Benny didn’t look like a thug. He hadn’t the muscles of the hard men who pumped iron in the gyms nor had he the bulbous gut of the men in pubs and drinking clubs who mostly slabbered and bragged but could be put to use for pickets and mob violence. He was more like a salesman, with a front of plastic charm. Terry had seen his type in other paramilitary groups. McGrath was one of them. Benny walked into the office, disregarding the receptionist. Men like Benny didn’t ask permission to talk to anybody.
‘Do sit down,’ said Terry, confident that the loyalist would recognise the sarcasm in his tone, not that you could rely on subtlety with men who were used to solving problems by the most direct route.
‘That case was a fuckin’ waste of money. I’m wondering whose side you’re on.’
‘I’m a lawyer. I’m on the side of whoever is paying me.’ Then Terry played for time by fetching the case folder from his drawer and poring over its loose pages.
‘It was open and shut,’ said Benny. ‘We opened it and they shut it.’
‘He wasn’t going to get off.’ Terry thought that had been obvious from the start and was tired saying it.
‘Because some half-blind Fenian bitch swears it was him she saw in the dark across a street and with a mask on?’
‘She used to babysit him. It’s a killer detail.’
‘It was your job to make her look stupid.’
‘The judge in the end believed her because he couldn’t accept that a woman would send down a man she had nursed on her lap if she wasn’t sure,’ Terry said.
‘That’s precious little he knows about human nature then, isn’t it?’
Despite this outburst, Terry trusted that Curtis would moan then make no real difficulty for him. They had sat across from each other at this desk many times and though they had never discussed their own backgrounds in detail, each knew that the other understood the paramilitary world, and had killed. One good reason to be wary of detail was that they might find out things about each other they would be more comfortable not knowing.
Terry said, ‘Are you guys getting any grief from the Cold Case crowd?’
‘Fuck’s sake, don’t talk to me. It’s worse than having nits.’
‘So how do you deal with them?’
‘Mostly we just tell them to fuck off. Otherwise you’d be getting a lot more business, wouldn’t you?’
‘Is that the way of it; they’re just ticking the box?’
‘Mostly. Why, what have you done?’
‘Nothing. Whacked a couple of loyalists, that’s all.’
And they laughed.
***
If Kathleen just sat on the sofa and thought about the police coming, she would fret. If she sprayed the surfaces, scrubbed and brushed, dusted and tidied and emptied the bins, checked the bathroom floor for discarded underwear and damp towels and put books back on their shelves, she would be able to contain the thoughts of what might happen and not be unhinged by her fear. ‘Yes, fear!’ She had said it, at last, though only to her clean, empty kitchen. ‘Fear.’ And yet more anger with Terry for bringing this on them.
***
Terry had learnt in the IRA – and remembered still – that children and fools evade their fears and a soldier faces them. He resisted the impulse to push from his mind the contemplation of the worst that could now happen. Did the police have new evidence against him? Was it possible that an informer had exposed him? There had been plenty of those. Mick Harkin, who had worked with him on the Magheraloy ambush, was dead now, and the dead don’t speak. He had spent five years in the Kesh in the early 1990s for a bank robbery and then, after a couple of weeks out, had blown himself apart with one of the new Semtex drogue bombs they were working on. So, if there was an informer behind this new investigation, it wasn’t Mick. It was someone else who had known him back then and remembered him still, after nearly twenty years. He doubted there was anybody talking now, which meant he was safe, but you could never be sure.
Terry understood the informers. He understood them better than he’d ever admitted because he had nearly become one. After Magheraloy, he and Mick had been arrested, held separately and interrogated. They had both been trained to resist the pressure and had both got through it. The lesson was: say nothing. Just sit still for seven days and say nothing. Then, if they had the evidence they would use it and if they didn’t you walked.
It was embarrassing to think about it, even after all those years. Back then, the police had devoted much of that seven-day holding period to kicking Terry about the interrogation room for trying to kill the Chief Con, as they called him.
In the republican mythology, the police were said to operate in pairs, with a good cop and a bad cop, one being genial and offering to help, the other, during his turn, kicking the shite out of you. Alternating treatments played on your fear and coaxed you to hope. That was maybe how they dealt with the younger ones, the ones who might respond to a little psychological manipulation. They didn’t even bother trying to soften up Terry, which was a compliment in a way. They just hammered him.
It is hard to sit still when your balls are swollen and your arse is bleeding. It’s hard to think when you’ve been slapped about the head so often that your ears are ringing constantly and you can’t even relax your face into an expression that doesn’t ache. He had assured himself then that he was weeping with the physical pain, not the fear. It hardly mattered. The kicking had touched on the tenderest nerves in his body and they were pulsing in the weirdest way inside him, and he had hardly trusted that he would be put back together again as a coherent human being. When they let him go, he went to Dom McGrath and told him he couldn’t face doing any more jobs.
Dom was good about it. What Terry remembered now was how the republican leader had handled him so much more gently than the police had done, and filleted him more neatly.
Two
Dominic McGrath was poised and thoughtful when Terry went to see him the day he was released from interrogation – eight days after the bomb. He lived, even then, in the large house on the Glaslough Road, that he occupied still, when he wasn’t abroad at political conferences or meeting heads of state. It was the sort of house a priest or a doctor might live in. From the outside, back then, it was a fortress, with grills on the windows and cameras over the front and back doors. A security man inside had a look at you through the camera as you waited between two gates, in a kind of airlock. Perhaps there were metal detectors. No one knew just what Dominic McGrath had, but they knew he had the best.
Then there was another buzz and the second gate opened. Dominic was waiting for him in the hallway, in jeans and a sweater, a mug of tea in his hand.
‘Turlough, a chara!’ He always addressed him first in Irish. ‘Stand where you are now and Oweny here will frisk you – nothing personal. Then come through to the kitchen.’
Terry let Oweny frisk his body as closely as any soldier or peeler had ever done. He emptied all his pockets and Oweny ran clenches of his big fists along his arms and legs. Terry winced at the clasping of his sore balls, but neither made any remark.
‘Open your shirt,’ said Oweny.
‘Uh?’
