Field of Blood (34 page)

bombing range. Ernie always makes me laugh. He hopes you are well. I've been

raking the last of the leaves today from the elm, and managed to get a bonfire

going, but then Mrs Frobisher put her washing on the line and I had to put a bucket on it. We're playing bridge with her next week, she's not been well.'

He was £98.72 overdrawn. He didn't bank with his father. They'd have to be patient, till after Christmas. Christmas ... what a thought ... Christmas in the Springfield Road barracks. Sunray serving up the brown windsor and the yellow

turkey for the squaddies, paper hats in the Mess, and the Chaplain trying to pretend that for one day at least there could be hope and love on the streets of

Belfast.

There was a biscuit tin in his cupboard. He stuffed his mother's letter into it, and the bank statement.

He sniffed at Sam's envelope. Cheeky girl. He ran his thumb nail under the gummed down flap. He could see Sam's tongue licking the flap down, could feel

it if he half tried. Ten weeks gone, six to go. He was certain of Sam, she was the

only human being in the world that he was sure of. God, what Sam would have

done for the morale of a Spitfire squadron parked out on a field in Kent in 1940.

Every pilot, heading for death or glory, would have thought of Sam when it was

curtains time and loved her.

`Darling David, it's hells boring here ‐ when are you coming back to me?' ... Sam

was close to being worth a desertion charge ...`That hideous little solicitor from

Frome has been pestering me to go to

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**dinner, so I told him he should get a commission in the Parachute Reg. and then I'd look at him again, he said I couldn't go through life being flippant, I told him to naff off' . . . he believed her. The solicitor wouldn't have an overdraft of

£98.72. The solicitor had a future that stretched further than six more weeks patrolling West Belfast ...`The papers have been full of the supergrasses, especially this smelly little turnip they've just roped in. Anyone who has to deal

with him must feel like having a good bath afterwards' . . . he saw Sam in the bath, bubbles and nipples and knees, and he saw Gingy McAnally hurrying with

his children to the opened hatch of a helicopter ...Ìf you've been without it for 184

sixteen weeks will you be impotent when you come back? I met a doctor at the

Mendip Hunt thrash who said that men who had been without for too long

sometimes lost the urge' . . . you're a bloody tease, Sam. Fusilier Jones would have a ruder name for Sam. Fusilier Jones wouldn't like to think of a girl in Somerset getting his officer all charged up ...`Lots of love, David darling, from your Sam ‐ P.S. Daddy's dived into a book about the Russian army. He says the

Russians wouldn't have let N.I. go on for so long ‐ finger out, my darling.'

It was the sixth letter he had received from her since the Battalion had travelled.

He kept all her letters in a cellophane folder in the breast pocket of his denims.

Sam's letters were always with him on patrol in Turf Lodge.

One last time he held the envelope to his nose, then he tore it into small pieces

and put them into the black plastic bag that was the room's rubbish bin.

He stretched.

He heard the rifle fire.

He heard the crash of S.L.R.s on semi‐automatic. He heard urgent, shouted orders.

He heard the alarm bell howling through the windowless walls of his room.

Sam vanished. Ferris had slept in his boots. Standard Operating Procedure that

officers slept in their boots if they cat‐napped in daytime. He plunged off the bunk, grabbed his flak jacket from the nail on the door. He stuffed Sam's letter

into his trouser pocket. He took his rifle from the floor under the bed, and sprinted out of the quarters and into the yard where the vehicles were parked.

Bedlam outside. Men running. Officers and N.C.O.s shouting. The Saracens with

the big red crosses on them were revving their engines.

Ferris saw the smoke climbing from the street side of the screen fencing round the barracks.

Ìt's your patrol.'

He turned. He saw the Intelligence Officer running behind him.

The gates were open. Ferris ran out into the Springfield in the wake of the second

Saracen.

Just down the road, to the right, on the far side, were the two landrovers. The lead landrover was intact. The follow‐up vehicle was a blackened base and above

it were climbing flames. Soldiers were kicking in the door of the house beside it.

Shots were fired into the upper window. Two black, scorched figures rolled, writhed, in the middle of the roadway, and the stench spread the width of the street.

The medics reached the two men.

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An old lady, not an inch above five feet tall, was dragged dumb from the front door of her house.

Sunray was out in the street, and Bravo's Company commander.

Fusilier Jones was kneeling by a lamp post, his rifle at his shoulder and covering

the upper windows on the far side of the street. Ferris saw his chin trembling uncontrollably. He went to him, he crouched down beside him. He felt a terrible

sense of shame. His men, the men of his platoon, attacked while he was in his pit.

`Tell me, Jones.'

Ìt's the Sarge and Nobby. Not much to tell, really. Window breaks, a can full of

gas and a fire stick came out. That's about it. We pump the window, too fucking

late. Sarge's vehicle catches the gas. Harry and Rick get out O.K., Sarge and Nobby don't have the luck. Sarge's fucking bad . . .' the young Fusilier looked away from his sighting aim, looked into his officer's face. He was shouting. `You

couldn't see them ... you couldn't hit the cunts back.'

Èasy, lad.' Ferris's hand rested on Fusilier Jones's shoulder.

Time for a bloody officer to display bloody leadership, wasn't it?

Of course, they couldn't hit back, not with rifles, not with vehicle patrols. Getting Sean Pius McAnally into the witness box was hitting back. Getting him to testify

was hitting back at the bastards.

The ambulance Saracen wailed away the few hundred yards to Casualty at the Royal Victoria.

`Take the vehicle back and get a mug of tea,' Ferris said to Jones.

Rennie extricated Gingy McAnally from the Special Branch rooms at Castlereagh.

