him so that she could see his face. ‘What are they going to ask you about?’
‘The Magheraloy bomb. It was one of the famous ones. Did you hear about it?’
‘Where the frig is Magheraloy? No, I never heard about it.’
He sighed. ‘It was on telly the other night. Magheraloy is in County Louth, touching the border. We did a lot of ambushes down there. This one went wrong.’
An accident. Good, she thought. An accident would be easier to live with. Anyone can have an accident.
‘The plan had been to blow up the Chief Constable. We were into big, high-profile targets then – spectaculars, the media called them. Remember the whack at Downing Street. So that was the thinking: do something big and stay in the news. We had set up an ambush. The Chief Constable of the RUC was coming back from holiday with his wife and kid in the car.’
‘Oh, no!’
‘We were happy to take the kid and all, so long as we got him. It wasn’t us that coined the phrase collateral damage. You’ve seen it on the news yourself, missiles hitting bridges in Iraq and some poor fucker driving a trailer of melons or something goes up in flames … but what the hell.’
‘It doesn’t make it right.’
‘It was worse, love. Much worse. We hit the wrong car.’
‘And?’
‘And three people died for nothing. Father, mother and daughter.’
She hadn’t taken it all in yet. ‘Who were they?’
‘They were called Lavery. They were from somewhere in south County Derry. You don’t watch the funeral or read the stories when you do something like that. You don’t want to know.’
‘Oh God.’ She had to try and comprehend this. There had been a girl in her class at school called Lavery, and there was a lecturer at the university called Lavery.
‘Oh God, Terry. A whole family … just killed.’
‘You rationalise. You tell yourself they could have crashed into another car or a lamp post; they just happened to run into our bomb.’
‘Fuck.’ This was different from what she had expected, from what she could excuse, had excused. She was stunned. She had imagined Terry as an IRA man shooting at soldiers and policemen who were armed and alert to the threat, who were defending the political set-up that had produced the Troubles in the first place. She had imagined him attacking people who expected to be attacked, who were paid to take the risk. But, if she was honest, she had always known too that children had been killed. From the very start, children had died in ricochets and bombings. She suddenly felt stupid for never having asked Terry if he had been implicated in the least defensible things that the IRA had done.
‘What was your part in it?’ she asked.
‘I set the bomb at the side of the road and laid down the tripwire for another guy to trigger it. Mick Harken. He’s dead now. Then I did lookout for the car and for anyone that might come near us.’
‘Whose mistake was it?’
‘Mine. I signalled to him to hit the wrong car.’
It seemed a small relief to her, that he had not actually pressed the button, or whatever it was they did. Shit! Fuck; she was screaming inside herself. Something like panic was building up in her. A child! Fine little limbs, soft smooth skin, hair in bows, eyes as bright as jewels.
‘You saw the car coming. Had you got the number wrong or something? The colour? What?’ She hadn’t worked out the worst of it yet.
‘It was the right colour and the right make.’
‘Did you not see the child?’ Then it dawned on her what a stupid question that was. Of course he had seen the child. The car was the right colour and the right make and there were three people in it and one of them was a child. That’s what made it the right car.
‘Ah!’ she gasped. The breath would not come to her. When she could speak she said, ‘How old? The child – how old?’
‘A wee girl. Ten.’
At least Terry’s frankness helped. She’d be nearly forty now.
‘Oh, dear God. To take that much away from people.’
Kathleen was perplexed by the enormity of her husband having killed a child. Every time her mind tried to grasp it she recoiled. She was almost wheezing now and she left the room without saying more. Words felt false.
Terry knew not to follow her. She would be waiting for the feeling to match the thought. She’d be dreading the clarity that would overwhelm her. In the IRA he had mixed with people who could absorb shocks like this, who could manage with black humour. He had known men who had done dreadful things and he had stood at bars and drunk with them, never questioning them, always trusting that it wasn’t easy for them. But Kathleen was not out of the hard culture. She had cried for the whale stranded in the Thames when it was on television. Ig would have said, all that for a fucking fish!
Kathleen came back into the room and her face was streaked with tears and her hair dishevelled. She practically spat at him. This was worse than he had feared. There was a logic in it he had not foreseen.
‘For years we tried to have a baby and we couldn’t. Well that was justice. That’s what that was. And I never knew.’
He said, ‘You’ll have to compose yourself before the police come. Don’t give them the satisfaction, please.’
‘I don’t care what they think. I don’t care what they do.’
***
Inspector Basil McKeague believed in God and he believed in Hell, and that made his job easier. He didn’t depend on the corporeal and temporal world for justice. He visited Terry Brankin’s home that night with the fullest information to be had on the Magheraloy bomb that had killed Patrick and Elizabeth Lavery and their daughter, Isobel. He knew who had provided the intelligence that the Chief Constable and his wife and child would be driving up from Rosslare, crossing the border at Magheraloy after returning from a holiday in France. He knew who had mistaken the Lavery car for the Chief Constable’s. He knew who had made the bomb and set it by the roadside. He knew everything. He knew that Dan Leeson, who had debriefed Terry Brankin for the IRA, had been a Special Branch agent. He had the transcripts and the tapes of that debriefing. He had everything but admissible evidence, and he could manage without that because he had faith in God. So he rang the Brankin doorbell that night assured that he was about to meet a man who would burn in Hell.
‘Mrs Brankin?’ The woman who answered was in her fifties, trim and healthy with it. She had been crying. That didn’t surprise him.
She led him into the living room, where Terry Brankin was sitting on the sofa. He had turned on the television while Kathleen answered the door. Terry did not rise to shake hands with this man who had come to ruin their lives.
He looked the cop over. He was tall and fat in a jacket that was too tight for him and a trouser belt that supported his paunch. Good skin, though; didn’t smoke or drink. Red cheeks, so he was either nervous or angry or had bad circulation.
