about.
Inspector McKeague said, ‘Would you mind turning the television off? I am going to need your full attention.’
Terry was surly in the face of authority and did nothing, so Kathleen picked up the remote and stabbed the air with it three times until she had pressed the right button.
‘Thank you,’ said Inspector McKeague. ‘You both know why I am here?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then you’ll excuse me if I sit.’ The inspector sat on the armchair by the fireplace and set his thick brown briefcase on his knee.
‘Do you want a cup of tea?’ said Kathleen, not knowing what else to say.
‘He won’t trust us not to poison him,’ said Terry, so Kathleen sat down.
‘Well?’ said Terry. ‘You may begin.’
The inspector took his business card from his top pocket and set it on the table, and then he spoke in the soft measured tones of someone who might have been selling insurance. ‘Mr Brankin, you were a suspect in a bombing incident in Magheraloy in March 1985 in which three members of the Lavery family were killed. Isn’t that right?’
‘I was questioned about it in Castlereagh.’
Kathleen sat back with a stunned look on her face, amazed that conversations about murder and guilt were routine for both men.
‘Well, let’s be plain about our understanding of that incident. You were part of the bomb team. You were the lookout rather than the trigger man. That was Michael Harken, who met his just deserts later. Are you content to proceed with this conversation on that understanding?’
‘No.’
‘For God’s sake’, blurted Kathleen, ‘what’s the point in playing games now?’
‘I have not cautioned you, and none of what we say has any value for evidential purposes.’
‘So,’ said Terry, ‘you have no expectation that you will get to that point.’
‘Not really. But I have procedures to follow, largely for the sake of Seamus Lavery, the son of Patrick and Elizabeth Lavery, the twin brother of Isobel. I am instructed to review files of old killings and to offer the families of victims the best possible prospects of prosecution of the guilty. You are guilty. That is why I am here. Unless you actually choose to confess I can, of course, do nothing.’
‘Well, I am not going to confess.’
Inspector McKeague opened his briefcase and, before the Brankins could move, he dropped a large colour photograph onto the floor where both could see it plainly. Kathleen wondered what the point of this was. It looked like an ad for some kind of ice cream, with streaks of raspberry running lavishly over the main confection. Then she gasped, clenched her mouth and tried not to be sick.
‘That’s little Isobel. She was sitting alone in the back of the car and took the force of the blast underneath her. That’s why the legs are splayed and the clothing is torn. I’m afraid you can’t quite make out her facial features.’
‘Huh, huh, huh …’ Kathleen’s convulsive gasping was out of her control.
Terry leapt to try to console her but she pushed him away. ‘Get off me!’ He turned to McKeague, who was sitting calmly with another photograph in his hand.
McKeague said, ‘Of course, if you don’t wish the interview to continue here, we can go to the station.’
Terry had to contain the impulse to reach for him and fling him from the house. McKeague dropped the next photograph onto the carpet.
‘We think that most of this is Mrs Elizabeth Lavery. She and her husband were both wearing seat belts and it is remarkable how effective these can be in preserving the integrity of a body that has been torn by an under-car bomb. Here …’ – he dropped another picture – ‘is Patrick Lavery’s right leg. A colleague of mine had to fetch it out of a ditch. He says he will never forget that. A leg on its own is always heavier than you’d expect it to be.’
Kathleen was weeping and shrieking as if she was being jabbed at with a sharp knife. She had both hands in front of her face, trying to make it all go away, but it was futile, for what she was trying to banish was the past and the future, and none of it was under her control.
Four
Kathleen’s phone beeped on the seat beside her. She checked the text without slowing down, one hand on the wheel. ‘Are you OK?’ Terry never abbreviated.
She was not OK but she felt calmer now that she had a project in hand.
That morning she had told him that she would leave if he didn’t confess to the bombing. She had spent the night awake in their bed with her back to him, resenting his ability to sleep. She supposed he’d learned that too from the IRA, switching off the emotions. The only rest she got was after the whirling in her brain had settled into a resolve. She’d told him as soon as she was aware that he was awake beside her.
‘What you’re asking for is daft,’ he’d said. ‘I have done my time – in my head. Do you think I have not agonised over this for years? I suffered long and hard.’ She doubted that.
He had been grilled by the nutting squad for days that had felt like years, and then he had had to go to England and work for shit pay just to stay out of the way. He had worked a year in a gay bar in Lancaster and lived in a shared house down by the river. And all of it was so that the whiff of the Magheraloy bomb would not contaminate the fragrance of Dominic McGrath while he was secretly negotiating peace terms with the government.
Kathleen had gone to the Linenhall Library that morning, to read newspaper cuttings about the bomb and the Laverys. A smiling young man with curly hair and the first wisps of a beard had carried the huge bound volumes of broadsheet papers from the time and laid them out on the big oak desk in front of her. She had to stand to be able to view them and it surprised her to see how normal Belfast had been in other ways at a time when the IRA was bombing shops and paramilitaries were shooting civilians and police officers, men and women. None of it had pushed the ads for girdles off their corner spots on front pages. The curly haired young man might as lightly have assumed she was looking for pictures of a wedding or a book review as for a murder.
None of the pictures in the papers of the time were as gory as the ones that Inspector McKeague had dropped on her floor, but there was reportage and commentary on the atrocity, the familiar condemnation of the ‘animals’, ‘barbarians’ and ‘terrorists’. Some said they were the ‘scum of the earth’. Clergy and politicians had vented their moral outrage; that was part of their job.
She wondered what she had been doing on the day. She worked out that she would still have been doing her GCSEs. She was surprised to find that all the local papers had given extensive front-page coverage to the bomb and had inside features on the family. She couldn’t remember any of that. None of the reports speculated that the bomb had been intended for the Chief Constable and his family.
She read that Patrick Lavery had been a property developer and he had gone to County Meath, that last morning of his life, to look at a piece of land he might buy. He had chosen to make a day out of it with his wife and daughter. There was a photograph of the couple in The Irish News, in formal dress at a GAA dinner dance.
