Northern Spy

by Flynn Berry

  “You’re provincial,” said Tom, and he was right. We’d been in Rome for three days, and every morning I’d checked the weather for Belfast first, like that mattered more.

  I tell Marian about visiting her safe house yesterday. “How was Niall groomed?”

  She frowns. “Niall wasn’t groomed. He went to Seamus every month for a year asking to join.”

  “Why?”

  “He grew up in care. If anyone has seen how our system’s not working, it’s him.”

  “He asked what you want for Christmas,” I say, and Marian smiles. “This isn’t fair on him. He has no idea what you’re doing, he thinks you’re his family.”

  “I am his family,” she says.

  “You’re a tout, Marian. You’re lying to him.”

  “He’d understand eventually. I’m still working for the same goal, just in a different way.”

  I wince, shifting against the seat.

  “What’s wrong?” asks Marian, and I gesture at my chest.

  “I haven’t had time to pump.”

  “Oh, go home.”

  “I’m supposed to meet Eamonn. Mam’s minding Finn.”

  “You could get mastitis.”

  “If I get mastitis because of this,” I say through my teeth, “I’ll kill you.”

  Marian hands me a capsule of evening primrose. “What’s it for?” I ask.

  “Stress.”

  “How many can I take?”

  * * *

  —

  On the beach, I talk to Eamonn with my coat wrapped over me while warm liquid seeps under my shirt, down my bare stomach. My milk let down. This was not one of the problems I’d anticipated with breastfeeding. Or informing, for that matter.

  “I can’t stay long. My mam can only mind Finn until seven.”

  “That’s fine,” says Eamonn, sounding preoccupied. He wants to talk more about the meetings at Gallagher’s. “How does Marian act around them?” he asks.

  I shrug. “She seems natural.”

  He kicks at the sand, then says, “Do you think Marian has really changed?”

  “Sorry?”

  “There’s always the possibility that Marian is a fake defector,” he says. Behind him, gray waves roll in from the sea. “The IRA might have sent her to give us disinformation.”

  “You don’t actually believe that.”

  “They’ve done it before,” he says.

  “Is that why you wanted me to meet her unit?”

  “No. But you know Marian better than I do. Does she seem at all scared around them?”

  “If she couldn’t hide her fear by now, she’d already be dead. Who is this coming from?”

  Eamonn doesn’t answer. So much information is being gathered here, and I don’t even know who for. The station chief? The head of MI5? The queen?

  “In July, Marian told us about an arms drop in an orchard in Armagh. We’ve had it under surveillance for months. Yesterday the service sent a drone with thermal imaging over the orchard, and it’s empty. Nothing’s buried there.”

  “They must have moved it, then. Your surveillance must have failed.”

  “That’s possible,” he says. “Or the actual arms drop was somewhere else.”

  “How can you say that? Marian just put a listening device inside the Balfour for you.”

  “We haven’t picked up anything relevant from it yet.”

  “What were you expecting? To hear an army council meeting the next day?”

  “I haven’t met with Marian for over six months,” he says. “She’s back in the fold. There’s concern that I may have lost control.”

  “You were never controlling her.”

  “Of the situation, I mean,” he says. “Her loyalty isn’t set in stone. It could change at any moment, given the right pressure.”

  I remember Marian dancing with Damian at the wedding. Would that be considered pressure?

  “I’m not spying on my sister for you.”

  31

  Outside the car, the woods around Mount Stewart are dark. Finn is asleep in his car seat, and Marian is telling me about a bunker in a field outside Coleraine. “We use it for target practice,” she says, “but it might be where they store the gelignite from the boat.”

  With effort, I turn my attention from the dark woods to her. “Have you been there? Have you been inside an underground firing range?”

  She nods. “During training.”

  I’d thought those were myths, those rumors of IRA bunkers buried under farms, but now my sister is describing another one in Tyrone, which might also be used to hide the explosives from the shipment. She thinks that the fishing trawler will land soon, based on a conversation she overheard. It might already be steering up the Bristol Channel.

  We’re close together, in the enclosed space of the car. “Are you lying?” I ask.

  “Sorry?”

  “Eamonn doesn’t know if you’re genuine. He thinks the IRA might have sent you to give the government disinformation.”

  Marian lets out a sound. “That’s mad,” she says.

  “Why did you become an informer?”

  “It wasn’t only one reason,” she says.

  “Why are you still lying to me?”

  “I’m telling you the truth,” she says. “I stopped believing that what we were doing would work, but it happened slowly, it was a series of moments.”

  The moon rises above a serrated row of trees. “Tell me about them.”

  Marian has started to cry. “Um,” she says, “one was you. One was your miscarriage.”

  I close my eyes. I was four months pregnant when blood slid down my legs in the shower. She says, “I didn’t want to keep going afterward. There was enough pain out there already without us causing more.”

  “You caused worse,” I say, though it’s hard for me to imagine worse.

  After the ultrasound, after the doctor told me my baby’s heart wasn’t beating, I called Marian from the hospital car park. The D&E had been scheduled for the next day. I couldn’t find my car, and I was telling Marian what had happened while searching for it with worsening panic, like if I found the car then everything would be all right, and after a while of this I leaned my head against one of the cement pillars and began sobbing. Marian said, “Stay right there,” and minutes later she was running up the steps, flying toward me.

