Field of Blood (9 page)

be here but I will, so I say that everything has to be right, and I'm taking him from your charge. Got it?'

Ferris led the way. Out into the night air and across to the police cells, down the

corridor, escorted by a constable. The crash of the keys, the swish of the door.

McAnally sat on the iron bedframe. His knees were clamped close together, his

arms were hard against his chest. His lip was swollen. Ferris was behind the shoulder of the detective, but he could see McAnally stiffen, straighten, at the sight of Howard Rennie. Ferris reckoned it the defiance of a trapped rat.

`Morning, Gingy. . .'

McAnally stood up. He tried to lift his chin. He walked to Rennie and then turned

his back, reached his wrists to the base of his spine, and was handcuffed. He turned back to face Rennie.

`The injury to the prisoner's mouth, Mr Ferris, that happened during his arrest?'

`Correct.'

`Just getting it right, Mr Ferris, like I said. Come on, Gingy.' Detective Chief Inspector Howard Rennie strode away down the cor

ridor. His shoes were iron‐tipped, reverberating. His quilted, open

anorak seemed to fill the corridor. Ferris followed, walking alongside

McAnally. The constable was behind them. Rennie was hurrying, as if

the whole visit to Springfield Road had been a bloody liberty taken at

44

his expense. Ferris felt the light kick at his heel. McAnally was close

to him. The prisoner looked up once into Ferris's face. He spoke quietly,

almost a whisper, out of the side of his mouth.

Ì know what you did.' `What I'm paid to do.'

`You stopped them kicking the shit out of me.' `Safe journey, Mr McAnally.'

McAnally was bundled into a police landrover. The engine was

already running, spewing smoke across the yard. Rennie was unlocking

the door of his car. Ferris saw him take off his anorak and sling it into

the back seat, and then produce his pistol from a shoulder holster under

his jacket, and cock it and place it in his waist. The convoy of the

landrover and Rennie's car swept out through the gates, out into the early

morning darkness.

Ferris headed off in search of a cup of tea and then bed.

`You go easy with it, I'll fix it proper later.'

The neighbour stepped back to let Roisin McAnally out through the front door of

Number 63. All the neighbours had called on Number 63 in the hours since the military raid. The first had come in their sleeping clothes, in their dressing gowns and slippers. As the light had come up, they had come dressed for the day. Some

came to comfort, some to help, some to witness the scene. This neighbour had

come with his tool kit to repair the front door.

`That's a terrible bloody way to be coming into a family's wee home . . .' The neighbour shrugged. He had come with his drills and screwdrivers because his own woman had told him that he must. He wouldn't have said that he liked Roisin McAnally. With drink taken he would have called her a stuck‐up cow. But

his wife had told him to come and so he had made a job of mending the hinge fastening on the door. And the bitch hadn't even thanked him, just looked through him, and stamped off down the pathway to the front gate that was already hanging slack from a long time before. He was buggered if he'd fix the front gate ... To himself the neighbour reckoned that all the Provo widows were

the same, stuck‐up cows. Not that he would have ventured that opinion in public,

wouldn't have said that down at the bar on a

48

49

**Saturday evening. They were always called `the widows', whether their man was dead or running or walled up in the Kesh, and he reckoned they all wore their

45

widowhood with a sort of bloody arrogance. So, she hadn't thanked him for fixing her door, and he simpered a smile behind her back as she stalked away. In a

right paddy temper, the neighbour thought. Could see it in her chin and in her mouth and in her eyes, like she's going to kick the arse off the first man that crosses her.

`You go carefully with it, Missus,' the neighbour called at her back ... and more quietly ...òr you'll be doing the fucking thing yourself, if you bust it.'

The neighbour had read Roisin McAnally right.

She smouldered in a ferocious anger as she set off down the broken pavement of

the Drive. She walked with her back straight, and her head up, and knew that the

curtains all the way down the slope of the Drive would be flickering back. They would all be watching her, all of them in 61 and 59 and 57 and 55 ... and all the

curtains on the other side of the road would be twitching, and those that couldn't

see her because there was a car parked in the way would hustle up their bloody

stairs to get a grandstand view ... They'd been there in the night, whining their sympathy, and asking the sly bloody questions. `What had he been at, Missus McAnally? ... He's not one for stepping into trouble, is he, Mrs McAnally? ... Doing well down in the Free State, isn't that him, Missus McAnally? ...' Her mother was

now in the house, and fretting, and minding the kids, and the kids were all quiet

as if they'd been thrashed. Young Gerard hadn't opened his mouth since the soldiers and his father had gone, and Little Patty had cried in her bed and wet the

sheets which she hadn't done for a year, and Baby Sean had screamed because

his mother was cold and numbed and couldn't offer him love.

And the coldness had changed to fury.

She knew where to go. She knew in which house she could let rip her temper. A

quarter of an hour's fast walking on a chilled damp morning.

She knew her man's speciality was the R.P.G. launcher.

She knew what he had done the previous day. She had known he was on a hit from the time he had crept out of the house before dawn, and from the time when he had come back home and made a joke and laughed and his chin had shaken as if the muscle‐wires were loose and uncontrolled. She had known from

the way that he had paced the little front room and picked up the kids and made

too much noise and not been able to settle. From the way he had smoked half a

packet of cigarettes and stubbed each butt down. From the way he had loved her

in their bed ... He had been silent only once the previous day, when the telly news

was on, when he had seen a blackened car and a chorus of politicians and churchmen keening a litany of condemnation. And

46

she had never referred to it. She hadn't pretended that she knew. That wasn't the

way of the widows. The widows did not expect to be told. The widows expected

to serve up the food on the table and the comfort between their legs. Deep down, hard down, she supported her husband's involvement in the Organization.

