Field of Blood (11 page)

was under perpetual strain, and some comfort from the strain came from the gin

bottle. To the Organization he represented a considerable threat, a threat they had attempted twice to eliminate. The living room of his cul‐de‐sac house in the

quiet Dunmurry suburb of the city was replastered and repapered but still showed the indentations of a burst of Armalite on automatic when the animals had made it inside his house to wait for his return home. More recently they had

tried to car bomb him. A Ford Fiesta loaded with fertilizer mix and parked on the

main road at the junction past which he must drive on his way to work, and the

remote controlled detonation a splitsecond late, and the force of the blast taken

by a young housewife out

shopping. The housewife had died, and Rennie had survived untouched and

drunk a half‐bottle before lunchtime. He was supported by his wife, who had spent one ever‐to‐be‐remembered Sunday evening cuddling her children and

facing the Armalite barrel and the pinched, hating face of a Provisional

marksman. She never questioned her husband nor urged him against his

prosecution of the war. She accepted that on the table beside their marriage bed

there would always be, at night, a loaded P.P.K. pistol. She was Gloria. She lived

behind blast‐proof windows, she lived in a house that was bathed in light at night. She helped with the outings for the R.U.C. Widows and Dependents, and

with the tombolas that paid for them. Her husband left the house most mornings

before eight, and returned fourteen or fifteen hours later . . . and through the day she listened to each and every one of the local radio news broadcasts. She thought Howard Rennie was a grand man, and she knew she had no chance of changing him.

In the war, the Interrogation Rooms were his chosen battleground. In the twenty‐

one Interrogation Rooms at Castlereagh he was a familiar figure. He could be hunched and confidential and kindly, his elbows splayed on the table, his face close to that of his prisoner. He could be angry and pacing and shouting and 55

threatening. The camera watched him, but there was no microphone in a

Castlereagh Interrogation Room.

It was the middle of the evening.

Rennie had eaten his tea in the canteen. Sausages and chips and a smear of brown sauce, and a mug of tea with two sugars. From the canteen he stamped

his way over to the Interrogation Block. He rarely strolled. It was his habit to hurry. McAnally was up for the third time. And the third team of detectives was

working on him. Rennie knew they had been brief and cursory the first time. That

was often the tactic. Let the implications of capture swim in the prisoner's mind.

The second session was always tougher, more direct, attempting to exploit those

implications ... but, of course, since the bloody Amnesty fellow travellers and the

European Court creatures had had their pennyworth, then the likes of Howard Rennie were no longer permitted to slap and tickle a prisoner ‐ that was the camera's job, to make certain the likes of Howard Rennie didn't take a fist to the

chin of a horrible little bastard whose only talent in life was sniping with a Remington Woodmaster rifle, or mixing fertilizer for a beer keg bomb ... Shit, and

if you couldn't belt the bastards, then there was sod all hope of getting them to

talk.

Rennie knew that in the second session, McAnally had not opened his mouth.

Not one bloody word from the little beast that was useful.

He shouldered past the uniformed policeman patrolling the corridor, into the fifth room from the end on the right. He nodded for the younger of the detectives

to get himself up from his chair and out. Bloody regulations, regulations said that

no more than two detectives should be

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**present at any one time for interrogation ... bloody regulations tying the hands

of the men who tried to keep the Province safe for decent people, that was Howard Rennie's anthem.

McAnally was looking up at Rennie.

Ì'm obliged to give you my name. I'm Rennie, D.C.I. ...' Rennie spun the chair back to front. He sat heavily down, elbows resting on the chair's back. He belched, all the bloody chips. He was leaning forward.

`Being helpful are we, Gingy?'

Behind McAnally's head the detective shook his head.

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Àre we going to be sensible, or are we going to be difficult? Are we going to have a life sentence without a minimum recommendation, or a life sentence with

twenty‐five years written in?'

McAnally flopped his head down onto his fists.

A cold grin from Rennie. Ì'm not allowed to offer you an inducement, McAnally,

but all the big boys know the form. Help us, and there's a life sentence without a

recommendation, that's a bloody sight easier than a Twenty‐five . . .'

McAnally closed his eyes.

`McAnally, if you're not daft you'll examine your position. You were informed on

... that's how rotten your organization is, it's rotten from floor to ceiling. Your own people grassed on you.'

McAnally opened his eyes, glowered at Rennie. His lips trembled, but he said nothing. Fighting to say nothing.

`Couldn't have been many who knew you were coming up from down South.

Well, one of them that knew was friendly enough with us to grass on you. Are you

going to spend a bit of time working out in your head which one it was? 'Course

you'll spend a bit of time, you'll have twenty‐five years of time to think which one it was ... if you're not sensible. You've been inside, Gingy. You know how long twenty‐five years takes inside.'

McAnally rolled off his chair.

He lay on the floor of the Interrogation Room.

He was face down on the floor, and he covered his ears with his hands.

`Getting the message, Gingy?'

Rennie was now off his chair and dropping to his hands and knees, and then straightening his legs as if about to make a press‐up, and he lowered himself down, down onto the floor, down beside McAnally.

`You should be getting the message by now, Gingy. They grassed on you. They

brought you up for a one‐shot, and that was the end of their use for you.'

Little Gingy McAnally and big Howard Rennie both stomach‐down on the floor,

and McAnally squeezing the palms of his hands against his ears, and Rennie whispering into the cracks between his fingers.

`Nasty cut that one on your lip, Gingy.'

McAnally's tongue slipped between his teeth, rolled over the swollen

lip.

`Don't you like a beating, Gingy? You're good at handing it out. You

gave a bit of a beating to Billy Simpson. There's plenty in here would

like to kick your stomach through your arse.'