  She had already given me a newborn-size sleepsuit. I asked her if I had to give it away now or if I could keep it, and she said, “Of course you can keep it, Tessa.”

  Marian knows that my daughter was going to be called Isla, and whenever she meets an Isla, she says, “That was my niece’s name.”

  Is that my sister? Or is she the woman firing a gun in a bunker?

  “Who are you?” I ask. It’s not a rhetorical question, I want her to answer.

  “I’m going to prove it to you,” she says. “Give me a little time.”

  * * *

  —

  I drive home on the lough road past the Georgian houses, their windows golden against the black sky, and for a moment I allow myself to imagine that there are two car seats behind me, that my two children are both currently asleep in the back, each with their own blanket and bear.

  My daughter would be three years old in March.

  After the awful procedure, the D&E, I read the section in the pregnancy book on recovering from a miscarriage, and then I skipped to the chapter I wanted to read, “Bringing Your Baby Home from Hospital.”

  I read about night feeds and swaddling techniques, latching on and mastitis. I read that vests with snaps on the side are best in the first weeks, and about using witch hazel to clean the umbilical stump. My baby was gone, but the information still seemed intimately, urgently relevant, like I needed to know how to take care of her.

 
For weeks afterward, I’d catch myself cupping my breasts or stomach in my hand, as I’d been doing for the past four months, to check how much they’d grown. It seemed, often, that time had stopped, the way it can on long flights, that the days were not progressing. Tom wanted us to take a holiday, he thought it might make me feel better. I said I didn’t fancy a trip, and tried not to hate him for offering that as a solution.

  At my follow-up appointment, the doctor told me that the miscarriage wasn’t my fault, but other doctors had told me to avoid sleeping on my back, or drinking too much caffeine, or eating licorice, or performing strenuous exercise, since those can cause a miscarriage, so maybe I had caused it. They’d also said that stress is bad for a baby, which is singularly unhelpful advice for anyone, but especially someone living in Northern Ireland.

  A year later, during my pregnancy with Finn, my ankles became swollen with a thick collar of fluid. My jeans no longer fit, then my dresses. After a shower, I noticed that the veins across my breasts were a brighter blue, like there was more blood, or it was closer to the surface. None of this convinced me.

  I felt like a fraud, taking a prenatal vitamin, having cravings, complaining of being tired, like this act wasn’t fooling anyone. At any point, I might have already lost the baby. I hadn’t known the first time either.

  The pregnancy book seemed to be addressing someone else, someone who had never come home from hospital and scrubbed the bloodstains from her bathroom floor on her hands and knees.

  I obeyed every word of it, though. I stayed away from soft cheeses, raw fish, hot baths, smoke, exhaust, drink, even if those weren’t really a danger, even if the danger had already come and gone without my noticing.

  At the ultrasound appointment in my third trimester, I watched the small blurt of white light on the screen. His heart.

  32

  Marian seems quieter tonight. We’re in the back room at Gallagher’s, at a table crowded with empty glasses. She knows that I’m watching how she acts with the others, trying to work out if she has really defected or not. The idea that maybe she hasn’t, that I might be alone in this room, terrifies me.

  “Same again?” asks Damian, and Marian nods. She’s drinking whiskey neat. She hasn’t been meeting my eyes, she might still be stung from our last conversation.

  Marian sits across the table from me, in a mint-green jumper, with small gold hoops in her ears. Even now, I feel the usual pleasure in her company. At every party and family holiday, we try to engineer seats beside each other, and always have done, since we were small. That instinct doesn’t go away easily, apparently.

  Seamus says, “How was work, Tessa?”

  “Fine.”

  “Did you have extra security today?”

  “No. Why?”

  “Lord Maitland was in your building. You didn’t meet him?”

  I shake my head, taking a sip of my wine. “He was in for Newsnight.”

  “Why?” asks Damian.

  “His charity,” says Seamus. Lord Maitland is an aristocrat, with a vast Palladian manor in the Cotswolds. He’s in line for the throne, technically, mounted somewhere in the order of succession.

  Seamus says, “He has a holiday home here. He told Newsnight he has a soft spot for Ireland.”

  Niall snorts. And the statement does sound disingenuous. Not this Ireland, presumably. Not this bar, this neighborhood, these people. He means the countryside, the glens, the Cliffs of Moher.

  “Jesus, how long has he been coming here?” asks Damian. “Why didn’t we know?”

  They talk about targeting Maitland, and I listen without any sense of alarm. He seems so far outside their sphere of activity. A seventy-six-year-old man, an earl. They aren’t about to cross paths. Someone with that much money and privilege is unreachable.

  I’m much more worried about the police officers in Saintfield. They’re under a credible threat, Maitland isn’t, and they will have to evade it without taking refuge in a gated manor in England, or a team of private bodyguards.

  “Where’s his holiday home?” asks Damian.

  “I don’t know,” says Seamus.

  Damian says, “I’ll find out what he told Colette.”

