their faces, setting out their demands, or sitting at a table in silence, assembling a bomb.

  The detective seems to think Marian has been groomed. That someone has been taking her away on trips, sending her extremist material to read. I know what they say, the recruiters. Come where you are needed. Come where you are loved.

  “Does Marian have access to any industrial chemicals?”

  “No. Look, this is absurd.”

  “We only want to find her,” he says, which anyone from here would know isn’t true. The police don’t search for a terrorist the same way they search for a missing person. Let’s say they find a house and send in a special operations team. The team will have different instructions for a raid than an extraction, they will behave differently if someone inside the house needs to be protected.

  “She’s pregnant,” I say.

  The detective takes in a breath. I wait for a moment, like I’m silently checking Marian’s response. This was the first tug on the lock, this lie.

  I can tell it was the right decision. Across the table, Fenton drags his hand down the side of his face. He’s already recalculating. He might be considering how to advise the officers who are out hunting for her. The government won’t want to be responsible for the death of a pregnant woman, even if she is a terror suspect. Or, especially if she’s a terror suspect. The situation is volatile enough already without the police accidentally turning a pregnant terrorist into a martyr.

  “How far along is she?” he asks.

  “Six weeks.” If this lie comes out, he could, in theory, charge me with obstructing an inquiry, but that’s less important.

  “Who’s the father?” he asks.

  “Her ex-boyfriend,” I answer without pausing. “Jacob Cooke. He lives in London, they saw each other when he was back in April.”

  Fenton considers me from across the table. Traffic inches along the motorway, the neon sign above the pub blinks. I twist the ring on my right hand. Marian gave me the ring, a meteorite stone, to mark Finn’s birth.

  She wept the first time she held him. I remember her standing up, in the waiting room outside the maternity ward, her face shining and collapsing into tears when she saw him.

  “She’s not a fanatic,” I say.

  The detective leans his arms on the table. His expression has changed. I might have convinced him, finally.

  He says, “But was she lonely?”

  4

  My mother is giving Finn his bath when I get home. He squawks to greet me, and I kneel on the mat beside her, pushing up my sleeves. It feels so good to see him, sitting with his small legs straight in front of him in the warm, shallow water.

  She starts to soap Finn’s hair, and the room fills with a mild, astringent smell. I remember opening the bottle of baby shampoo during my pregnancy and thinking, This is what he’ll smell like after a bath. Toward the end of my pregnancy, I was impatient to hold him and see him, and I smelled the shampoo the way you smell someone’s shirt when they’re away.

  My mother tips water over his head with a beaker. “Are you okay?” I ask.

  “Two detectives were out here,” she says. “They think Marian’s in the IRA.”

  “I know.”

  “They asked me if she’s ever talked about killing police officers.”

  Both of us look down at Finn, blinking the water from his wet lashes. He doesn’t seem alarmed by our words, or my appearance, or the tension radiating from my mother. He’s still so young. Though he already loves Marian. If she were to walk in right now, he would dip his head, shy and pleased.

  Her name will be on a whiteboard in an incident room now. A counter-terrorism unit will be assembling a picture of her, trying to work out when she was radicalized, who she knows, what she has done. Officers from SO10 might be driving out to her old shared house on the Ormeau Road, to her last boyfriend’s high-rise by the quays, to her ambulance station in Bridge End. They might be asking her friends about her pregnancy, and I imagine their surprise.

  My mam’s thick blonde hair is pulled up in an elastic, and she has on a loose pink t-shirt, darkene
d in places with bathwater. I can imagine her at the start of her day, reveling in the hot weather, opening all the windows as she cleaned the Dunlops’ house, ruffling their labradors’ heads before taking them for a walk, and now she’s rigid, with pouches under her eyes. I’m still catching up with the idea that my mam’s not about to comfort me. She’s not going to say, as she always does, It’s all right, darling, you’ll sort it out.

  I swish my hands in the warm water, making the toy boat rock on the waves. Finn heaves himself toward it and tries to fit the boat in his mouth. I smile, and he looks up at me, with both hands clutching the boat, his jaw wide.

