Shadow Dancer

by Tom Bradby

  Mulgrew stood straight again and looked at her. ‘Lieutenant Ryan. No connection, I presume?’

  Colette looked at him, her heart pounding. With all the charm and confidence she could muster she smiled and said, ‘I knew I bloody recognized him, then today I remembered where I’d seen him before.’

  Mulgrew looked uncertain, clearly wanting to ask more, but suddenly aware of his surroundings. Somebody was sitting right behind them. Colette wound the spool back and put it into the cardboard box. As she gave it to the woman behind the counter, she turned to Mulgrew and said, ‘Sorry, Martin, I’m late for the kids and I’ve got to run. I’ll be seeing you.’

  She ran down the stairs and was almost out of the door when she heard the shout. She ignored the first, but then he shouted louder, so she stopped and turned to face him. He slowed as he came down the last few steps and stopped just in front of her.

  ‘You didn’t ask about the boy,’ he said. ‘His name was Declan as well.’

  She looked at him, unsure what to say.

  ‘There’s good news,’ he said. ‘Looks like he might be all right.’

  Colette stood absolutely still. She realized that he was looking for a response and she managed to smile.

  ‘We’re going to try and get somebody in to see him,’ he said.

  She forced another smile and told him again that she had to go, saying she was late. She jogged most of the way up the Lower Falls and found it hard to get Mulgrew’s face out of her mind.

  She reached Conway Mill just too late. Catherine and Mark looked hurt when she arrived and she cursed herself quietly. Why did the little things sometimes matter so much?

  Ryan was watching the news.

  The woman on the screen was twenty-five years old and she said she did not regret marrying a policeman. Her voice was quivering with emotion. ‘I hope these people know what they’ve done. I hope they can sleep easily in their beds, because I never will. I saw Johnny lying in the hallway in a pool of blood and I held his head until he died. He told me he loved me … He told me he loved the children …’ Her voice was breaking up, but she stumbled on. ‘They were sitting there … aged three and two … just watching their daddy die.’

  She was crying.

  ‘I want to forgive these people … as a Christian, I want to forgive them, but I just can’t. I can’t forgive them for what they’ve done. I can’t forgive them for what they’ve taken … I loved him so much, you see … Oh God help me, I loved him so much.’

  The woman put her face in her hands.

  The next item showed a windswept, snowy cemetery and a collection of grim-faced mourners. Ryan thought Gingy Hughes’s widow looked like she was about to collapse. The big bearded reporter ended, ‘Despite claims made by the Provisional IRA, Mr Hughes’s family still deny that he was a Special Branch informant…’

  Then there were pictures of Musgrave Park Hospital and a report on the condition of the young man injured in the foiled attack on Henderson. ‘Under armed guard,’ the reporter said, ‘his condition still described as critical.’

  Ryan found himself hoping the kid would die. He thought he deserved to.

  He picked up the remote control and switched off the television. He thought the news was developing a nicely ironic structure. A report on hopes of peace to lead. ‘Tonight, Sinn Féin says peace declaration must be clarified,’ followed by a lengthy collection of murders and funerals.

  He looked at the clock above the mantelpiece. Ten past six. Twenty minutes to wait.

  He got up and put on his donkey jacket. He opened the patio door and stepped out again, lighting up as he did so. He hated houses that smelled of cigarettes.

  He inhaled deeply and peered into the window to the left. Still no sign of life there. He wondered if that was a Service flat too.

  He walked round the corner, along the line of the hedge, and, as he did so, he found himself thinking of the policeman whose wife had cried so movingly on the news.

  He wondered what it must have been like to be in that fateful house outside Lisburn as the policeman’s life came to an end. The family had been watching television, the children not yet in bed, when two gunmen opened fire through the window. Death on the carpet. And then the police came to your door; the forensic officers and the detective officers from CID and possibly Special Branch. Then the media, looking for interviews – a man’s life summed up in thirty seconds – with the bereaved always so articulate and moving in their grief. And then what? And then nothing. Then normality, with a pale stain on the carpet, where the police couldn’t quite get the blood out. Normality, except that nothing would ever be remotely normal again, for any of them.

  Well, he should know about that, shouldn’t he? He shivered. Not his fault. Strangely, the image that stuck in his mind now was not the moment itself, but the funeral on the television – with them all gathered in the one room. He remembered the laughter, the jokes. ‘That’ll learn the bastard.’

  Stupid. They weren’t laughing when the murder charges were laid.

  He thought of the man, thought of his face on the tarmac; sheet white, in pain, blood dribbling from his head onto the pavement and fear in his eyes. A life ebbing away. Some pathetic words about his mother … Christ.

  He walked round the side to the front of the block of flats and lit another cigarette. If only he had been a Provo, he thought, though he wasn’t sure now whether even that would have made any difference.

  He saw the Granada turning into the driveway and dropped his cigarette on the stone pathway, stamping it out. He walked back round the house, stepped inside, locked the patio door and went to find the house keys.

  The driver was talkative. ‘What do you think Sinn Féin are playing at?’ he said as they turned out of Malone Beeches and headed up towards the ring road. Ryan shrugged. It was still rush hour and the traffic was moving slowly, the pavements to the left and right of the road largely deserted. It was too cold for walking.

