Terry Brankin Has a Gun. Malachi O'Doherty
year in a gay bar in Lancaster and lived in a shared house down by the river. And all of it was so that the whiff of the Magheraloy bomb would not contaminate the fragrance of Dominic McGrath while he was secretly negotiating peace terms with the government.
Kathleen had gone to the Linenhall Library that morning, to read newspaper cuttings about the bomb and the Laverys. A smiling young man with curly hair and the first wisps of a beard had carried the huge bound volumes of broadsheet papers from the time and laid them out on the big oak desk in front of her. She had to stand to be able to view them and it surprised her to see how normal Belfast had been in other ways at a time when the IRA was bombing shops and paramilitaries were shooting civilians and police officers, men and women. None of it had pushed the ads for girdles off their corner spots on front pages. The curly haired young man might as lightly have assumed she was looking for pictures of a wedding or a book review as for a murder.
None of the pictures in the papers of the time were as gory as the ones that Inspector McKeague had dropped on her floor, but there was reportage and commentary on the atrocity, the familiar condemnation of the ‘animals’, ‘barbarians’ and ‘terrorists’. Some said they were the ‘scum of the earth’. Clergy and politicians had vented their moral outrage; that was part of their job.
She wondered what she had been doing on the day. She worked out that she would still have been doing her GCSEs. She was surprised to find that all the local papers had given extensive front-page coverage to the bomb and had inside features on the family. She couldn’t remember any of that. None of the reports speculated that the bomb had been intended for the Chief Constable and his family.
She read that Patrick Lavery had been a property developer and he had gone to County Meath, that last morning of his life, to look at a piece of land he might buy. He had chosen to make a day out of it with his wife and daughter. There was a photograph of the couple in The Irish News, in formal dress at a GAA dinner dance. There was another picture of the twins, Isobel and Seamus, playing on swings in the garden at home. They were only five years old, by the look of it, when the picture was taken, a few years before the bomb. There was no picture at all of Isobel as she was in the last days before she died. Perhaps the family didn’t have one.
Kathleen wondered why wee Seamus had not been in the car that day, what small domestic consideration – a cold or a tantrum – had determined that his twin sister Isobel would die and he would live.
She searched online to find where Seamus Lavery was now. Google turned up several men of the name, one a priest, one a pool hall manager and one a councillor. The one Kathleen thought was most likely to be the son of Patrick and Elizabeth was a hurley player and ran a computer repair shop in Swatragh, a small town in the Sperrins.
But what could she say to him? ‘My husband killed your parents and your sister and I want you to know that I’m very sorry’?
***
Terry went to see his friend Nools at her home near Templepatrick. A lot of police and security people lived out there, just ten minutes up the motorway from Belfast. The little estate was shaped like a tree, with cul-de-sacs curling off a main stem. He parked away from her home and walked there. But people were sure to notice him, weren’t they?
‘The only thing that ever brings you to my door is trouble,’ she said, in a tone which suggested she had given up wishing it was different.
He followed her into the living room.
‘I’ve been tidying up. We’d the book group last night.’
‘Kathleen said she couldn’t finish it.’
She walked through to the kitchen and he browsed her shelves as he waited. He looked for books a prison officer like her husband, George, might read. Solzhenitsyn?
Nools came back with tea and biscuits on a tray. ‘Well?’
‘A cop came. He raked up all this stuff about an awful bomb he wants to pin on me. Kathleen couldn’t take it.’
‘Now why would he want to pin a bomb on you – blame you for something you’d nothing to do with?’
‘I don’t do confession anymore, Nools. Not even to you.’
‘I suppose till now Kathleen thought it was all Robin Hood. She should have married a prison officer and seen him come home at nights with the roared abuse and smell of shit still in his head, and leaping out of bed in the early hours to grab his gun and shoot at shadows,’ she said.
‘The guy handling the case is old, burnt-out and cynical. I’m guessing he’s been handed a file by someone who’s tired of looking at it and getting nowhere,’ Terry said.
‘What do you want me to do?’
‘Aren’t you in those circles? Don’t you still have protection officers hovering round you?’
‘If it’s the Cold Case crowd then they have it because the A team don’t see any hope of closing it themselves. They’ve off-loaded it. I shouldn’t worry.’
‘Or they’ve come up with something that warrants another look at it?’
‘DNA? I think if it was that, they would have you in now and not be sending one of the ould fellas out to talk to you.’
***
She drove down the narrow country road to the town and looked for the cemetery. She walked along the aisles of shiny black marble headstones, learning the most common names of the town, noting those who had died young and those who had lived long. This calmed her. The Lavery family plot was a wide triple grave with a large stone angel over it but with no indication on it of how the three people below that angel had died. Kathleen wondered if it was an embarrassment in a Catholic town to have people belonging to you killed by the IRA. There were too many republican families around for anyone, even a victim, to feel free to risk offending them. She looked at other graves, some of small children, most of older people. Usually people died at the proper time – three score years and ten, indeed much later still – but there were children ‘taken suddenly’ and young men who had smashed cars on country roads. ‘Murdered by cowards’ was the tribute on one grim untended grave. Kathleen felt the need to mark her pity for the Laverys but she had not thought to bring flowers. She said a prayer.
***
Basil McKeague raised another spoonful of gloop to his wife’s lips, but she pursed them against it. ‘Do you want me to read to you, then?’
She nodded.
‘From the Holy Bible?’
She sighed.
He lifted the black book from the table by her bed, where it usually sat beside the box of tissues and the bottle of lemon barley water. He opened it at random, allowing the Lord himself to pick the text for the day.
‘And in every province, whithersoever the king’s commandment and his decree came, there was great mourning among the Jews, and fasting, and weeping, and wailing; and many lay in sackcloth and ashes. So Esther’s maids and her chamberlains came and told it her. Then was the queen exceedingly grieved; and she sent raiment to clothe Mordecai, and to take away his sackcloth from him: but he received it not.’
His wife said, ‘What’s that all about then?’ and when she saw him compose himself for a considered answer, she said, ‘Never mind. Read on if it pleases you.’
‘Do you get no comfort from it?’
‘I get no comfort from anything. Tell me about your work.’
‘I met a sinner yesterday, one of the worst of sinners,’ he replied.
‘An adulterer?’
‘A killer – one who has slaughtered the innocent.’
‘And will you be able to put him in jail or is this another one that will get away?’
‘He will have to confess; it’s the only way.’
‘Then you’ll be waiting till