Down in her guts she saw herself as a prop to her man. She had a brother and a

first cousin in the Kesh. She accepted that her husband was involved. She had not

cared to understand why her man had gone south, and turned his back on the war. She knew the strain of fighting the war. She carried the same strain. Roisin

McAnally was no quitter. She believed in the war, she was committed to the armed struggle. She wept no tears for the enemy's fallen. If she could have killed

one of the soldiers who came into her house in the small hours of that morning,

she would happily have done so.

Her raven black hair streamed out from her head as she walked into the teeth of

the wind. She wore jeans and a sweater and a bright red nylon shower‐proof jogging jacket. Her clothes, and her children's, she gathered from jumbles and from relatives' cast‐offs. And with her head up, and her chin jutting, and with her

eyes burning in her anger, Roisin McAnally was beautiful.

The man opened the door to her knock. He was Battalion staff. He had not shaved. She knew him because in the old days he'd brought her money. He wore

his socks and his trousers and a vest. He had his kids round his legs, jam and crumbs at their mouths. He had once tried to bed her, but he'd been pissed and

she hadn't counted it against him. He would have seen her anger, and he made

way for her and hurriedly opened the door of his front room that reeked of old smoke and smelt of cold damp, and he cuffed the kids out of the door and closed

it on their protests.

`They took my Sean, the army came this morning and took him.'

She saw the shock spreading on his face and the shadows forming in his frown.

`They took Gingy ... ?'

She roared at him. `They took Sean. He's back two days, and they came for him.

First job in two years, and he's lifted. How did they know to come for him? He's

been informed on ... he's been fingered by a bloody tout . . .'

The man ducked, as if attempting to deflect the accusation. Ìnformer' and `tout',

they were the obscenity words of the Organization. His teeth were biting on his

bottom lip. Nicotined teeth on the pale pink of his lips.

`You can't say that, woman.' Said as if he hardly believed his denial.

47

Ì can say what's the truth ... He comes back, and he goes out, and he's lifted. It

wasn't a routine lift. My house was half filled with bloody soldiers. Who touted on

my Sean?'

50

51

**The man squeezed his eyes closed and shook his head. `How can I answer ... ?T

'You find the bloody answer. You find who touted on Sean.'

`You best go home ... You're better at home.' `Don't you want to talk to me?

Won't you face me? 'If Gingy's been touted on then I've work at hand.'

`Kill the bastard. Kill him for me.' The blaze in her eyes was misted. Ìf there's a

tout, we'll find him.'

Ànd kill him ... What sort of bloody army is it when a man doesn't know whether

the boy with him is a friend or a bloody tout?'

She was sobbing, and the man took her in his arms. He thought she was a great

girl, he thought she was one of the best. He held her against him and felt the ripple movements of her crying.

Ìf there's a tout then we'll find him. That's a promise, Missus.'

`Bloody good for me,' a small voice, choking. `My Sean's on a lifer . . .'

She went out onto the street still crying. She stumbled once on the broken pavement where the slabs had been lifted to be smashed into missiles. As far as

she looked there were narrow roofs and spirals of smoke and grime‐laden

farades. In that moment she hated Turf Lodge. In Turf Lodge a man had touted

on her Sean. She saw the graffiti ... `Provos Rule' and `Brit Bastards Out' and

`Smash the H Blocks' and `Touts Will be Shot'. Shooting was too good for a tout.

It did not enter her mind that there could be any other reason for the arrest of her husband. He was in the cage because a tout had put him there. She saw a lifetime

ahead of her, from youth through to middle age and through to old age, of traipsing to the stop for the prison bus ... because of a bastard tout.

All around her was the emptiness of the early morning. A lifetime of waiting for

the fucking prison bus. A lifetime without a man. A lifetime of scrimping and saving her pounds.

She began to run, and her tears hastened her. She ran back to the Drive and her

home, back to her children.

The word would spread, like the scent of foul air, like the drift of a winter wind off Divis Mountain. The word said that Roisin McAnally had claimed to a Battalion Staff Officer that her husband had been touted. The Organization cringed at the

word. More than all the soldiers and all the policemen ranked against them, the

48

Organization feared the tout. The tout was a dark shadow swimming as a germ in

the bloodstream. The tout struck at the core of the Organization. The tout was to

be tortured, hooded, executed, dumped.

Within an hour of Roisin McAnally's reaching home, the news of

Gingy's arrest had reached the Housing Executive maisonette in Andersonstown

that was the current refuge of the Chief. He called for a conference in the early

afternoon. He summoned to the meeting those who were closest to him, those

that he trusted absolutely. But the doubt gnawed in his gut. The men who were

closest to him were the same men who had known of the arrival of McAnally in

Belfast.

The Chief had a way with touts. Cigarettes on the balls and the stomach, for the

confession. Then the hooding. Then the noisy cocking of the pistol against the ear of the tout. Then the shot into the ground beside the tout's foot, so that he

pissed himself and messed himself. Then the barrel against the back of the neck.

Then the killing.

It had to be a tout, and a tout who knew only of McAnally's role in the Crumlin

Road hit. A tout who didn't know the names of the man who had driven the car,

of the men who had ridden shotgun, of the youth who had fled with the used launcher.

The girl he lived with, Mary, stayed in the bedroom, abandoned him to his angry

pacing of the living room.

`You stay in your bed when they come.' He shouted at her as if she was just something to be kept in a cupboard, put away when there was business. He felt a

flicker of regret ... There had been a man once who had told him earnestly and