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V
She found a space on a desk in a quiet corner and opened the first envelope that came to hand.
Martin McBree was IRA royalty. His career was outlined in two separate full-page profiles. He joined the organization when he was little more than a boy, pledging his loyalty three years before the Troubles began in the North, in the balmy days when IRA was said to stand for I Ran Away. He came through as part of the generation of Northern Irish Republicans who ousted the old guard when the Troubles began, turning the IRA into a significant paramilitary force.
On the second Bloody Sunday, British soldiers, unprovoked, had fired upon a peaceful civil rights march and killed thirteen unarmed civilians. McBree had been in the crowd that day and a photographer captured him in a moment of such tender glory that the image was published in newspapers all over the world. He was carrying another man, one arm under his shoulders, the other under his knees, leaning backwards to counter the weight. He was small, only five foot seven or so, but he must have been all muscle and sinew. The man had an open chest wound, was probably dead already. He had a black coat on and the photo was in black and white, but there was no mistaking the thick black blood on his chest, ru
Paddy read down: the dead man was a plumber. He had four sons and a daughter. He was thirty-one.
She looked at the picture more closely. McBree didn’t look frightened. His jaw was clenched tight at the strain of the weight he was carrying. Here was a man used to blood. Here was a man who could face a hard task without flinching.
She found his name in an article about the first round of hunger strikes: he had been imprisoned many times for arms offenses and was the prisoner representative at the Maze for a year. Talks broke down when he left.
More recently he had been arrested and released for traveling on a false passport. He was on his way back from Lebanon. She checked the dates, counting back to Pete’s spell in hospital. Terry had been reporting from Beirut at the same time.
Later clippings reported that McBree admitted to attending a training camp in Lebanon, and they cited off-the-record speculation that he had been training both PLO and ETA guerrillas in hand-to-hand combat.
McBree was pictured in New York, a stolen snapshot of him at an airport. Just as Aoife had said, he was sent there with a mandate to restructure Noraid, ostensibly to make it more efficient but actually to shift power to a new raft of soldiers. He was ruthless in taking power away from the factions supporting the armed struggle and giving it to those who wanted a negotiated settlement. McBree’s hand-to-hand combat training must have come in useful, Paddy thought. His wife had stayed home in Ireland while he was gone and a bomb had gone off near his house. Police suspected infighting in the Republican movement.
He had been in her house. She thought back to the blunt letter opener, imagined herself trying to stab him, and realized how lucky she had been. Sweating lightly, she sat back and saw Bunty’s Monkey watching her, his arms crossed, looking smug.
The Donaldson clippings told her little of interest. He was pictured at a couple of press conferences, looking slimmer, less debauched. His son had died in the Maze and Donaldson himself was forced out of Northern Ireland after a turf war.
The joint clippings filled out his story. His son, David Donaldson, had been stabbed to death aged nineteen by a junior member of a Loyalist paramilitary group just two days after he was brought in on remand. The assassin had been given an amnesty under Martin McBree’s orders, only to be found with his throat cut the day after his release. Rumor had it that McBree averted a gang war to give his group leverage with the prison authorities, and to afford the Donaldson family the courtesy of killing the assassin themselves.
Donaldson owed McBree. He would have phoned him the minute she left the Shammy, reiterating every detail of what she had said, telling him that her son’s safety was her only concern.
She sat back and thought about what Aoife had said: McBree was a good guy but only compared to the likes of the Shankill Butchers.
NINETEEN. CALLUM IN THE STREET
I
Maggie, the social worker assigned to his case, came in the morning and sat with Callum in the living room. She asked him questions about how he felt and he guessed the right answers: scared about the press, ashamed of his offenses, happy to be free. She waited long after they had run out of things to say to each other, drank a cup of tea Elaine gave her, and then said she’d come back next week, same time.
Elaine avoided him. She spent most of her time in the kitchen. It was two in the afternoon and she was no longer strained but nippy now, sniping at the two babies, waking them when they fell asleep, trying to make them sleep when they were awake.
Callum hadn’t moved from the sofa since watching Count Duckula with the kids before school, because no one had told him to and he didn’t want to just wander around the place. He went to the toilet a couple of times, accepted a cheese sandwich from Elaine and a cup of tea when Maggie came, and watched the television all day while the toddler came in and out. Sometimes she approached him, curious, pawing at his trouser leg, but she always went away. He didn’t know how to play with her.
Finally Elaine came back into the living room.
“Right.” She had her purse open and was looking through it. “Here’s two quid. Could you go three doors up and get me four pints of milk and a loaf?”
Callum looked around. She couldn’t mean the toddler. “Me?”
“Aye. Save me going.” She held the notes out to him and he took them. They looked at each other. She went into the hall and came back with his coat. “Just out the door and to the left, three doors down.”
He stood in the close and looked across the road to the door where he had seen the rat feet hiding. He could see straight through to the dirt in the backyard, to the bin shed and next to it a big puddle with two small children crouched on its shore, playing. Women bustled past the close mouth, hurrying down the street, summer tops and jeans. Old women wore overcoats.
He stepped out of the close, one, head down, keeping close to the wall, two three four five steps, slipping along to the left until he came to a shop door with stickers advertising cigarettes and bananas. Nineteen steps outside, alone, and nothing bad had happened.
The door jingled as he opened it. A small Asian man looked up from the counter and then looked away again. Callum hurried over to hide behind the shelves, struggling to catch his breath. Twenty-six steps outside and nothing had happened. No one had looked at him twice. No one had recognized him. Maybe he wasn’t as famous as Mr. Stritcher said he was.
The radio was on in the shop, a jagged song with an insistent fast beat that the cheery DJ a
Callum stood still, staring at the bread and the boxes of cakes, and listened to the end. Wonderful. A mind can only hold one thought at a time and his mind now was full of beautiful music. He could feel the beat on his face, the stirring, sweeping notes through his chest. He wanted to dance, to sway and move his feet.