Читать книгу Terry Brankin Has a Gun - Malachi O'Doherty - Страница 13

Three

It was a frustrating drive home. The traffic on the Lisburn Road moved slower than walking pace at six every evening. The radio news said that the Republican Party president, Dominic McGrath, had called for full disclosure about the dirty tricks the British had used in their war against the Irish people. As well he might, thought Terry. The British had won their war by placing agents all around McGrath, bugging his office and his car and turning people who worked for him. It wasn’t Terry that Dominic should have been worrying about back then; it was Oweny the security man and Dan the driver of the white van – both informers. A year before, Oweny had been whisked out of his home by MI5 and taken on an RAF flight to somewhere in England for his own safety. Even his wife wouldn’t accept calls from him now. And Dan was dead. The poor man had foolishly thought that the peace process enabled him to go on living in Belfast after he had been outed. He couldn’t bear to live anywhere else. Then somebody – probably Ig – had rung his doorbell one night and shot him in the face with a double-barrelled shotgun: the most thorough and least traceable of weapons.

Think how much worse things could have turned out, Terry said to himself. Had he stayed in the IRA and been loyal to McGrath, he would have been surrounded by the same spies. The Brits would have known his every move and they would have kept him in place for as long as they had judged him to be a useful fool. His least unpleasant fate would have been to spend most of the 1990s in jail making Celtic harps out of matchsticks for Irish Americans to raffle in bars – like Boomer, whoever the fuck Boomer was. And that would have been hell.

***

Kathleen was in the shower when the thought came to her: how much do I know? How much do I want to know? She had lived in Belfast through the closing years of the Troubles, when the bombs were bigger than they had been before and the sectarian killings had multiplied and come close. She wasn’t naïve. She was sure she wasn’t naïve.

She had lost a friend to loyalist killers. She had learnt that you keep your sanity if you stop asking questions, stop wondering what impact even your own words might ultimately have. Then she turned up the heat to try to make her skin hurt enough to clear her mind of bad memories and big fears.

What would a bullet do to a skull? She had often thought about that, thought about how a person might feel in the last moments of mental and physical torment before being finished off, usually when fearing for Terry. She had only ever seen people shot dead in films, and she assumed that in the real world it was bloodier. If Terry had shot a soldier from a distance, without seeing his fear, or if he had shot someone in self-defence, she could forgive that more easily, but she knew that IRA men had shot people in the face, had emptied pistols into them as they lay on the ground, that they had shot women. Over the years she had seen the coverage of all their doings on the nightly news and had often blanked it out and turned to something else rather than ask herself: would Terry have done that if they had ordered him to?

But she knew that Terry was a good man. She knew that, like hundreds of others, he had got swept into a war that was not of his making; that he had found his personal, even moral bearings in the depths of that war, and that he had saved himself from death and imprisonment though not from guilt.

As she dressed in the bedroom, she heard him come through the front door. She brushed her hair and studied her face in the mirror, recognising the gravity in her own expression. She would have to ask him.

He had dropped his briefcase on the floor and was planted on the sofa, bent over and rubbing the day’s stress out of his brow. The room was already untidy again.

‘Hi.’ She leaned over and kissed him on the head.

‘Sorry about all this.’

‘We’ll manage – but tell me everything before they get here. Don’t leave me exposed.’

He swallowed hard. ‘OK. Sit down.’

She sat opposite him so that she could see his face. ‘What are they going to ask you about?’

‘The Magheraloy bomb. It was one of the famous ones. Did you hear about it?’

‘Where the frig is Magheraloy? No, I never heard about it.’

He sighed. ‘It was on telly the other night. Magheraloy is in County Louth, touching the border. We did a lot of ambushes down there. This one went wrong.’

An accident. Good, she thought. An accident would be easier to live with. Anyone can have an accident.

‘The plan had been to blow up the Chief Constable. We were into big, high-profile targets then – spectaculars, the media called them. Remember the whack at Downing Street. So that was the thinking: do something big and stay in the news. We had set up an ambush. The Chief Constable of the RUC was coming back from holiday with his wife and kid in the car.’

‘Oh, no!’

‘We were happy to take the kid and all, so long as we got him. It wasn’t us that coined the phrase collateral damage. You’ve seen it on the news yourself, missiles hitting bridges in Iraq and some poor fucker driving a trailer of melons or something goes up in flames … but what the hell.’

