1999 (21 page)

Since his first complaint about being cold McCoy had received an embarrassing number of sweaters, all in brown paper packages addressed in Ursula's handwriting. Trusting she would forgive him, he traded the latest woolly jumper for items he needed more.

 

Lenny Murphy continued his bloody work as self-appointed executioner by putting together a firing squad composed of Archie Waller, Sam McAllister, and William Green.
³
The gang seized three local men who had been accused of various petty crimes and ordered them to kneecap each other. When they tried to resist, one—a fellow member of the UVF—was shot dead by Archie Waller. The other two were shot in the knees and left writhing on the ground while Murphy's gang strolled away.

The UVF did not hesitate to dispense its own justice. Within a matter of days Archie Waller was dead.

The internecine war that followed resulted in several more murders and deflected Murphy's campaign of vengeance against Catholics. But only temporarily.

 

Barbara announced she wanted a flocked Christmas tree. “A white one,” she added, which further mystified Barry.

“What's that when it's at home?” he wondered.

“A tree that's been sprayed with cotton fibres and white paint, of course. They're very stylish.”

“In America maybe, but not in Ireland.”

“Nonsense,” Barbara said firmly. “All you have to do is look.”

Curiosity as much as the desire to please his wife propelled Barry on an expedition in search of a white-flocked tree. No one knew what he was talking about. A farmer selling Christmas trees by the side of the road in South Dublin summed things up. “I don't hold with heathen ideas,” he told Barry. “My trees are the way God made them.”

Barry took a detour on the way home and stopped in to the Bleeding Horse for a drink.

The Usual Suspects laughed when he told them what he had been doing. “You might as well go in search of the Holy Grail,” said Brendan. “Where does the woman get such ideas?”

Barry felt he had to defend Barbara. “From her description, it could be beautiful.”

“Did you buy a tree at all?”

“I did not buy a tree, though I must have looked at a hundred. But I did…” Suddenly he put down his glass. “I did have an idea,” he told his friends. Leaving the drink unfinished, he drove to Harold's Cross for his cameras.

Barry spent two days taking pictures of opulent, symmetrical pines and sparse, lopsided pines. He stopped looking at them as objects and recognised them as individuals, spending as much as half an hour on a single tree, walking around it, studying it from every angle and in changing light, seeking to capture its unique personality before it succumbed to the slow death already decreed by the axe.

On Christmas Eve he very deliberately purchased a forlorn little tree no one else would buy, and took it home to be lavished with love.

Barry's photographic essay entitled “The Great Christmas Tree Search” earned more money than any single item of his political work that year. Barbara's response was, “It's time you did something worthwhile with your photography.”

At that moment Barry hated her. He imagined putting his hands around that full white singer's throat and squeezing. Hard.

Yet he loved her.

Barbara was not the woman he had imagined her to be. In some ways she was more intelligent, in other ways less. A facade of naïveté concealed a devious mind. She delighted in demonstrating an encyclopaedic knowledge of trivia, often adding—with feigned astonishment—“You mean you didn't know that?” Yet Barry's attempts to impart information were dismissed with, “You just got that out of some book,” as if book knowledge were of no value.

At the beginning of their relationship Barry had been charmed by capricious behaviour that he mistook for a facet of femininity. In time it wore thin. He could never be certain of Barbara's mood; walking into the house was like walking into a minefield. His wife never asked how he felt, or how his day had been, yet if he failed to make these enquiries of her she was mightily offended.

She took a positive delight in one-upmanship. Any area in which he excelled, she denigrated. Any subject in which he expressed an interest she dismissed as boring, though she might discuss the same subject animatedly with a perfect stranger. If Barry made a flat statement she invariably expressed the opposite view. When he pointed this out she took affront. “Am I not allowed to have my own opinions?”

With the passage of time Barry had realised that his love for Barbara had little to do with sex. The act of sex was one of overwhelming physical sensation but did not touch the well of tenderness at his inmost core. The tenderness a man must keep hidden, or be thought less of a man.

Yet for all her faults, Barbara constantly evoked tenderness in Barry. When she lifted their little son and laughed into his laughing face. When she snored in her sleep; little stuttering bursts like Apollo's motor on a frosty morning.

