Controlled Explosions (2 page)

The journalist, some English fella with an accent like grating machinery, was taking notes by hand now. Maybe, God willing, the batteries on his wee machine were dead. ‘And you, Sergeant, are you Protestant?’ They always pronounced it like that, with the
t
stuttering in the middle, instead of softened into a
d
like you did if you were local. Bob met the gaze of his partner – no, his
deputy
, he had to stop forgetting that – over the man’s head, and they both shrugged. Then PJ Maguire looked away. It was a hard habit to break, thinking of PJ as his partner, though they hadn’t been that for years. Not since Bob’s promotion, and everything else that happened in 1993. PJ was a Catholic, and for various reasons Bob wasn’t his favourite person, but dear God, the English. They hadn’t a notion what went on here. ‘Aye, I am,’ he said, thinking of the sash in the wardrobe back home, pressed and under plastic. One year he’d led this parade himself, now he was shutting it down. ‘But right now I’m just a police officer.’

PJ’s radio buzzed and he listened for a moment. ‘They’re doing a controlled explosion. We better move on back.’

‘Can we watch it blow up?’ asked the journalist, scribbling excitedly in his notebook. ‘That would be amazing.’

Bob Hamilton sighed, and watched his town burn.

‘Tout.’

She could hear the word behind her, hissing in her ear. At the front of the class, the teacher was droning on about abortion.

‘Your ma was a tout.’

Paula spun around, teeth bared. Everyone’s head was down, writing, but she knew who’d said it all the same. ‘Shut up!’

‘What’s that racket?’ The teacher, Mrs Reilly, was fat, like really fat. Once she was wedged into her seat she didn’t get out for anything. ‘Paula? Is that you talking?’

She felt the red sweep up her face, the unfairness of it, as behind her a breeze of giggling broke out. ‘No, miss.’

‘In that case can you tell me why the Catholic Church doesn’t support abortion?’

Paula sighed. The file paper in front of her was covered in doodles, stars and hearts. No notes on the lesson at all.

‘Well? I knew you weren’t listen—’

Paula said, bored: ‘It’s because of the scripture verse “before I formed you in the womb I knew you”, that shows life starts at the moment of conception. Jeremiah one, five.’

Another faint giggle, this time not aimed at Paula. She looked down at her paper again.

The teacher said nothing for a few moments. ‘Well. That’s right. Now keep it down, please.’

Behind her, Paula could feel Catriona’s beady eyes bore into her.

Tout. Your ma was a tout.

The worst thing about it: it was probably true.

‘Bunch of cows,’ said Saoirse, scowling, when Paula caught up with her in the science corridor. ‘You should tell someone.’

Paula made a noise that was almost a laugh. You never told on people. Everyone knew that. The teachers did nothing, and you just got in more trouble on top of the bullying. ‘Yeah, sure I’ll do that. Duh.’

‘Anyway, what did you reckon to
ER
last night? Wasn’t it brilliant? I wish Dr Carter would marry me. He’s sooooo gorgeous.’ Saoirse was going to be a doctor; she’d always known it. Paula wondered sometimes if she knew it wouldn’t be exactly like
ER
.

‘Yeah … it was good.’

‘Listen. Forget about Catriona O’Keeffe. She’s just a little Provo bitch. Come on.’ Saoirse put her arm through Paula’s as they wandered down the hot corridor, with its reek of Impulse and PE kits. ‘We’re getting out of here, remember? One more year! Then we’ll be in Belfast, we can get our own flat, we can have people round for dinner …’

But there’d be no getting out. There’d be Catrionas in Belfast too, lots of them. And everyone would know Paula’s da was a Catholic policeman and her ma was maybe a tout and maybe dead but maybe not. Sometimes she couldn’t stand it. She’d been starting to think, though she had no idea how to tell Saoirse, that maybe she’d go even further away than Belfast. Further than Dublin too. Maybe she’d go as far away as she could. Maybe she’d just keep running until it wasn’t possible to find her way back.

‘What’ve you now? I’ve Statistics, FUN.’

‘Eh … I’ve a free.’

‘Lucky. See you on the bus then.’

‘Yeah. See ya.’

Saoirse had a normal life. She had both her parents, she had three brothers and two sisters. On Sundays they sat in a little row in Mass, all of them going up to Communion with clean faces and crossed hands. Paula, she had … well, nothing.

‘We put him inside. Didn’t we?’