‘It doesn’t make it right.’

‘It was worse, love. Much worse. We hit the wrong car.’

‘And?’

‘And three people died for nothing. Father, mother and daughter.’

She hadn’t taken it all in yet. ‘Who were they?’

‘They were called Lavery. They were from somewhere in south County Derry. You don’t watch the funeral or read the stories when you do something like that. You don’t want to know.’

‘Oh God.’ She had to try and comprehend this. There had been a girl in her class at school called Lavery, and there was a lecturer at the university called Lavery.

‘Oh God, Terry. A whole family … just killed.’

‘You rationalise. You tell yourself they could have crashed into another car or a lamp post; they just happened to run into our bomb.’

‘Fuck.’ This was different from what she had expected, from what she could excuse, had excused. She was stunned. She had imagined Terry as an IRA man shooting at soldiers and policemen who were armed and alert to the threat, who were defending the political set-up that had produced the Troubles in the first place. She had imagined him attacking people who expected to be attacked, who were paid to take the risk. But, if she was honest, she had always known too that children had been killed. From the very start, children had died in ricochets and bombings. She suddenly felt stupid for never having asked Terry if he had been implicated in the least defensible things that the IRA had done.

‘What was your part in it?’ she asked.

‘I set the bomb at the side of the road and laid down the tripwire for another guy to trigger it. Mick Harken. He’s dead now. Then I did lookout for the car and for anyone that might come near us.’

‘Whose mistake was it?’

‘Mine. I signalled to him to hit the wrong car.’

It seemed a small relief to her, that he had not actually pressed the button, or whatever it was they did. Shit! Fuck; she was screaming inside herself. Something like panic was building up in her. A child! Fine little limbs, soft smooth skin, hair in bows, eyes as bright as jewels.

‘You saw the car coming. Had you got the number wrong or something? The colour? What?’ She hadn’t worked out the worst of it yet.

‘It was the right colour and the right make.’

‘Did you not see the child?’ Then it dawned on her what a stupid question that was. Of course he had seen the child. The car was the right colour and the right make and there were three people in it and one of them was a child. That’s what made it the right car.

‘Ah!’ she gasped. The breath would not come to her. When she could speak she said, ‘How old? The child – how old?’

‘A wee girl. Ten.’

At least Terry’s frankness helped. She’d be nearly forty now.

‘Oh, dear God. To take that much away from people.’

Kathleen was perplexed by the enormity of her husband having killed a child. Every time her mind tried to grasp it she recoiled. She was almost wheezing now and she left the room without saying more. Words felt false.

Terry knew not to follow her. She would be waiting for the feeling to match the thought. She’d be dreading the clarity that would overwhelm her. In the IRA he had mixed with people who could absorb shocks like this, who could manage with black humour. He had known men who had done dreadful things and he had stood at bars and drunk with them, never questioning them, always trusting that it wasn’t easy for them. But Kathleen was not out of the hard culture. She had cried for the whale stranded in the Thames when it was on television. Ig would have said, all that for a fucking fish!

Kathleen came back into the room and her face was streaked with tears and her hair dishevelled. She practically spat at him. This was worse than he had feared. There was a logic in it he had not foreseen.

‘For years we tried to have a baby and we couldn’t. Well that was justice. That’s what that was. And I never knew.’

He said, ‘You’ll have to compose yourself before the police come. Don’t give them the satisfaction, please.’

‘I don’t care what they think. I don’t care what they do.’

***

Inspector Basil McKeague believed in God and he believed in Hell, and that made his job easier. He didn’t depend on the corporeal and temporal world for justice. He visited Terry Brankin’s home that night with the fullest information to be had on the Magheraloy bomb that had killed Patrick and Elizabeth Lavery and their daughter, Isobel. He knew who had provided the intelligence that the Chief Constable and his wife and child would be driving up from Rosslare, crossing the border at Magheraloy after returning from a holiday in France. He knew who had mistaken the Lavery car for the Chief Constable’s. He knew who had made the bomb and set it by the roadside. He knew everything. He knew that Dan Leeson, who had debriefed Terry Brankin for the IRA, had been a Special Branch agent. He had the transcripts and the tapes of that debriefing. He had everything but admissible evidence, and he could manage without that because he had faith in God. So he rang the Brankin doorbell that night assured that he was about to meet a man who would burn in Hell.

