'Does this mean I've lost the job?' I asked.

He folded his arms across the jacket of his pinstripe. Without replying he turned slightly and spoke to the soldier standing against the door. 'You can leave us, corporal,' he said. He'd been there as long as I'd been more or less awake. Every thirty minutes or so another soldier had opened the door and given him three or four puffs on a fag and then taken it back. The soldier nodded, changed his rifle from left to right hand and pulled the door open. He joined his colleague on the other side of the frosted glass.

'Are they looking after you, Starkey?'

I nodded.

'Nothing you need?'

'You are joking, I take it?'

'No. Not at all.'

I pulled myself up into a sitting position. I still had a touch of the dizzies, but I'd stopped being sick. He had a pained expression on his face, but it looked as if it had more to do with gastronomic over-indulgence than any exasperation with me. Which was a nice change. 'Maxwell -Neville, whatever,' I said. 'I've been given a free helicopter ride, medical treatment, good food, a nice bed. All of these things I appreciate. But perhaps you can tell me how all the people who have dealt with me have been struck dumb?'

Maxwell found himself a seat, a red plastic effort sporting a series of burn marks that allowed the yellow foam rubber within to poke out. It looked like an Edam cheese with legs. He took out a packet of cigarettes and offered me one. I declined. He lit up and took a long drag. 'You're not normally supposed to smoke in hospitals,' he said, 'but the military wing's a bit behind the times.'

I nodded and waited. He blew smoke out of his nose in one long stream. It hung around like an indoor haze.

'You'll be pleased to know,' he said, leaning forward, 'that your wife is okay. She has been in our care for a while actually.'

'She's not hurt?'

'She's fine. There was a little, ahm, unpleasantness for a while until certain facts were made clear to her captor. He is currently recovering in another part of this hospital.'

'What are you going to do with her? She wasn't involved in anything. You must know that.'

'Yes, we know that. She will perhaps need a little time to recover. Then she is free to go home.'

'The girl that was with her?'

'Oh, yes, fine too.'

'And Brinn?'

'Good news and bad news. He was elected prime minister with a landslide at 2 a.m. this morning. Unfortunately he vas declared officially dead at the scene of that explosion it 9 a.m. yesterday morning. He had of course been dead or quite a while by that stage. And we kept the news back until after the polls closed.'

'The others?'

'Patrick Coogan. Michael Angus. Seanie Murphy. Malachy Burns.'

'Yeah.'

'Dead.'

I nodded. I sat back. I thought about the coolness of he grass verge, lying back and watching the smoke from infernos at either end of the road rise and mingle high up in the blue. I remembered trying to pick out shapes in it. I thought I saw my mother's face. A vague horse and trap. I know I saw a map of America and watched helplessly as it ell apart as helicopters clattered through it. So much death. So much death around that I was laughing as the soldiers in black-face gathered around me. I sniggered at the cavalry come too late.

I was aware of Maxwell's intense gaze, but I was thinking if Agnes. I was thinking of Lee, and Margaret, and Patricia. [ was thinking of mass peace rallies and sudden death. And then I was thinking of me. I could see them all, all their faces, as if they were at different points on a spider's web, some on the periphery, some close to the centre. What was I, the fly caught in the web or the spider that connected everything?

'Well,' said Maxwell, smiling nervously, his capped teeth to the fore, 'you're alive, which quite frankly surprises me, so you should consider that a bonus. Your wife is alive, which is another. There is a faint possibility that you could be charged with manslaughter over Mrs McGarry, but frankly I think that that is unlikely - as long as you are cooperative, that is.'

'Meaning exactly what?'

'You know a lot of things, Starkey. A lot of things that should remain out of the public domain for the immediate future. Things are very fragile out there at the moment, very fragile indeed. It wouldn't take much to tip them one way or the other.'

It never did. 'Just tell me what you're proposing.'

'Okay.' He rubbed his hands together briefly, then eased them down his trouser legs. He wasn't happy. He wasn't comfortable. 'The agreement must be this - I tell you what I can about what has happened to you and why, and you agree that it's off the record. In other words, no story.'