  They pulled away from the roundabout by the House of Sport and Ryan saw one or two people walking up from the river Lagan as he listened to the driver giving his views on Sinn Féin’s demand for clarification of the Government’s peace declaration.

  The man thought the war was ending – ‘Been here for ten years, the Provos have had enough’ – and Ryan hoped he was right.

  But, by the time they turned onto the ring road, Ryan’s mind was drifting again. He found himself thinking of Colette’s face in the graveyard. Stupid to have gone, he thought. He told himself she hadn’t seen him before that moment.

  When he got to Stormont, Hopkins was friendly. Since Ryan had not officially been posted to the Province, and since Colette had been recruited in England, the whole operation – or at least his part of it – was still technically under the control of the Counter-Terrorism department in London. But he needed to liaise with MI5’s permanent station in Northern Ireland and Hopkins was the head of it.

  His office was large, with magnificent views down across Stormont Park – melancholic views, Ryan thought, at this time of the year – and he produced a large bottle of Bushmills whiskey from beneath the desk.

  After a few minutes – ‘welcome’ and associated small talk – a woman knocked on the door and Hopkins introduced Ryan to Alison Berry, one of the senior analysts. They shook hands warmly.

  The point of the briefing – Ryan hadn’t realized this was a briefing – was to impress upon him the need to push for any information regarding the Provisional IRA leadership’s intentions. ‘We need to know what the hell they’re up to,’ was the general sense of it, but Ryan found it hard to stop himself looking at Berry’s legs. They were long, quite thin and encased in black tights. She was not conventionally attractive – her nose was too bulbous for that – but she was certainly sexy.

  She was friendly too – and direct. She did most of the talking, outlining in detail what they believed was currently going on within the IRA. There were, she said, severe tensions between the hardliners and t
he moderates over the so-called ‘peace process’ – the hardliners arguing that this was just a sell-out. She didn’t mention Gerry McVeigh by name, and when he did, she showed no particular interest. He wondered if Special Branch and MI5 were communicating as thoroughly as they ought to be.

  Ryan thought about how many bosses he appeared to be accumulating: MI5 in London, MI5 in Belfast, Special Branch in Belfast.

  His position, on reflection, was really rather difficult, and he thought about how much he hated internal politics. It was hardly surprising they sometimes lost sight of the enemy.

  Afterwards, Hopkins and Berry showed him round the office. He was even given his own desk.

  He got home about eight, having picked up an Indian takeaway on the Ormeau Road. He ate voraciously, realizing as he did so that he hadn’t had anything since breakfast. Too much to think about.

  That night, in bed, he fantasized about Berry and had the curious sense, as he did so, that he was being unfaithful.

  Colette was dreaming.

  She could see the youth clearly. He was spotty and really ugly and she found herself viewing him with total contempt. When she looked at his face, she saw a callow young man motivated by a diet of total certainty.

  He was lying in a coffin now and he was wrapped in an Irish Tricolour, as indeed was the coffin, as indeed was the whole room – the Tricolours hanging as drapes on the wall, making the room seem like some giant, exotic tent.

  She could see the boy as she walked up and down beside him. In fact, she was actually walking along above him, and she was draped in a Union Jack which hung from her shoulders like a regal robe. She swaggered and felt very pleased with her image as she caught sight of herself in the giant mirrors at the end of the room. She looked, well, regal, and she swung her hips as she strode down towards the man at the end.

  Ryan was there too, wearing jeans and a sweater and a blue woollen jacket, and smiling and laughing at her. He was pointing to the coffin beside her and she watched now as it was engulfed in flames. For a moment, she found herself laughing too …

  She woke up.

  The room was dark, the curtains once again billowing out very slightly in the wind. She sat up and rubbed her eyes. The room was silent but for the sound of the kids breathing. She pulled the pillow from under her and put it up against the wall and then sat back.

  The room was quiet.

  She tried to replay in her mind the exact chronology of the events in the house before the attack and was frustrated by the fact that it no longer seemed clear. She could not remember exactly what was said and she couldn’t recall at what point in the conversation she had first been conscious of the boy’s presence on the stairs.

  And then there was the possibility that it was all her paranoia.

  Bollocks, she told herself. I saw that stare. But then, maybe that was desire?

  She thought of his face. He was spotty – and ugly too. He didn’t look like a patriot. She remembered her dream and hated the image of herself wrapped in a Union Jack. Somehow, that really was obscene.

  She got up and looked out of the window. The scene was the same – an empty alley. The lights were out in the house behind them and there had been no row this evening. Not his night for drinking, obviously. Or perhaps she’d whipped him into shape and reformed him.

  Fat chance of that, she thought.

  She wondered if the Brit ever got drunk and, if so, how he behaved. She thought he would probably be different.

  She got back into bed and tried to get to sleep, but every time she shut her eyes she visualized the young man’s spotty, suspicious face. She thought of him in his hospital bed, tied up to a life-support machine, perhaps, his life hanging by a thread. For a few moments she felt sorry for him – really sorry and guilty – and then she wondered why in the hell they hadn’t managed to kill him. After all, it wasn’t so much to ask.