The Branch were easy on Gingy. Their concern was the structure of the

Organization, the morale and thinking of the P.I.R.A. Volunteers and Officers, the tactical approach of the movement. An easy ride for Gingy. The big picture

was of little use to Howard Rennie. Rennie's job was to get men into court first, to get men into the Kesh second.

Out in the corridor Rennie crowded McAnally up against a wall. He towered over

the tout.

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**`Yesterday was pretty bloody. It won't get better till you make it better. It's in your hands, and the only way you'll make it better is by getting on with it, head

down. You have to face them, and you're going to face them, all the men you've

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named. When you can do that, when you can spit in their bloody eyes, then it's

getting better.'

Rennie punched McAnally on the upper arm, hurting him, tensing him.

`Head down, and you spit in their eyes, and you face them.' McAnally nodded.

Ànd no pissing me about.'

Again McAnally nodded.

Rennie knew that he could never be certain of a supergrass. Once he had psyched

a man right up to the back door of the Crumlin Road Court House, and defence

had won a week's adjournment, and the supergrass had gone flat on them,

walked out. He'd shouted at him, pleaded with him, threatened him, and the man

had walked out on them. Rennie wouldn't risk his life on a supergrass making it to

Crumlin Road, hardly depend a bloody toenail on it.

Ìs the house alright, the new house?' Rennie asked conversationally. They were

tramping the corridors on their way to Interrogation.

`The house is grand.'

Rennie thought McAnally would call a shit house a palace if he thought that would please. He had to find a way of planting some balls in the man if he wasn't

to be crucified under cross‐examination. He knew all the barristers, mostly Protestants because they'd had the places at the Law Department in Queens, and they wet themselves at the chance of turning over a supergrass in the witness box.

`Don't you bloody dare let me down.'

That afternoon Sean Pius McAnally confronted Fatsy Rawe and Eamonn Bugsy

Malone and Damien Dusty O'Hara and Brennie Toibin and Phonsie McGurr and

Joey Mulvaney and Billy Clinch. No hanging about, no messing as there had been

with Muldoon, O'Brien, McGilivarry, McCreevy. A uniformed Inspector was

present as an independent witness. Two detectives to watch the prisoner.

McAnally into the doorway, reciting his accusations that were sometimes

drowned in the protest shouting or the hissing threats, and out of the door.

Rennie never let go of McAnally's arm, not when they were back out in the corridor, not when they were in the doorway in confrontation.

McAnally might have run a mile. He was weakening, he was sagging, and

Rennie's hand held him upright, propelled him towards each of his former

comrades.

`Can I go back to Roisin?' With both hands McAnally gripped a mug of tea.

Ì'm laying charges tonight. You'll go on facing them till you're through your list.'

`Yes.'

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Rennie softened. `Prentice bays to me that Roisin didn't know ... he says she's as

buggered by the bullet as you were.'

`She wouldn't have done it if she'd known.'

`She didn't know what she was doing ... It's not only you that's going through the

hoop, Gingy ... Give her time, laddie.'

`What'll you do with her Ma?

'Nothing.'

McAnally snorted. `Possession of ammunition, there's guys doing a Fiver for possession of a bullet.'

`Don't play bloody lawyers with me ... I'd love to book the bastard who put the

bullet in her hand. To send him down I've got to heave her through the courts, as

a witness or in the dock. If I do that then you lose Roisin, Gingy. They're not bloody daft, they knew we'd do damn all.'

McAnally dropped his head. Ì'm only here because of Roisin, because I wanted to

do the best for her, for the kids.'

Rennie said cruelly, Ànd a matter of three life sentences, that little matter too.

Let's get on with it ...'

Back to the Interrogation Block. Back to the snarling, enraged faces of the men

accused by Sean Pius McAnally.

Andy Goss escorted McAnally back to Thiepval, same transport, same armoured

landrover.

Goss wasn't making much of his job as `minder' during the journey in the dimmed

light of the landrover's interior. He'd been chirpy enough when Rennie had given

him the afternoon to go and see his girl. She'd wanted him with her after the bank closed, for Christmas shopping in Royal Avenue. He'd said he couldn't make

it. She'd wanted him at home for lunch on Sunday because her relations were coming up from Dungannon. He'd said there was no chance he could get away this Sunday.

`You're supposed to be engaged to me, not that wretched informer. You'll get known, you know. You can't help but get known. What if he runs out on you, or

his wife, then those murdering Provos'll have your name. They'll come for you, to

shoot you. That's a hell of a future for me, marrying a man who's a target. You

didn't think of me when you walked into the job. God only knows what you were

thinking about.'

She'd left him at the door of the bank.

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`How did it go today, Gingy?' Goss said.

`Pretty well.' His face was in shadow. Goss couldn't see McAnally's doubt, only hear it.

A long ride to Lisburn, skirting the city centre, and time for Goss to

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**think on what his girl had said, to think of his future if the Provos had his name as a supergrass minder.

The civil servant smiled at the aggravating persistence of the American

interviewer. The audience in the United States was considered important. It was

believed in Whitehall that if the British `line' on Northern Ireland were correctly

explained then funds for the Provisionals from across the Atlantic would dry up.

The civil servant regarded such a belief as nonsense. He reckoned the Armalites

and the dollars would still drift over however clean a figure the Secretary of State cut with the American media.

The New York Times had come from London.

`But surely you've considered the possibility that a supergrass, like this McAnally, will further alienate the Catholic population, make a bad situation worse?'

He'd come on the early morning flight, taken a taxi round the Falls, then beer and

sandwiches with the Telegraph, then an ear bashing from an abstentionist

Catholic politician, then another taxi to Stormont Castle. Plenty of time to become an expert, the civil servant reflected.

`You have to understand our legal system. I have nothing to do with the law. In

the United Kingdom the judiciary are quite separate from the political process. It