  I want us to leave. I want to get him away from here, but the decision isn’t mine alone. My ex-husband and I share custody. I might be able to petition the court, but then Finn would grow up without his father.

  “Are you not scared of something happening to him here?” I asked Tom recently.

  “No,” he said. “Look at the numbers. He’s in more danger in the car.”

  The numbers change, of course. That’s the problem.

  My mother holds up a towel and I lift Finn into it. He throws back his head and howls at the cold air. Even once he’s dry, he lets out a few last cries, like he wants to be sure his complaint has been lodged.

  He maneuvers his arms out from the towel and reaches a hand toward my face. We consider each other. His skin is cool from the water, and he looks pensive in the dim room. His legs bicycle in anticipation as I lower him to my chest to nurse.

  Finn is old enough to sit up on his own now. He has rosy feet and toes that appear double jointed, and dry creases at his wrists and ankles. He sometimes has a milk rash on his cheeks. He always ends his yawns by rasping, and he always sighs after sneezing. He hates being dressed, and has started trying to roll himself off the changing table. He likes having his pram pushed over gravel, he likes to grip the tag on his blanket, he likes to watch me cook from his carrier, and will stare down with fixed concentration at, say, eggs being whisked. The lines on his palm have the exact same proportions as mine, and though I don’t believe in palmistry, I am still glad he has a long life line. When someone new tries to hold him, he wails until they hand him back to me. He won’t sleep through the night, and at this point I’m convinced he never will, that I’ll always be this tired. “When did you feel rested again?” I asked my mam, and she laughed and laughed.

  Six months. My cabinets are crowded with things I can’t bring myself to throw away. Lanolin ointment, prenatal vitamins, iron tablets, appointment cards. During the delivery, I looked at the scale across the room where the baby would be weighed at birth, a perspex tray under a yellow flannel patterned with ducks. It was impossible to believe that in a matter of hours a baby would be placed on that scale, and then carried back to me.

  * * *

  —

  Once Finn falls asleep, I find my mother in the kitchen and pour both of us a brandy. After the Victoria Square attack, I gave Marian brandy from the same bottle, and the thought comforts me, like it means she can’t have gone far.

  My mother says, “Who were those men with her?”

  “I don’t know.” I might have recognized them if their faces had been in view, or they might be strangers.

  “Why would they want Marian?” she asks.

  “She might just be who they found,” I say. I can’t imagine an IRA unit making a list, and then choosing her from it. What would the criteria even be? Other paramedics? Other women her age?

  “When did you last speak with her?” I ask.

  “Yesterday, around eight.”

  “Where was she?”

  “A pub in Ballycastle. She was about to have dinner.”

  They might have taken her at the pub, or while she was walking to her car, or once she was back inside the cottage. I can’t decide which is worse.

  “Which pub?”

  “The Whistler.”

  Are there security cameras in Ballycastle, in a town that small? On the main street, maybe, but not out on the headland, not anywhere near the cottage. Even if they identify the men, though, the police might not find her. They have enough trouble finding actual members of the IRA. Hundreds of them are in Belfast, hiding in plain sight.

  “Do you think they’re hurting her?” my mother asks in a thin voice.

  “No, mam. They have no reason to hurt her. She cooperated with them.”

  “If they do, I’ll kill them,” she says evenly.

  “I know.”

  My mother and I went to the peace vigil in Ormeau Park last month. We stood in the darkness with thousands of others, holding candles. But maybe we’re not actually pacifists, maybe we’ve just been lucky until now.

  Having Finn has made me understand revenge. If someone were to hurt my son, I would rise up and find them. It has made sense of the conflict for me, and now I don’t see how it can ever end, with both sides desperate to avenge the ones they love.

  “I can’t stand this,” says my mam.

  “It will be fine. You know what she’s like.”

  Marian will ask the men questions, draw them out, win them over. Chances are she already has.