Detective Inspector Alec Johnson stared round the table. No one answered. He glared at the man furthest from him, who was tipped back in his chair, shirtsleeves rolled up. ‘Patrick. It was you made the arrest.’

PJ Maguire didn’t like being called by his first name, Bob knew. Couldn’t blame him. If your name was Patrick, you may as well wear a T-shirt saying ‘I’m a Taig, please set fire to my house’. ‘Aye, sir, it was. Red Hugh’s in the Maze and he hasn’t put a foot outside it in three years. That’s a fact.’

‘So why are we still finding his signature bombs all over the routes of Orange Order parades?’ Johnson slapped the paper down on the table. It was the analysis of the device from earlier that day, the fifth they’d found that summer. A list of chemicals as long as your arm. Johnson liked to pace up and down behind you in meetings – kept you on your toes. Bob tried to concentrate. Johnson was talking. ‘See those long names? That’s fertiliser. We all know Red Hugh favoured fertiliser – he used to get subsidies for it on his farm. From the British Government. Then he put it into bombs to blow up British Army patrols.’

‘I doubt he appreciated the irony,’ PJ muttered. Bob stared down at the table. He could still picture the man at his trial. Mad eyes and a straggly beard like some Russian Commie – they called him Red Hugh because he’d got into the Provos via a dalliance with radical Marxism. That, and the brand of fertiliser he used leaked a red dye that was exactly the colour of blood.

Johnson went on. ‘He uses these same detonators. He even uses this brand of copper wiring, but he’s in the Maze. So what’s going on? How is this possible?’

No one had any answers.

‘Sir?’ A female voice, quiet but clear. It said –
listen to me. I’ve got as much right to speak as you.
‘Do you not think maybe someone’s taken over Red Hugh’s bomb factory?’

Johnson looked annoyed. ‘That’s where I was going next, Miss Corry.’

‘It’s Detective Constable.’

Bob looked at her from the corner of his eye, which was close enough. It wasn’t right, all that blond hair and the short skirts. This Corry girl was from Belfast and had been pushed up the ranks, though she was barely even thirty. She’d appeared in the station at the start of parade season, after they’d found the first bomb. They didn’t even have a vacancy but there she was. And she had a baby, he’d heard. Who was looking after it while she was sitting here telling her elders what to do? Bob had been still on traffic at that age. Of course, things were different then.

Bob had started at the station in 1968, on the same day as Alec Johnson, and Sergeant Ian Robinson had trained them both, showed them how to survive, how to look for car bombs, how to vary your route to work, how to get answers out of some cocky wee IRA shite with a balaclava in his back pocket and a bent lawyer on speed-dial. Until the day Robinson forgot his own rules, and started his BMW in the car park.

They’d heard the bang three storeys up. Cups fell off tables and shattered. The windows bubbled in. Bob had frozen, tea soaking into his shirt and blood on his fingers from trying to catch the broken mug.

Blood. There’d been a lot more of it on the lower windows of the station. They’d had to get in a wee man with a squeegee, who did the job with a fag hanging out of his mouth, not a bother on him. Bob had called his son after his dead sergeant – it felt like the very least he could do. He thought about Robinson every day, even without that. Every time he turned the key in his own car, that half-second where you held your breath, waiting for it all to be over. Hoping at least it would be quick.

‘So we’ll investigate Red Hugh’s farm then? See if the materials are still there?’ The Corry girl was upright, alert. She might be a mother but to Bob’s mind she could still be in school, putting her hand up for the teacher.

‘Yes.’ Johnson was doing his best not to look at her. ‘Miss Corry, in this station we wait until people have finished before we give our views.’

She didn’t bat an eyelid. ‘Do we also wait until the whole town knows what we’re about to do?’

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘There’s been no physical evidence at any of the bomb sites, no prints or DNA, just clear signs that link them to someone who can’t have done it. Am I right?’

‘What are you suggesting?’

‘It all seems too neat. Someone knows what we’ll be looking for and that we’ll make the connection to Red Hugh. Sir.’

The silence that fell on the conference room was heavy. It was the kind of silence that came from ten forty-plus men looking at one girl barely out of her twenties. Bob thought of the rumours she’d brought with her from Belfast – that the Corry girl was there to check up on them all, some kind of Professional Standards review. That she took her orders right from the top. He hadn’t believed it. The girl wasn’t much more than a wean.

She didn’t seem to mind the silence. ‘I think we should go to the farm soon. Today, ideally. Tomorrow morning at the latest.’