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Rennie saw McAnally try to bury his head down against his chest, as

if that way he could better shut out the tap‐drip of the voice in his ear. Ì would

have thought the soldiers would have half killed you,

Gingy . . .'

He saw McAnally's head move in the barest and quickest acknowl

edgement. Rennie crouched over McAnally and his hands were either

side of McAnally's head, and his mouth brushed against the nape of

McAnally's neck.

`The officer saved you, didn't he, Gingy, saved you from a bloody

thrashing, didn't he?'

McAnally nodded.

`The officer stopped them from belting the shit out of you, Gingy? 'Yes.'

`That officer showed you a bit of kindness?' `Yes.' A tiny, reedy voice.

À bit of kindness where you didn't expect any kindness?' `Yes.'

`You'd trust that man, that officer, would you, Gingy? 'Yes.

`You'd trust him because he was a good young man, because he wasn't

a bastard like me, because he saved you from a beating. Right, Gingy? 'Yes.'

Ànd that officer's name is Lieutenant Ferris? 'Yes.'

All of interrogation was a chance. Each day when he went into the

Interrogation Rooms it was without a clear idea of how he would

respond to his suspect. He played his hunch, sometimes he won, many

times he lost. Rennie's head dipped, his forehead was against the floor.

His mouth was close to McAnally's ear.

Ì reckon that officer feels sorry for you.'

Rennie reached up. His fingers found the table's edge, and he levered

himself to his feet. Ì must be about my business now, Gingy. I'll be

back. And in the meantime you just have a wee thought on your friends,'

Rennie said. `No great urgency, of course,' he added, as the door closed

behind him.

,

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**Past nine in the evening and the inside lights glowing through the thin curtains

of the Turf Lodge streets. Wet streets, glistening in the landrovers' headlights.

Empty streets, because the Social Security was not paid till the next morning, and there was no money left for the bars. The landrovers cruised slowly, engines

whining. Ferris and his driver and two squaddies, in the lead vehicle.

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Ferris was thinking of Sam. He hadn't had a letter from her that week, but then

he hadn't tried to ring, so it was quits. When he did write to her, or telephone, he never had much to say about Turf Lodge, about night patrolling. If he didn't write

often and he didn't ring often, it was because there was nothing to say that he thought she ought to know, not because he didn't miss her. A girl who lived with

her parents in a six‐bedroomed stone house with a paddock and an orchard in rolling Somerset wouldn't have too much in common with patrolling the Turf Lodge estate ‐ so he didn't tell her about it. He'd tell her about Sean Pius McAnally, but only enough for her to know that his platoon was getting the Glorygrams from Sunray. She'd like that, and she'd tell her father. Sam's father

was a retired half Colonel. Effectively he had made Major and Company

Command in the old Somerset Light Infantry, but he'd been upped to half

Colonel to oversee the local schools' Cadet units. Not a bad chap, Sam's father,

and he didn't stand in the way of what Sam did when David Ferris was down on

leave. Trouble was he'd forgotten he hadn't made General, forgotten it clean out

of the window when he'd had the Falklands map pinned up in the study during the South Atlantic affair.

She was lovely, his Sam, but thinking of Sam on a cold, wet night in Turf Lodge

was enough to get himself sniped. Safer to be thinking that there might be a marksman in a snipe hide between the Drive and the Parade. She had bloody good thighs because she jogged three times a week, and bloody good breasts because she drank a pint of milk each morning and she was a bloody good girl because she kept herself for David Ferris all the time he was cruising through the

Turf Lodge estate. If a chap had to be sniped then so much the better if he had a

clear picture of Sam's very beautiful body in his head when the bead was on him.

`What are you thinking of, Jones?

'Fanny, Sir. What are you thinking of, sir?' `Military tactics, Jones, what else?'

In the faint light Ferris could see Jones holding a straight face. He smiled. He heard the snigger of the squaddies behind him.

`. .. DELTA FOXTROT COME IN OVER ...'

His head spun with the cry in his earpiece. He found the button on his radio, twisted the volume down. `. . . Delta Foxtrot receiving over . . .'

`, .. DELTA FOXTROT THIS IS 49 ... S.A.P. PARADE STROKE AVENUE R.V.. . .

OUT . . .,

Ferris said quietly to Jones: `Soon as possible to the junction of the Parade and

Avenue.' He turned to his squaddies behind him. `Sharp look‐out, lads . . .' ,

Fusilier Jones knew the Turf Lodge like a local. Three right turns and a left.

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The headlights swung along the street and caught a squaddie crouched against

an overgrown hedge, and then the corporal who was bent down against the wall

of a lock‐up garage. Ferris saw what seemed to be a bundle of rags, perhaps a sack, beside the corporal before Jones killed the lights. Ferris swung his legs out

of the landrover and scurried to his corporal.

The corporal's masked torch shone down into a small white face. Ferris saw the

terrified, staring eyes and the blood‐drained cheeks that were smeared with tears. •

Ferris's thoughts were racing. Bloody hit and run driver, no bloody lights in the street . . . But the corporal's torch was moving down the short length of the boy's

jersey ... Ferris saw the hole at the elbow, worn through . . . and the torch moved

on down the boy's thigh. He saw the blood‐soaked knee of the boy, and the dark

bullet hole set in the spread of crimson.

`But it's a bloody child . . .'

Ìt's a child, Mr Ferris, and he's been knee‐capped,' the corporal said grimly.

`God Almighty . . . I don't believe it . . .'

`He's Liam Blaney, he's thirteen years old. Father's in the Kesh ... Want to see his stomach?'

The corporal didn't wait for Ferris's reply. He pulled back the boy's shirt, lifted his jersey. Ferris saw the burns and the bruises.

`Must reckon him an informer, sir,' the corporal added.

Ferris knew the corporal's own children from back at the depot in England. He knew the dry, flat answers to be a sham.