I?’ She turned to me. ‘When you’re ready, Major.’
Binnie opened the door for us and I followed her out and as we went down the corridor Al Bowlly launched into Goodnight but not goodbye.
In Harm’s Way
As we went down the steps to the street, a Land-Rover swept out of the fog followed by another, very close behind. They had been stripped to the bare essentials so that the driver and the three soldiers who crouched in the rear of each vehicle behind him were completely exposed. They were paratroopers, efficient, tough-looking young men, in red berets and flak jackets, their sub-machine-guns held ready for instant action.
They disappeared into the fog and Binnie spat into the gutter in disgust. ‘Would you look at that now, just asking to be chopped down, the dumb bastards. What wouldn’t I give for a Thompson gun and one crack at them.’
‘It would be your last,’ I said. ‘They know exactly what they’re doing, believe me. They perfected that open display technique in Aden. The crew of each vehicle looks after the other and without armour plating to get in their way, they can return fire instantly if attacked.’
‘Bloody SS,’ he said.
I shook my head. ‘No, they’re not, Binnie. Most of them are lads around your own age, trying to do a dirty job the best way they know how.’
He frowned, and for some reason my remark seemed to shut him up. Norah Murphy didn’t say a word, but led the way briskly, turning from one street into another without hesitation.
Within a few minutes we came to a main road. There was a church on the other side, the Sacred Heart according to the board, a Victorian monstrosity in yellow brick which squatted in the rain behind a fringe of iron railings. There were lights in the windows, the sound of an organ, and people emerged from the open door in ones and twos to pause for a moment before plunging into the heavy rain.
As we crossed the road, a priest came out of the porch and stood on the top step trying to open his umbrella. He was a tall, rather frail-looking man in a cassock and black raincoat and wore a broad-brimmed shovel hat that made it difficult to see his face.
He got the umbrella up, started down the steps and paused suddenly. ‘Dr Murphy,’ he called. ‘Is that you?’
Norah Murphy turned quickly. ‘Hello, Father Mac,’ she said, and then added in a low voice, ‘I’ll only be a moment. The woman I saw earlier is one of his parishioners.’
Binnie and I moved into the shelter of a doorway and she went under the shelter of the priest’s umbrella. He glanced towards us once and nodded, a gentle, kindly man of sixty or so. Norah Murphy held his umbrella and talked to him while he took off his horn-rimmed spectacles and wiped rain from them with a handkerchief.
Finally he replaced the spectacles and nodded. ‘Fine, my dear, just fine,’ he said and took a package from his raincoat pocket. ‘Give her that when you next see her and tell her I’ll be along in the morning.’
He touched his hat and walked away into the fog. Norah Murphy watched him go then turned and tossed the package to me so unexpectedly that I barely caught it. ‘Four thousand pounds, Major Vaughan.’
I weighed the package in my two hands. ‘I didn’t think the Church was taking sides these days.’
‘It isn’t.’
‘Then who in the hell was that?’
Binnie laughed out loud and Norah Murphy smiled. ‘Why, that was Michael Cork, Major Vaughan,’ she said sweetly and walked away.
Which was certainly one for the book. The package was too bulky to fit in any pocket so I pushed it inside the front of my trenchcoat and buttoned the flap as I followed her, Binnie keeping pace with me.
She waited for us on the corner of a reasonably busy intersection, four roads meeting to form a small square. There were lots of people about, most of them emerging from a large supermarket on our left which was ablaze with light to catch the evening trade, soft music, of the kind which is reputed to induce the right mood to buy, drifting out through the entrance.
There was a certain amount of traffic about, private cars mostly, nosing out of the fog, pausing at the pedestrian crossing, then passing on.
It was a typical street scene of the kind you’d expect to find in any large industrial city, except for one thing. There was a police station on the other side of the square, a modern building in concrete and glass and the entrance was protected by a sandbagged machine-gun post manned by Highlanders in Glengarry bonnets and flak jackets.
Norah Murphy leaned against the railings, clutching her case in both hands. ‘Occupied Belfast, Major. How do you like it?’
‘I’ve seen worse,’ I said.
Two men came round the corner in a hurry, one of them bumping into Binnie, who fended him off angrily. ‘Would you look where you’re going, now?’ he demanded, holding the man by the arm.
He was not much older than Binnie, with a thin, narrow-jawed face and wild eyes, and he wore an old trilby hat. He carried an attaché case in his right hand and tried to pull away. His companion was a different proposition altogether, a tall, heavily built man in a raincoat and cloth cap. He was at least forty and had a craggy, pugnacious face.
‘Leave him be,’ he snarled, pulling Binnie round by the shoulder and then his mouth gaped. ‘Jesus, Binnie, you couldn’t have picked a worse spot. Get the hell out of it.’
He pulled at his companion, they turned and hurried across the square through the traffic.
‘Trouble?’ Norah Murphy demanded.
Binnie grabbed her by the arm and nodded. ‘The big fella’s Gerry Lucas. I don’t know the other. They’re Bradys.’
Which being the Belfast nickname for members of the Provisional branch of the IRA was enough to make anyone move fast. We were already too late. A couple of cars had halted at the pedestrian crossing and a woman in a headscarf was half-way across pushing a pram in front of her, a little girl of five or six trotting beside her. A young couple shared an umbrella behind.
Lucas and his friend reached the opposite pavement and paused behind a parked car, where Lucas produced a Schmeisser machine pistol from beneath his raincoat and sprayed the machine-gun post.
In the same moment, his friend ran out into the open and tossed the attaché case in an arc through the rain and muffed things disastrously, for instead of dropping inside the machine-gun post, the case bounced from the sandbags to the gutter.
The two of them ran like hell for the shelter of the nearest side street and made it, the Highlanders being unable to open up with their machine-gun for the simple reason that the square seemed to be suddenly filled with panic-stricken people running everywhere.
The case exploded a split second later, taking out half of the front of the machine-gun post, dissolving every window in the square in a snowstorm of flying glass.