  Her mind kept on working as the hours passed. Gradually she began to realize that, somehow, she was going to have to ensure he did die.

  McIlhatton was watching the news.

  The newsreader said that a policeman had been killed in Ulster, and then she introduced a report which included footage of the man’s widow giving a tearful interview.

  At the end of it, McIlhatton stood up and shouted, ‘Yes! Re-sult.’

  He walked to the window and looked out at the empty street, feeling slightly better. It had boosted his morale, which had been slowly sinking again.

  CHAPTER TEN

  THE MEETING HAD NOT BEEN GOING WELL. THERE HAD BEEN resistance, incomprehension and even some anger, but Colette thought the leaders had been expecting it.

  The man from Derry was still talking and she looked about her. Everyone had kept their coats on, though the room was getting quite warm.

  There were some serious men here. She’d seen Murphy from south Armagh, Fox, McKendrick. There was one man who wasn’t there, of course. She wondered if anyone else was conscious of Gingy Hughes’s absence.

  Poor bastard. She thought about his wife. She imagined Mark and Catherine being forced to watch her being shot. A weird image.

  She looked to her left and felt the kind of shock that was becoming too familiar. She smiled back at Martin Mulgrew.

  She looked forward and tried to listen to what the man from Derry was saying.

  ‘The point is, as we’ve said before, we are now in a position of strength. We have got the Brits running scared. They’re terrified of another bomb like the one in the City. They’re terrified of the cost of the damage – millions of pounds for that one alone. It is our firm belief that the Brits want to get out of Ireland, but they’ll never go whilst the campaign is in full swing.’

  Right, Colette thought. She stifled a cough. The room was full of smoke and the man next to her was lighting up again.

  She looked over at Mulgrew briefly and was relieved to see he was staring at the floor. She looked back at the platform and the two men standing in front of a Sinn Féin ‘Time for Peace’ poster.

  The man from Derry’s voice was weak from talking too much. Despite his age, she thought, he retained a boyish look, with curly hair and bright blue eyes.

  ‘Sooner or later we’ve got to stop to see whether they are willing to get out, as they have intimated to us in our secret talks, or whether they’re just stringing us along—’

  ‘They’re stringing us along,’ somebody shouted from the back in reply. Colette turned round and tried to see who it was, but several of the men were smiling. She was mentally checking people off. McConaghy from Derry, Mallon from east Tyrone.

  Sean Fox was on his feet at the front. He was tall and blond and kept a hold on his beer glass. ‘What you’re saying is we’ve got nothing.’ He looked round the room, but there was no response. ‘So what are we going to say to all our people? I mean, we’ve all suffered, we’ve all lost people, we’ve all seen the inside of Long Kesh. And you’re saying that is all for nothing? How the fuck are we going to sell that to our people?’

  The man from Derry leaned forward again. ‘I’m not saying it’s all been for nothing, totally the reverse. We’ve achieved great things and we all recognize the sacrifices all of us – each and every one of us – have made. But what we’re saying is that we’ll never go the final mile, we’ll never get everything we want, until we break the military campaign and try an exclusively political tack for a while.’

  Fox was still standing. ‘Why should we trust the Brits?’

  ‘We don’t. But we do trust their self-interest. We believe, and it is our firm impression, that they want to get out of here. They want to get out if we allow them the time and the space to do it. And we’ve cemented the Nationalist side together. With the Irish and American governments standing by us, we believe we can put enough pressure on the Brits to ensure they move in the right direction.’

  ‘And if they don’t?’

  ‘They will.’

  Fox’s voice hardened. ‘And if they don’t?’

  �
�The military option remains. The IRA stays together like any other army. We train and prepare for the worst.’

  Fox took a drag on his cigarette.

  ‘That’s easy for you to say, but I’m telling you, if this thing’s over, it’s over. There’ll be no mucking about. I’m not explaining a different strategy to our volunteers every fucking week. They need to know what’s happening.’

  Colette was conscious that she was taking mental notes of all this. She was conscious that information is power.

  She looked over at Mulgrew, frightened that he would somehow be able to read her mind. He had moved a few paces further away and appeared to be looking intently at someone else closer to the front. She followed his gaze and was surprised to see he was looking at Paddy.

  Paddy didn’t seem to notice. He was twiddling the end of his moustache idly.

  Colette moved over to her right, keeping her eyes down on the dirty blue carpet beneath her feet. She wasn’t sure this was the best place for a meeting. If there was trouble … well there was only one exit from Conway Mill, down the spiral staircase, out of the security door and into the car park.

  She considered the possibility of a bomb and felt scared suddenly. All it takes is one tout, she thought. One tout who could slip away a few minutes early …

  She told herself not to be so stupid. She moved over to one of the high white walls and leaned against it. She could see Gerry a couple of rows ahead of her, standing straight and still.

  The atmosphere in the room was tense and electric, some of the men excited, some angry. This wasn’t easy for any of them. Few could remember what it was like to live without the war. It was their raison d’être.