Johnson paused. Bob could see the grey in the hair cut neatly around his collar. He was pushing fifty, both of them were. Did Bob look old too? They’d both be out when everything changed, most likely. Letting weans and women run the place. ‘The farm is dead set on the border, so we need to set up liaison with that lot first. It won’t be today.’

‘
An Garda Siochána
?’ The Corry girl rolled off the Irish name of the Southern police force. Definitely Catholic. Had to be. ‘I can set that up for you.’

‘Oh you can, can you?’

‘Of course. It’s no bother.’ She didn’t even ask if she could go out to the farm – and why would she want to, a wet-behind-the-ears girl? It was easy enough to criticise when you were safe in the office, not out in the field afraid someone would shoot the head off your shoulders any minute. Would this be the way now, taking orders from people behind desks, who’d never chased after a wee gobshite with a grenade in his hand, never carried the coffin of yet another colleague shot in the head or blown up? Who’d never washed their friend’s blood off their car windows, scrubbing and scrubbing with a sponge, then throwing the sponge and everything you were wearing into the bin, then hosing down your driveway, then selling the car anyway because you couldn’t stand to see it outside your house.

She stood up and put on her suit jacket, flipping her yellow ponytail out behind her so it swung like a scythe. ‘I’ll get on to that now, sir.’

It was amazing how you could use the word to someone while still managing to convey you had no respect for them at all. The girl walked out of the room, clacking on the heels of her shoes, and all the men in the room looked after her, but she didn’t turn around.

Paula was tall for seventeen, nearly five foot ten already, but there were four of them, and only one of her.

‘Fuck off,’ she said, trying to look hard. What were they even doing in her street? Catriona lived out in the country somewhere with the mud and the cows and the mad Provos. But there she was, standing in the road as Paula got home from school, with her little minions Mary and Brid. A boy was sitting on next door’s wall, smoking.

Catriona blocked her way. ‘Going home to tout on us too? Guess it runs in the family.’

She tried to walk past them, head bowed, but they were everywhere. Her house was only three along. If she could run … They were just girls, three of them in the same maroon uniform as her, socks pushed down as far as they’d go, skirts rolled up, sports tops zipped over their blazers – none of it official school uniform. Paula was pretty sure Mary and Brid wouldn’t be passing their A-levels – they were both thick as the pigshit they shovelled on their farms – but Catriona was smart. Smart and mean.

The boy was older, maybe nineteen, wearing jeans and Army boots. He had acne down the side of his face. She didn’t know who he was.

‘Your ma was a tout,’ Catriona repeated. ‘That’s why she snuffed it, isn’t it? Couldn’t keep her mouth shut.’

‘She’s not—’

‘Is she not? Then did she just go off and leave you? No surprise really. And where’s your da? Off harassing his own people? He’s a fucking traitor too. Him and your dead ma.’

‘Fuck off!’ The tears in Paula’s eyes were stinging. ‘She might be dead, I don’t know! I don’t know anything and neither do you, you stupid cow. At least I’m going to pass my A-levels. At least I’m getting out of this fucking stupid town. You’ll be stuck here forever, milking the cows and signing on the dole.’

‘
Bitch
.’

She hadn’t thought they’d actually hurt her – though words could hurt enough, and she’d never believed that crap about them being gentler than sticks and stones – but suddenly there was a scuffle, and Catriona’s chipped nails were scratching at Paula’s face, and she could smell the girl’s BO and bubblegum, and she was fighting back with no plan, just instinct, slapping and pulling, grabbing at Catriona’s hair and making a noise like an angry cat.

‘Fuck off! Fuck off!’

‘Hey, hey, come on now!’ Someone was pulling her back. She couldn’t see for a moment from the hair in her eyes, just feel someone’s hands on her waist. Then – it was Aidan O’Hara. What was he doing here? She pulled away, breathing hard.

‘What the fuck’s going on?’

‘None of your effing business.’ Catriona was panting, straightening her clothes. ‘Guess all you touts stick together.’

Aidan didn’t say anything about that, but he stood very still. ‘Her da’s a cop, you know. You better piss off or you’ll get a record. Silly wee bitch.’

The other girls were juking off down the road, but Catriona was still shouting, standing her ground. Her dyed blond hair had fallen out of its tight bun and her eyes behind their seven coats of mascara were wild. The boy got down off the wall, held her by the arm. He hadn’t said a word during the whole thing. She was screeching, ‘Whole fucking family are traitors. And your da too, O’Hara. I know who you are. Your da got what was coming to him, and so will hers.’