'Maxwell, I lost interest in stories a long time ago.'

'I hope so, because this one doesn't need to get out.'

I gave him a hand to get started, because he was plainly in no hurry. 'Okay,' I said, 'in the beginning was the tape.'

'No,' he corrected, 'in the beginning was the bomb. The 1974 bombing of the Paradise restaurant which killed eight people.'

'Which was planted by Brinn.'

'Which was planted by Brinn but whose detonation was organized by Coogan.'

'Aha.'

'Aha, indeed. Coogan was in command of a six-man IRA unit which organized the campaign in that particular area. Brinn was the youngest member, but an ambitious wee bastard nevertheless, even then. He was becoming something of a thorn in Coogan's bum. Coogan was more of a businessman than Brinn liked. The bomb on the Paradise was a hit on a police function, sure, but it was also because the owners refused to cough up enough protection money. We believe Coogan had a good idea that the police had already transferred their dinner before he ordered the attack. Anyway, Brinn was starting to catch the ear of some of the high-ups about Coogan's profiteering just around the time that the bombing took place. The bomb went off early, early enough to catch Brinn on the way out and give him some pretty horrific injuries.'

'And he thought Coogan set it off early, deliberately to shut him up.'

'Something like that.'

'And did he?'

'We have no way of knowing. Brinn was in hospital for months during which time he underwent a conversion to democracy.'

'A miracle indeed. And he was never suspected of the bombing?'

'No. We'd no reason to. Our information then wasn't what it is now. He was fresh on the scene and hadn't made it into those scabby little manila folders we used to have on prime suspects. As far as we were concerned then he was just an average punter who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.'

Maxwell took out another cigarette for himself, offered me one again, lit up. 'So, all burnt-up and high on drugs, Brinn gives an emotional interview on TV condemning senseless violence which goes all over the world.'

'And so the personality cult started. I know all that.'

'Okay. So from patient to politician. And a good politician at that.'

'But with a few skeletons in his closet. Eight, in fact.'

'More.'

'More? You mean yesterday's

'Well, yes, bringing it right up to date, but before that as well.'

I shook my head. 'Before when?'

Maxwell pushed another smile onto his face. Blew out a little more smoke. 'Let's go back to Coogan. He's still in charge in bandit country, he's gotten rid of the little thorn. He moves progressively further away from Republicanism to concentrate on making money for himself. Eventually his unit is disbanded by the Army Council of the IRA, but he still remains the power in that part of the world, particularly in his stronghold in Crossmaheart. Follow?'

'Follow.'

'Right. So Coogan and his new gang reap the profits, occasionally working hand in hand with the IRA, but mostly not. He watches Brinn's rise with some amusement apparently, appears happy enough to leave him alone in his new career, while he builds up a fortune in his. But then things start to happen that get him worried. There are a couple of failed attempts on his life. IRA men start getting hit. But there's nothing random about the hits; the gunmen are acting on very precise information. Within a couple of years the four remaining members of the original cell which organized the Paradise bombing have been shot dead. And you know as well as I do the way that cell structure works in the IRA. Only the members of that particular cell would have access to that sort of information.'

'You're not saying Brinn killed them.'

'No. He didn't kill them. But he fed the information to whoever did. The UVF. We believe he surprised himself with the success of his politics. He knew it would only be a matter of time before word leaked out about his past, so he did some leaking himself.'

'He turned Deep Throat.'

'Deep Throat and deeply depressed. The rumours had already started ... he felt he had to take some action.'

'So Coogan gets suspicious.'

'Coogan doesn't get suspicious. He makes a decision and then acts on it, right or wrong. That's the thing about Coogan, he makes his mind up one way or the other, then gives it one hundred per cent. He sets out to get Brinn. But Brinn is already one step ahead of him. He got word, through whatever channels, that Coogan was going out for a bit of fun, a bit of cattle rustling. It's what he does to relax. He gets it to the UVF, who sit in wait for him. Unfortunately there's an informer on the UVF side who leaks the ambush to the police. The UVF gets offside sharpish, but Coogan gets caught in the act of rustling. He has everything in the book thrown at him, all the banks they know he did but can't really prove, in the hope that something will stick.'