  The rim of my glass cracks against my teeth. Marian’s eyes move to mine, willing me not to speak. “Colette McHugh?” she says quickly, covering for me, drawing the table’s attention. “I thought she wasn’t political.”

  “Everyone’s political,” Seamus muses. “Saying you’re not political is political.”

  He might not answer the question. Under the table, out of sight, I press both hands against my stomach. Colette is one of my best friends. She has been the makeup artist at the BBC since I started. We’ve seen each other every day for years, we’ve spent hours on tea breaks together, or at lunch, or at the pub around the corner.

  “She’s in D company,” says Damian through a mouthful of smoke. “Ballymurphy.”

  Looking at me, Seamus says, “We have Broadcasting House sorted.”

  “Are there others?” I ask, and Seamus winks, lifting his pint.

  Almost every major politician has passed through Colette’s studio. And they talk to her. Their protection officers always wait outside, it’s the one place where they’re left alone. Most of the politicians seize the chance to have a normal chat with Colette. She says that having their faces touched or their hair brushed makes them trust her. And, she says, people are embarrassed. They point to their bad skin or the dark circles under their eyes, and then offer an explanation.

  I wonder how many blackmailings and assassinations over the years have been based on information from her.

  Colette will have seen to Lord Maitland before his appearance on Newsnight. She will have sponged makeup onto his soft, jowly face, tilting him toward the light. She will have instructed him to close his eyes, and he will have talked to her, blindly, while she worked.

  “Can you go talk to Colette now?” asks Seamus. “I want to know how long Maitland is in Ireland.”

  Damian drains his pint and leaves. Soon the rest of us have finished our drinks, and Marian says, “I’ll walk you to your car.”

  Outside on the wet street, I say, “How could you not tell me about Colette?”

  “I didn’t know.”

  “But Damian did.”

  “Other units borrow him sometimes.”

  “Is there anyone else? Nicholas? Tom? Our mam? Can you just tell me all of them now?”

  She says, “I’m sorry. I know you were close.” I fold my arms, and she says, “The IRA didn’t send me to pose as an informer, I promise. I swear on Finn’s life.”

  “But you would say that, wouldn’t you?” I say, without knowing if I mean it or only want to hurt her.

  “Stop it, Tessa,” she snaps. She’s furious with me, I realize, and hurt. “We need to stay together now, okay? You need to believe me.”

  She sounds more like herself, in this moment, than she has for months. “I believe you.”

  * * *

  —

  Eamonn curses when I tell him about Colette. “We have to leave her in place,” he says. “Or the IRA will know our information came from you and Marian.”

  “Colette can’t be left there. Do you know how easily she could kill someone in that room?”

  That might be their endgame, to wait until the prime minister is in her studio, or the home secretary.

  Eamonn says extra security measures will be used. The studio will be bugged, presumably, and the lock will be disabled, so Colette can’t bolt it from inside.

  * * *

  —

  When my burner phone rings early the next morning, I don’t want to answer. I want to fling it against the wall. Seamus says, “Did I wake you?”

  “No.”

  He did wake Finn, though, and I hold the phone against my shoulder while lifting h
im from his crib.

  “Colette learned that Maitland will be at his friend’s house in Mallow this week,” he says, and I feel vindicated. Maitland is already gone, swept away by his power and connections, out of reach. Mallow is in the republic, five hours south of us. “But he’ll be spending the weekend at his holiday home in Glenarm. He told Colette he wants to sail one last time before putting his boat in dry dock for the winter. We’re going to bomb the boat.”

  Seamus describes the harbor, the sailboat, and the location of Maitland’s home, on a hill above the village. “We need you in Glenarm starting on Thursday for surveillance.”

  “Of course.”

  Afterward, I hold Finn closer, blinking across the room above the top of his head. They want me to help them plant a bomb.

  I remember talking with Marian by the lough this summer, when she first asked me to pass messages to Eamonn. “You won’t need to do anything yourself,” she said.

  This is my own fault. I should have left with Finn that night.

  * * *

  —

  Today Lord Maitland is with his friends in Mallow, where, he told Colette, they will be fishing in the River Blackwater, having long suppers, and playing charades. That is the part I keep returning to. This old man, with his plummy voice, acting out a charade, while my sister and I work to save his life.

  His friend’s home is a castle on the Blackwater between Mallow and Fermoy. The castle has been photographed often, and at work I look at pictures of the arched windows, the chinoiserie-papered walls, the deep fireplaces, the paintings and piles of books, with a degree of envy.

  I would like to be served tea in those cups, to sleep in that four-poster bed, to have dinner at that long dining table. It’s not fair that Maitland is there, being cossetted, while Marian and I are out here. He’ll never know of our efforts, either. Maybe, once he’s home, MI5 will advise him not to return to Ireland, will imply that they had to intercede on his behalf, but he’ll never know about me or Marian.

  It feels like we’re serving him, the way our great-grandmother served men like him. She went to work at age twelve, and the landowner who hired her wouldn’t let her ride to the house in his carriage, she had to walk behind it for miles. No one comforted her once they arrived at the great house, either. No one mentioned that she was a child, or that it was her first night in her life away from her mother. After four months of work, she was paid five pounds.