‘Mrs Brankin?’ The woman who answered was in her fifties, trim and healthy with it. She had been crying. That didn’t surprise him.

She led him into the living room, where Terry Brankin was sitting on the sofa. He had turned on the television while Kathleen answered the door. Terry did not rise to shake hands with this man who had come to ruin their lives.

He looked the cop over. He was tall and fat in a jacket that was too tight for him and a trouser belt that supported his paunch. Good skin, though; didn’t smoke or drink. Red cheeks, so he was either nervous or angry or had bad circulation. Terry would outlive him. This was a burnt-out ould peeler, not someone they’d have sent on a serious job, either to face danger or even make an arrest. There was nothing to worry about.

Inspector McKeague said, ‘Would you mind turning the television off? I am going to need your full attention.’

Terry was surly in the face of authority and did nothing, so Kathleen picked up the remote and stabbed the air with it three times until she had pressed the right button.

‘Thank you,’ said Inspector McKeague. ‘You both know why I am here?’

‘Yes.’

‘Then you’ll excuse me if I sit.’ The inspector sat on the armchair by the fireplace and set his thick brown briefcase on his knee.

‘Do you want a cup of tea?’ said Kathleen, not knowing what else to say.

‘He won’t trust us not to poison him,’ said Terry, so Kathleen sat down.

‘Well?’ said Terry. ‘You may begin.’

The inspector took his business card from his top pocket and set it on the table, and then he spoke in the soft measured tones of someone who might have been selling insurance. ‘Mr Brankin, you were a suspect in a bombing incident in Magheraloy in March 1985 in which three members of the Lavery family were killed. Isn’t that right?’

‘I was questioned about it in Castlereagh.’

Kathleen sat back with a stunned look on her face, amazed that conversations about murder and guilt were routine for both men.

‘Well, let’s be plain about our understanding of that incident. You were part of the bomb team. You were the lookout rather than the trigger man. That was Michael Harken, who met his just deserts later. Are you content to proceed with this conversation on that understanding?’

‘No.’

‘For God’s sake’, blurted Kathleen, ‘what’s the point in playing games now?’

‘I have not cautioned you, and none of what we say has any value for evidential purposes.’

‘So,’ said Terry, ‘you have no expectation that you will get to that point.’

‘Not really. But I have procedures to follow, largely for the sake of Seamus Lavery, the son of Patrick and Elizabeth Lavery, the twin brother of Isobel. I am instructed to review files of old killings and to offer the families of victims the best possible prospects of prosecution of the guilty. You are guilty. That is why I am here. Unless you actually choose to confess I can, of course, do nothing.’

‘Well, I am not going to confess.’

Inspector McKeague opened his briefcase and, before the Brankins could move, he dropped a large colour photograph onto the floor where both could see it plainly. Kathleen wondered what the point of this was. It looked like an ad for some kind of ice cream, with streaks of raspberry running lavishly over the main confection. Then she gasped, clenched her mouth and tried not to be sick.

‘That’s little Isobel. She was sitting alone in the back of the car and took the force of the blast underneath her. That’s why the legs are splayed and the clothing is torn. I’m afraid you can’t quite make out her facial features.’

‘Huh, huh, huh …’ Kathleen’s convulsive gasping was out of her control.

Terry leapt to try to console her but she pushed him away. ‘Get off me!’ He turned to McKeague, who was sitting calmly with another photograph in his hand.

McKeague said, ‘Of course, if you don’t wish the interview to continue here, we can go to the station.’

Terry had to contain the impulse to reach for him and fling him from the house. McKeague dropped the next photograph onto the carpet.

‘We think that most of this is Mrs Elizabeth Lavery. She and her husband were both wearing seat belts and it is remarkable how effective these can be in preserving the integrity of a body that has been torn by an under-car bomb. Here …’ – he dropped another picture – ‘is Patrick Lavery’s right leg. A colleague of mine had to fetch it out of a ditch. He says he will never forget that. A leg on its own is always heavier than you’d expect it to be.’

Kathleen was weeping and shrieking as if she was being jabbed at with a sharp knife. She had both hands in front of her face, trying to make it all go away, but it was futile, for what she was trying to banish was the past and the future, and none of it was under her control.