When she sang.

 

On the fourth of January, 1976, five Catholics were killed by loyalists in two separate incidents near Whitecross in County Armagh.

The following day ten Protestants were shot dead in an ambush by republicans at Kingsmill, County Armagh.

On the ninth of the month Lenny Murphy struck again. He ordered his confederate William Moore to acquire a “clean” gun—one that could not be traced to the UVF—from a member of the Ulster Defence Regiment. The Walther pistol was used in the small hours of the following morning to shoot and kill a random victim, Ted McQuaid, in the Cliftonville area of Belfast.

 

McCoy's Christmas presents for the Hallorans did not arrive until the last day of January. They consisted of a wallet made in the prison craft shop for Barry, a coin purse from the same source for Barbara, and a tiny, beautifully carved wooden bird for Brian. Ursula received a slightly larger version of the same bird, with a note in its beak.

The note read, “This is me.”

On the sixth of February two teenage members of the Provisional IRA ambushed and shot two policemen who were patrolling the Cliftonville Road. One of their victims died instantly, the other two days later.

When news of this latest killing reached the bar where Murphy, Edwards, and Moore were drinking, it did not take long for the black taxi to be on the road again. They stopped long enough to pick up a like-minded individual called Robert “Basher” Bates, then went
taig
hunting.

This time the victim was a small, inoffensive fifty-five-year-old man called Thomas Quinn, who worked as a road sweeper. He was savagely beaten and repeatedly attacked with a butcher's knife before being dumped on a grassy bank close to the road. There the knife was wielded again, cutting his throat through to the spine.

The Belfast
Sunday News
received a telephone call announcing where the body of a “militant republican” could be found, and claiming the act was in retaliation for the shooting of the constables.

The following Monday Murphy looked forward to slaughtering a whole truckful of
taigs
. He had learned that a crew of Catholic workmen stopped at a little shop on the Shankill Road every weekday as they passed through the Protestant neighbourhood. With the aid of several confederates, a Thompson submachine gun, and a MKI carbine, Murphy hijacked a Ford Cortina belonging to a postman.

The gang parked the stolen car in front of the shop and took up their positions. Soon a lorry arrived and parked on the opposite side of the road while its occupants went inside. When they came out again, Murphy's gang opened fire. A horrified witness realised what was happening and shouted, “They're Prods, they're Prods!” but it was no use. The lorry was sprayed with eighteen rounds before the attackers sped away in the Cortina.

Two Protestant men died and two more were seriously injured. None of them had a connection with any paramilitary or political organisation.

When a BBC broadcast on the atrocity made clear that the victims had been Protestant, Murphy “went berserk” according to later testimony from Moore, and vowed to kill twice as many Catholics.

It was a vow he kept many times over.

The gang the press labelled the Shankill Butchers went on a mass murder spree unprecedented in the bloody annals of Northern Ireland. Catholic and Protestant alike fell prey to them; the total number of innocent men and women they shot, bludgeoned, and hacked to death may never be known. All the murders had one thing in common: extreme savagery.

This was killing for its own sake, feeding an irrational, sadistic bloodlust arising from educational and emotional deprivation coupled with a societal atmosphere where sectarian murder had been the norm for centuries.

 

When the Shankill Butchers made headlines the London tabloids wanted pictures, and the more gruesome the better. Every freelance photographer with connections in Northern Ireland was approached. Barry already had seen enough horrors to last a lifetime, and had a marked distaste for sensationalism for its own sake. He declined the assignment until the money was too big to turn down.

Barry did not tell Barbara exactly what the northern assignment was, nor did she ask, once he told her the sum he had been offered. She said, “We'll be able to have a damp-proof course installed before this house falls down around our ears. If you were going to buy a place at all you should have bought one built on a concrete slab.”

“Our climate and soil are not like those of America. Our construction is adapted to…”

Barbara shrugged dismissively. “If you insist on doing things the way they've always been done, this will always be a banana republic.”

He fought to keep his temper. “Copying someone else is not necessarily improving.”

“It is if they have a better way.”