  I pour my mother another short brandy, and we begin to compare our conversations with Marian over the past week, everything she has said, every place she has visited. My mam tells me that Marian went swimming in Ballintoy yesterday.

  “Good,” I say. I picture her following the cold, clear swell into the caves, and diving under the limestone arches. In the hours before they took her, she was free, and she’ll be free again.

  * * *

  —

  Ilurch up in bed at the sound of crying and rush into Finn’s room, but he’s all right, he’s in his crib, he’s only crying because he’s hungry.

  I don’t remember setting him down again after nursing him, or whether we’ve been up once or twice already tonight. He’s wearing a different sleepsuit. I must have changed him at some point, too. This disorientation reminds me of the first weeks with him, when I’d wake in terror, certain that I’d fallen asleep while holding him, that he was suffocating in the blankets, then see him through the mesh wall of the bassinet, safe on his back, sound asleep.

  I lift Finn from the crib and onto a pillow on my lap. It hurts when he first latches on, and I flex my feet toward me. He settles to nurse, a steady, diligent expression on his face. Where is my sister? How do we get her back? After settling Finn down again, I find the surveillance footage from the robbery online. I pause the video and study the two men.

  They seem to be about our age. Marian has a slighter build than either of them. In the footage, she has the same distant, fixed expression as she did in school while taking an exam.

  I rub my forehead. The police will be in Ballycastle, searching the lane out to the headland and inside the cottage. They might find blood on the floor or the walls.

  Marian doesn’t look hurt in the surveillance footage, but I still feel sick. She would have been alone in the cottage when they came. She must have been so scared. I imagine her begging them not to hurt her, and fury drops over me like a hood. I wish I’d been there with her. I wish I’d been there, and I wish that both of us had been holding baseball bats.

  I go back to bed, and for a long time I lie in the dark with my eyes open. How is this fair? How can I be here while she’s there? Marian should be able to come here to rest while I take her place. We should at least be able to take it in turns.

  5

  More rain has reached the north coast this morning, according to the radio. I crack eggs into a bowl on the counter. Finn bounces in his swing, then tips his weight forward. “Careful,” I say, pointlessly.

  I turn to see my mam standing in the doorway. She seems taken aback by the flour spilled on the counter and the cracked eggshells in the sink.

  “What are you making, then?” she asks finally.
<
br />   “A Dutch pancake.”

  I continue whisking flour into the batter. My mother hesitates. I can tell she wants to ask if there’s not something more urgent for me to be doing right now than making a pancake.

  I don’t try to explain my sense that the IRA wants us to act in a certain way, and we have to do the opposite. I’m so sick of having them decide how we will behave. They tell us when to be scared, when to be quiet. When Colette’s cousin tried to leave her husband, an IRA representative came to her house and said, “He’s going crazy up in that prison. You can’t be leaving him. It’d be bad for morale.”

  If we refuse to play our parts, maybe this will be over sooner. Marian will come home.

  The butter is starting to burn. I tug the pan from the heat, pour in the batter, and place it in the oven. I wipe my hands on my jeans. Out the window over the sink, a dull wash of cloud stretches across the sky. The rain will arrive here soon. Already the storm has knocked the heat from the air, when yesterday I was hot in only a linen dress.

  “When will it be ready?” asks my mam. “Do I have time for a shower?”

  “Twenty minutes.”

  Neither of us will go to work today. I’ve already told Nicholas, and asked Clodagh to cover for me. When I rang the day care owner, to tell her Finn would be staying at home with me, I wondered if she’d seen the news. All my friends did, though I haven’t returned any of their calls or messages yet.

  On the coast, rain will be falling past the mouths of the caves, drifting over the headlands, dripping from the lobster traps on the quays. Marian should be there. I keep thinking that she is, that this stricken feeling has nothing to do with her, that at any moment my phone will light up with a picture of Dunseverick castle in the rain.

  When the timer sounds, I use a dish towel to pull the hot pan from the oven. I blow on a piece before handing it to Finn, while my mother settles at the table with damp hair.