Terry Brankin Has a Gun. Malachi O'Doherty
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty-One
Twenty-Two
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Several people have influenced the writing of this book and deserve a mention. At an early stage my then agent Jonathan Williams offered valuable guidance. So did my niece, Katie O’Kelly, particularly in relation to Kathleen’s shopping expedition. David Torrens of No Alibis Bookshop contributed as a friend and ally. My later agent Lisa Moylett was a huge help, as was the editor Maria McGuinness. Other helpful readers of early drafts include Stephen Walker, Niamh Gormley and Darragh MacIntyre. The Arts Council of Northern Ireland assisted me at one stage with a SIAP grant and the finishing work was done during a period in which I was a recipient of a Major Artist Award from the Arts Council, funded by the National Lottery. My wife, Maureen Boyle, a writer herself, was an unfailing support and astute critic.
PROLOGUE
Back Then
He was driving to his death and didn’t know it. The death itself would be so sudden and decisive, he wouldn’t even have a second to anticipate it – nor would his wife and daughter beside him. They would all be torched in an instant. Horrible to think about, if you are a bomber with a conscience, but reassuringly brief.
It had been a long day. The light was dim, and the wipers slashed rivulets across the windscreen. The lights from oncoming traffic seemed brighter than usual and stung his eyes. He was tired and the drive was boring. In the back seat, his daughter switched between fidgeting and moaning. She had a little doll that one moment she was hugging close to her and the next, flopping carelessly onto the seat beside her. He checked on her occasionally in the rear-view mirror, afraid that she would slide out of her seat belt again.
Beside him, Libby selected Black Beauty from a stack of tapes in front of the gear stick and slotted it in, wishing she hadn’t to hear it through again. Paddy reached across to press the rewind button, keeping one hand on the wheel and an eye on the drab, wet, familiar road. Two hours from home. Seconds from death.
Approaching the border, he hoped that the checkpoints would not delay them. There should be a decent motorway between Dublin and Belfast but, he supposed, security took first claim on budgets. There was no point in yawning or complaining.
Men who knew all about security were waiting for a bottle-green Rover just like Paddy Lavery’s. Theirs had been a long day too, meandering around mountain roads to evade detection, crouching between gorse bushes in combats that could guard the skin against thorns but not the backs of their necks against the rain that dripped on them from the low trees they manoeuvred through. They knew that there were soldiers in hill-top towers who had cameras that could check the hair in their ears.
Clever and painstaking enough not to be seen, not even to raise a suspicion, they had collected their package, placed it and primed it and unrolled a wire to the shelter of bushes. The lookout guy would know the target by the make and colour of the car, by the number of passengers: a man and a woman – the chief constable and his wife – and their child behind them. Pity about the child. Probably grow up to be as bad as the da anyway.
The man with binoculars would signal from a rise; the other would trip the switch.
Was his daughter dozing? Paddy wasn’t sure. He’d thought wee Isobel would enjoy the drive; he’d wanted her brother Seamus to come too but knew now that two would have been double the distraction and the worry. He’d be back down this road in a couple of weeks for the All-Ireland and could make it up to the boy then.
The one with the binoculars wasn’t sure at first, but he had only about a hundred yards of road in which to make up his mind. The make was right: it was a Rover. The colour? In this light? Yeah, it was green, yes, bottle green. Do you mean wine- bottle green or beer-bottle green? But he held back because he could only see two heads. No, there was definitely someone in the back seat. Now his heart was pounding. This was on. He’d be far enough back to be safe from the blast but the suddenness of it and the noise always got you anyway. He waved a signal then lowered himself flat on the cold wet ground. He turned his face away from the car as it passed close below him.
And the blast punched his heart.
God knows what that was like for the people in the car. In the moment it had taken him to shudder and recompose himself, they had been obliterated. Then the car’s wreckage was tumbling on the road, screeching and rattling, thankfully away from him. He’d have looked silly if it had fallen on top of him. Surely they felt nothing as fire tore through them. He couldn’t help imagining it though, being scorched and torn from below. But even if there was a fraction of a second of the worst possible pain, there would be no recall of it now, in Heaven or in Hell. And he believed in neither. The Chief Con and his wife and sprog were beyond all grief and suffering. As well for them.
In an hour, he and the others on the team would be scrubbed and in a pub in Newry. The first pint would take the bitter taste out of his mouth. The second would settle him. In time, he would be warm again and among friends, who would let him sit close to the fire. And if they had to, would swear he had been there all day.
One
‘Hello, love.’ Terry Brankin had a tone reserved for his wife when her number showed up on his phone. When he had taken calls from her more brusquely, on other lines, she had accused him of coldness.
‘There’s a policeman wants to come to the house tonight.’
‘What’s that about?’ It was as well to pretend he could have no idea.
‘He didn’t say.’
‘Well, sure you go out like you planned, and I’ll deal with it.’ He had a half-memory that this was her night for the book group.
‘No way, Terry.’ She’d want to support him and didn’t understand how he would manage better without her there.
Kathleen knew that Terry had been in the IRA, back then. They had told each other everything, she supposed, had made a point of it. A month into their relationship they had sat together at the dining table in her Camden Street flat and unfolded their lives to one another. She had told him about Ciaran Simpson, a lad who fished for mackerel around Rathlin Island and courted her by leaving a massive dogfish on her mother’s step. She had told him about a German man called Tomas who had camped near her home one summer and brought her into his tent. He had told her about Lynne Doniger, a girl he’d met in Lancaster who’d left him for another woman. And about a couple of other lovers. She had felt that they had bonded with this show of honesty. They presumed now that they wouldn’t infect each other, so they could stop using condoms and she could go on the pill.
‘How long were you in the IRA?’ she had asked him then.
‘A couple of years.’
‘And don’t they shoot you if you try to leave?’
‘No.’ He laughed. ‘Loads of people left.’
They had sat silently together, toying with teacups. He knew there’d be another more probing question.
‘Did you kill anybody?’
‘The honest answer is that I killed hundreds of people – dozens of peelers, some shop girls and farmers, even a wee nun driving home. I had a part in every killing the IRA did in the time I was in it. That’s what membership means.’
‘But, up close?’
Up close the way their friend Tom Donnelly was shot? He sighed deeply. ‘I never shot anyone dead. I shot a few in the legs, wee hoods. The kneecappings. That was my job for a time. But then I got out. I’m not proud of everything I did, but then is anybody?’
She had left it at that and when thunderous echoes of a waning war reached their door or rattled their windows at night, they might grimace but say nothing, for trouble as messy as in Northern Ireland ultimately implicated even herself in its secrets. If you lived in Belfast, you saw men move in back alleys; you