A muscle jumped in his jaw. “If you think America's so wonderful I'm surprised you're not still there.”

“How can you say that?” She burst into tears and ran to her room.

Barry headed for his car.

 

The leadership of the Provisionals had begun talking amongst themselves about calling off the campaign altogether. They were forced to admit something they had been avoiding for far too long: the British government had no real interest in solving the problems in the north—and the republicans did not have enough manpower or gun power to force the issue.

Then on the twelfth of February Volunteer Frank Stagg died in England's Wakefield Prison while on a hunger strike. The British government had refused to transfer him to an Irish jail. There was rioting in West Belfast the following day.

The campaign was back on.

 

Barry Halloran arrived in Belfast in time to take photographs of the riot. When he rang Dublin that night he told Barbara, “I shall be here for a while, maybe even several weeks. There's so much going on right now that I'm spoiled for choice when it comes to covering stories.”

“I still don't like you being so far away.”

He laughed. “Belfast to Dublin is no distance at all. If you need me you'll always have a phone number where you can reach me, and in the meantime I've given Philpott strict orders to take good care of you.”

“Thanks for nothing,” said Barbara, slamming down the receiver.

There were a number of people with whom Barry might have stayed in Belfast, from dedicated republicans to Barbara's Protestant cousins. Instead he always chose the sort of cheap, off-the-main-street hotel frequented by travelling salesmen. A place where no one asked questions as long as you paid your bill and spoke with the sort of vaguely neutral Northern Irish accent he had perfected long ago.

 

With Britain in economic difficulties and the pound floundering on the international money markets, on the sixteenth of March Harold Wilson unexpectedly resigned as the British prime minister. Although Wilson had been able to steer Britain into EEC membership, his time in office had seen no appreciable improvement in the running sore that was Northern Ireland.

On the seventeenth of March, St. Patrick's Day celebrations in the Hillcrest Bar in a Catholic area of Dungannon ended in tragedy when the UVF car-bombed the bar. The bomb was packed into a green Austin Healey parked just outside. When the car exploded at 8:20 that evening, fifty-seven-year-old Joseph Kelly died inside the bar. Andrew Small, aged sixty-two, was walking past the bar with his wife. He also died, as did a couple of children who were playing in the street nearby. Another patron of the bar, Patrick Barnard, died in hospital the following day.

 

Barry did not take pictures of the wrecked bar; he was viewing the latest victim of the Shankill Butchers. Tom Madden had been stripped naked, hung upside down from a beam in a lock-up garage, and slowly skinned alive. After hours of agony he had died of strangulation. Hardened detectives turned their heads away, unable to look at the sight.

Barry did not photograph the body. Instead he photographed the shock and revulsion on the faces of the detectives.

Obtaining permission to visit a nonrelative in Long Kesh had proved to be a long, tedious process. The bureaucratic mind, pathologically obsessed with trivia, was the same everywhere. Barry had to submit identical documentation to a number of different offices that obviously did not share information with one another. He was called in for questioning several times—always expecting to have “Refused” stamped on his application.

But at last he was driving up the long, bleak stretch of the Bog Road that led to chained and padlocked gates and manned guard towers. The sky above was grimly grey.

So was the prison.

Barry had been in combat. He knew how it felt when someone was trying to kill him. That kind of fear could trigger an adrenaline rush that was, in its own way, exhilarating. There was no adrenaline rush to be had in Long Kesh. The prison was designed to shrink the human soul to insignificance.

As a visitor to the Maze (Compound) Barry was kept far away from the Maze (Cellular). All he could see of the new H-Blocks were the high concrete walls enclosing them.

Anything could be happening behind those walls,
he thought with an eerie presentiment.

Barry was directed to a guard box where he presented his identification and stamped permission form. Two guards scrutinised them, peered intently at him, then looked at the documents again. When they were satisfied, he was taken to a windowless cubicle and searched. He endured the process in silence, with a clenched jaw and icy eyes that stared unblinkingly toward an invisible horizon.

Those eyes unnerved the guard who searched him. The man later remarked, “That big tall bastard made the hair stand up on the back of me neck.”

