There was a festive, giddy quality to those days: soldiers walked around without flak jackets; local children took rides in their Land Rovers. Dolours derived a certain mischievous satisfaction from flirting with the troops. Once, the soldiers, with their berets, asked her to pose for a photo with them, and she obliged. There was one British officer, Ian Corden-Lloyd, who would come to the house in Andersonstown and chat with her. He must have known, or at least suspected, that she was a member of the IRA, but they would argue amiably about politics as if they were a couple of graduate students, rather than adversaries in a bloody guerrilla war. At one point, Corden-Lloyd told her that he would love to come back and see her in ten years’ time, ‘and we could all tell each other the whole truth’.
Traditionally, the IRA killed as an example: murdering a traitor in a public fashion was a means of reinforcing social norms. But in the case of Joe Lynskey, the Provos would break that tradition. At a certain point, Lynskey simply disappeared. No announcement was made about the verdict of his court-martial. No body was dumped on the street. Nor, indeed, was any explanation ever offered to the Provo rank and file about the true attacker of Joe Russell, or the sordid backstory of the shooting at the Cracked Cup. Nobody said a word.
Because Lynskey’s work often took him away for long stretches, when he initially vanished, in August 1972, his family did not realise that anything was amiss. A rumour took hold that he was in America – that he had gone to start a new life, as many people during those days did. This was a deliberate campaign of misinformation. At one point, a nephew of Lynskey’s was in New York and met a local Irish republican who told him, ‘You just missed Joe. He was here the other week.’ When Lynskey’s mother died, three years later, she believed that her son must be alive and well and living in the United States.
By that time, he was already long dead. In a twist that represented either a small kindness or a terrible cruelty, when death came for Joe Lynskey, it was in the person of a friend. Dolours Price arrived at Lynskey’s sister’s house to take him across the border. She did not tell Lynskey that he was being summoned to his execution. She said there was a meeting in the Republic that he needed to attend.
Lynskey descended the stairs, freshly bathed and shaven and clutching an overnight bag, as if he were leaving for a weekend in the country. They got into the car and drove south towards the Republic. Lynskey did not say anything much, but Price realised that he knew exactly where they were going. It was just the two of them in the car. He was stronger than she was; he could have overpowered her. But instead he sat there meekly, holding his little bag in his lap. At one point, he tried to explain to her what had happened, and she said, ‘I don’t want to know, Joe. I don’t want to know. I just have this very difficult thing to do.’
He was sitting in the back seat, and she looked at him in the rearview mirror. I’ll take him to the ferry, she thought. I’ll take him to the ferry and say he ran off. He could escape to England and never come back. But instead she kept driving. Why doesn’t he jump out of the car? she wondered. Why doesn’t he smack me on the head and run away? Why doesn’t he do something to save himself? But as she drove on, she realised that he could not act to save himself for the same reason that she could not act to save him. Their dedication to the movement would not allow it. She had vowed to obey all orders, and Lynskey, it seemed, had chosen to accept his fate.
When they arrived in County Monaghan, just across the border, a group of men were waiting for them under a lamp post. Lynskey thanked her for driving him and told her not to worry. He reached out and shook her hand.
‘I’ll be seeing you Joe,’ Price said. But she knew that she wouldn’t be, and she cried the whole way home.
9
One day in January 1973, a television crew from the BBC arrived at St Jude’s Walk. They were looking for the McConville children. Jean had been gone for more than a month. The local press had become aware of the story after an initial article was published in the newsletter of the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association. Under the headline WHERE IS JEAN MCCONVILLE, the article described how the widowed mother of ten had been missing since 7 December, ‘when she was unceremoniously removed from her home’. Picking up on that original item, the Belfast Telegraph ran a short article on 16 January, ‘SNATCHED MOTHER MISSING A MONTH’, which noted that none of the children had reported the abduction of their mother to the police. The next day, the paper appealed for help in solving the ‘mystery disappearance’.
The BBC crew discovered Helen and the younger children living alone in the flat. After the cameras had been set up, the children sat huddled on the sofa, framed by a backdrop of striped yellow wallpaper, and described their ordeal. ‘Four young girls come into the kitchen. They ordered all the kids up the stairs and they just walked in and took my mummy,’ Agnes said quietly. ‘Mummy walked out in the hall, she put on her coat and left.’
‘What did your mummy say when she left?’ the interviewer asked.
‘She had a big squeal,’ Agnes said.
‘Do you know why your mummy was taken away?’
They didn’t. Helen was a lovely-looking teenager, with the same pale and narrow face as her mother, her dark hair swept to either side. She sat with Billy on her lap and nervously averted her eyes from the camera. The boys were fair and ginger. Tucker was sitting on Agnes’s lap, wearing a blue turtleneck and shorts, though it was the dead of winter, revealing his knobbly knees. The kids were twitchy, their eyes roving all over the place. Michael sat to Helen’s side, nearly cut out of the shot. He stared at the camera, blinking.
Michael, Helen, Billy, Jim, Agnes and Tucker McConville (Still from BBC Northern Ireland news footage, January 1973)
‘Helen, I believe you’re looking after the family,’ the reporter said. ‘How are you managing to cope?’
‘Okay.’
‘When do you think you’ll see your mummy again?’
‘Don’t know.’
‘Nobody’s been in touch with you at all?’
Agnes mentioned that they had seen Granny McConville.
‘She must be a fairly old lady by now,’ the reporter said.
‘She’s blind,’ Agnes said. Agnes was thirteen. She noted, hopefully, that her mother had been wearing red slippers when she was taken away. It was like an image from a fairy tale. A clue. Agnes said that the siblings would ‘keep our fingers crossed and pray hard for her to come back’.
Granny McConville may have been part of the reason that the children had not reported Jean’s disappearance to the police. She told people that she was afraid to, though she did not spell out precisely why. The children believed, fervently, that their mother would soon come home. But things began to look bleak. They were able to draw on Jean’s pension. But where one might expect the close-knit community in Belfast to rally around and care for such a family, dropping by with a hot meal or assisting Helen with the children, nobody did. Instead, it was as if the whole community in Divis simply chose to ignore the flatful of abandoned children on St Jude’s Walk. It might simply have been that this was a time of crisis in Belfast and people had worries of their own, or there could have been some darker reason. But