'But only the rustling does.'

'Right. So he gets fifteen years, which is way over the top for the actual offence, but that's Diplock Courts for you. Not that I'm complaining.'

'It wouldn't do to criticize the law,' I said. 'And with our cock-eyed remission system and good behaviour he's out in five and out for revenge.'

Maxwell smiled wanly. 'In a nutshell,' he said.

'What an apt description.'

'And about the same time the pressure of being at the top, of knowing what he knows, gets to Brinn, just the once. The wrong time, the wrong place, again. The story of his life. He lets his hair down to a traitor with a tape recorder.'

'A pity for him that the two events coincide. Coogan getting but, the tape becoming available.'

'Well, it's not quite as simple as that.'

'Oh, I know that. I come in and fuck up the equation.'

'Well, yes. You do, if you'll pardon the expression, and with all due respect to the late Mr Parker, become the nigger in the woodpile.'

'That's not showing much respect at all.'

'It was only an expression.'

'Expressions get you killed here.'

Maxwell's head slumped and he gave what he thought was a pained expression. 'You don't . . .' he began and then stopped. His caps appeared over his bottom lip for a second, about as far away from a smile as teeth can be, like the forced grin you get on a skull after the flesh has rotted away.

'Don't be so combative, Starkey. It doesn't help. I know you've been through a simply horrid time and I will try to take that into account.'

I pulled at my bottom lip, exposing a little of my own teeth. 'That's very generous of you . . .' I could tell the sarcasm grated on him.

'We were

'If you don't mind me asking, Neville, who's we?'

'Central Office of Information. You knew that all along.'

Of course I did. I knew everything. I just didn't know that I knew, I always thought you were just some kind of press officer.'

‘I am.'

'You must have fuckin' huge terms of reference.'

He took a leaf out of my book. He shrugged. 'Press. Information. The same thing really,' he said dryly. 'We were aware of the tape's existence. We were aware McGarry was trying to sell it.'

'So why didn't you just nip in and nick it off him? Wouldn't that have been the wise thing?'

Maxwell gave a little sigh, folded his legs. Blew some more smoke out. 'Starkey, you have to understand, sometimes it's better to watch and wait.'

'To gather information.'

'Sometimes these things have a way of working themselves out if you leave them alone.'

'Brinn is dead. You knew something that could have saved the life of the prime minister, for God's sake.'

'And would it not have been worse if he'd been unmasked as a killer while in office? Think about it. His . . . charisma, whatever ... got his party into office. They're there now, by popular demand. They have a chance to change things.'

I shook my head. 'Do you know what happened to the Sex Pistols when Johnny Rotten left them? Did they survive and prosper?' He looked blankly at me. I persevered. 'Cut off the head and the body dies, Neville. Think about it.'

'Prune a rose bush, it flowers again. Better than before. You think about it, Starkey - we have a popular government in power, a famous gangster is dead, a political fraud has been removed. There's hope again. There's little real harm done.'

I put my head back on the pillows, closed my eyes, and asked him if any harm had come to Margaret McGarry.

33

Scout's honour, I won't tell a soul. Except I was a BB boy from way back. Maybe Maxwell with his Central Office of Information didn't know everything.

I had four days of what he euphemistically called debriefing. It sounds like something vaguely humorous, like a Whitehall farce, but my interview sessions were ill-tempered shouting matches. He didn't say a lot himself, he had a team of experts to do that for him, but he was a brooding presence over it all, a probing, wistful spirit intent on entering every cranny of my mind in search of buried treasure, but shrouded in a perpetual gloom because nearly all the crannies were empty, or half full of a poisonous, swirling bile. They gave me drink and hoped it would loosen my tongue, but they were wasting their time because there was nothing more to tell; I was not privy to any secrets; I was not involved for any reason beyond my own stupidity; I was a fool first and journalist second and neither had overlapped during the whole episode.