When the search was concluded Barry was escorted to a low shed furnished with a few grimy plastic chairs. Two were a faded turquoise colour, the rest were orange. No other amenities were available. No tables, no magazines, no urn of tea, no pictures on the walls.

Barry sat down on one of the turquoise chairs. It was not only hard, but too small for a man of his height. He had to decide between sitting with his knees halfway to his chin or stretching his legs out in front of him for others to stumble over.

Because there already were four women and two young children in the waiting room, Barry chose the former posture.

While the children tried to find something to play with, the women chatted in working-class Belfast accents. Any semblance of normality was impossible. Soon they gave up and just sat, staring blankly at the blank walls.

Time passed. Everyone waited. As a matter of self-discipline Barry refrained from looking at his watch. The wan light coming through the smeared windowpane gave no hint of the location of the sun in the sky—if there was any sun.

Eventually a guard informed three of the four women that they would not be allowed to see their men that day. No explanation.

With a resigned sigh, the youngest stood up and removed the pink scarf she had worn at her throat to lend a little colour to her pale face. She tied the scarf over her hair like a bandana, beckoned her children to her, and followed the other two from the room. The fourth woman, older, sagging in her chair, continued to gaze at the wall.

I could take a portrait of her that would wring your heart. Is she someone's wife, someone's mother? How often does she come here? How often is she sent away without seeing him? What is her life like between visits? What is his?

A voice from the doorway startled Barry out of his reverie. “You Halloran?”

“I am.”

“You here for James McCoy?”

“I am.”

“He don't get many visitors,” the guard commented. “Follow me.”

The room set aside for visits was as bland and uncomfortable as the rest of the prison, equipped only with a few metal tables and the ubiquitous plastic chairs. A British soldier stood rigidly at guard just inside the door. When Barry entered two prisoners were already there, talking with their female visitors. Suddenly one of the men threw back his head and laughed. A great roaring laugh, filled with delight.

The soldier at the door stiffened; for a moment he looked frightened in spite of the sidearm he wore.

McCoy entered, accompanied by a prison guard. He was a little greyer, his squint more pronounced, but otherwise he looked the same as always. When Barry reached out to shake his hand the guard said, “No touching the prisoner.”

Barry's hand fell to his side. “How're they treating you?”

“Can't complain.”

The two men sat down facing each other across one of the narrow tables. Barry stretched his long legs to the side to avoid kicking his friend.

“What about your cough?” he wanted to know.

“Stop minderin' me, will you? In the Cages a man is obliged to keep himself in shape. The O/C has us doing sit-ups and squats and all that class of thing. I'm stronger than I was the last time you saw me,” McCoy claimed proudly.

As long as the guard was near enough to hear them they spoke only of safe subjects. “How's your mother, Seventeen? Is she in any pain?”

“If she is, she never tells me. But some days she's pretty damned cranky.”

“I don't blame her,” said McCoy. “I'm getting pretty damned cranky myself.”

Barry lowered his voice. “You haven't been hurt or anything, have you?”

“Nothing permanent,” McCoy replied. His mouth twitched.

The precious minutes allotted for the visit were racing past. When the arrival of another set of visitors distracted the guards, McCoy said hurriedly, “We hear everything in here, sooner rather than later. IRA engineers are copying U.S. claymore mines now. DuPont in the States is the world's leading explosives manufacturer but the stuff's expensive and tricky to import. We're beginning to replace unstable explosives like nitrobenzine and ammonium nitrate with Semtex from the Czech Republic.

“Every company's struggling to get its own supply. Of course some companies are better at self-finance than others,” McCoy said with a quiet chuckle. He swept the room with his eyes. No one was paying any attention to them.

“We have a few major arms dumps and a lot of transit dumps scattered throughout the country,” he continued. “The main staging point is Dublin, but that could change if the situation changes. The IRA network's spread pretty thin from Tyrone to Kerry, which is a shame because there's a hell of a lot of coastline and the British can't watch all of it.

“I've been having a wee think, Seventeen. If the Army had someone with connections in the west of Ireland and America too, a very special man who knew a lot about explosives…” McCoy did not finish the sentence. It was not necessary.

Barry felt a drum beginning to beat inside him.